Visitors from afar

One drawback to life in the Northwest Corner -- I suppose that some of you might instead consider it an advantage -- is that we do in fact live in a corner, and thus off the mainstream routes of American intercity travel.  No one drops by for a visit, as he passes through Seattle on his way to somewhere else.

Visiting Seattle or Portland requires an element of real determination, in some folks' mind -- like travel to Africa.  Or, at least, England.

For Californians, coming north across the Siskiyous into Oregon and beyond represents travel into a great, unknown, empty, green and moldy wetness.  For Easterners, even those who no longer fear sudden Indian raids, it's a heck of a long trip across the prairies.  Even flying over the prairies.

So, I was happy to have three members of my family up for Thanksgiving.  My sister, like me, was born and raised in the Northwest, and so lacks some of the fear and trembling that apparently seizes non-natives.  Clinton and their adult son are Californians through and through but, over the years, have grown accustomed to brief forays into our local fishing villages and lumbering towns, our potlatches and bar brawls.

So the three drove up, and arrived on Tuesday.  We celebrated mother and son birthdays that night at a downtown steak house (now-Californian Kathy has retained certain atavistic cravings from her less sophisticated childhood).  We did some in-town hiking under gray and threatening skies at Seward Park -- a large and still forested Seattle city park.  My guests cheerfully (fully aware of my inept cooking abilities) took on the responsibility of preparing a traditional Thanksgiving dinner, large enough to feed most the city's homeless, for the four of us.

And, on Friday, we had a light dinner downtown, and then took the monorail out to McCaw Hall in the Seattle Center where we watched Pacific Northwest Ballet's first 2014 performance of the Nutcracker. 

In 1983, PNB commissioned Maurice Sendak (Where the Wild Things Are) to design new sets for a complete re-working of the familiar Christmas ballet, and has presented that production annually ever since.  It was Sendak's and the PNB's artistic director's decision to return to the ballet's roots in the original story by E. T. A. Hoffman.  Sendak felt that the oft-repeated ballet had become boring and predictable, and he hoped to re-emphasize the more unsettling aspects of the story.  He has written that, as usually performed, the ballet

is smoothed out, bland, and utterly devoid not only of difficulties but of the weird, dark qualities that make it something of a masterpiece. 

Unfortunately, this year will be the last in which the Sendak sets and the associated choreography will be presented.  Next year, PNB will perform the more traditional 1954 Balanchine production.

We had seen PNB's Nutcracker exactly ten years ago, and loved it then.  I liked it even more Friday night, maybe because I knew I'd never see it performed this way again.  The sets were, of course, dramatic.  The battles between toy soldiers and sword-bearing mice were exciting enough to keep the kids -- of whom there were many in the audience -- wide awake.  Drosselmeyer -- the young heroine's god father and a local magician -- was one-eyed, strange in appearance and behavior, and interested insistently enough in all the small children on-stage to create a feeling of unease in the adult members of the audience. 

Overall, the production was often funny, always beautiful, and well-danced by both adult and child members of the cast -- all without losing that sense of the weird, the dark, and the eerie that Sendak and PNB's art direction had hoped to achieve.

The ballet was a highly successful conclusion to a very welcome visit by my relatives.  I was sorry to see them leave town and return to the lotus-eating pleasures of their California lifestyle.

Synesthesia

You're always learning something new.  Sometimes, if you're lucky, something new about yourself.

I'd never heard of "synesthesia" until this past month, while reading a YA novel.  To the narrator, every letter appeared in his mind as having a specific color -- the letters appeared so involuntarily -- and always the same color for each letter.  And because words were spelled with letters, every word had a different coloration.

The whole word takes on the colour of the first letter, really, but the other letters retain some of their own colour too.  In the case of Oxford -- with two terra cottas, a dove grey x, a pale green f, a bright red r, and a dark brown d -- the other letters don't do much to modify the first letter.  But take another word, and the effect is different.  England, for example, is lilac, coral, fuchsia, bright orange, pale yellow, coral, dark brown.  The whole word takes on a lilac tint, but I can still see the orange and yellow and brown.¹

A person with this form of synesthesia would obviously have a richer sense of words and (as shown in the novel) of their spelling than do the rest of us.

I thought that was all certainly interesting, but a condition totally foreign to my own colorless existence -- until I did a little on-line research into the phenomenon of "synesthesia."

While synesthesia, when known about at all, is most commonly associated with the color form described above, there is also a "number form" of synesthesia.  According to Wikipedia:

A number form is a mental map of numbers, which automatically and involuntarily appears whenever someone who experiences number-forms thinks of numbers. Numbers are mapped into distinct spatial locations and the mapping may be different across individuals.

The article suggests that the condition may result from a cross-activation between the portion of the brain responsible for numbers and that responsible for spatial relationships. 

These number forms can be distinguished from the non-conscious mental number line that we all have by the fact that they are 1) conscious, 2) idiosyncratic (see image) and 3) stable across the lifespan.

The image to which the article refers is that reproduced at the top of this post.

If I had been a cartoon character, a small light bulb would then have appeared above my head.  I was -- I am -- synesthetic!

Since my earliest days as a child, numbers have appeared in my mind as laid out in a complicated set of loops.  They start out from 1 to 12 more or less like the numbers on a clock -- and as in the illustration -- but then continue in circles within circles within circles.  Centuries are laid out in a different manner, and -- as I now realize -- laid out in a vague manner over the map of Europe.  So that 300 B.C. is in Greece, 300 A.D. is in Italy, and the low and high Middle Ages work their way up through France and England.  Days of the week are in a simple circle, counter-clockwise, with Sunday at the "top" of the circle.  Months are laid out in a different circle, clockwise, a circle that seems pitched more "horizontally," while the days of the week are laid out more "vertically."  Letters of the alphabet are arranged in an order that I could draw for you, but that would be difficult to describe.

The spatial lay-out is conscious and automatic, whenever I think of a number.  It's idiosyncratic -- other members of my family have very different mappings.  And it has been the same for me ever since I can recall (with the association of centuries with countries no doubt developing gradually over time as I learned about history.)

Weird, huh?   And yet I've always assumed everyone had similar "maps" in their mind -- mainly because most members of my family do.  It must be a genetic trait.

Some friends, who I now realize are "normal," have listened to my descriptions with some puzzlement, responding that, in their imagination, days and months and years just go on and on in a straight line, one after another.  I always thought this was a little strange, and I couldn't understand how they could organize temporal occurrences in their minds with so boring a spatial layout.  But they do.  Obviously.  And their "straight line" isn't really experienced as a spatial layout in the same sense as mine.

Anyway, so I'm weird and my brain's wired oddly.  But it seems normal to me.  I only wish I had color synesthesia.  Now that really is weird.  And definitely pretty cool!
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¹Robin Reardon, Educating Simon (2014)

Decline and Fall

To most Americans, Evelyn Waugh is known, if he is known at all, as the author of Brideshead Revisited, a nostalgic look backwards from 1945 to an earlier, idyllic and idealized England as perceived through the lens of Oxford student life and the upper class world of one of the great country homes of England.

As I discussed in a post in 2008, the underlying theme of Brideshead, over which its portrayal of an opulent society was something of a golden gloss, was theological -- in fact, explicitly, Roman Catholic.  This religious aspect was downplayed to some extent by the excellent and popular PBS series and, later, by the less successful Hollywood film.

But before Brideshead, Waugh's reputation was of a rather smart satirist of contemporary life, politics and morals during the 1920s and 1930s.

For no particular reason, I've just finished reading his first novel, Decline and Fall, written in 1928.  Waugh's tone in that book is, I would say, humorously mordant -- and certainly neither nostalgic nor pious.

Decline and Fall is an account of, well, the decline and fall, of the feckless young Paul Pennyfeather.  Briefly, Paul -- a quiet and studious theology student at a fictional Oxford college -- finds himself surrounded one night by a mob of drunken students on campus who, for their own amusement, remove his pants, forcing him to run for cover.  He is apprehended and "sent down" -- expelled -- for public indecency.  Desperate to support himself, he takes a position as an instructor at a small Welsh "college" -- prep school -- of questionable academic reputation.

While there, he falls in love with the glamorous mother of one of his students, who, days before their planned marriage, sends him on a business mission to Marseilles.  Paul discovers all too late that his fiancée's "business" is ownership and management of an international chain of brothels.  He is arrested, and his best friend from Oxford actively prosecutes the case against him.  His story, because of his relationship with his famous and well-loved fiancée becomes a national sensation.  They throw the book at him as an example to others.  He is sentenced to years of hard labor in prison.

Paul's most notable character trait is his mildness.  When asked why he left Oxford, Paul repeatedly states, without amplification, that he was sent down for "indecent behavior."  Fortunately, this charge hardly disqualified him from teaching school.  As he was told during his interview:

Well, I shall not ask for details.  I have been in the scholastic profession long enough to know that nobody enters it unless he has some very good reason which he is anxious to conceal.

When arrested for unknowingly furthering a major prostitution ring, he admits guilt in order to protect his fiancée; when, while in prison, he is advised that the good lady plans to marry another man, he agrees that she is too fine a person to ever survive in prison.  He agrees not to  attempt to secure his own release by implicating her in any way.

In the hands of another writer, this story might conceivably have been presented as a rather shaky tragedy; for Waugh, on the other hand, it is all the grist of farce -- a mere framework on which to display the author's humors and prejudices and witty writing.

For example, look at how the English headmaster of Paul's Welsh prep school portrays the country in which he now finds himself:

From the earliest times the Welsh have been looked upon as an unclean people.  It is thus that they have preserved their racial integrity.  Their sons and daughters mate freely with sheep but not with human kind except their own blood relations. 

The townspeople do nothing to rebut the headmaster's view of them as the British equivalent of stereotypical Kentucky hillbillies:

There was a baying and growling and yapping as of the jungle at moonrise, and presently he [a Welsh musician] came forward again with an obsequious, sidelong shuffle.

"Three pounds you pay us would you said indeed to at the sports play."

But the Welsh are only an incidental target of Waugh's scorn.  It is the English upper classes who are most ridiculed -- effectively if less broadly.  The Oxford "club" members who caused Paul's expulsion are portrayed in a manner that puts to shame the best efforts of American fraternity members on a warm Friday night:

It was a lovely evening.  They broke up Mr. Austen's grand piano, and stamped Lord Rending's cigars into his carpet, and smashed his china, and tore up Mr. Partridge's sheets, and threw the Matisse into his lavatory.  Mr. Sanders had nothing to break except his windows, but they found the manuscript at which he had been working for the Newdigate Prize Poem, and had great fun with that.  Sir Alastair Digby Vaine-Trumpington felt quite ill with excitement, and was supported to bed by Lumsden of Strathdrummond.

Somehow, I suspect I'm giving my readers an impression that Decline and Fall is a thoroughly unpleasant book.  They will have to take my word for it that, in fact, it is a very funny book.  It would be even funnier if we today had a clearer picture of some of the excesses of British society that are being satirized -- but we certainly can catch the general drift.

Waugh, who could with some fairness be described as a reactionary snob, was asked in later years how he -- a Catholic convert -- could reconcile his chronic unpleasantness with his profession of Christianity.  His reply is famous:

You have no idea how much nastier I would be if I was not Catholic. Without supernatural aid I would hardly be a human being.

To his credit, Waugh did make some effort in Decline and Fall -- after chronicling poor Paul Pennyfeather's steady decline and freefall throughout the entire novel -- to avoid total nastiness by cobbling together a "happy" ending in the final chapter.  After conveyance of tactfully presented bribes originating with his former fiancée, Paul is surreptitiously whisked out of prison, his death is feigned, and he slips off to Corfu to bide his time.  He returns with a mustache and re-enters Oxford as a freshman.  He doesn't even bother to change his name.

Not even the mustache was really necessary.  Paul Pennyfeather had been a mild student, and as such he returns.  No one much remembers him, or pays attention to his return.  He happily and mildly goes back to his religious studies.

A bad idea abandoned

Weird groaning and scraping noises awoke me and my cats about 3 a.m. Saturday morning.  They continued until dawn, leaving me puzzled and somewhat nervous until I finally fell asleep.  I figured it out once I got up. The noises continued and became even louder, stranger, and more threatening yesterday.

I realized that I'd been listening, through the still night air, to the long-delayed death throes of the R. H. Thompson freeway.

Back in the 1950s, even before I-5 had been built through the downtown, Seattle city planners had decided eventually to build a second north-south freeway, this one through the eastern, residential side of the city.  They planned to name the freeway the "R. H. Thompson," in honor of the early city engineer responsible for leveling Denny Hill -- a pleasant downtown vista, crowned by the ornate, recently-opened "Washington Hotel" -- by use of high-pressure water hoses, leaving behind a flat, uninviting, and undeveloped area of parking lots for the appreciation of generations to come.

The freeway would have come up from Renton, followed Empire Way (now Martin Luther King Way), cut through the cherished Washington Arboretum, connected with then proposed east-west State Highway 520, tunneled under the Montlake Cut to University Village, and continued northward to Lake City.  Voters approved bonds to build the freeway in 1960.

To me -- and, eventually to the majority of city voters -- the most devastating aspect of this proposed route was what it would have done to the long, narrow Arboretum.  The freeway would have cut through the length of the Arboretum, and have passed roughly a hundred feet in front of my house -- although, had it been built, I doubt if I ever would have moved here. 

As noted in a 2001 HistoryLink essay, as the 1960s progressed, city residents observed the enormous disruption to city residences and topography caused by construction of the I-5 and I-90 freeways.  Environmentalists and civic activists protested vigorously.  In 1970, the city council removed the freeway from the city's comprehensive plan.  And in 1972, voters by a 71 percent majority formally terminated the project and revoked the authorization for the still unissued bonds.

That was 42 years ago.  What did all of that have to do with the noises that awoke me in the night?

When State Route 520 from I-5 to the east side of Lake Washington was built in 1963, plans for the R. H. Thompson were still very much alive.  Therefore, shortly before reaching Lake Washington, a network of entrance and exit ramps were built in anticipation of the connection between SR 520 and the RHT.  Those ramps -- the "ramps to nowhere" -- have remained there ever since, serving primarily as illegal diving boards from which kids dive each summer into the waters around Foster Island.

Much to the discomfort of Montlake residents like myself, SR 520 -- about eight blocks north of my house -- is being widened to carry more traffic.  A large number of trees have been cut down from the northern edge of the present freeway.  It does not appear that the widening of the freeway -- unlike the proposed R. H. Thompson -- will require the removal of existing residences, but a number of people living in rather nice homes on the northern side are going to find the woody area behind their houses replaced by the newly-added lanes of SR 520.

As part of the work on SR 520, the vestigial connections to the R. H. Thompson are being removed.  SR 520 was closed over the weekend.  That impressive racket that shocked me awake in the night was the sound of demolition as the overpasses and ramps are dismantled. 

From the looks of things last night, it will take more than this one weekend to complete the job.  I can tolerate the noise.  I can consider it music.  It marks an end to a city "improvement" that thankfully was never undertaken.  Unlike San Francisco, we didn't have to build our own "Embarcadero" before we decided we hated it and tore it down.

The Big Apple Revisited

As much as I like San Francisco, Washington, D.C., and Chicago, I'm forced to admit that New York really is the Big Apple.  It's the only city in America that compares with London or Paris as a "big city" --  cosmopolitan, diverse, beautiful, and ... well, huge.

I try to drop by every few years -- not all that easy to do from here in the Northwest Corner -- and remind myself why I like it so much.

And so, I returned last night from a four-day visit.  I often visit in November, and have never been disappointed by that month.  The weather was rather cool the evening I arrived, but became progressively warmer each day.  And the many trees of the city were proudly showing off their fall colors, resplendent in the daily sunshine.

I've long since adopted the Upper West Side as "my" part of town.  Unfortunately, I'm apparently not the only one to do so, as hotels in that neighborhood are increasingly being renovated -- and their rates jacked up accordingly.  So I abandoned my favorite hotel on W. 77th, and stayed for the first time at a hotel on W. 87th,  just off Broadway -- which is as far "uptown," as I've stayed to date.  As I rapturously posted on my Facebook page, I'll never weary of wandering the residential streets of the Upper West Side, and exploring the beauty to the east and west, respectively,  of Central Park and Riverside Park.

The "events" around which I centered my visit were two Broadway plays -- This Is Our Youth and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.  The former is essentially an interaction in a one-room apartment between two twenty-something young men, played by Michael Cera and Kieran Culkin.  Cera's character is immature, hyper-active, insecure and submissive.  He is bullied by his "friend," Culkin's character, who is a drug-dealing, brash, overbearing jerk.  As one would expect, as the play progresses, neither character is adequately described by these initial impressions.  Cera' acting, especially, was brilliant -- at 26 years of age, he is capable of looking and behaving ten years younger.

Curious Incident is based on the best-selling novel by Mark Haddon.  It's the moving story of a brilliant, autistic, British teenager, and of his growth and development into a more adequately functioning young man as he goes about trying to solve the mystery of who killed his neighbor's dog.  The staging is unique and "digital," with lighting effects that vividly demonstrate the boy's mental reactions to events about him.  (The play co-stars Toby, the white mouse, whose story was told today in an article in the New York Times.)

Those two plays -- and the logistics of getting to and from them -- consumed a substantial chunk of time.  Otherwise, I did  a lot of walking -- not merely around the Upper West Side, but throughout the city. Just to say I did it,  I followed Broadway from my hotel on 87th, all the way through mid-town and lower Manhattan to its termination (or origin) in Battery Park.  I'm sure I've walked every block of that route, at one time or another, but this was the first time I'd walked the entire route in one fell swoop, and it gave me a coherent picture of how various Manhattan neighborhoods are knit together.  We brag about Seattle's Pike Place Market, but the twenty blocks of Broadway from 34th to Union Square is virtually one long open-air market selling produce, meats, clothing, odds and ends and souvenirs. 

I also revisited the High Line.  I posted to this blog in 2009 about the first segment of this elevated walk, one that follows an abandoned freight line along the Hudson.  Two more segments have since been opened, and the High Line now stretches from the far southern reaches of Chelsea to the tracks behind Penn Station, where it bends toward the river, then crosses the  tracks, and ends up on 30th.  Like light rail lines in other cities, the High Line has prompted new development.  The northern third of the route is surrounded by construction sites, and the Penn Station rail lines will be covered over in a few more years by a skyscraper development to be called Hudson Yards.

It was all fun, but I may remember most vividly small moments -- sitting on a rock outcropping in Central Park, looking across one of the park's many lakes at the dense autumn foliage, and at the skyscrapers beyond; coffee and a sandwich in front of  "The Boathouse" in the park, trying to fend off hordes of small birds who wanted to share my food; watching crowds ice skate at the Trump rink in southern Central Park, and at a city rink in Bryant Park (in 60 degree temperatures); staring with awe at the beautiful new 79-story Two World Trade Center building, just completed; and being impressed by the helmeted small children of affluent families pushing scooters around Upper West Side sidewalks -- and mentally contrasting that sight with images from those days when "New York" meant "deadly juvenile delinquent gangs" to folks from other parts of the country.

It's a city we can be proud of, as the hordes of tourists speaking languages other than English will gladly attest.