A milestone: 4

Five years of A Honey of an Anklet:

  • 2006: We drove out to the Eastern Shore yesterday to say goodbye to Marlie…
  • 2007: Katherine Ellison looks at today’s carbon offset market.
  • 2008: Henry Phillips received a patent for his screwdriver and screws on this day in 1936…
  • 2009: The last play in August Wilson’s cycle of Pittsburgh plays, Radio Golf, is set in 1997…
  • 2010: Just a quick snap to mark my completion of the Fairfax Cross County Trail.

Old Times

Director Michael Kahn and his cast give a cool, clean, faithful reading of Harold Pinter’s enigmatic exploration of memory and friendship. The intermission changeover of the set from the sitting room to the bedroom, specified in the script, serves to disrupt the momentum of the piece; the perfunctory second act (30 minutes, if that) feels as if the narrative arc has fallen off the table.

But this mounting, admirably, makes the story both more transparent and more opaque to me compared to the last time I saw a production. (It couldn’t have anything to do with the intervening twenty years, could it?) Steven Culp’s amiable Deeley is a bit shambling; Tracy Lynn Middendorf is languid in pink satin as Kate; Holly Twyford’s brittle Anna makes us wish that she had known as much fun as a young girl in London as she claims to have.

  • Old Times, by Harold Pinter, directed by Michael Kahn, Shakespeare Theatre Company, Washington

Selby decoded

Nothing too hard to figure out, but I found it interesting as a bit of antique technology.

The machines finally stopped and [Lucy] told the children to sit right there and she emptied the machines then sat back on the bench and waited to use the extractor. While she waited a woman came in with a cart of clothes and asked if she could use the extractor, the one in her laundromat across the way broke down. The woman in charge told her she would have to wait until all her people were finished, that she couldnt let people from other buildings come in here and use her extractor until her people were finished and she didnt know if theyd be finished in time, it was getting late and there were a awful lot of people waiting and she had to close soon.

—Hubert Selby, Jr., Last Exit to Brooklyn (1957), pp. 260-261

There are several online definitions of extractor that fit the specific sense of a laundry machine more advanced than a wringer, among them Infoplease’s “a centrifuge for spinning wet laundry so as to remove excess water”.

Frederick City Watershed

Our wrapup field trip took us to the Frederick City Watershed Cooperative WMA (part of the municipal forest property), on Catoctin Mountain between the national park and Gambrill State Park. We were cleared for netting in this area, and fortunately it’s not deer season, so we got good up-close looks at three skippers, Little Glassywing (Pompeius verna), Northern Cloudywing (Thorybes pylades), and Tawny-edged Skipper (Polites themistocles), as well as a Summer Azure (Celastrina ladon neglecta). I am still struggling with IDs of Papilio swallowtails, but Pat called Spicebush and Pipevine for the butterflies we brought in.

The destination butterfly for this area, however, is Edwards’ Hairstreak (Lycaena phlaeas), which is dependent on scrub oak and barrens habitat. Starting from a parking area on Gambrill Park Road north of Five Forks, Pat led us to a heathy patch (Vaccinium in fruit) known to be a hotspot. We were extremely fortunate to find several individuals, many of them ventrally basking on the oak foliage (Quercus ilicifolia). My field trip organization skills let me down however, so I was without means for good photographic documentation. The butterflies didn’t seem to mind.

Content farm byproducts

Sad: Laura Miller reports on the glut of spammy content being sold as e-books.

Do not doubt, either, that book spammers will find their way around plagiarism detectors just as email spammers seem able to defy the most vigilant filters. Take, for example, the supremely banal How to Plan and Budget a Family Vacation, currently available from the Kindle store in its [Private Label Rights] form as the work of Debra Pauling. Someone named Shafiq Shah has published the same book under the title How to Manage Holidays With Family, altering the text by running it through some kind of processor, perhaps translating it from English to a foreign language and back again?

Whatever Shah did to How to Plan and Budget a Family Vacation, the result is a bizarre yet strangely appealing word salad. Behold the opening sentences: “The unit holiday has been portrayed in umpteen ways. From National Lampoon’s ‘Holiday’ showing the trials and tribulations of the Griswold pedigree trying to get to ‘Saphead Humans’ to ‘The Zealous Alfresco’ with Gospels Candy and his clan transaction out a cabin in the woods only to showdown a meddling carry.”

Warner decoded

Or, rather, not.

I rather like it that William W. Warner doesn’t slow down to define every bit of terminology that he uses in Beautiful Swimmers: Watermen, Crabs, and the Chesapeake Bay. Words like cultch and shunpike (a great word, that) are fairly accessible through desk dictionaries. But the following passage defies lookup:

Presently the Dorolena threads the long, dredged channel into Tangier [Island]’s crowded harbor. Crab ponds and shanties are everywhere, and on shore one can detect busy people shuttling around on bicycles and golf carts. The feeling of having arrived somewhere out-of-the-way is very strong; passengers line the rail in anticipation of setting foot on this dot of land in the emptiest reaches of the Chesapeake. Indeed, for all true nesophiles, the journey on the Dorolena is reason enough to go to Tangier. (ch. 10, p. 244)

The mystery word doesn’t ruin the sense of the paragraph, but what exactly does Warner mean by nesophile? My fat dictionaries downstairs offer no help; online sources likewise. Bing, somewhat inexplicably, offers Anne-Sophie Mutter’s official site.

Is a nesophile a lover of islands? A devotee of hard-working ships like the Dorolena, a freight-passenger-mail vessel in service more than 30 years? Or is it someone who likes being in the middle of nowhere? Was Warner going for mesophile and mistyped?

For scale

for scaleSo before I whacked this Paulownia tomentosa to the ground I thought I would get some photographic evidence. Leta helped out, but balked at doing a fan dance with the dinner plate-sized leaves. More fool I for not identifying the tree (known as Princess-Tree or Blue Catalpa) last year and letting it overwinter. There are several other weeds along this side of the house that I need to deal with, as I clean up after the overgrown juniper that was damaged by recent winters, but one thing at a time, please. Besides, I rather like Pokeweed.

How did it get here? Well, Sibley describes the fruit as “pods persistent, brownish, splitting open to release hundreds of seeds.”

Montgomery County butterflies

for next yearOur first stop on today’s field trip, part of Pat Durkin’s class on butterflies and their conservation, was to Black Hill Regional Park and a captive breeding facility for Baltimore Checkerspot (Euphydryas phaeton). This relative of the Pearl Crescent is dependent on wet conditions and its host plant of Turtlehead (Chelone glabra); in Maryland, it’s in decline but has earned special attention because its black and gold colors recall Lord Baltimore’s livery. It overwinters as larvae, wrapped in a self-spun web of silk. Adults from the first breeding season in this modest facility (a pair of mesh-walled pup tents) have already flown, but they have left a promising egg mass on this Turtlehead leaf.

starting pointWe then moved on to the Native Grassland Conservancy property, 23 acres leased from Seneca Creek State Park. Randy Pheobus showed us the work that the conservancy is doing, attempting to reclaim this old field, overrun with some nasty invasives like Johnsongrass and Canada Thistle. Randy is passionate and very persuasive about the need to protect grassland and meadow habitat in the mid-Atlantic. While forests and wetlands warrant legal protections and mitigation, grasslands are in a “blindspot” and get short shrift, according to Randy.

the first patchAfter three years of work, he and other volunteers have established four tiny beachheads of native grassland plants, including the one you see here. Randy’s team has transplanted Little Bluestem (Schizachyrium scoparium), a grass, and Viola sagittata, a heliophilic violet. Not everything you see in the plot is native, but there are about 50 native species represented. As Randy might say, you have to pick your battles. The plastic pot holds rotting Star of Bethlehem, which apparently deters the deer population. Elsewhere on the property, a native thistle, Cirsium discolor, is gaining ground. Randy describes thistles as the keystone of any project managed for pollinators.

As interesting as the botany was, we were there to look at butterflies. The class found an even dozen species at this stop, including a fine Variegated Fritillary (Euptoieta claudia) and a couple of skippers that I hadn’t met, and I added several names to my extremely short twitcher’s list. We agreed that netting a butterfly and transferring it to an observation jar is trickier than it looks.

good spottingOn the way back to the cars we left at the park, we made a quick stop at a garden planted for Monarchs; most of the planting has gone to Dogbane (Apocynum sp.) and were rewarded with great looks at a Banded Hairstreak (Satyrium calanus).

bobrauschenbergamerica

I recently worked on a project in which the director spent a fair amount of time arranging actors in space so that viewers could observe how the actions of one character affected another. That principle of basic stagecraft is sublimely flouted by Forum Theatre’s production of Charles L. Mee’s bobrauschenbergamerica. The black box of Round House Theatre’s Silver Spring second stage is configured galley style, and director Derek Goldman often positions his players at opposite ends of the playing space, so we in the audience ping-pong from one to another, watching reactions. Often there are little wordless subplots going on in the corners of the stage, bits of nonsense worthy of Ernie Kovacs, and we just don’t know where to look.

It’s an exuberant production of Mee’s dramatic collage that matches the tone of sculptor Robert Rauschenberg’s three-dimensional assemblages of castoffs and intimate materials. Consider Carl’s (Aaron Reeder’s) joyful dance with a load of laundry, or the zany movie scenario described by Becker (Maboud Ebrahimzadeh) and acted out by the ensemble cast, or the delicious batch of martinis mixed by Phil’s Girl (Chelsey Christensen). The grounded Annie Houston (as Bob’s Mom) digs into Rauschenberg’s small town roots with a narration fit for an old photo album but set on a slideshow of the artist’s works. In this yard sale of the mind, people expound on astronomy while slurping a Texas picnic’s worth of watermelon, or rant about sexual politics while stuffing cake in their mouths. Or beat the crap out of an aluminum trash can with a baseball bat. Or just tell silly chicken jokes.

The final tableau, in which all of Rauschenberg’s ladders to the stars and bathtubs and old license plates are brought center stage into one meta-assemblage, is sublime.

  • bobrauschenbergamerica, by Charles L. Mee, directed by Derek Goldman, Forum Theatre, Silver Spring, Maryland

Some lists: 11

Via kottke.org, the Guardian‘s list of the greatest 100 nonfiction books. I’m acquainted with about a fifth of the titles, if you count a couple high school assignments: lots of hits in the society category, not so much in politics, history, and travel. Some odd choices here: as much as I enjoyed it 30 years ago, I’m not sure that I would choose Douglas Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid as the sole representative in the mathematics category.