Saturday Sounds - Philip Glass - Music For Film

For this week's musical treat, we're back to the music of Philip Glass with a new compilation of his film music. Glass has been a prolific composer of scores and incidental film music over his entire career. He's well known for films like Koyaaniqatsi and The Truman Show, but he's contributed to many lesser-known films inside and outside of Hollywood.

Music for Film, with the Brussels Philharmonic conducted by Dirk Brassé,  contains music from 19 films, mostly single tracks, though a few films like The Hours get three. I am surprised that it didn't contain anything from his scores for Dracula and La Belle et la Bête, both of which I've seen performed in conjunction with the films. In any case, it's a fine collection and a good representation of Glass's range as a composer.

Lost Science

Trump's second presidential term has resulted in several high-profile academics leaving the US; for example, historian Timothy Snyder is now teaching at the University of Toronto. Universities in other countries have been poaching researchers in many disciplines, including medicine and the "hard sciences". 

The New York Times has been covering what's been happening to science in the US under the Trump administration in a section called Lost Science. There's more than a dozen articles profiling scientists whose work has been affected or ended by cuts in funding. 

I want to focus on a couple of longer articles that I found especially interesting. 

 A long article focuses on Kelly Holley-Bockelmann (gift link),  a leading astrophysicist studying  gravity waves, moved to the Netherlands because it was becoming impossible for her to conduct her research.

Every few days, Holley-Bockelmann opened another all-caps email from colleagues about “an EXTINCTION level scientific event.” The administration threatened to cut funding for NASA’s science programs by as much as 47 percent. It took over the National Science Foundation’s headquarters in Alexandria, Va., on one day’s notice and gave the building to another department. Holley-Bockelmann scrambled to comply with Trump’s executive orders against diversity programs, changing the name of one Vanderbilt program from “Inclusive Training” to “Interdisciplinary Training,” and scrubbing grant applications of flagged terms like “gender,” “barriers,” “race” and “historically.”

She made several trips to lobby in Washington and organized media campaigns with other scientists, but the footholds she once used for support were disappearing. NASA’s advisory committee on astrophysics was disbanded. Vanderbilt’s chancellor, one of the country’s leading advocates of “institutional neutrality,” largely avoided criticizing the administration, even as cuts reached his own campus. It was increasingly left to Holley-Bockelmann to email her students with a running log of the program’s deterioration.

Another article (gift link) looks at what's been happening to younger scientists, including who those enrolled in Ph.D programs, who will be the future of American science over the next generation.

Facing uncertainty in the flow of federal funding, many university departments significantly reduced the size of their incoming Ph.D. student classes last year, even as the number of applications rose.

The Times analyzed data from 27 of the nation’s top research universities. Between 2024 and 2025, new Ph.D. enrollments declined by about 18 percent in engineering programs and by about 10 percent in science and health disciplines. New enrollments in math and computer science programs also dropped by roughly 10 percent.

Overall, these declines are steeper than those seen in other fields, such as economics and anthropology.

The article goes on to profile several scientists working in areas like oceanography, neurology, and biology and describes what's happening to their programs. 

It's clear from reading these articles that scientific research in the US has suffered a major blow that's going to take years if not decades to reverse. 

 

 

 

 

Science Fiction Author Wins the Booker Prize

Update: I've added links to a couple of article from The Guardian. 

M. John Harrison, a "bona fide" science fiction author has won the Booker Prize (gift link). 

When M. John Harrison began his writing career, in the 1960s, he sometimes spoke with other science fiction writers about the genre’s poor reputation.

“Why shouldn’t a well written S.F. be considered to be literary fiction?” he recalled asking, during a recent BBC interview.

Some 60 years later, the idea that sci-fi writing cannot hit heights of literature has long disappeared. And on Monday, Harrison’s “The End of Everything,” a novel that imagines aliens overrunning Britain, won the Booker Prize, the prestigious literary award.

The Guardian has published a profile of Harrison based on an interview with him after he won the prize. 

The End of Everything took around 15 years to write, with real-world events overtaking him. AI, late capitalism, environmental collapse, the refugee crisis, Brexit – nearly all the manifestations of today’s omni-crisis can be found in the pages of this slim, elusive novel. As its title suggests, this is the work for our end times. “I suddenly thought, ‘Well, you’re 80, you might as well have a go at pushing it over the cliff one more time.’ My rule has always been push it as far as it will go, then move back slightly from the edge. But this time I thought, ‘Let’s push it over and see what happens.’”

This isn't the first time that a science fiction novel has won a major literary award, but they've been books by "literary" authors dabbling in science fiction or fantasy. Harrison is a genre writer who has gained a wider mainstream appreciation. 

I've been looking over his bibliography, and as far as I can remember, the only book of his that I've read is "The Centauri Device" which was published in the 1970s, though I'm pretty sure that I've read some of his short fiction. 

Now that the genre has conquered the Booker, will the Nobel be next? Ursula LeGuinn's name was mentioned a possible Nobel candidate as has Canada's Margaret Atwood,, though she's more of a mainstream author who has written SF. Personally, I'd like to see William Gibson get a Nobel thoush a more realistic choice might be Kim Stanley Robinson.

Here's another article from The Guardian looking at the fraught relationship between literary fiction and science fiction. 

While some past Booker-winning authors draw heavily on SF – Margaret Atwood, Kazuo Ishiguro, Ian McEwan – Harrison is the first winner from the “bona fide SF” sphere, said Booker prize foundation chief executive Gaby Wood on Monday. The Pulitzer and the Nobel rarely take notice of SF either, though the latter has honoured Ishiguro and Doris Lessing – both of whom are considered literary writers who dabble in SF, rather than purists, and thus perhaps considered more palatable to a wider reading public.

Ishiguro says that when he emerged on to the British literary scene, he was “mystified” as to why the establishment had “fenced off SF into a ghetto”. He believes it’s done “real harm to the development of ‘literary fiction’ in the UK”, and he “personally felt liberated to go in that direction only in the early 2000s, after noticing – and envying – the brilliance of younger writers like David Mitchell and Alex Garland who were clearly inspired by SF, comics and games”. He notes, however, that his mentor and teacher Angela Carter had “no such prejudices”, often using SF elements in her work.

Photo of the Week - November 8, 2026

This week's photo shows part of Pickering's Esplanade Park behind City Hall with giant poppies to commemorate Remembrance Day (November 11). Taken with my Pixel 8 Pro.

Preparing for Remembrance Day

 

Saturday Sounds - Oscar Peterson, Ben Webster - During This Time

This week's musical treat features a Canadian jazz legend, Oscar Peterson in concert, recorded December 14th, 1972 at the 84th NDR Jazzworkshop in Studio II, Hannover, Germany. Peterson's trio of Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen on bass and Tony Inzalaco on drums is joined by the great Ben Webster on saxophone. 

Setlist

01. Poutin‘ 0:00:00

02. Sunday 0:08:55

03. I Got It Bad And That Ain’t Good 0:16:11

04. Perrdido 0:23:54

05. Come Sunday 0:31:59

06. For All We Know 0:39:37

07. Cotton Tail 0:50:20

08. Ben’s Blues 0:57:20

The video is quite good for 1972 and the audio is excellent (in stereo, even). The performance is up to Peterson's usual high standards. This really makes me regret never seeing him perform in person. Enjoy. 

"I Voted" the Stickers Said

I, like many other people, am still trying to evaluate the results of Tuesday's mid-term elections in the United States. It was clear before the election that the Democrats would likely do well, but the magnitude of their performance was astonishing. 

This image, from ‘I Have Seen the Enemy, and It Is Us’: Inside Team Trump’s Historic Collapse (gift link) in the New York Times sums up the national mood  better than the reams of text (including the excellent Times' article) than anything else I've seen. The caption reads "Stickers reading “I voted” on Wednesday at the memorial site for Alex Pretti, who was killed by federal agents in Minneapolis. Credit...Tim Evans/Reuters"

I Voted

From Dean Blundell, here's a look at what the scene was like in the White House on Tuesday night after the election results started coming in. The smart staffers have already left. 

Here is what White House insiders are now leaking to the Daily Mail, the Daily Beast and anyone else who will listen, because the first rule of a Trump disaster is that everyone inside it immediately starts talking.

Within an hour of the first results on Tuesday night, Trump retreated to the second-floor private residence with Natalie Harp, the 35-year-old aide who follows him around with a printer, and Chief of Staff Susie Wiles. He put Fox News on. And then, according to one source, he stopped speaking. Not quiet. Not sulking. Paralyzed. One insider described him as barely getting a word out. Another said the residence was “very, very dark” and called it a dark scene, which is the kind of thing you say when you want the reporter to understand you mean the lighting and the man.

 Downstairs, Cabinet officials, advisers and MAGA hangers-on had gathered in the East Room expecting a party. Somebody had ordered platters of Cheesecake Factory appetizers. The word used by the Mail’s source for this plan was “delusional,” and I don’t think I can improve on it. By 10 o’clock, the trays were uneaten, and the senior people were gone, out the door and into the bars of Washington to drink and figure out who was going to get fired.

On a peronal note, my ex-wife won election to the Fairfield Township Board of Elections in Indiana. Go, Amy! 

 

Wildwood Is Amazing

We just got back from seeing Wildwood. If you haven't heard about it, it's a fantasy epic, filmed in a mix of stop-motion and digital, produced by the same people who did Coraline. And it is amazing. 

I haven't seen a film that drew me into its world in years the way Wildwood  did. I'd compare it to the first Avatar or Lord of the Rings in that respect. The story is OK with a mix of many standard fantasy tropes with some sly humour thrown in for the adults. (It's rated PG-13; I wouldn't bring a six-year-old to it.) But visually, it's jaw dropping. Don't be put off by the stop motion; it's better than most of the CGI superhero epics polluting the screens these days. 

Try to see it in a theatre instead of waiting for streaming. You need the big screen to appreciate the detail that went into building the world. Even having watched the "Making of" video, I still can't imagine the amount of effort it must have taken to bring Wildwood to the screen.

 

We went to an afternoon screening and there were maybe a dozen people in the theatre. I hope evening shows draw a bigger audience; I would really like to see this be a big hit. Even if it doesn't draw huge audiences, I think it will become a movie that people will still be watching twenty years from now.