Author: David Gorsline

Poetic license

In the first chapter of the The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, by Aimee Bender, a quite fine novel, this passage stopped me:

My father usually agreed with [my mother’s] requests, because stamped in his two-footed stance and jaw was the word Provider, and he loved her the way a bird-watcher’s heart leaps when he hears the call of the roseate spoonbill, a fluffy pink wader, calling its lilting coo-coo from the mangroves. Check, says the bird-watcher. Sure, said my father, tapping a handful of mail against her back. (p. 5)

Now Ajaia ajaja is indeed a spectacular bird to see, and she’s got the habitat right, but waders as a rule don’t have much of a voice. But (thought I), since I hadn’t heard the birds I saw in Florida some years ago, maybe the spoonbill does have a pleasant coo. Not so, says Roger Peterson (eastern North America field guide, 5/e): “VOICE: About nesting colony, a low grunting croak.” David Sibley adds, “Also a fairly rapid, dry, rasping, rrek-ek-ek-ek-ek-ek, much lower, faster than ibises.” The one available audio sample from the Macaulay Library confirms.

I ♥ NPR

i ♥ nprThe city has been repaving the curb cuts in my part of downtown. One or more street artists have capitalized on the opportunity to embellish the freshly-trowelled concrete, and many of their efforts are darn clever. In the case of the present example, found just down the block from 635 Massachusetts Avenue, N.W., its epigraphy is a little crude, but its sentiments are apposite and appreciated.

Swaps

Richard A. Fuller et al. make a provocative proposal in a recent latter to Nature. Working with a data set of the protected areas of Australia, the authors make a quantitative assessment of each preserve’s contribution to conserving vegetation types in the country. They then divide that contribution by the cost of continuing to protect the land (its estimated market value plus management costs), thereby deriving a benefit-cost ratio for each property. Fuller and his team find that about 1% of Australia’s protected areas are not pulling their weight in terms of conserving diversity, and propose that selling these lands (the local term of art is “degazettement”) and using the funds to acquire alternative lands leads to an overall increase in protection with no net impact on public spending.

There are certainly points to argue with in this work. The authors use conservation of vegetation types as their benefit measure, adjusted for the amount of each type found in the protected area and the percentage of each type remaining countrywide since the arrival of Europeans in the mid-eighteenth century. Another measure might yield different results. There are some benefits to protection—a visually attractive viewshed, for instance—that don’t appear to fit into this analysis. Along the same lines of thought, the importance of keystone or indicator species is discounted. If old-growth temperate rain forest is preserved specifically to protect Spotted Owl (Strix occidentalis), there may be knock-on effects. Also, the work assumes that protection can be acquired at market rates, either through outright land purchase or through conservation easements.

Nevertheless, I think it’s a good step toward quantifying the tradeoffs that are an inevitable part of conservation. It’s also worth noting that nearly all the benefit gains are achieved by degazetting the “dogs,” the bottom 1%. Beyond that, the bang (as measured by number of vegetation types protected) doesn’t increase.

Meanwhile, the U.S. federal government is under pressure from the State of Wyoming over two parcels of state-owned land adjacent to Grand Teton National Park, as Bob Beck reports. The high-value properties are held by the state in order to produce revenue, but the lands are yielding little, due to federal restrictions on their use. Wyoming is looking to exchange the land for other lots that can be developed, say for coal mining.

Flaubertian

The artifice lies in the selection of detail. In life, we can swivel our heads and eyes, but in fact we are like helpless cameras. We have a wide lens, and must take in whatever comes before us. Our memory selects for us, but not much like the way literary narrative selects. Our memories are aesthetically untalented.

—James Wood, How Fiction Works, §39

The Mountain State, not the Extraction State

A case where a wind farm appears to be the less damaging alternative: Tom Zeller, Jr. reports on efforts to forestall mountaintop removal mining at Coal River Mountain in Raleigh County. W. Va.

The idea for a wind project first surfaced in 2006, after David Orr, a professor of environmental studies at Oberlin College in Ohio, approached researchers at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, part of the Department of Energy, about its analysis of wind potential around the country.

“We were supporting lots of groups trying to stop mountaintop removal and to do remediation at former sites,” Professor Orr says. “But we realized that, while that’s fine, it’s hard to get something done if you’re always just against something. So we began looking for alternatives to mountaintop mining.”

Getting off the carousel

For most men and women these thirty years [between thirty-five and sixty-five] are taken up with a gradual withdrawal from life, a retreat first from a front with many shelters, those myriad amusements and curiosities of youth, to a line with less, when we peel down our ambitions to one ambition, our recreations to one recreation, our friends to a few to whom were are anæsthetic; ending up at last in a solitary, desolate strong point that is not strong, where the shells now whistle abominably, now are but half-heard as, by turns frightened and tired, we sit waiting for death.

—F. Scott Fitzgerald, ‘”O Russet Witch!”‘, iv

Fitzgerald decoded: 2

F. Scott Fitzgerald may have committed neologism in his story from 1922, “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz” (I’m reading the version collected as Tales of the Jazz Age in the Library of America edition, pp. 913-953). Rich scion John Unger is visiting his richer school friend Percy Washington in Percy’s family retreat, a Hearstian fastness in cis-Canadian Montana:

On one of the towers, the tallest, the blackest at its base, an arrangement of exterior lights at the top made a sort of floating fairyland—and as John gazed up in warm enchantment the faint acciaccare sound of violins drifted down in a rococo harmony that was like nothing he had heard before.

Now my desktop source, The New Harvard Dictionary of Music (Don Michael Randel, ed.), defines acciaccatura as a musical ornament of the 17th and 18th centuries, featuring a nonharmonic tone that is neither prepared nor resolved. Randel proposes a derivation “perhaps from acciaccare, to crush.” But he doesn’t provide an English musical sense for acciaccare on its own.

Google Books does turn up James F. Warner’s 1841 translation from the German of Godfrey Weber’s General Music Teacher, which does treat the two words together in one glossary entry:

The substantive acciaccatura, from the verb acciaccare, means literally a violent seizing, or attacking, and is employed in a similar sense in music, though it is used in such extremely different applications, that its signification has become entirely indefinite. (p. v)

Not much to hang onto there, and certainly not enough for us to guess what “the faint acciaccare sound of violins” might sound like. Indeed the only examples of acciaccare in English that I’ve found are quotations from Fitzgerald.

By the way, what does “a rococo harmony” suggest to you?

A page previous, Fitzgerald does better. After being picked up at a train flag stop, bouncing along a boulder-flecked road, and undergoing a sort of portage, John and Percy find the way to the castle easier going:

“The worst is over,” said Percy, squinting out the window. “It’s only five miles from here, and our own road—tapestry brick—all the way.”

Tapestry brick was a fancy brick with variable coloration, used to clad buildings. A tony apartment building that opened in Washington in 1925 featured its tapestry brick exterior as a selling point. It would seem to have a rough texture: one source uses “rug face brick” as a synonym and shows a brick with irregular vertical striations. A document prepared by D.C.’s Capitol Hill Preservation Society describes tapestry brick as “usually tan or buff-colored.” Fiske & Co. manufactured what it claimed was “the only Tapestry Brick in the world” and used Tapestry as an unregistered trademark. Their mark, undefended, fell into generic use, and the product ultimately fell out of popularity.

So shiny, polished bricks were out of fashion at the time. Still, I would think they would make for a smoother ride when used as a road surface.

Cat’s Cradle

Kathleen Akerley does a commendable job of wrestling Kurt Vonnegut’s blackly comic novel onto the stage, trimming it to a two-and-a-half-hour evening while retaining good chunks of dialog intact—for instance, the memorable warning by Claire Minton to never index your own book. The script also maintains narrative drive by focusing on narrator Jonah’s (the bemused, solid Michael Glenn) urge to finish the book he is writing about Dr. Felix Hoenikker and his family, in much the same way that the reporter in Citizen Kane maintains a line through that film’s various episodes and reminiscences—or at least until Jonah arrives in San Lorenzo and all hell breaks loose.

The play is also cinematic in its distortion of space and scale: Jonah looks at Franklin Hoenikker’s scale-model town through a magnifier, and the actors become full-size representations of the plasticine people that he sees: bodies as set dressing. In a reversal of scale, Jonah re-enacts in act 3 the destruction of San Lorenzo with a paper doll theater, lip-buzzing the island as the planes in the air show, knocking the six-inch puppets with his hands into the abyss. And in the stunning opening scene with Jonah, a bartender, and a prostitute, Akerley solves the sight-line problems of the Callan’s black box performance space by placing the players in three different playing areas, each with a duplicate set of props: three letters from Newt Hoenikker to Jonah.

Alas, the technical reset necessary to get us into act 3 is a bit of a momentum-killer.

The Longacre Lea regulars are augmented with additional cast members, bringing their numbers to ten to fill the roles of three dozen named characters. Of particular note among Joe Brack, who gives us a manic Franklin Hoenikker, and Danny Gavigan’s clearly defined bartender, cabbie, and Angela Hoenikker.

  • Cat’s Cradle, by Kurt Vonnegut, adapted and directed by Kathleen Akerley, Longacre Lea, Callan Theatre, Washington

Now with less orange

WordPress 3 and it’s time for a theme change. I’ve still got some issues to clean up, but it’s good enough for now. I’m trying to resist the temptation to hack the PHP for this theme; rather, to use the sidebar widgets as much as I can. But there are some things about the old and new themes that just don’t work as well as they should right out of the box. And it looks like the new 2010 Weaver theme’s HTML doesn’t validate. 

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.