Another Green World

Today was very warm – in the 90s, unusual for early June – and J and I both went to concerts which were also overly warm. My concert was at 3 pm in the Methodist church downtown – a choir of nearly 100 women, including my friend BHW. I was sitting so far back that I wasn’t even sure she was there. By the third song, a violinist who’d been blocking my view of the women on the far side was out of the way, and I could see a woman who was my best candidate to be my friend – right height, right singing range, her general look, etc., except that her hair was darker and cut differently from my friend, and as I said, she was so far away that I really couldn’t tell. Whenever she’d turn to the side, the haircut made her look so different that I was sure it wasn’t her. Finally, after the concert, I ran into her husband in the lobby, and that decided things!

Then, after his Magic event was done, J drove to Portland to see They Might Be Giants. It was even hotter in Portland than it was here, and of course in a concert hall where everyone was standing, it was fairly uncomfortable. He had a good time, though, and was delighted that he recognized about two-thirds of the songs. He’d never been to a rock concert before, although he’d planned to see TMBG in Eugene many years ago… however, the concert was scheduled for September 13, 2001, so both the concert and his flight out here got cancelled. Tomorrow will be very warm too – we’re expecting 95 – and Tuesday should be fairly warm, but after that we’ll be back in the 70s for at least a week.

There There, by Tommy Orange. I finally got myself to read this generally excellent novel. After the first few chapters, I realized I’d better read it all in one day, and today was the day. It’s the story of “Urban Indians” – Native Americans who live in Oakland, California, where I lived for 11 years in the 1980s and a bit beyond. In fact, I lived six of those years in the same neighborhood with the author, who’s about the same age as my older son, so they would both have been about 3-9 at the time. As the story begins, we learn that several Natives are planning to steal the cash prizes from a big powwow, to be held at the Oakland Coliseum. We meet quite a few characters, whose lives all intersect on that dreadful day. We’re left in suspense about two of the characters, although there’s a prequel/sequel out just now, and a review told me about the fate of one of them.

I’m curious about two of the author’s artistic decisions – which may have been good decisions, but I wonder whether they were deliberate. One was that by having so many different characters, it’s a bit harder for the reader to relate to them as individuals than if we’d focused on just a few. Maybe the point was for us to relate to them as a collective? The second is his focus on a Native/white binary – almost all of the characters were one or the other, even random unnamed strangers. Maybe this was deliberate, if he wanted us to focus on that binary, and since he may have anticipated that a large number of his readers would be white. As someone who’s lived in Oakland, though, it seemed a bit odd for so many of the random strangers to be white, since Oakland has more Black than white residents. I only remember one person being Black – but maybe I was failing to pay enough attention.

The day I started reading the book, it was very fun for me that J. had just returned from Berkeley, and he’d been in many of the BART stations that played such a prominent role in the story.

Let’s see, I made good progress on my paper today, I returned a stack of library books, I found some potentially useful exercises for sciatica, and I attended an a capella concert by The Clefs of Insanity. They sang 15 songs, and in addition to those in English, there were songs in Middle English, Gaelic, Quenya (as in elvish), Latin, French, and Estonian. They also sang the main song from Barbie.

I was sitting on the aisle in the back, which was nice until directly before the concert started, when a mom and a small child (3? 4?) sat down in the row in front of me, and the boy talked incessantly – quietly but incessantly – through the first two songs. People in front of him were turning around and looking. I gave up after the second song and moved to an entirely different part of the hall. I think the point was that the child’s dad was one of the singers? Nevertheless, it was pretty inconsiderate.

We continue to have lovely weather. I'm still having issues with sciatica, and some of it is apparently caused by my shoes, which are expensive shoes of good design, but my back strongly prefers having me walk barefoot instead. People stare if a woman my age is walking along the sidewalk barefoot, and today I saw a kid on his bike getting too distracted by me (though he was fine). So after that I decided to switch to a pair of very beat up, old shoes that are much flatter - we'll see if that helps!

This month I decided to read Gregory Bateson’s Steps to an Ecology of Mind, which I associated with my lunch hours in Berkeley back in the early 1980s. I probably hadn’t read it then, just his Mind and Nature, and I was always daunted by the prospect of reading this one, so I did, although it took me most of the month. Then yesterday I also watched the DVD An Ecology of Mind, which Nora Bateson made about her father. Imagine having a dad who is 65 when you are born and who dies when you are 11! I always thought my mom’s dad, Grandpa Ben, was rather old, and but Bateson was 8 years older than that for his daughter and her father, not grandfather. And then imagine that your dad is someone who tried to change the world, in a deep and thoughtful way – I can see why she wanted to make a documentary about him. He must be mythic to her. My commitment for June is also related to J’s trip to Berkeley and Oakland – I plan to read Tommy Orange’s There, There.

As for games, I didn’t play any more of Nightshade, though I intend to. Yesterday I finally started a new one from my backlog - Subnautica, although I only played it for 9 minutes. I got through the spaceship pod crashing by not looking much at the screen, and then I found a menu of controls but don’t know what to do, so that was that for now.

No lentils, ha.

Don’t Buy It: The Trouble with Talking Nonsense About the Economy, by Anat Shenker-Osorio. This book focuses on the metaphors and framings that are often used when talking about the economy, with an emphasis on how progressives should be doing things differently. As someone who is both an expert on conceptual metaphors and framing and sympathetic to progressive politics, I agree with her reasoning, but I’d have preferred a less partisan approach. I also have some thoughts on how I’d rather she’d framed her own arguments differently. For example, by her own reasoning, focusing on the conservative ways of talking about the economy serves to reinforce them, but she didn’t start talking about the alternatives until p.56 or so – it would have been better to start with them. It was also curious that she didn’t include the “household budget” metaphor that’s so commonly used as the rationale for why a business leader should be in charge of the government. Maybe it was less common in 2012 when her book came out, but I doubt it. Also, since she was making such good points, it would have been better if the book were written from a more “timeless” perspective, whereas now it feels a bit dated, even though not all that much time has passed.

J took a plane to Oakland this morning so he can attend a cool weekend event, the LessOnline conference in Berkeley. It’s organized by the people who do the LessWrong blogs, which are largely concerned about “rationality” and also about what happens if AI goes wrong. He arrived at the venue in the early afternoon (having taken BART from the airport, so handy), attended lots of talks, had some curry for dinner, and eventually had a fun conversation in the evening with the person who’s in charge of “alignment” for the AI that J likes to use, Claude. I hope he’ll sleep well but also wake up early, because tomorrow there will be so much for him to do there.

Meanwhile, my friend Z came over for nearly three hours of conversation! I’d been so excited about the idea of J visiting Berkeley, of which I have such great memories, that it had been messing up my sleep and complicating my dreams, so I was too tired to drive to campus in the evening for a university symphony concert. I just stayed home and read; I also did a walk around the block but the sciatica is causing issues again, so I mostly walked with my shoes off, which helps (even though my shoes are very well designed for foot support).

Yesterday or so I learned that there would be a very high quality piano concert tonight at the university. Apparently this year they started a new program in which, over the course of the school year, three world-class pianists will come here and do a concert and a master class; all of the pianists have Cliburn medals! I believe they said our university will begin hosting a biannual international piano competition as well!

Tonight’s concert was by Valery Kuleshov, a Russian who lives and teaches in the U.S. He performed a piece by Bach arranged for piano (“Chaconne from Violin Partita No.2”), the “Carnaval” by Schumann, “Six Etudes” by Zhelobinsky (of whom I hadn’t heard before; they were nice), and “Six Romances” by Rachmaninov. It’s fun that I’d seen PBS shows about Schumann (esp. the “Carnaval”) and Rachmaninov in the past month or so. We were all enthusiastic, and Kuleshov did four (!!!!) encores – more than two hours of music for $10! Afterwards I chatted with my friend the Soviet history professor and then my new friend C.

Contact, by Carl Sagan. From J’s book club; we saw the movie just a few months ago, so it’s still quite fresh in my mind. I quite liked the book, although the story was rather quietly told. I’m especially interested in the differences between the book and the movie, which I’ll tell without spoilers for the movie. Ellie’s social world was moderately different, but that makes sense given that movies need to have many fewer characters for us to learn over the span of a couple of hours. The eventual strange adventure is similar in some ways but different in one very important way that makes the book far better. Then, at the end, the book and movie have different ways of proving that everything was real. I thought the movie’s way, which was much simpler, was also far more realistic. In the book, the big discovery is that in a sense, circles are embedded within the math for circles – which is cool, but for the average person, it would be very hard to understand why it’s more cool and important than, say, the repeating pattern you’d find when zooming into the Mandelbrot Set fractal – if, in fact, it is. I’m certain that it would be very hard to build a future social movement based on the fact that mathematicians believe something extraordinary is true. So – it’s a fine book, I recommend it, and it’s also fine to read the book if you’ve already seen the movie.

This afternoon for the Oregon Bach Collegium we got to hear works mostly from the English baroque - Henry Purcell, Matthew Locke, and William Lawes, along with an Italian composer who was greatly admired in England, Nicola Matteis. Such a lovely selection of pieces! At the end, we learned that violinist Emma Simmons, who's been featured in almost all of their performances this year and who has worked closely with Ryan on organizing the season, will be leaving in the fall for at least three years - she's pursuing a second master's degree in Lyon. I expect that will be a wonderful experience for her, but we will miss her!