name puzzle

So there's this guy on TV a lot who's called Louis C.K. I don't know much about him, but I do know that he adopted that form of name in an attempt to get people to pronounce his Hungarian surname, Székely, approximately correctly.

Which affords me an opportunity to ask a question I've wondered about before: why is it that people so often consider the pronunciation of their name to be inviolate, while the spelling is infinitely malleable to accommodate it? Why is the pronunciation "real" and the spelling is not, when you have to go to a lot of trouble to change the spelling, whereas if Louis had wanted to change the pronunciation of his name to "zeh-kelly" he wouldn't have had to do anything at all.

Then there's this guy.

it ain't me, babe

I'm not sure whether to tell you that my latest review is up at SFCV or not. Oh, there's a review there, with my name on it, and I wrote large parts of it - and turned it on Friday morning, so why it took till Monday afternoon to appear I know not - but despite it not being overlong it got so drastically cut that an entire composer (André Previn) disappeared, and, a la Peter Jackson cutting down Tolkien, other stuff I didn't write got put in, mostly a strongly-expressed opinion that I do not share.

I've just had a long and rather warm talk with my editor, who's promised to correct some of these problems, so I don't know what you're going to see if and when you click, so I'll leave it at that. That nothing like this happen again is my strong hope and desire.

My boon companion for that concert was athenais. A couple days later, I took B. back over there for the final blowout "prelude performance", which didn't precede anything - instead of 2 pieces in 60-70 minutes, it was four pieces and an intermission in 2 1/2 hours - and which was played by the secondary set of artists who deserve no condescension. It featured the brightest and perkiest rendition imaginable of Beethoven's Op. 12 No. 2 violin sonata, with violinist Petteri Iivonen (whose CD was available and which we promptly bought) and pianist Mika Sasaki. Sasaki and Michael James Smith did equal honors to Schubert's Grand Rondo. This was followed by a softly melancholy version of Schumann's Op. 80 piano trio and a chaotic attack on Tchaikovsky's Souvenir de Florence sextet.