In a moment that is commonplace but still special, my daughter passed her driver's road exam and is a fully qualified member of the driving society.  It's not a big deal in the grand scheme of things but in our house -- where one of the parents doesn't drive at all -- it's not just about teenage freedom.

Despite an incredible bout of nerves that kept her awake the night before the test, she passed with flying colors.  Her excitement in naturally boundless as mine will be when I see the first insurance bill.  Still, she's a good driver and even though I have second thought about adding one more driver to the environmental mix, I'm pretty happy for her.  The father's role at the Driver's Licensing Center is to not say too many embarrasing things and watch as future truck drivers fail writen exams for their commercial license.  Oh, and pay the Department of Transportation $43 (USD) for a tiny bit of plastic and some ones and zeros in a huge database.

Currently I'm working my way through John Nunn's book entitled "Winning Quickly at Chess."  It is a book that attempts to demonstrate that many people lose at chess early in the game because of some basic flaws in their thinking.  I'm going through the book at the rate of about one game a day and entering them into Chess base so that I can go back and forth through the variations.

It's an interesting self-assignment.  We'll see if it pays off when I go to play over-the-board or online.

Here is a link for Keavy.

I'm just about finished with The Rest is Noise -- Listening to the Twentieth Century by Alex Ross.  I'll start by simply recommending it to anyone interested in classical music.  As a cultural narrative, it's a triumph because it puts the fundamental crisis of 20th Century music in nearly purely cultural (rather than musical) terms.  This means that almost anyone can read and enjoy this history without having to have a detailed musical background.

What Ross gets right, it seems to me, is the subtle connection between the end of possibility for the traditional strain of European classical music and the problem of filling the vacuum.  Schoenberg and Stravinsky are the early heroes of the book, but they end up tragic figures: overtaken by the forces they have unleashed.  Ross also draws another connection that I had never thought about: the connection between musical theater and cabaret in the 1920's and the emergence of jazz, bebop, Broadway and rock in the 1950's.  It's interesting how the end of classical music isn't really the "end" but sublimation into other forms.

What reamins is the bombast and nonsense of Boulez, Stockhausen, Xenakis and the Darmstadt School.  Ross is particularly good at pointing out the sheer craziness of the Darmstadters wihtout stooping to simply heaping abuse on their silliness.

It's interesting that Britten and Shostakovich are taken together after the 1950's and I learned things about Shostakovich that I had never read in any of the biographies.  One wonders what happened to British Music in this period because Ross chooses not to mention Alwyn or Malcolm Arnold as reactions against total modernism.

Still, Ross really delivers and I highly recommend the book.  It is at Amazon right now for about 35% off and that's a good value for a book that is going to give anyone interested in Classical Music in the 20th Century many hours of surprising pleasure and new insights.  Ross is the music critic of The New Yorker and this success makes me want to seek out his reviews and interviews in that magazine.

On Friday of this week -- the 29th of February -- Gaelen and I are on the road to Purdue University to sit in on some engineering classes.  Gaelen has already been accepted there and is sufficiently interested to go ahead and attend a day of classes.  It's something I never did when I was starting out as an undergradualte and, given that Purdue remains one of his favorite schools so far, it makes perfect sense to do.

It's a longish drive -- we'll leave about 4:30 after school gets out and are likely to arrive between 9pm and 10pm.  I'll be interested to see if I can make it through the campus tour given that my back is not cooperating with me lately.

The official -- or, quasi-official!? -- photographer for my brother's retirement ceremony has posted some pictures from the event.  Here is a link to the website that has the pictures.  I found it a little bit slow, but that's okay I suppose.