Bruckner: Turning the Corner

Anton Bruckner
Symphony No. 3 in d-minor

German Symphony Orchestra Berlin
Riccardo Chailly

It is possible that my friend, with whom I am undertaking this tour of all of Bruckner’s symphonies, forced my hand a bit when he commented recently that “Bruckner really turned a corner in No. 3,” but now that he did, I find it impossible to see the work in any other light.

The opening movement starts with some trademark over-the-top brass, but we get some weirdness as early as 1:13 in — there is something unsettling here in both brass and strings.  The passage at 3:10, albeit brief, sounds almost modernist, especially in the strings, and by the four-minute mark or so, Bruckner prefigures Mahler in no uncertain terms — slow and pastoral, yet with a lot of tension.  Shortly after — no more than a dozen bars, maybe less — the music gets downright spooky, the first expression of the movement’s subtitle of Misterioso.  A couple of minutes later, there are some pretty wild intervals between strings and oboe (and, a bit later, horn) — Bruckner had certainly not scored anything this bold in any of the previous symphonies.  The unsettled feeling continues to a greater or lesser degree for the rest of the movement, culminating in some real harmonic ambiguity towards the end, at 15:54 and again at 16:20, where Bruckner hints more at Debussy of La Mer than anything I know of Mahler, much less of Bruckner’s contemporaries.  He even plays with rhythm in ways he hasn’t up until this point — is that a bolero around the 18-minute mark?  To be sure, there is some patented Bruckner moments, too — the obnoxious climax at 11:00 followed by some anthemic chest-thumping, short but gorgeous horn and flute solos throughout, and an organic way he reworks the material of the opening themes in the second half of the movement.  But the gauntlet has been laid.

The Adagio is not as dramatic a departure from earlier slow movements: an expansive opening, lots of lush drama throughout, both in the dynamics and the harmonies, lots of beautiful horn writing — the instrument really carries the movement.  But even here, we get unsettled by the oboe and strings at the end of the first minute, albeit briefly, then again by the strings at 2:55.  There is rhythmic weirdness, too — I’m not sure what’s happening at 4:25, but it sounds as if the record skipped a couple of times… except I was listening on CD.  Finally, we get a seriously dissonant climax at 9:11 that will startle even the most absent-minded listener.  It seems that Bruckner has left the old, beautiful-but-predictable Adagios of earlier symphonies behind for good.

The Scherzo brings its own flavor of surprises.  After a characteristically brash opening, the second theme is a fast and very un-Brucknerian waltz.  And the Trio, again fairly long here, just like it was in No. 2, is also a waltz, slower and almost Straussian in feel.  Not entirely, of course — there is stuff here that Strauss neither could, nor needed to, write.  But the overall feel is unmistakably mid-19th-century Vienna.

There are more contrasts in the Finale.  After a bombastic opening (is Bruckner capable of any other kind?), the second theme is sweet, almost saccharine, built from the material of the waltz from the Scherzo, but in duple time.  Tricky.  The unaccompanied horn chorale is a pleasant surprise and an effective transition device, and after a false start or two, things get going and go to a much darker place, on average, than anything that came before, opening movement included.  There is more development in the second half, another brass chorale, a new theme, a recap of the “sweet” motif, and some other stuff besides.  The ending, though, is massively huge and unambiguous.  The overwhelming force of whatever un-namable thing inspires Bruckner has triumphed over, well, pretty much everything.

Bruckner: The Safe Symphony

Anton Bruckner

Symphony No. 2 in c-minor

 

Royal Concertgebow Orchestra Amsterdam

Ricardo Chailly

If we had to nickname Bruckner’s Second Symphony, the way Beethoven’s Sixth got nicknamed “Pastoral” somewhere along the line, I might suggest “Safe,” but that is not as bad as it sounds.  Perhaps Bruckner was looking for more popular and critical acclaim after the relative adventurousness of the First.  The first movement opens in an anthemic, expansive fashion.  Unusually, Bruckner gives short solos to the flute and clarinet as early as 1:45, but by and large there is no adventure here.  The second theme is also very expansive and pastoral (speaking of pastoral things), and also with no tension, except maybe a hint at 3:50.  The movement builds steadily, with nice parts for oboe, bassoon and, once again, flute — clearly one of Bruckner’s favorite instruments.  Horn introduces a new section around 6:00 which starts to develop the opening theme’s material, but again with no unusual harmony or dissonance to speak of.  There is a triumphant climax at 7:40, followed by some nice melodic passages for winds.  A lush melody starting around 12:50 or so foreshadows later movements, and the section at 15:00 has, like bits in the previous symphony, something Russian about it.  The whole movement is very even-keeled, especially in the second half, and, on the whole, dare I say it, a little boring.

The Adagio movement is full of melancholy beauty right off the bat, but we finally get a bit of dissonance at 1:48 in the way the solo violin is set against the strings.  This doesn’t last, however, and the horn theme at 2:50 is the basis for the rest of the movement.  The climax around 5:58 sounds very cinematic to my ear, and would work very well in a film soundtrack.  There is a new major-key theme starting at 12:00, and what little real harmonic tension there is in the movement, it is here.  By the 15:00 mark, we’re back at the opening theme.  Safe though it is, the whole movement is gorgeous.  It may not make you think, but check your pulse if it doesn’t make you feel something.

The Scherzo is energetic and, unlike in the First, the Trio section is obvious — it starts at 3:38.  It is pleasant, if somewhat repetitive, and surprisingly long.  There is a straight restatement of the opening theme at 7:35, but in the closing section Bruckner works in bits of the Trio material in an organic and subtle way.  One of the more pleasant surprises of the whole work.

Like the earlier movements, the Finale is full of lush consonance from the get-go, opening with a triumphant theme that is very Beethovenian in spirit, and a little in content, too.  The second theme is again very pastoral and a dramatic contrast to the opening — clearly a thing with Bruckner.  After the extremely slow section  at 5:10, there is finally some real harmonic tension in the strings starting around 6:25 or so.  The middle section is mostly slow and lush, with attractively prominent wind parts, and there is something about the Bruckner’s orchestral colors here that to my ear looks ahead to Mahler.  Finally, things begin to sound as if Bruckner decided that if the audience has lasted this long, they’ll stay to the end, and starts to experiment with some interesting harmonies at 12:27 and some previously absent chromaticism around 14:00.  The brass chorale at 16:14 if gorgeous and unexpected, and thus very effective.  Brahms would do something similar later.  There is ass-kicking brass in the final recap before the symphony closes with a highly triumphant, unabashedly major-key finale.

Bruckner: The Boring Symphony

Anton Bruckner
Symphony No. 1 in c-minor

German Symphony Orchestra Berlin
Riccardo Chailly

Bruckner composed the first of the symphonies he saw fit to perform in 1865-1866, conducting the premiere in 1868 in Linz.  He revised the symphony in 1890-1891, and it is this later version that we usually hear today.  It is clear from the first listen that most of the weight of the symphony is in the last movement.  It was also clear to me from my first listen that although it has its moments, on the whole the symphony is fairly boring.

The opening of the first movement is conventional, vaguely Beethovenian but not too much.  As early as a minute in, we get the foreshadowing of weirdness to come with an unstable chord or two in the strings, and it is these small moments of unexpected material that we have to listen for if we want to get something out of the symphony.  A chromatic second theme leads to some tension around 3:00, and we get another taste of weirdness to come in the ominous-sounding low brass around 4:50.  Not really a conventional sonata-allegro to my ear, the movement slips into development almost unnoticed and starts to build some real tension.  The brass chords around 7:10 are very much at odds with perfectly pleasant strings, and we get more unsettled harmonic stuff around 9:50 after a brief restatement of the first theme.  Eventually, things settle back down and a fragment of the first theme closes things out on an appropriately triumphant note.

The Adagio opens with some seriously dark and strikingly modern-sounding strings under a horn pedal, but unfortunately the mood doesn’t stay as melancholy as I might have liked.  I’m not sure how I feel about the flutes at 2:20, but the tonal colors are nice once other woodwinds come in.  The darkness clears up relatively quickly and the movement proceeds mostly in major.  Strings around 5:00 are compelling, and the counterpoint between strings and flute at 7:30 is effective.  There are some moments of tension later in the movement (e.g. around 8:30), but on the whole there is not a lot to hold one’s interest, and the overall effect is a little flabby.

Bruckner opens the Scherzo on a rousing note, and I suppose some people would call the wind colors in the opening vibrant; to my ear garish is a better descriptor.  Opening ideas develop for a while starting around 1:50, then we abruptly get a brand-new theme at 4:10.  Is this the trio?  I wasn’t sure.  There is more subtlety and variety in this section, but in the end it still doesn’t grab me that much, though I can’t argue with the gorgeous tonal colors in the low brass around 6:10.  At 7:30, we get a restatement of the opening — that second theme was the trio, after all.

Finally we get to the main event.  The opening of the Finale is super-dramatic; all I could think of is theme music for a final battle scene in a film.  Mild dissonance in the quiet passage at 1:15 leads to a slower, much more pastoral and, to my ear, slightly flaccid second theme.  There is more battle after that, and by the four-minute mark we’re in the development. Interestingly, Bruckner develops the second, pastoral theme first, though he does eventually get to the battle stuff, too.  There is new material starting around 6:40, and it is probably one of two or three most compelling bits in the whole work, with some really interesting chromatic movement in the strings.  Unfortunately, the music bogs down after this, the beautiful clarinet solo notwithstanding.  There is a tumultuous new section just before the ten-minute mark.  It reuses bits of the opening theme and manages to build emotional tension without much corresponding harmonic tension. Around 12:19, Bruckner recaps the opening with bits of the second theme woven in — whether you consider him one of the “greats” or not, it is moments like this that make him a solid candidate.  Too bad we had to wait until the second half of the last movement to hear it.  There is a faux finale just after 13:00, with more stuff after that that sounds unrelated to me.  There is a dense buildup to the real finale.  Once again the colors are very nice, but the overall effect is busy, and the main feeling I had once the symphony ended was one of relief.

A Symphony of Contrasts

Anton Bruckner

Symphony No. 0 (“Nullte”) in d-minor

 

German Symphony Orchestra Berlin

Riccardo Chailly

 

Bruckner’s Symphony 0 was actually his third, completed in 1869.  The designation “Nullte” comes from the fact that, apparently unsatisfied with it, Bruckner withdrew it (“annuliert”) from the body of his published work.  If I had to sum up the symphony in a single phrase, I would have to call it a work of extreme contrasts, in the end a little too extreme for my ears.

 

The opening of the Allegro is dramatic and attention-grabbing, and Beethoven’s influence is immediately obvious, but things get odd pretty quickly.  It is possible that hindsight is our worst enemy here – Bruckner’s dedication to his Catholic faith and the large body of sacred music he composed are both well-known – but it sounds to me that this sacred music creeps in everywhere in the first movement.  As early as the three minutes in, the swelling strings wedge a hymn of praise into the music.  At around 4:00, a chorale-like passage in the low reeds harkens back to Bach, or perhaps even earlier, but definitely to the mysterious world of the cathedral.  A brass passage that thematically seems to come out of nowhere does the same around 6:30.  The contrasts have begun. The pastoral-sounding section with its chirping bird-like flute around 7:00 also comes out of nowhere, disorienting us briefly until the opening theme eventually recaps.  Only a minute later, though, Bruckner wallops us with a decidedly un-Beethovenian, densely chromatic section that looks sideways at Wagner and perhaps even ahead to Mahler.  I still can’t decide whether it is revolutionary or simply weird.  The development starting around 9:30 is nice, with some good solos in it, but before too long we get another slow, hymn-like passage out of nowhere, followed by a recurrence of the chromatic material around 13:30.  The long pause at 14:20 is far longer than any I’ve heard elsewhere, and then – a brand-new slow theme that to my ear bears no melodic relationship to anything that came before.  Someone intent on assigning programmatic meaning to music and, again, informed by Bruckner’s religiosity, could plausibly argue for the first movement as a depiction of a struggle between good and evil.

 

The opening of the Andante second movement is episodic, strung together from thematic fragments.  The wind passage at 1:45 is only one example.  The orchestration, though, is nice and lush, and the strings around 11:00 are deeply melancholy.  Beethoven’s influence is much less obvious here.

 

The Scherzo, to my ear, has something distinctly Russian about it, even though I can’t put my finger on what it is, exactly, that makes it so.  Something in it, I think, echoes Tchaikovsky, no doubt by coincidence.  Things get pretty bombastic pretty quickly, especially in the brass.  The trio section, on the other hand, reaches much further back, almost to something Haydn might have written, before the bombast returns and, frankly, overwhelms a little.

 

The finale, marked Moderato, takes up the bombast of the scherzo almost as soon as it begins – around 1:20.  It strikes me, once again, as Beethovenesque, but this time it is the “heroic,” anthemic quality that makes it so, even as the melodic and harmonic material is Bruckner’s own.  After the second theme is introduced at 2:50, the movement doubles down on the contrasts between energetic fast and pastoral slow sections.  There is some interesting texture in the strings towards the end of the movement.  The symphony ends, after a hair less than 50 minutes in Chailly’s rendition, just about the way you would expect.

 

A morsel of carrot on the tip of a conductor's baton

National Symphony Orchestra's performance of Shostakovich's Eleventh Symphony last Saturday was not bad. On the contrary, it was excellent. I cannot recall the orchestra sounding better, and the massed violas in the third movement, accompanied by nothing but a quiet pizzicato in the double basses, produced some of the finest sound from the notoriously ornery instrument I have heard anywhere. But it could have been much, much better. The credit for nearly ruining the performance goes to guest conductor Andrew Litton's introductory remarks.

Now, just making some remarks, while unnecessary, could be forgiven. And to be sure, Shostakovich can benefit from historical context more than most composers. The relevant information could easily be placed in the program notes, or the interested listener could look it up in any number of print or online sources, but ok, talk if you must. The coup de grâce was Litton's musical examples. He started with a few bars of the opening, as if to apologize for the movement's supposed stasis and to assure us that it really does make musical sense, but it got worse. One of the Eleventh's most famous features is Shosti's use of songs popular in Soviet Russia of his time, most of them rousing numbers intended to motivate workers and soldiers. While it's true that a typical American concert goer of today almost certainly does not know these songs, anyone with half an ear can tell where they are. Any pop, or folk (for that is what these songs had become), tune worth its salt sticks out immediately in the context of a large-scale symphony. But Litton insisted on having the orchestra play every single one, stripped of its context, bookended by explanations, to hammer us over the head with their prominence and illustrate the ideological ambiguity the composer introduced by syncopating, transposing, or otherwise changing the raw material of these songs, lest we forget that Shostakovich was a Very Complex Man working under Very Complex Political Circumstances. For one example, he went so far as to play over the PA a recorded sample of a version as it was performed in Russia by the Red Army Chorus before giving us the composer's rendition. What gives? Surely a conductor of Litton's caliber knows that a symphony only makes sense when played in its entirety, from beginning to end, in order? Imagine an accomplished chef carefully preparing a four-course meal, but before serving it to you, he hands you a fork with a piece of carrot on it and says, “This is one of the main ingredients in the salad.” Then, a spoonful of rice: “This is what the first course will be served with.” After that, a mouthful of freshly ground black pepper. As you choke on it, the chef says, “This is the principal seasoning I used in the main course.” Is that how you would like your meal introduced?

The experience was so bizarre that it provoked a reaction from the audience. After one particularly martial passage, complete with a staccato snare part, and Litton's comments about the brutality it supposedly portrayed, someone screamed “Got it!” A few moments later, a voice clearly yelled out, “Stop talking and play your music!” Rude to be sure. Some boos from the audience ensued. When Litton was finally done talking, he got some strong applause, no doubt as a sign of support and a desire to put the heckler in his place. At least I hope that was the reason. If, on the other hand, the patrons genuinely enjoyed having a bunch of unmoored musical morsels stuffed down their throats and washing them down with a lecture, then classical music is truly dead, not because the audience is getting old and dying, or because the tickets are too expensive, but because we are no longer capable of hearing a complete work on its own terms and forming a personal relationship with it without a crutch. Say it ain't so.

Roasted Carrot and Chickpea Salad with Chiles, Cumin and Dill

Carrots and cumin are a classic combination, I was tired of seeing an old can of chickpeas every time I opened the cupboard, and I happened to have a bunch of fresh dill left over from making potato salad a few days earlier, so:

• 4-5 medium carrots, scrubbed, sliced diagonally into 1-inch-thick slices
• 1 Tbsp. + 2 Tbsp. olive oil
• 1 can chickpeas, drained and rinsed
• 1 4-oz. can whole mild green chiles, preferably Hatch, drained and sliced
• 2 tsp. whole cumin seeds
• Juice of 1/2 fresh lime
• A handful of fresh dill, finely chopped (about 2 Tbsp.)
• Salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste

 

1. Preheat the oven to 450 degrees F.
2. Toss the carrot slices with 1 Tbsp. olive oil in a medium bowl. Sprinkle with a pinch of salt and toss again.
3. Turn the carrots out onto a cookie sheet or shallow roasting pan large enough to accommodate the carrot slices in a single layer and roast until tender but not mushy, and the edges are slightly caramelized. This shouldn't take much more than 10 minutes, depending on the thickness of the carrot slices.  Remove from oven and let cool for a few minutes.
4. Combine the roasted carrot slices, chickpeas, sliced chiles and cumin seeds in a bowl.  Add the remaining 2 Tbsp. olive oil, lime juice and dill.  Season with salt and pepper.  Gently but thoroughly mix the salad, cover and let stand at room temperature for a couple of hours or in the refrigerator overnight.  This will soften the cumin seeds and release some of their aroma.

Serve at room temperature as a side dish, part of an appetizer buffet, or bring to a picnic.  Feel free to adjust the amounts to taste, as well as substitute whatever fresh leafy herb you have on hand for the dill.  Cilantro works particularly well, but parsley will do in a pinch.

Royal Philharmonic at the GMU Center for the Arts

Some soloists, conductors, and perhaps even entire orchestras just aren't cut out for performing music written in certain styles or periods.  They are just not generalists.  Such was the case last weekend with the Pinchas Zukerman leading, from the violin, the Royal Philharmonic at George Mason's Center for the Performing Arts.  They opened with Bach's A-minor violin concerto, and it was quite likely the most boring Bach I have ever heard.  The orchestra's playing was baby-bottom smooth, with a dynamic range narrower than a bigot's mind.  This is music that cries out for playfulness and zest and can sustain almost unlimited amounts of experimentation and irreverence, but the Royals sawed away like automatons for the entire concerto.  Zukerman himself, his technique as smooth and characterless as that of his troops, looked bored, just standing there with no expression on his face (except maybe that of mild disdain) and consequently none coming from his fingerboard.  If you care so little for this music, why play it?

Zukerman and Co. followed up, less radically than it sounds on paper, with Schoenberg's Verklärte Nacht, Op. 4, scored for strings, and although I do not know the work intimately, it was obvious from the first few moments, that the group was much more in their element than on the Bach.  The smoothness and “of a piece” nature of their sound served the orchestra exceptionally well as Schoenberg's diffuse and mysterious score moved between the sections.  Written when the composer was on the cusp of his twelve-tone breakthrough but not yet there, this is gorgeous music, the the Philharmonic did it full justice.

The coup de grace of the concert came in the second half, as Zukerman and Canadian cellist Amanda Forsyth attacked Brahms' Double Concerto, Op. 102.  Clearly, Romantic symphonic material (the Concerto started out as the composer's Fifth symphony) is where both the soloists and the orchestra were fully at home.  The dynamics, so constricted on the Bach, were sweeping, and the tutti sections were delivered with unshakable authority.  Zukerman played well, but, for my money, was blown away by the glamorous and talented 47-year-old Forsyth (incidentally, Zukerman's third wife – what's with young soloists falling for cranky old conductors?).  Her tone was beautiful, yet full of character, with just enough juice in the attack to make her 1699 Testore cello sound distinctive on every note.  Spectacular performance of one of my favorite works by one of my favorite composers.  By the end, I was perfectly happy to forgive Zukerman and the gang their strangling of the Bach, though I must insist that the credit for lifting the violinist and his orchestra to such soaring heights go primarily to Forsyth.

Zwack! Or, How I Almost Invented a Cocktail

Stepping off the office elevator one morning, a colleague and I found ourselves face to face with a young project manager with whom we occasionally worked.  “Would you like some Zwack?” she asked cheerfully.  As if in a bad sitcom, the colleague and I looked at one another, then back at the PM and said, in unison, “What?!”  The PM reached into her bag and pulled out a squat, spherical bottle.  “Zwack,” she said.  “It's Hungarian,” she elucidated after an awkward moment or two.  The label did indeed read “Z-W-A-C-K,” with a symmetrical, Swiss-looking cross underneath.  The story apparently was that PM's husband, a former U.S. army soldier, used to participate in joint exercises with the militaries of various NATO countries, particularly Hungary.  Ever since, his army buddies have been bringing back beverages native to whatever country they happened to visit.  “Are you really giving it away?” I asked skeptically.  “Yes,” she assured me, “we have a ton of it at home.  There is no way we could go through all of it.”  I had no idea what the company policy was regarding accepting offers of free booze, but being reasonably sure that it was being offered in good faith and with no expectation of any return favors, I took it.

The PM's heartfelt assurance that the stuff was not available in the US was proven false after a single glance at the back label (“Imported by Diageo North America, Inc., Norwalk, CT”), but that made it no less interesting.  Zwack is a liqueur made with a proprietary blend of herbs and spices, in the manner of Italian amari, the original recipe dating back to the late 1700s.  Medium amber in color, it has a nose of citrus, especially orange, as well as gingerbread and molasses.  The herbs are evident, but muted.  On the palate, it is more sweet than bitter, with flavors of orange, a hint of tea, and a medicinal quality not unlike that of Benedectine, but more subtle.  It is as if Cointreau and Chartreuse has a love child who turned out to be an introvert.  Now I had a bottle of the stuff.  But what to do with it?  Hungarians reportedly drink shots of ice-cold Zwack, but to me it had "cocktail" written all over it.

Rewind a couple of years and two thousand miles or so due west.  On a visit to Oregon, I had discovered Rogue's Pink Spruce – a locally made gin aged in Pinot Noir barrels.  A bar in Portland made it into a convincing Aviation Cocktail for me, and knowing I could not get it back home, I brought back a bottle.  The problem was that it proved not to be interchangeable with a traditional English gin in most contexts.  With a nose that was musty and not particularly fresh and a sharp burn of alcohol on the front palate, it was both more assertive and less refined than the gins I was used to, though with careful tasting, I detected some cucumber and spice on the finish.  The key difference, though, was that it was sweeter than any other gin I've ever tasted, Portland's own famously sweet and floral Aviation included.  Somewhat disappointed, I shoved the bottle into the back of a cabinet.

Although my embrace of the nouveau-cocktail culture has been slow and skeptical (let's face it, I'm just too old to hang with the faux-speakeasy kids), thanks to a couple of places in Asheville and Philadelphia I have grown fond of the Martinez, a mix of gin, sweet vermouth, maraschino and orange bitters that may or may not have been the predecessor of the modern martini.  Its main challenge, however, is that it calls for Old Tom gin, a relatively sweet precursor to the modern English gin, which only the most dedicated of home mixologists would keep on hand.  Could the Pink Spruce be an effective stand-in?  The answer proved to be a qualified yes.  After a few experiments with proportions, I had a reasonable facsimile.  But why not keep going?  Could Zwack's pronounced citrus flavors work synergistically with the bitters to mask the dank basement quality of the Pink Spruce?  This time, the yes was far more resounding, if I say so myself.  What I ended up with, though not that similar to the original Martinez any longer, was balanced, not too sweet, light-bodied enough not to coat the tongue but with enough layered depth to keep you focused and prevent you from drinking too many too quickly (Pink Spruce clocks in at 90 proof, after all).  I am still trying to come up with a good name.  My working name, in a nod to the Corpse Reviver, is Rosemont #2 (#1 still being under development), though if someone has something Hungarian-sounding to offer, I'd love to hear about it.

Rosemont #2
2 oz. Rogue Pink Spruce or Old Tom gin
¾ oz. sweet vermouth, preferably Dolin
¾ oz. Zwack
Generous dash of orange bitters

Fill a cocktail shaker half-way with ice.  Add the ingredients and stir vigorously for 30 seconds.  Strain into a chilled cocktail glass.  Garnish with a swath of orange peel.

Complexity vs. Simplciity

An Atheist Defends Religion: Why Humanity is Better Off with Religion than without It
Bruce Scheiman

Capsule Review

In An Atheist Defends Religion: Why Humanity is Better Off with Religion than without It (Alpha, 2009), Bruce Scheiman makes the claim that religion offers the best means of understanding one's place in the world regardless of whether God exists.  Specifically, in his view it offers more than a purely materialist, science-based approach ever could.  He offers many interrelated arguments to support his claims.  Unfortunately, I do not have the time to dissect Scheiman's ideas in detail, but, after the majority of his edifice eventually collapses under the barrage of questions with which any thoughtful reader would inevitably bombard it, one question remains standing that we must consider.

Scientific materialism is reductionist – it holds that complex natural phenomena can always be reduced to a collection simpler ones.  Thus, any biological process is a collection of chemical ones, and a chemical process is a combination of physical ones.  In other words, biology is just chemistry, and chemistry is just physics.  And we all know that left to their own devices, physical processes will always move towards greater entropy, i.e. a lack of order.  So physics will always move away from greater complexity towards greater simplicity.  Yet few of us would deny that life, over the millions of years of its existence, has evolved towards greater complexity.  From RNA to DNA, from single-cell organisms to multi-cell ones, and eventually towards consciousness and intelligence.  How do we reconcile this glaring contradiction?

Scheiman says that only religion can do this.  This, though deeply appealing to a vast majority of people (he is right about that), is, of course, false.  Thomas Nagel, for one, has offered the idea of natural teleology that is compatible with a fully non-theistic view of the world.  His ideas, which, though fascinating, are a subject for another day, may yet end up being, if you will allow me, reduced to scientific materialism as we understand it today.  Still, the question of how to reconcile the physical imperative of greater simplicity with life's inexorable march towards greater complexity is something those of us who use science to guide important life decisions must examine seriously.

A position on gun control


The Aurora, CO movie theater shooting is only the latest event keeping the gun control debate on the front burner, but in fact it is something I have been thinking about for a long time, and have finally arrived at something I hope resembles a coherent position.

If you believe that ensuring public safety legitimately falls within the purview of government, then it is reasonable for the government to regulate, restrict and even ban certain types of weapons such as assault rifles. Now, this is a big if. Everyone should decide for themselves whether they believe that there is such a thing as public safety, and whether it is government's proper role to ensure it. But if you do, then it follows that it is also proper to restrict or ban certain forms of weapons. However, the Second amendment guarantees the individual's freedom to bear arms, and as currently interpreted by the Supreme Court, that freedom is absolute. Therefore, restricting or banning any form of weapon today would result in violation of constitutional law, and therefore we must not do it.

The problem is that the Supreme Court blew it when interpreting the Second amendment. Its text reads: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary for the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” But the Supreme Court basically threw out the entire Militia clause – a grave mistake. There is a good reason why the Founding Fathers put the militia business in. In the early days of the republic, the army was small, weak and ragtag, with no formal reserves. Communication and industrial infrastructure was non-existent. The fledgling Federal government had no way to mobilize the army quickly in an event of an attack, and had to rely on the citizenry to be ready at a moment's notice to go into battle. With their own guns. Hence “...militia being necessary for the security of a free state...”

Today this is not the case. Even the most strident originalist has to acknowledge that some evolution in how we interpret the Constitution is inevitable for simple reasons of history and scientific progress (cars? internet? nuclear weapons?). Second amendment is a perfect example of where such evolution has to take place. Assault weapons are an instrument of war and should be treated as such. They are no different than an F-16 jet fighter or an Abrams M-1 tank. You don't show up at your local dealer's lot and drive off in one of those. The same should hold for an AK-47.

What about the argument that “if guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns?” I do find this argument compelling, but in the case of assault rifles and other high-powered weapons, treating them as instruments of war would go a long way towards addressing it. The government – specifically, the military – would have a great degree of control over their manufacture and distribution (and, indeed, specification), making them much more difficult to obtain illegally. Yes, I have just advocated increasing the amount of government control over something. But this should not be controversial. If you believe that a state can legitimately raise and maintain an army, answerable to a civilian, more or less democratically elected government, then most aspects of that army's operation will naturally fall within government's control.

There is a law enforcement side to this, too. Once assault weapons are fully militarized, penalties for their illegal possession and use should be very severe. If you steal a fighter jet (or smuggle in one bought overseas) and use it to attack people, that's a big deal. Far bigger than stealing a car and running over a pedestrian with it (as bad as that is). The same should hold for an AK-47.

So how to move forward? I believe the Second amendment should be repealed. Impossible? Today, it is. But it may not always be. Think about the Nineteenth amendment. Today, it strikes us as a ludicrous abrogation of the government's responsibility to protect individual rights. At the time, however, the social and economic impact of drinking was so immense, that a confluence of political and social forces enabled the amendment to pass. Yes, I realize that the Nineteenth amendment was woefully ineffective. See enforcement, above. It is also true that overall levels of drinking did decline during Prohibition, and have never gone back to pre-Prohibition levels after repeal. And besides, there is a qualitative difference between the desire to buy a bottle of gin and mix a round of martinis and the desire to buy and use an assault rifle, to say nothing of the relative number of people affected. My point is that as assault weapons proliferate and the shootings along the lines of the Aurora, CO movie theater, become more frequent and more deadly, political will will eventually obtain to repeal, or at least significantly reinterpret the Second amendment. It will take years, decades even, and thousands of people will have to die, but one day it may not seem as unrealistic as it does today.

Katherine Boo

Katherine Boo's Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity has been well covered elsewhere, so I will not attempt a full review here.  Suffice it to say that I cannot recommend it enough.  One of the remarkable things about the book is that it would be unreadable if it weren't for Boo's perfectly dispassionate, detached, documentary style.  A drop of emotion, and the events described in the book would be overwhelming even to the most atrophied heart.  What really sent me for a loop, though, is that more than once while reading I thought that perhaps there are places and times when a government does have a legitimate role that goes beyond merely ensuring that individual rights are not infringed upon as I usually like to maintain, and that role might reasonably be – can I really be thinking this? – to enforce a one-child policy.  Would China be where it is today if they never had such a policy, or never enforced it?  Would that be a good thing?  And for whom?

Highland Park 30-year-old Single Malt

Found myself at Jack Rose last Monday. I knew that the place had a mind-boggling collection of rare and vintage Scotches. What I didn't know is that most of them are available by the half-ounce taste. Well-aged Scotch is infamously unaffordable, but in half-ounce increments many are almost accessible to working stiffs once in a great while. For $6/taste, C.S. and I ended up trying Highland Park's 30-year-old single malt. It wasn't the "standard" 30-year, either. It appeared to be some kind of limited edition, long since out of production no doubt, but of course I've neglected to write down the exact name. The experience, however, needed no writing down. Color: dark amber, far darker than any other Scotch I've ever tasted. It looked like maple syrup. Nose: pronounced butterscotch (no surprises there) with some citrus and a sharp burn of alcohol. Palate: Butterscotch on the front, noticeable sweetness, very intense. On the mid-palate, surprisingly tannic. I tasted strong black tea. Finishes with a bright, acidic, almost lemony note - a Highland Park family trait shared with the relatively more plebeian 12-year-old. Quite possibly the best beverage in any category I have ever tried.

New Beligum and the earthquake

I guess I’m supposed to be writing about the earthquake, but there’s not a lot to write. Initially thought someone was jack-hammering downstairs, but as the intensity increased, people started coming out of their cubicles, saying “must be an earthquake.” One co-worker was seriously scared – the look on his face was the definition of paralyzing fear. All he could find the strength to say was “run fast.” I guess with both Fukushima and Haiti still fresh in everyone’s mind, I can’t blame him too much. The company sent people home. Cell phone service completely knocked out. The Metro was running, but on a 15-mph speed limit. I walked the five miles home, stopping for a pint along the way.

So instead, I am going to write about New Belgium. Long a staple of the craft beer scene out West, it is available here in Virginia as of last night. Rustico held a release party of sorts, which C.S. and I checked out. Once again I wasn’t taking notes, so I’m commenting from memory.

Ranger IPA (6.5% ABV, 70 IBU): Nice, clean-tasting IPA, balanced but slightly tilted towards bitter hops. Relatively light in body and color. Excellent when the weather is hot but you still want a pronounced hop flavor.

Trippel (7.8% ABV, 25 IBU): Seriously fruity and a little sugary for my taste. The brewers are mum on what they add, besides coriander (which I actually couldn’t taste), but some candy sugar has got to be in there. Not that there is anything wrong with that – adding it is an old Belgian tradition after all – but makes for a bit too much artificial sweetness for my taste.

Kick (8.5% ABV, IBU unspecified): Even more seriously fruity and sour cranberry and pumpkin lambic. Not at all my style. I only got a 3-oz. taste. It’s the sort of thing you like if you like that sort of thing.

I didn’t bother ordering a Fat Tire. Like everything else, it came in 12-oz goblets, which I thought was completely silly. Out West, it’s the quintessential session beer, and it will always remind me of weekend afternoons whiled away with friends on the rooftop of Grapevine in Scottsdale.

David Russell, For David

David Russel's For David: Music Written for David Russell, Guitar is a useful record. It is a snapshot of the state of contemporary composition for solo classical guitar. It is also excellent ammunition for those looking for evidence that modern "serious" music has become an emotionless, over-formalized, self-referential morass.

Of the composers represented here - all themselves guitarists, and all writing specifically for Russell - the American Phil Rosheger is probably the odd man out. His self-contained, single-movement pieces are very much in the tradition of 19th and early-20th century Spanish composers like Tarrega and are the only works on the record that feature themes that the listener recognizes as such. Frenchman Francis Kleynjans' Arabesque en forme de caprice also starts out promisingly enough with a theme that pulls off one of this listener's favorite tricks - evoking a melancholy mood in a major key - but has plenty of time to get bogged down over its nine-minute length, even if the overall effect is less grating than much of the rest of the music.

The next step down is Welsh composer Steve Goss, who contributes a work of three relatively short movements inspired by the poetry of Federico Garcia Lorca. The melodies, as a casual listener understands the term, are no longer there, and the development path of any given work is veiled at best, but Goss's saving grace is the same one employed by most other successful modern composers: space. He makes his point with a minimum of notes, and sounds honest as a result. The opening movement Cantiga, in particular, is effective - at less than two minutes in duration, it is essentially a miniature. By definition, it cannot say much, and that is precisely why it works. Too many people have a habit of saying too much in too many situations, and any work that bucks this trend is a welcome change. Listening does require some focus, but it's mental energy well spent.

The rest of the music - other composers represented are Sergio Assad and Ben Verdery - is fiendishly difficult, deeply chromatic and, to these ears, completely unappealing. Throughout the recording, Russell himself is, of course, flawless... and irrelevant. His prodigious technique is more than adequate, but on music with so little emotional content, the interpreter's personality is completely lost. The formal construction of many of these works is, no doubt, impressive, and a few hours spent with the scores would probably be very illuminating. But that is not what we have here. Performed, this music sounds like little more than aimless noodling.

Tyler Cowen

Went to hear Tyler Cowen, the George Mason economist, at Politics & Prose tonight. He was speaking in connection with his new book, The Great Stagnation. Not having read the book yet, I will refrain from detailed commentary. Suffice it to say that he had a few interesting things to say, and in the end I was glad I went.

The gist of his argument in the book seems to be that broad economic growth is driven by technological innovation, and that we have run out of innovation. "Broad" to him means something that the entire population benefits from, not just a narrowly-defined group. And the innovation has to be deep and fundamental to be meaningful -- something that transforms every-day lives of a vast number of people in readily recognizable ways. According to Cowen, for the past three hundred years, such innovation has been relatively easy to come by, and we started to take it for granted and assume that things will continue in the same vein for the foreseeable future. In fact, however, such life-altering innovation has now become very difficult to achieve. We have already picked off all the low-hanging fruit, and anything more will require exponentially more effort. Thus, phenomena like the leveling-off of income growth among many others.

Two points from the talk stuck with me. One is that the Internet is not all it has cracked up to be, at least when it comes to changing people's lives in fundamental ways. The intellectual elite in places like Washington, DC (i.e., all of us) don't recognize this. To us, it has fundamentally changed our lives, and we cannot imagine life and work without the Internet any more than we can imagine it without electricity or telephone service. The same is not true for the population at large, Cowen argues. For a middle-class family of four in rural Ohio pulling in $45K/year, it's a marginal improvement at best, and a bit of a luxury. I tend to agree with him on this.

The other point was a little more chilling. One of the reasons for the slow-down in innovation that Cowen has suggested is the lure of the financial sector for the best-educated. Because so many Harvard graduates (e.g.) go into finance these days, fewer talented people go into basic research, the sciences, and education. Someone in the audience, however, asked a provocative question -- how are we different in that respect from what was going on in the late 1920s, another major boom for the financial industry? Cowen's answer was that we weren't that different. In retrospect, of course, we all know where the events of 1929-1931 led to, especially in Europe. Unfortunately, I did not have an opportunity to ask him to comment on that during Q&A. I asked the question once the event proper was over, but I am not sure he got my drift. He was focused on the economic legacy of 1931 in the US, not the political legacy of 1931 in Europe. He advised me to pay off my mortgage. Thanks, Tyler.

James P. Carse, The Religious Case Against Belief

James P. Carse's The Religious Case Against Belief is a curious book. Carse - a former head of the religious studies program at NYU - starts with a bold claim that pretty much all commonly accepted definitions and, more importantly, understanding of religion is wrong, and sets out to provide the correct one.

The big problem for him are belief systems. Pretty much anyone would agree that a religion is a set of beliefs, and that, according to Carse, is precisely what has led to millennia of violence and intolerance in the name of religion. He spends the entire first half of the book deconstructing and analyzing belief systems and how they work. This he does with clarity, elegance and much nuance. In fact, this analysis is the chief appeal of the book and to many will be the only part worth reading. Carse points out, for example, that a fundamental feature of belief systems is the need for opposition, that they derive their vitality from not only espousing a set of beliefs, but from disagreeing with a set of opposing beliefs just as vehemently. If all of a sudden everyone said to a proponent of a given system, "Sure, you're right, I agree with you," the system would implode. He also points out - and that may be obvious on a bit of reflection, but he does it well nonetheless - that belief systems are by definition closed, i.e. they accept no evidence that does not support the beliefs already held. That is precisely why science does not count. Any scientist believes a great many things at any given moment, of course, but is always open to having his mind changed by new evidence. The mental process that is essential for subscribing to a belief system he calls willful ignorance - a notion that becomes important in the second half of the book.

So if religion is not a belief system, what is it? Here, Carse is far less clear. In opposition to willful ignorance, he posits a higher ignorance. A kind of sense of wonder at the ever expanding mystery of the world around you. The key here is that by definition you will always remain ignorant of the ultimate truth, and the more you learn, the greater your ignorance becomes. This is why science doesn't count here either, although he does not say that. Any self-respecting scientist would say that we could eventually know everything about the world. It might be that we never will, but we could.

Mere higher ignorance, however, even if you could pinpoint it exactly, is not by itself religion. Carse defines religion in terms of the Latin word communitas. It takes him a while to arrive at a definition. Mostly, he defines it as being in opposition to civitas (essentially, formal authority), but eventually arrives at this: "[communitas] is a spontaneous gathering of persons who identify themselves and one another as members of a unified body" (p. 83). Finally, longevity is essential - communitas has to have existed long enough to be meaningful. Carse never defines "enough" - it's a case of "I'll know it when I see it." Thus, Catholicism is a religion (as is Christianity in general), but Mormonism is not. So religion, then, is a spontaneous gathering of people that has coalesced around a sense of higher ignorance and has been around long enough. Interestingly, on the same page where he defined communitas Carse says that we cannot really know what religion is. But it's something like that. Note also that I didn't say a religion. This is essential - there aren't many religions, it's all one thing. Christianity and Judaism are mere short-hands (though Carse doesn't use the term) for something that we cannot know and cannot even really name properly.

One of the interesting things is that in an entire book about religion and belief, there is no God anywhere. He is barely mentioned, and even then in passing, while discussing belief. Perhaps more shockingly, the same is true of faith. Again, Carse drops the word once or twice in an intuitively understandable context, but does not really examine it or address its relevance to religion, if any. If pressed, I suppose he would say that it is a requirement for belief, but not for religion.

All this is interesting as far as it goes, but ultimately frustrating. Carse says a lot about what a religion isn't, a fair amount about what it is (or at least tries to), but nothing about what it does. I suppose he would say it doesn't do anything, it simply is. But that's a cop-out. We humans are a practical bunch. Higher ignorance and a sense of wonder is all well and good, but for us to bother, we've got to get something out of it, especially a couple of thousand years ago when we didn't have the luxury of sitting around reading books by retired religion professors. But as soon as we draw the usual inferences - "it helps us explain the world around us," "we have something to blame when things go wrong," etc., we are in the territory of belief and not religion.

So does religion have essentially no purpose? I suspect Carse would say yes. I wish he did - it would have made at least the book useful to some people, if not religion itself. But advocating the utility of something would put is back in the territory of belief, wouldn't it?

Jason Wilson, Boozehound

If you are going to go to school to study writing, don't do it at Drexel University. That is where Jason Wilson, the author of Boozehound: On the Trail of the Rare, the Obscure, and the Overrated in Spirits ostensibly teaches writing, and if the book is any indication, he is not very good at it. But I am getting ahead of myself. Boozehound is actually not a bad book. It's worth checking out by anyone who has any interest in distilled spirits and cocktails, primarily for the recipes. To his great credit, Wilson closes every chapter with a sizable selection of recipes, usually a mixture of classics and new-fangled concoctions, sometimes of his own creation. By the end of the book, all but the most obsessive amateur mixologist will be armed with a year's worth of experimental material.

As to the rest, Boozehound is largely true to food-writing form. Wilson travels around the Western hemisphere on his publisher's dime, visiting distilleries and bars, interviewing distillers and marketers and tasting a variety of spirits, some quite unusual, and marvels the whole time at his great fortune of being able to do this. Last I checked, this was called showing off.

Where Wilson really lost me, however, was the anecdotes of his supposedly misspent youth. Suburban New Jersey in the 1980s is an endless source of amusement to him, even all these years later. You would think that a college professor, ostensibly happily married with two kids, would have moved beyond this, and traveling around the world tasting exotic spirits would blow making out with a big-haired girl in a Camaro out of the water, but apparently not. Maybe it's just me. I never had the exhilarating experience of almost getting lucky with the most popular girl in the class on a high-school trip to Paris. But for my money, a well-mixed cocktail is best garnished with a twist of lemon peel, not a heap of teenage escapades.

The Astor Martini, or How I Failed to Broaden My Horizons

Going out of your comfort zone now and again is healthy, or so they say. Try something new for a change, you may surprise yourself. It'll broaden your horizons. My friend Clive, who knows a thing or two about beverages, recently shared a recipe for what he calls the Astor Martini: graprefruit juice, Campari and - here's the clincher - vodka. Ketel One vodka, specifically. Well, it is definitely grapefruit season, and Campari has been a staple in my home bar ever since Clive introduced me to the Negroni all those years ago. The problem is vodka. I do not drink it as a rule, and I tend to avoid cocktails based on it. The sole exception is the Bloody Mary, but even that is a rare treat these days. This despite, or maybe because, my origins lie in a place that invented the damn thing. So Ketel One was out of the question.

When I inquired about the possibility of using another brand, Clive equivocated, relaxing his dictum a bit but insisting on a certain minimum level of quality. Well, no doubt to his great disappointment, vodka quality is a foreign concept to me, and I am not likely to change the situation any time soon, due more to a lack of available liver capacity than interest. So I reached for the only thing I had ready to hand - a bottle of U.K.-made Three Olives that I bought a long time ago for a party.

Clive's photos show an unmistakably ruby-red grapefruit, but I had a yellow one on hand (really a pale pink once you cut into it). After a minute of squeezing, measuring, pouring and shaking, I had my cocktail. The original is apparently served without a garnish, but to me there is something incomplete about an ungarnished martini-style cocktail, the minimalist appeal notwithstanding, so seeing as I've already sacrificed a grapefruit, I gave the glass a generous swath of its rind. Then I strained and looked. Clive's photos show a decidedly red, almost blood-hued concoction, but mine came out unapologetically pink. I am talking blatant, 1980s nylon windbreaker pink. Girly pink, if I may use the term. Good thing no one is watching, I thought.

I sniffed - not much. A little pleasant citrus scent. I sipped. I must admit the flavor was appealing. Nice balance of sweet and sour, with just enough of the trademark Campari bitterness coming through to make it interesting. A little coriander, I thought - probably an ingredient in the famously secret Campari brought to the fore by the grapefruit. And then... nothing. The drink was a pleasant fruity bauble. Not nearly sweet enough to fall into the liquid-candy category - the grapefruit's tannic character saw to that - but it didn't exactly pack a punch, either. Perhaps it's the comfort zone thing, but I expect most drinks served in a martini glass to be potent, occasionally even overwhelming. After you take a sip of a properly made martini, you shouldn't want another one for a good long time - this is the reason why they should not be made too large and must be served as cold as possible. Same with the Manhattan - the best ones are made with a high-proof spirit like Rittenhouse Rye and a rich, viscous vermouth like Punt e Mes. The Astor, by comparison, was a breezy, whimsical thing, smooth to a fault, best served over ice at brunch. To be fair, the drink did originate at a Miami Beach hotel, and Clive recommended using it to "evok[e] holidays in balmy, exotic climates." My mind must be so far removed from such delights that even a cocktail can't bring it back.

Or did I do something wrong? Could it be that the vodka really does make a difference? Would the legendary (and expensive) Ketel One have added a whole new dimension to the drink, a level of depth and complexity that my semi-swill-grade flavorless alcohol vehicle just could not match? Maybe. In fact, I hope so. I am definitely looking forward to tasting a properly made specimen made by someone who know what he is doing. Until then, seeing as my days of plying unsuspecting female guests with deceptively smooth fruity cocktails are long since over, I am unlikely to attempt another one.

Portland, Days One and Two

We arrived late on a Friday afternoon, after a long but mercifully trouble-free connection through Los Angeles. A much needed vacation. Our hotel, the deLuxe, though just outside the heart of downtown, was very nice, quite luxurious, with friendly and professional staff and one of the more comfortable beds I recall finding at a hotel. Our room - the most basic and least expensive - could have been a tad larger and could have benefited from an armchair, but on balance, it was a more than adequate base of operations.

Somewhat unpacked and marginally refreshed, we walked through the heat of late-afternoon downtown to Nel Centro, a hip Italian joint located in the Hotel Modera (a former Days Inn dressed up in imitation mid-century modern duds) for a happy hour-cum-early dinner. The patio, though attractive, was crowded and lacked any shade whatsoever, so we settled in at the bar for drinks and a couple of delicious small plates. The crowd was young and fashionable - a bit too much for us - but on balance we enjoyed it.

We had no plans for the rest of the evening, so we took a leisurely walk back to the hotel while admiring the downtown architecture and whiled some time away at the Driftwood Room, apparently legendary around Portland. When the hotel was thoroughly renovated a couple of years ago, the regulars fretted over the old bar's fate, but the new owners resurrected it in its original form - walls covered with planks of wood, pieces of namesake driftwood adorning the room, the organic curve of the bar and an almost total darkness, broken up only by a few votives on the small tables and a handful of obliquely placed colored footlights that spotlit the walls without really illuminating anything. My negroni was perfectly proportioned and delicious.

We started our Saturday morning with a breakfast at Mother's, a pilgrimage spot for locals and tourists alike. Arriving a few minutes after the 9:00 a.m. opening time, we found chaotic crowds but were seated almost right away, although not in the main velvet and brass room that contains the bar. The food - fresh berry pancakes for J. and wild salmon hash for me - was delicious, to say nothing of Portland's famous Stumptown coffee, served in an insulated French press and worth every penny of the $7.50 they charged for it.

We took our time finishing breakfast, then gradually made our way to the Saturday Market, a Portland institution, but not before making a detour into the legendary Second Avenue Records. The Market, though lively, proved to be a disappointment. I was hoping for serious local artists exhibiting and selling their work, but although we did see some impressive photography and even one artist who constructed her images out of long sequences of microscopic numbers, on balance we found too many cheesy t-shirts and flowing tie-dye dresses and not enough other things.

Tiring of the market (and probably spending more time there than it warranted), we strolled South along the Willamette River through the unseasonably hot and sunny day, admiring Portland's numerous bridges and eventually arriving at some impressive looking but very new and thus still isolated residential high-rises and, just beyond, one of the more outlandish examples of Portland's preoccupation with public transit -- the Aerial Tram terminal. The Tram took us to the OSHU campus at the top of the hill, where we got an excellent view of snow-covered Mt. Hood, about 45 miles to the South-East and took a few pictures in the small sculpture garden before heading back and catching the streetcar to the Pearl District.

The Pearl is probably the quintessence of pre-recession Portland - hyper-modern and undoubtedly very green condo blocks, boutiques selling hideous urban clothing, chic-looking restaurants. On the whole, though, the neighborhood did less for me than I expected. Some of the residential architecture, to be sure, was far more attractive and engaging than anything I have seen most other places - rooftop gardens, asymmetrically cantilevered balconies, matte exterior paint in muted but contrasting colors. But the neighborhood, while it had sterilized itself of the original grit so plentiful in the rest of the city, did not replace it with dense sidewalk life you might find in a city like San Francisco. On a Saturday afternoon, it felt empty and sterile. Sweaty and tired by this point, we escaped briefly into the Deschutes brewery for a pint of one of their delicious ales, then headed back to the hotel to clean up for dinner.

We had a reservation at Wildwood, located in the Nob Hill area of Portland, and having run out of time to walk or take the streetcar, we ended up experiencing our one cab ride in Portland. The driver, with whom we chatted amiably throughout the ten-minute drive to the restaurant, was a fellow in his mid-twenties, well-spoken and obviously educated. Not something you find in other large or even medium-sized American cities (and small ones have no need for cabs at all these days). He was only the latest example of what I had been observing since the moment we stepped off the airplane. All service jobs in Portland are done by - I have no slick euphemism to employ here - young white people. The city was eerily immigrant-free. I would have to wait another day to find out precisely why that was.

Our dinner at Wildwood proved to be delicious. I started with tiny house-made gnocchi served with fava beans, morel mushrooms and bits of bacon. J. opted for greens with feta, heirloom tomatoes and peas. Both were delicious, with mine decidedly more substantial. For the main course, this being our first proper dinner in the Northwest, J. chose Chinook salmon served over potatoes and green beans, sauced with just a drop of brown butter. Simple to the extreme but just about perfect. I took our server's recommendation and ordered the pork chop, which, though far too large even on a day when I had no lunch, was spectacular -the most tender and flavorful pork I've had in years served over potatoes and shockingly sweet braised leeks. Our wine was a local Pinot Noir from Apolloni - more Californian than Oregonian in style, but very satisfying.

Sated, we slowly walked through the beautiful summer evening back towards downtown and our hotel, admiring the lively bars and restaurants along 23rd Avenue intermingled with stately but still boutique pre-WWII apartment buildings. I must admit that more than once that evening, I caught myself imagining an alternate universe in which Portland was home rather than a destination.

W.G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn

W.G. Seblad is unique, in my experience, in that his fiction is classified as such but does not read like fiction at all. He is the flip side of someone like Truman Capote in In Cold Blood -- a piece of journalism that for all the world reads like a novel. Sebald's The Rings of Saturn, in particular, comes off like a combination of travelogue, memoir and, at times, textbook, but never a novel. Written in the first person, it is a meandering account of a man -- there is no doubt that it is Sebald himself -- wandering, mostly on foot, through the English countryside, occasionally meeting people, and seeing places and things that launch him on long historical asides that sometimes don't end up anywhere near where they started.

If this sounds like a curious book, it is, but ultimately, the strange style -- I'm not even sure if that is quite the word for it -- is largely irrelevant. For me, Sebald is all about the mood, and Rings is full of it. Subdued and melancholy, it never degenerates into outright brooding -- about the right balance for me these days. The thing that strikes one immediately is that large swaths of the narrator's world, at least until he meets whomever it is he set out to find, is almost completely devoid of people. The few that are present are always so remote -- fishermen on the beach observed from a tall cliff, an embracing couple on a distant hillside -- that they offer no human companionship at all. When he does finally meet his interlocutors, they are inevitably individuals, never groups, engaged in some solitary pursuit. It is a world that, while not entirely appealing, is one in which I instinctively feel comfortable. The darkness and weight do get intense at regular intervals, but even then I feel drawn in by the stark beauty of his scenes. One does not read Sebald to cheer oneself up.

The Emigrants, which I had read a while ago, uses the same approach, and I enjoyed it slightly more than Rings, perhaps because the latter book, during one or two of Sebald's historic/educational asides, does get just a touch polemical -- something I do not remember the other book doing, heavy on history though it was. And the last chapter, dedicated entirely to the history of sericulture, and from which the narrator is completely absent, feels tacked on as an afterthought. Still, on balance, The Rings of Saturn gave me many an enjoyable moment of contemplating the narrator's, and by extension my own, loneliness in the world.