Leta and I spent most of our time at Longwood Gardens in the controlled environment of the conservatory, while the rain washed the outside. One of the destination plants of the conservatory is this single individual bread palm, Encephalartos woodii; the species is extirpated in the wild. Each of this cycad’s bright orange cones, each larger than a loaf of bread, is a pollen strobilus.
Author: David Gorsline
Short
Holy Fox! Alice Munro will receive the Nobel Prize in Literature!
In a statement from Penguin Random House, her publisher, Ms. Munro said that she was “amazed, and very grateful.”
She added, “I’m particularly glad that winning this award will please so many Canadians,” she said. “I’m happy, too, that this will bring more attention to Canadian writing.”
Unboxed Ware
My copy of Chris Ware’s Building Stories has been sitting on a shelf—well, lying on the floor propped up against a shelf—for months, too pretty to unwrap. This afternoon I finally had some time to clear off the coffee table and take a few snaps of the unpackaging.
Also solved today: I made horizontal space on a shelf where I can store the book once I’ve finished devouring it.
I like big books and I cannot lie.
WalkingTown DC 2013
My job as volunteer assistant on my two WalkingTown DC tours today called for logistics, crowd control, and passing out evaluation forms—and it kept me busy, but I did grab two quick snaps of inside Washington.
First, Steve Livengood pointed out the communications equipment that TV people use for their standups outside the Senate side of the Capitol, nicely concealed by a low barrier wall, and out of frame when the cameras are rolling.
Carolyn Crouch took us through the good, the bad, and the dismal of the 1960s-era L’Enfant Plaza urban renewal project. Perhaps the low point of the dismal is this stairway that connects D Street, S.W. to the elevated L’Enfant Promenade. As we ascended the weirdly-treaded steps, vague noises of something like sandblasting could be heard from the behind the tarps that you see. Or perhaps they’re concealing a hellmouth.
Keysville lav
One of my favorite underrepresented photographic subjects, the porcelain convenience at Shorpy.
Al dente
Marcella Hazan, author of one of the two cookbooks that I actually cook from, has passed. She did prickly so well.
When Mrs. Hazan arrived in New York in 1955, Italian food was still exotic, served in restaurants with straw-covered Chianti bottles and red-checked tablecloths….
The culture shock nearly crushed her. She was appalled by canned peas, hamburgers and coffee she once described as tasting no better than the water she used to wash out her own coffeepot at home.
Silver Line progress report: 32
Sandbox John gave me the tip that signage was in place at the Wiehle station. The typography appears to be a mix of the heavier-weight Helvetica that has been used in the system from the start (over the station entrance) and a lighter weight on the pylon. I’m also seeing this fresh-looking lighter weight in new platform location signs along the Blue and Orange Lines downtown; the signs set aside empty space for the Silver Line route information to be added when the Line goes live.
John also reports:
The north end of the pedestrian bridge at the Wiehle-Reston East station is a little interesting. It just ends at the corner of the plaza of the Comstock Partners Reston Station property. No sloping canopy like at the bottom of the escalators at the entrance pavilions. There also is no entrance pylon marking its purpose. Adjacent to the end of the pedestrian bridge is a set of stairs that descend to the loading dock access road to the buildings that have not been built yet. Not sure why it is there, best guess is it there to allow access to the north side of the station from the location where the fire trucks would connect fire hoses from the fire hydrant to the dry standpipe.
Golden ages
Michael Bourne makes the provocative claim that the best of Broadway these days is on cable TV.
You can measure the Golden Age of American theater in many ways, but I would mark it from the 1944 debut of The Glass Menagerie to the opening night of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in 1962…. [F]or a short time after the Second World War, American commercial theater hit that elusive sweet spot where popularity meets ambitious social and artistic agendas.
I would contend that the best of Broadway has moved to Off-Broadway, and the best of Off has moved to Off Off.
Regarding a Missing Page On your Website
Recently in my e-mail I received a well-crafted if spammy solicitation to participate in a link farm. Not too many clues in the body of the message, most everything conventionally spelled, punctuated, and capitalized.
Hi,
Good MorningFirst I’d like to say you have a great page at http://www.ahoneyofananklet.com/2006/11/10/mother-of-hundreds/. My name is Christina and I am a science teacher in London. I also try and write helpful (hopefully!) articles and guides whenever I find a topic I think I can help with. I have bookmarked some of your links for future reference and projects – thanks.
I ran across a dead resource on your page. The Botanical Gardens of The Huntington link is broken , but I have a related article here [redacted URL]. Just thought it might be of interest to you and your viewers.
Thanks for the great page, keep exploring!
Regards
Christina.
The referenced page was little more than a link to a rather fine Botany Photo of the Day; hardly a trove of “links for future reference and projects.” My link was indeed broken (and easily repaired). The suggested replacement link, although it had nothing to do with the Huntington, led to a page with a few generic paragraphs about organic gardening worthy of Demand Media (written in American, not British English), but the payload was in the co.uk domain of the link: the root page of that domain flogs garden sheds.
Try again, old chap.
Detroit
Woolly once again reconfigures its performance space (thereby confusing its volunteer ushers) into a gallery configuration: two suburban tract houses (in a first-ring suburb of a mid-sized American city) face each other across their backyards. The design sets up an anticipated closing-scene effect that is less than spectacular, but it does provide a backdrop for some interesting film projections, accompanied by Christopher Baine’s sound, that cover the numerous scene transitions.
The misdirect in Lisa D’Amour’s Detroit is that it is less to do with any broken suburban dreams (despite the somewhat misguided lobby collateral) and more to do with self-destruction and self-deception—what your mother calls “lying to yourself.” Danny Gavigan and Gabriela Fernández-Coffey are quite good as Kenny and Sharon, both of them fresh out of rehab and scratching for respectability and financial stability. Gangling Kenny, who gives us some great cringes in response to neighbor Mary’s (Emily Townley’s) play-by-play on her plantar wart surgery, speaks a working class dialect of indeterminate origin that nevertheless reminds me of a certain colleague’s natural voice. The desperation for conventional normalcy in the voice of Fernández-Coffey’s Sharon is palpable.
Sharon and Kenny backslide, pulling Mary and husband Ben (Tim Getman) along with them, and narrative track falls off the table. In the coda, company member Michael Willis looks newly trim and distingué.
- Detroit, by Lisa D’Amour, directed by John Vreeke, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Washington
Ball mit Freystäten
Bryan Curtis talks to David Block, researcher of baseball’s origins. In the eighteenth century.
This is the great irony of English baseball. Historians once assumed it went unrecorded because it didn’t exist. But it’s just as likely the sport wasn’t written about because it was mostly the stuff of commoners. Baseball was everywhere. The newspapers didn’t cover it because it was so mundane.
The Cloisters
I thought I could leave the botany alone for a week, but apparently not. I found Quince (Cydonia oblonga) ripening in the medieval herb garden at The Cloisters (left) and Castor Bean (Ricinus communis) (right) also coming into fruit.
(By the way, the Cuxa Cloister is now on the list of my favorite quiet places in New York. Truth to tell, any of these quadrangular spaces would be a great place for contemplation.)
Crossing Central Park from museum to museum, I found a very tall Solomon’s Seal (Polygonatum biflorum) (or possibly a cultivar or import) bearing fruit.
Win-win
New research providing evidence for what we had good reason to believe: just as shade-grown coffee plantations are good for birds, birds are good for forested coffee plantations, especially predators of the Coffee Berry Borer Beetle (Hypothenemus hampei) like Yellow Warbler (Setophaga petechia). Traci Watson summarizes a paper by Daniel S. Karp et al.
Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play (New York premiere)
Why is it that I am so drawn to this powerful, murderously funny play? Maybe it is the third act, a capsule salmagundi of 250 years of musical theater and Greek tragedy, heavily salted by American pop culture.
Or perhaps it is the heart-breaking passage in the first act, in which survivors of an apocalypse (one that has disabled the electrical grid and scrambled nuclear power plants) exchange information about missing loved ones, paging through address books in ritualistic alphabetical order. As playwright Anne Washburn says in an interview with Tim Sanford,
I don’t think I thought about this directly when I was writing that scene but I was in New York on 9/11, and I was fascinated by the group-mind which followed the event…. People were desperate to seize on an order, and a way of doing things. I think I was also thinking of the fliers which went up, with the names and photos of the missing—for the first day or so they seemed like a practical idea, and they proliferated like mad. After the first day they continued to go up, but they felt like an increasingly desperate gesture, and like memorials, rather than a real way to find someone.
By comparison with the Washington version last year, in this production the characters feel a bit less actorly, more like the ordinary schlubs they are, who find themselves amid the broken shards of civilization, compelled to continue telling stories. Sam Breslin Wright, as the taciturn Sam of the first act, gives us a wonderful Mr. Burns in the third, with an evil whine that seems to come out of Jack Nicholson on meth. Matthew Maher is dead-on as Homer Simpson in the “How are you, Mr. Thompson?” scene, mastering Homer’s gormless eye take. And I hope someone finds a Diet Coke for Susannah Flood’s wired-up Susannah: she deserves it.
The orchestration for act 3 is more elaborate, to the best of my recollection. We hear a nice combo of piano, percussion, guitar, accordion, and (the too often overlooked) toy piano. But one wonders how the play’s survivors have keep all these instruments in good working order for 75 years.
Set designer Neil Patel fashions the “Cape Feare” houseboat out of a flat and some repurposed safety railing. The paint on the walls of the second act warehouse, seven years disused, is great: somewhat like Oscar Madison’s sandwiches, we can’t tell whether it’s green paint peeling to battleship gray and brown, or gray oxidizing to green. And the closing lighting effect, designed by Justin Townsend, is astonishing.
- Mr. Burns, a Post-electric Play, by Anne Washburn, music by Michael Friedman, directed by Steve Cosson, Playwrights Horizons, New York
Virginia Native Plant Society 2013
Three very satisfying field trips at the Virginia Native Plant Society annual meeting, hosted by the Jefferson chapter (Charlottesville).
Saturday morning we looked mostly at mushrooms with Mary Jane Epps at Preddy Creek Trail Park. Notice the word “trail” in the property’s name: we often found ourselves making way for mountain bikes, as well as one rider mounted on a horse. We found Old Man of the Woods (Strobilomyces floccopus) mushrooms, an nondescript and unidentified slime mold, a tiny rove beetle on a Lactaria mushroom, some fine examples of Pinesap (Monotropa hypopithys) (at left), and Polyporus mori (at right).
In their walks, both Devin Floyd and Tom Dierauf emphasized the subtle shifts in species composition that can be attributed to aspect and drainage, as when an oak-hickory forest on one side of a slope gives way to an ash-tuliptree forest on the facing side. Devin (co-founder of the Blue Ridge Discovery Center) took us through the Secluded Farm tract of the Monticello property. Bonus champion tree for this walk: the North American champion Blackhaw Viburnum (Viburnum prunifolium), mistaken for many years for an apple tree. Counterintuitive fun fact: Slippery Elm (Ulmus rubra) leaves are not slippery, but rough as sandpaper.
Back to the north side of Albemarle (a two-syllable word in the local parlance) County for a visit to Ivy Creek Natural Area with Tom. Tom’s looks at the woods with a forester’s eyes, so we looked at a lot of trees in various stages of growth and decay, and we forgave his references to “Yellow Poplar.” He pointed out several examples of Red Hickory (a/k/a Oval Pignut Hickory) (Carya ovalis), a tree that he describes as very common in Virginia, and often overlooked. It’s certainly been overlooked in my prior field instruction, as we only had learned C. tomentosa, C. cordiformis, and the closely related Pignut Hickory (C. glabra). He gave me the idea for a little field experiment to perform in my weedy back yard: an oak cut back to the ground can resprout from its root underground, but a maple can’t. Tom showed us a single Paulownia tomentosa tree, in the process of being shaded out by taller trees, and spoke of the tree’s economic value rather than its potential invasiveness. He’s much more concerned about the depredations of Oriental Bittersweet (Celastrus orbiculatus) at Ivy Creek.
An atmospheric image of the bark of an older Black Birch (Betula lenta) beginning to peel. Tom took a small scraping from a younger tree: the inner bark smells intensely, wonderfully like Clark’s Teaberry gum.
We did take a look at the herbaceous layer. This Cut-leaved Grape Fern (Botrychium dissectum) was quite nice.