It was 15 years ago today

Timeout from reviews to note that today is the 15th anniversary of our ascendancy to homeownership in this very house. That's not very exciting, I know, but who would have expected we'd be here 15 years later? Well, I would, since it was a traumatizing experience and not one to be immediately repeated, plus we've got a huge amount of crap that don't move itself. Beth wasn't figuring on staying here this long, but hey, it's her crap too.

After spending our first two years of wedded bliss in scenic Waltham, we decided to buy a house. Couldn't buy one in Waltham, though, unless you wanted a two bedroom bungalow (less than 1000 square feet). Even though there were only two of us at the time, all the aforementioned crap was going to require a lot of extra space. At the apartment we rented, we had access to the attic, plus I still had lots of comics back in Illinois and Beth had a lot of stuff at her Mom's house. Investing in real estate was in everyone's interest because our respective parents could finally rid themselves of all the stuff that we weren't carrying around with us already.

We started looking in the winter of '91, and focused on marlborough because it was in the same general direction as Waltham but enough further out to be reasonably priced. Beth, having grown up in Framingham, had to overcome the stigma that all the towns around hers had from all those years of rooting for the high school football team. Every town that Framingham played in football was a dump. Except for Natick, it was a cesspool. We got ourselves an agent who had been the real estate office secretary but had just gotten her license and was related to a friend of Beth's mother. She and her husband drove us around town one weekend, looking at pretty much all the inventory in our price range. She had no idea what she was doing, unfortunately. We bid on a victorian in an old part of town that Beth really liked, the guy who was selling it was trying to wheel and deal, we were neophytes and unforuntately so was our agent, so the whole thing fell through. Beth was despondent for weeks.

So we stopped looking for a while. We ended up switching agents and went with a Remax lady here in town, who was one of these go-getter million-plus sellers, and she was the listing broker for this house, which we were mildly interested in. The inventory had changed by then and she spent a Saturday driving us around not only in Marlborough but into Hudson too. We even went without her down to Quincy and Weymouth and looked at a few houses there, and one in Dedham, but they were all too small or too beat up. In our price range, you were either looking at fixer-uppers, not my area of expertise, or more "bungalows". We ended up bidding on this house, even though it had some problems (kinda old, not much of a yard) it was big and in reasonably good shape. Two guys had bought it together a couple of years before as an estate sale, figuring to do some cosmetic work while living in it for awhile, then "flipping" it, to use the current parlance. But the market turned on them and they couldn't get what they wanted for it. Meanwhile one of them had gotten engaged and was starting to get motivated to sell for less. We made an offer, they countered, we came to within about five thousand and stalled. Neither side would budge, so that deal looked d.o.a. also.

The summer was coming up so we decided to take a break and planned a trip back to England, our honeymoon destination from two years before, driving up from London to Scotland and back. After the trip was all planned, I was off at chorus rehearsal one evening when Beth got a call from our real estate lady, Elaine, asking if we were still interested in the house, since it still hadn't sold. Beth said we were, so Elaine made a few calls and called back a short while later to say they'd accepted our last offer. Beth wasn't quite sure what to do, since I wasn't there, I can home from rehearsal later and she said, "I think I just bought a house." She had told Elaine we'd stopped looking for a while and had just spent a chunk of cash on a trip to Scotland. "Well, go ahead and take it," Elaine said, "because it'll be the last trip you take for quite a while!" punctuated by this horrible aspirating laugh that she had.

In those days before cellphones and e-mail, everything was done by fax, which seems very quaint by today's standards. Moving day started with the closing itself, where we all had to schlep into Cambridge, and the movers showed up at the apartment around lunchtime, having already done one move that day. We knew we needed a crane for the piano, because that's how we got it in the apartment, so they were able to use it for the couch and the fridge too. Guys were bounding up and down the stairs two at a time, carrying multiple boxes of books or records. We had planned to help just to keep things moving along, but ended up just getting in the way. The truck was so full they couldn't swing by Sue's house as planned to pick up some furniture, but they made a couple of calls and got another truck to do that. Beth had her Mom and her brother and her Mom's friend Charlotte with a couple of her kids here at the house to help dispatch everything as the movers brought it in, it was Beth's brilliant idea to have a big dinner here for everyone as soon as the movers left, which I staggered through, totally exhausted.

A day or two later I was off to Vermont to my first board retreat at Keivan's place, leaving Beth to a big house full of boxes of stuff for the weekend. I figured I had plenty of time to unpack, but how often do you get to spend a weekend in Vermont? Fifteen years later, we're still unpacking. Beth still wants to move, I'm not against the idea, but it seems like sort of big job, not to be taken lightly. Best to think about it for a few more years.

auditions

This evening we had our first round of auditions for new chorus members, in anticipation of rehearsals starting up right after Labor Day. We've never done a midsummer audition before, but Steven's idea was to see how many people would sign up, and if we found some good ones we could get them to accept before they were tempted away by other organizations.

As it ended up, there were only four auditionees, and only one worth keeping. The others weren't bad, they had some aptitude in one area or another, but Steven is setting the new member bar fairly high, so some who may have squeaked in in previous years would be shown the door this time around. The thing to remember in being picky is that people who are that good can also be picky, and they may actually get accepted by a few choruses and then basically audition us at the first couple of rehearsals and see which one they like better.

We have a few advantages, not the least of which is the friendly nature of the group, which many new people have remarked upon, although I'm relatively surprised by that because I always feel like we could be a lot friendlier than we are. It was a different dynamic in the early days (before my time) when most members were from the local area and probably already knew each other outside of the chorus. But as the group grew in stature, the net got cast wider and now you've got people coming from all over the place. Although a suburban location leaves out those who need public transportation, it conversely includes people from outside the city who need to have a location with plenty of parking or who just plain avoid driving close in to Boston like the plague.

The next round of auditions is at the end of August, while we're in California, so I won't be around for those, although they should be better represented. We need to beef up the membership roster, so let's hope they start coming out of the woodwork soon.

floyd wins!

One more post about the TdF and then I'll shut up about cycling for a while. After 7 years of American domination in the person of Lance Armstrong, the assumption this would be a wide-open tour, which would make it a lot more interesting, not just because you knew someone besides Lance would win, but because you expected a lot of ups and downs as all the other contenders attacked each other with impunity. What ended up happening was both more and less than expected. The unceremonious departures in varying forms of Basso, Ullrich, Vinokourov, Mancebo, Mayo and Valverde levelled the playing field even more, taking out a lot of the big names and leaving still a fair number of major players, but no one dominant enough to say with any certainty who was a contender and who wasn't.

When Pereiro took the yellow jersey (or was given it, after the peloton allowed him to get a half-hour lead on the breakaway), he was still discounted as a serious GC contender (since otherwise they wouldn't have let him get so far ahead). Landis had everyone right where he wanted, then he fell apart in the last 10K up La Toussuire, and the prevailing wisdom was his chances were done, but then one day later he did the unexpected and got most of it back, in what many are calling the single greatest tour stage ever. So by the final time trial yesterday, you had something we haven't seen for a while, the top 3 contenders within 30 seconds of each other, with a couple of other guys only a couple of minutes behind them. Landis got back his remaining seconds, Pereiro again held his own, Sastre couldn't hold on, Kloden did a killer TT. The podium was set, and the French fans had to hear the American national anthem yet again on the Champs-Elysses. I'm sure they're tired of Americans winning the tour, but it's not like they have any fondness for the Italians, Spanish or Belgians either, and there aren't any French guys stepping up to the plate, so it might as well be an American as anyone else.

Landis's future is cloudy, since he has to have hip replacement surgery soon and nobody knows for sure if you can come back from that to ride at the top level, and he's no spring chicken either at 30. Bo Jackson tried to come back after the same surgery, and was never as fast as he was before. So it remains to be seen what's in store for the Americans longer term chances in Europe, the rest of the guys, Hincapie, Leipheimer, are getting older too, and you've got some promise with Zabriskie if he can improve his climbing and Danielson if he can stay healthy. But Landis has shown that even without Lance the Americans are here to stay and a force to be reckoned with. After 3 weeks sitting in front of the tv listening to Al Trautwig, I still can't wait for next year's edition to begin. Vive la Tour!

floyd knows beer

One humorous aspect to Floyd's miracle comeback has been the fact that he said after his terrible performance on La Toussuire that he was going to go have a beer. Then after his incredible victory in Morzine, he mentioned beer again. This was picked up by Patrick O'Grady, one of the columnists on velonews.com in Beer me, Floyd.

Asked why he kept calling for water, more water, alternately drinking it and pouring it over his head, Landis quipped: "It was very hot. Maybe that was the explanation, or maybe it was the beer I had last night."

The obvious question, which nobody thought to ask, was "What kind of beer was it?" O'Grady goes on to say:

Oh, it's maddening, I tell you. I could be a six-pack away from cycling success - I just don't know which six-pack has the killer legs in it.

leaving him to conclude he'll have to find out for himself by systematically trying every kind of beer in alphabetical order until he hits upon the right one.

A follow up letter from one of the site's readers explained it all, though:

The Landis beer thing got quite a bit of attention from the Dutch and Belgian press as well. One of them is obviously on your wavelength because someone asked about his beer and he said, "By the way, that was an Amstel." They showed that clip on the nightly Tour round up on Flemish TV and the announcer said that therefore Landis had not been drinking beer at all (because weak Dutch beer is not quite beer - get it?). It was pretty funny.

If I was Amstel, I'd be calling Landis's agent pronto! "Just one Amstel, and I trashed the peloton on the tour's hardest stage and won by 6 minutes!" By next year's tour, it'll be a competition to see who's more hammered, the fans on Alpe d'Huez, or the riders themselves.

superfloyd

Sure there's all this stuff going on in the world, what with that crazy guy in the White House and the Israelis bombing everything in sight and Mitt staying in Massachusetts for more than a day, but the real story has got to be Floyd Landis's spectacular win at today's stage of the Tour. One can only ask, "What were they thinking?", that so many other GC contenders held back until it was too late, and by the time they decided to take matters into their own hands they were already on the Joux Plane, the only place in 7 wins where Lance ever bonked, and it was all over. If everyone can just stay upright tomorrow, then Saturday's time trial will actually decide not only the winner but the entire podium for the first time in a while. To make things really interesting, it should be raining, too, like it was for Ullrich and Armstrong in '03. After yesterday's disaster, it seemed there was no hope for Floyd, but not only did he come out swinging today, nobody else had anything left in the tank to answer him.

I should've stayed home today to hear Phil and Paul cover it, I was following the early time gaps on my blackberry while I was driving to work, and got frequent updates from velonews.com once I got to my desk, and I couldn't believe what I was reading. Next year I expect they'll go the other way and the Pyrenees stages will be in the final week, note to self to work from home or come in late for those. This one's not in the books yet, so one more weekend where not much gets done around the house. Go Floyd Go!

five boro bike tour 2006

The first Sunday in May seemed like a good weekend to drive down to New York City and ride 42 miles through the city streets with 35,000 of my closest friends. I've been hearing about this Five Boro Bike Tour for several years, and it turned out that Jee had done it several times when he was living in New York (even James, our big boss, has done it a couple of times), and when the subject came up during the winter, we decided it would be a good early season goal to give it a try. It's not a race, just a pleasure ride through all five boroughs, the main attraction is that all the streets are closed off, so you can ride not only through midtown and Central Park, but down part of the FDR, over the Queensboro bridge, onto the BQE and over the Verrazano Bridge.

The weather was ideal, not too cold, not too hot. Jee stayed with his brother in law in Brooklyn and rode over the Brooklyn Bridge to get to the start line, I came down the day before with the family and we spent Saturday afternoon in Manhattan, hitting shrines such as the Disney Store and even spending a few hours at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the first time we'd taken the kids to a real art museum. We spent the night across the Hudson in scenic Fort Lee, New Jersey, then it was up bright and early to meet up with Jee in lower Manhattan by the Wall Street bull. Beth and the kids did some more shopping at FAO Schwartz and the American Girl store, while Jee and I lined up a good 10 or 15 blocks back from the start line, with at least that many more behind us.


What's interesting about a bike ride with 35,000 people is that there are many places, particularly at the beginning, where you have to walk. Although the starting gun was at 8:30, we didn't cross the start line until after 9, having walked there alongside our bikes. There was a huge amount of organization involved in bike traffic control, they were throttling the entrance to Central Park because the roads are so much narrower through there. We saw a few accidents, people collapsed in the middle of the road for no apparent reason. The course was mostly flat, and they kept cautioning you to slow down on those rare downhills (mostly the far side of the bridges). There were a number of places to stop along the way and grab a free bottle of water and a banana. We were passing people left and right as we rode, but when you stopped for a break the line of people going by just kept going and going, so you had no sense whatsoever of where your spot was in the continuum of riders.


We finished by about 2:30 at the Staten Island ferry, then stood in line for the free ride across the harbor back to Battery Park, where I called Beth and she drove down and picked me up on the side of the road and we headed for home. In the final analysis, 35,000 is too many people, maybe five or 10 thousand would've been plenty, it was a good time, and at 42 miles shatters the old record for my longest bike ride ever, I'm not sure if I'd rush back down there to do it again. Jee was kind of ambivalent after it was over, but a few days later he was talking it up at work and telling the team we should all do it next year, there were certainly plenty of people participating who looked like they'd never been on a bike before, so for what seems like a long distance to the neophyte it is very doable. Most of the people riding were not New Yorkers. In spite of the number of cyclists around here, I doubt you could ever do anything like this in Boston. Too many hills.

on the musical front

Our chorus has a new conductor after 52 years under the previous administration. Allen retired at the end of the '05 season, so during the last year we auditioned three candidates who did one concert each. Two of them were neck and neck as far as their musicianship, personality, and enthusiasm. The other exceeded them in musicianship (particularly as a choral conductor), but sadly lacked in every other category. We had a fourth concert after the 3 candidates had their turn, so we asked the guy from Harvard to do that, which sent the whole chorus into disarray with his unorthodox style and while I think he meant well, he didn't exactly gel.

It was hugely enlightening after having gotten so used to Allen's style over the years at how different these guys all were, not only from him but from one another. It was kind of fun to be subscribing to the conductor of the month club, if you weren't that crazy about the guy, well some other guy would be standing up there for the next time. But for many people, particularly the older, more crotchety members of the chorus, they didn't want variety, they wanted continuity, preferably with someone who took the time to communicate with people individually and learn their names.

In the final analysis, the search committee had two equally worthy and popular candidates and chose the more connected of the two, who unfortunately after a year and a half of assuring us that he could change the rehearsal night for his other engagement so it wouldn't conflict with ours, found out after getting the nod that he couldn't do it after all, and had to withdraw. So we went with the number two choice, Steven, who in many respects I think will prove to have been the better choice anyway. He's been very involved already, even though the rehearsals don't start until after Labor Day, and is full of ideas but on the musical and administrative side. The chorus has been living a hand to mouth existence the last few years, audiences are down, membership is down, some of it due to the lack of an artistic director, plus some other managerial shortcomings. After two years of focusing on who would lead the group for the next 52 years, now it's catch up time on taking care of all these other pesky details that have been languishing like giving better performances and getting more people to come hear them and raising the buckets of money that it takes to put on a show in this town.

Sadly, and maybe coincidentally, Allen passed away this past winter from cancer. His family put together a nice memorial service that somehow didn't seem to measure up to the scope of his contribution to musical life in Boston. One thing that I still think about is a story told by the president of the choral directors association at that service, who said that shortly after he became president, he passed Allen in the hallway at the annual convention and Allen took him aside and said, "Jim," or Dave or Bob or whatever his name was, "Always the highest standards." That's so Allen. It's not even a complete sentence, but it sums up his attitude and the sense of purpose that he conveyed in any group he stood in front of with a baton. Allen was reputedly a tyrant in his younger days, by the time I came along he was much mellower, but still evinced tremendous respect from everyone he came in contact with. He wasn't happy at first with the idea of retiring from the chorus, but I think he still thought there was more to be done, and once he didn't have those weekly rehearsals in his mind, it's not entirely surprising that his decline was relatively quick. I find his influence extends even in my piano playing, and as he made his presence felt in front of a chorus, an orchestra, and audience, his absence is felt equally as much.

warning, family guy fan

I'm always finding some new artifact of pop culture to become a fan of, it's my curse, I suppose, and one that I've acquired over the last several months is the cartoon "Family Guy". I've never gotten into the Simpsons, and while I'd watch King of the Hill, it wasn't deserving of cult status. Probably Beavis and Butthead was the last cartoon I would seek out, although South Park is usually pretty reliable. So awhile back Wizard magazine had an article on the 10 greatest cartoons, which for Wizard means the 10 greatest still being produced, since no one there is old enough to remember anything from before that. Some of the choices were more than a bit lame (Super Robot Monkey Team Hyper Force, Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends), which may be inventive but aren't really that entertaining to anyone over the age of 8. But Family Guy was also on the list, and Adult Swim started showing it around that same time, so I caught a few episodes and I was a fan, and now I've got the first 2 seasons on DVD. Unforunately in spite of all the different times its shown (on Fox, Adult Swim and even TBS) they seem to focus on the same subset of episodes, so there were a bunch on the DVD I'd never seen, and some of them have commentary tracks, which can be enlightening but contain a disproportionate number of extended pauses where no one says anything and they just watch the show, which can be very annoying.

What I like about Family Guy is you never know what anyone is going to say next, while every episode has a plot, most of the jokes are non-sequiturs that primarily come from pop culture, and a lot of '70's/'80's pop culture at that, such that the younger crowd couldn't possibly get all the references. This formula of random jokes is the running gag in a South Park episode about Family Guy (the one where they wouldn't show an image of Muhammed), where it is revealed that the writers of the show are really a group of manatees that just take a bunch of balls with different words written on them and line them up in some random order to make the jokes. As one of the grownups from that South Park episode says, "At least Family Guy isn't all preachy and have its head up its ass like that other show."

The same guy who created Family Guy later did another show called American Dad, which downplays the free association in favor of more interaction between the title character, a rabid conservative G-man, and his somewhat more liberal family. I've got that one on DVD also. While Adult Swim, the 11pm to 6am time slot on Cartoon Network, is the primary source of old episodes of both of these, I can't stay up late enough to see much of them. They show a lot of other original stuff that's downright hilarious, like Robot Chicken, Venture Brothers, Harvey Birdman. There's plenty of other shows that are popular but I can't get into (like Aqua Teen Hunger Force), and some are just crap (like Squidbillies), and then once in a while they have the bizarre idea to go retro with some non-cartoons, like Saved by the Bell, and most recently Peewee's Playhouse, which I avoided when it was on the first time, so not everything sticks, but there's more than enough worth watching to eat into my already scant free time. Probably just as well it doesn't start until 11pm.

The best thing about Family Guy is the mayor of the town is Adam West, and he's actually voiced by Adam West. Which reminds me, when are the old Batman tv shows coming to DVD? Creighton would have it that King of Queens is the greatest show on tv, but I don't see it. It's not even a cartoon.

the bartlett musicians

Justin turns 8 next month and this past Wednesday he had his first official piano lesson, making him almost exactly the same age as I was in I had my first piano lesson in December 1970. I haven't ever given the kids formal piano lessons, my feeling is if they want to learn they need to have a teacher they respect. Other than teaching Chloe how to play the beginning of "Chopsticks" a few years ago, they'd never seemed that interested, but lately Justin had expressed an interest in giving it a try, he has more the temperment (i.e. attention span) for it than his sister, so we'll see how it goes.

Meanwhile, this past year Chloe has been playing the violin at school. When she started fourth grade last fall, she had the opportunity to pick an instrument to play in either band or orchestra, or she could continue to be in the chorus (you can't do both because they meet at the same time). She was definitely interested in trying something, although she still liked the chorus too. I counselled her that this was the one time in her life she could start learning an instrument, and if it didn't work out she could go back to the chorus, since there's not much cumulative effect from learning to sing at that age. I was trying to steer her towards flute or clarinet, because I said if she gets really good I'm only out a grand or so for a topnotch instrument, whereas if she chooses violin and excels at that, a pro version will cost as much as a car. So of course she picked violin, we did a rental for the first year with the stipulation that she had to stick with it at least that long before deciding whether to continue. Her friend up the street started on flute and lasted about six weeks, but otherwise this year's fourth grade turned out for band and orchestra in record numbers.

As it turns out, Chloe exhibited some aptitude for it, which shouldn't be a surprise considering her parentage and that she's always been singing along with the tv or CD's since she could talk, memorizing the tunes and words effortlessly. She's not a prodigy or anything, but she seemed to get the hang of it relatively quickly, to the point that she could kind of coast between group lessons sometimes because at school they could only go as fast as the slowest kid. I've said about other instruments, how difficult can they be, you only play one note at a time? But I had the opportunity to consult on her violin homework, since even though I don't play the violin I know how to read music (fortunately she didn't pick an instrument in a different clef), so that gave her a leg up, too. As the school year wound down, she was somewhat apathetic about whether to continue or not, but we expect that, if she's not kicking and screaming against it, then you have to consider it a positive reaction. The original violin we rented was a 3/4 size, but now she's taller than Nina, who I'm sure has a full size violin, so Beth got another rental for the next year, and since the only full size violin they had to rent looked like it had been played by Pete Townshend, they reluctantly agreed to let her rent a new one (the first one was new also, and she took very good care of it, so she had that in her favor also).

They don't offer cello in the fourth grade in Marlboro, but I've selfishly thought that's the instrument Justin should really go for, and then we can have a piano trio in the house. I just bought volume 2 of the Beethoven trios from sheetmusicplus.com a couple of months ago when they were having a big sale on Henle editions (since I have about all the solo piano music I need for now), but I can only play along with the stereo for the time being. I told Chloe there's lots of good violin music out there with piano, once she gets past "twinkle twinkle". Something like violin suits her better since she's much more of a social butterfly and likes being in a big group, where Justin fits more the loner, brooding musician that is more your typical pianist. I've been anticipating this age when they take up an instrument since they were born, it will be interesting to see where it all ends up.

tour de france update

While the TdF is going on, it's a little more difficult to keep focused on anything else, like updating a web log. Floyd takes the yellow jersey today, in the first big mountain stage, while all the rest of the American hopefuls go belly-up. Without Lance, Ullrich and Basso in there, it's any man's tour, which gives it a different appeal. For the last several years we've been saying "How will Lance win?" while now we can finally ask "Who will win?" OLN (soon to be known as Versus) is doing their part to keep up the visibility of the tour, in spite of the lack of Lance, we'll see how long that keeps up after this year, especially if Floyd doesn't win.

Even if Landis takes the yellow jersey into Paris, his career may be over, since he needs to have hip replacement surgery after suffering the last two years from vascular necrosis caused by a bad crash during a training ride. This year I haven't been manically following each stage every evening, some of the flat stages were served just fine by reading the running updates on velonews.com while it was happening. You miss out on Phil and Paul's commentary and all those shots of the gorgeous French countryside, but there's still plenty to go around on the mountain stages. Stage 11 today covered 5 climbs, including some famous Pyrennes like Tourmalet, Peyresourde, Col d'Aspin, etc., and so it was on tv before I'd even left for work. With my Blackberry browser I can follow what's going on through the Velo News updates while I'm in the car, and again from the laptop once I'm in the office, so I didn't miss much (no morning meetings for once).

I keep saying in spite of the constant chaotic cycling schedule and format on OLN, it's still a lot better than my first TdF in '99 when you were confined to half an hour of highlights on ESPN2 at dinner time, hosted by Adrian Karsten. Turns out Karsten was an NU alumni, I had no idea until I read not too long ago that he'd died, come to find out he'd killed himself because he was going to jail for tax evasion (something they failed to mention in the alumni magazine). After one more year of that format (which went at least as far back as the Indurain days), OLN picked it up with live daily coverage with Phil & Paul, hosted by the great Bob Varsha, followed the next two years by Bill Patrick and Kirsten Gum, respectively, before finally spending some money and settling on Al Trautwig, who didn't know squat about cycling at first, but now in his third year seems to actually be interested in the whole thing. He's not pretty to look at, but then neither is Bob Roll. Let's hope he keeps the IRS happy and stays away from the gas pipe.

Eleven days still to go. Hincapie has choked, Leipheimer is probably too far down to make the podium, everyone else but Landis is a non-factor. Go Floyd!

20 years ago this month

20 years ago this month Beth and I first met, although neither of us could tell you when exactly or what was said or whatever. My first summer in Boston, I was taking classes at Tufts in my spare time for graduate credit. The summer session was split into two, and I took one class each session. The first one was "History of the Soviet Union", which met every morning for a couple of hours, so I was able to adjust my work schedule (I was a few months into my temp stint at Bank of Boston) so that I could come to work after class, since I was getting paid by the hour anyway. The second session, the class was called "Psychology of Russian Literature", taught by a guy named Lottridge, who'd been a Russian lit professor but had gone back to school and gotten a degree in psychology and was trying to figure out how to put the two together. It was basically a Russian lit class, but analyzing the characters from a psychological angle, an approach that is particularly well suited to the crazy people you find in Russian literature.

At the time, I was interested in things Russian, having studied the language (barely) at NU and taken a class there called "Intro to the Soviet Union" that was part lit part sociology. You could take a few classes for graduate credit before you had to actually enroll, and Tufts is affiliated with NEC, which is the original place I wanted to go for grad school, so it seemed like the thing to do, since living in Natick wasn't going anywhere. So it was goodbye Natick Village and hello living for the summer in a dorm again, the first session I had a roommate from Hong Kong named Clifton, the second session somehow I ended up without a roommate, although there was a guy in the room next to mine who liked to shoot fireworks out his dorm window, until the campus police caught him and threw him out of the dorm. After that it was pretty quiet.

Beth ended up taking the same Psychology in Russian Lit class because she was finishing up her undergraduate degree from the School of Museum of Fine Arts after several years off and says she picked the class out of the catalog as the one that sounded the hardest, in order to challenge herself. She like literature, too, so I think if there'd been a class called "Advanced Brain Surgery" she would've still gone for the lit class.

The class met twice a week in the evening for 3 and a half hours at a time. Beth was living with Deb in West Roxbury at the time and working at the old Heartland in Natick, and Tufts is on the Somerville/Medford line, so she was all over the city in her 3-year old Chevy Chevette. There were maybe 12 or so in the class, mostly our age, with a couple of old fogies in their 40's. We had to read several books and groups of stories, the previously mentioned Lermontov, some Gogol, Chekhov, and maybe a couple of Soviet authors, Zoshchenko (a favorite of Shostakovich), Olesha and Mayakovsky, although I may be conflating the syllabus with the NU class there. My first visual memory of Beth was the day she came into class wearing a white, summery sleeveless dress, she herself bright red with a sunburn. Her hair was much redder then, so it made for quite a contrast. Maybe that same evening might have been the first time we spoke, as Lottridge had passed around an lit crit article titled "Anality in the works of Gogol" or something, and Beth was asking why would anyone write something like that, since Gogol obviously wasn't thinking along those lines when he wrote his stories, and I asked her if she was saying that the article should't have been written.

As the class was winding down I was looking for a place to live and some new people to hang out with, preferably within the greater Somerville area, which was much handier to Boston than Natick had been. During the breaks in class a bunch of us talked about various things, particularly movies, and Beth and I and this other girl Carol had arranged to meet at Coolidge Corner for a couple of Woody Allen movies shortly after the class had ended for the summer. Carol never showed, so it became a date of sorts, and the rest is history. Beth never did finish her degree, I never did enroll in a masters program, Beth and Deb moved to Roslindale, I found Jeff, Randi and Bill on Paulina Street, and we had a group that hung out together for the next few years until we all got married and moved to different towns.

Over this past winter, we drove up to Tony's house in Gardner during a snowstorm for a mini-reunion with Jeff, who we've seen off and on over the years, and Bill, who we hadn't seen in about 10 years. Chip/Wayne, who was tangentially part of the group, was there also, everyone brought their kids along, Tony threw a Mardi Gras party and we all reminisced about the old days when we were young and thin and had hair. We resolved to get together again before another 20 years had elapsed.

In spite of some familiarity with Russian authors, I wasn't familiar with Lermontov before taking that class, and I hadn't read enough of European literature to recognize the archetype of the disaffected anti-hero common in many novels of the period, what the Russians call the "superfluous man", typified by Bazarov in "Fathers and Sons" or the nameless narrator of "Notes from the Underground". Pechorin, the eponymous hero of "A Hero of our Time", is an ex-military man with nothing to do, spending much of his time obsessing over women he can't have and ending up fighting a duel over a woman he doesn't really care about. At that time in my life I could probably identify with this type of character, not because of aimless womanizing, but because he's casting about for something to do with his life. Now 20 years later, Pechorin just seems annoying. Lermontov, if he'd lived long enough, would have probably agreed.

Lermontov

I didn't mention it here at the time because it was during one of my extended posting lacunae, but after 12 years the Borders Classics Reading Group was forced to find a new home when the eponymous location in Framingham decided to close at the end of last year. Laura researched a few alternatives and we ended up across the street at Barnes and Noble, where they won't discount the books but seemed happy to have us, and even insist on having an employee sit in, just like a real bookstore should. I went to the inaugural event there in January and haven't been back since, some of the books weren't that exciting, and now that I'm back on the board of my chorus, they decided to schedule their meetings for the exact same day.

That was a potential disaster I barely averted. For the last year, Beth had been going to a girl Scout leader meeting the first Wednesday of the month, and the reading group was the second Wednesday of the month. Then I was coerced into joining the board again last summer, and they had their meetings on the first Wednesday of the month. Now Beth was mad and I was in the doghouse because she'd need to find a babysitter for that night on a regular basis. But it ended up they moved her meeting to some completely different night of the week. Problem solved, no? No, because then Borders decided to close, and B&N said they could take us, but they already had a reading group meeting on our long-standing 2nd Wednesday of the month, so we voted and decided to move it to the 1st Wednesday of the month, so now I was in conflict with myself (although the other option was the 2nd Tuesday of the month, which would have been worse because it would conflict with rehearsals in perpetuity, unlike board meetings which are more fluid and I don't intend to stay on the board more than my initial two-year stint anyway). Life is complicated.

Last month we had a board retreat scheduled for a Saturday, so we didn't have a regular meeting on the first Wednesday. Ah, but the reading group was doing Emma, which I had no desire to read again, so I stayed home that night.

This month, Steven, our new conductor (more about him some other time), couldn't do Wednesday so we changed it to Thursday. So I could do both since the book was Lermontov's "A Hero of our Time", which I last read 20 years ago and really wanted to read again (and it's short). These two nights were immediately followed by Readercon, so I was out four nights in a row, which I normally would avoid like the plague, but Beth and the kids managed to console themselves by going to the ocean two days in a row, and then the pool at the health club the day after that.

So anyway, Laura weaseled out of providing her usual synopsis of the discussion, so here I'm left holding the bag. We had about 10 people, including most of the regulars, and the book was so short that everyone had finished it. Evan and Roger both liked it, which is fairly unusual in and of itself. The discussion covered the structure of the book, split into five sections told from different points of view and out of sequence, chronicling isolated events in the life of the protagonist Pechorin, the "hero" of the title. Some time was spent on the relative irony of the title "A Hero of our Time", since he's not the least bit heroic in the Byronic sense, does this mean that Lermontov is saying this is the best we (Russia) can do at that point in history? Lermontov himself is an interesting figure, having written quite a bit of poetry and this book, considered the archetypal Russian novel, he strove to emulate his hero Pushkin but only outlived him by six years before losing a duel (just like Pushkin) at the age of 27.

The edition I and a few others had read was translated by Nabokov, and the footnotes and introduction he provided were almost more entertaining than the novel itself. Nabokov begins by asserting that his is the first real translation of the book, all those that came before were "paraphrases", and he spends considerable effort in explaining how a good translation should sound like a translation in order to be faithful to the original text, and how Lermontov was not a very good writer (being largely self-taught and pretty green, too). He then completely goes against this rant and produces a translation that contains fluent if not florid prose, maybe devoid of the usual Nabokovisms you'd find in his own writing, but still very readable. One passage towards the end he footnotes as being a particularly good example of bad writing because it uses the word "separating" twice in the same sentence. We did our usual duelling translations, reading that section aloud to see how different translators handled this supposedly thorny syntax. Nabokov was the only one who didn't change the verb between the two usages, and he even borrows a couple of alliterative phrases "monotonous murmur" and "misty distance" from one of the same "paraphrases" he just trashed in his introduction. Made you wonder if the whole screed was meant to be a bit tongue in cheek.

If I get ambitious, I can go on a little more tomorrow about "A Hero of our Time" and how it reaches back to 20 years ago this month when I read it as part of the class at Tufts where Beth and I first met.

let's review

OK, so what's been going on since that memorable new year's in El Paso? I think we can summarize the high points as:

first week of March - went to China
first weekend in May - went to NYC
first weekend in June - went to Philadelphia
first Sunday in July - went to Fitchburg

The gradual downward progression will be apparent to the most casual observer. So let's start with the most recent.

The first weekend in July is always the Fitchburg Longsjo bike race, which I think claims to be the oldest stage race in the US. I've been to days 3 and 4 a couple of times, but never the first two (since they're during the week). This year it was just day 4, the 55 mile criterium around beautiful downtown Fitchburg. There's basically no other reason to ever go to Fitchburg, so if you're not a cycling fan you can safely ignore the city your entire life and not feel as though you're missing anything.

Jee and his family met up with us at our house and we carpooled together, takes less than an hour to get there, the trick is trying to get around the closed roads to find parking, but a few twists and turns later we could park on the street about 100 yards from the race. The women's pro race was already going on when we got there, so we caught the last half of that, immediately followed by the men's pro race, won by some guy I'd never heard of from some team I'm not familiar with. American cycling without Saturn just isn't the same. Plus now there are more opportunities for US riders in Europe, but these guys are still pretty good.

For being the oldest stage race in the US, the Longsjo classic gives the impression of being run like a small sf convention. There were no programs (unless they were all out), they had copies of the supplement to the local paper that gave some background, but the list of riders in there was alphabetical with no team affiliation or bib numbers, which made it a little hard to follow who was winning as they zipped by 60 times. I recognized a few names, Ivan Dominguez, the Macormack brothers, but most were unknowns, and other than Navigators, most of the teams were unknowns too. These guys must do it for love, since they can't be making much money at it. The race is not well attended (since who would want to spend a beautiful Sunday afternoon in Fitchburg?), and is officated by two guys who sound exactly the same yelling into microphones non-stop, one from the booth at the finish line and one walking up and down the street. Chloe got a free t-shirt from him. Mostly he was trying to collect donations from the spectators so they could offer a "preme" at 5 laps to go, and they managed to rack up over $1000. There's real prize money, too, like 50 grand total for the four days among all the races (several amateur categories are also included).

The weather was great, not too hot or humid, the clouds got a little darker towards the very end, but we managed to get out of the city without being trapped by a monsoon like we were a few years ago. We regaled Jee and Donna with our story of trying to leave the city one year in the middle of a biblical deluge as bags of garbage washed down the steep hillside streets. For all we knew, in Fitchburg that was how the trash got picked up all the time.

The kids were bored most of the time, Justin managed to entertain himself coloring with markers. Jee, who's a bike geek and has lived here for several years, had never heard of Longsjo. It's not exactly the Tour de France, which has a rest day today, but there's hardly any other races of note around here these days, Arlington came and went, even the New York race only lasted a couple of years. They could stand to have more publicity and better information, but it's worth checking out. One of these years I'll take the days off and see all 4 stages.

ping

OK, it's been six months, I don't know why. But I do know that with Readercon this past weekend, I feel like writing again all of a sudden. I felt this way last year after Boskone, too, and it lasted maybe a week, let's see how we do this time.

Guests of honor this time around were China Mieville and James Morrow. Imagine my surprise when I had Mr. Mieville autograph two of his books, only to have him open the first one and discover that he'd already signed it for me. Usually I remember standing in line to get someone's autograph, but I have no recollection of it whatsoever. Must've been a Worldcon, maybe Toronto, maybe Boston, I don't remember. Fortunately he hadn't signed the other one.

Programming was a little bit of everything. Geoff Landis did a slide show talk about the planets which should've been longer, because he didn't get through all of them (no thanks to a couple of people in the front row who kept asking two-minute questions). Most of the usual suspects were there, no Delaney, no Jim Kelly, but did see Tom Disch a few times, I'd only seen him briefly once before. Barry Longyear was there, but I didn't see any of his panels. Someone asked Mieville whether he was influenced by Doctor Who, and he said he hadn't thought so until he realized recently that what happens to one of the alien races in Perdido Street Station was basically the same thing as happens in The Masque of Mandragora, but I think he's thinking of the Mandrells in Nightmare of Eden. Same Doctor different episode. I think there's a paper in there somewhere, "Who References in the work of China Mieville". He also indicated he was happiest with The Iron Council out of all his novels, which of course is the one I had the most trouble with, it's probably the most literary, but I thought the literariness caused the story to take a back seat, unlike the first two New Crobuzon books that managed to juggle both equally well. I meant to tell him that I thought he was robbed when The Scar lost to Hominids, but I was distracted by the autograph incident and I'm sure he already knows it anyway.

Memorial guest of honor was Jorge Luis Borges, not an sf writer, but someone who wrote enough in a "magic realism" style to have influenced a vast swath of other sf writers. I picked up an anthology of Borges writings last week, since I'd never read anything by him previously (not good reading group material since he only wrote short stories, and most of them are very short). It's always fun to read sfnal ideas treated by people outside the field, and Borges spare but evocative prose, given a couple of readings, gives you a sense of awe of what he can accomplish in such a short space, breaking many of the rules of writing. Jeffrey Ford gave the example that new writers are always told "show, don't tell", but he said Borges almost always just tells, and gets away with it.

So after reading group Wednesday night, chorale board meeting Thursday night, and then Readercon, this is my first night home in nearly a week. Let's see if I can keep this blog going for a while. Since I've had some time away, I've got a few things to talk about, just need the energy to get it down.