The slow season

Manhola Dargis responds to fellow Times columnnist Dan Kois:

…The Hangover Part II, which I find boring, raked in $137.4 million over the five-day Memorial Day weekend. It’s the kind of boring that makes money, partly because it’s the boring that many people like, want to like, insist on liking or are just used to, and partly because it’s the sort of aggressively packaged boring you can’t escape, having opened on an estimated 17 percent of American screens. Filled with gags and characters recycled from the first Hangover, the sequel is grindingly repetitive and features scene after similar scene of characters staring at one another stupidly, flailing about wildly and asking what happened. This is the boring that Andy Warhol, who liked boring, found, well, boring.

I like it

Already widely linked, and even parodied, Jonathan Franzen’s op ed piece, adapted from a commencement address, is still highly linkable. Franzen’s like/love distinction reminds me of another excellent piece from the Times, Russell Baker’s “Why Being Serious Is Hard.” (My clipping of Baker’s column has, alas, gone missing.) Baker made a similar distinction between passionate commitment to something, even to the point of looking silly (“being serious”), and merely going along with the flow (“being solemn”).

Sage decoded

Robert Sage, in his contribution to the Joyce symposium Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress, looks at the prosody of this passage from what would become Finnegans Wake:

She was just a young thin pale soft shy slim slip of a thing then, sauntering, by silvamoonlake and he was a heavy trudging lurching lieabroad of a Curraghman, making his hay for whose sun to shine on, as tough as the oaktrees (peats be with them!) used to rustle that time down by the dykes of killing Kildare, for forstfellfoss with a plash across her. (Book I, chapter 8, known as “The Washers at the Ford”, p. 202 in the Viking edition)

Here’s part of Sage’s analysis:

Then comes the stronger three-syllable word sauntering, indicating development (adolescence) and leading by a short beat to the epitritus silvamoonlake, signifying full growth (maturity), the further associations with the latter stage being sylvan and the silver moon reflected in the lake. (p. 168)

So I marked epitritus in the margin, and when I got home started tracking it down. An internet search founders on the various inflections of the four-to-three ratio and a genus of ants. Randel’s Harvard Dictionary of Music offers, “A sesquitertian ratio, e.g., 4:3, which characterizes the interval of a perfect fourth.” Not what I had in mind. So let’s hit Webster II. Nothing under epitritus, but epitrite is glossed as: “A foot consisting of three long and one short syllables;—so called from being compounded of a spondee (which contains 4 times, or morae) with an iamb or a trochee (which contain 3 times). It is called 1st, 2d, 3d, or 4th epitrite according as the short syllable stands 1st, 2d, etc.”

I think that Sage heard the second syllable of silvamoonlake as the unstressed one, making this a second epitrite, but it’s a close call. To me, the four syllables sound almost equally stressed.

Not a moment too soon

Metro is considering a return to sanity, and by sanity I mean at least following its own guidelines for station names, as Kytja Weir reports. A naming policy review is planned for this week.

Some 15 of the 86 existing stations violate the 19-character limit, Metro says, and seven of those have more than one hyphen or slash mark separating the names.

Transfer stations have an even higher violation rate: three of the eight hubs exceed the 13-character limit.

The problem was highlighted last week when the blog Greater Greater Washington sponsored a fantasy map contest, asking its readers to submit redesigns of the existing Metro map. Of the 17 submissions, some maps struggled to fit the long names on their designs — and left off some stations altogether.

(Link via Washington Business Journal.)

(Washington Examiner web site team, your hack of the copy button is not unnoticed.)

Silver Line progress report: 18

two levelsThe teal-blue frame of the elevator shaft is visible rising above the mezzanine level of the future station for Wiehle Avenue. Concrete station walls have been poured, with the surface finished in Metro’s signature rough board-and-batten pattern.

With the closure of the Reston East park and ride lot, I have to be more creative in finding places to park so that I can stop and take these shots.

Good for something

Dr. Caren Cooper is collecting data on variation in House Sparrow (Passer domesticus) eggs.

Because House Sparrows are a nonnative species, they are undesirable inhabitants of nest boxes in North America, but they are an easily accessible study species that can be used to address ecological questions without disturbing native birds.

Researchers at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology are studying this species to help better understand the enormous variation in eggshell patterns and color. House Sparrow eggs exhibit an extraordinary amount of variation. Eggshell coloration and pattern may vary with available calcium, sunlight patterns, or habitat quality, and are expected to differ seasonally and geographically as well.

NestWatch participants are encouraged to submit digital photographs of eggs to Dr. Cooper, together with sufficient information to make scientific comparisons. Follow the link for more details.

Sugarloaf wildflowers

After a misty start, the weather proved especially cooperative for our final field trip for spring wildflower ID. Would that my point and shoot had done the same. I made suitable images neither of a darling yellow flower of the amaryllis or lily families, Yellow Stargrass (Hypoxis hirsuta), nor of the delicate Canada Mayflower (Maianthemum canadense), another lily.

Along Mt. Ephraim Road, where it crosses Bear Branch, to the west of the Sugarloaf Mountain summit, we compared the wiry stem of Indian Cucumber Root (Medeola virginiana) (yet another lily) to the fleshy stem of the pogonias, in this case Large Whorled Pogonia (Isotria verticillata) (an orchis family member). We also found some lingering fruits of Partidgeberry (Mitchella repens) along with this year’s tiny red flower buds in pairs. Coltsfoot (Tussilago farfara), looking like a dandelion as the flower is opening, is easy to distinguish from its fellow Composite when you see the somewhat hoof-shaped leaf.

don't insult itThe bottomland along the stream turned out to be a bonanza for non-spermatophytes, with at least five ferns in evidence. These are early fronds of Sensitive Fern (Onoclea sensibilis), so named because it dies back after the first frost.

neighAnd as an added bonus, a completely different division of the vascular plants: Equisetophyta, the horsetails. This drift of plants, per one general guide, is Field Horsetail (Equisetum arvense).

We then took a quick drive and climb to the summit, finding hawkweed along the roadside and blueberries as we mounted the stairs. Up top, there are a few tiny patches of Pink Lady’s Slipper (Cypripedium acaule)—I think I prefer Moccasin Flower for its common name. Also some nonreproducing American Chestnut trees (Castanea dentata). We went in search of Checkerberry but only found a group of five-plus Mourning Cloak butterflies (Nymphalis antiopa).

blackjackAlso scratching out a living on the summit, along with the Table Mountain Pine, is the leather-leaved Blackjack Oak (Quercus marilandica).

Threaded

As I was saying: we have come/ (or are we still going?) to a/ point where it is necessary to/ speak at cross purposes with what/ we are saying. It is because what-/ ever we were saying so failed to/ hit the mark. Now at last we know that/ saying one thing requires saying/ the opposite in order to keep the/ whole statement from being like/ a Hollywood set. Perhaps it would/ be better to be silent, but a) someone/ else would be speaking; and b) it/ wouldn’t keep us from going and we/ would continue doing what we/ are doing.

—John Cage, “Where Are We Going? And What Are We Doing?” (1961), collected in Silence

Please give

Recent disasters, natural and man-made, in Japan, Haiti, the Gulf of Mexico call out to us: we want to give time and money to alleviate suffering and mitigate environmental damage. And there’s nothing wrong with that.

But several columnists have pointed out that the need for charitable giving is a 24/7/365 thing (among them Holden Karnofsky at GiveWell). The earthquake victims are still under duress even after their tour through the news cycle. Often, what’s needed most at a disaster scene isn’t what’s easiest to fit in an envelope. Donated funds that are earmarked for relief of a particular calamity hamper organizations’ ability to deploy resources where they are most needed.

The best way to help is to establish a long-term relationship with a few select organizations, and to make unrestricted gifts. There is a handful of groups that I have helped for ten years or more, through thick and mostly through thin: there’s been maybe a year following a layoff when I wasn’t able to give. But when times are flush, I try to give more, and to more organizations.

To the extent that a particular sharp event cracks open your wallet, keep the relationship going. I made my first contribution to the American Red Cross in the aftermath of 9/11, and I’ve been giving slowly but steadily since.