Author: David Gorsline

Titular

So I was writing an online squib that referred to the 1959 horror film by Georges Franju, known as Eyes without a Face in English. And I was surprised that the National Gallery capitalizes visage in the French version of the title, Les Yeux sans Visage. Now I thought I knew the rules for title capitalization in French, but it turns out that (a) I had never learned them properly (see what comes of getting your information from kids on street corners) and (b) there are three different conventions that various authorities follow. Laura K. Lawless explains.

The convention I taught myself was rule III, sentence capitalization: Les yeux sans visage. It’s the most egalitarian. Rule I, first noun and its adjectives, accounts for many of the titles that I see that confuse me: Les Yeux sans visage. Looks unbalanced. Rule II, all important nouns, strikes me as quintessentially French, since it calls for a judgment of which nouns are important: Les Yeux sans Visage. Sort if like the way taxes are assessed in France.

(By the way, some people capitalize the English title as Eyes Without a Face. I say that without is a preposition and I say the hell with it.)

Rose River loop

cool by the poolFeeling the need to walk along fast-moving mountain water, I plotted a coathanger circuit hike using the Dark Hollow Falls and Rose River Trails in Shenandoah National Park, following only blue and yellow blazes—no white. The trails in this area offer quick access to a couple of fine water features.

nice colorA nice wash of fall color was on display, the reds provided primarily by maples. The Dark Hollow Falls Trail is built for lots of traffic, and it’s very popular. It’s a little less popular with the Bambi-peepers who are making the 600-foot return climb from the falls back to the parking lot.

Walkers become more scarce below the falls, where the descending trail follows Hogcamp Branch to its junction with the Rose River. Some muddy downslopes made me glad that I am carrying my stick with me on a more regular basis. I didn’t spend a lot of time botanizing, but I did find a little patch of Partridgeberry with some fruits still remaining. A couple of Downy Woodpeckers, a Common Raven to break up the quiet. On the return climb, a mixed flock with Dark-eyed Juncos.

the roadFor a return leg, I like the fire road, rather than the recommended horse trail on the other side of Skyline Drive. This way, I can stop at the Cave family cemetery to pay my respects.

Elevation change 1200 feet, distance 5+ miles, a fairly easy 3:20.

Ad novam vitam

He took a large, stout manila envelope from his sixties G Plan sideboard. “Everything’s here. New passports, birth certificates. An address in Ilkley—no point in pretending you’re not from Yorkshire, open your mouth and you’ll betray yourself—utility bills to that address, you’ll be able to set up a new bank account wherever it is you’re going. France is it? You should go somewhere that doesn’t extradite. New national insurance number as well, and as a little extra, you’ve got a profile on Facebook and you’ll be pleased to hear that you have seventeen friends already. Welcome to the brave new world, Imogen Brown.”

—Kate Atkinson, Started Early, Took My Dog, p. 323

Merriam to Robbins to Kaufman

Laura Erickson surveys more than a century’s worth of North American birding field guides.

A quantum leap in field guide quality took place in 1966, when the Golden guide to field identification Birds of North America was published by Western Publishing.

This was co-authored by Chandler Robbins and Bertel Bruun, illustrated by Arthur Singer, and edited by Herbert Zim. The “Golden Guide” made a great many innovations—in fact, I’d argue that this guide included more valuable innovations than any field guide before or since.

Mad Forest

Forum Theatre finds its way through the deep woods of Caryl Churchill’s Mad Forest, a fantasia on the events in Romania before, during, and after December, 1989, when the rule of Nicolae Ceaușescu was removed.

Acts 1 (before) and 3 (after) unfold in short, elliptical scenes, often wordless. A priest might converse with an angel, or a vampire with a dog, or merely a father with his wife, the family radio turned up to deafening volume lest the security police listen in. Everywhere is uncertainty: who fought whom during the regime change, and with what motive? Someone says, “we don’t know who we know,” while another explains an architect’s artifice of arranging for sunlight in an enclosed space.

The crux of the play is the compelling Act 2, in which the ensemble cast directly address the audience with the house lights turned up, each actor performing a single character’s monologue of what happened that December. From time to time, the voices overlap, bringing forth the image from Churchill’s epigraph, in which ancient Bucharest’s wooded plain, braided by multiple streams, was seen by outsiders as a place of madness. Matt Dougherty has an especially effective turn as a bulldozer driver and construction worker (on the job that became the Palace of the Parliament) sidelined by the political upheaval.

  • Mad Forest, by Caryl Churchill, directed by Michael Dove, Forum Theatre, Silver Spring, Md.

    Congress Heights

    Nathan Harrington led my afternoon WalkingTown DC tour, a scamper through the neighborhoods of Congress Heights. Nathan didn’t have a wealth of heritage markers or quirky landmarks to pause for, and we covered a lot of ground, but the tour was quite enjoyable.

    Colonial period settlers used this land as tobacco plantations, but became victims of their success: runoff from the farms silted up the Anacostia River, rendering it no longer suitable for shipping. (Early Bladensburg, upstream, served ocean-going boats until the river filled in.) Later, freedmen like Tobias Henson owned property.

    In the late nineteenth century, the heights were put to use as cemeteries for the Jewish community; walking east along Alabama Avenue S.E. from the Congress Heights Metro station, we passed these places of rest. We also passed Malcolm X Elementary School, which provides a STEM curriculum.

    old names die hardDoubling back and making our way to the small commercial district at the intersection of Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X Avenues S.E., I noticed numerous street trees that resembled Willow Oak (Quercus phellos), but these trees sported very bristly caps to their acorns. A cultivar? A mimic thrush also made its presence known. Nathan’s not sure why this particular intersection warrants the “formerly” signage: the street has been named for Malcolm X for at least fifteen years.

    come playUnfortunately, dining options in Congress Heights are limited. Nathan mentioned the IHOP (franchised to a group of D.C. policemen) to the east, one of the few sit-down restaurants in Ward 8. But the neighborhoods are leafy, and this bit of green extending from Shepherd Parkway is attractive. (Not too many neighborhood folks out today, on this unseasonably cool and wet Sunday.)

    down the blockleafyIn the late nineteenth century, Arthur Randle converted about 48 acres of the Knox farm for residential property. The name “Congress Heights” was chosen through a promotional contest, and is typical realtor hyperbole: you can’t actually see the Capitol dome from any ground-level Congress Heights location. Most of today’s residences were built later, in the early to mid-twentieth century. Nathan’s home on 11th Place S.E. (where he treated us to post-tour coffee and superlative banana bread) is a Craftsman bungalow from 1925. Many of the houses of these working- and middle-class neighborhoods are quite spruced up, although security dogs and alarm systems are all too necessary. Certain of the blocks remind me of Archie Bunker’s Hauser Street in Queens. The area holds attractions for would-be homeowners in the District: prices are much lower than west of the Anacostia, and parking is easy-peasy.

    back in serviceLocal landmark Congress Heights School is back in the education business, now as a charter school.

    found anotherTrue to the neighborhood’s mid-century history, fallout shelter signs can still be found. I spotted two for my collection: one at 5th and Mellon Streets S.E., and this one at Brothers and Highview Places S.E.

    Further reading: The Advoc8te’s Congress Heights on the Rise; John R. Wennersten, Anacostia: The Death and Life of an American River (2008).

    Fort Totten

    keep your powder dryMy first of two walks under the auspices of WalkingTown DC was a quick spin through Fort Totten led by Mary Pat Rowan, with an emphasis on the woody plants of this semi-preserved area. The geology of this high point in the landscape is somewhat unusual: it’s a gravel terrace perched on impermeable clay. You can get a bit of the feel for the geology in the image, where the clay and gravel are exposed by excavations that provided a powder magazine for this Civil War earthworks in defense of the capital. Unusual geology means unusual flora, with some dry conditions specialists in evidence, among them Amelanchier species (one of these days I will learn to recognize Serviceberry) and Blackjack Oak (Quercus marilandica). Chestnut Oak (Q. montana), that upper-elevation specialist, is also thriving. Mary Pat also noted that Pitch Pine (Pinus rigida) can be found in the park, but we didn’t have time to take a look.

    Barreling off trail and kicking up occasional human-dropped litter, Mary Pat led us through a patch of heath community plants, including high and lowbush blueberries (Vaccinium sp.), huckleberries (Gaylussacia sp.), and Pink Azalea (Rhododendron periclymenoides).

    Oh, please

    One of the web’s minor annoyances are those ads from “people finder” web sites that pop up on Google’s search results page whenever there’s an iota of a chance that you are searching for someone by name. It matters not that the service has no information for you, the lame ad is still there looking at you.

    From time to time I do a vanity search for Larry Shue to check that my little shrine to L.S. is still being indexed by Google the Stupendous. Recently these ads have been appearing. Dude, I already found Larry Shue, and he’s buried in Staunton, Virginia!

    Camus quoted

    There are a couple versions of this eminently quotable passage from Albert Camus knocking around online, but I have found none of them that clearly cite the original essay and translator. So let’s rectify that situation, shall we?

    This paragraph is from an essay that appeared in the symposium Réflexions sur la peine capitale, by Camus and Arthur Koestler, and published by Calmann-Lévy in 1957. Translated by Justin O’Brien, it appeared as “Reflections on the Guillotine,” and was collected into Resistance, Rebellion, and Death, published by Alfred A. Knopf, in 1961. The collection in English is posthumous, as Camus died on 4 January 1960. Albert Camus was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957.

    It’s the last three sentences of the paragraph that are most quoted (and most powerful), beginning with “what then is capital punishment…”

    Let us leave aside the fact that the law of retaliation is inapplicable and that it would seem just as excessive to punish the incendiary by setting fire to his house as it would be insufficient to punish the thief by deducting from his bank account a sum equal to his theft. Let us admit that it is just and necessary to compensate for the murder of the victim by the death of the murderer. But beheading is not simply death. It is just as different, in essence, from the privation of life as a concentration camp is from prison. It is a murder, to be sure, and one that arithmetically pays for the murder committed. But it adds to death a rule, a public premeditation known to the future victim, an organization, in short, which is in itself a source of moral sufferings more terrible than death. Hence there is no equivalence. Many laws consider a premeditated crime more serious than a crime of pure violence. But that then is capital punishment but the most premeditated of murders, to which no criminal’s deed, however calculated it may be, can be compared? For there to be equivalence, the death penalty would have to punish a criminal who had warned his victim of the date at which he would inflict a horrible death on him and who, from that moment onward, had confined him at his mercy for months. Such a monster is not encountered in private life. (p. 199)

    (Thanks to The Atlantic for bringing this quotation to my attention.)

    Showing up

    Dwight Garner’s provocative challenge in last week’s Times magazine to novelists who publish infrequently,

    If you and your peers wish to regain a prominent place in the culture, one novel a decade isn’t going to cut it.

    is more than a little short-sighted. Did James Joyce forfeit his influence on literature, his place as a modernist, for publishing only two books in the 23 years after A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man? (Granted, all three works were serialized first, à la Charles Dickens.) Do we think less of Ralph Ellison for never publishing his follow-up to Invisible Man?

    And yet, Garner makes a good point. He finds exemplars in Dickens, John Updike, Woody Allen:

    Good times, bad times, you keep making art. Many of your productions will hit; some will miss; some will miss by a lot.

    Bank on it

    Catherine A. Lindell, Ryan S. O’Connor, and Emily B. Cohen make a contribution to what we know about songbirds’ nesting success in active and abandoned coffee plantations and active pasture. Specifically, they studied White-throated Thrushes (Turdus assimlis) and Clay-colored Thrushes (T. grayi) in Las Alturas reserve (for four breeding seasons) and Rio Negro, an active coffee farm (unfortunately, only for one season).

    These two species of birds, congeners of our American Robin, do not migrate north to the U.S. to breed (there are some records in south Texas for Clay-colored Thrush), in contrast to the charismatic migratory wood warblers (used to promote shade-grown coffee) that feed in forests and plantation overstories in the winter months. The thrushes of the research prefer to nest on the ground or low in a tree. The slightly surprising results of the paper are that nesting success is only indirectly affected by type of land cover, and the effect is through how well the terrain provides concealment from predators. In particular, nesting in a steep bank in pastureland provides the greatest protection (the nest can’t be detected from below, and cattle can’t trample it).

    There is a scintilla of a hint that the birds can be more successful in an active coffee plantation—more humans means fewer predators—but keep in mind that only one year of data is available.

    I’ll let the authors summarize the research’s conservation implications:

    Conservation recommendations based on land-cover type would be relatively easy if we could rank land-covers as to the quality of habitat they provide for target species and if rankings were consistent across species. Our results indicate these conditions are not met for these species.

    Happy Days

    Delia Taylor gives a gleeful yet genteel reading of Winnie, Beckett’s lady of the mound—indeed, it’s musical: her “Hoo-oo!” summons of Willie (Jose Carrasquillo) is particularly fine. Taylor’s eyes (a key to this role) are mobile and expressive; her various reactions to the revolver in her bag are effective. Carrasquillo adopts a creaky old man’s voice for Willie that doesn’t quite fit.

    Technical elements in this production are mixed. Here, the mound that encloses Winnie is a clever extension of her elegant china blue brocade dress. Tony Cisek’s design also places Winnie high enough off the deck so that we all can see her clearly, especially in Act 2. But the constraints of working in Artisphere’s black box theater leave Winnie pinned onstage during the intermission, so that the transition to her neck-deep state in Act 2 has to happen in black, after an unnecessary introductory “the days pass” lighting effect. And the challenge of Beckett’s specification “Maximum pause. The parasol goes on fire. Smoke, flames if feasible” isn’t met.

    The program notes that provide the details of the allusions in Winnie’s text (Shakespeare, Milton, Robert Browning, Thomas Gray, and others) are quite helpful.