son of Smith post

So I wrote about the conference on Clark Ashton Smith that I attended. I've now had the chance to follow a link that I took note of during the panels. It's a (virtually?) complete file of Smith's writings online. If you've never tried his writings, here's your chance. One story of his that I found searingly memorable will make a bracing introduction to whether Smith is an author for you. Unusually for Smith, the main character of this one is the hero, not the villain, but nothing goes well for anybody in this story. I'm reminded as much of Tiptree's "The Last Flight of Dr. Ain" as of anything else by this story.

concert review: Saratoga Symphony

Once the bargain basement of local community orchestras, the Saratoga Symphony has improved tremendously in recent years. They did a pretty good job with the obscure but enormous Busoni Piano Concerto a couple years ago, and brought back the same pianist, local star Tamami Honma, in the very famous and also very large Rachmaninoff Second Concerto for a concert in a nearby church which, contrary to Saratoga's tradition of wreathing their programs in complete obscurity, they advertised heavily.

Honma played in a clotted but compelling manner, and the orchestra surged effectively. Music director Jason Klein craftily put the concerto after intermission, so as to force the audience that had come for it to also hear the other major piece, Sibelius's Fourth Symphony. This is by all odds the most inscrutable of all Sibelius symphonies, and a real challenge for the orchestra: not that it's particularly hard to play, but that it's very hard to interpret coherently. But this worked pretty well, especially keeping the drive up in the finale, and technically it did quite well for the community orchestra level.

concert review: San Francisco Symphony

My first concert of the calendar year, and almost a month since the last one.

The first time I heard Edward Gardner guest conduct SFS, I thought he led hot and sizzling performances. Half of that Edward Gardner showed up this time.

The half that didn't led the Bruch G-minor Violin Concerto. Soloist Randall Goosby had a remarkably light and smooth tone, and drove his part forward pretty well, but as an orchestral piece this was bland and dull. I wasn't too excited by the rendition of Vaughan Williams's Overture to The Wasps either, though the sound of the orchestra was unusually broad and shiny, especially in the winds.

This sound quality reappeared in places like the flute choir passages of Holst's "Saturn," and yes, The Planets was the good half of the concert. Hot and sizzling it was when the score called for it, but the most remarkable movement was the quietest, "Neptune," a most crisp and clear but delicate performance of an often-fuzzy piece. I left stripped of the forebodings I'd felt during intermission.

ubiquitous comic strips

A discussion elsewhere of the death of Scott Adams led to a consideration of how culturally ubiquitous Dilbert was in its heyday, however astonishing that may seem to those who only know it in its sad decline.

It's one of a series of strips that have held that status, with a new one close to waiting in the wings when the previous honoree begins to fade away.

I'm not sure how culturally ubiquitous early strips now honored as pioneers were - like The Yellow Kid (1895-98) and Krazy Kat (1913-44). The earliest one that I expect hit that status was Little Orphan Annie, which premiered in 1924, followed by Popeye the Sailor Man (first appeared in Thimble Theatre 1929). Those two are still cultural touchstones today, and I suspect they were heavily popular at the time; certainly Popeye soon made the jump to animated cartoons.

The next one I know about was Barnaby by Crockett Johnson (later of Harold and the Purple Crayon fame). This strip about a little boy and his louche fairy godfather Mr. O'Malley had a short run (1942-52) and is now pretty much forgotten except among those who've collected reprint volumes of it. But it was a big hit among commentators and SF fans, at least: the Berkeley SF club, founded in 1949 and still around when I joined in the late '70s, adapted its name - the Elves', Gnomes', and Little Men's Science Fiction, Chowder and Marching Society ("Little Men" for short) - from the name of Mr. O'Malley's social club in the strip.

Barnaby kind of puttered off in its later years, and allegiance switched to Pogo by Walt Kelly, which started in 1948 and quickly became very popular, not least for its wicked political commentary, with characters like Simple J. Malarkey, a parody of Joe McCarthy. Kelly wrote songs for the strip which were published and recorded, both originals and his still-famous fractured Christmas carol lyrics, "Deck Us All With Boston Charlie."

Pogo had its several-year run as the cultural ubiquity and then faded a bit into the background, to be replaced by the biggest cultural powerhouse of them all, Peanuts by Charles M. Schulz, which started in 1950 but took a few years to hit its stride. But during the 1960s, at least, it pervaded American culture to an extent hard to believe if you didn't experience it. And its pervasiveness popped up spontaneously from outside sources. There were books about it (this one, from 1965, was a collection of Christian sermons using the strip as textual illustrations, and this unlikely thing became a bestseller); there were songs (I first heard this one sung by the kids on the bus to camp in 1966 and I still know all the lyrics); NASA even named manned spacecraft after Peanuts characters.

But the strip faded from cultural intensity quickly after 1970, despite having another 30 years to run during which it maintained its prominence on the comics page. The cultural hit of the 1970s was undoubtedly Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau, which began in 1970. Plotted more like a soap opera than any of its predecessors, Doonesbury was even more explicit politically than Pogo. (This one, among others, won Trudeau the Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning.)

Doonesbury took a hiatus in 1983-4 and then rebooted itself; it was still popular, but the torch of cultural ubiquity quickly passed to Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson, which ran 1985-95; uniquely among these creators, Watterson stopped the strip before he could run out of steam. And then Dilbert, which began in 1989 and had built up its renown by the time Calvin and Hobbes signed off.

Dilbert started to fade by the mid-2000s. Since then, I dunno - newspaper strips as a cultural icon have faded with the fall of print. In my circles, maybe xkcd by Randall Munroe, which came along in a very timely fashion in 2005, but I'm not sure how commonly-known it is generally, and it's not even a strip in the traditional fashion. But that's where I think we are now.

men who sank their own reputations

1. Scott Adams, having alerted the world that he had terminal cancer and not much longer to live, has died, according to an announcement released today. Adams was the creator of Dilbert, one of a short list of iconic newspaper comic strips that successively defined their eras. Dilbert was a startlingly satirical strip, a standing refutation of the notion that business, because it has to make a profit, is more efficiently run than government agencies. But like other strips, even iconic ones, it outlasted its own brilliance and became tired out and hectoring, but no more so than did Adams himself, who fell down the right-wing rathole, not just in supporting DT but by being disingenuously nasty about topics like racial identification and the Holocaust. The snark that once served him well had gone rancid.

2. Neil Gaiman. I don't have to elaborate on the grief that this once-esteemed author became revealed as a truly toxic sexual predator. But if you want an elaboration on his background, and on not the origins of his offenses but on how the seeds of what made him the kind of person who could do that could be found in even his most spectacular early successes, there is an astonishing book-length (over 70,000 words) online essay by Elizabeth Sandifer on Gaiman's career. It's full of digressions: it starts with a full explanation of the background of Scientology: Gaiman's father was a leading Scientologist, and it must have affected Gaiman, though it's not clear exactly how, and even once you get past that, there are plenty more digressions on the backgrounds of Tori Amos and others who appear in Gaiman's career. But the main thread is about his writings and his career as a writer. Sandifer's thesis is that Gaiman always wanted to be a celebrated big-name author, but unlike those who just dream of it, he worked hard to make his writings deserve that status, and there's much on his innovations and creativity. But there are also warnings, of which the echoes of the author in Ric Madoc of "Calliope" are only the most obvious. But then there was a turning point when Gaiman achieved that full celebrity status, around the time of American Gods and Coraline in 2001-2. It was then, Sandifer says, that the sexual abuse which had probably been going on long already became obsessive and even more toxic, and victims described the experience as if Gaiman were enacting a script. And, Sandifer says, his writing fell off and lost its savor at the same time: the cruelest literary remark in the essay is that The Graveyard Book "feels like the sort of thing a generative AI would come up with if asked to write a Neil Gaiman story."

an author named Smith

So I attended the one-day Clark Ashton Smith conference yesterday, held in the old Carnegie Library - now just a historical site, devoid of books or historical displays - in Smith's hometown of Auburn, California, in the foothills of the Sierras. In Smith's day this was still the city library, and the self-educated author probably got most of his education from books here.

But despite the local boosterism, accentuated by a panel discussing Smith's life here, neither Smith nor any of the panelists hailing from Auburn liked the place much. They thought it a tiresome backwater of a town. I found it charming as a one-day visitor. And my sandwich from a local deli (the con offered to fetch lunch for us if we'd order and pay in advance) was delicious.

The programming was held in the library's one large room. The organizers said the attendance was 80-90; I counted closer to 50. The attendance was largely but not entirely male. And almost all white. And largely but not overwhelmingly old.

Besides writing ornate fantasy stories, Smith also wrote SF, and he began as a once-promising poet, and he also was an artist (drawing and sculpture). The day was occupied with panels discussing all these things, and full of enlightenment on Smith's style, artistic goals, and ethos. Despite his obscurity, a case was made that he was a substantial artist worth studying.

Two panelists were particularly interesting to hear. S.T. Joshi, the well-known weird fiction scholar, is - as you'd guess from his writing - lucidly voluble and erudite. He regaled us with tales of Smith's amorous adventures, and challenged the otherwise universally-held belief that the reason Smith stopped writing weird fiction in the late 1930s was as a reaction to the deaths in short order of both his parents and his colleague/friends H.P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard. I guess we'll find out when Joshi's biography of Smith is published later this year. I got a glimpse at a proof copy; it is not as overwhelmingly large as Joshi's Lovecraft biography.

The other liveliest panelist was the fiction author Cody Goodfellow, who read aloud the opening paragraph of Smith's "The Abominations of Yondo" in a voice so sepulchral that I'd buy a full-length recording of him reading Smith stories.

Downstairs in the basement were book dealers, but the two books I wanted to buy were only in one copy and sold to someone else before I could get them.

There wasn't a single person there I already knew, but the attendees were friendly, and I didn't feel downgraded for not being a real connoisseur or expert; there were others there who clearly had only just begun reading Smith. This was fun, the panels were all interesting throughout (including the other participants) and since this was not a far drive from home, I'm glad I took the trouble to come.

quotation

So I'm reading this book, An Immense World by Ed Yong (Random House, 2022), about animal senses, some of which are very different from our own. (But what kind of book about animals says virtually nothing about cats?) And this chapter concerns the sense of temperature, and this section is discussing animals which live under extreme temperatures.

When scientists study these so-called extremophiles, they tend to focus on adaptations like heat-reflecting hairs in their bodies or self-made antifreeze in their blood. But such adaptations would be useless if an animal's sensory system were constantly screaming it it, triggering feelings of pain. If you want to live in the Sahara, or at the bottom of the ocean, or on a glacier, you'd better tweak your sense to like it.
This concept is intuitive, and yet when we watch extremophiles, from emperor penguins braving the Antarctic chill to camels trekking over scorching sands, it's easy to think that they are suffering throughout their lives. We admire them not just for their physiological resilience but also for their psychological fortitude. We project our senses onto theirs and assume that they'd be in discomfort because we'd be in discomfort. But their sense are tuned to the temperatures in which they live. A camel likely isn't distressed by the baking sun, and penguins probably don't mind huddling through an Antarctic storm. Let the storm rage on. The cold doesn't bother them anyway.

I hope I don't have to ...

Grant

Ron Chernow, Grant (Penguin, 2017)

Chernow is the author whose biography of Alexander Hamilton inspired Lin-Manuel Miranda. I decided to see what he could do with a thousand pages on U.S. Grant, most of my reading on whom had been quite succinct.

What interests me about Grant is this: after brave and intrepid service as a junior officer in the Mexican War, he was a complete failure in the peacetime army and then in civilian occupations after he resigned his commission. But when the Civil War broke out, and men with military experience were at a premium, no matter how shoddy they might seem, as soon as he reached command level Grant showed instant assuredness and promptly became the most successful general on the Union side, a status he kept to the end despite various setbacks. How did he do this?

My conclusion is that Grant had what might be called moral courage. This is, as Grant discovered the first time he led troops into action, a different thing from personal bravery under fire. It's the courage to lead and order other men into battle, knowing that many will be wounded or killed, and then to do it again the next day. Many of the generals either shied at the idea of exposing their troops to injury or death, or were so appalled at the results when they did that they withdrew and did not press the attack - which only, Grant felt, made the war last longer and become even bloodier.

The problem with this book is that Chernow never discusses where Grant's moral courage came from or how he developed it. The very first time Grant led troops into combat was early on in the Civil War. He was a colonel looking for the camp of some Confederate raiders led by one Col. Harris, and he was extremely nervous about commanding an attack on the enemy, but when he got to the camp he found that the rebels had learned he was coming and vamoosed.

In his memoirs, Grant writes two key sentences: "It occurred to me at once that Harris had been as much afraid of me as I had been of him. This was a view of the question I had never taken before; but it was one I never forgot afterwards." Chernow quotes the first of these but not the second. He doesn't address the question of Grant's moral courage at all until he gets to the Overland Campaign of 1864, when Grant for the first time faced an opposing general with as much moral courage and tactical skill as his own, and the results were an impasse leading to grisly slaughter. But Grant carried on, despite the toll, knowing that, if he was to prevail, to withdraw and lick his wounds would be worse. Here Chernow quotes from Grant defining this courage in the way I did above, but he doesn't analyze or discuss it.

The questions that interest Chernow are very different. He is absolutely absorbed by the rumors of Grant's alcoholism. This is probably the book's major theme. Repeatedly Chernow quotes testimony swearing that Grant had been seen falling-down drunk, and repeatedly he insists that other evidence renders these stories extremely doubtful. So were these malicious lies, or what? We never learn.

In the postwar part of the book, a recurrent theme is Grant trying to make up to the Jews for an injudicious order he'd issued early in the war, expelling all Jews from the territory he controlled on the grounds of the actions of some rapacious Jewish merchants. His subsequent regret for this becomes a major theme.

Of course by the end of the war, Grant's sad earlier life had vanished from his personality. Now he was the Army's chief general, then President of the U.S., and he was used to being in command. Chernow depicts Grant as chief peacetime general in the Johnson administration as developing a degree of political savvy he'd never previously had to show, but then he depicts Grant as president and afterwards as politically naive and the constant victim of scoundrels and shysters - something that had happened during the war too, but only as a minor feature. Chernow does not attempt to reconcile the savvy and the naive Grant.

I was also puzzled by some fragmentary material testifying to hints in Grant's earlier life of the greatness he would only display later. There's a story of Gen. Taylor, the army commander in the Mexican War, coming across Lt. Grant taking charge of his men in clearing a waterway, and saying "I wish I had more officers like Grant." Wow, what a testimony. But what is the source? Endnotes reveal it's from a newspaper article published on the occasion of Grant's death 40 years later. Somehow I doubt its veracity. Elsewhere Chernow is sometimes cautious about accepting unverified stories, but not here.

There's a lot of useful and well-researched material in this book, but for all its extent I do not find that this book captures the man.

astronaut memoirs: a supplement

Back in 2021, I reviewed here the memoirs of every moonshot-era astronaut who'd written one. Soon afterwards, another one came out that I didn't find out about until recently. So I'm adding it.

Fred Haise (Apollo 13, STS-ALT-9, 11, 12, 14, 16), Never Panic Early: An Apollo 13 Astronaut's Journey, with Bill Moore (Smithsonian Books, 2022)
Fairly brief as these memoirs go. Haise says that at the time he was wrapped up in the nitty-gritty details of his job, and that's what this book is like too. There are occasional piercing insights into astronaut personalities (Jim Lovell under the stress of Apollo 13 started to act like the martinet Frank Borman) or of what experiences felt like to Haise, and excursions into externalities like what his living situation was like (e.g. napping in the simulator because it was too much trouble to take the time to go back to his hotel room), but no emotional reactions to problems - that's the point of his title, which he takes as a frequently-repeated personal motto - and though he notes the births of his children, there's virtually nothing about his life with them or his wife.
That's because he was so busy working he didn't have one, and that, he says, is the reason he eventually got divorced: no connection with his family. But Haise's workaholic attitude has its virtues in this book. Like other astronauts, he found that flying came naturally to him when he first undertook it, but unlike most he goes into detail about what learning to do it actually consisted of. His detail on the Apollo 13 mission is a useful supplement to the movie version, but he only mentions the movie once briefly and makes no direct comparisons or corrections.
After Apollo 13, Haise plunges into equal detail on the subsequent publicity junkets before going back to work on flight training, including flying many of the space shuttle's approach and landing tests, though he retired from NASA before any actual shuttle missions flew, then going to work as an administrator for the aerospace firm that he knew well because they'd built the lunar module. He also recounts the detail of his gruesome medical recovery from a plane crash.
But the hasty tone and lack of some detail remains a flaw. Haise recounts being told, after serving as backup on Apollo 8, that he'd be backup again for Apollo 11, without mentioning that he was bumped from the prime crew (the usual followup) or why - he was pre-empted by the more senior Mike Collins, who returned to flight status following surgery (Collins tells that story apologetically in his book).

previous posts on astronaut memoirs
introduction
Mercury Seven
Next Nine
Group Three
Original Nineteen

Eric Larson

Fr John R Blaker posted on FB that his close friend, and sometime my friend also, Eric Larson, "has taken his own life. His wife Pat Larson had cardiac arrest on December 23 and was 20 minutes without pulse. She was on life support with no brain function until a few days ago."

I'm so very sorry about all of this. I hadn't seen Eric in many years - probably since before he was married; I knew he had been but I don't recall ever having met Pat - but he and John and I were part of a circle of undergraduate science-fiction fans at UC Berkeley in the late 1970s. That's where I knew Eric best from.

We had two Erics in the group. The other was called Eric the Red for his hair color. Eric Larson was Eric the Large. He was very tall, and broadly built, and he had an immeasurably deep voice, which he later parlayed into a role as the PA Voice of God at various sf convention costume presentations.

Eric was a friendly guy, pleasant to be around, a valued member of our little community. Bless his memory.