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.

Golden days

The last day of August!  All prior complaints about Seattle weather should now be deemed inoperative.  The last few weeks have been so beautiful that ... well ... that I wonder how the rest of the nation can live anywhere else?

My sister visited Seattle for four days, a couple of weeks ago.  Her visit coincided with the hottest days of the year, which -- in Seattle -- means the low 90's.  We ate all our meals outdoors.  On my deck, yes, but also at lots of small cafés.  Yes, for the few weeks feasible, Seattle restaurants and coffee houses convert themselves virtually overnight into small European sidewalk cafés, giving the illusion that we live most of the year in the dry, hot, sunny weather of Rome or Athens.

Today, the eve of the long Labor Day weekend, I took a long walk from my house down to the lakefront at Madison Park, and then looped back home on Lake Washington Boulevard.  If you don't know Seattle, it doesn't matter.  You get the picture.

The air was relatively cool -- just under 70 degrees -- but the sun was hot.  Typically "early pre-autumn" around here, inspiring the same sensation you get at higher elevations during the hotter days of mid-summer.  I strolled into a Starbucks in Madison Park, bought a latte, and sat sipping it at a sidewalk table -- watching and eavesdropping on the pedestrian crowds.  

Passers-by in Madison Park don't live on food stamps.  I overheard much talk of friends just getting home from Europe, of winter plans for escapes to Hawaii, of kids heading back east to college.  Sitting at the next table were a couple of boys in their early teens with orthodontia, Lakeside School t-shirts, and nicely modulated voices -- self-confident kids who initiated a friendly chat with a passing woman about the pedigree of her small leashed dog.

All seemed well at Starbucks, so I meandered onward another couple hundred yards to the waterfront.  The beach was less crowded than when my sister was here, but the temperature today was also 20 degrees cooler.  Even so, the offshore diving float was well-occupied with tanned swimmers; younger kids were splashing around near shore, inside the rope safety barrier; and parents and other sun-lovers of all ages were sprawled all over the grassy slopes that separate Lake Washington from the modest but expensive housing for which the neighborhood is known. 

This is great, I thought!  Why don't I come down to this area more often?  I probably would, I replied with cold rationality, if it weren't usually so  so chilly and damp.

My route home -- south on McGilvra, past large, tasteful homes that engender nervous feelings of financial inferiority and past the Seattle Tennis Club (whose waiting list for admission, last I heard, was about ten years); then up winding and heavily forested Lake Washington Boulevard, cutting across switchbacks on nicely groomed trails; past the woodsy Bush School; skirting the Arboretum; and eventually back to my own neighborhood.

When Seattle wants to dazzle, it really knows how.  And because the days per year when such a stroll is enjoyable are numbered, my sense of joy and exhilaration today was intensified.  The old joke about hitting yourself over the head with a hammer because it feels so good when you stop rings true to some extent.  We (or at least I) need those months of Seattle gloom and rain to really appreciate the days we are experiencing now. 

You can only stare at a sunset with admiration so long before you get bored.  That's my justification for living in Seattle rather than San Diego or Honolulu.  I have to believe residents of those cities are jaded, weary of paradise, impervious to perpetual beauty.  Otherwise, why don't they walk around with permanent smiles pasted on their silly faces?

I really need to believe this.  Really, really badly.

Mr. Chairman, the proud State of Alabama ....

So here we are, two days into a hurricane-truncated Republican National Convention, and I haven't yet bothered to click on my television to watch.  Not because of  revulsion against Mitt and Paul, although I certainly feels some of that.  ("No one's ever asked to see my birth certificate!")   I probably won't be paying much more attention to the Democratic gathering, next week (I actually had to look it up just now to see exactly when the Democrats were holding theirs).

What a change over my lifetime.  I was at the beach with my family -- a skinny little kid with glasses falling down my nose -- when I first learned about conventions.  We didn't have a TV in our beach cabin, so my dad and I listened to it on the car radio.  I was mesmerized.  To me, it was as exciting as the World Series would be to more typical 12-year-olds.

Four years later, I virtually turned our basement TV room into Convention Control Central, with desk and chair, convention delegate forms and scorecards, various other written resources, and even an adding machine.  I lived in that dim room for both weeks of the two conventions, yelling at the chairmen when their rulings displeased me, hanging breathlessly onto the reports of the Credentials and Platform committees, keeping track of simmering rebellions in various state delegations and negotiations between leading candidates and "favorite sons" -- governors or senators who largely controlled their state delegations -- about swinging their states' votes to one candidate or another.

I was a 16-year-old political nerd.  It was so cool!  When did it all start to go wrong?

Blame it on the rapidly increasing use of primary elections to choose bound delegates, making surprises at the conventions less and less likely.  Blame TV announcers who found the long delays while politicians argued and bargained behind the scene -- with floor time occupied by prolonged noisy demonstrations, band music and long-winded speeches -- a waste of expensive TV time -- and thus intolerable.  (I remember Walter Cronkite grumbling  that the public (meaning himself) wasn't going to put up with this sort of nonsense much longer.)  Blame the increasing idealogical polarization of the parties, wiping out  the function of conventions as a gathering of a highly diverse party faithful from far-flung regions of the country, giving them a quadrennial opportunity to get together, talk shop, whoop it up, disagree good naturedly or bad naturedly, ultimately settle on a platform and a candidate, and go charging forth into the election, more or less united.

We don't live that way anymore.  The primary system (supplemented by those bound delegates chosen in caucus states) pre-determines the winner.  The whole process, after the primaries, could be done electronically.  Except that the two major parties have learned to love the free publicity given them by the TV networks -- the free national platform from which they can solicit the affections of the electorate -- publicity freely given back when what happened at a national convention was truly news, truly a critical step in the election of the president.

And so what we have left is a few vitriolic political speeches, in addition to the "acceptance speeches" of the two nominees.  All polished, pre-packaged, and plucked clean of any possibility of surprise.

This year, I find myself hardly bothering.  I'd rather read about it all in the paper the next morning.  And wallow, meanwhile, in nostalgia for a by-gone era of messy but meaningful national conventions.

Welcome to Everlost

Allie and Nick are 14-year-old passengers in two cars that hit head-on.  They find themselves flying through a tunnel toward a bright light. Their "bodies" collide, and they wake up in a forest.  Welcome, kids, to the world of Everlost.

When I blundered onto the Hunger Games trilogy last winter, my interest was re-awakened (moderately) in the young adult fantasy genre.  As an indirect result, this past week I finished reading the Everlost trilogy -- Everlost, Everwild, and Everfound, known more formally as the Skinjacker trilogy -- by author Neal Shusterman.

Everlost is a shadow world that overlies our own.  It's occupied only by children and teenagers, kids who for one reason or another didn't "get where they were going."  Adults apparently have better defined personas, and always "get where they're going" -- i.e., when they die, they always arrive at that bright light, whatever that bright light may portend for them.

Everlost has complex rules, as we learn together with Allie and Nick as the story progresses.  "Afterlights," as Everlost's inhabitants are known, can see what the living are doing, in a somewhat shadowy way, but the living can't see them.  Afterlights can feel objects -- like freeway traffic -- as those objects pass through them.  The sensation is a bit uncomfortable, but doesn't hurt.  Afterlights are beyond being hurt.

Allie is part of a small minority of Afterlights who can interact physically with the living world by entering the body of living humans or animals.  She "skinjacks" them. (Old fashioned folks would say she "possesses" them.) She can do so because, unlike Nick, she wasn't actually killed in the accident.  "Skinjackers" have bodies that either lie in a deep coma or are kept alive in hospitals in a vegetative state. They exist in both worlds. Until Allie's body dies, she can skinjack.

Afterlights have to keep moving, or find "dead spots" on which to stand, or gravity gradually sucks them into the earth. Once beneath the surface, they fall deeper and deeper, ultimately to the molten core where they'll remain as long as the earth remains intact.  This sounds horrible, but the Afterlights in the core, like the great majority on the surface of Everlost, find increasing delight in finding one simple but interesting activity and repeating it day after day.  One Afterlight in the core taught many of his neighbors to begin singing "One Trillion Bottles of Beer on the Wall," a song calculated to keep them amused for some years.  (This is juvenile fiction, don't forget!)

Although the great majority of Afterlights grow increasingly passive as time passes in Everlost, some preserve the ambitions and passions of their earthly lives, and by force of personality contribute to great dramas that sweep Everlost.  Allie and Nick both have their critical parts to play in these dramas -- dramas that, because of the ability of skinjackers to interact with the living world, have potentially huge consequences for the lives of both the living and the dead.

Of course, most of those who die never see Everlost.  They fly down the tunnel to the light the instant their life on earth ends.  Almost all Afterlights feel somewhat stranded in Everlost, and look forward to reaching the light. But Afterlights have no better idea than we do what they'll find, once they're there.  Afterlights wonder if the light is really Heaven of some sort, as they hope.  What if the light they remember seeing at the end of the tunnel is a world of eternal hellish fire?  What if both living and dead are ruled over by malignant deities?   Is there a deity?  Or are both Earth and Everlost parts of the fabric of an uncaring universe, a universe governed impersonally by implacable natural laws?

Shusterman tells us a lot about life and about Everlost.  But even the author doesn't know what awaits us all at the end of the tunnel. Afterlights sooner or later "get to where they are going," but no one knows exactly what that means.  Shusterman's only hint is the observation that each Afterlight, just before entering the tunnel on his way to the light, suddenly remembers everything about his earthly life that he's forgotten, and that he's observed by others to have a look of peace and delight on his face.  An instant later, before reaching the light, he vanishes from sight in Everlost.

These are highly imaginative books.  They touch on serious philosophical issues.  They describe the passive world of most Afterlights -- memories of whose pasts are failing, each absorbed in his or her own thoughts and repetitive activities -- in a way that calls to mind a vast nursing home.  But a nursing home where the falling away of ambition and curiosity brings a strange peace and happiness, and may in fact be part of the preparation for an early voyage to the light.

The books are imaginative and philosophical and moving, but they are also full of adventure, of monstrous beings, of reflections on our own society, and of at times rather funny dialogue.  In the third book, especially, Shusterman's writing sometimes calls to mind the ironic and outrageous humor of Douglas Adams's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

What can I say?  It's "kid's lit," but I loved it.  Sometimes, youth really is wasted on the young.  You don't have to be a teenager to enjoy the Everlost trilogy.

Late summer mountain hiking

Mt. Fremont Lookout

It's been that kind of summer in the Northwest Corner.  While the rest of the nation sweltered from Global Warming, we've been chilly.  Two weeks ago, I finally did my annual climb of Mt. Si, a climb I usually do in May. 

Today, I went prowling in Mt. Rainier National Park.  It had to be one of the few really nice days we've had for hiking -- not cold and/or wet, but also not sweltering in the 90's as it was for a couple of days a week ago.  In Seattle, the forecast was for 77 degrees, and it was of course cooler at altitude.

Sunset Lodge and parking

Rather than hike in the Paradise area, as I usually do when I visit Rainier, I drove around to the northeast corner of the park and explored the trails around Sunrise Lodge.  Despite a lot of hikers, the traffic and parking were far more manageable than they are on a similar weekend at Paradise.  I arrived a little after 10 a.m., found a parking spot close to the lodge, and relaxed over a roll and coffee at the lodge's small snack bar.

Sunset Lodge is situated at an altitude of 6,400 feet -- a thousand feet higher than its cousin at Paradise.  The lodge is the highest point reachable in the park by automobile.  My goal, this year, wasn't to undertake a rigorous climb, as I did last year trudging up to Camp Muir, but simply to wander the trails, enjoy the views and wildflowers, and be glad that I lived in the Northwest.  All goals were duly accomplished. 

Frozen Lake, looking south

My planned destination was a fire lookout at Mt. Fremont, a climb to only 7,181 feet -- but because the trail goes up and down, the gross elevation gain is about 1,200 feet.  The round trip was about 5.5 miles. 

The trail is heavily traveled as far as Frozen Lake, about 1.5 miles from the lodge.  At that point, it intersects the Wonderland Trail in a five-direction intersection, so the crowds get divided among various destinations.  Also, many walkers simply make Frozen Lake their destination -- which judging from their shoes, clothes and general physical condition appeared to be a good idea.  (I hate to sound snarky -- I'm actually happy when anybody, in any physical condition, gets out of his or her car and walks any distance at all.  And Frozen Lake does provide beautiful views in itself.)

Trail to lookout (viewable in upper left)

I took the northbound trail to Mt. Fremont.  The gradient was gentle for the most part, and the hike not at all tiring.  The trail follows a ridge -- generally uphill with some areas of ups and downs.  The majority of the trail consists of easily walkable packed earth, but there is a significant portion that works its way through rock slides -- a section that requires some attention to what you're doing with your feet.  The rocks you're dancing over look like granite, but must be, in fact, broken shale.  My footsteps rang out like those of a person walking over millions of broken coke bottles at some recycling dump.

Emmons Glacier,
viewed from Second Burroughs Mountain

I had lunch at the lookout -- unmanned, but still maintained and occasionally used -- along with a number of other hikers with similarly unimaginative ideas.  Good views of Mt. Baker and Glacier Peak to the north, despite slightly hazy horizons.  The Olympics were merely a blue shadow on the western horizon, although The Brothers was discernible from the sun's shining off patches of white snow.  Someone loudly claimed he saw the Columbia Center (76 stories) in Seattle; then again, someone else probably thought he saw a flying saucer overhead but had the good sense to keep quiet about it.

It was still only about 1:00 or 1:30 when I got back to Frozen Lake, so I decided to try out another trail from the five-point intersection.  I took the Burroughs Mountain trail to the southwest.  The trail climbs to a plateau called First Burroughs Mountain, and then dips slightly before continuing upward to a much more impressive view at Second Burroughs Mountain (7,400 ft.).  Total round trip distance from Frozen Lake is only 2.6 miles.  From Second Burroughs, you feel you can reach out and scoop a snowball off the side of Rainier, and you have an excellent view of the Emmons Glacier tumbling down the east side of the mountain. 

Both trails are easy, and there were lots of children climbing along with their parents.  (And some fathers carrying pre-schoolers, which strikes me as far beyond the normal call of paternal duty.)  Enjoyable day, not all that tiring, but still a nice workout.  Total walking distance for the day: 8.1 miles.

Arriving freshmen

It kills you to see them grow up. But I guess it would kill you quicker if they didn't. 
~Barbara Kingsolver

As I hoofed my way across campus a couple of hours ago, I came upon a surrealistic scene.  The Upper Quad -- which during normal class days is a sea of hustling humanity -- had been gussied up as a tranquil dining arena.  Tables with white table cloths.  Hot buffets.  Student servers and bussers in uniforms. And most amazing of all, in a mixed company of students and parents, bottles of beer sitting on tables, or held in hand by standing and chattering parents.  In my day -- says the old codger -- that scene would have been as likely as a kegger held in a Methodist church sanctuary.

But nowadays it's but another sign that freshman orientation is proceeding step by step through what seem to be an ever increasing number of steps.  In-coming students have been trailing around after guides like baffled sheep for weeks now, plastic name tags hanging from chains around their neck.  These al fresco dinners -- and indeed there will be more than one such dinner over the next five weeks before class begins -- are part of what seems to be a new chore for the University: weaning the parents away from their sons and daughters.  Or at least sending the parents home with full stomachs as part of such an effort.

Some universities have actually had to shut their gates at some point, and order the parents to leave.

The whole process of starting a new school year arouses strong emotions -- both happy and a bit melancholy. They are emotions that I share to a degree, as I observe the scene, with the more directly affected parents and students.  The students face the loss of the joys of childhood, along with the advent of the privileges of adulthood and the adventure of study at a major university; the parents, while feeling pride in their children's accomplishments, also must contemplate the prospect of emptier homes and diminished importance in their children's lives. 

Several houses down the block, a recent high school graduate named G. is preparing to leave town in the next few days to begin his university studies in Manhattan.  I met and became acquainted with G. three years ago this month, during an evening when many of the neighbors were getting acquainted with each other while watching the filming of The Details in and around my house (it opens September 7, by the way, in a theater near you!).  We've bumped into each other a few times since then, just frequently enough for me to keep track of his progress through high school.

G. reminds me in many ways of myself at 18 -- in his personality, in his interests, in his approach to life.  He's been in New York City a couple of times over the past two years, playing in invitational music competitions as part of his high school orchestra.  It's been these visits, at least in part, that have lured him to the Big Apple for college.  He approaches the start of this new phase of life, as he put it in a note to me today, "with cautious excitement."  How precisely that phrase captures the exact way I myself felt the week before I headed down to California as a newly minted freshman! 

I identify fully with G.'s combination of enthusiasm and nervousness, just as I identify with what I suspect are his parents' mixed feelings of pride and sadness.  But birds gotta fly -- and birds' parents have to learn to live with empty nests. 

And as my empathy is with G. in his endeavors, and with his parents in their undoubtedly conflicted feelings, it also goes out to the thousands of new Huskies who will be pouring onto the UW campus over the next few weeks, many of them accompanied by parents who are smiling broadly with pride, and at the same time hiding a certain moistness welling up in their eyes.  It's all part of life -- always has been, always will be.  Every door we pass through opens up a new room for us to explore, and causes us to leave behind an old room filled with poignant memories. 

Welcome, Class of 2016, to what I guarantee will be one of the more exciting "new rooms" that you will encounter during your lives!

Contractual cleaning

Like an increasingly large number of middle class citizens who are too busy, or too lazy, or too incompetent (or all of the above) to clean their own homes regularly, I have a housecleaner who comes in every two weeks and does it for me.

I've used the same contractor for years, a cleaning service that's provided me with an ever-changing cast of cleaners. Like secretaries, I've learned, housecleaners don't hang around that long. They get themselves married to affluent spouses, or go back to school, or move to Florida, or just get tired of what I suspect is a fairly unsatisfying job.

I've been using the same woman E. for about six months now. E. has been one of the best cleaners I've had in all the years that I've had cleaners. She even does (but don't tell anyone!) windows! And she's always been unusually careful to call ahead if she's had any change of plans.

But then, last week, E. didn't show up. She didn't call. The cleaning service was baffled -- she hadn't contacted them, either.

The cook was a good cook, as cooks go; and as good cooks go, she went.
--Saki

Yeah, it was pretty much like that, I guess.

Today, the cleaning service called and told me that they would be, once again, sending me a new cleaner. They've learned that E. has been soliciting homeowners for whom she's been cleaning. She apparently plans now to manage her own cleaning business, free of the need to pay a slice of her fees to the service provider. She's thus in violation of her contract with the service, a contract that contains some form of non-compete agreement. Not only is she now persona non grata with the service, they'll be deciding soon whether to sue her.

My sympathies are with E., of course, but I also see the service's point. (They're obviously concerned that I might hire E. independently myself -- they plan to charge me only half fee for my next cleaning, as compensation for my being "inconvenienced.") But if I did hire E., she might well be deemed my employee rather than an independent contractor. I might be liable for workers compensation and social security taxes; I might be subject to other employment law regulations. I'm sure that 99 percent of people who deal directly with their independent housecleaners never once consider such issues, but I'm the sort who does. I might want to run for President of the United States some day; I'd hate to have past violations of employment laws thrown in my face by my opponent.

Speaking not as an employment lawyer -- which I'm not -- but as a casual brooder over internet articles, I find that non-compete agreements are generally enforceable in Washington. They are considered valid if their prohibitions are no greater in extent than necessary to protect the business and good will of the employer. They must not be so great in duration and geographical scope that they prevent the worker from earning a living within a reasonable distance of her home. The judge obviously has to weigh conflicting interests in making decisions in these cases, doing so on a case by case basis.

I suspect that E. has, in fact, exposed herself to liability by soliciting present customers of her now-former employer. I doubt there are enough damages recoverable, however, to justify a lawsuit against her. A stern letter from the cleaning service's lawyer probably will scare her into backing off. Seattle provides a huge market for housecleaners, and I'm sure E. will be able to find folks for whom to work without violating her non-compete agreement.

E. was an excellent and personable worker. I wish her the best. I also understand the cleaning service's need to prevent workers from staying with them just long enough to develop marketable relationships with customers, and then walking off with those customers.

Meanwhile, my house -- uncleaned since before my trip to England -- is fast becoming engulfed in cat hair. Legal maneuvering aside, I'll just be happy to get someone in here who knows how to operate a vacuum cleaner!

Keeping it real

The reference to Seattle's "Galer Street School" is what first caught my attention.  I live only a couple of blocks from Galer.  But then Galer Street, like most of Seattle's streets, leaps from place to place across the city.  It starts off from Madison Park, hops across the Arboretum into my own neighborhood, and runs up Capitol Hill where it serves as the north boundary of Volunteer Park.  After disappearing into Lake Union, it re-emerges on Queen Anne Hill, and finally ends its long life on the bluffs of Magnolia.

The Galer Street School is, of course, fictional -- a plot device in Maria Semple's Where'd You Go, Bernadette, reviewed in today's New York Times.  But where could such a school have existed, had it in fact existed?  Not likely in my neighborhood.  Describing itself as "a place where compassion, academics and global connectitude join together to create civic-minded citizens of a sustainable and diverse planet," the school idealogically would more likely find itself perched among the large houses atop Capitol or Queen Anne hills, or perhaps snuggled amongst the leafily liberal avenues of Madison Park.  Except that, in the book, the school finds itself in unseemly proximity to a wholesale seafood distributor -- an unlikely neighbor anywhere Galer touches down to earth.

Admittedly, a bit of the novel's flavor has infected virtually all of us Seattleites, regardless of neighborhood.  Which raises the question in my mind -- how did the honest, hard-working, down to earth Scandinavians of my youth become the oh-so-twee objects of ridicule in an acclaimed "multi-media novel," a novel worthy of 28 column inches of review in America's Newspaper of Record? 

How did we become a city, even in satire, where a school gives not the five traditional letter grades of yesteryear, but three grades worthy of a community where all the kids are above average:  "Surpasses Excellence," "Achieves Excellence," and "Working Toward Excellence."  

Apparently, it's all the fault of Microsoft and Amazon, and their brilliant but disrespectful employees.  Things sure weren't like this when Boeing and the Teamsters ran the town!. 

I haven't read the book, of course, but I suspect that it describes Seattle with the same fidelity as Portlandia depicts our sister city to the south -- exaggerating a bit of the froth emanating from the hip and frothy, suggesting an embarrassing tone that's gradually infecting the rest of us, and yet missing a sense of the real substance of life here in our world of Douglas fir, constant drizzle, and patrons who wear jeans and hiking boots to the Symphony.

Someone needs to write a novel that captures the true spirit of Seattle, captures it in the same way as David Guterson caught it for the rural portions of the state in Snow Falling on Cedars.  But, as a character reportedly exclaims in Semple's novel:  "Grab your crampons because we have an uphill climb."

(Bold face in text.)

Underground trains

Subways fascinate me.  In part, they fascinate me as an environmentally sound alternative to automotive gridlock.  But they fascinated me long before I appreciated their eco-advantages -- they fascinated me as systems worthy of being mastered, as puzzles to untangle. Almost as a sufficient cause in themselves to visit big cities. 

I've written earlier my review of the novel Lowboy, a story about a psychotic youth who lived underground in Manhattan's subway tunnels.  I've returned recently from London, where I once more enjoyed the challenge of working my way, mole-like, from one landmark to another.  Just blocks from my house, here in Seattle, work continues daily on the underground light rail line from downtown -- our own poor man's version of a big city subway.   And today, the New York Times Magazine delights me with photos and text relating to on-going excavation of the Second Avenue subway extension in New York.

The history of the Second Avenue line resembles more the raising of a medieval cathedral than it does construction of a modern public works project.  The line was first proposed in 1929 as an expansion of the then-independent IND line.  Construction was sabotaged by the Depression, and then World War II.  Actual construction began in 1972, shortly before New York City became insolvent.  Several short segments of the route were excavated; they have been quietly awaiting further work for several decades.  In 2007, work recommenced on the first phase of the newly conceived project.

As all New Yorkers are well, aware, the East Side is served by only one north-south subway line, the Lexington Avenue IRT line, serving No. 4, 5, and 6 trains.  (An elevated line running up Second Avenue closed in 1942. The Third Avenue El was supposed to continue in operation until a Second Avenue subway line was opened, but commercial pressure caused it to be shut down in 1955.) The Lexington Avenue line now serves 1.3 million passengers a day -- according to the NYT article, more than are carried at the same time by the entire transit systems of Boston, Chicago and San Francisco combined. 

The phase now being developed will extend the existing Q trains -- which now run up Broadway in Manhattan on their way north from Brooklyn and then east to Queens -- from 63rd and Lexington over to Second Avenue, and then north up Second Avenue to 96th.  That extension should be open for business by the end of 2016.  Three more phases of construction on Second Avenue are planned, which will give rise to a new line, designated the T line, running from 125th to south Manhattan. None of these three phases has yet been funded:

• Phase 2 -- Extension north from 96th to 125th Street.
• Phase 3 -- Extension south from 63rd to Houston.
• Phase 4 -- Extension south from Houston to Hanover Square.  Eventually, the T trains may extend north into the Bronx and south to Brooklyn.

In my ideal world, no one would ever be tempted to drive a car into a major city.  The rapid transit infrastructure would be so highly developed, the trains so comfortable to ride,  that it would seem madness to risk traffic jams and sky-high parking fees by bringing your own vehicle.  The Second Avenue line won't achieve that level of nirvana -- it will barely keep up with growing demand, and no one's ever been exhilarated by the luxury of New York's subway cars.

But it's a step in the right direction.  That poor kid in Lowboy may have been psychotic in his devotion to the underground world of trains.  If so, it's a psychosis with which I can fully sympathize.