Author: David Gorsline

Content farm byproducts

Sad: Laura Miller reports on the glut of spammy content being sold as e-books.

Do not doubt, either, that book spammers will find their way around plagiarism detectors just as email spammers seem able to defy the most vigilant filters. Take, for example, the supremely banal How to Plan and Budget a Family Vacation, currently available from the Kindle store in its [Private Label Rights] form as the work of Debra Pauling. Someone named Shafiq Shah has published the same book under the title How to Manage Holidays With Family, altering the text by running it through some kind of processor, perhaps translating it from English to a foreign language and back again?

Whatever Shah did to How to Plan and Budget a Family Vacation, the result is a bizarre yet strangely appealing word salad. Behold the opening sentences: “The unit holiday has been portrayed in umpteen ways. From National Lampoon’s ‘Holiday’ showing the trials and tribulations of the Griswold pedigree trying to get to ‘Saphead Humans’ to ‘The Zealous Alfresco’ with Gospels Candy and his clan transaction out a cabin in the woods only to showdown a meddling carry.”

Warner decoded

Or, rather, not.

I rather like it that William W. Warner doesn’t slow down to define every bit of terminology that he uses in Beautiful Swimmers: Watermen, Crabs, and the Chesapeake Bay. Words like cultch and shunpike (a great word, that) are fairly accessible through desk dictionaries. But the following passage defies lookup:

Presently the Dorolena threads the long, dredged channel into Tangier [Island]’s crowded harbor. Crab ponds and shanties are everywhere, and on shore one can detect busy people shuttling around on bicycles and golf carts. The feeling of having arrived somewhere out-of-the-way is very strong; passengers line the rail in anticipation of setting foot on this dot of land in the emptiest reaches of the Chesapeake. Indeed, for all true nesophiles, the journey on the Dorolena is reason enough to go to Tangier. (ch. 10, p. 244)

The mystery word doesn’t ruin the sense of the paragraph, but what exactly does Warner mean by nesophile? My fat dictionaries downstairs offer no help; online sources likewise. Bing, somewhat inexplicably, offers Anne-Sophie Mutter’s official site.

Is a nesophile a lover of islands? A devotee of hard-working ships like the Dorolena, a freight-passenger-mail vessel in service more than 30 years? Or is it someone who likes being in the middle of nowhere? Was Warner going for mesophile and mistyped?

For scale

for scaleSo before I whacked this Paulownia tomentosa to the ground I thought I would get some photographic evidence. Leta helped out, but balked at doing a fan dance with the dinner plate-sized leaves. More fool I for not identifying the tree (known as Princess-Tree or Blue Catalpa) last year and letting it overwinter. There are several other weeds along this side of the house that I need to deal with, as I clean up after the overgrown juniper that was damaged by recent winters, but one thing at a time, please. Besides, I rather like Pokeweed.

How did it get here? Well, Sibley describes the fruit as “pods persistent, brownish, splitting open to release hundreds of seeds.”

Montgomery County butterflies

for next yearOur first stop on today’s field trip, part of Pat Durkin’s class on butterflies and their conservation, was to Black Hill Regional Park and a captive breeding facility for Baltimore Checkerspot (Euphydryas phaeton). This relative of the Pearl Crescent is dependent on wet conditions and its host plant of Turtlehead (Chelone glabra); in Maryland, it’s in decline but has earned special attention because its black and gold colors recall Lord Baltimore’s livery. It overwinters as larvae, wrapped in a self-spun web of silk. Adults from the first breeding season in this modest facility (a pair of mesh-walled pup tents) have already flown, but they have left a promising egg mass on this Turtlehead leaf.

starting pointWe then moved on to the Native Grassland Conservancy property, 23 acres leased from Seneca Creek State Park. Randy Pheobus showed us the work that the conservancy is doing, attempting to reclaim this old field, overrun with some nasty invasives like Johnsongrass and Canada Thistle. Randy is passionate and very persuasive about the need to protect grassland and meadow habitat in the mid-Atlantic. While forests and wetlands warrant legal protections and mitigation, grasslands are in a “blindspot” and get short shrift, according to Randy.

the first patchAfter three years of work, he and other volunteers have established four tiny beachheads of native grassland plants, including the one you see here. Randy’s team has transplanted Little Bluestem (Schizachyrium scoparium), a grass, and Viola sagittata, a heliophilic violet. Not everything you see in the plot is native, but there are about 50 native species represented. As Randy might say, you have to pick your battles. The plastic pot holds rotting Star of Bethlehem, which apparently deters the deer population. Elsewhere on the property, a native thistle, Cirsium discolor, is gaining ground. Randy describes thistles as the keystone of any project managed for pollinators.

As interesting as the botany was, we were there to look at butterflies. The class found an even dozen species at this stop, including a fine Variegated Fritillary (Euptoieta claudia) and a couple of skippers that I hadn’t met, and I added several names to my extremely short twitcher’s list. We agreed that netting a butterfly and transferring it to an observation jar is trickier than it looks.

good spottingOn the way back to the cars we left at the park, we made a quick stop at a garden planted for Monarchs; most of the planting has gone to Dogbane (Apocynum sp.) and were rewarded with great looks at a Banded Hairstreak (Satyrium calanus).

bobrauschenbergamerica

I recently worked on a project in which the director spent a fair amount of time arranging actors in space so that viewers could observe how the actions of one character affected another. That principle of basic stagecraft is sublimely flouted by Forum Theatre’s production of Charles L. Mee’s bobrauschenbergamerica. The black box of Round House Theatre’s Silver Spring second stage is configured galley style, and director Derek Goldman often positions his players at opposite ends of the playing space, so we in the audience ping-pong from one to another, watching reactions. Often there are little wordless subplots going on in the corners of the stage, bits of nonsense worthy of Ernie Kovacs, and we just don’t know where to look.

It’s an exuberant production of Mee’s dramatic collage that matches the tone of sculptor Robert Rauschenberg’s three-dimensional assemblages of castoffs and intimate materials. Consider Carl’s (Aaron Reeder’s) joyful dance with a load of laundry, or the zany movie scenario described by Becker (Maboud Ebrahimzadeh) and acted out by the ensemble cast, or the delicious batch of martinis mixed by Phil’s Girl (Chelsey Christensen). The grounded Annie Houston (as Bob’s Mom) digs into Rauschenberg’s small town roots with a narration fit for an old photo album but set on a slideshow of the artist’s works. In this yard sale of the mind, people expound on astronomy while slurping a Texas picnic’s worth of watermelon, or rant about sexual politics while stuffing cake in their mouths. Or beat the crap out of an aluminum trash can with a baseball bat. Or just tell silly chicken jokes.

The final tableau, in which all of Rauschenberg’s ladders to the stars and bathtubs and old license plates are brought center stage into one meta-assemblage, is sublime.

  • bobrauschenbergamerica, by Charles L. Mee, directed by Derek Goldman, Forum Theatre, Silver Spring, Maryland

Some lists: 11

Via kottke.org, the Guardian‘s list of the greatest 100 nonfiction books. I’m acquainted with about a fifth of the titles, if you count a couple high school assignments: lots of hits in the society category, not so much in politics, history, and travel. Some odd choices here: as much as I enjoyed it 30 years ago, I’m not sure that I would choose Douglas Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid as the sole representative in the mathematics category.

Bootycandy

Lance Coadie Williams runs away with the show with his opening scene, a monologue by Reverend Benson, a neighborhood preacher who gives up some of his own revelations from the altar: Williams’s mastery of rhythm, dynamics, and timbre is marvelous. Perhaps the work as a whole, a series of scenes (calling on the five actors to play multiple roles, sometimes even within the same scene) that show facets of the life of a young man growing up gay and black, doesn’t quite hang together. The closing scene of Act 1 offers a frame into which all the pieces might fit, and it certainly provides a novel, anti-climatic way to end an act, with the house lights already up and the characters slouching off one by one. But playwright O’Hara gives us a confusing message about the dynamics of racial and sexual identity: the black and/or gay playwright/characters in the scene refuse to engage with the gormless white moderator of the “Conference.” And maybe that’s the point.

Certainly there is much here that’s entertaining, such as the scene in which a couple and their friends get away to a sunny island for a “non-commitment ceremony” to give back their rings and exchange handwritten vows of “F U!” Company member Jessica Frances Dukes is one of the best parts of the “Happy Meal” scenes, as she’s asked to play a pre-schooler, almost wordlessly. And the intriguing “Mug,” another monologue, this time for the fearless Sean Meehan, is dressed cleverly by set designer Tom Kamm. To suggest a late-night Brooklyn street corner, he brings in a bus stop sign, but since the post itself isn’t needed, it’s only the sign itself that flies in.

  • Bootycandy, written and directed by Robert O’Hara, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Washington

At the park: 44

We did our last full check of all the nest boxes on Sunday. Three more boxes hatched out; one box with only two eggs was apparently predated. We have two boxes with eggs remaining that M.K. will check as she is checking warbler boxes.

Val Kitchens and others have reported sightings of Common Moorhen (Gallinula chloropus) in the park, but we were not so fortunate to spot the bird. As a hemi-marsh breeder, it’s a bird of special interest to park management.

M.K. showed us photos of the two snakehead fish that Dave Lawlor and staff took from the waters around box #13.

spot the damselUp at the north end of the wetland, where we find all the trash that washes down from the subdivisions, the Lizard’s Tail (Saururus cernuus) was waist-high, making trash-picking a non-project. Would that the damselfly in this image had busied itself with the mosquitoes that were chomping on me.

wetAt this same (very wet) location, I snapped a couple images of this purple-pink blooming milkweed, which I had identified previously as Swamp Milkweed (Asclepias incarnata). But take a look at the leaves, with the veins forming an almost right angle with the midrib. Newcomb keys this plant out as either Purple Milkweed (A. purpurascens) or Red Milkweed (A. rubra).

dryFurthermore, over by the observation tower, in the drier flat that is managed for meadow, milkweeds were in fuller bloom.

I need to go back and take a closer look at the underside of the leaves and the flowers. Milkweed flowers consists of a corona of five erect “hoods,” with a curved horn jutting from each hood. The size and configuration of hoods and horns is an ID key.

The species checklist prepared by the friends organization says that A. purpurascens is found in the park. Newcomb describes the habitat for A. purpurascens as “dry fields and thickets,” which is a better match for the meadow by the tower. Newcomb locates A. rubra in “wet pinelands and bogs,” which more closely describes the conditions at the north end of the wetland.

I hear that Paris is beautiful this time of the year

Nick Carbone reports:

Radio and television anchors in France are no longer allowed to use the names of the social networking sites [Twitter and Facebook] promotionally in their broadcasts.

(Link via The Morning News.)

And double annoyance points: time.com pulls a version of the hacky trick that the Washington Examiner uses: it forces the browser to append a “read more” promotional link to the copy-paste buffer that you’re using to assemble a pull quote. No doubt the party line is “Most of our users like the convenience of…”

The slow season

Manhola Dargis responds to fellow Times columnnist Dan Kois:

…The Hangover Part II, which I find boring, raked in $137.4 million over the five-day Memorial Day weekend. It’s the kind of boring that makes money, partly because it’s the boring that many people like, want to like, insist on liking or are just used to, and partly because it’s the sort of aggressively packaged boring you can’t escape, having opened on an estimated 17 percent of American screens. Filled with gags and characters recycled from the first Hangover, the sequel is grindingly repetitive and features scene after similar scene of characters staring at one another stupidly, flailing about wildly and asking what happened. This is the boring that Andy Warhol, who liked boring, found, well, boring.

I like it

Already widely linked, and even parodied, Jonathan Franzen’s op ed piece, adapted from a commencement address, is still highly linkable. Franzen’s like/love distinction reminds me of another excellent piece from the Times, Russell Baker’s “Why Being Serious Is Hard.” (My clipping of Baker’s column has, alas, gone missing.) Baker made a similar distinction between passionate commitment to something, even to the point of looking silly (“being serious”), and merely going along with the flow (“being solemn”).