Month: October 2009

Fitzgerald decoded

I’m a little disappointed with the notes to the LOA edition of The Beautiful and Damned. We get no help with “a seidel of beer” (p. 516) (nothing more complicated than a drinking glass, but still); most of the song lyrics are glossed, but not “Out in—the shimmee sanitarium…” (p. 784). And, most significantly, nothing on Bilphist and Bilphism (pp. 475 and passim), apparently a brand of spiritualism of Fitzgerald’s own invention.

However, a trip to the dictionary was worth it for this sentence. The Patches have come down in the world:

Anthony lay upon the lounge looking up One Hundred and Twenty-Seventh Street toward the river, near which he could just see a single patch of vivid green trees that guaranteed the brummagem umbrageousness of Riverside Drive. (“No Matter!”, p. 760)

Brummagem, a Menckenesque “cheap and showy; meretricious.” Umbrageousness here doesn’t mean what you think, but rather the property of “affording shade”. Coleridge has “A chestnut spread its umbrage wide.”

O.F.

Via The Morning News, John Adams gives tips on getting through the first rehearsal:

Be flexible and take every opportunity to talk to the players. Sometimes you can make an on-the-spot change that will make an instrumentalist’s day. Other times, although you realize that what you’ve written is in fact awkward and unreasonable, the player will be affronted if you offer to simplify or revise a phrase or a passage. They assume that if something isn’t working it’s their fault. Composers are geniuses, right? For them it’s their burden to somehow make it work, and they do not realize that it’s the composer who needs to get it right.

Many actors I know aren’t quite so accommodating toward playwrights.

I also must quote this bit, relating to the many, many details of the composition process:

[Is] it mezzo forte or mezzo piano? (Or maybe pianissimo, because they’ll play it loud in any event?) Why aren’t there more gradients available? (Stockhausen tried: zero to ten.) Is pianissimo in the brass still going to cover the clarinets? And you always forget about mutes. It says “mutes on,” but you’ve declined to say when to remove them. Is it true that Schoenberg thought “mezzo” forte and “mezzo” piano were for sissies who couldn’t make up their minds? Maybe he was right.

Meat pollution

Elizabeth Kirkwood on the very public decision by Britain’s top climate adviser, Nicholas Stern, to stop eating meat as a means of mitigating global warming. Strong stuff:

Why are we not outraged by what the meat industry and those who support it, which is, let’s face it, most of us, is doing to our planet? Why is meat consumption not stigmatised in the way that driving 4×4 gas guzzlers is?

There’s no “I” in “theater”

We are heading to the wire!! Make those reservations, see those shows, do those ballots! And be thankful that there’s no chance of WATCH being sold to Dan Snyder, because y’all are a great team!

—Weekly report to WATCH adjudicators for 28 October 2009

Although the adjudication coordinator is dangerously close to exhausting her quota of exclamation marks.

Perennial

Richard Harris visits Wes Jackson’s Land Institute, and also talks with plant breeder Lee De Haan.

As the silver-haired Kansan [Jackson] is fond of saying: If you’re working on a problem you can solve in your own lifetime, you’re not thinking big enough.

Are those chickadees that we hear in the background of the outdoor actualities Black-cappeds or Carolinas? Kansas is a contact zone.

At the limit

… [Winnie said,] “I think it’s a mistake to lose one’s sense of death, even one’s fear of death. Isn’t death the boundary we need? Doesn’t it give a precious texture to life, a sense of definition? You have to ask yourself whether anything you do in this life would have beauty and meaning without the knowledge you carry of a final line, a border or limit.”

—Don DeLillo, White Noise, ch. 30

Piedmont and Coastal Plain

After a gloomy, drizzly start, the wet weather held off and we had a great field trip, led by Joe Marx, exploring several sites of geological interest in the Four Mile Run and Holmes Run stream valleys in Arlington County and Alexandria City.

the view from the castleSetting out from East Falls Church Metro in the Piedmont, we paused to look at a cut in the stream bed of Four Mile Run to check out the alluvial layer from the last glaciation. The run slithers under I-66, skirting the so-called Brandymore Castle. At Joe’s fast pace, we climbed the castle, actually a lens of quartz from the middle Ordovician that protrudes into the landscape. The bedrock here is the Sykesville formation, a Cambrian schist, with bits of an even older actinolite intruding into it, and we found examples of both.

After a quick trip to Rosslyn to climb the first of five Tertiary period upland gravel terraces (the fifth and oldest forming the hill at Tysons Corner), we returned to Four Mile Run, farther downstream at the Long Branch Nature Center. We took a lunch break and indulged in some geology humor (Q: Where can you find the floodplain in Arlington County? A: Look for the picnic tables.) and did some sorting in the parking lot so that participants in Cliff Fairweather’s galls workshop got where they wanted to be. We stopped at Carlin Springs, now dry, but once a 19th-century resort stop on the W&OD railroad.

potholesalong the reachThe high point of this stop was visiting a lovely cascade of Four Mile Run, relatively unmanaged and unchannelled, known as Hoffman’s Reach (sp?). Here the stream has carved potholes in the Cambrian-period Indian Run formation; granite intrusions into the pale gray rock are visible in the photos. Joe also pointed out a good example of the bedrock decaying into saprolite; a soil scientist, working top-down from the other direction, would call this the C horizon, which is quite thick in this area.

the boundaryOur capstone stop was at the tiny sliver of a park in Alexandria named for Dora Kelley. Here, in the steep cut of a gully formed by a tributary of Holmes Run, Joe turned up an instance of the gravelly Potomac formation of the Coastal Plain (from 125 Mya) lying on top of the metasandstone of the Indian Run formation (from about 500 Mya). In the image, Joe is standing on loose gravel in the gully, and the rock exposure is behind him. The top horizontal edge of the dark, solid Indian Run rock is about even with Joe’s mid-thigh, and the layers of Potomac formation (gravel to clay) lie above.