Tall tales and fairy tales

Pale Fire
Vladimir Nabokov

I recently heard the awesome violinist Alexi Kenney* lead the San Francisco Symphony in Vivaldi's Four Seasons. Although the piece is comfortably familiar and familiarly Baroque, I still know of no other human creation at all like it. I would say the same of Pale Fire, a work of imagination and audacity of the highest order. For my second reading, after many years, I had intended to read it "straight": flipping back and forth between John Shade's 999-line poem and Charles Kinbote's extended commentary on it. In Kinbote's foreword, he recommends a different approach, starting with his notes and then proceeding back to the poem... purchase of a second copy is recommended to facilitate ready access to the notes. Of course, Kinbote is a rather unreliable guide, if he even exists, fictionally speaking. Reliable or not, he can be laugh-out-loud funny, if unintentionally, just as Shade can be a touchingly rich poet, even if his rhymed iambic pentameter is nostalgic and contrived. In the end I read it straight through: Foreword, Poem, Commentary, Index. I reckon I will not wait long before taking another crack at it, maybe next time following Kinbote's questionable advice.

The Sleeping Beauty
Elizabeth Taylor

This was the fifth of Taylor's novels that I have read, and it is a very good one – I'd rank it just a notch below her humble masterpieces, A View of the Harbour and Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont. Taylor's middle-class Brits often lead cramped, unhappy lives; her lead characters engage in small acts of heroism that involve the embrace of love over bitterness or honesty over (self-)delusion. When the pursuit of love conflicts with the virtue of honesty... well, that's drama... and comedy. 

* Full disclosure: Offspring of blogger.

Jack DeJohnette, RIP

He made much great music. This one is kind of a fusion version of speed metal. I have it on vinyl. Generally not my thing, but wow.

Reading roundup

The Hours
Michael Cunningham

A riff on Mrs. Dalloway, with its themes of madness, beauty, sexuality, and choosing between living and death, it is a fine novel, loaded with clever parallels and references to the original that only occasionally distract or become too contrived. 

James
Percival Everett

Having read about the novel, I was little worried that it would be too didactic or woke for my tastes, but in fact it is primarily a rollicking good adventure yarn, and in that regard not unlike its inspiration / foil Huckleberry Finn. Everett has serious fun with Jim's code-switching when speaking with his peers versus the white folks, if on occasion he is inclined to explain rather than show. Although the evils of enslavement, and its corruption of all levels of American society, are on display here, Everett's depictions never rise to the level of eloquence or horror of, say, Beloved, or The Known World. And in the end, in light of the plot's central revelation, what the f*** has become of Huck? I guess that question is left to the late Mr. Clemens to answer. This is not Huck's story, after all.

Desolation Island
The Far Side of the World
Patrick O'Brian

Ahoy mateys! I'd read a couple of his books before, and I was happy to return for more. Yes, they follow a formula. Yes, there are only so many things that can happen, so they keep happening, book after book: storms, doldrums, shipwrecks, battles at sea, floggings, scurvy. And yes, you have to make a choice between keeping Wikipedia close to hand so you can translate all the nautical jargon, or just blow through it like a westerly in the South Atlantic, counting on context and the pure music of the words. Anyway, our heroes Aubrey and Maturin are so compelling, the storytelling so gripping, the writing so facile, the moral sensibility so empathetic if traditional, you welcome yet another chase across the high seas, whether Aubrey is the hunter or the quarry. Call it science fiction: You are dropped right onto an alien spacecraft, with its own peculiar technology, language, culture, and rules. But better than most science fiction: Informed by historical and physical reality, and written by a master prose stylist.

D'Angelo, RIP

Some of the best-sounding music ever made. Way too young.

Congratulations, Arthur Sze!

Our next Poet Laureate is an excellent choice... Child of Chinese immigrants, teacher at Institute of American Indian Arts... How did this happen under Trump? 

Murder They Wrote

Summertime is the time for crime novels, one of the genres my mother always called "escapist literature." And couldn't we all use some escape?

The Glass Key
Dashiell Hammett

Hard-boiled, with plenty of political shenanigans. It is more graphically violent than I would have expected from a 1931 novel. A very good read from front to back.

Bluebird Bluebird
Attica Locke

Our favorite Black Texas Ranger Darren Mathews is back, and appealing as ever. Locke gets a little bogged down in her east Texas version of Faulknerian southern gothic, but the characters are mostly compelling, and the plot keeps you going. 

Harm Done
Ruth Rendell

I can't say exactly why I have never fallen for Inspector Wexford the way I have Dalgliesh, but nonetheless this is a decent read, despite some meandering plot detours and a bit of amateur sociologizing.

Eddie Palmieri, RIP

A giant. 

Larry Kotlikoff on Trump firing the head of BLS

I suppose you have to be an econ nerd to fully appreciate the work of our federal statistical agencies– notably the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Census Bureau. Suffice to say, they are not perfect, but they do incredibly valuable work generating data that we can have confidence in. At least until now. I don't agree with Kotlikoff on everything, but he is spot-on here. Krugman and others have noted that by corrupting and politicizing government data, Trump is doing what banana republics have always done. I suppose becoming a banana republic will have its advantages, since we will presumably have to grow our own when the Trump tariffs cut off banana imports.

Amanita augusta

At the end of July! In California! Spectacular.

Reading roundup

Mrs. Dalloway
Virginia Woolf

I first read it when I took an undergrad course in Woolf. I liked it then, though I found its stream of consciousness and frequent changes in perspective challenging. Less challenging today, which I like to think reflects my maturity and breadth as a reader. Stylistically, every sentence reads like poetry, in a good way. There is more social criticism than I remember. One of the great works.

The Friend
Sigrid Nunez

A girl and her dog. And her grief. I could have lived without the philosophical digressions about writing, but the book is overall engaging and lovely. Now a not-so-major movie at a theatre or streaming service near you. 

Long Island
Colm Toíbín

I loved Brooklyn. This is the highly praised sequel, which I found disappointing and dull. Maybe I have been reading too many virtuosic writers, including Woolf and Banville, and Toíbín's style is just so dry in comparison. I was looking forward to finding out what became of Eilis Lacey, the complex and compelling hero of the first book, and indeed she is here, and still admirable. But ultimately this is Jim Farrell's story. And Jim is no Eilis. The ending reads as if someone tore the last few pages out of the book before handing it to me. I know, it's on purpose. But I couldn't muster much interest in learning or even wondering whatever would become of Jim.

The Last Policeman
Ben H. Winters

This is a pretty conventional crime novel, with an appealing young detective, embedded within a pre-apocalyptic near-future dystopia. You see, a large asteroid will collide with Earth in a few months. Dystopia is really too strong a term, since, naturally, different people react to this impending doom in different ways, and not all of the ways are bad. That said, not surprisingly, suicides are up, and many people– including cops– are not inclined to dwell on whether a slightly suspicious suicide might not actually be a murder. After all, why does it matter? But our young hero and narrator Henry Palace can't help himself and, of course, suicide it's not. Published in 2012, pre-COVID and pre-Trump, there is an innocence to the narrative that you may find refreshing... or depressing...

Mrs. Dalloway

Just read it. Or read it again. One of the best novels ever. Not as difficult as I remember.

Anat Cohen

The clarinetist appeared at Stanford Jazz Saturday night in her duo with the Brazilian seven-string guitarist Marcello Gonçalves. They've been playing together for quite some time, and their ease and rapport show through. Given the instrumentation, the overall flavor is choro, but ranges more widely. They played several arrangements of pieces by Moacir Santos, some Jobim, some Nascimento, and then to preview their latest project, some Bernstein. The music does not push the envelope, but is varied and lovely. Recommended.

End of an era at KCSM radio

KCSM, "the Bay Area's jazz station," recently announced the "retirement" of longtime DJs Dick Conte and Michael Burman. Turns out their retirements were of the involuntary type, apparently required by an interpretation of CalPERS rules. Conte:

“It wasn’t my idea,” he said in an email to the Chronicle. “Michael Burman and I were forced to retire due to a CalPERS rule, which doesn’t allow retired annuitants to work for any CalPERS facility.”

Conte is referring to a rule that limits retirees drawing a pension from the California Public Employees’ Retirement System — such as those working for public institutions like the College of San Mateo, which operates KCSM — to temporary positions only, with a cap of 960 hours per fiscal year.  

Worse news still for fans of the station, on the air this morning the venerable Sonny Buxton announced his own retirement as of the end of next week, saying "it's time." Buxton, well into his 80s, seems to have been experiencing some health issues recently, so maybe his departure is truly voluntary. The recent death of another KCSM stalwart, Leslie Stoval, may have been on his mind. 

Between the three of them, these guys possess encyclopedic jazz knowledge– in particular Bay Area jazz knowledge– that comes with a deep love of the music and an eagerness to share their wisdom, not to mention their experience as musicians. Their tastes are all pretty mainstream, and if they have a higher tolerance for the Hammond B3 than I can muster, I forgive them that. I'll miss their friendly familiar voices and deep playlists. 

OBBB passes the Senate

"A true Washington gaffe is always a confession, and Vance’s is this: Trumpist populism offers its adherents nothing but the demonization and expulsion of immigrants. In return, generations of Americans will be left sicker and deeper in debt." Lydia Polgreen, NYTimes.

What's not to like?

Barbara Gowdy, The White Bone

I read The White Bone not long after it was first published in 1998, and I re-read it last week. I have not read another novel like it, and recommend it to everyone. A capsulized description would be something like: A sad and heroic quest story written from the perspective of African elephants. Gowdy heavily researched the lives of these creatures, and she tried very hard to get into their heads, bodies, and culture for this story. Of course, if you are a human who populates your story with non-human animals, some  anthropomorphization is inevitable, and often it's the whole point. Watership Down, for example, is as I remember it a tale featuring rabbit characters who are a lot like humans. Gowdy is after something bigger here, but because we humans cannot actually get into the heads and bodies of other creatures, the results must be judged as an act of imagination, as literature. 

The philosopher Thomas Nagel's famous essay asked "What is it Like to Be a Bat?" and his conclusion as I understand it is: we simply can't know. Gowdy uses story-telling to try to convince you otherwise, at least for elephants. Humans, by the way, do figure in her story, and for the She-ones (elephants), it is we, fallen creatures, who are alien and inscrutable, not to mention cruel and dangerous. You can hardly blame them for thinking so.

Reading roundup

Two by John Banville  

The Untouchable
The Sea

I've now read each of these novels twice. They are deservedly praised. Of the two, I think The Untouchable is Banville's masterpiece: a virtuosic, unsettling though often humorous fictionalization of the life of Anthony Blunt, one of the Cambridge Five. The first-person narrator and protagonist, Victor Maskell (Blunt), has led a double life along many dimensions– as a spy for the Soviets and closeted gay man– and his deceptions definitely extend to himself. It is also a twisted story of unrequited love. Especially, it is a glorious exercise in style– I found myself wanting to read many of the sentences over again, wondering just how Banville pulls it off, page after poetic page.

The Sea, another novel written as a first-person reminiscence, is shorter; exceptionally well written and structured as well. In the end, the plot didn't quite convince me. Still, a fantastic book.

Three Japanese novellas

Snow Country
Yasunari Kawabata

Kitchen
Banana Yoshimoto

The Emissary
Yoko Tawada

I had read Snow Country before. It is justly regarded as a classic. The Kitchen is perhaps a trifle, but delightful. The Emissary is a near-future dystopia, deliberately quirky... too deliberately, in fact. 

Miscellaneous "entertainments"

A Gentleman in Moscow
Amor Towles

A Certain Justice
P.D. James

Luminous
Sylvia Park

Exordia
Seth Dickinson

Of these, the P.D. James is– unsurprisingly– the best read. Nasty victim, nasty suspects... Dalgliesh and Miskin, getting it done. The Towles book is sweet, but the writing did not "cast a spell," as the blurb promised. The last two, sci-fi books, received some critical accolades, which goes to show that sci-fi critics have low standards and/or are starved for good literature. Luminous is a robot book, with a somewhat interesting kid robot character and a fairly perfunctory dose of family drama. But how many indifferently written disaffected robot books can you read? Exordia is a sprawling pull-out-all-the-stops alien encounter hard sci-fi meets woo-woo sci-fi with extended high-tech battle scene mess. I suppose it is the beginning of a series that I won't read.

Lisa Mezzacappa 5(ish)

Mezzacappa, a Bay Area-based bassist and composer, has assembled a kind of dream group, which I had the pleasure of hearing last night in Palo Alto. It was one of the best sets of music I have heard in a long time. The audience was– to put it mildly– sparse, but at least the performance afforded the band an opportunity to rehearse some pieces for Mezzacappa's upcoming residency at The Stone in New York, where one hopes the locals are a little more likely to turn out for some cutting edge improvisatory music. If you have the opportunity to hear them, do go.

Last night 5(ish) was a sextet, with Aaron Bennett on tenor, Kyle Bruckmann on oboes/electronics, Mark Clifford on vibes, Brett Carson at the piano, and Jordan Glenn on drums. The music is jazz, sorta... a structured soundscape that leaves space for individual and collective improvisation. At first listen I thought of Patricia Brennan's recent, fantastic album Breaking Stretch, but that album is more horn-heavy and rhythm-forward. Mezzacappa's ensemble has, if anything, more percussion, with drums, vibes, and Carson a decidedly percussive pianist, but the compositions– and percussionists– go for texture. It gets interesting when the two percussionists join the bassist in bowing their (metal) instruments.

Everybody in the band is a first-rate musician, playing challenging music that shifts from composed unison lines to odd rhythmic counterpoint. Bruckmann's rattles and chirps on the electronics fit right in, as did his oboe. Mark Clifford was a revelation, as was Jordan Glenn on the drums.

If I had one wish, it would be that the band devote a few more minutes of their set to swinging hard. As they showed in the evening's waltzy finale, they are more than capable. But that's a quibble.

If you have to ask...

Nice.... Thanks guys... 

 

The still explosions on the rocks

On the trail to Rancheria, above Hetch Hetchy, Yosemite.

Sly Stone and Brian Wilson, RIP

Two of the all-time greats. Sad week, when both of these guys die along with U.S. democracy.

Andy Bey, RIP

Possessed of an instrument of incredible range and expression– especially buttery bass notes with just a hint of gravel– Bey was a great interpreter of the songbook and a first-rate pianist to boot.

Boys will be boys

And boy, is this depressing. Source: Ezra Klein, NYT.

Joe Matos closing... sigh....

It's been some years since I last visited the Matos cheese factory in Santa Rosa... I'd been meaning to return, but it's too late now. It remains one of my favorite experiences in California. The last time I was there, Santa Rosa's sprawl was already encroaching on their farm. It's hard to begrudge people the desire to live in beautiful Sonoma County, notwithstanding some concerns about wildfires, and if the Matos family sells off the land, I hope they get a good price and enjoy a well deserved respite from the hard work of dairying and cheesemaking. They were damn good at both.

Sam Moore, RIP

Sam & Dave were awesome. They were best known for their funky up-tempo numbers like "Soul Man," but I like the ballads. Maybe this one is my favorite. It starts out with a weird little piece of "Chinese" music, and then ascends into soul heaven.

David Lodge, RIP

I have read a number of the well-known academic satires, including Lucky Jim, Moo, and Wonder Boys. Lodge's – especially his trilogy Changing Places, Small World, and Nice Work – probably gave me the most pleasure: funny, smart, well-written; biting, but ultimately humane. He couldn't help loving the characters he ridiculed.