Month: July 2010

Woodend: mushrooms

Despite this week’s rains, there wasn’t too much exciting to be found as I scrounged the woods of Woodend Sanctuary looking for mushrooms in today’s combo field trip/lecture (a makeup for Monday’s class which was powered out). The understory in the forest here is under strong pressure from deer browse, so most of the greenery below head height is spicebush.

However, I did take the opportunity (since I had a large tote with me) to do a little grounds maintenance. I snagged four raggedy tennis balls, three golf balls, a wine glass, and various other shreds of trash.

Döblin decoded

Eugene Jolas’s translation of Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz offers this poser. Karl is being questioned by the authorities about his role in the death of Franz’s girlfriend Mieze:

“Who told you that?” “To bury it? Well, somebody. I just wanta know how I stand. Did I commit a crime when I helped to bury a corpse?” “Look here, the way you put the thing, it’s hardly a crime at all, or only a petty one. If you were not involved at all and had no interest in it. But why did you help?” “I’m tellin’ you, I just gave a hand for friendship’s sake, but that didn’t matter, at any rate, I wasn’t involved in the affair and it didn’t matter to me whether the person was or wasn’t found.” “Was there some kind of femic murder in your gang?” “Well—” (Eighth Book, p. 307)

The only definition that femic turns up is something my geology teacher would be interested: it’s a category of igneous rock with certain proportions of iron and magnesium.

The only explanation that makes sense to me is a missed translation to/from femicide, which does show up in Oxford as “murder of a woman.”

[Untitled]

Vesela Sretenović: Is your lack of interest in making representational or narrative paintings the reason you avoid giving titles to your works?

Robert Ryman: Actually, titles came simply for identification purposes, and nothing was titled until it went out someplace. That’s why most of the small works from the early 1960s that have rarely been shown are still untitled.

VS: In the mid 1960s you started to use titles that were playful and associative, like Lugano, Archive, General, Pace, Courier, Spectrum, etc. You would think they had meaning, until you realized they were brands of paint, office supplies, shipping companies, or industrial materials. Was this an intentional tease?

RR: No, it was just a matter of finding a title that wasn’t so easy to associate with something specific. There was one title, Signet 20, that was from the brush I used, and someone called me and wanted to know if there was another Signet. But it was because it was a number 20 brush—there were not 19 previous Signets. The title Standard was from the company where I got the steel. Standard was just a word that couldn’t make one think of a landscape or a sunset or something.

Robert Ryman: Variations and Improvisations, 2010 (Phillips Collection exhibition catalog)

2 A’s in “Klaatu”

My goodness, two more posts about the sizzling practice of copy editing, this time via The Morning News. First, Lori Fradkin’s “What It’s Really Like to Be a Copy Editor”, followed up with Johnson’s (R.L.G.’s) reply. To which I can only add Charlie Baker’s lament:

CHARLIE: …That’s why she wanted me to go away, you see. She simply finds me shatteringly, profoundly—boring.

FROGGY: Now, why would she think that, eh?

CHARLIE: Oh, because I am. I know it. There I’ve sat behind my gray little proofreader’s desk for twenty-seven years, now—I sometimes wonder whether a science fiction magazine even needs a proofreader. Does anyone really care whether there is one K or two in “Klatu, barada, nikto”?

—Larry Shue, The Foreigner, I:i

So what is the Cleveland airport named?

Via Arts & Letters Daily, Andy Ross interviews Mary Norris about editing copy at The New Yorker.

One stubborn editor refused to believe that “arrhythmia” was spelled with two “r”s. This doesn’t come up often, but it is odd to have someone simply refuse to spell a word right because he thinks it looks funny. It’s almost admirable.

As a side note, Ross notes that there will be a master class on copy editing on 18 October as part of this year’s New Yorker Festival.

Paul Taylor Dance Company 2010

The Taylor company opened its one-night visit to the D.C. suburbs with Brandenburgs (1988), a last-minute replacement for the planned Also Playing. This is one of Taylor’s lovely pieces that achieve such stunning effects with simple gestures—a group of dancers executing simple two-foot turns while rotating in circle, but blindingly fast. Certain of the stage pictures look stylized and flattened, as if Taylor was looking back to an even more distant classical period, his dancers glazed onto the surface of a Greek krater. There’s a ankle-shake ornament that the women do that’s an answer to the musical accompaniment (movements from the J.S. Bach Brandenburg Concertos), sort of a choreographic mordent.

We received the first Washington performance of Phantasmagoria, set on compositions from the Renaissance period, a stew of folk dance and bawdy hijinx wrapped around a poison mushroom of death. Signature Taylor is a dance for four men who comically fail to execute cleanly: as the bumping and shoving degrades into fisticuffs, this bransle has become a genuine brawl. Less effective is another Taylor trope, the Bowery Bum who provides the piece with its second ending.

The evening closes with the powerful Beloved Renegade (2008), inspired by writings of Walt Whitman and scored by passages from François Poulenc’s Gloria. The dance was commissioned in memory of James Harper Marshall by his family. For the most part, this is the Whitman of “The Wound Dresser,” the poet of somber joy who found a path to glory amid the world’s suffering and pain. By turns balletic and vernacular, the piece is a celebration of the mystery of life. Laura Halzack is majestic as the spirit who eventually carries away Michael Trusnovec’s poet in “the sure-enwinding arms of cool-enfolding death.”

  • Paul Taylor Dance Company, Wolf Trap National Park for the Performing Arts, Vienna, Va.

A journalist

Let us mark the passing of Daniel Schorr: hired into Edward Murrow’s news team in the 1950s, named on the Nixon “enemies” list, barred from Khrushchev’s Soviet Union, dubbed a “son of a bitch” by CIA Director Richard Helms. Quite a life of accomplishments.

In the recent past, many of Schorr’s radio commentaries came off as nothing more than a recap of the week’s events. Perhaps that was his point.

It’ll be fun

One day before your procedure:

Drink only clear liquids for breakfast, lunch and dinner. All solid foods, milk, and milk products are not allowed. No alcoholic beverages of any kind….

Approved clear liquids: All clear soft drinks: 7-Up, Sprite, etc. All clear juices: Apple, white cranberry, white grape, or lemonade. PULP FREE. Gatorade or Kool-Aid (not red or purple)…

You may also have: Jell-O or Popsicles (not red or purple); Clear broth or bouillon; Black coffee and tea

No, this isn’t the latest checklist for travelers from the TSA.

Do you think I can convince them that chardonnay is white grape juice? At least I’ll have coffee. And what the heck is white cranberry juice?

Makes a good story, at least

(Since I was a teenager, I’ve been going to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, which mixes Shakespearean and non-Shakespearean plays. I recently saw the understudy—with twenty-four hours’ notice—play the lead in Cyrano de Bergerac. Every fifteen minutes or so, he’d call out to the assistant director, sitting in the front row, to provide the line for him. This Cyrano’s crippled eloquence, the actor’s grace, his refusal to wilt, was much more moving to me than anything in the play or any other play.)

—David Shields, Reality Hunger, §508

Jug Bay: mushrooms

from the deckWe were assembled before 9:00 this morning (and before staff had opened the entrance gate!) at Jug Bay Wetlands Sanctuary, situated on the east bank of the Patuxent River in Anne Arundel County, Maryland, for our first field trip in David Farr’s introductory mushrooms (and other macroscopic fungi) class.


work tableAs with Don Messersmith’s insect life class, the field trip procedure is simple: go find some specimens, bring them back to the table, and then everybody gets to see everything at once while the instructor leads the ID. David started us off with a particularly fine large (25 cm tall) poisonous Amanita, visible at the lower right corner of the table.


decurrent gillsboleteAt left, Omphalina chrysophylla is our teaching example of decurrent gills (that is, the lamellae [gills] extend down the stipe [stalk]). The specific epithet means “gold leaf,” and the gills are somewhat that color. Alex found this striking yellow Gyrodon meruloides: you’re looking at the fine network of tubes and pores on the underside of the pileus (cap). Alex didn’t report any Fraxinus in the area where he found this bolete, but the book says that these trees will be around. I had my best luck with easy-to-find wood substrates: on 1-cm sticks I found some nice Schizophyllum commune, easily grown in the lab and hence well-studied.


In my first field and desk test of Miller and Miller’s field guide, I am frustrated that the index doesn’t always include entries for genera, only species—to me, this is like trying to find a name in an Icelandic phone book.

Some links: 49

USGS’s home page for the magnitude 3.6 this morning, event ID us2010yua6. No shaking felt in Reston: but rather a boom loud enough to rouse me from indifferent sleep. I checked the basement for some mishap, found nothing. I figured that, somewhere down my row of neighbors, a bookcase had fallen over. Then Leta’s Facebook news feed began to light up with WTF?s from friends in suburban Maryland.

Contemporary American Theater Festival 2010

This year’s festival, the twentieth, offers two plays that take fresh perspectives on the past decade’s hostilities; a two-character drama; and a musical contrivance that almost defies description. Despite what one character says of the conflict in Iraq and its aftermath—”It’s your mess, nothing to do with me”—Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig’s Lidless makes it clear that all of us own this mess. When Alice (the super-flexible Eva Kaminsky), an interrogator at Guantanamo Bay and now out of the service running a flower shop fifteen years in the future, is confronted by Bashir (the doleful Barzin Akhavan), one of the prisoners on whom she performed extraordinary interrogation techniques, her repressed memories of that time come roaring back. The effects on Alice’s family take a tragic turn, leaving one of them literally breathless, but in the end a semblance of integration is achieved. Cowhig is a powerful storyteller with images: the passage in which Bashir crushes the blooms of a bouquet of yellow roses is stunning, while the climactic quintet rings with intensity. Certain plot developments (the question of daughter Rhiannon’s parentage, specifically) don’t seem to be fully anticipated, but a curtain speech suggests that this good work is still under development.

Akhavan returns as Yashin Shalid, a curator of antiquities in Mosul anxious that his museum’s treasures be protected from the imminent United States invasion, in Inana, by Michele Lowe. This is a slightly more comic role for him, as Yashin has just arrived in London bemused by his new wife Shali (Zabryna Guevara) who is exceptionally reluctant to begin the celebration of their wedding night. Michael Goodfriend shows some nice range in a couple of ensemble roles. While the story has a good misdirection to keep us guessing, it’s ultimately unsatisfying because Yashin’s success at saving the trove seems inevitable.

Kaminsky is joined by Helen-Jean Arthur in Jennifer Haley’s Breadcrumbs. Arthur plays Alida, a reclusive and crabbed writer, now an aging woman in the middle of her slide into dementia; she is accosted by needy, free-wheeling Beth, who tries to help Alida write her last story. The play is missing something: these two characters need someone else to bounce off them, so it came as no surprise to read Haley’s playwright’s note that they were lifted from a draft five-person play.

Lee Sellars’ and Max Baker’s concert with scenes, The Eelwax Jesus 3-D Pop Music Show, widely anticipated, disappoints. There’s certainly a lot to look at here: the four-piece band (sardonic indie rockers Eelwax Jesus) is set up center-right, while most of stage left belongs to a group home of residents who watch the band on TV, sing and dance along, and generally try to break through the glass of the screen. Then there is an 50s-era office set upstage (in front of the exposed back wall of the Frank Center theater), a scruffy man’s apartment, a woman ironing handkerchiefs (the tireless Margot White), and two large projection screens. At intermission, the screens offer a diverting montage of cheesy drive-in movie snack bar promotions and countdown clocks, and in the second act we see a fascinating old-school animation of basic plane geometry concepts—so engrossing that it upstages the live action. Alas, pacing in the book scenes (except for the “banter” between the band and the TV host, Kurt Zischke as the pneumatic Mr. Shine) is slow. And there just isn’t any there to tie this slightly surrealistic production together.

  • Contemporary American Theater Festival at Shepherd University, Shepherdstown, W.Va.
  • Lidless, by Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig, directed by Ed Herendeen
  • Inana, by Michele Lowe , directed by Ed Herendeen
  • Breadcrumbs, by Jennifer Haley, directed by Laura Kepley
  • The Eelwax Jesus 3-D Pop Music Show, book and lyrics by Max Baker, music by Lee Sellars, directed by Max Baker