theater, natural history and conservation, the utterly mundane, and Etruscan 8-tracks
I visited a couple of new DC-area performance venues this past year. The conference room at MITRE is stretching the category a little bit.
Yet more traveling this year, visiting family and plants. Overnight stays in 2012:
2011’s list. 2010’s list. 2009’s list. 2008’s list. 2007’s list. 2006’s list. 2005’s list.
Shame on Miriam Margolyes, touring a one-woman show of women from Dickens, who publicly berated an audience member for not joining the standing ovation at her curtain call at a performance in Vancouver. Ms. M., where I grew up, a standing ovation has to be earned—indeed, applause has to be earned—and it’s the height of hamminess to expect it just for showing up and doing your show.
Awesome Christmas-themed sestina (sestina, that Rubik’s cube of poetic forms) by Marcy Campbell.
I made two trips to Huntley Meadows Park last weekend. On Sunday, I worked with the RMV team to plant (mostly) trees and shrubs (mostly) around the new outdoor classroom, just across the entrance trail from the visitors’ center. I planted two viburnums, two beeches, a blueberry bush, and a Christmas Fern.
Saturday I got an update from park staff on the planned wetland restoration project, which has been scheduled to start construction Real Soon Now for several seasons. The new plans call for a composite design for the dam, anchored by interlocking panels of vinyl sheet piling, with riprap on the downsteam face and a gentle earthen slope on the upstream face. This idea was suggested by National Wildlife Refuge managers, who know something about engineering water impoundments. To deceive the beavers (a beaver never met a course of running water that he didn’t want to dam), the design uses Clemson water levelers to collect the water that will flow through the structure.
Soil science word of the day: it’s the lean clay layer (clay with low plasticity) lying just under the surface that is responsible for keeping the wetland a wetland. If this layer were to be disrupted, it wouldn’t matter how clever the design of the dam was.
David Shulman attends a performance of Drama of the Ring, a work in the repertory of the ancient and endangered Kudiyattam theater of Kerala. Each performance is a giga-marathon of drumming, dance, music, and improvisation.
As in other Kudiyattam performaces, the opening moments of the Drama of the Ring are taken up by the purappadu, or “setting out,” in which the solitary actor—to the accompaniment of Sanskrit verses of benediction sung by the Nangyar—uses an abstract progression of pure, stylized movements to generate an entire world, complete in all its parts, from Brahma the Creator down to the tiniest ants and blades of grass. It can take a few hours.
What’s most admirable about Sam Borden’s piece on the reluctance of NFL players to wear athletic protection is how he runs the table of euphemisms without once referring to the family jewels. Oh, and I learned why a pioneering manufacturer of jockstraps was named Bike.
In the United States, warblers number more than fifty species, and during spring migration they are among the bird-watcher’s special joys—their gay colors flitting through the fresh green like vagrant snippets of rainbow.
—Eugene Kinkead, “Central Park Bird Walk,” The New Yorker, 2 August 1969
More bad news for useful local businesses: the lease for Backstage‘s space on the Hill expires at the end of the year. Plans to relocate to and expand in Alexandria were clobbered by Sandy. Alicia Lozano has the report.
Our last stop in the Dayton metro was at Oakwood High School, a rather fine institution from which I was graduated in 1974.
There is nothing new under the sun, and a young person with access to an automobile will find a way to use it for mischief. And so it came to pass in those days, that after an evening with my nerdy friends of playing Risk and usually intoxicated by nothing stronger than diet soda, we would find ourselves on the streets of this lovely, leafy suburb in my mother’s blue Austin America (an underpowered MG with a singularly peculiar suspension system).
And lo, the people saw that the faculty parking lot along the south side of the high school gave onto a sidewalk with no curb.
And my friends said, behold, the other end of this sidewalk ends with a curb cut on the Avenue of Schantz, near the playing fields. Let us rejoice in this attractive nuisance, and drive your vehicle from the parking lot directly into the Avenue of Schantz, without impediment.
And so it was done, and we drove the America down the sidewalk (think of Jason Bourne being chased through the streets of Paris in his Mini Cooper, but at vastly reduced speeds), and it was good.
That is, until some obstacle loomed on the passenger’s side and put a big crimp in the door. (Was it that big red oak that you can see in the first image? I seem to remember some sort of stanchion.) I achieved a new level of creative prevarication when I explained to my mother that the damage wasn’t my fault. (It was only last year, when she was zonked on hospital sedatives, that I came clean to my mother. But I think she’d figured it out a long time ago.)
Mom drove the America for another year or so, into my first year of college at least, until the hydrolastic suspension leaked and the car developed a severe list.
In any event, the sidewalk connection and the curb cut are still there, almost 40 years later. The ADA-compliant bumpy bits are the only change.
P.S. Don’t ever do a Heart song @ karaoke. They are inimitable.
We took a quick drive through Dayton on our way back home to D.C. I spotted this building-mounted street name sign in the Oregon district. Back in the 70s when I lived in the metro, the Oregon was ju-ust starting to be revived and redeveloped. That might have been the first time I hear the word “gentrification” (though perhaps it was when I arrived here and heard what was going on on Capitol Hill). At any, the neighborhood looks rather spruce these days.
Directly after everyone’s favorite stage direction, this wonderful bit of Shakespearean hey-you-kids-get-off-my-lawn:
SHEPHERD: I would there were no age between ten and three-and-twenty, or that youth would sleep out the rest; for there is nothing in the between but getting wenches with child, wronging the ancientry, stealing, fighting— [Horns.] Hark you now! Would any but these boil’d-brains of nineteen and two-and-twenty hunt this weather? They have scar’d away two of my best sheep, which I fear the wolf will sooner find than the master. If any where I have them, ’tis by the sea-side, browsing of ivy.
—The Winter’s Tale, Act III sc. 3
I’m inclined to agree with Sara Mosle, who writes in favor of upcoming curriculum changes for high school students. The Common Core State Standards, adopted widely but not yet by Virginia, specify reading requirements that are lighter on the fiction, heavier on the non.
It occurs to me that almost all of my expository writing assignments in high school consisted of analysis of prose fiction; why was I never tasked with writing an explanation of how a fuel injector works, or describing the mechanic down the block who serviced them? And correspondingly, we were given few reading assignments in narrative nonfiction.
What schools really need isn’t more nonfiction but better nonfiction, especially that which provides good models for student writing. Most students could use greater familiarity with what newspaper, magazine and book editors call “narrative nonfiction”: writing that tells a factual story, sometimes even a personal one, but also makes an argument and conveys information in vivid, effective ways.
In my day, students got a good whack of mediocre historical fiction in an attempt to make the work more palatable: Johnny Tremain by Esther Forbes, Julius Caesar instead of the good Shakespeare.
What, instead, to read? Robert Atwan offers his list of the best ten essays since 1950: James Baldwin, Susan Sontag, John McPhee, Annie Dillard, David Foster Wallace.
“Do you understand how there could be any writing in a spider’s web?”
“Oh, no,” said Dr. Dorian. “I don’t understand it. But for that matter I don’t understand how a spider learned to spin a web in the first place. When the words appeared, everyone said they were a miracle. But nobody pointed out that the web itself is a miracle.”
—E. B. White, Charlotte’s Web, chap. XIV