Author: David Gorsline

Little Bennett Regional Park

Leta and I took a nature stroll along paths in Little Bennett Regional Park, on the southwest side of Little Bennett Creek. On this holiday weekend, the main entrance road was closed to all but campers, so we followed the suggestion at the contact station and parked at the maintenance yard and walked in. A better choice would have been to park in the lot at Wilson Mill along Route 121. This lot is connected to the trail network, despite what the map I received at the contact station said.

Indeed, following that map was a challenge, as it showed trails that weren’t there along with not showing trails that were. And since it’s the area is designed for camping, it’s full of short trails that don’t go in the direction you want. A little bit of climbing, not much; somewhat rocky footing with lots of white quartz cobbles exposed. About 4 miles round trip from the maintenance yard.

for scalemounds without nutsNevertheless, we did make it as far as the Mound Builder Trail to see the earthworks built by Formica exsectoides. We kept an eye on the ground to avoid stirring up the ants that scurried across the trail in sixes and sevens.

jack's clubsDogwood and spicebush were coming into fruit. We found some interesting mushrooms to confirm some of the IDs I learned in this summer’s class. I heard a Common Raven to go along with the usual mid-day forest bird residents. At a wet spot (relatively so: all the stream beds were dry), Leta spotted Jack-in-the-pulpit (Arisaema sp.) in fruit.

And learn your lines

Stephen Tobolowsky explains his approach to auditions.

First, you have to understand it is the idea that you are walking into a room with people sitting on the other side of the table judging you that is making you nervous. Right? Not completely. Once I got there early and walked into an empty room with a table in it and I got nervous. That’s when it dawned on me that the table itself is a factor. I realized I needed to turn the tables so to speak.

The solution—and this advice works for any profession you have to go on interviews for—go sit on their side of the table. Not literally, but figuratively. Don’t stand opposite them to be judged, become a collaborator. The one thing you always have in common with the producers or your employers is the project. If you make the project the most important thing in the room—not you—you will sit on their side of the table and you won’t be so nervous.

In the Next Room or the vibrator play

Sarah Ruhl’s script plays it straight for most of In the Next Room or the vibrator play, reserving her trademark theatricality for the satisfying ending. Indeed, it’s a play that accomplishes some of its best moments in the shared silences between two characters, especially a touching subplot between Sabrina Daldry (the fine Kimberly Gilbert) and clinic nurse Annie (an understated and hence very effective Sarah Marshall); the silences are fitting, since this is a story that unfolds in a Victorian America where sexual experience is not discussed, hardly even recognized for what it is. (And apparently no one saw the need for personal lubricant.)

There’s a lovely passage toward the end of Act 1 in which Catherine Givings (welcome newcomer Katie deBuys) looks forward to the coming century in which “everything in our lives will be electrified: On. Off. On. Off.” with clearly mixed feelings.

Daniel Conway’s set puts two half-circle rows of bleacher seats onstage to frame Dr. Givings’ parlor and consulting room as if it were an operating theater. Unfortunately, upstage action creates sightline problems for patrons sitting in the upper row. But I loved the hand-cranked entrance bell fitted to the Givings’ front door.

  • In the Next Room or the vibrator play by Sarah Ruhl, directed by Aaron Posner, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Washington

No news is good news

Matthew Kaiser reports (in the most recent Friends newsletter) on Resource Manager Dave Lawlor’s July survey of the waters of Dogue Creek, which drains Huntley Meadows Park. Fortunately, no snakehead (Channa sp.) fish were detected, and even more positively, samplers found ten Largemouth Bass. It is believed that the presence of the bass will put pressure on snakeheads that would otherwise move upstream in the Creek. Other species counted in the survey (alas, no scientific names in the report):

  • Yellow Bullhead
  • American Eel
  • White Sucker
  • Satinfin Shiner
  • Creek Chubsucker
  • Tessellated Darter
  • Lamprey
  • Green Sunfish
  • Pumpkinseed
  • Bluegill
  • Creek Chub
  • Eastern Mudminnow

I find it unpleasant to find myself reporting observations of Lamprey as a good thing. Lampreys are the one taxon of the animal kingdom that I could do without, if it’s all the same to you: they’re nasty things.

West decoded: 3

Or not, as the case may be. The Day of the Locust, Nathanael West’s maggotty mash note to California, has several instances of slang that may be obscure, undocumented, or simply his own coinages. I got nowhere with the following:

He sat near Harry’s bed and listened to his stories by the hour. Forty years in vaudeville and burlesque had provided him with an infinite number of them. As he put it, his life had consisted of a lightning series of “nip-ups,” “high-gruesomes,” “flying-W’s” and “hundred-and-eights” done to escape a barrage of “exploding stoves.” An “exploding stove” was any catastrophe, natural or human, from a flood in Medicine Hat, Wyoming, to an angry policeman in Moose Factory, Ontario. (ch. 6)

How is it that Medicine Hat was transported from Alberta to the Equality State? I wonder whether hundred-and-eight is a misprint for hundred-and-eighty—unlikely, since it would be plural in this context.

Most of the online hits that this next one turns up want to sell me an Acura.

Faye was coming back. Homer saw that Tod was going to speak to her about Earle and the Mexican and signaled desperately for him not to do it. She, however, caught him at it and was curious.

“What have you guys been chinning about?”

“You, darling,” Tod said. “Homer has a t.l. for you.” (ch. 20)

This last one has such a rhythm that I have to believe West made it up.

… all those poor devils who can only be stirred by the promise of miracles and then only to violence. A super “Dr. Know-All Pierce-All” had made the necessary promise and they were marching behind his banner in a great united front of screwballs and screwboxes to purify the land. No longer bored, they sang and danced joyously in the red light of the flames (ch. 27)

Spark decoded

Spang on page 2 of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is a topical reference, never directly referred to again in the course of the short novel, but one definitely laden with foreshadowing. The work was published in 1961, but its events begin in 1930.

At that time they had been immediately recognizable as Miss Brodie’s pupils, being vastly informed on a lot of subjects irrelevant to the authorised curriculum, as the headmistress said, and useless to the school as a school. These girls were discovered to have heard of the Buchmanites and Mussolini, the Italian Renaissance painters, the advantages to the skin of cleansing cream and witch-hazel over honest soap and water, and the word “menarche”; the interior decoration of the London house of the author of Winnie the Pooh had been described to them, as had the love lives of Charlotte Brontë and of Miss Brodie herself.

In the interwar period, the evangelist Frank N. D. Buchman formulated an approach to shared spiritual experience that became known as the Oxford Group. Even digging shallowly in the online record, it’s clear to me that Buchman’s methods attracted controversy. A snippy notice from an 1928 number of Time calls the Group a “curious collegiate cult” apparently obsessed with sex. Later in the 1930s, with war drums rumbling, Buchman and his followers organized under the banner of Moral Re-Armament (MRA). Buchman was active in Nazi Germany, ultimately denounced by the ruling party; Communists likewise attacked him. His work is also credited as one of the roots of the Alcoholics Anonymous movement.

The fierce urgency of now

Martin Luther King. Jr., addresses the crowd from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, 28 August 1963:

This is our hope. This is the faith that I go back to the South with. With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day.

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.