UD likes Chris Van Hollen, who represents her and all ‘thesdan peoples; but now that Murray Hill’s in the race, she’s conflicted.

The Washington Post reports:

Murray Hill might be the perfect candidate for this political moment: young, bold, media-savvy, a Washington outsider eager to reshape the way things are done in the nation’s capital. And if these are cynical times, well, then, it’s safe to say Murray Hill is by far the most cynical.

That’s because this little upstart is, in fact, a start-up. Murray Hill is actually Murray Hill Inc., a small, five-year-old Silver Spring public relations company that is seeking office to prove a point (and perhaps get a little attention).

After the Supreme Court declared that corporations have the same rights as individuals when it comes to funding political campaigns, the self-described progressive firm took what it considers the next logical step: declaring for office.

“Until now, corporate interests had to rely on campaign contributions and influence-peddling to achieve their goals in Washington,” the candidate, who was unavailable for an interview, said in a statement. “But thanks to an enlightened Supreme Court, now we can eliminate the middle-man and run for office ourselves.” …

They’ve already got a pretty compelling ad out.

Here’s an interview with their Designated Human.

And here’s their website.

… from the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, UD moved to Paris for a year, where she did dissertation research.

Through a mutual friend, she met Lisa Nesselson, a fellow Northwestern University graduate who, with her boyfriend, Glenn Myrent, had moved to the city to write about film.

Lisa’s friend Mark Hunter happened to be moving back to the States for a few months, and UD was able to sublet his apartment on the rue de la Grande Chaumiere, steps away from Montparnasse, and a few doors down from where Samuel Beckett once lived.

This connection to an apartment was only one of many kindnesses displaced UD received from Lisa, who went on to translate several books and work as a film critic.

Her wit and charm, and her distinctive voice, have now brought her to radio and tv.

When UD first knew her, Lisa was struggling – living in a ridiculously small seventh-floor walkup in Paris, doing this and doing that to stay in France, watch films, and write about them. All these years she’s persisted in doing what she wants to do with her life, in the city where she wants to do it, and UD salutes her.

… opens up about Chopin’s Funeral March on National Public Radio.

University Diaries‘ webmistress, UD‘s niece Carolyn, works in a building in Austin not far from the anti-IRS crash.

She wrote me a couple of hours ago:

Hi Aunt M. In case you have heard about the Austin plane crash, I just wanted to let you know that I’m OK. The crash was near my office building, and I’ve heard people saying that they can see the smoke if they go outside. I’m going to stay inside to avoid the airborne toxic event….

Howard Jacobson, a British novelist, teaches at GW next semester. As he notes in The Independent, his arrival has been bumpy.

… I am in Washington being a visiting professor. Seemed like a nice gig when I was offered it, but that was before the snow fell. Let’s not be churlish: it still is a nice gig, or it will be if George Washington University ever reopens. The minute we landed, the city’s institutions began to close their doors. You’ve never seen so much snow. Lock yourself in your room and don’t come out is the advice on radio and television. Which is all very well if you’re in your own home and have a freezer stuffed with pizzas, but an apartment hotel with a complimentary sachet of coffee, two tea bags, and a packet of chocolate chip cookies – the difference between civilisation and barbarism is the difference between an English biscuit and an American cookie – is no place to be holed up in for a month.

… Trader Joe’s turns out to be the best grocery store with principles I have ever shopped in, and that isn’t just desperation talking. Yes, you can get your slivered seeds if you want them, but you can also get salamis soaked in red wine, puttanesca sauce made with red wine, excellent red wine vinegars, red wine mustard, and best of all, red wine itself, organised not only by country but by grape. Suddenly I don’t want the siege to end; God willing I won’t have to do an hour’s teaching and can sample every pinot noir the state of Oregon can produce before I fly back home again, assuming a thaw, in March…

… George Washington University Hatchet.

… Georgetown University v. George Washington University snowball fight, in the Georgetown Voice.

Scathing Online Schoolmarm would, though, like to correct the following:

Once GWU began to flood the hill Georgetown students were standing on, the snowball fight digressed rapidly for the Hoyas.

Fights do not digress. People digress when they leave or lose the main point they were making in an argument. The writer might have meant deteriorated… ?

Cream of crab soup
Salt and pepper calimari
How I survived The Blizzard of 2010

Yes, I could offer many haiku detailing UD‘s snowed-in week here at the Legacy Hotel in ‘thesda (She was just interviewed by the George Washington University newspaper, The Hatchet, which is doing a feature on “stranded professors.”), but I think I’ll stop with one, and turn instead to the consideration of a very fine poem about snow, Theodore Roethke’s The Far Field. It’s a bit long, so let’s take it section by section.

***************************

I

I dream of journeys repeatedly:
Of flying like a bat deep into a narrowing tunnel
Of driving alone, without luggage, out a long peninsula,
The road lined with snow-laden second growth,
A fine dry snow ticking the windshield,
Alternate snow and sleet, no on-coming traffic,
And no lights behind, in the blurred side-mirror,
The road changing from glazed tarface to a rubble of stone,
Ending at last in a hopeless sand-rut,
Where the car stalls,
Churning in a snowdrift
Until the headlights darken.

*************************

The initial stanza tells us we’ve got a lyric poem, autobiographical — I, I dream. The poet describes a recurrent dream of his in which he drives alone in the snow, no other traffic, himself carrying nothing of his life (without luggage) out to the end of a long peninsula; and when he gets to the point at which he can drive no further, he sits in his car while its stalled engine churns until everything shuts down — the headlights darken.

Such a dream, recurrent, seems suicidal, the poet drawn to an eerie narrative of a more and more narrowing world in which his mind – headlights – finally stalls and shuts off. Snow is all over this dream as the pall of coffined earth, covering the dying poet more and more as he moves forward.

*****************************

II

At the field’s end, in the corner missed by the mower,
Where the turf drops off into a grass-hidden culvert,
Haunt of the cat-bird, nesting-place of the field-mouse,
Not too far away from the ever-changing flower-dump,
Among the tin cans, tires, rusted pipes, broken machinery, —
One learned of the eternal;
And in the shrunken face of a dead rat, eaten by rain and ground-beetles
(I found in lying among the rubble of an old coal bin)
And the tom-cat, caught near the pheasant-run,
Its entrails strewn over the half-grown flowers,
Blasted to death by the night watchman.

I suffered for young birds, for young rabbits caught in the mower,
My grief was not excessive.
For to come upon warblers in early May
Was to forget time and death:
How they filled the oriole’s elm, a twittering restless cloud, all one morning,
And I watched and watched till my eyes blurred from the bird shapes, —
Cape May, Blackburnian, Cerulean, —
Moving, elusive as fish, fearless,
Hanging, bunched like young fruit, bending the end branches,
Still for a moment,
Then pitching away in half-flight,
Lighter than finches,
While the wrens bickered and sang in the half-green hedgerows,
And the flicker drummed from his dead tree in the chicken-yard.

— Or to lie naked in sand,
In the silted shallows of a slow river,
Fingering a shell,
Thinking:
Once I was something like this, mindless,
Or perhaps with another mind, less peculiar;
Or to sink down to the hips in a mossy quagmire;
Or, with skinny knees, to sit astride a wet log,
Believing:
I’ll return again,
As a snake or a raucous bird,
Or, with luck, as a lion.

I learned not to fear infinity,
The far field, the windy cliffs of forever,
The dying of time in the white light of tomorrow,
The wheel turning away from itself,
The sprawl of the wave,
The on-coming water.

***********************************

Wait – I’ll post what I have so far. What with all the interruptions (along with the Hatchet reporter, La Kid called wanting to talk about Pride and Prejudice, and Mr UD called), I haven’t been able to concentrate on the poem’s second section.

I think Mr UD misses me. He said: “You are like Formula One racing. Maybe not so great for one’s longevity, but very exciting.”

I’m watching a fifty mile an hour white-out from my hotel room window. There are virtually no cars on the road – only emergency trucks. The power company has stopped sending crews until the blizzard’s over.

But the Legacy Hotel, UD‘s new home, is warm and powered-up and still has room service.

**********************

UD thanks her sister for the picture.

… in the hallway, the sun shines bright on the Rockville Pike, and UD sits up in bed, reacquainting herself with heat and electricity.

She’s at the Legacy – a boutique hotel, all angular lamps and ochre walls. The guests are mainly, like UD, ‘thesdans thawing out. It’s been quite the blizzard, and it ain’t over yet.

The snow came down thin and sifty like confectioner’s sugar, but when it finally stopped the whole world was whipped cream.

Evergreens leaned and creaked and spilled limbs all over town.

We sat quietly in our cold houses, marveling at how precisely we could see, in winter sunlight and with a backdrop of snow, the wing patterns of birds.

For heat there was the fireplace, and pots of water simmering on the stove, and piles of throws on the bed.

We took turns shoveling the walk and the car, and we managed to keep a path to Rokeby clear.

At night we settled under the throws and held little battery lamps to our chests so that we could read. I chose A Short History of Nearly Everything, a funny, well-written scarefest (asteroids! viruses!).

UD‘s buddy Jon sends her this ‘thesdan dispatch:

[Bethesda resident] Paul Pickthorne [hosts bondage and discipline parties] … in the castlelike, 3,600-square-foot McMansion he rents… The cost: $20 for a basic ticket, $50 for VIP treatment.

… [His neighbors] convened a meeting in someone’s living room last week, then fired off indignant e-mails to county council member Roger Berliner (D), whose district includes their Merrimack Park subdivision.

“I share your sense of outrage that a sex club is operating in your lovely neighborhood,” Berliner wrote back. “I want you to know that my office has been advised that our County has moved aggressively to put an end to this blight on your community.”

The county moved all right. Pickthorne got a written warning from a zoning inspector Monday. But hold on. Suppose Pickthorne stops charging admission, as he says he might? Suppose he complies with the inspector and hosts all future BDSM gatherings as strictly noncommercial functions in accordance with Section 59-C-1.31? What then?

“Well,” says Berliner on the phone, hesitating. “Certainly one has to respect everyone’s constitutional rights.”

In other words, if no money changes hands, and the kinky people don’t cause a noise or traffic nuisance, the First Amendment would ring clear: Party on!…

Plus there’s about four inches of it on the ground.

But George Washington University’s open, so UD‘s currently attempting to get to campus in order to teach her class on James Joyce.

Later.

A few weeks ago, at a town dinner honoring Garrett Park‘s archivist, UD chatted with her friend Peter Benjamin about the Metro.

She mentioned the Metro to Peter because she vaguely recalled he had some position there, and because there’d just been some bad train accidents.

As she began talking about the system, she saw Peter assume the brace-for-impact position. He clearly expected — clearly often heard — angry complaints. But UD only wanted to say that despite its difficulties she loved the Metro system; that she was grateful, year after year, to live in a city with clean, well-lit, reasonably reliable public transportation.

Peter’s shoulders relaxed as she spoke; he looked astonished, elated.

That vague position of his in the Metro system has been clarified: He’s just been appointed chair of the board.

Peter Benjamin, a veteran engineer with 20 years of experience in senior positions at Metro, took the helm of the agency’s board of directors Thursday, stepping into a critical role as the agency faces the biggest budget and leadership challenges in its history.

… Over the course of 20 years, Benjamin, 67, a technocrat known for his grasp of the complexities of running Metro, served as the agency’s chief financial officer, director of planning and senior financial adviser.

Before that, he worked on technology development and program analysis for a decade at the Urban Mass Transportation Administration, now the Federal Transit Administration. In the early 1970s, he headed the DOT’s Urban Analysis Group. He served as mayor of Garrett Park from 1996-2000 and 2002-04…

That last bit’s the most important, of course, packing the most prestige…

*********************

Garrett Park’s scary tree canopy also made the Washington Post:

Being at work Dec. 29 was a good thing for Darren Welch and his wife, Joanna, because it meant a tree that had crashed onto their Garrett Park deck and tore down an electrical line that day hadn’t also crushed their cars.

“The deck was essentially destroyed,” said Darren Welch, whose house is on Kenilworth Avenue.

The tree caused power outages to 116 homes and damaged a gas meter, causing it to leak, according to Montgomery County Fire and Rescue Service. A few Kenilworth Avenue homes were evacuated as a precaution. The tree, a mighty Northern red oak with sound wood, probably had no obvious signs of what the town arborist thinks was the cause of its downfall: root rot.

“For a tree to blow down without leaves on it like that — first of all, it was old, but it probably had root damage from construction or something that may have happened years ago,” said Phil Normandy, a Kensington horticulturist who consults with Garrett Park about the health of trees on town property.

A tree such as Welch’s, which was not in Normandy’s official purview, can thrive even though it has a weak root system, delivering nutrients without stability, Normandy said.

If that diagnosis is not a comfort to residents living under the shade of Garrett Park’s arboretum — a title that since 1977 has spurred Garrett Park to plant more than 400 trees and shrubs for beautification and education — perhaps this will be: Normandy, a tree specialist who has worked for 30 years at Brookside Gardens, checks the town’s trees once or twice a year for evidence of poor health. Trees he deems unstable are put on a removal list; rogues that might become dangerous are put on a watch list and get more regular checkups…

One tree that will be removed this year, a big willow oak on Montrose Road, had many residents concerned because it has a large cavity. Normandy poked around in the hole, “much in the way a dentist would check a cavity,” but couldn’t determine the health of the tree, which was still outwardly lush.

The town called Bartlett Tree Co., which has technology that can assess the extent of a cavity in a tree, and the decision was made to remove it.

“It still could snap, and it probably would make mincemeat of somebody’s house, so that one will be coming down this winter,” Normandy said…

House, deck, car — Aren’t we missing something here? Trees can make mincemeat of people too, you know…

In case you missed me.

At four AM, all the electricity in the house – in the town – went out.

PEPCO said it’d be back on at eleven this morning. It’s still out.

I spent the day waiting for electricity and reading To the Lighthouse for my independent study group on postmodern fiction tomorrow (we’re starting with a modernist novel for comparison). I’ve read this novel many times – taught it often – and enjoyed it. This time, however, I found it tiresome, mannered, and depressing. Go figure.

When not reading the novel, I played happy Haydn pieces on my just-tuned piano, and went around and around my acre picking up twigs and branches from last night’s windstorm.

A rather frustrating day. I did get a poem out of it.

***************************

At Four a Windstorm Blew the Lights

At four a windstorm blew the lights.
I slid a door and hauled out of night
Florida air that purpled the sky
And made the dark house stand by

For some fireworks. Death flared!
I scanned the ceiling, scared:
Streamers of nothingness!
Infinite means measureless

I said. Measureless to man, like Xanadu.
So take the measure of infinitude
Just as it is, unsparked and uncandescent,
Unelectric charge inside the head, incessant.

The sparklers drifted and arc’d,
Their spectacular bursts unmarked
By carillon, spinet, or choir.
The only holies in that unholy fire

Were human faces.
Firing up the cosmic spaces.

… Winchester, Virginia, headed out at
ten in the morning for some coffee
and then a walk in the hills. And then
back to writing in her room overlooking
the town.

*************************

Patsy Cline was born here.