I’m going to have to create a tag just for New York Times reviews that use some variation on the concept of “transcending genre” when discussing works with fantastical, science fictional, or speculative content.

This time, Caryn James lauds P. D. James’s Children of Men in the following terms:

“The Children of Men” is not another of Ms. James’s famed detective novels, and it is not, as it has sometimes sloppily been described, science fiction. It is a trenchant analysis of politics and power that speaks urgently to this social moment, a 14-year-old work that remains surprisingly pertinent. Mr. Cuarón and Mr. Owen have made a film that works superbly apart from the book, but Ms. James’s extraordinary novel deserves to be rediscovered on its own.

In both forms “Children of Men,” which opened Monday, is a story of redemption, set in England just decades in the future (the film takes place in 2027), when women have inexplicably lost the ability to become pregnant. Utterly cynical, Theo (Mr. Owen) is drawn into a group trying to protect a woman who has, just as inexplicably, become pregnant and whose child is likely to be used for the despotic government’s own purposes.

Er, which elements of the book are not recognizably science fictional? The dystopian future setting? The fact that the dystopia takes place “just decades” from now? The “inexplicably” lost fertility of the human race, or the “just as inexplicably” regained fertility of one woman? It must be the fact that the book is “a trenchant analysis of politics and power that speaks urgently to this social moment.” Surely no SF could claim that kind of insight. GAG.

I tried to post these as embedded YouTube clips, but they broke my formatting, so links will have to do.

As a follow-up to my post about this fall’s concerts, here’s Final Fantasy performing Mariah Carey’s “Fantasy,” and Joanna Newsom’s “Peach, Plum, Pear.”

Listen for the series of hoots when the audience recognizes the Mariah Carey song.

The reading meadow

Originally uploaded by Katharine B.

I’m in Oregon, where it’s cold. Today is a little warmer, perhaps 40, which will mean less ice fog and also less beauty. My plane landed with no trouble on Sunday, despite the weather — we didn’t even need to make a second approach. Every day since then, I’ve pulled out a warmer coat: first the down vest, then the puffy red down parka, then the long, dark-eggplant-colored, serious down coat I used to wear in Massachusetts winters.

Yesterday morning my father and I went for a walk in the park downtown. This is a picture of the meadow where T. and I sat and read in the summer, now iced and bright. (There are other pictures from that walk up at my Flickr page.)

The frost, accreted over the last few days, has only just melted from the backyard. The deer are sleeping just beyond the garden fence and the trees are full of chickadees and robins. There’s one dim hummingbird that hasn’t fled south — he comes to the feeder several times an hour. Yesterday Dad had to keep bringing the feeder in to warm it up and the hummingbird hovered, confused, by the window. When Dad returned with the feeder, the little thing landed to drink before he’d even hung it up.

I haven’t gotten much done since I arrived here. There are so many little things to occupy us: baking, putting lights on the tree (to be left outside for the first time this year, as we don’t have time to hassle with sweeping up dropped needles), making dinner. And there are bigger things, too. My father will, we hope, have a stem cell transplant in early spring, and he has another round of chemo coming up just after Christmas, which was just determined today. So it’s hard to focus on anything but spending time with my parents. I’ve been reading Jane Austen and eating cookies and playing with the cat, and trying to work a little on revising my first novel. More about that soon.

I’ve turned in my grades, which means that my semester is officially complete — a fact that has been celebrated with sushi, as all good things should be. I should be posting here more often over break, especially as I work on revising my first novel. (More about that soon.)

To begin, a recap of the shows I’ve seen this fall, in chronological order:

1. Final Fantasy at the Parish: by far the best show of the fall (though T. might argue for Asobi Seksu or Man Man), and probably one of the most technically impressive performances I’ve seen. I wrote about it briefly here, and I’m not sure what else to add, except maybe little glittery hearts around Owen Pallett’s name. I loved this show.
2. Sufjan Stevens at the Paramount. This was just — not affecting, I guess. Beautiful, though the visual elements of the show were silly at times, but not beautiful in any way that surpassed the experience of listening to his most recent album. Not dynamic. I felt somewhat the same way about Sigur Rós, which we saw in a similar venue last year, though their music suited the opera-hall style space better.
3. Man Man at Emo’s. This was an anniversary present for T., who’s wanted to see them again since we saw them open for Okkervil River last fall. They were, uh, still mustachioed and crazy? Just as crazy as their music video, in fact, except with fewer images borrowed from Married to the Sea. I liked their show a lot when we saw them first, but found them less charming as a repeat concert experience, and I don’t think Emo’s was as good a venue for them as the Stubb’s indoor stage was. They had more room to play and less matter to fill it up.
4. Beirut/Voxtrot at Emo’s. We didn’t catch all of Voxtrot; it was late, and I was tired. Plus, Voxtrot was not so great. I was there for Beirut, who were marvelous and energetic.
5. Asoki Seksu/Mates of State at Emo’s. This concert was outdoors and FREEZING. Asobi Seksu sounded lovely, and were very — professional? I’m not sure if that’s quite the right word, but their lead singer had a delightfully no-nonsense air and a wonderful stylized voice. Mates of State were somewhat dull, or maybe that was just their song structures. Repetition annoys me, and I really don’t go for the verse/chorus/verse/chorus mode, especially when the rest of the song’s not complex. The onstage flirting between wife and husband was sweet, though I kept thinking of Oscar Wilde’s line about airing one’s clean laundry in public. They had a cute bit about encores, though, which seemed somewhat ironic after…
6. Joanna Newsom at the Parish, just this Wednesday. Disappointing — I’d been really excited about this, because I adore Ys and much of The Milk-Eyed Mender. But the opening act (Smog) was dreadful, the show wasn’t terribly well-run, and Joanna herself wasn’t so professional. She’d already done an earlier show, and began our show by begging that she not be videotaped because she was losing her voice and she was going to be “bad.” She kept repeating this throughout the show, excusing herself for skipping songs or singing roughly (to her own ears, I guess), and then left without an encore. Aside from some hoarseness on the first two songs and a few moments in which she didn’t reach for the high notes, I wouldn’t have been able to tell, and her anxiety just made it seem as if she wanted to be elsewhere. Not the most pleasant kind of stage banter. As with Sufjan Stevens, I didn’t feel that being present for the show added much to the music as recorded.

I find this approximately tri-weekly schedule of concerts both fun and odd, considering that I went to about six shows during my entire college career. Austin has me trained.