The Other Don Kelly

We just got back from Godfrey Daniels on the other side of the river, where Anne participated in an old-time music jam — a bunch of crusty old characters playing fiddle and banjo, mandolin and dulcimer, and Anne on her violin, and me as the only audience. (Jeff F showed up later in the evening with his violin.) I knew pretty much none of the songs, but it was a real pleasure to listen to everyone play.

I myself did not get to play today. I was supposed to be playing duets with Donna, but as I was getting ready I found my cello horribly out of tune, and when I tried to tune it one of the strings broke. (It turns out, Donna couldn’t make it anyway, so it wasn’t that much of a disaster.) I took my cello to Montero Violins, where the woman talked me into a full set of new strings — they were rather old and starting to sound dead — which put me back a good chunk of change, but it had to happen sooner or later. (I also got a lot of good advice on the care and feeding of my cello, so that helped make it worthwhile.)

Saturday night we went out to a concert in Easton with Jeff and Kristen. Two full string quartets — the amazing Emerson Quartet, who are actually disbanding after this year so we were lucky to see them, and the younger but also incredible Escher String Quartet. Tey played a whole bunch of combinations, quintet and sextets, and ended with this amazing Mendelssohn Octet. It was an amazing night, capped off with a quick trip to Porters.

So that was my musical week!

We went with Shari & Rick to see “NOPE” today. Holy cow, what a movie! No spoilers, but it was a UFO horror film, packed with all sorts of other creepy stuff that may or may not have anything to do with the main story (spoiler: they do, I just spent the last hour reading reviews of the movie).

Anyway, here is a trailer, and a recommendation: go see “NOPE.”

Reading: The Dazzle of Day by Molly Glass. Emmi’s husband Kyle sent us this book, which he read recently and liked, and thought we’d like too. (He’s always spot-on in his recommendations.) I started reading it the other day.

So far we’ve been jokingly referring to the book as “Quakers in Space,” since that’s the basic premise: the Earth is dying, and a worldwide consortium of Friends manage to establish a working ecosystem on a generation ship (think the Nauvoo/Behemoth from “The Expanse”), then leave to search for a new home planet among the stars. I’m now up to Chapter 2, where the ship is approaching its target planet, after more than a century of travel, and preliminary scans show it to be disappointingly inhospitable. I suspect that the rest of the book will center on the decision they will have to make — make a go of it on this planet, or keep looking for a better one.

So far I’m finding the book to be an engrossing read, but it’s really personal, and intense, and weirdly sad… I can only read a few pages at a time.

Bewilderment by Richard Powers: this is the most recent novel by the guy who wrote The Overstory. It concerns an astrobiologist — he studied extremophiles as a biologist, and now scans the spectra of newly-discovered planets for signs of anything that can be called life — and recent widower with a difficult child who may be somewhere on the spectrum. He and the boy struggle with the mom’s death, and the imminent death of the planet (the mom was a heroic environmental activist); he tells his son tales of other planets as bedtime stories; and — this where I am so far — he enrolls the son in an experimental brainwave/biofeedback program rather than let school put the kid on drugs. It’s interesting, but it’s also a bit of an anxiety attack; I don’t read much of it at any one time. Stay tuned…

Excession by Iain M. Banks: Another Culture novel, and a Christmas present from my parents. Pure “bubblegum for the mind” as Anne calls her detective novels, and I happily put Bewilderment aside to scarf this book up in about three days.

PostGIS in Action by Regina O. Obe and Leon S. Hsu: Another Christmas present, this one is nonfiction, bordering on reference, and something I’ve been meaning to pick up for a long time. I read the first few chapters in one sitting, and am now working through it a little more slowly, with my laptop open and QGIS running. Lots of good stuff, a bit dense but the learning curve is pretty forgiving.

The Hydrogen Sonata by Iain M. Banks: another Christmas present and another fast-paced Culture novel, more bubblegum and I am about halfway through.

I wrote this on Valentine’s Day thirteen years ago. Valentine, Venus, Vesuvius, Venezuela, Vhiessu…

I had several projects I wanted to work on this evening, and a whole bunch of straightening I could be doing, but instead I fell down a rabbit hole — I’d been perusing Anne’s copy of The Dictionary of Imaginary Places last night (after reading some non-Lovecraft Cthulhu stories), looking for the kinds of entries I might like. Plenty of Narnia and Middle Earth, and other things I could do without, but nothing about the Miskatonic River (small blurbs about Arkham and Innsmouth), and then I flipped to the back to read the entry for Vhiessu — nothing.

So today, after a pretty trying day, I sat down at the computer to do those projects (more on them at some other time), and instead I Googled Vhiessu. There really isn’t a lot about it, though it was used as the title for some rock album, and, on obscure fan pages for Pynchon and Jorge Luis Borges, I found some reference to a fictional travelogue by the “accidental founder of Rosicrucianism,” which also mentioned Vhiessu, and which was in the 1740’s the inspiration for some intentional community outside Prague, which collapsed into “cannibalism, orgies, and mass suicide.” WTF?

I tried to find more, and found that some of what was referenced was real, but other parts seemed to lead to weird Internet dead ends: circular references, missing articles in archives of dead journals… In the end, I may have been the victim of an elaborate literary prank.

Now I have to read some Borges, and I’ll have to see if Anne’s book has any references to Ukbar or Tlön.