Author: David Gorsline

Decline of the West: 1

First it was the lights coming on at Wrigley Field, then the closing of Tower Records and Ollsson’s Books, and then the end of the zone system for D.C. taxicabs. We endured. But this blow is too much to take: the Metropolitan Museum of Art has discontinued its colorful admission buttons, replacing them with paper tickets, stickers—and advertising. A spokesman for the museum says that the the new paraphernalia will save the organization two cents apiece. Bah!

hoping for a freebieAnd Godzilla here was working on collecting a full set, hoping to score a free admission when his color came up again.

Not unlike some consultants I know

“Christ a-mighty, it’s hot, huh, kid?”

Clem Hoately, the talker, stood beside Stan, wiping the sweat from the band of his panama with a handkerchief. “Say, Stan, run over and get me a bottle of lemon soda from the juice joint. Here’s a dime; get yourself one too.”

When Stan came back with the cold bottles, Hoately tilted his gratefully. “Jesus, my throat’s sore as a bull’s ass in fly time.”

Stan drank the pop slowly. “Mr. Hoately?”

“Yeah, what?”

“How do you ever get a guy to geek? Or is this the only one? I mean, is a guy born that way—liking to bite the heads off chickens?”

Clem slowly closed one eye. “Let me tell you something, kid. In the carny world you don’t ask nothing. And you’ll get told no lies.”

“Okay. But did you just happen to find this fellow—doing—doing this somewhere behind a barn, and work up the act?”

Clem pushed back his hat. “I like you, kid. I like you a lot. And just for that I’m going to give you a treat. I’m not going to give you a boot in the ass, get it? That’s the treat.”

Stan grinned, his cool, bright blue eyes never leaving the older man’s face. Suddenly Hoately dropped his voice.

“Just because I’m your pal I ain’t going to crap you up. You want to know where geeks came from. Well, listen—you don’t find ’em. You make ’em.”

He let this sink in, but Stanton Carlisle never moved a muscle. “Okay. But how?”

Hoately grabbed the youth by the shirt front and drew him nearer. “Listen, kid. Do I have to draw you a damn blueprint? You pick up a guy and he ain’t a geek—he’s a drunk. A bottle-a-day booze fool. So you tell him like this: ‘I got a little job for you. It’s a temporary job. We got to get a new geek. So until we do you’ll put on the geek outfit and fake it.’ You tell him, ‘You don’t have do nothing. You’ll have a razor blade in your hand and when you pick up the chicken you give it a little nick with the blade and then make like you’re drinking the blood. Same with rats. The marks don’t know no different.'”

Hoately ran his eye up and down the midway, sizing up the crowd. He turned back to Stan. “Well, he does this for a week and you see to it that he gets his bottle regular and a place to sleep it off in. He likes this fine. This is what he thinks is heaven. So after a week you say to him like this, you say, ‘Well, I got to get me a real geek. You’re through.’ He scares up at this because nothing scares a real rummy like the chance of a dry spell and getting the horrors. He says, ‘What’s the matter? Ain’t I doing okay?’ So you say, ‘Like crap you’re doing okay. You can’t draw no crowd faking a geek. Turn in your outfit. You’re through.’ Then you walk away. He comes following you, begging for another chance and you say, ‘Okay. But after tonight out you go.’ But you give him his bottle.

“That night you drag out the lecture and lay it on thick. All the while you’re talking he’s thinking about sobering up and getting the crawling shakes. You give him time to think it over, while you’re talking. Then throw in the chicken. He’ll geek.”

—William Lindsay Gresham, Nightmare Alley (1946), Card I, “The Fool”

Weird little marks

I use a lot of apostrophes. And usually, I use them according to standard practice. But sometimes you have to ask yourself, “what would happen if I didnt?” Faulkner, Selby, McCarty, and Kelman get along fairly well without most of them. Lucy Ferriss thinks we might be better off without the oft-misused mark.

And even if all the apostrophes in the world were vaporized tomorrow, it wouldnt solve all usage and punctuation peeves. Wed have more energy to focus on the teeming millions who seem to think that the second person nominative pronoun is spelled u.

One step at a time

State by state, a struggle is going on, one with a lower profile than the cause of marriage equality, but one that reflects more brightly our compassion as a people. Ever so gradually, capital punishment is being phased out, by legislative and judicial means.

If [death penalty abolitionists] can win in enough states, they’ll ultimately try to convince the Supreme Court that “evolving standards of decency” demand the death penalty be struck down as cruel and unusual punishment, [Robert] Blecker says.

That may not happen anytime soon.

But progress comes in increments. Colorado editorialists’ reluctance to seek blood revenge on accused Aurora shooter James Holmes is a favorable sign.

Seeking native speakers

The Washington, D.C. studios of Learning Ally, where I have been recording textbooks for a number of years, handles foreign language texts in addition to English language materials. The studio has put the word out that it is specifically seeking volunteers with proficiency in any of the following languages:

  • Khmer
  • Polish
  • Korean
  • Tagalog
  • Urdu

Do you speak one of these languages, and would you like to help? Do you know someone else who might be able to assist? Drop me a line, or contact the studio directly.

At the park: 61

hangoutPaul and I checked all the boxes last week and counted eggs for the remaining three nests. Swamp Rose (Rosa palustris) was in bloom, attended by various pollinators and other hangers-on.

The Hooded Mergansers continue to be more successful in our 16 boxes. We saw 7 clutches that were primarily merg, yielding 103 eggs, hatching 92. The Wood Ducks produced 6 clutches, laying 72 eggs but only hatching 48. Of the 13 total clutches, there were eggs of the other species in 4 of them. Our combined species total of 140 ducklings is the maximum over the 30-odd years that we have data for.

The two boxes that were relocated in preparation for the construction project (#77 and #6) were both successful. Box #13 had eggs
laid in it over a period of about 6 weeks, from 1 March to 13 April. In the end, 11 of the 14 eggs hatched.

Wood Duck and Hooded Merganser trend chart

Stupid Fucking Bird

Aaron Posner’s “sort of” adaptation, the play with the name that many news media won’t reproduce verbatim, takes Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull and feeds it back on itself with the gain turned to 11. Just as William Forsythe hyperextended the classical ballet world’s preparatory steps, Posner injects taboo-word vernacular, monologues that baldly state subtext, and direct address of the audience (in and out of character) into Chekhov’s twisted comedy of artistic ambitions and daisy-chained love triangles—and comes up with something wickedly funny.

The play is Posner’s argument with Constantin Stanislavsky’s “method” of realistic theater. The tension is reflected in Misha Kachman’s set design, which swings from Act 1’s ambiguous, minimal space—a samovar that no one pours from, an exposed flyrail, a clearly artificial back wall, seven bentwood chairs, and a battered piano—to Act 2’s ultrarealistic apartment kitchen, its walls covered with every domestic utensil known to Williams-Sonoma. The argument is made explicit in a tour de force rant for Conrad (frantic Brad Koed), a plea for a new approach to theater in which he heckles playbill-scanning audience members.

It’s an argument with Chekhov’s arcane symbolism, too. I’m still looking for someone to explain to me why Nina thinks she is a (forgive me, birding community) seagull.

Yet, amid all this potty-mouthed Neo-Futurism, Howard Shalwitz’s direction never loses touch with emotional honesty. Rick Foucheux’s aging Sorn (sort of a smoothie blended from Chekhov’s characters Sorin and Dorn) quietly reminds us, “when you see an old guy, you never know,” and the passage is a heart-breaker. Kimberly Gilbert’s Beckettian Mash, so despondent that she can’t utter the word “hope” without three levels of Palinesque quotation marks around it, is pursued by Darius Pierce’s Dev, the sweetest shlub you’ll ever see on stage. And Gilbert shows some mad musical chops on the ukulele.

  • Stupid Fucking Bird, by Aaron Posner, sort of adapted from The Seagull by Anton Chekhov, directed by Howard Shalwitz, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Washington

Patuxent Research Refuge

easy goingI had a little time before my scheduled meeting at Patuxent Research Refuge/National Wildlife Visitor Center, up the B-W Parkway in the general vicinity of Laurel, and I needed some more field notebook work, so I took a quick loop along the Fire Road and Laurel Trails. The trails here are picture book walks in the woods, very friendly for school trips (of which I am sure there are many in season): duff and pine needles and pea gravel, a little wet in the low spots. And apparently more or less deer-free.

in transitionThe plants here on the Coastal Plain reflect an acidic soil: some lingering Kalmia latifolia blooms, but mainly fruit; blueberries dominating the herbaceous and understory layers in many places.

stillnessThe Goose Pond is a tranquil spot, at least looking in the opposite direction from the water control structure.

At the park: 60

on the buttonThere’s always something new to see at Huntley Meadows Park. Today I visited with a group led by Jane Huff for my general biology class. I rarely spend much time on the boardwalk in June, so I don’t get to see Buttonbush (Cephalanthus occidentalis) in fruit. Today I saw the buttons.

penny for your thoughtsWater Pennywort (Hydrocotyle americana) is such a common emergent that I’ve never stopped to really look at it. This image is perhaps more atmospheric than diagnostic, but I like it.

Classmate Tom took one look at the watermarked plant that so bedeviled me last month (and for which I had no good photo) and said, “Here’s Sweet Cicely.” So we can put a name it, Osmorhiza claytonii.

We watched the usual noisy tussle between smaller birds and a Red-shouldered Hawk. But what I hadn’t seen before was an extended interaction between a male Red-winged Blackbird and a Great Egret that, according to the blackbird, was too much in his space. (This was down at the remnants of beaver dam just below the tower, the place that I remember for a tree that used to be there in which I saw one of my first Orchard Orioles.) The blackbird vocalized and flew at the egret, occasionally striking it. The egret seemed to shrug this off, moving a few strides away, but the blackbird persisted, continuing to harass. The blackbird was so insistent that he coaxed a croak out of the egret. Eventually the egret flew off down Barnyard Run. A few minutes later, we saw a second brief fight farther across the main pond—very difficult to say whether these were the same two birds.

Lots of Great Spangled Fritillaries (Speyeria cybele) flying and feeding on the Swamp Milkweed (Asclepias incarnata) that is coming into bloom. We saw one of these butterflies puddling on the remains of some goose poop on the boardwalk.

all earsThe really interesting find was this jelly mushroom that we came across along the informal trail along Barnyard Run. It keys out to Auricularia auricula, and is apparently edible. An Asian species is called “Cloud Ears;” it is dried and used to flavor soups. Go figure.