Getting off the carousel

For most men and women these thirty years [between thirty-five and sixty-five] are taken up with a gradual withdrawal from life, a retreat first from a front with many shelters, those myriad amusements and curiosities of youth, to a line with less, when we peel down our ambitions to one ambition, our recreations to one recreation, our friends to a few to whom were are anæsthetic; ending up at last in a solitary, desolate strong point that is not strong, where the shells now whistle abominably, now are but half-heard as, by turns frightened and tired, we sit waiting for death.

—F. Scott Fitzgerald, ‘”O Russet Witch!”‘, iv

Fitzgerald decoded: 2

F. Scott Fitzgerald may have committed neologism in his story from 1922, “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz” (I’m reading the version collected as Tales of the Jazz Age in the Library of America edition, pp. 913-953). Rich scion John Unger is visiting his richer school friend Percy Washington in Percy’s family retreat, a Hearstian fastness in cis-Canadian Montana:

On one of the towers, the tallest, the blackest at its base, an arrangement of exterior lights at the top made a sort of floating fairyland—and as John gazed up in warm enchantment the faint acciaccare sound of violins drifted down in a rococo harmony that was like nothing he had heard before.

Now my desktop source, The New Harvard Dictionary of Music (Don Michael Randel, ed.), defines acciaccatura as a musical ornament of the 17th and 18th centuries, featuring a nonharmonic tone that is neither prepared nor resolved. Randel proposes a derivation “perhaps from acciaccare, to crush.” But he doesn’t provide an English musical sense for acciaccare on its own.

Google Books does turn up James F. Warner’s 1841 translation from the German of Godfrey Weber’s General Music Teacher, which does treat the two words together in one glossary entry:

The substantive acciaccatura, from the verb acciaccare, means literally a violent seizing, or attacking, and is employed in a similar sense in music, though it is used in such extremely different applications, that its signification has become entirely indefinite. (p. v)

Not much to hang onto there, and certainly not enough for us to guess what “the faint acciaccare sound of violins” might sound like. Indeed the only examples of acciaccare in English that I’ve found are quotations from Fitzgerald.

By the way, what does “a rococo harmony” suggest to you?

A page previous, Fitzgerald does better. After being picked up at a train flag stop, bouncing along a boulder-flecked road, and undergoing a sort of portage, John and Percy find the way to the castle easier going:

“The worst is over,” said Percy, squinting out the window. “It’s only five miles from here, and our own road—tapestry brick—all the way.”

Tapestry brick was a fancy brick with variable coloration, used to clad buildings. A tony apartment building that opened in Washington in 1925 featured its tapestry brick exterior as a selling point. It would seem to have a rough texture: one source uses “rug face brick” as a synonym and shows a brick with irregular vertical striations. A document prepared by D.C.’s Capitol Hill Preservation Society describes tapestry brick as “usually tan or buff-colored.” Fiske & Co. manufactured what it claimed was “the only Tapestry Brick in the world” and used Tapestry as an unregistered trademark. Their mark, undefended, fell into generic use, and the product ultimately fell out of popularity.

So shiny, polished bricks were out of fashion at the time. Still, I would think they would make for a smoother ride when used as a road surface.

Cat’s Cradle

Kathleen Akerley does a commendable job of wrestling Kurt Vonnegut’s blackly comic novel onto the stage, trimming it to a two-and-a-half-hour evening while retaining good chunks of dialog intact—for instance, the memorable warning by Claire Minton to never index your own book. The script also maintains narrative drive by focusing on narrator Jonah’s (the bemused, solid Michael Glenn) urge to finish the book he is writing about Dr. Felix Hoenikker and his family, in much the same way that the reporter in Citizen Kane maintains a line through that film’s various episodes and reminiscences—or at least until Jonah arrives in San Lorenzo and all hell breaks loose.

The play is also cinematic in its distortion of space and scale: Jonah looks at Franklin Hoenikker’s scale-model town through a magnifier, and the actors become full-size representations of the plasticine people that he sees: bodies as set dressing. In a reversal of scale, Jonah re-enacts in act 3 the destruction of San Lorenzo with a paper doll theater, lip-buzzing the island as the planes in the air show, knocking the six-inch puppets with his hands into the abyss. And in the stunning opening scene with Jonah, a bartender, and a prostitute, Akerley solves the sight-line problems of the Callan’s black box performance space by placing the players in three different playing areas, each with a duplicate set of props: three letters from Newt Hoenikker to Jonah.

Alas, the technical reset necessary to get us into act 3 is a bit of a momentum-killer.

The Longacre Lea regulars are augmented with additional cast members, bringing their numbers to ten to fill the roles of three dozen named characters. Of particular note among Joe Brack, who gives us a manic Franklin Hoenikker, and Danny Gavigan’s clearly defined bartender, cabbie, and Angela Hoenikker.

  • Cat’s Cradle, by Kurt Vonnegut, adapted and directed by Kathleen Akerley, Longacre Lea, Callan Theatre, Washington

Now with less orange

WordPress 3 and it’s time for a theme change. I’ve still got some issues to clean up, but it’s good enough for now. I’m trying to resist the temptation to hack the PHP for this theme; rather, to use the sidebar widgets as much as I can. But there are some things about the old and new themes that just don’t work as well as they should right out of the box. And it looks like the new 2010 Weaver theme’s HTML doesn’t validate. 

Woodend: mushrooms

Despite this week’s rains, there wasn’t too much exciting to be found as I scrounged the woods of Woodend Sanctuary looking for mushrooms in today’s combo field trip/lecture (a makeup for Monday’s class which was powered out). The understory in the forest here is under strong pressure from deer browse, so most of the greenery below head height is spicebush.

However, I did take the opportunity (since I had a large tote with me) to do a little grounds maintenance. I snagged four raggedy tennis balls, three golf balls, a wine glass, and various other shreds of trash.

Döblin decoded

Eugene Jolas’s translation of Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz offers this poser. Karl is being questioned by the authorities about his role in the death of Franz’s girlfriend Mieze:

“Who told you that?” “To bury it? Well, somebody. I just wanta know how I stand. Did I commit a crime when I helped to bury a corpse?” “Look here, the way you put the thing, it’s hardly a crime at all, or only a petty one. If you were not involved at all and had no interest in it. But why did you help?” “I’m tellin’ you, I just gave a hand for friendship’s sake, but that didn’t matter, at any rate, I wasn’t involved in the affair and it didn’t matter to me whether the person was or wasn’t found.” “Was there some kind of femic murder in your gang?” “Well—” (Eighth Book, p. 307)

The only definition that femic turns up is something my geology teacher would be interested: it’s a category of igneous rock with certain proportions of iron and magnesium.

The only explanation that makes sense to me is a missed translation to/from femicide, which does show up in Oxford as “murder of a woman.”

[Untitled]

Vesela Sretenović: Is your lack of interest in making representational or narrative paintings the reason you avoid giving titles to your works?

Robert Ryman: Actually, titles came simply for identification purposes, and nothing was titled until it went out someplace. That’s why most of the small works from the early 1960s that have rarely been shown are still untitled.

VS: In the mid 1960s you started to use titles that were playful and associative, like Lugano, Archive, General, Pace, Courier, Spectrum, etc. You would think they had meaning, until you realized they were brands of paint, office supplies, shipping companies, or industrial materials. Was this an intentional tease?

RR: No, it was just a matter of finding a title that wasn’t so easy to associate with something specific. There was one title, Signet 20, that was from the brush I used, and someone called me and wanted to know if there was another Signet. But it was because it was a number 20 brush—there were not 19 previous Signets. The title Standard was from the company where I got the steel. Standard was just a word that couldn’t make one think of a landscape or a sunset or something.

Robert Ryman: Variations and Improvisations, 2010 (Phillips Collection exhibition catalog)

2 A’s in “Klaatu”

My goodness, two more posts about the sizzling practice of copy editing, this time via The Morning News. First, Lori Fradkin’s “What It’s Really Like to Be a Copy Editor”, followed up with Johnson’s (R.L.G.’s) reply. To which I can only add Charlie Baker’s lament:

CHARLIE: …That’s why she wanted me to go away, you see. She simply finds me shatteringly, profoundly—boring.

FROGGY: Now, why would she think that, eh?

CHARLIE: Oh, because I am. I know it. There I’ve sat behind my gray little proofreader’s desk for twenty-seven years, now—I sometimes wonder whether a science fiction magazine even needs a proofreader. Does anyone really care whether there is one K or two in “Klatu, barada, nikto”?

—Larry Shue, The Foreigner, I:i

So what is the Cleveland airport named?

Via Arts & Letters Daily, Andy Ross interviews Mary Norris about editing copy at The New Yorker.

One stubborn editor refused to believe that “arrhythmia” was spelled with two “r”s. This doesn’t come up often, but it is odd to have someone simply refuse to spell a word right because he thinks it looks funny. It’s almost admirable.

As a side note, Ross notes that there will be a master class on copy editing on 18 October as part of this year’s New Yorker Festival.

Paul Taylor Dance Company 2010

The Taylor company opened its one-night visit to the D.C. suburbs with Brandenburgs (1988), a last-minute replacement for the planned Also Playing. This is one of Taylor’s lovely pieces that achieve such stunning effects with simple gestures—a group of dancers executing simple two-foot turns while rotating in circle, but blindingly fast. Certain of the stage pictures look stylized and flattened, as if Taylor was looking back to an even more distant classical period, his dancers glazed onto the surface of a Greek krater. There’s a ankle-shake ornament that the women do that’s an answer to the musical accompaniment (movements from the J.S. Bach Brandenburg Concertos), sort of a choreographic mordent.

We received the first Washington performance of Phantasmagoria, set on compositions from the Renaissance period, a stew of folk dance and bawdy hijinx wrapped around a poison mushroom of death. Signature Taylor is a dance for four men who comically fail to execute cleanly: as the bumping and shoving degrades into fisticuffs, this bransle has become a genuine brawl. Less effective is another Taylor trope, the Bowery Bum who provides the piece with its second ending.

The evening closes with the powerful Beloved Renegade (2008), inspired by writings of Walt Whitman and scored by passages from François Poulenc’s Gloria. The dance was commissioned in memory of James Harper Marshall by his family. For the most part, this is the Whitman of “The Wound Dresser,” the poet of somber joy who found a path to glory amid the world’s suffering and pain. By turns balletic and vernacular, the piece is a celebration of the mystery of life. Laura Halzack is majestic as the spirit who eventually carries away Michael Trusnovec’s poet in “the sure-enwinding arms of cool-enfolding death.”

  • Paul Taylor Dance Company, Wolf Trap National Park for the Performing Arts, Vienna, Va.

A journalist

Let us mark the passing of Daniel Schorr: hired into Edward Murrow’s news team in the 1950s, named on the Nixon “enemies” list, barred from Khrushchev’s Soviet Union, dubbed a “son of a bitch” by CIA Director Richard Helms. Quite a life of accomplishments.

In the recent past, many of Schorr’s radio commentaries came off as nothing more than a recap of the week’s events. Perhaps that was his point.