Category: Words Words Words

Ulysses

If you’re one of us Joyceans, then likely you have a favorite chapter of this strapping big book. No matter which of the eighteen you fancy, you will taste a delicious sample of it in this 3-hour reduction of Ulysses—introduced through the fourth wall by Scott Shepherd. (If you’re not familiar with/entranced by the book, hopefully you will find something of interest, be it the orchestrated chaos of “Circe” or the quiet opening of “Telemachus.” A handy synopsis of the material is available.) Only “Penelope” is presented in full, a gentle, intimate reading by Maggie Hoffman.

Myself, I’m partial to “Eumaeus” and “Ithaca,” with Shepherd answering the questions with ghostly reverb. But it’s the explosion of sound (Ben Williams) and projections (Matthew Deinhart) in “Aeolus” that knocked my socks off, every clank of the printing press turned up to 11. KMRIA!

Shepherd again breaks the fourth wall at two other points, to unpack the subtle satire of “Cyclops,” and before that to poke at a question that had not occurred to me: Bloom appears certain that Boylan will visit Molly at 4 PM, but nowhere in the text are we given an explanation of how he knows that.

Of necessity, this “greatest hits” interpretation of the book omits some characters in the interest of clarity, but there still are scads of characters for this vituoso ensemble to embody—among them, Stephanie Weeks as an oversexed Martha Clifford; Kate Benson as Zoe, Myles Crawford, and The Citizen; and Vin Knight as Leopold Bloom. A wonderful choice is to have two actors speak some of the internal monologue lines simultaneously, both the actor-character and a narrator. In Shepherd’s introduction, he suggests that every reading of a text is a misreading, and indeed this production amps up the juicy, saucy bits (see above, something for everyone). Most characters speak with an American dialect; perhaps some of the music is lost. To that end, I was somewhat taken aback by the pronunciation of Mr Deasy’s name as “DEE-zee.”

One more nugget that I’ve never noticed before: Molly speaks of men and their “20 pockets.” Yes, we are usually blessed with an abundance of places to store cakes of soap and potatoes and mash notes, but why 20? Did Molly come up with that number herself?

  • Ulysses, created by Elevator Repair Service, text by James Joyce, co-direction and dramaturgy by Scott Shepherd, directed by John Collins, The Public Theater, Martinson Hall, New York

Some links: 111

Some links: 110

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Since I like to pick apart scientific names of plants, let’s look at the name of Spicebush (Lindera benzoin), whose fruits are just now ripening to red here in the mid-Atlantic. That benzoin is interesting; it suggests benzene. Do they have something in common? And which came first?

Well, it’s easy to figure out which came first, as Linnaeus named the plant in the 18th century, while Kekulé worked out the structure of benzene (the simplest aromatic hydrocarbon) in the 19th century, after Michael Faraday and others first isolated the chemical and named it earlier in the century. Benzene (benzin, benzol) was derived from benzoic acid, which in turn was derived from gum benzoin. Gum benzoin, known since antiquity, is an aromatic resin made from the bark of several species of trees in the genus Styrax.

So where did the word benzoin come from? Doesn’t sound very Latin. It’s traced back to Middle French benjoin, to Catalan benjuí, to Arabic لُبَان جَاوِيّ (lubān jāwiyy, “Javanese frankincense”).

And just to bring it back home, we have two native species of Styrax in Virginia, American Snowbell (S. americanus) and Bigleaf Snowbell (S. grandifolius). Both are found in the southern counties of the state.

A mystery: 31

A word that pops up in Elmer Rice’s Street Scene, both the stage play (1929) and the screenplay (1931):

SHIRLEY [to SAM, referring to ROSE]. I don’t see, just when you’re graduating from college, why you want to get mixed up with a little batzimer like that!

Shirley (played by Anna Konstant [or Ann Kostant]) pronounces it BATE-sim-uh, or something like that, which suggests that it might also be transcribed as behtzimmer.

The closed captioning on the TCM streaming version of the film doesn’t even try to transcribe the word.

Modulo some search hits on the name of a porn performer, the only thing that turns up is some semi-speculation in a comment thread, suggesting the word has a connection to bathroom. But I’m not convinced, because that would suggest a pronunciation like BAHT-sim-uh.

German bettzimmer is bedroom, perhaps more promising.

It could always be something that Rice heard wrong, or just made up.

How many houses

§18 Don’t let it bother you that languages (2) and (8) consist only of orders. If you want to say that they are therefore incomplete, ask yourself whether our own language is complete—whether it was so before the symbolism of chemistry and the notation of the infinitesimal calculus were incorporated in to it; for these are, so to speak, suburbs of our language. (And how many houses or streets does it take before a town begins to be a town?) Our language can be regarded as an ancient city: a maze of little streets and squares, of old and new houses, of houses with extensions from various periods, and all this surrounded by a multitude of new suburbs with straight and regular streets and uniform houses.

—Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations,
trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker, and Joachim Schulte

Some links: 105

  • Full of stars: It’s only been 100 years since we learned that there are other galaxies out there.
  • Ooh, I’ll have to root around in my botany glossary: “You scalar implicature!”
  • MLM mind games:

    They will often try to get you to accompany them to a conference or other gathering where you will be surrounded by people who are just as eager to tell you how successful and happy they are while complimenting you for being smart enough to sense the opportunity.

    I can confirm, from personal experience, a version of this practice.

And for the DOGEs in the back:

Some links: 100

  • Walter Shawlee, slipstick reseller, has passed.

    Over time, his customers included a weather station in Antarctica, where many electronic gadgets could not take the cold; photo editors responsible for adjusting image sizes (they like slide rules for their clear displays of different values for the same ratio); an archaeologist who found that calculators got too dusty to work properly during digs; the drug company Pfizer, which gave away slide rules as gifts during a trade show; slide rule enthusiasts in Afghanistan and French Polynesia; and “guys from NASA,” Mr. Shawlee told Engineering Times in 2000.

  • Sorry, overwintering turtles don’t breathe through their butts.

    The notion that cloacal gas exchange helps North American turtles survive long winters trapped under the ice is pervasive in pop science, but to date, there is no solid evidence that hidden-necked turtles use cloacal gas exchange. The skin and mouth lining are where gas exchange happens during winter hibernation.

  • The Old English for spider is gange-wæfre (“walker-weaver”).
  • From Zack Stanton for McSweeney’s, “Morrissey or Trump?”

    This could only happen to me / Who has been through anything like this?

  • Guest column for Washington Business Journal by Alan Berube and Tracy Hadden Loh: “Caps and Wizards moving to Virginia isn’t ‘regionalism.’ It’s gaslighting.”