Dickens decoded

At the present time, in the dark little parlour certain feet below the level of the street—a grim, hard, uncouth parlour, only ornamented with the coarsest of baize table-covers, and the hardest of sheet-iron tea-trays, and offering in its decorative character no bad allegorical representation of Grandfather Smallweed’s mind—seated in two black horse-hair porter’s chairs, one in each side of the fireplace, the superannuated Mr and Mrs Smallweed wile away the rosy hours.

—Bleak House, ch. 21, p. 343

Wile away: eggcorn or no? Arnold Zwicky isn’t so sure. My edition is merely the 1971 Penguin paperback, and doesn’t offer any editorial suggestions about Dickens’ intentions. There are many versions of the book online that amend the phrase to the more widely accepted while away.

In chapter 38, Mr. Guppy is hypermeticulously securing an oral witness (Caroline) to a renunciation of a marriage proposal:

‘Married woman, I believe?’ said Mr Guppy. ‘Married woman. Thank you. Formerly Caroline Jellyby, spinster, then of Thavies Inn, within the City of London, but extraparochial; now of Newman Street, Oxford Street. Much obliged.’ (p. 602)

A dictionary and some thought gives us extraparochial as “outside of any church parish.” So before she married Turveydrop, Caroline lived in a place within the City that was not part of any parish. But the connotations of this term run deeper, when we consider Dickens’ (who composed Bleak House in the early 1850s) steady theme of providing for the poor. A UK government guide to 19th century census reports elaborates:

Besides parishes, with their tythings or townships and chapelries, there were also many places in England and Wales not contained in the limits of any parish. These extra-parochial places had inherited an independence by which they enjoyed virtual exemption from taxation; from maintaining the poor, since there was no Overseer on whom a Magistrate’s Order could be served; from the Militia Laws because there was no Constable to make returns; and from repairing the highways, because there was no official surveyor….

In 1857 the peculiar privileges enjoyed by extra-parochial places were curtailed under an Act ‘to provide for the Relief of the Poor in Extra-Parochial Places’ which decreed that places named extra-parochial in the 1851 Census report were to be deemed parishes for this purpose and to have Overseers appointed for them by the Justices of the Peace. In the case of extra-parochial places covering a very small piece of land, the place was annexed to an adjoining parish, if the consent of the owners and occupiers of two-thirds in value of the land was forthcoming. Special provision was made for the particular cases of the places in London termed the Inner Temple, the Middle Temple and Gray’s Inn where the officer acting for the time being as Under Treasurer, and the Registrar in Charterhouse were appointed Overseers. This act did not apply to places not specified as extra-parochial in the census reports. In these cases the act was merely permissive and, therefore, largely inoperative. In a later Act of 1868 it was declared that every extra-parochial place existing on 25 December 1868, should be added to the next adjoining civil parish which had the longest common boundary. In spite of these acts there are still some places in England and Wales which are extra-parochial from civil parishes. They are all islands or lighthouses which were probably overlooked in the act since they were not contiguous with any parish and, therefore, could not be added to any. There are also still many extra-parochial places from ecclesiastical parishes which enjoy special privileges under Church laws or custom.

Yes, I’m a little woozy after reading that, too. According to a Wikipedia article stub, certain places in the City are yet today considered extraparochial. Something to do with the Knights Templar, ’nuff said.

Welcome to this situation

Arthur Lubow profiles Tino Sehgal, zero-impact conceptual artist/sculptor/choreographer.

Unlike so much of contemporary art, Sehgal’s art evokes passionate reactions among the unschooled as well as the cognoscenti. Anyone who has seen the onlookers trudging passively through an art museum (all too often the Guggenheim ramp resembles the humane cattle slaughterhouses designed by Temple Grandin) can appreciate the achievement. What fascinates me about Sehgal is that working only with human clay, he can call forth thoughtful and visceral responses from people who remain unmoved by more conventional paintings and sculptures. When I expressed this to him, he laughed at me. “I’m more ambitious than that,” he said. “That’s too little of a game.”

Pocket change

The neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) don’t necessarily kill: they maim, blind, and stunt the world’s poor. It’s estimated that of the world’s bottom billion in poverty, at least everyone is afflicted with at least one of these nasties, from hookworm infection to dengue hemorrhagic fever to lymphatic filariasis. Most of these diseases can be controlled, even eradicated, for as little as 50 cents a person, according to Peter Jay Hotez and the Sabin Vaccine Institute. That’s not 50 cents a day, that’s 50 cents a life.

Some links: 42

A few weeks ago, Bas Bleu retraced the track of a bicycle trip she took across France 30 years ago, this time en voiture. I’m reading her reports completely out of order, chronologically and geographically, but I don’t think it matters. You could pick up the thread with her in Bordeaux, perhaps.

Show Boat

Kern and Hammerstein’s breakthrough musical gets a simplified and trimmed production in Arlington. This 1927 show from the novel by Edna Ferber shows the traces of turn of the century operetta and music hall—songs that don’t fit into a simple verse-chorus structure are plentiful and two songs of the period are interpolated—even as it takes on social issues, chief among them race and class relations. Plays that capitalize on backstage shenanigans are so common as to pall (if I see one more riff on Moon Over Buffalo I can’t be held responsible for my actions), but the current piece, which follows 40 years in the life of a Mississippi River show boat of traveling players (something like vaudeville with a paddewheel), is still charming.

Some of the cast manage the challenge of aging four decades in the course of the evening more gracefully than others. Delores King Williams’s Queenie, of the supple voice, is a pleasure to listen to. She’s part of the most energetic and enjoyable number of the show, the playful “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man” from Act 1. The dancing in this number is modest, but appropriate to its time. Elsewhen in the show, swing player Patrick Cragin, playing the role of hoofer and stage villain Bobby Smith last Saturday night, also shows some fancy tapping.

The show’s signature song, “Old Man River,” is a lovely piece, but I found the choice to reprise it twice (with little change in emotional temperature) a bit odd while chunks of plot were clearly jettisoned in Act 2 to keep the running time down. When Joe (amiable VaShawn McIlwain) takes the dynamics of “I’m tired of living,/And scared of dying” to a 10 the first time through, there isn’t any place for him to go. Notwithstanding, music director Jon Kalbfleisch’s orchestra of fourteen supports him with one clean, clear voice.

  • Show Boat, music by Jerome Kern, book and lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II, based on the novel by Edna Ferber, directed by Eric Schaeffer, Signature Theatre, The Max Theater, Arlington, Virginia

Easy pickins

Over the holidays, Leta’s family told me about a natural phenomenon more or less peculiar to Mobile Bay. From time to time during the summer months, low oxygen levels in the bay drive the resident fish and shellfish up into the shallows of the eastern shore. The swimmers arrive in such numbers that hungry Alabamans come down to the beach with washtubs to collect a jubilee of easy-to-catch seafood. Harold Loesch and Edwin May have studied the phenomenon and written it up in journal articles. Conditions that seem to promote the (usually pre-dawn) event: winds out of the east and a rising tide.

Upcoming: 20

I received a flashed version of my judging assignments for WATCH this year. Lots of Bills, some old friends (the evergreen TBD tallest among them), some new releases, and two of the increasingly popular Really? A Musical of That?.

  • Reefer Madness, the Musical, Studney and Murphy
  • The Lion in Winter, William James Goldman
  • I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change, DiPietro and Roberts
  • The Miracle Worker, William Gibson (no, not that one)
  • As You Like It, William Shakespeare
  • Evil Dead, the Musical
  • Company, Stephen Sondheim
  • A Party to Murder, Kash and Hughes
  • The Pajama Game, Adler and Ross
  • Little Women

I haven’t auditioned for anything yet, but scheduling and interest conflicts are sure to arise. Let the trading begin!

Powerful Kramler: Nabokov decoded

Kinbote writes of dialling 11111 to summon first responders to the scene of the shooting (“I then dialled 11111 and returned with a glass of water to the scene of the carnage,” Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire, note to line 1000). At the time of these events, various countries were beginning to adopt 3-digit emergency telephone numbers, following the lead of Britain’s 999. New Zealand introduced a 111 emergency number in 1958; the year before, California rolled out a ZEnith 1-2000 (presumably one asked for rather than dialled this number, since Z is not assigned a digit on the telephone dial); Australia adopted 000 in 1961. Use of 11111 for emergency purposes is undocumented, as far as my searches go.

Old World/New World: “…the disguised king’s arrival in America where he descended by parachute from a chartered plane piloted by Colonel Montacute, in a field of hay-feverish, rank-flowering weeds, near Baltimore whose oriole is not an oriole.” (note to line 691) As is often the case, a New World family of birds (the black and yellow Icteridae, “jaundiced ones”) is not closely related to its Old World namesake, in this case the orioles, family Oriolidae.

Nabokov appears to have introduced two coinages in the book, one by Shade (“And that odd muse of mine,/My versipel, is with me everywhere,/In carrel and in car, and in my chair.” [ll. 946-948]) and one by Kinbote (“The Shades were out, said the cheeky ancillula, an obnoxious little fan who came to cook for them on Sundays and no doubt dreamt of getting the old poet to cuddle her some wifeless day.” [note to line 802]). Versipel is glossed as a back-formation from versipellous, “changeable; protean; having a form, nature or appearance that changes often.” Ancillula is from the Latin, and is a diminutive of ancilla, “handmaid.”

There’s a snag

Saved to my to-read folder: a new special report is available from the American Bird Conservancy: Landowner Stories in Bird Conservation: Managing for Cavity-Nesting Birds in Ponderosa Pine Forests. Birds of particular conservation concern include Flammulated Owl (Otus flammeolus), Lewis’s Woodpecker (Melanerpes lewis), and White-headed Woodpecker (Picoides albolarvatus).