Author: David Gorsline

Deanwood

I joined a 90-minute walk along portions of the Greater Deanwood Heritage Trail, led by Kia Chatmon and organized by Cultural Tourism DC. The Deanwood neighborhood lies in that part of Northeast east of the Anacostia River (and now the expressway and railway lines); purists will insist on the tighter boundaries of Sheriff Road and Nannie Helen Burroughs and Division Avenues. Whatever your limits, the close-knit African-American community carries a strong history of self-reliance. Up through mid-century, residents of this suburb-in-the-city had enough land to grow their own vegetables and keep small livestock.

big chessIrving Parker, second-generation businessman and proprietor of Suburban Market, told our tour group some salty stories of clandestine horse races along Eastern Avenue that he participated in—the streets were not all paved yet, and people still kept horses even though Benning Racetrack had closed in the 1930s. Eugene Brown of the Big Chair Chess Club also spoke to the group about his organization’s emphasis on self-discipline and upholding tradition.

planetreeThe heritage trail crosses the troubled waters of Watts Branch, culvertized and subject to dumping, but at least it runs clear under Minnesota Avenue. Indeed, once you step away from Minnesota Avenue and its light-industrial flavor, Deanwood still shows its leafy, suburban soul. Robins and a mockingbird made their presence known during the walk. Planetrees planted along Sheriff Road rise to impressive heights.

Decimate clutter

Steve Offutt dares to challenge the security bollards that have popped up in the last decade all over the city like so many fruiting bodies of concrete fungus. They won’t work, and they’re anti-people.

By now, the totality of those barriers must cover scores of acres of valuable sidewalk real estate. They create an unwelcome atmosphere to pedestrians, forcing them to weave and sometimes wait for others to make room just to walk to and from their destinations. Most of them are unsightly at best and downright ugly at worst. They have degraded the open space and welcoming feel of virtually every outdoor space in the core of DC.

Complexity

Francis Lam takes on the canard of household spice rack turnover:

“Six months?” [Jane Daniels] Lear said, with a genteel indignation. “Some food Nazi probably made that rule up. Or someone from a spice company who just wants you to throw out all your spices twice a year.”

A comeback

Stephen Syphax gave an interesting presentation to the Friends of Dyke Marsh on the wetlands restoration work at Anacostia Park, the first and perhaps most successful being 1993’s 32-acre (13 ha) Kenilworth Marsh project. Syphax is Chief of the Resource Management Division for NPS’s National Capital Parks-East.

Early in the previous century, the tidal lagoons along the slow-moving Anacostia River were viewed as a problem to be rectified: the McMillan Plan captioned an image of the area as “malarial flats to be excavated.” So, wetlands that were home to abundant stands of wild rice (Zizania palustris) were displaced and the river straightened by the Army Corps of Engineers to make way for a golf course, landfill, power plant, and parking lots for RFK Stadium.

Restoration work began in 1991 with pilot-project containments, with the objective of identifying the optimal ground elevation (about 2 meters) for encouraging emergent vegetation. Syphax suggests that too much height promotes the growth of Phragmites australis. Hydraulic dredging (to minimize the suspension of potentially toxic sediments) began shortly thereafter—what Syphax called the arrival of “the big yellow machines.” Novel “water tubes” (think of Godzilla’s garden hose stretched across the marsh) were used as a temporary, low-impact means of containment of dredged-up material as it settled and consolidated. Then came planting of about fifteen species of native plants, 350,000 individuals in all, along with the arrival of another dozen volunteer species—including the invasive Purple Loosestrife (Lythrum salicaria). In retrospect, Syphax says it wasn’t necessary to plant as many different species as they did. Once the plants were established, another machine cut tidal guts into the reclaimed wetland.

A happy result of the restoration work was the sighting of Marsh Wren (Cistothorus palustris) in 1996. And the jewel of the rehab is the reappearance of American Lotus (Nelumbo lutea), which opens its pale yellow blooms over the water each July.

While this phase of the restoration work was quite successful, more recent work in the Kingman Lake area has been hampered by resident populations of Canada Goose (Branta canadensis). The geese saunter over from Langston Golf Course and treat the newly-planted veg as a “salad bar,” in Syphax’s apt phrasing.

As You Like It: an update: 4

with the fool's dialred socksEvery costume has at least one snazzy feature. My costume for Jaques followed the design concept of “things out of joint” in the early 20th century, the era in which Picasso and Braques were inventing Cubism. Other players’ costumes had bits of the wrong linings attached, or even mismatched pants legs (for Adam), but I had just this really fine vest. Alli added a pair of Mike’s socks (“his youthful hose, well-saved”) for the finishing touch.

Acorns

Interesting early buzz in Jim Dwyer’s “About New York” column for Diaspora*, an open-source distributed social networking platform. The project is a reaction against the centralized uniformiarian approach of Facebook. Explains Raphael Sofaer, one of the four NYU student founders,

.”We don’t need to hand our messages to a hub. What Facebook gives you as a user isn’t all that hard to do. All the little games, the little walls, the little chat, aren’t really rare things. The technology already exists.”

As You Like It: an update: 3

Lessons learned: There’s a reason for the no-chocolate-chip-cookies-in-costume rule. Do not try to clean your vest with your hankie and the water from your water bottle. There are some times when an iron backstage is your best friend.

So far, receptive audiences, especially when Kate and Brian’s classmates are in the house. Saturday last was almost full; the Sunday matinee showed signs of life.

I’ve had my usual share of minor lapses in focus or breathing. Still, it’s unnerving when I think that many in the audience know the big monologue, or at last think they do. Richard in the lobby was kind.

Faulkner decoded

Chapter IV of Absalom, Absalom! repeats the word durance several times, as in the passage, “…Henry waited four years, holding the three of them in that abeyance, that durance, waiting, hoping, for Bon to renounce…” It doesn’t quite mean the way it looks. My Compact Oxford glosses it as “archaic imprisonment (in durance vile),” but yet there is an etymologic connection to durable and one of Bill’s favorite words, endure.

Sutpen’s adjunctive (ch. VII, “when he repudiated that first wife and that child when he discovered that they would not be adjunctive to the forwarding of the design”) is also in the desktop dictionaries, but only as a related form to the main entry, and adjectival form of another adjective, not unlike his own attitude to spouse and spawn.

Doggery is clear from context (ch. VII, “doggeries and taverns now become hamlets, hamlets now become villages, villages now towns”), yet only turns up in American Heritage as “dogs, collectively.” Merriam-Webster adds the more apposite slang definition, “cheap saloon.”

What you don’t want to hear at adjudication

  • “that Star Trek moment”
  • “it seemed to get in your way”
  • “baffled”
  • “would urge you to reconsider”
  • your own voice, explaining

after the showFortunately, Leta and her team didn’t hear anything like these after their lovely presentation of Clean, by Audrey Cefaly, at ESTA in Newark, Del., but rather a few constructive suggestions (“maybe a puddle of water at the opening”) and lots of compliments like “detailed,” “believable,” and “specific.”


Perhaps to Crawford?

“…and his land cleared and planted with the seed Grandfather loaned him and him getting rich good and steady now——”

“Yes,” Shreve said; “Mr Coldfield: what was that?”

“I dont know,” Quentin said. “Nobody ever did know for certain. It was something about a bill of lading, some way he persuaded Mr Coldfield to use his credit: one of those things that when they work you were smart and when they dont you change your name and move to Texas…”

—William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!, ch. VII

The first order meme


Via Apt. 11D, the first order that I can find in my history at Amazon.com was placed on 8 March 1997: Pogue and Schorr, Macworld Macintosh Secrets, 4/e; Sterrit, The Films of Alfred Hitchcock; and Steinbach, The Birth of the World as We Know It: Or Teiresias. The Steinbach has gone to the great library sale in the sky, and the Mac book is buried in a box somewhere with old COBOL manuals, but the Sterritt is still around.

I think that I placed an online order or two with CDnow before I bought anything from Amazon.com, but those records are long gone.

Okay, here’s something silly: the order history page for those 13-year-old purchases offers a Return Items button. (But if you click through the next page says that the items are not eligible for return.)

Are you dark?

Patrick Healy reports on the traffic jam around Times Square: despite shows closing early, there are few slots available for new productions seeking a Broadway-sized venue (500+ seats). An accompanying infographic plots the locations and capacities of the 40 houses, although the bubbles that represent foot traffic on the various streets don’t really tell the story they were meant to. (The print edition of the graphic uses bubbles to represent the theaters as well: online, the building footprint graphics work better, perhaps because of finer resolution.)