Author: Laura Conrad

The Great Gatsby

I watched
this
movie last night — it was more enjoyable than I expected.
Mostly the music and the dancing girls, although the acting was
pretty good, too.

I’ve never read the book — my parents owned Tender is
the Night, and I tried to read it several times and
always got bored, so I never went in for any other F. Scott
Fitzgerald, either. I did see the
version
with Robert Redford in the 70’s, and remembered it visually
but not for the plot. For instance, I remembered the scene with
Gatsby floating dead in the pool, but not the details of how
or why he died.

This version is a much more lavish production — I don’t
remember there being scantily clothed dancing girls doing
production numbers in every drug store in the other version.

It’s definitely a Hollywood production and not a BBC
historically accurate costume drama. I remember hearing an
interview with a famous actor who had worked in both American TV
and British TV, and he said the difference was how much less
important the actors were in the British version. He’d have
these fittings for costumes, and they’d find a jacket that fit
him pretty well and make notes about how to alter it for his
exact shape, but also for the exact year of the scene he was
wearing it in, as in “We’ll take off these buttons — they
weren’t made until the ’20s and this is 1904.” And the
people who knew about the buttons were treated as well (or
badly) as the actors who wore the suits.

They didn’t do that in this movie. I don’t know enough about
buttons to say when the ones in this movie were made, but I did
get startled when a scene very explicitly billed as 1922 was
playing Rhapsody in Blue as a background to the
fireworks. I looked it up, and sure enough, it wasn’t until
1924 that Gershwin wrote it. It did work really well as the
background to the fireworks. Maybe the Boston Pops Fourth of
July concert could use that instead of or in addition to
Tchaikowsky some year.

I also noticed that the English actress Carey
Mulligan’s American accent was better than some. It didn’t
sound like any American I’ve ever known, but she did almost
convince me that she might know something I don’t about how a Louisville
debutante born at the turn of the 19th century might have
spoken.

If none of this sounds like I spent a lot of time caring about
what happened to any of the characters in the movie, I didn’t. But I did enjoy
it.


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How many Boston Properties Employees does it take to change a lightbulb?

[Kendall Square Fountain]
Galaxy, Earth, Sphere fountain in Kendall Square, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA

I like fountains. I live on a street with a world-class
fountain (the Tanner Fountain in front of the Harvard Science
Center) at one end, and what was originally a very good fountain
(“Galaxy: Earth Sphere” by MIT professor Joe Davis) at the
other.

This post is about the Kendall Square end. The original design
had a metal globe in the middle, jets of water spraying on the
globe in summer, steam mists arising around it in winter, and
small globes with different perforation patterns in them
illuminated at night. The globes weren’t as interesting as the
rainbows that form in the mist at the Science center on a sunny
afternoon, but they did change as you walked around them.

This fountain was installed in 1988. For most of the time
since then, it’s been broken.

This
article explains the repairs that resulted in the water flow
being restored after some number of years in 2010. It mentions
that at that time the steam was still broken. No article I’ve
ever seen mentions that the lightbulbs in the small steel globes
have never been replaced (or maybe are just never turned on).

There’s also no mention that the fountain is turned off at
night and on weekends these days. During the day, it is often running at less
than full strength, so that the water streams don’t actually hit
the globe.

My guess is that Boston Properties, which is responsible for
maintaining the fountain, got significant zoning concessions in
return for providing “amenities” to the neighborhood. In my
opinion, it should get no more development permissions until it
has restored this amenity, and is providing it for residents as well
as employees.


[Science Center Fountain]
Tanner Fountain in Front of Harvard University’s Science Center

Zealot, by Reza Aslan

I might not have noticed this book if Fox News
hadn’t done an interview
with the author that was widely reported as a failed attempt at a
hatchet job.

I enjoyed the book a lot. This
review in the New York Times, by Dale B. Martin, who is the
Woolsey professor of religious studies at Yale University,
suggests that there’s current scholarship that casts some doubt on
ideas that Aslan presents as facts. But he doesn’t suggest any
books about such scholarship that are as readable as this one.

What makes this especially readable is that the notes are
separate from the texts — Aslan is a college professor, but he
obviously knows that books written by professors for other
professors don’t make the best seller lists. So he writes what he
considers the best guess about the history, and then for each
chapter has a notes section that lists the books he used, and
suggests further reading. (This is the references to other
contemporary writers; the biblical texts are referenced by chapter
and verse in context in the usual way.)

The best part of the book is the description of the politics
and economics of first century Palestine. Anyone’s guesses about
exactly what role the early Christians played in that mess are
clearly open to question, but in this century we really know a lot about how the
Romans, Greeks, Jews and other groups related to each other that
makes the stories in the New Testament make a lot more sense.

I especially liked the description of James the brother of
Jesus. (Aslan does not believe that brother meant half-brother or
cousin. I think I doubted that when the nuns said it in seventh
grade, too.) Here’s the first paragraph of that chapter:

They called James, the brother of Jesus, “James the Just.” In Jerusalem, the city he had made his home after his brother’s death, James was recognized by all for his unsurpassed piety and his tireless defense of the poor. He himself owned nothing, not even the clothes he wore—simple garments made of linen, not wool. He drank no wine and ate no meat. He took no baths. No razor ever touched his head, nor did he smear himself with scented oils. It was said he spent so much time bent in worship, beseeching God’s forgiveness for the people, that his knees grew hard as a camel’s.

His thesis is that Christianity would have become a
very different religion if the Hebrew faction led by James hadn’t been wiped
out by the Roman destruction of Jerusalem in 65 C.E, leaving the
Greek faction led by Paul in charge by default. Martin
claims that this description of the early church is
oversimplified, but doesn’t claim that you won’t get the current
complicated view by reading the books in the notes section to that
chapter.

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News of the week of October 22, 2013

Meeting Report

We played:

Schedule

We will be meeting as usual on Tuesdays at 7:45 PM at my place.

Tuesday, November 5, is an election day, and I will be working
until 9 or so, so either someone should volunteer to open up and
start the rehearsal, or we can skip that day.

New Format

What I said last
week about wanting to know on Tuesday morning how many people
would be here on Tuesday evening doesn’t seem to have worked, so I
will be more specific this week.

One of the ways this group works, when it does, is that I go to
the computer after breakfast on Tuesday morning and transcribe a
piece of music I hope will be suitable for the group that night.
It used to be quite rare that the piece I picked was unsuitable in
the sense that it had the wrong number of parts for the group, but
it has become increasingly common that I transcribe something that
we can’t play because I don’t know who’s coming. And there’s a
very nice 5 part piece I transcribed last Spring that still hasn’t
really had a reading.

So what I want in the future is that everybody who usually
comes, tells me by 10 on Tuesday morning whether they’re coming
that night. And everybody who doesn’t usually come, if they
decide to come on a given Tuesday, you should tell me by 10 in the
morning that you’re doing that.

And if you frequently miss more than half the meeting, you
should tell me whether that’s likely for that meeting.

And whatever you have or haven’t told me, you should feel some
obligation to honor that commitment. I don’t want to go so far as
saying you aren’t welcome if I didn’t know at 10 AM that you were
coming, or that if a serious illness comes on between 10 AM and 8
PM you should come anyway, but casual or postponable distractions
should be avoided.

So that’s a pretty mild form of not being a drop in group, but
as of this week, we are no longer purely a drop in group.

Music and Success

A friend forwarded me this
article from the New York Times. I read it hoping it would be
the blog post for that day, and found the reasoning fairly
shallow, although there were some good quotes from musicians who
had achieved success in other fields about how learning music had
helped the other activity.

This morning, the Times published a set of letters
making many of the same points I would have made had I posted.
One being the obvious one that correlation isn’t causation, but
the other being that even if we knew that learning music could
cause success in other ways, that wouldn’t be the reason to learn
music. Here’s the letter making that second point, which I
couldn’t have written but am glad to have read:

While learning music may indeed be correlated with later career success in life, it is not a reason to encourage music education for our children.

Music foremost provides our children with access to an abstract mode of expression of human emotions that cannot be emulated by words, making their lives richer.

Indeed, teaching children music with the expectation that it will improve their performance in other fields may add competitive pressure to the experience that can sometimes undermine the capacity to express oneself using this beautiful language.

YUVAL SHEER
New York, Oct. 13, 2013

Aged Mead

[Thyme Mead]
Thyme Mead bottled on February 14, 1993.

What I was doing earlier today instead of posting was
celebrating the apple harvest at the annual Wort Processors cider party.

There was a lot of good cider, and because of having cleared
out a little storage room to make a guest room, I had come across
some of the stuff I brewed back in the early 90’s. The beer went
down the drain, but I had hopes for some of the meads, so I
brought a few bottles. There was the 1993 Cyser, which won
several awards at club competitions when it was about 10 years
old. There was also the 1991 cyser, which may have been the first
one I made. And there turned out to be a case of 12 ounce bottles
of the thyme mead.

20 years aging does seem to do a lot for a mead — all of them
had developed sherry-like flavor, but still tasted of honey and
the cysers had remnants of apple flavor, although not as much as
they probably did ten years ago.

Electric Pressure Cooker

I mentioned yesterday how convenient my
pressure cooker was for bringing food
somewhere. I realized I haven’t blogged this gadget that I
acquired over a year ago.

It’s one of the really successful cooking gadget purchases I’ve
made recently. It’s called a multi-cooker, which means that in
addition to pressure cooking, it will also slow-cook at low or
high temperature. There’s a button for rice, which runs the
pressure cooker for 6 minutes, which is the right time for most
white rice. I’ve been cooking Basmati white rice on that setting
and it comes out well, although a little stickier than when I use
the same ratio of water to rice on the stove. These days I use
the stove when I’m using the cooker for something else, but
otherwise the cooker is a bit easier, and I like the result just
as well.

This article,
which is otherwise very good advice about pressure cookers,
advises against buying the electric version, on the grounds that
the pressure isn’t as high as the stove-top ones the recipes are
written for, but I haven’t had trouble converting. I think for
someone who’s sometimes doing something else while cooking
(e.g. walking the dog while the breakfast oatmeal cooks), having a
digital timer that will turn the pot to warm when the time is done
is a real convenience.

The controls are a bit confusing at first, but when you get
used to always pushing start after setting a time, it’s pretty
good. You have to check every time whether the “pressure” valve
on the lid is in the position you want, and if you’re pressure
cooking you have to be careful to seat the gasket in the lid
correctly or it won’t reach pressure and all the water will boil
away.

I bought it because my slow cooker had died and I found I
missed it. I ended up getting the one combined with a pressure
cooker because I figured it would make slow-cooked dishes with
beans faster. It does — now when I want to do that I just
pressure cook the beans for 15 minutes first, and then add the
other stuff and slow cook it all. But I’m using this gadget
several times a week, not the once a month or less that I cook
beans.


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Sorrel Soup

Most people think of Sorrel as a Spring crop, but this year my CSA decided to try
growing it in the Fall as well. I think most of the greens these
days are from the greenhouses, so the exact climate outside
doesn’t matter so much.

I had cream left over from the gettogether,
so I decided to make sorrel soup, although I’m sure it would have
been good in my greens for
breakfast, too.

So I tore up the sorrel and sliced some potatoes and leeks
thin, and put them in the slow cooker with some cooking liquid.
(In my case, I used a cyser
that had come out too dry to be an enjoyable drink, but still has
good apple flavor. I think just water would work fine, or any
kind of light-flavored broth.)

My slow cooker is also a pressure cooker, which has the
advantage that the lid seals nicely and has a handle on it, so I
took that without packing, and the stick blender, and the cream to
my sister’s house where I was having dinner that night.

When the potatoes were tender, I creamed everything with the
stick blender and added the cream. I tasted it to see if it
needed salt or pepper, and decided it didn’t.

There were three of us at dinner, and everyone had seconds
(there was lots of other food, so they must have liked it).

It reheated well in the microwave for after the band the next
day, and there was a small mug for me the day after that.

Perdido Street Station

I had read a couple of books by China Miéville and remember not
particularly liking The City and the City and
enjoying Embassytown pretty well. I read Perdido
Street Station because John Scalzi said it was the best SF book of the current century.

I finished it yesterday, and I think he may be right.

In terms of plot, it’s the normal fantasy plot with a giant
monster (in this case a moth of enormous strength whose wings have
changing patterns that mesmerize potential victims so that their
brains can be sucked dry) who goes around killing everyone until
it’s the end of the book and something works so that it gets
killed instead.

But the world-building and characters are both superb. The
world is inhabited by a number of intelligent species, which over
most of the world coexist by having their own territories, but in
New Crebuzon, the city where the action takes place, most of the
races are represented. Most of the main characters are humans as
we know them, but one is a hybrid beetle/human, who communicates
by sign language
with her own species, and with humans, such as her lover, who have
learned the signs. But she can communicate, although slowly, by
writing on a pad. And she’s a sculptor. In the climactic scene, she reenacts the
Orpheus/Euridice myth, with Eurydice’s motivations much
better explained than I’ve seen them in any other work of art
based on the story.

Another is a bird/human hybrid, who has been
punished for a crime by having his wings sawed off. There is also
a large population of the “remade”, who have been altered as
punishment, either just to punish them, or to make them useful for
some industrial process.

The main character, Isaac, is a scientist who makes a number of
morally dubious choices in the course of saving the city from the
moths, but is forced at the end to realize that all the choices he
could possibly make for using his invention to save his friend the
wing-deprived bird hybrid are wrong.

So if you want to know what the state of the art in Science
Fiction/Fantasy is, read this book. There are two others set in
the same world, and I have the next one on hold at the library.

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