Book notes:

:: A few days ago I finished reading David Brin's science fiction novel Sundiver. This is the first novel in his Uplift series, which as far as I can tell involves two separate trilogies. The central concept of the series, that of "Uplift", is that all sentient species in the galaxy have been "uplifted" to sentience by a previous, older species -- all species, that is, except humanity, which appears to have had no benefactor species at all. Humanity may well be the only species that did not receive a helping hand.

The Uplift series -- sometimes called a "saga" -- has been cited in some places as being a space opera, with giant wars and ancient races and relics and whatnot; I was thus surprised that this book is basically cast as a mystery, and it's not the most involving one, unfortunately. A scientist named Jacob Demwa is working to "uplift" dolphins when he is asked to join an expedition into the upper portions of the Sun itself in a spherical ship called a "Sunship", in order to observe a race of aliens that actually live within the star itself. This whole idea is fascinating, and the best parts of the book evoke that "sense of wonder" that drives all of the best science fiction, and this facet of the book is really why I recommend reading it. The mystery plot, involving various scientific factions and a galactic "pecking order" amongst the races and species, is less involving because it's fairly clear who the villain actually is (although the way in which it's all revealed is fairly nifty). It's one of those mysteries that the reader can solve by filling in the blank for the sentence, "It would be the most surprising for the murderer to turn out to be _____" So I found myself absorbed in the dives into the sun, in the interactions with the solar beings, and the explorations of Brin's future while I also found myself skimming over the "investigation" bits (which include one of those standard "parlor gatherings" that ended every Agatha Christie novel). I've looked at a few reviews of Sundiver since I finished it, and the consensus opinion seems to be that the Uplift series gets much, much better after this first novel (which is also Brin's first novel, period). Some even call the series a classic, so Sundiver is successful in that I want to read more of this universe and explore more of these ideas. On the grading curve, I guess I'd call it a B-minus.

:: I was delighted last week to find that my local public library had copies of Asimov on Science Fiction and Asimov's Galaxy: Reflections on Science Fiction, both by the great Isaac Asimov. These books, or at least the essays contained within, should be sought out by anyone interested in the background or nuts-and-bolts of science fiction. The essays -- many of them written for Asimov's Science Fiction, one of the last SF magazines still being published -- reflect Dr. Asimov's views on various matters pertaining to science, science fiction, science fiction writing, writing in general, fantasy, and occasional political matters. Asimov's fiction writing nowadays seems very unsophisticated, and in a lot of ways it really is, but Asimov was a leading light in SF for many, many years -- but still, too few -- and these essays capture the thoughts of one of the twentieth centuries most fluid and liveliest minds. Some of the essays have been reprinted elsewhere, but I haven't read many of them in a long time -- at least five years for some of them -- so I greatly welcomed encountering them again. To this day, Asimov's blunt statement regarding the importance of learning spelling and grammar is the best such formulation I have ever seen:

Besides, take it from an old war-horse, if your spelling and grammar are rotten, you won't be writing a great and gorgeous story. Someone who can't use a saw and hammer does not turn out stately furniture.

Beautiful.

The presents are opened, the toys have all been played with at least once, much food has been consumed, and a large tree with lights still sits in the living room, although it is now beginning to dry out a bit and drop the needles that will still be piercing the flesh of an unsuspecting foot next August. Christmas has come, and gone.

We had a lovely time this year. We attended a church service on Christmas Eve, although we had to go to the early service instead of the late one; then we went out for our traditional drive to observe Christmas lights on people's houses culminating in a drive through Lights On the Lake, an amazing drive-through Christmas light display on the shores of Onondaga Lake (the lake at one end of which Syracuse is located). As we drove through Lights On The Lake, we listened to our local classical station's broadcast of the St. Olaf Christmas Festival, a gorgeous concert of sacred music involving a number of St. Olaf College musical ensembles. (This brought back a flood of memories of my own college experiences with our own annual Christmas musical pageant. Remember those, Sean?)

We marked Christmas morning by making waffles and sausage for breakfast -- one of our favorite meals, but one which we don't indulge in often because, well, it's not that healthy. (I tend to view waffles as a delivery-mechanism for large quantities of Mrs. Butterworth's.) Then, after we'd eaten our fill -- we would not eat again until dinnertime, we were so full -- it was off to the tree to open presents, with the observation that this is probably the last Christmas for a number of years into the future that we will be able to sleep in. I expect our daughter next year to start the business of waking us up slightly before sunrise in order to open everything.

The best gift I received was a VHS copy of the Extended Version of Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring, which I had no idea was even released on VHS (and in widescreen, to boot). Circumstances have conspired in such a way as to keep us behind the DVD revolution, but now I will get to see the four-hour version of the film at long long last, which means that a certain friend of mine will have one less thing to pester me about every time I encounter him online. (You know who you are....) Something of a tradition of mine is that I give my wife a new book, which she invariably loves and ends up losing a bit of sleep because she reads the book before going to sleep at night and I always manage to pick out one of those "Well, just one more chapter" types of books. This year it's Ken Follett's new one, Hornet Flight.

But the best thing was watching our daughter open her gifts. I've noticed that there are two kinds of people in the world: the ones who look at the toys kids have today and say, "Man, the toys we had in my day are sure better than this crap!" and the ones who look on today's toys and think, "Man, I wish I'd had these toys, because mine were sure crap!" I tend to fall in the latter camp, although I don't think my toys were lousy. It's just that these are so cool...expecially the LeapPad. This is just totally nifty, and it's already getting us more quiet time as she plays with it in her room. Hooray and Huzzah for the LeapPad!!

There were also the obligatory new videos: Monsters Inc. (which we've already seen), Ice Age (which we haven't), and a Veggie Tales video. We've become pretty big fans of Veggie Tales, even if the tomato-guy by his look reminds me ever-so-slightly of Cartman from South Park.

Dinner, for those still reading this post, included ham, corn in butter sauce, garlic-and-parmesan couscous (couscous being one of the greatest foods ever invented, as far as I am concerned) and a nice Zinfandel. (Real, red Zinfandel, not the "white" Zin -- although I do like white Zin as a summertime wine, when blush wines tend to fare better.)

Setting aside the religious importance of Christmas, I love all the trappings of the holiday -- the trees, the colored lights, the ornaments, the music. It never bothers me in the slightest measure that the trees start going up in the department stores and malls in October; what bothers me more are the now-bare trees I see hauled out to the sidewalk for weekly garbage pickup on December 27. It bothers me that to such a degree we have relegated beauty -- even the simple beauty of a tree with colored lights and sparkly ornaments hung upon its branches -- to such a specific timeframe, to be complained about if it's begun too early and to be dispensed with according to a specific timetable. (Not that it should stay in the living room until March, of course. We're not the Simpsons, after all.)

To all the readers -- loyal, occasional and accidental -- of Byzantium's Shores: I wish you all the merriest of Christmases.

"Noel: Christmas Eve 1913", by Robert Bridges (1844-1930).

A frosty Christmas Eve when the stars were shining
Fared I forth alone where westward falls the hill,
And from many a village in the water’d valley
Distant music reach’d me peals of bells aringing:
The constellated sounds ran sprinkling on earth’s floor
As the dark vault above with stars was spangled o’er.
Then sped my thoughts to keep that first Christmas of all
When the shepherds watching by their folds ere the dawn
Heard music in the fields and marvelling could not tell
Whether it were angels or the bright stars singing.
Now blessed be the towers that crown England so fair
That stand up strong in prayer unto God for our souls
Blessed be their founders (said I) an’ our country folk
Who are ringing for Christ in the belfries tonight
With arms lifted to clutch the rattling ropes that race
Into the dark above and the mad romping din.
But to me heard afar it was starry music
Angels’ song, comforting as the comfort of Christ
When he spake tenderley to his sorrowful flock:
The old words came to me by the riches of time
Mellow’d and transfigured as I stood on the hill
Heark’ning in the aspect of th’ eternal silence.

An addendum to yesterday's football thoughts: I had no delusions that the Steelers would be able to go into Tampa and win, especially with the Bucs striving for home-field advantage. Well, was I ever wrong...the bone-jarring, drive-snuffing defense turned out to be Pittsburgh's, as they were able to make the ten points the offense scored stand up, and add a touchdown of their own to boot. And it is always a pleasure to see a trash-talker like Warren Sapp (a player I actually like, although I wish he'd tone it down a bit) get beat.

John Madden summed up the meaning to the Bucs of losing last night's game best. Al Michaels noted that by losing, instead of having a first-round bye and home-field advantage in the playoffs, they would instead have to play a first-round game at home and then have to go on the road to either Green Bay or Philadelphia, and then to the other of those two locations the next week. Madden replied, "If they go to one of those places in the second round, they won't get to the other one the week after."

And now, of course, both of my Super Bowl picks have won their divisions. [Voice of the Emperor]Everything is proceeding as I have foreseen....[resume normal voice]

A quick maintenance note: the Image of the Week will be taking two weeks off, this week and next week. Also, there will be no further updates this week until Friday.

Note to political commentators: Beware "auto-correct" spelling programs in your word processors and weblog software. One of the MSN homepage's headlines this morning had the presumptive new Senate Majority Leader's surname as "First".

And now I can't help but think of the Captain Oveur character in Airplane!....

Just a few notes on yesterday's football action:

:: As expected, the Bills fell to the Packers. Going into Lambeau field on a sub-freezing day in December, when the Pack is having a good year, is an almost impossible task for anyone. Of course, that doesn't mean that the Bills needed to help them out by giving up six turnovers. And I'm a bit chagrined that after I set up camp in Sean's comment section defending Drew Bledsoe, the Bills' QB goes out and has his worst games of the year, by far. Ugh. And a double ugh, considering that the Bills' defense, which I have been maligning all year, had its best game yesterday.

The game did point out the one thing I think the Bills need to add to their offense for next year. (Well, maybe two things.) They already have the outstanding receiver duo (and maybe trio, when promising rookie Josh Reed blossoms); they've got the franchise quarterback; they've got the franchise running back; they've got the young and quickly improving offensive line (not that you could tell by yesterday's abominable pass-blocking, but anyway....). They still need a good tight end, something the Bills have lacked since Pete Metzelaars retired years ago. Jay Riemersma simply isn't it, and the big contract that John Butler gave him was simply unwarranted then and insane now. The other thing the Bills really need, especially for games like yesterdays -- cold-climate games with wind conditions that hobble the passing game -- is a good, blocking fullback. Larry Centers is a good pass-catcher out of the backfield (he has more receptions than any RB in NFL history), but he's not a great blocker. I remember how in the early 90s, when the Cowboys were so good, Emmitt Smith would run behind the blocking of not only a great offensive line but the superior blocking of fullback Moose Johnston. A good lead blocker yesterday would made a big difference in Travis Henry's output in a game where he only had 2.3 yards per carry. The Bills were unable to establish their running game yesterday, despite a JCPenney shopping bag full of opportunities to do so.

So the Bills are officially out of the playoff hunt, and I am now just a football fan. Could be worse, eh?

:: It's official: I now dislike the Patriots more than I dislike the Dolphins. That said, it looks like the Dolphins are about to complete another of their patented December swoons (which they incidentally seem to have licensed out to the Saints and Chargers this year) by losing to the Pats this coming week. The Dolphins can win the division by winning at New England, but they are 2-5 on the road, and history doesn't particularly favor teams from South Florida going to snowy, northern stadiums in December. However, the Jets' defeat of the Pats last night means that the Jets, who are home for the Packers, can win the division if the Pats do, in fact, defeat Miami. So next week I'm rooting for Miami and the Jets.

:: I didn't see last night's Jets-Patriots game, but judging by his linescore, Tom Brady was not particularly impressive. (19-37, 133 yards, 1 touchdown, 1 interception.)

:: Super Bowl prediction update: The Eagles are in position to clinch home-field advantage next week, and a win in either of their next two games clinches the AFC North for the Steelers.

:: The Titans and the Giants may be the most dangerous teams right now.

Updates to Byzantium's Shores will be light this week, considering the holiday and other projects that I am trying to shove out of my cranium. I'm in the home stretch of the novel-in-progress, and the story that's been fermenting in my mind is at last ready to be bottled (on second thought, I don't like that metaphor...). I am working on a few longer essays for eventual appearance here, but none of them are done yet.

Even though I don't live in Buffalo anymore, I still care deeply about the old hometown. When you hear about all the old, industrial Northeastern cities that fell on hard times in the 1970s and 1980s but then made big comebacks in the 1990s, with revitalized downtowns and commitments to high-tech industries to shore up the eroding tax bases -- cities like Cleveland and Baltimore -- one also notes, lurking in the background, those other poor cities, the ones knocking on the window and crying, "Can I play too?" That's Buffalo, sadly -- a city with miles and miles of undeveloped waterfront land that, for more than a decade, has had local politicians saying "We've got to develop that land!" and then having nothing happen; a city that is grasping not just at casino gambling, but Indian-run casino gambling (which, according to last week's TIME Magazine, in all likelihood will not even benefit the Indians running the thing) as the latest silver-bullet to jump-start a downtown that only needs a few tumbleweeds and an Ennio Morricone soundtrack to finish the current look; a city where financial management is so bad that the City Controller literally could not find some of the city's money; a city whose economy is such dire straits that even in a time of fiscal crisis the city officials found a way to ride to the rescue of, not a local factory or hospital or other big industry, but K-Mart.

So it's not at all surprising to read today that the Buffalo Sabres may be forced to leave town if the city and state can't help get the team sold. And I won't be at all surprised if they find the money, somehow. They found it when the Sabres threatened to leave town unless they got a new arena; they found it when the Bills likewise threatened to leave unless Ralph Wilson Stadium (then Rich Stadium), a county-owned facility, were significantly upgraded; they found it when K-Mart threatened to leave the city. (And we're talking about one store here -- that's all. They kept a single K-Mart open.) They couldn't find it, though, when there wasn't enough to keep all the fire departments and police precincts open. They haven't been able to find enough to keep from having to close schools and repair the ones still open.

Hockey's not my thing, really, but I love sports. I think that professional sports (and collegiate sports, if there is a good program in town) add a great deal to a municipality's lifestyle. I root for the Bills very strongly, and I do root for the Sabres, even though I'm far from passionate about them. I'd hate to see Buffalo lose its franchises, but I'm not sure that spending the money to keep them -- when there are bigger, more important problems to be solved -- is a good idea. When we're saying "Gee, we just can't give the schools and the arts the funding they want, but we'll see what we can come up with for the hockey team", I think the priorities are a bit, maybe just a little, a tiny bit, f*cked up. And I'm not at all convinced that sports bring in huge amounts of revenue, nor am I convinced that they spawn business development. I've driven through too many areas -- in Buffalo and in other cities -- where these arenas, stadiums and ballparks exist, surrounded by nothing but parking lots, empty buildings and nothing else.

A recurrent topic in Buffalo is the city's "brain-drain": the fact that the bright, young people almost inevitably leave once they become adults because good jobs are very scarce there. In effect, the city's young -- its children -- are saying, "We may be forced to leave town if you can't come up with the jobs that we want." Faced with that choice on the one hand by its children, and on the other by its hockey team, Buffalo keeps choosing to keep the hockey team.

Is this any way to run a city?

I haven't seen The Two Towers yet. I don't know when I'll get to see it, but I'm hoping for sometime next week. It's hard waiting, but then, I've survived long waits for movies before. I survived the sixteen years between Return of the Jedi and The Phantom Menace, after all.

So, now that Trent Lott has stepped down as Majority Leader, the question naturally rises for the Democrats: what next?

It seems to me that the Democrats have an opportunity here, but it's an opportunity that is almost always missed when it arises in the course of political life. When politicians reach a fork in the road, and this particular opportunity lies one way, the politicians almost invariably choose the other path. What is the opportunity? The chance to shut up, say nothing, and move on to the next thing.

By this I mean, no gloating; no crowing and attacking; no rubbing of the hands with glee before looking around and saying, "Who's next?" I'm hoping that the whole Lott fiasco does not start another feeding frenzy of the sort that consumed politics from the late 1980s -- when Senate Democrats organized to scrub President Reagan's nomination of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court -- and well into the 1990s, when the unfortunate phrase "the blood sport of Washington" became so apt. Perhaps the fact that a great deal of the pressure on Lott came, eventually, from Republicans may alleviate any need for reprisal and counterattack. Perhaps.

This isn't to say, though, that the entire issue should be swept under the rug. I was listening to the public radio program Here and Now earlier today, and they had a guest -- a journalist whose name I do not recall -- express the fear that Lott's decision to step down as Majority Leader would put an end to the entire story, which involves the larger reality that racial issues are still a very big problem in America. This journalist drew a parallel with the conclusion of the O.J. Simpson murder trial, when for about a week after the verdict there was a great deal of concern in the national media about what it all meant -- especially the fact that whites by and large thought that Simpson had gotten away with murder, whereas an almost identical proportion of African Americans felt that the correct verdict had been rendered. What did this mean for race relations in the United States? We still don't know, because no real dialog ever took place -- instead, we moved on to the next story. I hope that this does not happen here, but I fear it will: we will say to ourselves, "There, someone said something racist and got what he deserved, so we can stop concerning ourselves with race for a while." That would be the wrong thing to do.

As for Lott, I'm fine with him staying in the Senate while abdicating his leadership position. I'm a firm believer in letting the punishment fit the crime, and I don't feel that his comments -- stupid and racist as they were -- warranted his removal, either forced or by back-room coercion, from the Senate. (Now, his comments might very well warrant his removal from office by the voters, which is one reason why I have always been against term limits for elected officials. A lame-duck officeholder has nothing whatsoever to lose by saying or doing things as dumb as this.) I felt the same way during the impeachment of President Clinton: he did a loutish thing, but it did not warrant his removal from office. In a little more than a month, Trent Lott has gone from salivating over the prospects of leading one half of a Republican-controlled Congress with a Republican President and a friendly Supreme Court down the street; now he's just one more member of the Senate. That's pretty far to fall, in and of itself.

IMAGE OF THE WEEK





"Icebound Lake Boat", Charles Burchfield (1893-1967)

Charles Burchfield lived for part of his life in Gardenville, NY, a small suburb of Buffalo (now part of the Town of West Seneca). He is one of the premier American painters, and his work reflects the natural world of the Great Lakes region in which he lived. I came to know his work through visiting the Charles E. Burchfield Nature and Art Center, a park in West Seneca that is a mix of nature preserve, art gallery, outdoor sculpture park, and outdoor performance space. It's one of the places I miss the most in having moved from Buffalo.

Russian Romantic Composers, part two.

Yesterday I wrote in general about the Russian composers during the Romantic period, in an effort to place some of the artistic context of The Brothers Karamazov. Today, I'd like to discuss a few specific composers and works.

:: Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893). Tchaikovsky is the most famous name in Russian Romantic music, and with the possible exception of Igor Stravinsky he is probably the most famous Russian composer of all time. His music is imbued with the Russian character, and in his music one can most readily hear the qualities that distinguish the other Russian Romantics: sweeping, epic melodies; scherzos that are redolent of folk-dances; dramatic and fiery contrasts; evocative orchestrations. He is perhaps the quintessential Romantic: the tortured, emotional genius who poured all of his sufferings into his art, living a fairly unhappy life as a closeted homosexual before dying young of cholera. Tchaikovsky's music isn't strictly Nationalistic, but it is a natural extension of the Russian Nationalist masters who came before him.

His most famous works are the Romeo at Juliet Overture; the Piano Concerto No. 1; the Fourth, Fifth and Sixth Symphonies; and the great ballets Swan Lake, The Sleeping Beauty and The Nutcracker. I love all of the ballets, and of course no audiophile should be without a blistering, digital recording of the 1812 Overture to display the abilities of one's speakers. While I've never responded much to his symphonies, the Fifth is my favorite while the Fourth is the most Russian in character and the Sixth is the most blatantly emotional.

(The St. Louis Symphony Orchestra recordings of the ballets, conducted by Leonard Slatkin, come in handsome boxed sets with cardboard cut-outs of the characters, folding backdrop sets, and illustrated liner notes that tell the story beautifully.)

:: Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov (1844-1908). Not much of Rimsky-Korsakov's music is played today, but more's the pity as his music is often wonderful. According to Harold Schonberg, Rimsky-Korsakov was the most Nationalist of the Russian Romantics, so it's a bit ironic that he is primarily known for works that purport to depict lands other than Russia: the Capriccio Espagnol, inspired by Iberia, and the magnificent Scheherazade, which happens to be one of my favorite musical works of all time. He is also known for Flight of the Bumblebee, the Russian Easter Overture, and Tsar-Saltan.

(The best recordings of Scheherazade I've heard are the London Symphony Orchestra conducted by Sir Charles Mackerras, and the New York Philharmonic conducted by Leonard Bernstein.)

:: Modest Moussorgsky (1839-1881). Moussorgsky's most famous work, to regular listeners, is probably Pictures at an Exhibition, a suite for piano inspired by a series of paintings by an artist friend of the composer's who had died the year before. The work was later orchestrated by Ravel, and this orchestral version has become a standard in the standard concert repertoire. Almost as famous is his tone-poem Night on Bald Mountain, played most often in its form edited by Rimsky-Korsakov. Moussorgsky's masterpiece is his opera Boris Godunov, a work with which I am unfamiliar.

(The Pictures at an Exhibition and Night on Bald Mountain are among the most frequently recorded works in the entire spectrum of classical music. On many CDs the works are paired together. The one I own is performed by the Philadelphia Orchestra under the baton of Riccardo Muti.)

:: Vasili Kalinnikov (1866-1901). The history of any art is replete with names of promising artists whose youthful works, while rough and awkward, show flashes of brilliant talent that would never blossom because of a tragic, early death. Film actor James Dean may be the most famous example; in the case of the Russian Romantics, Kalinnikov's name is notable in this regard. (Mozart is not an example of this phenomenon; although he did indeed die young, his musical output is one of staggering genius with many works of transcendent perfection as opposed to promise of what might have been.) Kalinnikov is known by a handful of works, the best being his two symphonies. These works are loaded with beautiful melodies, powerful orchestral tuttis, delicate sonic structures in the slow movements, and thrilling cyclic constructions. The works have awkward transitions, and occasionally threaten to overstay their welcome, but to listen to these symphonies is to hear an uncommon musical mind at work and to wonder what that mind might have produced had it not perished too soon.

(Kalinnikov's two Symphonies are available on an excellent Naxos CD, performed by the National Symphony Orchestra of Ukraine, conducted by Theodore Kuchar. And since it's a Naxos CD, it can be had for less than ten bucks. Naxos rules!)

I looked at the new proposals for the WTC site, and I was glad that unlike the first batch, these seem to have some vision. What's separating the two sets of plans is the way the first set was geared around making the new buildings blend into the surrounding skyline of Lower Manhattan, which is something many architectural experts never felt the original WTC did; there was a real way in which the original Twin Towers were not beloved until they were actually destroyed on September 11, 2001. The new plans, though, for the most part call for height and grandeur, which I for one am glad to see. I strongly feel that whatever gets built there, needs to soar.

My favorite is this one, by Studio Daniel Libeskind of Berlin:



I find this design beautiful, elegant and distinctive. Not so, however, the design by the United States' Meier Eisenman Gwathmey Holl. It seems to me that my first thought upon looking on the Lower Manhatten Skyline should not be, "X gets the square!"



This design is definitely grandiose, but I can't imagine it an improvement to build something that would clash with its surroundings even more than the original WTC purportedly did.

I didn't watch 24 last season, but this season I am completely hooked. This show is totally riveting.

The plot this year involves the government learning of a terrorist plot to detonate a nuclear bomb in Los Angeles, sometime during the "day" during which the entire season's shows take place. It's amazingly constructed entertainment, with every plot twist dovetailing together as it goes. One thing that's been bugging me, though, is the fact that since the entire season takes place in twenty-four hours, then obviously the nuke can't be set to detonate until the twenty-fourth episode, so I know exactly how much time Agent Jack Bauer has to find it. But last night they may have dealt with this particular problem, by setting things up so that when Jack finds out where the bomb is and gets there barely in time to stop it, the bomb almost certainly will not be there, because of an unexpected crimp in the terrorists' plans.

It's going to be hard waiting until May to see how this thing plays out....

(Some clever soul over on the message boards at AICN has dubbed the show "The Jack Bauer Power Hour". Funny thing, that.)

Yesterday morning, The Today Show did a brief segment honoring the anniversary of the Wright Brothers' first flight at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina -- ninety-nine years ago. The segment was interesting, but it seems to have erred a bit in attributing the dawn of the Space Age to the Wright Brothers' invention. The problem here is that the Space Age has been dependent not on aeronautics as pioneered by Wilbur and Orville Wright, but on rocketry as pioneered by Robert H. Goddard and the Russian Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, who had written an article proposing a rocket as a vehicle for spaceflight five years prior to the Wright Brothers' first flight. Even now, almost a hundred years after the first airplane flight, we are still reliant on rockets for leaving Earth's gravity, the Space Shuttle notwithstanding (the Shuttle being basically a supersized glider attached to a rocket for launching purposes -- in fact, the Shuttle is entirely useless as a flying machine). It's certainly true that our current technological society is a case of "standing on the shoulders of giants", but in the case of spaceflight the giants are Goddard and Tsiolkovsky, not the Wright Brothers.

When encountering a work of art with which I am unfamiliar, I have always found it helpful to place the work in something of a historical context – not only within the milieu of the events of the day, but also within the context of the other arts with which the present work is contemporary. I imagine that most people do this, if they are artistically and historically aware, to the extent that they are able. For me, most often this means that I consider the present work in the context of the music being produced at that time. In the case of The Brothers Karamazov, therefore, I have been considering the music of Russian Romanticism in the late nineteenth century, occasionally even listening to this music while reading Dostoevsky’s novel.

The music of the Russian Romantic period differs from that of, say, Germany in that the Russian composers of the time were not only Romantics but they were also among the first Nationalists. Nationalism in music – the conscious reliance by a composer on his nation’s body of native folk music – became a powerful force in the late nineteenth century, with the Russians forming the most famous "bloc" of nationalist composers. This is what gives the music of composers like Glinka, Balakirev, Moussorgsky and Rimsky-Korsakov its distinctively Russian character; even when these composers are not using actual folk tunes in their compositions, their music still carries that folk flavor.

One possible reason why the Russian Romantic composers were also Nationalists may be the fact that Russia was very late in developing its own musical tradition – in fact, Russia was very late in developing beyond a medieval society in the first place. The Russian musical scene up to the mid-eighteenth century was dominated by foreign music, primarily that of Italy. There are no important Russian composers of note from the Baroque or Classical periods. It was not until Mikhail Glinka (1804-1857) that Russian music began to blossom on its own, with his opera A Life for the Czar. Russia's tardiness in musical development meant that there was no musical establishment for Russian composers to follow as the nineteenth century marched on; without the resulting sense of tradition and academic constraints upon the compositional process (Russia had no conservatory of music as late as 1850), the budding Russian musical movement was thus enchanted with the freedom offered by Nationalism, as first displayed by Franz Liszt and Frederic Chopin. The Russians were not the first Nationalists, but Russia was the first place where Nationalism truly became a force in music.

I don't want to give the impression, though, that the music of Romantic Russia is concerned exclusively with folk-songs and ethnic character and not with traditional musical elements like form, harmony and orchestration. Nationalism in music does not necessarily refer to the use of actual folk music, but rather on a character that is folk-like, even while the Russians were using traditional forms in their compositions – symphonies, concertos, et cetera. Leonard Bernstein once put it this way: "Tchaikovsky's symphonies are German symphonies with vodka substituted for beer." That's a good way of putting it.

Tomorrow I will post a bit on specific Russian composers whose music I particularly admire.

(I am indebted to the book The Lives of the Great Composers by Harold C. Schonberg for some of the material in this article.)

Some ISP weirdness led to my absence yesterday. Annoying, but without Net access I actually got a lot done. And this Internet thing is supposed to increase productivity....

I watched very little football yesterday. Next week is likely to be the last Bills game of the year (at Green Bay) that I'll be able to watch; I would be extremely surprised if the Bills sold out their season finale against....the Bengals. Who wants to go out on a December Sunday at Ralph Wilson Stadium, a place so windy that they could erect windmills there to power the place if they wanted, to watch the Bills in a meaningless game against the NFL's worst team? Not me! I expect attendance at that game to total around forty thousand (the stadium seats something like 75,000).

:: I'm glad the Bills won, and a bit surprised -- the Chargers had more to play for, and despite the game's cold climate the Chargers' game is well-suited to road games in the cold. They're a power-rushing team that doesn't put the ball in the air much, and they have an underrated defense. From what I could tell listening to the radio, Junior Seau is still a force to reckon with. Drew Bledsoe had a forgettable game -- not a disaster, like his games against the Patriots, but not inspiring, either. The defense seems to have adopted a "bend but don't break" philosophy, which works sometimes but can drive one crazy.

The Bills' running back Travis Henry could post the fourth highest total in rushing yardage in Bills' history this year, eclipsing Thurman Thomas's best season (1992) and only looking up at O.J. Simpson's three best years. Henry has 1,312 yards right now, with two games left. I don't recall the number he needs exactly, but it's something like 170 yards over the next two games. My question, though, is why on earth Henry is only averaging about nineteen carries a game. A workhorse RB like Henry should be getting around thirty carries a game, which would ease things on the offensive line and Drew Bledsoe, who has been forcing his throws lately in the belief that he has to overcome his own team's defensive shortcomings.

I got to watch the last two minutes of yesterday's game, because all of the other games on CBS had gone final, so they offered "bonus coverage"...which was the Bills and Chargers. Thus, I got to see Doug Flutie's last attempt at magic. I don't think Flutie has the physical tools anymore to really play in the NFL, but there is no question that he once did. There's no reason why he had to spend most of his playing years in the CFL.

:: In this "year of streaks" in the NFL, getting hot at the right time -- the way the Patriots did last year -- could be the key to whichever team ends up going all the way. The NFC race is a thrill, with the Packers, Eagles and Buccaneers all heating up. In the AFC, the Dolphins look like the hottest team right now -- but there's no telling if that will remain the case. In any case, it's a strange feeling to be just two weeks away from the end of the season, and still not have a single playoff berth in the AFC clinched. Wow.

:: For Christmas, every player on the New York Jets should get a CD containing nothing but seventy-five minutes of Chris Berman, saying "That's why they play the games...."

:: The status of my Super Bowl picks: the amazing Eagles are not only doing OK without Donovan McNabb, they're actually fluorishing and may actually win home-field advantage throughout the playoffs. I'm not sure if McNabb would come back for the playoffs then, or at least the NFC Championship Game if they advance that far, but the injury that seemed likely to kill the Eagles' season now looks like a mere speed-bump on their way to the postseason. The Steelers control their own destiny in the AFC North; they only need a single victory in their last two games to secure the division. However, that may prove a bit difficult: their next game is at Tampa (with the Bucs still fighting for home-field), and they wind things up at home against Baltimore. If the Steelers lose to the Bucs, and the Ravens beat the Browns this weekend, then that game would be a winner-take-the-division showdown, with the loser likely exiting the playoff picture. Of course, if the Steelers beat the Bucs on Monday night, then the game against Baltimore is meaningless except for playoff-seeding purposes, if even that.

:: This season, with the amazing parity in the AFC, reminds me in a way of the seasons ten years ago or so, when there would be no dominant AFC team and an 11-5 record would be good for top-seed in the playoffs. Back then, the NFC was clearly the better conference, as was made plain each year when the AFC Champion would be beaten -- most times, badly -- by the NFC Champion in the Super Bowl. But then, there are differences: back then there was always a dominant NFC team, either Dallas or San Francisco or Washington, for whom the entire season would be an inexorable march toward the title. That's not the case this year for the NFC, and a look at the standings reveals that the NFC has seven teams with records of .500 or better, while the AFC sports thirteen such teams. There are only three losing teams in the AFC, and one of those -- Jacksonville -- could well be a winning team if a few breaks had gone its way. Right now, the three best teams in the NFL are all in the NFC, but the AFC on average seems to be better, and none of those three top NFC teams would be any kind of lock over any of the realistic AFC champions. So here we are, with only two weeks left in the season, and twenty of the NFL's thirty-two teams still have a mathematical chance at the Super Bowl.

I haven't posted much here about my various writing projects lately, so a couple of updates:

:: The novel-in-progress (otherwise known as the damned book, or officially, The Promised King: The Welcomer) is proceeding apace, although I had to take four whacks at a certain scene last week. It's a scene where one of my main villains meets a person he has seriously wronged face-to-face for the first time in the work. These scenes are very hard to write without having them sound like the standard "James Bond meets the bad guy" type of thing. These characters have history that extends long before the events of the book, and the hard thing to execute is the sense that the villain genuinely believes himself to be the hero. There are contexts in which villains like the evil Queen in Disney's Sleeping Beauty can work ("You thought you could defeat the Queen of All Evil???") but my current work is not one of them. Villains have to have reasons for what it is they are doing, beyond "because it's the evil thing to do". The most interesting villains aren't the purely selfish ones; the most interesting villains are the ones who genuinely believe that the world will be a better place when their selfish goals are realized.

Now I'm on to my heroine's "mystic quest", which takes place outside the actions in the novel's "real world". This is where I can plug in a lot of the weirdness I've been saving from all of my readings into Celtic mythology. One item that has me waffling is whether or not to include a passage where she must successfully answer a riddle before she can proceed. I'm leaning toward including it, because riddles are part-and-parcel of Celtic myth and legend, but I also don't want the thing to end up reminiscent of The Hobbit.

:: My current short story (no title yet; I rarely have titles for my stories at the outset of writing) has been in cryogenic slumber for a while because I had reached the Third Act, and I had no idea what to do at that point. I don't outline, and in many cases I don't even figure out the ending of a story before I start writing it. It's usually been my experience that the ending will occur to me much earlier in the process, when I'm halfway done, perhaps. (And that's only in cases where I don't know the ending beforehand; sometimes I do.) But with this story, I was truly stumped.

But, yesterday I think I figured out where to go with it. The key, of course, is the famous bit of advice: Murder your darlings. Basically, I realized that one of my main characters dies in a rather nasty manner. The only thing bugging me is that I'm still undecided on what action my heroine will take once this particular character has expired. She can do one of two things, and the trouble is that both may be in character for her.

:: Three stories went out last week to various editors, for perusal and immediate rejection. Unless, of course, I manage to glom onto some of this guy's luck and actually sell a story for once.

I'm waiting until after I've seen the film to write a detailed analysis of the score to Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. Suffice it to say, though, the score CD is an absolute joy. My skin literally shivered as I heard the Ring motif in the very first seconds of the album, and judging by the motifs from the first film revisited in that opening cue, I can only imagine what is depicted in the film's opening scene. I cannot wait....is it Wednesday yet?

One reason I was able to complete my Christmas shopping today is that the Bills game (against the Chargers) did not sell out 72 hours before kick-off, so the NFL's blackout rule kicked in....but I'm wondering, why? My understanding -- and it's borne out by a few minutes of searching online -- is that the rule applies to a 75-mile radius from the stadium in question. Syracuse is roughly 140 miles away from Orchard Park, NY, where Ralph Wilson Stadium is located. Why, then, should the game be blacked out in Syracuse? especially when the TV markets don't overlap, given the presence of Rochester, NY between the cities of Buffalo and Syracuse? Perhaps someone can explain this to me.

I don't have much to say about the whole Trent Lott fiasco, except to note that since it was not an "off-the-cuff" remark -- a la Al Gore's unfortunate wording that got morphed into the urban legend that he invented the Internet -- but rather an actual, written comment in Lott's text for that day, I can't fathom what on earth he was thinking. Even if he is a raging racist (and I suspect he's at least a non-raging racist), surely a politician of his experience would be able to craft his rhetoric better than this. I caught a replay of the moment the other day, and I was so flabbergasted that he could actually, knowingly write and say those words without realizing how they would be interpreted, I could only think of that scene in Reality Bites where the Winona Ryder character finally has had enough with the nasty female anchor on the news show she writes for that she slips some...unfortunate words into the prompter feed, causing the anchor to say something live, on-the-air, like "I wet myself". Of course, that's not the case here, although Lott might well wish it was.

We all say stupid things, things we wish we could take back. But we rarely plan on saying stupid things. We rarely put them into the body of our prepared text. This is precisely the kind of laughably absurd story that keeps me a political junkie (although I try not to write about that here).

Another reason I've been light on the blogging lately is typical for this time of year: Christmas shopping. I'm all done now, and it was fairly painless -- even the insanity of trips to the mall on a Saturday and a Sunday in December. The only irritating thing was in the way people these days appear sometimes to have completely forgotten that the concept of "personal space" ever existed -- at times, in various stores, I felt like a pinball being bumped around a set of bumpers.

We also taped all of the yearly Christmas specials so we could watch them on a single night -- Frosty the Snowman, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, and my favorite, A Charlie Brown Christmas. We also ended up watching a couple of newer "sequels" to those classic shows, which were not very good. I'm all for sophisticated humor and whatnot, but the line "Let's go out in the snow and make a fertility goddess!" simply does not belong in a Christmas special. Nothing against fertility goddesses, but to everything a time and place, eh?

One benefit of the health-regimen I adopted last January has been that I've spent the time since almost cold-free, except for a couple of one-day bugs. Well, that ended this weekend. Ugh.

Luckily, this cold -- even though it's lasted two and a half days -- is still nowhere near as bad as some of the nasty colds I've had in the past. I still do not believe in taking 10000 milligrams of Vitamin C a day, but I have to believe that my weight loss combined with my exercise regimen combined with taking a multivitamin each day has something to do with it.

IMAGE OF THE WEEK





Ballycotton Lighthouse, Ireland.

I was doing a bit of noodling around on the Web, looking for information on lighthouses -- research for a future writing project, really -- and I found this lovely image of a lighthouse in Ireland, which seems to me to capture both the beauty and the solitude (or loneliness) of a lighthouse.

A good clearing-house type of site for lighthouse images can be found here.

Some book notes are due today.

:: The vagaries of the publishing world require that some classic works of fantasy fiction stay in print forever, as in the case of The Lord of the Rings. Others, however, are left to go out-of-print for long periods, after which they are reissued by another publisher, stay in print for a while, and then go out-of-print again. One example of this phenomenon is John Bellairs's wonderful first novel, The Face In the Frost. It's in print and available now, but despite this book's near classic status in the fantasy field, it's been vaccilating in and out of print ever since its initial publication in 1969.

The Face In the Frost is Bellairs's only work of adult fiction. After its publication, he turned his attentions to children's literature, producing a body of work much of which has never gone out of print. His specialty was gothic fiction, and he was very adept at creating suspense and unnerving moods through atmosphere and characterization rather than through graphic gore or shock value, and while all of his children's books entertained me greatly, a number of them actually caused me to leave the light on in the hallway all night, lest one of Bellairs's demonic creations enter my room and....you get the picture. Bellairs is also able to accomplish this kind of scare in The Face In the Frost, and in re-reading it last week -- for the first time in nearly ten years, since I bought the book last time it was published -- I discovered anew this writer's gifts.

It's not all horror, though; Bellairs is one of those "chiaroscuro"-type writers who leavens his scary material with humor, some of which is immensely funny. This was true of all of his children's books, and it is true in The Face In the Frost, but the humor is based more on puns and literary in-jokes than on the follies of exaggerated personalities from his works for young readers. His language is also a joy. This is a book where characters utter lines like this: "Oh, good heavens! Great elephantine, cloudy, adamant heavens full of thunder stones!" It's a book where a wizard sits down before his magic mirror to plumb the depths of what his scrying device might reveal...only to have the mirror show him a game between the Chicago Cubs and the New York Giants.

The story is fairly straightforward: two wizards, Prospero ("and not the one you are thinking of, either") and Roger Bacon, are dear old friends who stumble onto the activities of a third wizard who is, as they say, "dabbling in the black arts". The book follows their adventures as they attempt to find this wizard, identify his aims, and finally balk them. The plot really isn't the thing, here; with Bellairs, the emphasis is on language, mood and character. The Face In the Frost is a joy, and any person claiming to be a lover of fantasy but has not read this book is, as Bellairs might say, "a pompous, posturing hornswoggler....guilty of mystagogic muckification and pointless prattle".

:: If I had been a scientist, my sciences of choice would have been, without question, astronomy and cosmology. I've always been keenly interested in the stars and the universe and the Big Bang and how it all fits together. It really is what Carl Sagan called "the grandest of mysteries", and there is nothing in my mind so beautiful as to look at a moonless night sky, filled with stars.

Our Cosmic Habitat by Martin Rees is a brief precis of the state of cosmology today and of the problems facing cosmology right now. This brief book is fairly short on the history, instead giving a quick background on the nature of the stars and planets, of gravity, and of the shape of the universe before delving into the questions of origins. The book's central focus is on examining the possible answers to Einstein's famous query: "Could God have made the world differently?" I won't summarize Rees's answers to that question here (partly because I'm not entirely sure I understood them), but I will note that the book is compelling, written in a clear and concise style that, being as devoid as is possible of scientific jargon, makes it all about as clear as it's likely to get. Particularly fascinating is Rees's discussion of how the qualities of our observable universe, from the shapes of galaxies and the formation of stars to the rise of life itself, are dependent on a small group of "initial settings" -- numbers which, if their values are changed even minutely, would have led to a much different universe -- and very likely precluded life at all.

Readers looking for a history of cosmological thought would be better served by Carl Sagan's Cosmos (which really should be read by everybody, anyway) or Timothy Ferris's Coming of Age In the Milky Way, but readers wanting to know just where we stand right now as far as science's understanding of the universe could do far worse than to read Rees's book. Rees is, among other things, Astronomer Royal of Great Britain.

:: Those of you who tend to walk right by the "Bargain Books" section at Borders or Barnes&Noble, cut it out! You never know what treasures lurk on those haphazardly-stacked tables. The other day I was perusing the "Bargain Book" table at Media Play, and I found Roger Ebert's Book of Film for six bucks, in hardcover. I'm not the filmgoer that I used to be, but this is a terrific collection of film-related essays and writings.

Ah, to partake in every blogger's solution to a lazy day: Random Linkage!!!

:: I saved this link a while ago and forgot about it. It's a Slate article about the shortcomings of President Bush's new initiatives on "forest management", otherwise known as "Give the loggers what they want".

:: Harry Knowles doesn't like Star Trek: Nemesis.

:: Yes, this is shamelessly filched from MeFi, but any lover of Edgar Allan Poe should love this 404 message.

:: WOW. This is one of the few times a website has ever made my eyes pop. Trust me on this.

Over at Ed's Daily Rant, Ed recently took a breather from short and pithy (and entertaining) political observations to present something of a guide to the wide, wonderful world of....malt liquor. Malt liquor isn't my thing, really, but once in a while it's neat for a change. It's sure better than that Zima stuff....

A new round of books for sale can be found in my "Marketplace" section. Go forth and bid.

Now that I'm living in Syracuse, I'm obviously out of touch with what's going on in Buffalo. Thus, I have to wonder if any of that city's "leaders" -- the ones who are falling over themselves in trying to get an Indian-run casino built downtown, with promises of spawning lots of development and economic boosting of the Seneca Nation of Indians -- have bothered to read TIME Magazine's cover story this week. I'm guessing, probably not.

I've complained before about NBC's habit of ruining surprises in episodes of its shows, by their insistence on doing promos that invariably warn us not to miss the last five minutes or to be on the lookout for a twist no one could see coming. (Well, now that I've been told about it, I can see it coming, can't I?) Until yesterday, I was glad that this annoyance was confined to NBC. Sadly, FOX appears to have been bitten by the bug, based on their commercials prior to last night's episode of 24. There was a surprise development at the end of the episode, involving the trunk of a car, which FOX was nice enough to telegraph in the promos, with a cop shouting "Open the trunk!" followed by a shot of one of the characters standing over the open trunk, screaming "Oh my God", and the announcer then intoning in grand NBC style, "A twist you won't believe", or something like that. The problem is, as soon as I knew that this particular character was shocked about something in the trunk of this particular car, there was only one possibility as to what the item in the trunk could be. I had it figured out before the commercial was even over, much less before last night's episode even began (I saw the ad during That 70s Show).

The worst part is that this development would have been shocking, had FOX allowed the surprise to be sprung upon us as the show's producers clearly intended it to be. I actually was shocked by this plot twist, but why couldn't FOX have let me be shocked during the damned show? For a surprise plot twist to really work, we have to first be unaware that there is a surprise plot twist in the first place. Of course, the networks don't care about that; what they're after is ratings and ad revenue, so they want to keep viewers from switching channels, so this is their strategy. But that doesn't stop it from being completely annoying.

Derek Bell, harpist for the wonderful Celtic music group The Chieftains, has died. He was a wonderful musician and will be missed. A fine tribute to Bell can be found here.

(Edited to remove photograph by request.)

The Western has never been my favorite genre; for some reason, I always find it hard to relate to the concerns of the characters in them. That's not to say that I dislike Westerns, though, as I've loved some of the recent ones: Dances With Wolves, Tombstone, Silverado, and most notably, Unforgiven. The older Westerns, though, usually don't resonate with me very much -- I admire their craft, and enjoy their stories, but as a whole they're not really my cup of tea.

A case in point is The Searchers, which I just watched this weekend. To be perfectly honest, I probably would never have bothered to watch this film if not for the fact that a major subplot of Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones is reportedly an homage to The Searchers: Anakin Skywalker's search for his mother, who has been abducted by sandpeople. The story of The Searchers is fairly straight-forward: a frontier family is attacked by an Indian tribe (Comanches, I think), and the father, mother and son are murdered while the two daughters are carried off. A posse, of course, is formed to go after them, and after failing, two of the possemen closest to the family -- the John Wayne and Jeffrey Hunter characters -- go on alone, having a number of adventures before finally locating the tribe that has abducted the two daughters.

The film is fairly dark, with racism in its subtext. The Wayne character hates the Comanches with frightening passion, so much so that he also seems to hate the Jeffrey Hunter character, who is something like one-eighth Indian. Wayne barely treats Hunter like a person throughout the film, calling him things like "Blankethead" and refusing to let him drink in a saloon. He also makes clear that his intent, upon finding the missing girls, is not to rescue them but to kill them -- because by that point they will have become Comanche themselves. Wayne portrays this character as a man whose soul is constantly roiling in anger, and Hunter portrays his in much the same way, but their respective angers are different, which creates a great deal of tension between the two men. This is the best aspect of The Searchers (along with the frequently stunning cinematography).

There are subplots along the way that did not engage me -- prime among them, a love story between Hunter and, well, some woman. (I can't recall the character names from this movie for the life of me....) This whole storyline felt like padding, interjected into the film to give it running time. It distracted from the dynamic between Wayne and Hunter, and it distracted from the main concern of the plot. Thus, a lean and taut film took on a flabby aspect. As to my failure to really relate to the concerns of the characters, as mentioned above, I'm not entirely sure what this family is doing in that spot in the first place. The land they live on appears to be smack in the middle of a vast desert, with no crops and no irrigation, and they don't appear to be ranching (although I might well have missed this). I felt like their sole purpose was to be out in the wilderness, just to be kidnapped in the first place.

So, I'm reporting a mixed reaction to The Searchers. I can see some of why it is so highly regarded -- but at the same time, I can't admit to having really enjoyed it.

You know what the difference is between hitting .250 and hitting .300? I got it figured out. Twenty-five hits a year in 500 at bats is 50 points. Okay? There's 6 months in a season, that's about 25 weeks--you get one extra flare a week--just one--a gork, a ground ball with eyes, a dying quail -- just one more dying quail a week and you're in Yankee Stadium!

              -- Crash Davis (Kevin Costner), BullDurham

It is now that part of the NFL season known as "crunch time", when the playoff picture begins to solidify. This is when the best teams put their divisions away and shift their focus to securing home-field advantage or a first-round bye, and when a cluster of good teams start jockeying either for third (and, new this year, fourth) seed division titles and wild-card playoff berths. Each week sees more teams that have been "on the bubble" slide off it, into the ranks of the also-rans, and the worst teams start to play for pride and for the pleasure of being a spoiler. And for the teams on the bubble, this is when the season can become agonizing; this is the time of year where when the season is over, the players will look back and remember that one game or -- in some cases -- that one play that took them out of playoff contention. December is when a football season either becomes a success or a failure, and when the ones who fail look back and achingly wonder why they couldn't get that one more first down, not lose that one fumble, not had that one ball that was batted into the air come down into the arms of a defender, that might have meant that one more win and a season in January. This is when they wish for the football equivalent of that "one more dying quail".

:: For the Buffalo Bills, the end of their playoff hopes came yesterday with their definitive loss to the Patriots. It wasn't as bad as the 38-7 debacle at home a few weeks back; they played tougher yesterday, on the road, and their defense actually acquitted itself fairly well, although the tackling still needs a lot of work. The fault yesterday was squarely on Drew Bledsoe's shoulders: he threw four interceptions. Turnovers, as always, are the single thing most likely to utterly kill a football team. There isn't really much more I can say about this game, except that the Bills have shown a lot of progress this year. Their remaining three games are for redemption; even if they win them all -- an unlikely event -- to finish 9-7, they would need a series of miracles to make the playoffs. Next week they are home for the Chargers, who are in the thick of the playoff hunt and will need a win; then they visit the Packers, who have clinched their division but need to keep winning to get home-field advantage; and then they wind things up with an exhibition game against one of the lesser college teams (the Cincinnati Bengals).

:: For further instruction on how turnovers can kill you, look at the Steelers game yesterday. Instead of beating an expansion team to join the eight-game winners in the AFC and solidify their position in first place in the AFC North, they lost 24-6 to the Texans despite gaining almost nine yards for every yard gained by Houston. (Houston's 47 total yards is the lowest number of total yards gained by a winning team in NFL history.) The culprit? Five turnovers, three of those courtesy of Tommy Maddox. Now the Steelers are only a half-game ahead of the Cleveland Browns in the AFC North. If they want to make the playoffs (and keep my Super Bowl prediction alive!), the Steelers must win their division. I don't see a wild-card team coming from this division.

:: My other Super Bowl pick, the Eagles, kept their pace by beating the Seahawks. The Eagles are one of three ten-win teams -- all of them in the NFC -- and a victory next week will give them the NFC East title.

:: The Chiefs won't make the playoffs, but they are sure looking impressive in the last two weeks. They have won their last two games by the combined score of 98-10.

:: The road to the Super Bowl in the NFC may well end up going through Tampa. The Bucs appear to have the easiest remaining schedule of the three ten-win teams in the conference. And recent history may be on the side of the Bucs: four of the last five Super Bowl champions were teams that, at that point, had never won a Super Bowl before.

I lived in one of Buffalo's larger suburbs, and one that directly borders the city, for two years. In that time there was only one instance of crime in our vicinity, an isolated incident of domestic violence that did not recur. In that incident, some property was destroyed but there were no injuries.

Now, we've moved to a smaller suburb that is farther away from a city that is already half Buffalo's size. We live in a moderately upscale residential community that has its own golf course and elementary school. Not a gated community, but still pretty nice and quiet and the town is small.

And two mornings ago, a murder occurred in a townhouse less than a quarter of a mile away from our apartment. There have been scant details released yet, so we don't know if it was a domestic dispute gone wrong or a burglar who got interrupted in his break-in. The murder happened, apparently, around 10:30 Friday morning....when we were all at home. So while we're home drinking coffee and surfing the Net and watching Sesame Street, a man was dying of a gunshot wound less than a thousand yards away.

It's always frightening when the world decides to remind me that it can be a disturbingly random place.

I've made some additions to "Other Journeys" at left.

:: Asymetrical Information (formerly Live From the WTC) by Jane Galt is always interesting, even when I disagree with her -- hell, especially when I disagree with her. I've particularly enjoyed her recent posts about file sharing and the fact that even though it is likely to become more and more prevalent, it will have other effects that aren't going to please the "Information wants to be free" folks who think that the end of intellectual property will lead to some kind of wondrous utopia.

:: CalPundit is, like William Burton, a particularly clear-minded liberal voice I've been enjoying for a month or so. His recent post about the coming Iraq war -- ostensibly a review of the book The Threatening Storm -- is superb, both in its logic and in its writing.

:: Reading and Writing, by Joseph Duemur, is a fairly intellectual blog by a professor at Clarkson University, located in Pottsdam, NY (roughly a three hour drive, I think, from Syracuse). It's a good blog, and I have to support my fellow Upstate New Yorkers.

:: I wrote a few days ago about Piquant Rants and Sassy Impudence. As noted, I'm totally on the opposite side of her, politically, but I like her "voice" and I greatly admire the project she is now undertaking.

[Edited for an unfortunate misspelling of "Asymetrical".]

With December being a prime release month for movies, it's also a prime release time for film score CDs. I'm eagerly awaiting this coming Tuesday, when Howard Shore's score to Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers is released. Another big upcoming release is the John Williams score to the new Spielberg film, Catch Me If You Can, which is reported to be a more jazzy-sounding effort than Williams's usual symphonic-style work. While I think that Williams's output in recent years has made clear that he is no longer at the height of his powers (as far as film music is concerned), I'm looking forward to this one because it (reportedly) presents Williams working in an idiom that he hasn't done much with since his early days as a jazz pianist in Hollywood.

The big new release that's out now -- it came out last week -- is Jerry Goldsmith's score to Star Trek: Nemesis. The reviews I've read of this one are almost unanimously positive, and some are amazingly so, stating that Goldsmith has turned in a classic. I bought the CD yesterday, and while I like a lot of it, I can't say that I consider it a classic -- in fact, it's not even as good as Goldsmith's scores to Star Trek: The Motion Picture (an undisputed classic, one of the finest SF film scores ever composed) and Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, a great score that was the best thing about the film most commonly named as the worst of the Trek films. I'd say it's roughly as good as Star Trek: First Contact and better than Star Trek: Insurrection, based on the CD alone.

As is the case with many of Goldsmith's score CDs, this release is fairly short, although it's more generous than usual at forty-nine minutes or so. The result is that a good deal of music in the film did not make the CD, and according to reports an entire heroic aspect of the score has been left off the CD. What is on the CD is mostly comprised of quiet, suspense-type music and, toward the CD's end, rattling action cues. It's all pretty good stuff, displaying Goldsmith's amazing ability to weave a single theme through an entire score in a kind-of inversion of traditional leitmotif-based scoring techniques, but the sequencing of the album makes, unfortunately, for a fairly "monochromatic" listening experience. Basically we get the same emotional texture for roughly half an hour, and then the action stuff kicks in, and we switch to full-bore exciting music and get that for fifteen minutes or so. Notable features of the score are its surprising use of electronics -- Goldsmith is very good at incorporating electronic sounds into his orchestral textures -- and his reuse of motifs from his previous Trek scores.

Then we get Goldsmith's end-credits suite, which is identical to the last four he has done for Trek films: the Alexander Courage "Enterprise Fanfare" leading into Goldsmith's classic ST:TMP/ST:TNG theme, and then a beautiful, lyric theme that is followed by the same coda. It's a formula, and I find it more disappointing each time I hear a new iteration of it: Goldsmith does not even compose a transition into the "lyric" theme; instead, his Trek march simply stops and after a second of silence the lyric theme starts. I really wish Goldsmith would stop using this exact same arrangement each time out. Now, the lyric theme here is utterly gorgeous, so I'm forgiving to that extent, but the whole manner of execution still smacks of a bit of laziness. Goldsmith is a great composer; surely he could do more than simply slap a new middle section into the same End Credits music with each Trek film to come down the pike.

And I question the album's sequencing and music choices. Goldsmith, more than any other composer for films, seems to fall victim to the devilish "re-use fees" that result in short CDs that leave a great deal of music off the disc. That said, Goldsmith is apparently responsible for choosing which music makes the CD and which does not. In this case, he has apparently not done a very good job, as he has left off a good deal of the score's actual character, resulting in a CD that seems to get stuck on one mood for a long time, then another mood for a similarly long time, and then the End Credits.

Jerry Goldsmith's work on Star Trek: Nemesis may prove to be his finest work for a Trek film, but how many of the reviewers out there can pronounce it so on the basis of this CD is a mystery to me. Of course, it's a Goldsmith CD, so it's good by definition. But I'm still disappointed.

Steven Den Beste recently shooed a cadre of Ayn Rand cultists from his virtual doorstep, saying that he found the question "Have you ever read Ayn Rand?" to be equivalent, in some ways, to the question, "Have you spoken to Jesus lately?" I couldn't agree with him more; I have always found Rand's devotees to be a fairly scary bunch. Anyway, a good resource for people whose reaction to Objectivism (the fancy-schmancy name for Rand's philosophical ideas) is to think "Something is rotten in the state of Denmark" can be found here.

IMAGE OF THE WEEK





A vineyard on the slopes of one of New York's Finger Lakes.

When the glaciers receded after the last ice age, deep valleys running roughly north-south were cut into the Central New York region, which then filled with water, creating the Finger Lakes. These deep, long and narrow lakes -- reminiscent of the Lochs of Scotland, especially in winter -- provide some of the most wonderful scenery in New York State, as well as a home to the bulk of the state's wine industry. (New York is the second-leading wine producing state in the United States, behind California.) This is because of the steep hillsides along the lakes, where the vineyards reside, and the lakes themselves, which being as deep as they are moderate the climate in their immediate vicinity -- keeping the summers cool enough and the winters mild enough for the grapes to flourish.

And here, as a bonus image, is a fascinating satellite image of the Finger Lakes Region. The large body of water at the photo's top is Lake Ontario; the large lake at the upper right of the photo -- spilling off the edge -- is Oneida Lake, which is about twenty miles away from Syracuse. The city of Syracuse itself lies at the southern end of Onondaga Lake, which too can be seen in this image. It is the small lake, just south and west of Oneida Lake, that runs northwest-to-southeast.

It's always interesting when I find my tastes changing, such that something that I have heretofore disliked intensely becomes an object of increasing affection. This has been happening lately in my musical life, as I've been listening to a bit of French music from the Impressionist era -- composers such as Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel.

I've always had a difficult time relating to this area of music, because I think the music has more to do with color and evocation of mood than with more purely "musical" goals, such as the development of melodies in accord with the requirement of certain established forms. You won't find Debussy composing a classical rondo, and you'll be hard pressed to locate a passacaglia by Ravel. And sonata-allegro form? Forget it.

You don't even find melody, at least in the sense of a definite theme that can be hummed to oneself after listening to a work. There is melody in the Impressionist music, but it's a slippery thing -- it rises from the depths and sinks again into the musical texture, making it occasionally difficult to ascertain if one is listening to a melody at all, or if it is all part of a larger tonal painting. I find that in listening to Impressionistic music, I must resort to non-musical metaphors to describe it -- visual metaphors such as color, physical and emotional metaphors to describe mood. In fact, mood in itself seems to be of prime concern to the Impressionist composer; even though melody and development do exist, they are subservient to mood. The musical architecture, then, seems to me to be more emotional and less formal in nature. For a person like me, whose musical experience is so grounded in the classical tradition, relating to Impressionistic music has been difficult for a very, very long time -- so much so that I have always viewed the Impressionists with suspicion; I've found Ravel to be a master of orchestration but a composer of cold, lifeless music, while judging Debussy to be a poseur of the highest order, a composer of works that are sometimes enjoyable but at the same time are light and inconsequential. I've come lately to revise my views of both composers.

My reexamination of Ravel comes courtesy of his amazing ballet Daphnis et Chloe, which is more familiar to listeners via the Suite #2 which Ravel culled from the complete score of the ballet. I can't speak to this ballet's narrative elements, because I am unfamiliar with its story, but I can note that there are moments of supreme transcendence within it, including one breathtaking sequence with a "falling" motif is repeated and developed throughout the orchestra and chorus until reaching an apotheosis of majesty and elemental mystery. This is amazing, wondrous music, and it reveals to me new possibilities for music beyond classical forms -- especially in Ravel's orchestration, which is some of the finest orchestration I have ever heard. (Some of his orchestration anticipates the sound that some film composers, such as Jerry Goldsmith, would employ almost a hundred years later in their film scores.)

As for Debussy, I have been listening both to some of his orchestral works and to his piano Preludes. His musical landscape is less universal than Ravel's, more suggestive of ethnic color (particularly in a work like Iberia) and more intimate (as in his Preludes for piano). I had always dismissed Debussy as a lightweight, a wine-and-cheese Frenchman whose dull work has eclipsed my own supreme being amongst French composers, Hector Berlioz. That judgement was in error (although I doubt very much that Debussy will ever fire my soul the way Berlioz has for years). Debussy's music is even more illustrative than Ravel's, with his use of smaller orchestral ensembles and a "blocking" effect in his sound that yields orchestral sonorities that are much more complex than I have ever given him credit for.

I think sometimes that in this culture of ours, obsessed as it is with speed and with advancement, we sometimes forget all of the wonderful things we have either discounted or missed entirely along the way.

Steven Den Beste just changed the contents of his blogroll, performing an "out with the old and in with the new" kind of operation. I didn't make the cut, which doesn't surprise me as I rarely write about the types of things that he writes about and when I do it's not from his side of the political aisle. But I did find something potentially nifty in exploring his new set of links.

The site in question is Rachel Lucas. This is a site I've read a few times before, usually briefly and in passing, because she's a gung-ho conservative one of whose main inspirations is "hating Al Gore". I don't have a problem with that (aside from disagreeing with it), but given that it's not my particular point-of-view, I would not have ever become more than a sporadic reader of hers. I'm glad I checked her site out today, though, because she has announced a new focus for her blog: she intends to visit with elderly people in nursing homes and such, and transcribe for posterity as many of their stories as she can. (She writes about her intentions and her background for this interest more eloquently.)

This also illustrates the problem I have with The Rittenhouse Review's recent decision to impose meta-restrictions on sites hoping to make the blogroll there: the "turning inward", in the sense of association only with that with which we already agree. When we refuse to engage other people because we know their politics stand in opposition to ours, we inevitably miss out on other things they may be doing that could be more important.

A couple of weeks ago I finished reading The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck. Since then I've been thinking a lot about the American Dream.

Not so much the standardized vision of the Dream, with the nice suburban house on an immaculate lot bound by a white picket fence and all the trappings that go with it, but the more abstract idea of the American Dream: the idea, central to our society and essential to its functioning, that anyone willing to work hard and show dogged persistence can achieve his or her dreams. The Grapes of Wrath shows just such a family, the Joads of Oklahoma, and it follows them as they engage in a quest for work that is almost Quixote-like, in that at the end when they have worked and worked and worked some more, and in between working have searched for work, they have achieved mere survival. For the Joads, work is not a means to a dream, but a means just to stay alive. The funny thing is, it doesn't start out that way.

At the beginning of the novel, Tom Joad -- the eldest son in the family -- is paroled from prison in Oklahoma (this is the Dust Bowl era), and he returns home to find his family already evicted from the family farm (whose fields are now dry, dessicated acres of dust) and preparing to head for California. The occasion for this departure from their ancestral home is the dozens of handbills that have been plastered all over Oklahoma, promising work in the bountiful fields of the Pacific Coastal Plain -- work in such abundance that they will be able to save money and follow their respective dreams. As the Joads set out on their journey westward, it is with a sense of optimism, even in the face of the great difficulties they have already faced.

The optimism begins to shift about halfway through their trek to California, when they encounter fellow Oklahomans -- but who are heading east, back to Oklahoma. The work, the Joads are told, is not as easily found as they believe, nor does it pay well at all. Nevertheless, the Joads maintain their determination, although it becomes a grim determination. They are going to find good work, if it kills them.

And when they finally arrive in California, they discover that the situation is indeed as dire as they have been told. Competition for jobs is incredibly fierce; the migrant Oklahomans are looked upon with disdain by the Californians (they are derisively called "Okies" and invariably treated as subhumans); they are forced to work for wages that are barely enough to pay for food; they are in turn charged prices for food that are almost extortionary; and whenever the subject is brought up of the workers banding together to demand better treatment, such talk is discouraged because the locals won't hold with "Reds". The upshot is that they have no choice at all in what they do, and are instead herded about almost like sheep. Throughout the course of the book, the initial optimism gives way to pessimism and ultimately to a dreary fatalism as the Joads pretty much lose whatever status they once had as individuals and are instead pushed into a kind of indentured servitude and forced to join a subclass of humans who are always present, always necessary, but never taken seriously or allowed any more than what they need to keep from dying on the doorstep.

The Grapes of Wrath ilustrates a problem with the American Dream: that it is possible for people to work as hard as they can, indeed as hard as anyone can, and still not achieve any kind of success beyond base subsistence. How we respond to this problem -- if, in fact, we even admit that it is a problem ("That's not a bug, it's a feature!") -- lies at the heart of much of our country's political debate over much of the last century and beyond. And yet, it is not a political novel so much as a depiction of the trials faced by one family and the choices made by its members. The novel's final scene -- in which a character who has been so self-centered as to be insufferable through most of the book performs an act of generosity that is at once shocking and stirring -- will linger with me for a long, long time.

I've been looking a bit the last couple days at a timeline of the AIDS epidemic.

I suppose I am lucky in that I have not been personally touched by the AIDS crisis -- no one I know, and certainly no one in my family, has either died of the disease or even contracted HIV. (This is less certain of people I've only known online; there could very well be an AIDS-sufferer among the people with whom I have interacted over the years, but if so, none have been public about it, at least within the scope of my interactions with them.) I do recall being in junior high school when reports first started surfacing about this ghastly disease that was wreaking death in shocking amounts on the gay community worldwide; given that I was in junior high, I'm sorry to admit that the reaction was not fear at a new and horrible ailment but to use AIDS as simply another bit of ammunition for homophobic insults and humor. In a culture where to call something or someone "gay" was to express as much derision about it or them as possible, likewise AIDS became a verbal weapon of sorts. If someone was absent from school, presumably with flu or whatever, someone would invariably say "I'll bet he's got AIDS", and then everyone in earshot would respond with a chorus of Beavis and Butthead-style chortling. I'm glad that I matured beyond such things, but I'm also saddened to note that continued efforts to dispel the notions about AIDS that held sway amongst my junior high classmates are still needed.

Looking over this timeline and noting the growing number of deaths each year, I did a small calculation based on the number of persons who had died of AIDS as of 2000. Assuming a population of 290,000 people, which I recall is fairly close to the results of the 2000 census, the total number of AIDS deaths is equivalent to the entire population of Buffalo, New York....seventy-five times.

It's funny the signs that one receives, in the course of daily life, that reveal the extent to which one is getting....well, old. Case in point: this morning, the local news program that is on before The Today Show reported a gossip piece about a video game that is apparently in development, in which Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck are characters. The program's anchor -- a woman whom I did not think was this young -- then said (in as close to a perfect transcript as I can recall): "The Ben-and-J.Lo game is to be based on the arcade classic....hmmmm....I've never heard of this one....'Donkey Kong'?"

I was just coming to grips with the fact that there have been entire generations born post-Star Wars, but this is getting weird.

And, the new auctions are up and running (with two more to come tomorrow). Look over to the left and bid. Now. Bid lots. Bid often. You know you want to.

The first big snowfall of the year occurred in Syracuse this weekend. There are now approximately eight inches or so on the ground. The view out our patio door in this apartment is much wider than the view at the Buffalo apartment we recently left; here I can look across a wide section of the local golf course at some distant houses. The effect is that even on the dark days of winter, it's brighter inside than at our last home.

My initial round of Ebay book auctions has ended, with four of the five volumes offered finding new homes. I will have a new slate of auctions up, either later tonight or sometime tomorrow. Keep an eye on the "Marketplace" section in my sidebar.

There are a couple of Sundays each football season when all hell seems to break loose, when the once-playoff hopeful teams start dropping off the radar and the ones still alive start battling for the right to play in January. Yesterday was one of those days.

:: OK, I keep harping on the Buffalo Bills' defense every week, but still! You know your team is too loaded on offense when they give up more than 220 rushing yards to the opposing team's running back, in a non-overtime game, and still win. This was the most rushing yards ever yielded by the Bills to a single player, the previous record having been held in a 1997 game in which Denver's Terrell Davis riddled them for something like 210 yards. That game, though, was an overtime game. (And I happened to be present at that game, one of two Bills games I've ever been to.) Now, if you subtract Ricky Williams's two touchdown runs, he only had 120 yards rushing. That's right: his two touchdown runs, by themselves, gained 100 yards: a 45 yard gallop and a 55 yard sprint. I don't think he made physical contact with a single Buffalo defender -- not even to brush against them as he ran by -- in either run. Nobody got a hand on him or was even in a position to do so. The defense is so bad that I posit the following: we will know with certainty the prospects for the Bills in 2003, as soon as the free-agent signing period and the draft are over. If they don't add some significant defensive help -- including beef on the line -- pencil them in for no better than 7-9 next year, too.

The other annoying thing about the Bills is their lack of discipline and precision. This was Week Thirteen of the season, and most of the key players are at least second-year men, with some -- Moulds, Price, Bledsoe, Ruben Brown, Pat Williams -- being actual veterans. They commit too many stupid penalties for a team of this level of experience. The Bills are a young team, but they're not the ragtag collection of rookies and cast-offs that comprised last year's squad.

Next week: an almost certain loss as the Bills go to New England, whom I still favor to take the division (contrary to my pre-season predictions, darn it all).

:: So Miami finally puts together a big offensive line, a ball-control centered offense, and they finally get the top-flight running back that they haven't had since....well, I can't remember the last top-flight running back Miami had. They do all this so as to avert the inevitable December swoon that is their trademark, when they have to go on the road to places like Buffalo and win without putting the ball in the air forty times a game, the way Marino used to do. And it pays off initially in the game: they take early command, getting good pressure on Bledsoe and not allowing his receivers to break free, mostly containing Travis Henry, and using their running game to make the big plays. And then, somehow, they lose because the great players on the Bills' offense start to play like the great players they are, making circus grabs and executing perfect routes and tricking defensive backs into hesitating just enough so they can get open. The Bills may have won this one by seventeen points, but they might very well have lost it by that many. This game was closer than the score would indicate.

:: Commentators galore are speculating on whether or not that injury to Kurt Warner's throwing hand has ever really been healed, and it certainly seems not; he can still put a lot of air under the ball but he can't throw with the precision that's been his trademark in the last three years. Add to that the obvious problems on his offensive line, and you've got the kind of disaster that befell the Rams yesterday. Eight sacks and a bunch of turnovers given up to the Eagles. But I'm also questioning Warner's leadership, because he doesn't seem to be the heart and soul of this team, the way Jim Kelly was to the Bills or Joe Montana was to the 49ers. Warner has never brought the Rams back from a fourth-quarter deficit. I think that Warner needs to grow beyond his status as a player with freakish physical gifts into a real, legitimate field marshall for his team.

:: ....but on the flip side of the coin, how about those Eagles, making my preseason Super Bowl pick look pretty good with their smothering defense and competent play by a third-sting QB? Wow!

:: And the Steelers keep pluggin' away at the AFC North, with Kordell Stewart beginning to put on what's referred to in baseball as a "salary drive". He's a free agent after this year, and he'll want some team to actually bring him on as their QB, so he's actually taking advantage of what is probably his last opportunity to look good in a Pittsburgh uniform.

:: Speaking of salary drives, someone should explain the concept to Arizona's Jake Plummer. Going 14-for-31 for 88 yards and three INTs is not going to bring general managers beating a path to Plummer's door with anything better than offers to be, say, David Carr's backup.

:: Michael Vick is the best player I've never been able to watch, due to the TV market in which I live. This guy must be exciting, though.

:: Now that there will only be two wild-card teams per conference, it seems a bit odd that both NFC wild-cards are likely to come from the NFC South. I'm thinking Tampa will win the division, with Atlanta and New Orleans also making the playoffs. And isn't it odd how here we are, with only four weeks left in the season, and there are still thirteen teams of whom it would not be terribly surprising if they won the Super Bowl? So help me, I actually like parity.