Book Review: The Golden Compass (or Atlas Shrugged for kids)

I picked up an omnibus volume of Philip Pullman's "His Dark Materials" trilogy a little over a month ago.  I finished it last night.

Story: this is an alternate history with mythical/religious elements.  The time is now, but the last 300 years are very different from our last 300 years.  The church is powerful, technology is stagnant, and powerful forces are at work.  In steps Lyra Bellacqua, a precocious 12-year old girl.  

The story follows Lyra and her companions through parallel worlds (each similar to but a little different from our own).  The social/religious fabric is rich and complex.  There is enough detail about it to get a sense of it, and enough tidbits of information thrown in here and there that it makes it seem real.  You know how a good author has trouble deciding which parts of their world to not write about, not trouble making the book long enough to sell?  Pullman is one of those.  There are hundreds of stories he could tell about this universe he's created.  

The main characters are compelling, but oddly so: they are miniature versions of Ayn Rand's characters in The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged.  They are able instantly to tell if a person they meet is worthy of their friendship or not, and they are always right.  They are able to get out of any situation by the force of their own will.  Their eyes are intense, so that other people are afraid of them because of how inadequate they'll feel.  And they are going about the business of completely reversing the order of the world.  

The books are engrossing, the story is fabulous and deep, and some parts of it make you want to cry.  It is not, despite what you may have read, an anti-God or anti-religious book.  In its alternate world, the Church (always with capital letters) is repressive and seeks only to dampen people's spirits and kill the joy in the world.  It does reflect the author's atheistic view, and if his view of religion in general were accurate then I suppose it could be subversive.  The thing is that Pullman's vision of Christianity does not at all match with what I live.  It is an alternate reality, and will remain so.

I highly recommend these books - they're a great experience.  I'd put them next to the InkHeart series.  More serious than Peter and the Starcatchers.  Less grown-up (and more, in some ways) than Twilight.

On my first piano performance since 1982

For FB readers, you can read this note with normal formatting at http://kermitisking.blogspot.com.

I'm taking piano lessons at the Hoffman Academy.  It's relatively new, run by a young guy named Joseph Hoffman.  The staff is great - well-educated, friendly, talented, and engaged in the local music scene.  Joseph has done some arrangments for the PMCO, Dave Thomas is published as a researcher specializing in Russian music, Becca is part of a band that has paying gigs.  It's a good and fun place. 

The culture is laid-back in a certain sense - nobody makes you feel bad if you didn't make any progress that week.  But it's intense in that the staff will take you as far as you are willing to go.  These are pros who really really love what they do, and it shows.  Part of the experience includes performance opportunities.  There is the recital every term, and there is also a "come together" week every month or so.  This provides some cost-reduction (and free time) for the academy, as they provide 2 teachers for a group of 4-6 students.  But the value-add is that the students play for each other.  It's very informal, and everyone just plays what they've been working on.  

I'm rather outclassed at this point.  I'm the only man taking lessons there (most are children, as you'd expect), and there are 4 women who take lessons there.  All of them are vastly more capable than I am.  The first student to play did a Bach innovation (I think), #10.  Not flawless, but very good.  My first thought was, "Holy cow, the lady can play!"  I took out my little Bartok piece (get it here, this is a great site), #1 of his book for children.  After saying how new I was to this a few times, I played/stumbled through it.  I wasn't as nervous as I might have been.  It is a difficult piece for me - both hands attacking different rythms and changing hand positions.  And I wasn't perfect at it.  But it was good enough given that I'd only had it for 6 days.  The response was positive - we spent a little time going through it, we all played through it to give it some musicality.  And then it was time for the next student to go, and she did some crazy Beethoven that was extremely technical.  Amazing.

So it was a good experience - I'll be less nervous for my next session since I know what to expect.  And I'll spend a little time finding a piece that fits me better.  The Bartok was ok, but I'll need something that uses my voice, too.  I'm a singer at heart, and a piano going without vocals just sounds lonely to me.  Time to have fun with it and claim this art form as my own as I have with vocal performance and theatrical performance.  

Life is to be lived - forget that, and you might was well give up the habit.

How Things Have Progressed...

...with work, family, and life.

Work

I had 2 people move to a different department, and was able to fill their spots with 2 more excellent people from other departments.  A lot of people applied, and all were qualified for the positions.  I had the luxury of balancing technical ability, personality, accomplishments and potential all at once.  In the end, I wished I'd had 6 spots.  I would have been very happy to take my top 6 candidates.  

It was a true gut check.  I had known several candidates since I was a newbie to my company.  Some I'd worked together with projects, and some had mentored me.  Some I'd taught Japanese to a few years ago.  In the end, I realized that my company pays me to manage its money wisely.  And the best investment of its money was to invest in the 2 people I chose.  1 of them I'd known for a while but had never been directly involved with, and the other I had never heard of.  Not being able to tell some friends whom I think the world of that I'd be able to offer them a position was difficult.  But as a manager, it was the best decision for me to make.

Family

The kids are getting older (as they tend to do), and each is entering a different age bracket.  Aria is becoming a tween.  She speaks intelligently, can reason, deal with disappointment well, and likes to explore.  There are still too many times when she clings to a preconceived notion and won't listen to a new one.  But she's getting better at it.  The biggest struggle we have now (thank goodness this is our biggest one!) is that when she gets a redically new type of homework assignment (like her first book report) she is so decided that she doesn't get it that she won't listen and engage as we try to help her understand it.

Christian is getting better and better at reading - you can't quite see his face light up with it yet, but he's very very close.  If we don't push him, I think some day soon he'll come to us and say, "I read this whole book!"  

Libby is finally leaving the toddler stage and becoming a little girl.  She wants someone to play with, and enjoys playing house.  

Jakers is, probably because of how unavailable Katrina and I have been, a holy tornado.  He can talk really well, but the boy will grab anything he can find, open it, and eat it.  Tonight, we found that he had opened (and eaten!) a new stick of deodorant.  It wasn't on his breath, though.  He says he ate it.  We haven't found it anywhere else.  

Life

With interest rates low and a family that is getting bigger (if not more numerous), it seemed like the right time to take advantage of the opportunity to do an addition.  So we're looking at adding 1300sf.  The drawings are in progress, and if the financier thinks the new work will appraise high enough, we'll be in business.  2 weeks for the drawings, 2 weeks for the financing, 4 weeks for the permits, and 3 months until project completion.  Assuming there aren't big problems with the first 3 steps.  

The Morning Stars is still a blast.  We're at 6 members now, and watching our capabilities grow has been lots of fun.  They're great guys to sing with.  We warm up with the hymnal each week, and it seems that more and more often we're at performance quality on our first run through.  Which is cool, especially when we're reading something new.  

Piano lessons are fun as well.  It's a little humbling to go back to beginner level.  I was secretly hoping that I would get something more difficult and work on it longer to improve my skills.  Turns out that it's best to do it from the beginning as a beginner.  But I'm getting better.  And now Aria and I have some duets to play, and our skills are improving quickly.  Yay!  Soon I'll be 2-handed at the piano.

One more thing: I've had a few plastic bags of old family photos (of my uncles in the military in the 50s) and I scanned them all recently.  Really cool.  I'm getting the scanned and printed versions ready to pass around at this year's family reunion so my uncles and aunts can comment on them.  

Sesquicentennial Report

A smooth and seamless event it was not.  

We made it to the capitol mall at about noon.  We wandered around the blacksmith areas, saw the old trucks there, and visited some of the statuary on the grounds.  We tried to go inside, but there were people guarding the doors.  "The entrance is closed until 1, there are too many people in there."

So we walked around some more.  The governor was there on the steps outside, and made a little speech.  Cool to see him in person.  We got in line (in line to get in the Oregon capitol building???) at 12:55, and got in at about 1:20.  The place was packed.  The main recepetion area (with the Oregon Seal on the floor) had a little room to move, but there was no movement in the connector hall between the front and back of the building.  Christian wanted to buy some rocks at the gift shop.  20 minutes in line.  The lines to get the free birthday cake and hot dogs were 20 minutes each.  So we skipped those.  We did find the cookie decorating area, and my mom decorated cookies with the other 3 kids while I was with Christian buying rocks.

Now who decided to have the hot dogs and cake inside the building?  I really wanted the kids to get a sense of the wonder of how the government works in a way that's a little more fun than it was on school field trips.  We were able to peek in the House chamber, and we pointed out the governor and his office on the 2nd floor.  So it wasn't bad, but it wasn't as fun as I had hoped it would be.  We'll go back some day when the legislature is in session and spend a day there looking at the paintings and walking through Oregon history and observing the legislature at work together. 

Pics are posted on FaceBook.  

On My First Adult Piano Lesson

A little over 2 years ago, Aria and Christian started piano lessons with Joseph Hoffman at the Hoffman Academy.  They learned a lot and had a lot of fun.  But their parents didn't do so well at followup.   It looked very likely that we were going to move for work, so we dropped out.  And the next year was just too busy with me in school, etc.

But I finished in June and have had some time to decompress, so it was time to head back to learning.  This time, Aria and I enrolled in partner classes at the Hoffman Academy.  This is a cool place - highly recommended.  Great staff, great price for the quality, good location.  

Partner lessons are what they sound like: 2 students, 1 teacher.  The homework assignments for both are similar but not always identical.  The idea is that the students reenforce each other.  For Aria and I, it also means that we play piano together every night. 

We showed up for lessons early - our session with Kim was due to start at 6:15, but we were there at 5:45.  We sat in the car for 20 minutes waiting, which was totally my fault.  We walked in the place, and found Dave Thomas in the back room, finishing with some vocal students.  Kim was in the next room, and had just started to eat an apple.  Turns out that she gets a break between students.  

In our first session, I did a ton of things I'd never done before.  I improvised at someone's request.  I did an improve without title first.  Then Aria did one called Snow.  Then she picked Thunder for me to do.  We practiced singing and plunking the notes out (Kim called it voice matching).  We transposed a song from D to C.  And one of our assignments was for Aria to play an arrangement of "Go Tell Aunt Rhodie" on the right hand while I accompany with the guitar.  So lots of variety - this is not a place where you see a song and master a few songs.  This is a place where you learn to transpose, improvise, play by ear, and read notes.  All at once. 

It's a little outside my comfort zone, which is good for me.  I'm loving it.

Reply to Peggy Noonan's latest column

I posted a reply like this on the WSJ forum.  I lost the copy paste, so rewrote it below.  The post is in response to a post by Peggy Noonan, the conservative columnist.  The whole column is here.  

I responded to this part of the column:

On Wednesday, in an interview with Politico, Dick Cheney warned of the possible deaths of "perhaps hundreds of thousands" of Americans in a terror attack using nuclear or biological weapons. "I think there is a high probability of such an attempt," he said.

When the interview broke and was read on the air, I was in a room off a television studio. For a moment everything went silent, and then a makeup woman said to a guest, "I don't see how anyone can think that's not true."

I told her I'm certain it is true. And it didn't seem to me any of the half dozen others there found the content of Cheney's message surprising. They got a grim or preoccupied look.

The question for the Obama administration: Do they think Mr. Cheney is essentially correct, that bad men are coming with evil and deadly intent, but that America can afford to, must for moral reasons, change its stance regarding interrogation and detention of terrorists? Or, deep down, do the president and those around him think Mr. Cheney is wrong, that people who make such warnings are hyping the threat for political purposes? And, therefore, that interrogation techniques, etc., can of course be relaxed? I don't know the precise answer to this question. Do they know exactly what they think? Or are they reading raw threat files each day trying to figure out what they think?

In the post, Ms. Noonan restates the conservative talking point that either we torture or we'll have another (and worse) terrorist attack.  This is equivalent to saying that operating under the rule of law is a bad thing; that American law can not deal with terrorism.  That the only way to deal with terrorists is to operate in an extra-legal manner.

This is a bad assumption.  Most obviously, the reverse is actually true.  Places like Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Pakistan and Egypt are well known for poor treatment of prisoners at the least and torture or murder at the worst.  Where did the majority of 9/11 hijackers come from?  Suadia Arabia.  Where is Al-Qaeda based?  Pakistan.  Torture, rather than extracting extra important information, instead reenforces the idea that "the state is evil and must be overturned".  Its continued practice means that we get old information that is probably inaccurate, while new terrorists are hatching evil plots and have not been captured.  It creates a new threat while not obviating the old threats (because either you have the potential perpetrators already in custody or the plot has changed since you captured them).

This is a false choice, and somehow that has to get through the chatter and make some sense.  Torture does not equal safety.  It equals tyranny.

What Ripple Effect? and other thoughts

In this economy, I'm not seeing many ripples.  I am seeing a large number of tsunamis and dominoes, however.  They are even starting to reach their cold mixed-metaphorical hands into my workplace and into our personal financial decisions.  

In other thoughts, I'm very interested in Obama's first week at work.  He's been very busy, no?  So far, he's taking action to deliver on his campaign promises as well as govern with pragmatism.  That missile strike in Pakistan?  Not the act of a weeny liberal.  The plan for economic stimulus?  Not the plan of a bleeding-heart liberal.  Obama is governing from the center, with a vengeance.  He ran to the left of Hillary, which is still where he is.  Which shows that real political liberals don't get very far.  I've really liked his approach.  And I love the look of his cabinet and appointees.  Especially the picks for OLC and DOE.  These are both cases of completely apolitical political appointees.  Both candidates are very qualified in their field, and are accustomed to leading where people will follow.  The OLC choice in particular was like an addict setting limits for himself: she's a fierce critic of over-reaching executive power, and Obama can expect that if he does things he's not supposed to, she'll stop him.  

The office at home is coming together nicely.  We went to City Liquidators in Portland and found a pile of beautiful wood.  We're refinishing it and turning it into a huge T-shaped desk for the new office.  We have a bunch of extra, so we've been experimenting on a smaller piece to make sure it turns out like we want it before we do all 28 sq feet.  Cost for a similar setup that still isn't quite right: $1000.  Our cost: $300.  It's gonna be bee-you-ti-full!

The audition today was a blast.  Sometimes when you audition, you do a less-than-acceptable job, and you think, "I blew it".  Sometimes you audition and you think, "That wasn't my best run ever, but it was good enough.  If they don't pick me, it's not because I screwed up."  Today was one of the latter.  This performance was a big step up for us as a group (The Morning Stars) because of several factors.  The piece was more challenging harmonically and rythmically than we've done before, the audience was a lot more discerning, and we had to make a change on the fly because one of our members wasn't able to make it.  And despite all of that, it worked out.  Yeah!  I expect to hear soon whether we made it or not, and I'll post.