Five things I had to look up/check that I came across in Roz Chast’s marvelous, hyper-specific Can’t We Talk about Something More Pleasant?:
- Waldbaum’s supermarket
- Newkirk Avenue on the 2 and the 5
- Placenta previa
- Rexograph
- Dr. Brown’s Cel-Ray
theater, natural history and conservation, the utterly mundane, and Etruscan 8-tracks
Five things I had to look up/check that I came across in Roz Chast’s marvelous, hyper-specific Can’t We Talk about Something More Pleasant?:
TIL, thanks to Arthur V. Evans’ recent Beetles of Eastern North America, that a Japanese Beetle (Popillia japonica) has five white tufts along each side of the abdomen. You can just make them out in this image I snapped a couple of summers ago at Black Hill of a Wheel Bug (Arilus cristatus) munching on one of the beetles.
Alan Ford led a workshop on grass ID at Wakefield Park for the Potowmack Chapter of the Virginia Native Plant Society. Tips and reminders of some training that I took from Cris Fleming a couple of years ago. Grasses are sneaky hard to get into good focus with my happy snap camera, so most of my images remain on my hard drive.
Five gleanings:
I did get an acceptable image of the jizz of the delicate open panicles of Purple Love Grass (Eragrostis spectabilis), a species that many people love and that I have trouble recognizing.
Five last vocabulary builders from Robbe-Grillet’s La Jalousie. Most of these appear over and over again in the book:
- la fente
- slit, as between the slats of a jalousie
- la pente
- slope
- aplatir
- to flatten
- étendu (p.p. of étendre)
- outstretched, extensive
- l’accoudoir (m.)
- armrest
Five words and phrases from Robbe-Grillet’s La Jalousie that I know I never learned in high school:
- le margouillat
- any of various species of lizard; on the narrator’s banana plantation, probably the gecko Hemidactylus frenatus
- l’igname (f.)
- yam, of genus Dioscorea
- la crémone
- window-latch, perhaps named for the city of the same name
- zone blanche
- “blank area”, in Richard Howard’s translation; blanc having the senses of “unwritten”, “innocent”
A… n’est plus à la fenêtre. Ni celle-ci ni aucune des deux autres ne révèle sa présence dans la pièce. Et il n’y a plus de raison pour la supposer dans l’une quelconque des trois zones blanches, plutôt que dans une autre.
A… is no longer at the window. Neither this window nor either of the two others reveals her presence in the room. And there is no longer any reason to suppose her in any one of the three blank areas rather than in any other.
- dans le sens inverse des aiguilles d’une montre
- counterclockwise
Five words from Robbe-Grillet’s La Jalousie that I had to look up and probably have unlearned since high school:
- en revanche
- on the other hand
- demeurer
- to remain
- quelconque
- any, with connotations of ordinary, banality; n’importe lequel
- écarter
- to spread open
- la paroi
- interior partition, wall
Five North American birds that I find exceptionally beautiful to look at. I’ve been fortunate to see all of these, at one time or another.
Coolest last names of the NHL (polysyllable conference):
Five nature fun facts from today’s winter weeds workshop with Stephanie Mason:
Five (and five more) obsolete common names for birds, taken from the index to Richard H. Pough, Audubon Bird Guide: Small Land Birds of Eastern & Central North America from Southern Texas to Central Greenland, 1946 and 1949, and their modern synonyms.
Stuff that’s just fun to say:
Fortunately, 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.”
Five genres on my iPod not likely to be found elsewhere, as assigned by me:
Nearby cities that I have never visited (expressways and airports don’t count):