Smith decoded

So. So the fact is, at the end of the 4th century Greenwich was covered in the kind of plant life and so on that grows over the places no one goes to or uses. Probably there was a lot of ancient wildlife which came when that happened, the equivalents of frogs and hedgehogs and the kinds of things that come and inhabit places like on Springwatch on TV. On that programme they tell you how to make a wilderness in your garden so that live things will come and visit it or even decide to make their homes there. Some of them can be quite rare like the bird that is called a willow warbler which used to be widespread but now there are hardly any. But the point is, places that right now right this minute are places people go to in London and do not think twice about being in, can seriously just disappear. (There but for the, p. 286)

Ali Smith’s ten-year-old narrator Brooke has the gist of the conservation argument, but her facts regarding the status of Willow Warbler (Phylloscopus trochilus) are not quite there. Across Europe, the bird is not listed as a species of concern; it’s only in Britain that populations have fallen off, placing it on Amber conservation status.

Holiday weekend

zoom zoomzoom zoom zoomLast weekend was a time of watching things go very fast—the Baltimore Grand Prix, from our grandstand on Pratt Street. The people we saw on the office building roofs had the best vantage point. Leta was bemused by the sponsorship of Braille Battery.

Pekoe at easeAnd for watching things that go much slower, but not necessarily quieter. Pekoe’s purr has been known to approach the triple-digit decibel range.

Bollard envy

Via DCist, images of jersey walls and other security barriers in the District of Columbia, signs of the pernicious growth of what Tom Sherwood called “securicrat” culture. But, writes Sherwood,

Look up beyond the barricaded doors and bomb-proof glass to see how many flagpoles sprout from private and government buildings. Take a moment to enjoy the sight of Old Glory waving in the wind. (We particularly like the big flag on Freedom Plaza, an aptly named space on Pennsylvania Avenue.)

Look at those flags that stand for freedom — and for a country that honors freedom and tries to export it to the world. That’s the America we want to see. And we want to see it with as few barriers as possible.

Pause on 9/11 to honor the victims of those horrible attacks, but don’t give in to fear. It would be downright un-American of you.

Lewis decoded

Two proper names in Babbitt, both of which the Library of America edition’s editors chose not to gloss (although the note on the Torrens system of registering land titles is quite helpful):

The customer joined him in the worship of machinery, and they came buoyantly up to the tenement and began that examination of plastic slate roof, kalamein doors, and seven-eighths-inch blind-nailed flooring, began those diplomacies of hurt surprise and readiness to be persuaded to do something they had already decided to do, which would some day result in a sale. (ch. VI)

Kalamein was used as a trade name for the sheet metal cladding on doors and windows, applied as a fireproofing measure in the absence of high-quality timber. As John M. Corbett writes,

A century ago, wood windows were first clad in zinc coated or zinc plated steel, with the object of making them fire resistant, and marketed under the trade name “Kalamein”. This name refers to calamine, the mineral which furnishes the ore from which zinc, the eighth metal known to man, is extracted…. While the trade name “Kalamein” seems no longer to be maintained, the terms “kalamein”, “kalamien” and “calamine” persist, referring to the general practice of cladding architectural elements in sheet metal of any composition.

The implication of the passage from the 1920s by Sinclair Lewis is that kalamein, like the plastic slate, offered an inexpensive, relatively safe dwelling. Somewhat paradoxically, Corbett, addressing architectural restoration, says that kalamein doors now are no longer cheap.

It turns out that I’ve already done the research for the second mystery name. Babbitt is stumping around the city’s ethnic neighborhoods for mayoral candidate Lucas Prout:

Crowded in his car, they came driving up to Turnverein Hall, South Zenith…

I found a Turnverein Hall in Sacramento last month.

Schooled

“Now you look here! The first thing you got to understand is that all this uplift and flipflop and settlement-work and recreation is nothing in God’s world but the entering wedge for socialism. The sooner a man learns that he isn’t going to be coddled, and he needn’t expect a lot of free grub and, uh, all these free classes and flipflop and doodads for his kids unless he earns ’em, why, the sooner he’ll get on the job and produce—produce—produce! That’s what the country needs, and not all this fancy stuff that just enfeebles the will-power of the working man and gives his kids a lot of notions above their class.”

—Sinclair Lewis, Babbitt (1922), chap. II

Virginia earthquake 23 August 2011

needed a new clock anywaya little cleanup to doAt home, the quake left a little evidence of its passing. In the basement, some coffee cans of picture framing hardware spilled from the top of a high shelf, and a clock likewise fell.

Upstairs in the back bedroom a lamp tipped over and a lava lamp hit the deck. I am very grateful it fell on carpet and did not smash. Everything else looks just like I left it this morning. The various cracks in the walls, the result of the house’s settling ever since I started loading my belongings into it twenty years ago, are no worse than before.

Great Falls grasslands

our fallsSo the last place you would probably expect a workshop on grasses identification to take place would be Great Falls Park. It turns out, however, that the park harbors some specialized habitat—globally rare, according to trip leader Cris Fleming—that is especially hospitable to Poaceae and the other graminoids.

high water marksThe Potomac River’s periodic floods, every twenty or so years, is the key to the grasses’ success. Right along the edge of Mather Gorge, large trees don’t get a chance to establish a closed canopy which would shade the grasses out.

bedrock terraceThe result is tiny patches of specialized plant communities that otherwise you’d expect to see in the tallgrass prairie of the Great Plains. Tucked into the crags and clinging to the extremely thin soil are species like Big Bluestem (Andropogon gerardii), Little Bluestem (Schizachyrium scoparium), and various Panicum species, like Switchgrass. Members of some other plant families like it here, too, like the flashy blue Dense Blazing Star (Liatris spicata), the diminutive Whorled Milkweed (Asclepias verticillata), and Wingstem (Verbesina alternifolia).

no one sowed themIt should come as no surprise that grasses are a challenging photographic subject, especially when the photographer and gear are of the point-and-shoot variety. But I did manage to snap this image of Wild Oats (Chasmanthium latifolium) in a slightly shadier spot.

keying it outOf the fescue tribe of the grass family, we looked at Elymus virginicus, Virginia Wild Rye (not related to the domesticated rye), with its aggresively long awns; Bottle-brush Grass (E. hystrix), looking like a herringbone; Purple-top (Tridens flavum), also known as Greasegrass: it feels more tacky than greasy. North of the visitor center, in the bed of the Potowmack Canal, we saw two Leersia species, including Rice Cutgrass. My old posts suggest that this native plant is a problem at Huntley Meadows Park, but we saw just a small patch here. It does resemble the violently aggressive Stilt-grass (Microstegium vimineum), but its leaf lacks the silvery pale midrib.

We also found some nice examples of non-grasses, a nice sedge (Cyperus strigosus) and a rush all in fruit (Juncus tenuis) ekeing out life on the towpath. Elsewhere, the Black Gums (Nyssa sylvatica) are starting to go red in the leaves. Black Vultures (Coragyps atratus) were kettling and generally hanging out with the more numerous Turkey Vultures.

Hesitation, doubt, and ambiguity

Bill Keller proposes that the current occupants of the Capitol would benefit from a little poetry:

Poetry is no substitute for courage or competence, but properly applied, it is a challenge to self-certainty, which we currently have in excess. Poetry serves as a spur to creative thinking, a rebuke to dogma and habit, an antidote to the current fashion for pledge signing.

He quotes from William Carlos Williams (somehow I had remembered these lines as coming from Whitman): “It is difficult/to get the news from poems/yet men die miserably every day/for lack/of what is found there.”

His colleague David Orr suggests some works that might serve as antidotes to the paralysis. I think Kay Ryan’s “All You Did” is especially pertinent.

Something Past in Front of the Light

Longacre Lea makes good on its promise of “physical productions of cerebral works” with this year’s Something Past in Front of the Light, an articulate, allusive, provoking examination of the nature of faith in the divine: whose promises can you trust?

Alexander Strain is stunning as a young man who presents himself to Christopher Henley’s documentary filmmaker with a once-in-a-lifetime proposition. Strain’s character, so he says, is The Devil—Beelzebub himself—and the wants Henley to tell the story of his life. He can provide some home movie clips to fill in the details.

Whoever he is, Satan, or “Stan” as he comes to be known, is not of this world. He inhabits Strain’s body like one of David Byrne’s big suits; the voice is overloud and the social niceties ignored, as if he were somewhere in the midband of the autism spectrum; a barefoot, awkward gait recalls Shaw’s hoofed demon in Man and Superman. When Stan chooses to participate in a conversation, he speaks in koans—or are they midrashim? The easy sentiments of a pop love song, as well as the rare display of integrity of character, are equally likely to spin him into a collapse to the floor.

Kathleen Akerley’s script places this personification of negativity in a pop/classical culture context. Stan imagines the Crucifixion as a stage-managed cinematic event; a catfight on a strangely reflexive television reality program echoes the postures of Laocoön and his sons. A second-act encounter with Stan’s nemesis, his Other, is somewhat unsatisfying, suggesting as it does an audience with Bokonon over closed-circuit TV. But then, it was Satan who arranged this meeting. Double bluff?

  • Something Past in Front of the Light, written and directed by Kathleen Akerley, Longacre Lea, Callan Theatre, Washington