MAWNGENOWN. I have no idea what the spelling of this word is in Danish. The spelling in the caption is how it sounded when my mother said it. Words enter languages because they are useful (see the other post for today). My mother defined “mawngenown” as “morning grumpiness in men.” We pressed her on whether it could ever be applied to women. She was firm that it could not be used to apply to women. Because the men in the household were too sleepy in the morning to muster grumpiness, we learned the word fairly late in life.
Archive for July, 2007
MAWNGENOWN.
Monday, July 23rd, 2007Uppehållsväder.
Monday, July 23rd, 2007Uppehållsväder. The Swedes have a word for it. Chris Weisfelder wrote me from Sweden: “I’m going to teach you a word that you hear a lot in Sweden – uppehålsväder (holding up weather). We had some today. This is basically when it’s not raining right now but it could rain any moment, but hopefully, it won’t. We had dinner outside in holding up weather. I wanted to serve outside and set the table. Then a few drops of rain came onto the napkins and I thought, “better set the table inside” and I did the table in the house. Back and forth in indecision. At the end, the rain held up so we ate outside, and after guests had left, it came down in buckets.”
ARE TWINS UNSUCCESSFUL? (COMMENT).
Sunday, July 22nd, 2007ARE TWINS UNSUCCESSFUL? (COMMENT). I checked Wikipedia here to see whether I had forgotten any famous twins. It seems to confirm that the answer to Dick Weisfelder’s question is that there have not been many distinguished twins. I had not mentioned the Epstein twins (who wrote the screenplay for CASABLANCA) and the Shaffer twins (Anthony wrote SLEUTH and Peter wrote EQUUS and AMADEUS). The McWhirter twins were responsible for the GUINESS BOOK OF RECORDS. Twins seem to have had more success in sports; I left out the Barbers, the Grants and the Mahres, among others. Finally, in the annals of crime, there are the Kray twins, who were colorful London gang leaders in the fifties and sixties.
TWINS IN SPORTS– WITH ONE MISTAKEN IDENTITY STORY (COMMENT).
Saturday, July 21st, 2007TWINS IN SPORTS –WITH ONE MISTAKEN IDENTITY STORY (COMMENT). Successful twins seem to be more common in sports than in politics. There were the Van Arsdale twins in basketball, who had remarkably similar careers. I saw them play when they were at Indiana. Dick Van Arsdale played 12 seasons in the NBA and scored 15,079 points and had 3057 rebounds; Tom Van Arsdale played 12 seasons in the NBA and scored 14, 232 points and had 3942 rebounds. I was glad to see that they played together their last year. In the middle of their careers, there was a story about a teammate coming up to one of them and saying, “Guess what! We traded for your brother!” Wonderful! Who did we give up?” “You.” The Gullickson twins were very successful in tennis, especially in doubles. One was left handed and the other was right handed. Unlike almost every other successful tennis player, they had not played the junior circuit and were not well known to other players. This led to a story about a European pro fuming that after beating him playing right handed, Gullickson had shown him up by beating him the next week playing left handed.
IMPORTANT TWINS (COMMENT).
Friday, July 20th, 2007IMPORTANT TWINS (COMMENT). Dick Weisfelder in a comment mentions the ultranationalist Kaczynski twins in Poland and asks “How about some posts on roles identical twins have played in various careers and countries?” I have been thinking about Dick’s question, and I can’t think of very many successful identical twins. In politics, both John Lindsay and Everett Dirksen had brothers who were identical twins. If the test is success in the same field, I guess that Abigail Van Buren and Ann Landers would be the leaders. The Stanley Steamer was created by the Stanley twins. I wind up thinking that the Kaczynskis (President and Prime Minister of Poland) may be the most successful twins ever. Which twins have I missed?
CRIME IN CHICAGO.
Thursday, July 19th, 2007CRIME IN CHICAGO. For the next couple weeks, the Chicago newspapers are going to be having trial stories with vivid descriptions of gangster life. Here are yesterday’s story and today’s story. In a college economics class, Meyer Burstein commented that we should be grateful that we lived in a country where it was more dangerous to have Tony Accardo as an enemy than to have the President (Eisenhower at the time) as an enemy. The first story describes the murder of two men who made the mistake of burgling Tony Accardo’s house.
WHAT’S 16 VARIATIONS WHEN YOU CAN HAVE 42?
Wednesday, July 18th, 2007WHAT’S 16 VARIATIONS WHEN YOU CAN HAVE 42? I was excited by the 16 Ayckbourn plays. I have received in the mail an ad for the next shows at 59E59 Theaters (where the Ayckbourn plays were performed) and one of the upcoming plays is THE NINA VARIATIONS, which has 4 Treplevs and 10 Ninas performing 42 variations of the final scene from THE SEAGULL. I’m tempted. Just to spend more time with Chekhov would be worthwhile.
THE AYCKBOURN PLAYS–THE BEST ACTING I HAVE EVER SEEN?
Wednesday, July 18th, 2007THE AYCKBOURN PLAYS—THE BEST ACTING I HAVE EVER SEEN? I think yes. Of course the demands of the plays on the actors are astounding—over twenty hours of dialogue for only two actors. Each actor created three major characters and several minor characters. The comic timing, the line readings, the shifts in mood and the precision of the emotions—all were brilliant. Maybe the best evidence is that I heard one lady saying at the end of the show that she didn’t realize that there were only two actors playing six parts until the curtain call when only two actors came out to take a bow. The two actors are: Bill Champion and Claudia Elmhirst.
THE AYCKBOURN PLAYS–CAN EACH PLAY STAND ALONE?
Tuesday, July 17th, 2007THE AYCKBOURN PLAYS—CAN EACH PLAY STAND ALONE? I described here the Alan Ayckbourn cycle of sixteen plays called INTIMATE EXCHANGES. The extraordinary challenge of sixteen plays raises the question whether an individual play would be worth seeing on its own. Annalisa and Nick each saw only one of the plays and each was enthusiastic about that play. Nick saw LOVE IN THE MIST and Annalisa saw A GAME OF GOLF. Each commented on how sad the play they saw was, and how funny.
THE AYCKBOURN PLAYS–HOW MANY OF THE SIXTEEN PLAYS SHOULD BE SEEN?
Tuesday, July 17th, 2007THE AYCKBOURN PLAYS—HOW MANY OF THE SIXTEEN PLAYS SHOULD BE SEEN? My answer is that I would see all 16 of them if I could. I managed to see five of them in an eight day period. Do the plays taken together have a larger meaning? I saw in a couple of reviews the suggestion that what was demonstrated was simply the ingenuity of the playwright. I think that there was a larger resonance for me. I was always troubled in college literature courses by the argument that a novelist’s view of the world could be inferred from reasoning backward from the events in the plot. The 5 plays I saw worked together in the sense that they dispelled that kind of recursive thinking. The plots of the plays reflected only one of many possible courses of action without simplistic moral lessons. Taken as a whole, they also suggested that character is not destiny. The events in the plays I saw are very different and yet the characters are basically consistent. One very broad generalization may be that if a character takes action (or shows will power by resisting a cigarette), that decisiveness makes a difference in the character’s life in other areas.
