Vintage Festival

Sonoma is wine (lots of it) and history (the founding of the 25-day-long California Bear Republic). Both are celebrated exuberantly throughout the Valley of the Moon Vintage Festival.  I'll be flying down to the Bay Area on Thursday for Sonoma's 115th celebration of the Festival.

My sister, despite growing up like the rest of us with strong roots in the timber and fish resources of the Northwest Corner, long ago abandoned the Fatherland for the wine-based culture of the Sonoma Valley.  As a result, much of my family, and their friends, now live in and about Sonoma.  My annual presence at the Festival is almost (but not quite) a given.  In any event, this year I'll be there.

The Vintage Festival dates back to 1896, as a celebration by local vintners of science's triumph over the phylloxera louse which had devastated grape crops for several decades.  According to a past issue of the local newspaper (Sonoma Index-Tribune):

To organize the celebration they created what they called The Bacchus Club of Rhinefarm, in honor of the Greek god of wine. Imaginative, witty and fun-loving clans (as their descendants still are), they wrote skits, composed humorous songs, designed costumes and practiced lively dances in preparation for the festival which was scheduled for Oct. 16, 1896.

The festival was Greek and Bacchanalian in many respects, with pageants, singing (drinking songs, naturally), "faux-Greek drama," and a re-enactment of "Sonoma's greatest social event" ever, the double wedding of the two daughters of General Vallejo in 1863.

The Festival remains a small town event, although perhaps less bizarrely unique in 2012, more sophisticated, and attracting far more visitors from San Francisco.  It can also be more expensive for the unwary visitor. 

The spiritual high point of the weekend is the blessing of the grapes in front of Mission San Francisco Solano.  The profit-oriented high point is the Friday night wine tasting.  More energetic events are the Firefighters' Water Fight, the Grape Stomp, and the picturesque 5k run through the vineyards, starting out at the Sebastiani winery.  And, of course, the Festival parade. 

I've attended this event for years, and somehow have never grown tired of it.  It's of course an excuse to get together with relatives, but it's also fun to join in the Festival's seldom varying traditions, watch the locals, observe with bemusement the tourists -- and sample a lot of wine.  It's a big event, supported by a major industry, but still never loses it's small town feel. 

I'm again looking forward to it.

No salsa, please. We're Americans.

I concluded (as did many of my colleagues) that the [Cuban] blockade was completely unnecessary and harms the Cuban people and Cuba's attempt to develop economically through tourism and trade with the U.S.  ... It is also difficult to see the Cuban flag flying over oil derricks outside of Havana indicating that the companies are joint ventures between Cuba, China, Spain, Russia and other countries.

So reads a classnote from a fellow alumnus and fellow member of the Washington State Bar, following his tour of Cuba, a tour sponsored by the bar association. 

Yesterday's New York Times contains an article advising that it will be increasingly difficult for the public to travel to Cuba in the future.  After loosening restrictions on travel in 2011, the Obama administration is now tightening up those restrictions and refusing to renew licensing of many groups that sponsor trips to Cuba.  These moves are in response to politicians' complaints that tourists are just "having fun" -- rather than engaging in serious "educational exchanges" -- while in Cuba, and especially to reports of tourists joining in salsa dancing (gasp!) with Cuban nationals. 

Many travelers respond that the opportunity to join in these spontaneous dances was a high point of their visit, their best opportunity to actually meet, mingle, and talk with the common people in Cuba.

The Cuban blockade, and especially its travel restrictions -- now having lasted for sixty years -- is one of the more bizarre chunks of American foreign policy.  It's the foreign policy equivalent of the federal crusade against marijuana -- both policies are ineffectual, neither would be worthwhile even if they were effectual, both are infringements on individuals' personal rights without reasonable justification.  Even if the embargo may have been a reasonable emergency response to crisis in the early 1960s, it's gone on for decades -- just like the marijuana campaign -- out of sheer, unthinking, unquestioning momentum.

Cuba is ninety miles from the U.S. mainland.  We shun it as a pariah.  Can anyone claim that Cuba is uniquely evil and deserving of such treatment?  Anyone with a visa can travel to Iran.  Is Cuba more dangerous to American foreign policy interests than Iran?  I actually can't think of any other country -- not even North Korea -- from which American citizens are barred from travel, by their own government, unless they are part of a licensed travel group.

We all know why.  Florida politics.  And perhaps, at least originally, the fear that Cuba might prosper under communism, and thus make a communist economy attractive to other South American countries.  So we demonstrated our confidence in our own economic system by systematically reducing Cuba to poverty and ensuring -- for sixty years, now -- that it remain impoverished.

This state of affairs won't last forever.  There is already a softening of attitude among ordinary Americans -- except among the old guard of Cuban exiles -- now that Fidel has stepped down as leader.  But our foreign policy toward Cuba is not a shining example of American diplomacy.  Not something our grandchildren will read about with pride in their history books.

Meanwhile -- if you are able to visit Cuba -- don't let anyone photograph you smiling. And no salsa.

Lecturing world-wide

In a digital, twenty-first century world, do we still need universities?  Or, rather, do we still need universities as large collections of buildings occupying physical space?

Universities originally formed around men learned in their fields, who offered to teach any students who cared to hang around and pay for the instruction.  Couldn't scholars provide similar instruction now -- not just to a handful of young people who gather together from distant homes to receive it, but to the entire world via the internet?

Providing university-level instruction over the internet is a "hot issue" in educational circles at present.  Stanford has taken a lead in offering such free courses -- or more precisely, in permitting and encouraging its professors to offer such courses.  Stanford President John Hennessy is particularly enthused about such efforts, at least to the extent of having his school experiment with both the necessary technology and the development of course work amenable to presentation on-line.  Stanford professors are now offering certain lecture courses, complete with interactivity between the professor (or his teaching assistants) and the individual student. 

Stanford's alumni magazine this month contains a lengthy article discussing the issue.

Opinion on campus is mixed. Many professors, understandably, don't care for the idea of providing individual assistance -- or even examinations -- to several hundred thousand students around the world.  The courses so far offered have been ones capable of computer grading -- and have been offered primarily in the computer sciences.  Furthermore, the students tend to work together on-line cooperatively in response to the lectures, largely obviating the need for the faculty to hold, metaphorically, their hands.  Grades and university credit, at present, are not given.  The student who successfully completes the course receives a letter or certificate of completion, but not one written in Stanford's name.

I doubt that these courses will ever replace the experience of "going to college."  Much of the "learning" that I received as a student came from being around fellow students who shared my own interests, or students who had totally different interests and whose enthusiasm was contagious.  It does seem possible, however, that even matriculated students could benefit from viewing large lecture courses on-line, rather than sitting in a huge auditorium.  In experiments of this sort at Stanford, attendance at lectures in some large courses has dropped to thirty percent when the lectures are also available on-line.

The feeling was, "Why should I wake up at 8 in the morning to come to class when I can watch it at 2 a.m. in my dorm room?

The Stanford Magazine article begins with the example of a 16-year-old boy in Greece who joined 100,000 other students worldwide in taking a Stanford professor's on-line course in "applied machine learning" -- defined as the "science of getting computers to act without being explicitly programmed."  The Greek youth received no Stanford credit for the course, just a letter of completion.  But he wrote:

Andrew Ng is truly one of the best teachers I have ever had, even though I've never met him.  I want to thank him from the depths of my heart for offering these amazing learning opportunities.

He's now taking courses in natural language programming and algorithms.  He plans to apply to Stanford in two years.

A moving testimonial to the impact of excellent teaching -- especially when it's received from a youngster on the other side of the globe.

Other students included "a 13-year-old budding physicist, a recovering addict, an unemployed librarian, a thirtysomething stay-at-home mom, and a 72-year-old retiree who once built a computer from scratch."

Obviously, there are a vast number of problems and concerns to be resolved before such courses are offered routinely.  Will professors receive extra pay from their institutions for preparing lectures specifically for on-line use?  Can universities spare the faculty resources when these courses become routine, not experimental?  Is there any way to make money from these courses, or at least defray their expense? Does a university like Stanford "dilute its brand" by opening its instruction to the entire interested world?  (But is this really different from publishing a professor's textbook?)  Will the availability of such courses, taught by world renowned authorities, hurt the ability of smaller schools with less capable faculty to draw student applications? 

Many of these issues are discussed in the article -- discussed, but not resolved.  But, along with Stanford's provost, we can contemplate the potential effects of such innovative teaching methods.  He compared on-line courses to the development of the printing press in the 15th century, which "led to an explosion in the number of universities by radically increasing the efficiency with which knowledge could be transmitted." 

As the cost of a college education skyrockets, any innovation that reduces costs without damaging the education being received is worth our consideration.

Cellist

Five years ago, when this blog was still pushing its tender young shoots up from the soil, I wrote a rather silly post about Joshua Roman, the then 23-year-old principal cellist for the Seattle Symphony.  I noted that while most Symphony musicians seemed stiff and subdued while sitting on stage waiting for the conductor to appear, "Mr. Roman, on the other hand, looks like a high school student goofing off before class, waiting for the teacher to arrive."

I saw Roman perform again last night.  The white Afro was gone, the fidgeting and grinning were now under control, and he has aquired a pair of dark rimmed glasses that he kept shoving back up onto the bridge of his nose.  He no longer looks like a mischievous high school student.  At 28, he now looks like a relaxed college student.  He almost resembles a younger and slimmer version of another Seattle icon, Bill Gates. 

After two seasons with the Seattle Symphony, Roman has performed  as a soloist with numerous groups internationally.  But although an Oklahoma native, he obviously retains a soft place in his heart for us Northwesterners -- since 2007, he has served as Artistic Director for Seattle's Town Hall.

Town Hall is a former Christian Science church, modified for the presentation of lectures and musical performances.  It's a beautiful venue, within a short walking distance of the business district, but far enough up First Hill to be surrounded by tree-lined streets.  The larger of the two auditoriums, in which last night's performance was presented, has an audience capacity of about 1,500 (compared to nearly 2,500 in the Symphony's Benaroya Hall.

Roman played as part of a piano trio (piano, violin, cello). He stood before the crowd and gave a very relaxed and entertaining introduction to the program, also throwing in enticements and encouragement for us to come back and enjoy later performances (by other performers) during Town Hall's 2012-13 musical season.  The trio gave very moving performances of Beethoven's Trio in B-flat major and Schubert's Trio in E-flat major (originally scored for clarinet rather than violin), performances that were applauded ecstatically.  The trio also premiered a short contemporary work, Lonesome Roads by Dan Visconti, that was also well received.  Philistine that I am, I found it merely "interesting."  ("I know what I like, and I like what I know.")

For whatever  reason, I've come to enjoy chamber music more and more as I grow older.  Maybe I no longer need the adrenaline rush that results from  having a full symphonic orchestra come at me full tilt; or maybe my ear has just grown more attuned to the intimacy that listening to individual instruments playing in a small group permits.

At any rate, it was an excellent concert, and it's reassuring to watch Joshua Roman's career develop successfully over the years.  I look forward, obviously, to hearing him again.

The two swords

On December 29, 1170, Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, was hacked to death in his own cathedral by four minions of Henry II: murdered by four knights inspired -- whether intentionally or accidentally -- by the king's exasperated exclamation, "Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?"

Most of us are familiar with the outlines of the story, if only from viewing the 1964 movie Becket (based on the Jean Anouilh play), or from attending T.S Eliot's drama, Murder in the Cathderal. 

As a college student, required to produce a thesis for my mandatory junior-year historiography seminar, I chose to examine the life of Becket.  Specifically, I addressed the issue of whether the Church had a reasonable basis for declaring Thomas a saint, just two years after his death.  Unfortunately, I didn't make a copy of my (doubtlessly) brilliant paper -- over thirty pages in length with voluminous footnotes -- probably because, following my normal custom, I had sat up all night, the night before it was due, typing it out on my old Smith Corona, and had hurriedly handed it in the next morning.  Somewhere, however, I still have the nearly illegible manuscript from which I did my typing.

I remember more about the process of research and writing than I do about the analysis contained in my magnum opus.  I'm confident, however, of my ultimate conclusion -- Thomas was indeed worthy of sainthood, although his acts and motivations often remain ambiguous  and confusing -- and certainly infused with the politics of his time.

As the play and movie suggest, Thomas Becket's life is the sort of stuff that popular history thrives on.  And today's New York Times presents a book review of a new look at the saint's life:  Thomas Becket, by John Guy.  The book is suggestively subtitled: "Warrior, Priest, Rebel: A Nine-Hundred-Year-Old Story Retold."

My research paper was a primitive attempt at the analysis of history as an historian, drawing no conclusions not based on reliable original source material.  A popular history, on the other hand, has the advantage of not being so restrained by documented facts -- the author can fill in the blanks, based on his empathy for the characters and for the times he is describing, so long as he doesn't actually contradict known facts.  This advantage makes the popular history more readable and exciting than the scholarly analysis; it also, however, if the author isn't careful, allows him to speculate freely, to impute today's motivations and concerns into the minds of those who lived in a totally different intellectual and emotional climate.

I haven't read Guy's book (although I intend to do so).  But the NYT review devotes some of its brief allotted space to discussing possible homosexual relationships between Becket (as a teenager) and an older friend and mentor, and -- later -- between Becket and Henry II himself.  Thomas Becket's life has been a subject of fascination to both friends and enemies, both religious and secular, for nearly a millennium.  I don't recall ever having read any such speculation until now, the sort of speculation that has seemed to permeate obsessively almost every biography -- of almost every person -- written in the past 50 years or so.

Judging from the review, Guy's work focuses on the conflict between the king and his former close friend and chancellor as "more like a chess match than a morality play."  To understand that conflict, and Becket's ultimate assassination, it's certainly critical that one understand the politics of the time.  The church's role in England was that of a major player, a force constantly at odds with the monarchy (when not acting, at other times, in its support).  But to us, those conflicts appear as merely cynical struggles for political and personal power, as in some cases they were.  But in the world of the eleventh century, the struggle for political power was never wholly divorced from the parallel struggle for personal salvation. 

The bishops and papacy thus strove for power for their own political ends, but at the same time sincerely believed they were fighting for God and the salvation of the souls entrusted to them.  And the king himself could never forget that any conflict between him and the church endangered not merely his power base, but also his own hopes for eternity.

As the review concludes, "Guy's biography is a portrait of a saint with plenty of shadows."  Those shadows have intrigued historians for centuries.  They were the reason my college paper seemed worth writing. 

I look forward to reading this new examination of the life of St. Thomas Becket, trusting it will offer  new insights into the life and world of this most complex of men.

'Tis the voice of the Midshipmen

’Tis the voice of the Lobster; I heard him declare,
You have baked me too brown, I must sugar my hair.
--Lewis Carroll

Midshipmen at the Naval Academy probably get annoyingly noisy occasionally, fired up by androgen hormones, compulsively showing off, singing off-key and strumming guitars -- in any way possible trying to attract dates.  (I merely conjecture.)  But now their namesakes, the midshipman fish, are being blamed for vocalizing so noisily that it's annoying the good people of West Seattle.

The midshipman fish, of which fourteen separate species have been identified in the Porichthys genus, are known for their vocalizations.  Their name comes from luminous spots (photophores) which someone, sometime, fancifully thought resembled the buttons on a midshipman's uniform.  The male makes all the noise (as in so many species), a sound mediated by androgen and estradiol steroids (also a relationship we can appreciate). No "voice of the lobster," merely a series of grunts and an underlying hum.

Typical Type II male calls are divided into: short grunts that last for milliseconds or are produced in a series of grunts called a “grunt train,” mid-duration growls, and long duration advertisement hums that can last up to an hour.

--Wikipedia.  These sounds understandably excite the female into a frenzy of egg-laying.

The voice of the love-sick midshipman fish has been known to wake houseboat owners.  And that brings us back to West Seattle.  The reported hum has been so loud that experts suspect that it may have been amplified by the metal hulls of ships in the Duwamish river.  Other experts, more skeptical that the hum of the midshipman fish could be heard not merely by houseboat dwellers, but across the land mass of West Seattle, blame the noise on cement plants, ferry engines, or street sweepers.

But how prosaic! Everyone really prefers the midshipman fish theory.  They are ugly little devils, but, as a local fish expert put it lyrically: "These fish sing like birds at night to attract females."  It ill-behooves the citizens of West Seattle, whose own adolescent offspring sing their own amorous tunes, to begrudge our fishy friends a little love-struck humming.

Honey, can I have money for a new razor?

Wives, be subject to your husbands, as is fitting in the Lord.
--Colossians 3:18

In Alabama, many residents rely on the literal words of Scripture to guide their lives and to shape their views of society.  An article in Sunday's New York Times Magazine analyzes the lives of several families in Alexander City, Alabama, revealing how difficult in today's world it's become for the husband to assert his traditional leadership of the family unit.   Wives are becoming the breadwinners.  "Welcome to the new middle-class matriarchy," the author asserts.

I grew up in a small town dominated by several large timber and aluminum based industrial mills.  Men worked at tough, dirty jobs, paid their union dues, and received decent paychecks.  Wives generally -- although not always -- stayed at home, taking care of the house and the kids.  (My own mother worked in what would now be called "data processing," from the time I was 11 or 12.  Her being employed was not considered freakish.  It was, however, atypical.)

Now, those factory and mill jobs are gone.  Unemployment is high.  I haven't kept in touch with my home town, so I don't know the employment statistics.  I suspect, however, that most of the work now available is in the clerical, retail, health care, and education fields.  As the NYT article observes, these are not considered "manly" areas of employment.  And in the South, in particular, a man's ability to be "manly," to be the strong face his family presents to the world, remains critically important.

The men in Alexander City now find themselves floundering around, trying to find jobs in which they can use the skills they learned working for the large textile mill that was once the town's major employer.  The women, on the other hand, have developed new skills and found new kinds of jobs.  Women are being flexible and climbing the economic ladder; the men are unemployed and stagnating.

The NYT article attempts to find reasons for this disparity between the sexes.  One significant factor is that the textile mill had been highly patriarchal.  Men, unlike female employees, were made to feel part of a family, of a structure that provided them a place in the universe; women, handling more mundane clerical tasks, saw their work merely as jobs.  Men, therefore, feel today like children abandoned by their parents.

In addition, Alabama men don't -- according to the article -- consider the jobs most available in the new economy -- in schools, retail stores, hospitals -- to be jobs suitable for "real men."

But I think there's something else going on, something that I don't understand and that needs more research.  The article mentions in passing that among Alexander City teenagers, it's the girls who seem to display ambition and focus.

Around Alex City, she said it seemed that it was the girls who were full of energy and eager to see the world.  Her own brother, Alex, who was 17, seemed to want to stay in town forever and raise his family here.  But Abby was enrolled in Southern Union State Community College, attending on a show-choir scholarship.  Her plan was to go there for a year, as many girls in Alex City do, to save money, and then head to Auburn University.

Perhaps this disparity derives from the teenagers' observations of their parents' lives.  But there have been a number of articles recently about American teens in general -- kids not necessarily influenced by the same blue collar malaise experienced in Alexander City.  In general, it seems to be the girls who have the greater drive to get ahead, to go to college, to get advanced degrees, and to fight their way up the corporate ladder or establish themselves in the professions.  The boys, on the other hand, would rather hang out together with their high school friends, play computer games, and enjoy addictive substances.

An unfair generalization, to be sure.  I can walk across campus any day and observe thousands of male students who clearly defy this stereotype.  But most stereotypes have some basis in fact.  Fifty-eight percent of college undergrads are now female; 47 percent of law school students are women (up from virtually zero 40 years ago), as are 49 percent of medical students.  Even in engineering -- that most macho of the major professions -- 18 percent of the students are female, a percentage that keeps rising.

In a way this is cause for self-congratulation, the disappearance of gender bias from our society.  But the rapid entry of women into formerly male occupations -- in just one generation -- suggests more than a natural result from the collapse of barriers.  To me, at least, it suggests that women are progressing much more quickly than men in adapting to fundamental changes in our economy, that they are showing greater energy and initiative in pursuing the more cerebral and less physical occupations that will provide the job opportunities of the future.  We may, in fact, be seeing something that St. Paul could not in his worst nightmares have envisioned -- development of a matriarchal society.

Not that there's anything wrong with that, I suppose.  But it would be good to understand better why.