drybots

J kindly joined me for our company’s team at trivia night, at the Drop Bear Brewery. He hasn’t enjoyed it much in the past, because very few of the topics are related to his interests, but tonight we got to contribute. I knew all the answers for the category on Iran, and we both knew them for the category on the chemical elements whose names don’t match their standard abbreviations. After three rounds, our team of 10 was in the lead! We didn’t do so well on the category with photos of artists, and J and I had nothing at all to contribute to the music round, but the other members did okay, and we finished in third place. Since we had more than eight (or is it six?) players, we just won bragging rights, and the fourth place team got whatever our prize would have been.

Today I finally made it to a Delgani concert, the first time this season. I’d watched the three previous concerts from home but for different reasons each time didn’t attend in person. They were playing famous “lasts” – the final string quartets of Haydn, Britten, and Beethoven. I always look forward to socializing at these things, but my friend SDH is on sabbatical and not really in town this year, and right up until the concert started I only saw couples I knew. Then at the last moment my friend JH arrived, and then my friend CH. At the intermission it turned out they knew each other but not very well – I chatted with them then a bit, and more during the reception afterwards. The really exciting part, though, was first violinist Anthea seeking me out to tell me her book is coming out in October! She has very interesting plans for her second book, which she’s working on already.

If you’d like to preorder a memoir by a tremendously entertaining musician with a great sense of humor, here’s the Amazon link: https://www.amazon.com/Crescendo-Chronicles-Adventurous-Anthea-Kreston/dp/1589882172/ I assume it will also be available elsewhere.

The Black Wolf, by Louise Penny. Inspector Gamache #20. This book, a direct sequel to The Grey Wolf, had all the usual characters and features of the other Inspector Gamache books – less time in Three Pines than some, so less time with our cozy favorites, but more thrilling developments in the halls of power. I quite enjoyed it and read it all in two evenings, which was just about perfect. Penny kept us waiting to find out who the real “Black Wolf” was until the final pages.

Today’s weather forecast was that it would reach 63˚F and there would be some sunshine in the afternoon. Well! Instead it got at least as warm as 72˚! J went on a bike ride to the river and back, something he wouldn’t normally venture until at least April. On the way back, he stopped at the high school volleyball court – which apparently has very, very good quality sand – and played volleyball for an hour with some law students.

I then walked down to the park to meet him. I heard finches, crows, and the ever-present and ever-noisy flickers on the way there, and chickadees after I arrived. Several people had their dogs off-leash on the path but fortunately had good control over them anyway. It was so early that the magnolia at the end of the street was still in bud.

In unrelated but very welcome news – DG’s friend R is conscious again, and breathing on her own. He hopes to visit her in the next few days, although Seaside is a three-hour drive from here.

Radical Universalism: Beyond Identity, by Omri Boehm. This short and interesting philosophy book received a very positive review in the New York Times, so I rushed to buy it. I am neither a professional philosopher nor intimately involved with identity politics, so I’m not in the best position to appreciate it. Among his arguments, there were three that particularly struck me.

First, he’s very concerned that “identity politics” has devolved into a mess in which groups tend to think and act only in their own self-interest. As an Israeli Jew living in the United States, his personal experience is probably deeply connected to the problem, as he keeps observing, of Jews thinking only in the interest of Jews, when it comes to the Palestine situation. My own understanding of “identity politics” is rather different – I see specific identities like Black or Indigenous, etc., as giving individuals a stronger sense of community than they’d have without it and a way to lobby for their group being included in the larger American (or British, etc.) “we” – as in the phrase “Black Lives Matter.” I haven’t encountered Black people insisting that they need only think about Black people, for example.

Second, he is especially concerned with human rights and innate human dignity, as established via Enlightenment writers like Kant. At one point in the book he expresses concern that Thomas Dewey doesn’t treat individual human dignity as a foundational premise. This struck me as odd, because Dewey is very much concerned with human well-being, so I looked into it further. Because Dewey focuses on processes and interdependence, he doesn’t treat human dignity per se as innate (that would be an “absolute”), and he doesn’t talk about individual rights (because individuals are always part of a larger community). Rather, he teaches that human communities and humans-in-interdependence should thrive, and dignity comes from learning to be thoughtful and reflective and respectful of one’s fellow humans. I think they’re both right, but Dewey’s formulation – although perhaps more correct than the “innate dignity” argument – is much harder to explain and enforce.

Third, Boehm makes the case that “what is right” comes from an even higher authority than God, and that we can innately know it and God can be wrong. Certainly the Biblical God can be inconsistent, but I was surprised that he based his argument in an unusual interpretation of the “Binding of Isaac” story. In the text in the Bible, God tells Abraham to sacrifice his son, then when Isaac is all tied up for sacrifice, God tells him to go ahead and substitute a nearby ram and keep his son alive. However! In those Bible verses, God is referred to in two ways – sometimes he is “Elohim” and sometimes “Yahweh.” Boehm tells us that “Elohim” can mean God but it can also mean “conventional social practice,” while “Yahweh” refers to the individual who is God. So, if you interpret “Elohim” as “conventional social practice,” the things that one is normally expected to do, and then if you strip out all of the mentions of “Yahweh” in those verses as being commentary added later, the story becomes very different: Abraham takes Isaac to sacrifice him because that’s what their culture expected of him, but after he’d tied him up he looked up and saw a ram nearby and decided to sacrifice the ram instead because that would be more right than following their cultural convention. He made up his own mind about what was right and followed a higher moral authority than the “God” referenced in their local sacrifice-your-son tradition.

His final essay, about what it means to “never forget” and how the highest social value for Jews is peace for all and not vengeance for Jews, was very good.

Yesterday I was about to repurpose a browser tab when I realized it was the new month’s event calendar for the bookstore. Looking more closely, I saw there was about to be a piano concert there in three hours, at which my violinist friend Julia would be performing too! So I went. The concert was by a piano teacher named Alexis Gibbons; she performed works by Bach, Glass, Scarlatti, Ravel, and Rachmaninoff. Apparently her students had been doing their recitals at the bookstore for years (the piano is a very nice one, donated by a woman I’ve met whose stepson plays clarinet with the San Francisco Symphony), but this was her first appearance as featured artist.

I started thinking, hm, D’s clarinet teacher had two kinds of students, children and older adults. Maybe I should consider piano lessons? I do have a piano, which has been sitting here functioning as a photo display shelf for at least 20 years. It had been my grandma’s classroom piano – it was built somewhere Back East around 1905 and then shipped “round the Horn” to Oregon.

My conclusion was that maybe I should consider piano lessons, but if I might want to do that, first I should… move the computer and stuff on the floor so there’s room for the bench, relocate all the nice photos keeping me from opening the key lid, get out my old piano books, and see if I can make a habit of practicing scales and other music. For all I know, the repetitive strain injury in my right hand would complain! The piano probably needs tuning, too.