Clockwork moon

Jo Marchant brings us up to date on the reconstruction of the Antikythera Mechanism, a second- or first-century BCE gearwork model of the heavens salvaged from a shipwreck more than 1,900 years later. Michael Wright has used computer-assisted tomography on the badly-corroded assembly of bronze to reveal a pin-and-slot model of a nine-year cycle in the Moon’s movements:

One of the wheels connected to the main drive wheel moves around once every nine years. Fixed on to it is a pair of small wheels, one of which sits almost—but not exactly—on top of the other. The bottom wheel has a pin sticking up from it, which engages with a slot in the wheel above. As the bottom wheel turns, this pin pushes the top wheel round. But because the two wheels aren’t centred in the same place, the pin moves back and forth within the upper slot. As a result, the movement of the upper wheel speeds up and slows down, depending on whether the pin is a little farther in towards the centre or a little farther out towards the tips of the teeth….

The researchers realized that the ratios of the gear-wheels involved produce a motion that closely mimics the varying motion of the Moon around Earth, as described by Hipparchus. When the Moon is close to us it seems to move faster. And the closest part of the Moon’s orbit itself makes a full rotation around the Earth about every nine years. Hipparchus was the first to describe this motion mathematically, working on the idea that the Moon’s orbit, although circular, was centred on a point offset from the centre of Earth that described a nine-year circle. In the Antikythera Mechanism, this theory is beautifully translated into mechanical form. “It’s an unbelievably sophisticated idea,” says Tony Freeth, a mathematician who worked out most of the mechanics for Edmunds’ team. “I don’t know how they thought of it.”

Follow links in Marchant’s piece to more technical material, nifty illustrations of the reconstructed device, and Freeth et al.’s paper.

The Little Prince

RHT brings a gentle touch to the theatrical elements of this adaption of the short novel by Saint-Exupéry, the wide-eyed fairy tale well-known to tenth-grade French students nationwide. The Snake first appears behind a scrim, then fully lit but still in pantomime, manipulated by a puppeteer, before finally appearing in the form of a human actor; the various “big men” that the Little Prince meets in his fall to earth appear in a circus wagon-sized frame.

But the text of the production is faithful to the words and drawings of the novel, at times slavishly so, as when Craig Wallace (the aviator-narrator of the story) speaks to us exactly what he’s thinking. On the other hand, something we miss from Saint-Ex is the Little Prince’s jaunty cutaway royal gown: to accommodate the exuberant physicality of Jamie Kassel’s characterization, perhaps, the Prince wears some sort of bedraggled nightshirt. Kassel fully commits herself in her playing, but two shows in a row in Bethesda that feature principals with squeaky voices is a little too much to ask of us.

In the second half, as the Fox, Wallace has more scenery to chew, and he does so endearingly. The episode of the taming of the Fox is managed as a manic dance to Jacques Brel’s “La valse à mille temps,” and it’s a show-stopper.

  • The Little Prince, by Rick Cummins and John Scoullar, based on the book by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, directed by Eric Ting, Round House Theatre, Bethesda, Maryland

The thrill when you get it right in public

Daphne Merkin covers a lot of the usual ground in her profile of Tom Stoppard, born Tomas Straussler. (The piece accompanies the opening of The Coast of Utopia in New York.) But, towards the close of the article, an insight glimmers:

The longer I ponder the Stoppard legend—the difficult beginnings and then the smooth ascent, with nary a glitch to be seen—the more I find myself wondering at the gaps in his history, at how much he has discarded along the road…. Stoppard may in fact be that rare creature, an untortured creative artist for whom art is not an escape from trauma but rather an extension of his intellectual largess. Or he may be someone stuck in his own characterization, playing out the upside of an absurdist existential situation…

Giving thanks

I am thankful that, of all my problems, or issues that I think are problems, I always have some means of controlling the outcome or mitigating the situation.

I am thankful for the printed word. Wherever I am, I can fold open a “clothy brick,” as John Updike would have it, and magically hear someone else’s voice in my head. If it’s a script, I can hear three or four voices. No incompatible technologies, no licensing restrictions, no planned obsolescence.

I am, by nature and necessity, pretty self-sufficient in terms of relationships. But when Leta came into my life, she was the seventh on the top of the major chord that makes it sound all the more resonant. Darn right I’m thankful for her. And her folks, too: family Thanksgiving dinners are something that I actually look forward to, now.

(Inspired by wockerjabby’s wonderful mash note to her husband.)

Unerased, sampled

I’ve just finished rereading The Erasers, by Alain Robbe-Grillet, translated from Les Gommes by Richard Howard. Robbe-Grillet is one of the champions of the nouveau roman, and The Erasers (1953) is his first published novel. Ostensibly a detective story, it unfolds as a police procedural gone down completely twisted, finally unravelling as a retelling of the Oedipus myth. In a small coastal city crisscrossed by canals, terrorists have infiltrated the police force that is investigating a political murder, but no body can be found. Or maybe it’s the other way around. Dreams, imagined reconstructions of the crime, and outright fantasies push themselves into the story without warning. The book is actually one of Robbe-Grillet’s most accessible, and unlike his later books there’s hardly any sexy bits in it. The course of Wallas, the investigator, through the labyrinth of the nameless town suggests Leopold Bloom’s traversal of Dublin, as well as every other traveller’s tale that has come before.

I’m using a mass-market paperback with a cracked binding that I bought new sometime around 1975. The front matter says that this Evergreen Black Cat edition of 1968 was in its third printing, but I didn’t know about Robbe-Grillet until I picked up a copy of Snapshots in a bookstore in Evanston. In my first reading(s), I marked words and phrases with two colors of ink in an attempt to keep my narrative bearings. I don’t use pen any more on my books: I like the opportunity to efface the evidence of some fatuous inference of mine from the past. Some of the passages that I marked, I have no idea why I found them to be significant. Anyway, as an exercise in reflexive found poetry, here are all the phrases that I underlined or circled from that trip through the book 20-plus years ago, in the order that they appear in the text. I omit sidebars for longer passages and my own inane annotations.

a day in early winter

Today is Tuesday

Daniel Dupont

That was yesterday

how much stranger it is that he is not dead

“Look at the paper”

Garinati

the text… Lazarus will rise from his tomb, wrapped in his shroud

priest’s

footsteps… on the surface of the sea

“which can not prevent…”

“Tuesday, October 27”

black overcoat

Roy-Dauzet

Marchat

precautions… precautions

There is no victim

Tuesdays

his watch… stops every once in a while… and then starts again

life has not yet begun

between yesterday and tomorrow there is no place left for the present

smooth band

they all fall into place in good order

the roadway behind him comes apart

Boulevard Circulaire

This is what making up stories gets you into.

curves south by a series of imperceptible angles

Fabius

Fabius

Already people were saying that he mistrusted easy solutions, now it is whispered that he ceased to believe in the existence of any solution whatever.

Roy-Dauzet

seven-ten

black overcoat

five to eight

“eraser”

eraser

“I could, if I had the body at my disposal”

Albert Dupont

“You see, your facts aren’t so exact after all!”

“Why the first person? Suppose the murderer had slept there last night, what would you know about it?”

eraser

If only the cartridge shell had been found too.

play

trompe l’oeil

The death of Daniel Dupont is no more than an abstract event being discussed by dummies.

“they cut the telephone wires”

“at least two hours to clean the bedspread”

the bedspread has been changed

one bullet has already been fired

“Did Monsieur Dupont shoot at the man running away?” he asks, although he knows the answer in advance: when Dupont came back with his revolver, the murderer had disappeared.

two o’clock train

it still shows seven-thirty

bronze clock… also stopped

he is not the same man any more

[as if this] overexactitude were possible only in a painting

chief’s

already half turned around… latch

third-story window… several times

garden fence

Fabius, having closed the garden gate behind him

notices someone odd watching him… third-story window

“Don’t tell me too many details; you’ll end up making me think I saw the whole thing.”

Wallas

The scene will be over.

the manager will go on staring into space

“eraser”

“Twelve-fifteen”

closes the door behind him with a thousand precautions

some fifteen people—continually changing

reproduced many times: “Please Hurry. Thank You.”

“Monsieur André WS.”

He need only button his jacket and it won’t show any more.

himself… minister

all the streets in the neighborhood look alike

“eraser”

He paints carefully

photographing

water, greenish

precise, long deliberated reason

it still shows seven-thirty

[the] features have lost a good deal of their actuality

Wallas does not even know what the dead man looks like.

eraser… “postcard”

short, sickly looking man there, wearing a long greenish coat and a dirty hat

time… jewelry store window

beige raincoat

“Monday, October twenty-sixth, at eight minutes after nine”

exaggeratedly detailed notations

“distorted the truth”

“A replica, a copy, a simple reproduction of an event whose original and whose key are elsewhere.”

mirror

around five in the evening

four-thirty… railway station

erasers

eraser

The deductions that can be made from such evidence furnish little opportunity for certainty.

Wallas reaches the garden gate. ¶It is seven o’clock.

The big house is silent.

the only pair to be found in the clinic was a pair of medical glasses, one of whose lenses is very dark and the other much lighter

Dupont sees only his own face in the mirror

it shows seven thirty-five. Then he remembers that it had stopped at seven-thirty. He raises it to his ear and hears the faint ticking.

eight-thirty… murder of the millionaire exporter

It was also the only proof of the exact time of his arrival in the city.

“If you can’t tell the difference between yesterday and today there’s no use talking.”

Fallout

Via Ward-O-Matic, Conelrad is “devoted to ATOMIC CULTURE past and present but without all the distracting and pedantic polemics.” A featured multi-page article provides the production history of “the Citizen Kane of of Civil Defense,” Duck and Cover.

A few years ago, I noticed some apartment blocks on 15th Street that still carried the black and yellow CD signs indicating the presence of a fallout shelter. The last time I was in that neighborhood, I couldn’t relocate the signs. I’ll keep a lookout.

Back to school

I’m working on a scene for Michael S., who is taking a directing class at the Studio Theatre. I’m doing a 5-minute scene from Jon Klein’s Dimly Perceived Threats to the System with scene partner Amal. Klein’s play is a dark comedy that swings the Hauser family from dysfunctional reality to frightening fantasy and back again, sometimes in the course of one page of script.

In my scene, Amal’s Christine is called into the office of the school mental health counselor, Mr. Sykes. A conventional upbraiding turns ugly: an imagined Mr. Sykes contemplates electroshock and desktop lobotomy with Frankensteinian glee.

Michael’s assignment for this phase of the class is characterization, so we’ve done a fair amount of table work before putting the scene on its feet. (Or floor work, in Michael’s case: he likes to work lying on the deck.) We did an improv in which, instead of the understanding Mr. Sykes, I became a harpy of a department secretary, chewing out Christine for what she’s done (she spit on three students’ baloney sandwiches because she’s having her own food issues).

Now we’re actually working the scene, and in realistic beats Michael has me moving about, leaning on the furniture, that sort of thing. Let’s hope the scene doesn’t turn out the way the last one did. There’s no storage available, so it’s pack-your-own props: I’m schlepping an extra jacket and a Makita cordless power drill back and forth on the subway.

Since the last time I was in the conservatory space upstairs, the Studio has completed the reconfiguration of its space, and now we enter through the main lobby on 14th Street. I still feel a little like I did when I was taking a class at Woolly earlier this year, working in the classroom while the mainstage production was being rehearsed in the next room over, that is, like the Bud Light gate crasher guy surrounded by all these professionals. But this evening we worked from 6:30 to a bit before 8:00, so I was on my way out through the main lobby as the house-opening announcement for The Long Christmas Ride Home played on the PA. That was cool.

Martha, Josie, and the Chinese Elvis

Woolly’s American premiere of Jones’s comedy set in Bolton, in the north of England, may not knock it for six, but the solid production does score a run. The signature Woolly Mammoth theatrical elements are present: a dominatrix mom considering retirement; her two daughters, one of them a bit thick in the head; her shiny-pated client, proprietor of a local dry-cleaning establishment; an Irish cleaning woman with OCD; a neophyte Elvis impersonator from somewhere in the Far East, who has all the singer’s looks but is still learning the words to the songs; and those all-important fur-lined handcuffs. These are enough to keep the punchlines bouncing around the two-level half-timbered set, while themes of reconciliation and costuming and concealment play out.

Sarah Marshall’s natural comic rhythms are sometimes at odds with the dialect called for by her Martha, but she has a lovely, heartfelt second-act monologue that gives her character the opportunity to explain herself.

  • Martha, Josie, and the Chinese Elvis, by Charlotte Jones, directed by John Vreeke, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Washington

Shadow this

Steven Soderbergh recovers 1940s-era moviemaking techniques to film his postwar noir The Good German.

By reproducing the conditions of an actual studio shoot from the late 1940s, he hoped to enter the mind of a filmmaker like [Michael] Curtiz, to explore the strengths and limitations of a classical style that has now largely been lost.

* * *

If there is a single word that sums up the difference between filmmaking at the middle of the 20th century and the filmmaking of today, it is “coverage.” Derived from television, it refers to the increasingly common practice of using multiple cameras for a scene (just as television would cover a football game) and having the actors run through a complete sequence in a few different registers. The lighting tends to be bright and diffused, without shadows, which makes it easier for the different cameras to capture matching images.

* * *

“That kind of staging is a lost art,” Mr. Soderbergh said, “which is too bad. The reason they no longer work that way is because it means making choices, real choices, and sticking to them. It means shooting things in a way that basically only cut together in one order. That’s not what people do now. They want all the options they can get in the editing room.”