Zwischenzug: winter holidays

Today I used the word "toque" in a sentence and no one knew what it meant. Oops.

Still no snow here but it's below freezing in the evenings, e.g., right now.

The Bilbao tournament finished today (just a short exhibition) not in the total disaster augured by the first day; man only lost 4-8 (+1=6-5). Huzzah. Meanwhile, Sunday the World Cup starts in Siberia. Convenient for the 23 Russians (not "former Soviets") attending (out of 128, to be fair, but next highest I think is China or Ukraine at 9 or 10 each).

The town is shutting down for Thanksgiving, beginning tomorrow -- even Fine Library is closed, and Fine Library is open to one o'clock in the morning on weekdays (only eleven o'clock on Sundays, and seven o'clock on Saturdays). Blessings to the bureaucrat who decided they should still serve meals here during this time, including something labelled "holiday dinner." (They even did something like this last week, although I didn't recognise the turkey stuffing as such until I tentatively bit into it.) One imagines the only thing in a couple kilometers that won't be closed is the local 24-hour convenience store. -- and I thought living in North Vancouver was parochial.

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Postscript, that night. I went to a concert the other night. I've been meaning to go to something, anything, since I got here, since generally they're free or very cheap for students, and probably they have some adequate talent. Various things intrude. This one took place at the local chapel, which is an enormous and impressive structure.

(In fact I was putting off writing about this because I took a few pictures and I was trying to figure out what to do with them. In the end I decided "nothing at all," because the pictures aren't any good. This is because (a) it was nighttime and quite dark; (b) I didn't feel good about wandering around to gawk and get the shots I might have wanted; (c) I didn't even try to make the best of the ones I did get. Shameful. Here's the best of the lot, and it's blurred and has distracting things in the foreground which I can't get rid of without (a) killing the perspective and (b) chopping off the column. Ugh.

And of course since there's no light outside the magnificent stained glass windows looks slightly less impressive. Close parenthesis.)

They have an 8,000 pipe organ, which is what I went to hear, really. It was an organ concert, more or less, and it made quite a noise in there, to the extent that the building seemed to vibrate slightly during the most intense parts. I wished I was sitting about seven pews further ahead, which looked acoustically superior, but that section was marked "Reserved." It was supposed to be music of Bach, and anyway it was in a chapel, so they had a few cantatas, sung by a nice mezzo-soprano whose voice was given an ethereal reverberation. Also of note: chaconne for unaccompanied violin, which a colleague tells me is just about the most remarkable unaccompanied violin music ever written. ("Basically nothing notable happened after Bach until Bartok," he remarked. "Sounds less impressive if you don't know Bartok's dates," I quipped, thinking of the usual "from A to Z" rhetoric.) It's BWV 1004, if you're wondering, 'Chaconne from Partida No. 2in D minor'. I heard a fugue I hadn't before, BWV 532 in D major, which was unremarkable, to put it gently.