Author: David Gorsline

West decoded

Nathanael West slips an archaism into the mannered, allusive novella The Dream Life of Balso Snell (1931):

… all would agree that “Life is but the span from womb to tomb; a sigh, a smile; a chill, a fever; a throe of pain, a spasm of volupty: then a gasping for breath, and the comedy is over, the song is ended, ring down the curtain, the clown is dead.”

Easily decodable from context, borrowed from French, is volupty (stress on the first syllable), but what’s sort of interesting is that it leaves little online trace. It’s a word on the verge of extinction. The 1913 Webster dismisses it as “Voluptuousness. [Obs.],” the OED also marks it “Obs.” while Webster II (1960) gives it some life as “Pleasure; now, usually, sexual pleasure.” Harold P. Simonson, in his Beyond the Frontier (1989), slaps a sic on his quotation from old Nat.

Wilson decoded

We learned in grammar school how to multiply two-digit numbers with pencil and paper, but I’ve never heard this phrase, which metaphorically substitutes the placement for the arithmetical operation. In this passage from Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, set in 1911, pedlar Selig is buying finished cookpots from artisan Seth at a dollar apiece, who is in turn buying raw materials (eight sheets of metal) from Selig:

SELIG: How many of them pots you got?

SETH: I got six. That’s six dollars minus eight on top of fifteen for the sheet metal come to a dollar twenty out of the six dollars leave me four dollars and eighty cents.

SELIG (Counting out the money): There’s four dollars… and… eighty cents.

—August Wilson, Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, I:1

Or (6 · 1) – (8 · 0.15 ) = 4.80.

Brunner decoded

Bernd Brunner, in his Bears: A Brief History (trans. Lori Lantz), introduces the denizen of the Appalachian woods as the American Black Bear (Ursus americanus) with the synonym baribal, a term unknown to me. Furthermore, as a 1982 query by A. Richard Diebold, Jr. indicates, it’s not at all clear where this word came from. Folk etymology suggests a loanword from a Native American language, but Diebold could find no evidence for this claim.

In the tunnel

Via The Morning News, Kathryn Schulz interviews Ira Glass on being wrong. We all know this, but it’s worth repeating once in a while:

…I feel like being wrong is really important to doing decent work. To do any kind of creative work well, you have to run at stuff knowing that it’s usually going to fail. You have to take that into account and you have to make peace with it. We spend a lot of money and time on stuff that goes nowhere. It’s not unusual for us to go through 25 or 30 ideas and then go into production on eight or 10 and then kill everything but three or four. In my experience, most stuff that you start is mediocre for a really long time before it actually gets good. And you can’t tell if it’s going to be good until you’re really late in the process.

No thumbs up

ROTHKO: Of course you like it—how can you not like it?! Everyone likes everything nowadays. They like the television and the phonograph and the soda pop and the shampoo and the Cracker Jack. Everything becomes everything else and it’s all nice and pretty and likable. Everything is fun in the sun! Where’s the discernment? Where’s the arbitration that separates what I like from what I respect, what I deem worthy, what has… listen to me now… significance.

—John Logan, Red, sc. 1

Twelve steps

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, [Arnold] Schoenberg’s music no longer sounds so alien. It has radiated outward in unpredictable ways, finding alternative destinies in bebop jazz (the glassy chords of Thelonious Monk have a Schoenbergian tinge) and on movie soundtracks (horror movies need atonality as they need shadows on the walls of alleys). With the modernist revolution spintered into many factions, with composers gravitating back to tonality or moving on to something else, Schoenberg’s music no longer carries the threat that all music will sound like this. Still, it retains its Faustian aura. These intervals will always shake the air; they will never become second nature. That is at once their power and their fate.

—Alex Ross, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, ch. 2, “Doctor Faust”

At the park: 37

Well, I had expected this to be the last post for nesting season, as boxes #2 and #6 had hatched out this trip, but Melina reports new eggs in boxes #67 and #68 along lower Barnyard Run—new since our last check before Memorial Day. We have records of nests hatching in July in past years. This might be one of those years, but it’s just as likely the eggs are “excuse-me” drops and will not turn into complete clutches.

showy globecheck the hindwingOn my way to box #2, just north of the boardwalk as you come out into the wetland, I found clumps of Swamp Milkweed (Asclepias incarnata) in bloom. The flowers attracted a small group of Great Spangled Fritillaries (Speyeria cybele) who stopped for a nectar snack. The image at right doesn’t do justice to the bold coloring of this butterfly’s upperwings, but it does show the field marks on the under hindwing: silvered spots and the broad cream-colored band.

Strange bedfellows

Kenneth T. Cuccinelli, II has pulled some bonehead plays in his short tenure as Attorney General of my Commonwealth, generally managing to push himself onto the national stage. It’s not for nothing that he has earned the nickname “The Cooch” from DCist. But when he’s right, I have to acknowledge it: citing First Amendment concerns, Cuccinelli has chosen not to climb on the bandwagon with other states in filing an amicus brief on behalf of the family of Lance Cpl. Matthew Snyder. Effectively, this puts the AG on the side of the reprehensible Fred Phelps and his Westboro Baptist Church organization. But, as foul as Phelps and his family may be in their invective, their right to say it is protected, within reason, and must continue to be protected. From the press release:

…Snyder v. Phelps… could set a precedent that could severely curtail certain valid exercises of free speech. If protestors—whether political, civil rights, pro-life, or environmental—said something that offended the object of the protest to the point where that person felt damaged, the protestors could be sued…. We do not think that regulation of speech through vague common law torts like intentional infliction of emotional distress strikes the proper balance between free speech and avoiding the unconscionable disruption of funerals.

To the extent that Cuccinelli is sincere in his reasoning, I agree with him. There is, perhaps, more to this story…

Gruesome Playground Injuries

We might be forgiven for wondering why Woolly Mammoth, having built its fabulous proscenium-styled performance space, enables its directors and designers to reconfigure it variously, as in the recent Full Circle and Clybourne Park. Nonetheless, the seating shifts are worth it. For the current production, the interesting two-hander Gruesome Playground Injuries, the audience is arranged arena style around the remains of a hockey rink. Scenes skip forward and backward at five-year intervals in the lives of Doug and Kayleen, as they age from 8 to 38; a relationship evolves between them that perhaps is never sexual (a particular scene ends ambiguously) but is often more intimate. The exchange of (other) body fluids, as well as scars (visible and otherwise), become their emotional currency. The excellent Tim Getman plays accident-prone Doug as one long goofy lope through life, while Gabriela Fernandez-Coffey’s Kayleen always holds something mysteriously in reserve.

  • Gruesome Playground Injuries, by Rajiv Joseph, directed by John Vreeke, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Washington

Drop by drop

Good special report from The Economist on the state of the world’s fresh water demand and supply. Not surprisingly, the report stresses the point that water is woefully underpriced:

[Chris] Perry, the irrigation economist, says water is typically priced at 10-50% of the costs of operating and maintaining the system, and that in turn is only 10-50% of what water is worth in terms of agricultural productivity. So to bring supply and demand into equilibrium the price would have to rise by 4-100 times.

Unfortunately, water access and pricing is a hot, hot political issue; the report concludes that a mixture of regulation, property rights, pricing, and small-community management (a farmers’ co-op in India’s Andhra Pradesh state is visited) may be the only way to go. One thinks of the acequias of the American Southwest as described by Stanley Crawford in The River in Winter and Mayordomo.