Author: David Gorsline

There’s a snag

Saved to my to-read folder: a new special report is available from the American Bird Conservancy: Landowner Stories in Bird Conservation: Managing for Cavity-Nesting Birds in Ponderosa Pine Forests. Birds of particular conservation concern include Flammulated Owl (Otus flammeolus), Lewis’s Woodpecker (Melanerpes lewis), and White-headed Woodpecker (Picoides albolarvatus).

The year in review, 2009

The first sentence (more or less) of the first post of each month from this blog:

  • 2 January: WATCH assignments for the calendar year were distributed over the holiday break.
  • 2 February: wood s lot reminds us that it is James Joyce’s birthday.
  • 1 March: Only a light frosting of snow this morning on the still-sleeping woods (the bigger dump is expected this evening).
  • 3 April: “Midmost of the black-soiled Iowa plain, watered only by a shallow and insignificant creek, the city of Nautilus bakes and rattles and glistens.”
  • 1 May: Via Arts & Letters Daily, Stuart Jeffries explores the recent population explosion of bangs…
  • 2 June: Lawrence M. Hanks et al. have captured on video a Common Raven (Corvus corax) in Death Valley NP that has learned how to turn on a campground water spigot to get a drink.
  • 2 July: The last play in August Wilson’s cycle of Pittsburgh plays, Radio Golf, is set in 1997, at a time when the city’s black upper-middle class is enjoying both economic good fortune and the prospect of genuine political power.
  • 2 August: Michael Weller’s Fifty Words heads up the list of five plays (featuring two pianos!) presented at another fine festival in Shepherdstown.
  • 6 September: Some tidbits from the most recent newsletter from Friends of Huntley Meadows Park…
  • 3 October: “At the heart of the Park idea is this notion…”
  • 1 November: George Plimpton’s hockey book is back in print…
  • 2 December: I came across the following turn of phrase in Chapter 13 of So Big.

The year in review, 2008 and 2007.

My year in hikes and field trips, 2009

Taking a couple of classes, plus a concerted effort to spend more time in the field and documenting it, means I have lots of field trip notes this year.

2008’s list.

McCarthy decoded

In the course of tracking down some of the more obscure vocabulary in Blood Meridian (obscure, unless you’re a Scots-descended horseman living in what is now the American Southwest), I ran across the interesting word scantlin or scantling (“I got busted in the head with a scantlin,” chap. III, p. 32 in the Modern Library edition). It refers to a timber used for framing a house or a ship, like a 2×4, and is often used in the plural. It has several other older senses, reaching back to its derivation from scantillon, jumping from the French échantillon, with senses of “a sample” or “a measuring rod.” But of course the confusion with scant is all too easy, and one proceeds with caution in tracing its etymology.

Slear (“Climbing up through ocotillo and pricklypear where the rocks trembled and sleared in the sun…”, chap. V, p. 62) does not show up in my printed references, but there are online uses of slearing as a industrial process performed on coiled metals. Perhaps a portmanteau of shear and slit? And is this the sense that Cormac McCarthy had in mind?

Old Zemblan

We are absurdly accustomed to the miracle of a few written signs being able to contain immortal imagery, involutions of thought, new worlds with live people, speaking, weeping, laughing. We take it for granted so simply that in a sense, by the very act of brutish routine acceptance, we undo the work of the ages, the history of the gradual elaboration of poetical description and construction, from the treeman to Browning, from the caveman to Keats. What is we awake one day, all of us, and find ourselves utterly unable to read?

—Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire, note to line 991

He wrote the book

A belated memorial to Paul Samuelson, who died on 13 December at the age of 94. From The Economist‘s obituary:

“To understand economics you need to know not only fundamentals but also its nuances,” Mr Samuelson would explain. “When someone preaches ‘Economics in one lesson’ I advise: Go back for the second lesson.”

I learned the fundamentals of macroeconomics from Robert Eisner lecturing out of the 9th edition of Samuelson’s Economics (today’s edition, co-authored by William Nordhaus, is the 19th). Maybe the best thing about the book was its endpapers: the IBC gave a family tree of economic thought, from Aristotle and Aquinas to the post-Keynesian synthesis; while the IFC charted real per capita GNP on a log scale over the period 1870-1973 for six countries: the U.S., Germany, Great Britain, Japan (fourth overall but with the steepest growth), the Soviet Union, and (way down at the bottom of the chart) India (and notice we were talking about national product and not domestic product back then).

Slow melt

day afterbobcatThe sun did indeed come out again. In fact, I’m waiting on it to work on a stubborn icy patch on the sidewalk between the townhouse rows; this is the place where the northwest wind whips through from Saskatchewan. At the middle school behind the cluster, a maintenance guy was hard at it with a Bobcat clearing the fall.

August: Osage County

Tracy Letts is working here on a larger canvas than his earlier Killer Joe and Bug, but he has not left behind his signature deadpan violence, both verbal and physical. The tour of August: Osage County brings the darkly comic story of the crumbling of a small-town semi-patrician Oklahoma extended family, extended sufficiently that we are happy for the headshot-enhanced family tree in the program (the sort of thing that helps us through Shakespeare and Chekhov). Events of the play are sparked by the disappearance of the father, poet and professor Beverly Weston (the superb John DeVries, showing us some of the salt and grandeur of Robert Ryan in his day). Yes, there are shocking reveals and pandemonium, but the work’s theme is in the running down; as one character remarks in the third act, “Dissipation is much worse than cataclysm.”

With such an expansive script, every actor has a moment or a monologue in which to shine, chief among them the headliner Estelle Parsons as Violet Weston, the barbiturate-fogged wife of Beverly. Paradoxically, it’s her dinner table explosion of invective (fueled by drugs and decades of resentment) that sets up her even more effective quiet scenes later. Shannon Cochran also comes on strong as eldest daughter Barbara, who tries and fails to keep the shards of this house together.

The huge three-level set, the Weston homestead with the front wall sliced off (“a dollhouse for nasty people,” as one of us may have said), is impressive, but Violet’s final climb to the top takes so long that the beat seems to lose momentum. For a piece that depends on physical violence, the design and execution of the fight choreography is disappointing. But we liked the subtle flickering light effects that stand in for the television unit set in the fourth wall. And the subtle and nearly flawless sound amplification means that actors can sit on both sides of the dinner table and we can still hear everyone.

  • August: Osage County, by Tracy Letts, directed by Anna D. Shapiro, Kennedy Center Eisenhower Theater, Washington