On deck: 3

on deck: 3George Plimpton’s hockey book is back in print; an old Dickens from the basement shelves that I never got around to reading; an Angela Carter that I didn’t know about; and this seems to be the year of Edna Ferber around here.

Fitzgerald decoded

I’m a little disappointed with the notes to the LOA edition of The Beautiful and Damned. We get no help with “a seidel of beer” (p. 516) (nothing more complicated than a drinking glass, but still); most of the song lyrics are glossed, but not “Out in—the shimmee sanitarium…” (p. 784). And, most significantly, nothing on Bilphist and Bilphism (pp. 475 and passim), apparently a brand of spiritualism of Fitzgerald’s own invention.

However, a trip to the dictionary was worth it for this sentence. The Patches have come down in the world:

Anthony lay upon the lounge looking up One Hundred and Twenty-Seventh Street toward the river, near which he could just see a single patch of vivid green trees that guaranteed the brummagem umbrageousness of Riverside Drive. (“No Matter!”, p. 760)

Brummagem, a Menckenesque “cheap and showy; meretricious.” Umbrageousness here doesn’t mean what you think, but rather the property of “affording shade”. Coleridge has “A chestnut spread its umbrage wide.”

O.F.

Via The Morning News, John Adams gives tips on getting through the first rehearsal:

Be flexible and take every opportunity to talk to the players. Sometimes you can make an on-the-spot change that will make an instrumentalist’s day. Other times, although you realize that what you’ve written is in fact awkward and unreasonable, the player will be affronted if you offer to simplify or revise a phrase or a passage. They assume that if something isn’t working it’s their fault. Composers are geniuses, right? For them it’s their burden to somehow make it work, and they do not realize that it’s the composer who needs to get it right.

Many actors I know aren’t quite so accommodating toward playwrights.

I also must quote this bit, relating to the many, many details of the composition process:

[Is] it mezzo forte or mezzo piano? (Or maybe pianissimo, because they’ll play it loud in any event?) Why aren’t there more gradients available? (Stockhausen tried: zero to ten.) Is pianissimo in the brass still going to cover the clarinets? And you always forget about mutes. It says “mutes on,” but you’ve declined to say when to remove them. Is it true that Schoenberg thought “mezzo” forte and “mezzo” piano were for sissies who couldn’t make up their minds? Maybe he was right.

Meat pollution

Elizabeth Kirkwood on the very public decision by Britain’s top climate adviser, Nicholas Stern, to stop eating meat as a means of mitigating global warming. Strong stuff:

Why are we not outraged by what the meat industry and those who support it, which is, let’s face it, most of us, is doing to our planet? Why is meat consumption not stigmatised in the way that driving 4×4 gas guzzlers is?

There’s no “I” in “theater”

We are heading to the wire!! Make those reservations, see those shows, do those ballots! And be thankful that there’s no chance of WATCH being sold to Dan Snyder, because y’all are a great team!

—Weekly report to WATCH adjudicators for 28 October 2009

Although the adjudication coordinator is dangerously close to exhausting her quota of exclamation marks.

Perennial

Richard Harris visits Wes Jackson’s Land Institute, and also talks with plant breeder Lee De Haan.

As the silver-haired Kansan [Jackson] is fond of saying: If you’re working on a problem you can solve in your own lifetime, you’re not thinking big enough.

Are those chickadees that we hear in the background of the outdoor actualities Black-cappeds or Carolinas? Kansas is a contact zone.