“Lisburn Road,” by Michael Hofmann.
A trunk holding a suitcase holding a holdall,
The travel equivalent of the turducken…
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For Leta: 6
Posted in In Memoriam, Poetry
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Dark slope
A word peeked sometimes from the cave mouth
only to shuffle back,
Posted in Poetry
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Clinch
Akiko Busch suggests that we learn the names of some of our rivers and other natural features.
The name of the Brazos River in Texas was derived from the Spanish Rio de los Brazos de Dios, meaning the “River of the Arms of God” — what the waterway appeared to be to early settlers in that parched part of the country.
Posted in Water Resources and Wetlands
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Chute
Richard Bolles has passed away. Early in my career, as I blundered my way into writing software for a living, I turned to his books for guidance. I’m not sure that he provided any specific, useful advice, but I was reassured: it always felt like he was in my corner.
It turns out that he spent a good part of his early life as a clergyman in the Episcopal church. Leta would say, “of course.”
Posted in In Memoriam, Like Life
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Perking
From the coffee and birds file: Juan Medrano et al. at the University of California, Davis have published the genome of Coffea arabica.
Posted in Agriculture, Biodiversity and Species Preservation
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GO CAPS
TIL the New York Times does not have a rule in its style manual concerning capitalization of the titles of artistic works set in lower case by their creators.
It does call for following American capitalization rules for the titles of foreign-language works (“Così Fan Tutte,” not “Così fan tutte”); urges avoiding “fanciful” punctuation in company names (“Yahoo,” not “Yahoo!”); and calls for capitalizing only the first letter of acronyms that exceed four letters (“Unicef,” not “UNICEF”).
Posted in Words Words Words
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Spark decoded
“Guy’s account,” said Henry, “is substantially the same as the others, with the most interesting exception that he gets Tol calls from London at between six and seven in the evening when the cheap rate is on. In his opinion the offender is a schoolboy.”
—Muriel Spark, Memento Mori (1958), chap. 11
A slip? Tol for toll? But here it is again:
“Nonsense,” said Dame Lettie. “A middle-aged man.”
“It is simple,” said Henry, “to trace a Tol call from London to the country. And yet the police have not traced any caller to Guy Leet at Stedrost.”
And indeed, Tol was a shorthand for placing a metered call within the London exchange:
Previously, making a trunk call involved what was known as ‘delay working’ where a subscriber booked long distance calls in advance and was later rung back by the operator when one of the trunk lines became available. Obviously, the greater the demand made on the exchange, the longer the wait. Under the new ‘Toll’ system subscribers were now able to ask the local operator for ‘Tol’ for calls to exchanges within the London Toll Area. They were then connected to the Toll operator who completed the call while the subscriber remained at the telephone. Later, as more automatic exchanges were introduced, the subscriber simply had to dial ‘TOL’ to be connected to the Toll operator.
Dialing TOL was a service like dialing TIM for the time, as fans of Tom Stoppard’s If You’ll Be Glad I’ll Be Frank know. Or dialing UMP to get cricket scores?!
Posted in Words Words Words
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Leonard decoded
This one isn’t too obscure, but Leonard’s rendering of the company name is idiosyncratic:
“You cut the wire,” Donnell said.
“Is that all?” Chris brought out the Spyder-Co knife that was always in his right-hand coat pocket. “Here, you do it.”
—Elmore Leonard, Freaky Deaky, p. 219
Chris handles his Spyderco knife at least two other times in the course of the book. The company is still in business. I don’t know whether its cult following was stronger in the last 80s, when this book appeared, or now. I suspect that Chris carries a Leatherman tool now.
Posted in Words Words Words
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Not looking good for the Arcade
Ted Rall offers one explanation for what happened (is happening) to Dayton, Ohio.
Posted in Economics and Business, Like Life, Public Policy and Politics
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Baby Screams Miracle
Woolly continues its admirable run of productions in which people of faith—specifically, Christian faith—are front and center, with their questions and fears driving the story. (I think of 2011’s A Bright New Boise as another fine example.)
In Baby Screams Miracle, Carol and Gabe, parents of young Kayden (an odd, withdrawn little girl) are beset by a mounting series of calamities. A storm sends a tree crashing into their house, the storm growing to tempestuous levels. The technical demands of the script are masterfully met by James Kronzer’s set and Jared Mezzocchi’s video projections.
As the punishments visited on the family rise to Old Testament proportions, we wonder what part Kayden plays in this narrative. Is she a malevolent instigator? Are these calamities all in her imagination?
- Baby Screams Miracle, by Clare Barron, directed by Howard Shalwitz, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Washington
Missing
Moreover, as anyone who’s ever owned a remote control can tell you, new technologies themselves are often infuriatingly unfindable, a problem made worse by the trend toward ever smaller gadgets. It is difficult to lose an Apple IIe, easier to lose a laptop, a snap to lose a cell phone, and nearly impossible not to lose a flash drive. Then, there is the issue of passwords, which are to computers what socks are to washing machines. The only thing in the real or the digital world harder to keep track of than a password is the information required to retrieve it, which is why it is possible, as a grown adult, to find yourself caring about your first-grade teacher’s pet iguana’s maiden name.
Posted in Quotable
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Great Backyard Bird Count 2017
I got started earlier in the day, and somewhat surprisingly, the list is shorter: only 17 species this year. Good weather (forties) for birding. Got the pair of RSHAs.
Posted in In the Field
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Caroline, Or Change
Tony Kushner and Jeanine Tesori’s ambitious, admirable musical, with a story drawn from Kushner’s life, concerns an African-American maid (Nova Y. Payton, in the title role) and her relationships with the Jewish family that she works for in 1963 Louisiana.
The first act doesn’t give us much information about what’s going on in Caroline’s head, since much of the time she’s not singing to another person, but rather to the various appliances in her basement workspace—and, in a nice touch, they sing back: the Washing Machine (Theresa Cunningham), the Dryer (V. Savoy McIlwain), and girl-group trio Radio. Alas, sound mixing in some of the multi-voiced passages makes it difficult to follow the various lines.
Tesori’s spiky score of many influences unfortunately saddles the eight-year-old Noah Gellman, son of Caroline’s employers, with a clichéd, squeaky, pitchy vocal line for most of the show. And the musical passages for the Moon don’t get into orbit.
In the second half, a scene centered on a Chanukah party is energized by the arrival of father-in-law Mr. Stopnick (the sufficiently nimble Scott Sedar)—one of Kushner’s antediluvian radical stand-ins—and the flow of contentious dialogue. The klezmer-splashed music also gives this section a boost.
Payton’s late-act aria (“Lot’s Wife”) is quite powerful.
- Caroline, Or Change, music by Jeanine Tesori, book and lyrics by Tony Kushner, directed by Matthew Gardiner, Round House Theatre, Bethesda, Md.
It’s a privilege to pee
Broadway houses scramble to add capacity, manage the lines for the ladies’ loo at intermission.
Posted in Theater
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For Leta: 5
I delivered a version of the following remarks at Grace Episcopal Church on Saturday, 4 February 2017.
Leta and I were sweethearts for sixteen years. She liked to say that, in our relationship, she was Ernie and I was Bert. I don’t see the resemblance.
Leta never stopped learning, whether the subject was medieval monarchs, Tudors vs. Plantagenets; or how to mix a cocktail that hadn’t been in the recipe books since the 1920s; or American Sign Language; or tagging along with me on a nature walk. She would badger the guide with informed, attentive questions.
And she was good luck when we were out looking for birds together. We took a trip to California, and I planned a visit for us to the Monterey Bay Aquarium, just a short walk down Cannery Row from our hotel. The only problem was that day it was pouring rain. But she was game and we set off—and we got soaked, but I saw a bird for my life list, my first Pelagic Cormorant (Phalacrocorax pelagicus), on that walk in the rain, and she gets the credit.
She never stopped learning. Just a week or so before her diagnosis, she was taking an online class, learning how to code for the web; we did a screen-sharing call for me to help with her JavaScript homework.
Leta loved theater, and she was good at it.
Many of you know that she was nominated twice by the WATCH organization (honoring excellence in Washington area community theater), for her roles as Diane in The Little Dog Laughed and Alma in Taking Leave. Personally, I think that she did even better work in two plays by Donald Margulies: Karen in Dinner with Friends and Sarah in Time Stands Still. She was utterly committed to each role, each project, she took on.
She told me about a director who offered her a part; the director said, “there are many people who can do this role, but there are few that I would trust with this role.”
Leta loved theater, and she didn’t mind sharing that love.
She wouldn’t just tell an actor she happened to see in a lobby how much she liked the show—that’s easy. A few months ago, we saw a show downtown, a regional production on its way to Broadway. One thing and another, it was maybe half an hour after curtain that we started walking to the subway; we were blocks away from the theater… and at a crosswalk, she recognized an actor from that show, on his own way home, and she stopped him to say how much the play meant to her.
For all her expansiveness, her extroversion, Leta’s tastes were clean and simple.
She loved the intricate simplicity of a wall drawing by Sol LeWitt, a poem by Langston Hughes, a black and white abstract ballet by George Balanchine, a play of unspoken dread by Harold Pinter. Or just a nice hot cup of tea. When I would come back from a business trip, she didn’t want a fancy gift from the airport shop, but she did expect the free toiletries from the hotel. For fun, we would browse real estate listings, modest little post-war bungalows along Viers Mill Road, houses she called “dumpy.” For her, this was a high compliment.
Leta’s tastes were simple, especially when it came to what she found funny.
The New York Times arts section has a style guide, and it calls for a “Mister” on second reference, even if the subject was someone with a name like Iggy Pop. And so Leta would read about “Mr. Pop,” and dissolve into bubbles of giggles. She is the only person I know who laughed “tee hee.”
I can’t say that Garrison Keillor’s penguin joke was her favorite joke, but it was on her top ten list. So maybe you can help me understand this…
Two penguins are standing on an ice shelf—I don’t know whether they were Adélies or Gentoos or …—getting ready to jump in the ocean and do some fishing.
And the first penguin says, “Say… you look like you’re wearing a tuxedo.”
And the second penguin says, “What makes you think I’m not?”
I think she told it better.
Leta Madeline Hall made the gift of sixteen years of her life to me. Thank you.
