Points of Departure
Abe, Honestly
In downtown New Haven, the writing is quite literally on the wall. On Court Street—a few buildings down from the orthographically sinister awning of “Cryptonnite Beauty Salon”—a Viennese furrier has posted a handwritten note informing his clients that he will return by April 20th. Close to Chapel Street, a plaque commemorates the world's first commercial telephone exchange, which opened in 1878 several hundred feet away from the current location of a Southwestern Bell Corporation building. Ghostly messages traced on its dusty windows read “Dixwell” and “7-26- 02.” On the other side of the same building, at the corner of Court and State Streets, two plaques hang next to each other. One is an unexpected and well-ornamented tribute to the 1856 founding of a B'nai B'rith lodge; the other plaque causes one to pause.
Installed on March 6th, 1976, the plaque bears a quotation from a speech Abraham Lincoln gave in New Haven on that same date 116 years earlier. During his campaign for president in 1860, Lincoln toured Connecticut, speaking forcibly against the extension of the institution of slavery. The plaque on Court Street, however, focuses not on slavery but on laborers’ right to strike:
I'm glad that a system of labor prevails in New England under which laborers can strike when they want to… I like the system which lets a man quit when he wants to. . . One of the reasons I am opposed to slavery is just here.
Appropriately, the Bicentennial Labor Commission of Greater New Haven sponsored the Court Street plaque.
The strike to which Lincoln refers was not confined to New Haven. Earlier that year, shoemakers in Massachusetts had gone on strike, inciting twenty thousand shoemakers across New England to join the movement. In the years following Lincoln’s speech, New Haven would see a number of similar labor movements. Printers went on strike after a typesetting quarrel broke out between newspapers, and an 1871 issue of The New Haven Evening Register enigmatically reported, “Some days ago, Quigley's plumbers were said to have been on a strike. That announcement was a mistake. All the plumbers but those at Quigley's were on a strike, and they have probably returned to their work by this time.”
The rights of laborers, then, were certainly relevant to those who listened to Lincoln's speech. Yet the plaque’s declaration that Lincoln spoke “against slavery and for labor’s rights” is misleading. Although Lincoln advocated for laborers’ rights, his words are embedded in a larger anti-slavery argument and are often considered simply one of the means by which he campaigned against slavery. In fact, the first ellipsis on the sign stands in for Lincoln’s praise of workers who “are not tied down and obliged to labor whether you pay them or not.” This rhetoric of bondage, deliberately omitted by the plaque’s designers, reminds us that, in New Haven, Lincoln was primarily speaking against slavery. In The Library of America’s collection of his writings, the speech runs 17 pages long, and the paragraph from which the Bicentennial Labor Commission of Greater New Haven drew their quotation is one of the very few moments that Lincoln refers to the labor movement. This particular speech is more often remembered for the extended passage in which he compares slavery to a “venomous snake” in bed with children.
In transforming the sound of Lincoln’s voice into metal, the Bicentennial Labor Commission also performed an act of referential alchemy, compelling the quotation to stand in tribute to labor unions. It all likelihood, the commission wished to honor the New Haven public school teachers who were arrested for striking the year before the plaque was commissioned.
Like the flyers and awnings that run along Court Street, the plaque is an advertisement, selling one particular interpretation of history— with Abraham Lincoln as its spokesman. This street corner is a lesson in how history is made, reminding us that to quote is always, perhaps, to misquote. After all, Lincoln himself warned against his opponents’ tendency to create “a specious and fantastic arrangement of words, by which a man can prove a horse chestnut to be a chestnut horse.”
Mad Props
"Well, we wrapped a bolster pillow into a circle and covered it with yellow cloth. Then we found a giant inflatable duck, you know, like the kind that a child would sit on. And we cut off its head and stuffed that..."
No, this is not a tidbit from a particularly traumatizing episode of Martha Stewart Living. It’s Alison Merrick’s description of her favorite aspect of her job. As Props Assistant at the Yale University Theater, Merrick is the woman in charge of finding and creating props for the eighty productions the theater stages each season.
When the theater agrees to put up a show, Merrick and her boss, Props Master Brian Cookson, produce props in a number of ways. If the show has been in production elsewhere, as this winter’s colorful Brundibar was, it may arrive at the University Theater with a full smorgasbord of props. A director then decides whether to add or replace items. For Brundibar, Merrick dreamt up two major props: a giant ball of yarn, created by wrapping a yoga ball in string; and a baker’s tray bearing Technicolor muffins. The ball of yarn was an entirely new addition, the tray, a replacement for an inferior version used in earlier performances. “This one is bigger and lighter and more colorful,” she says. “And it wiggles!”
On the other hand, if the show debuts at the University Theater, Merrick and Cookson must build all of the props themselves. They begin with props already at their disposal in the theater’s warehouse, isolated in an industrial area between Fair Haven and Wooster Square. The warehouse shares an enormous space with Tile America, so as visitors move into floor space owned by the University Theater, the shelves’ contents shift from painted plaster tiles to clunky typewriters and paisley armchairs.
Props are arranged on the shelves by type. Populating one area, like the remnants of an abandoned men’s room, are three full toilets, a urinal, and several toilet seats of various colors. Behind a pre-stuffed bra made of gold lamé lies a carton of other accessories that actors use to augment their postures: walking sticks, canes, and scepters. Objects that are more trickier to categorize are strewn among the piles: A lonesome deer torso keeps quiet vigil over a forest of baby carriages and computer boxes. The props create a feeling of surrealism. After walking by two stuffed arms sporting painted-red fingernails, one feels one has stumbled into a Dali painting.
The sheer quantity of props makes it easy to forget the effort that went into each individual object. They are stored so carefully because many are hand-crafted entirely from raw materials. Merrick lists a few props she has constructed, among them cars, trees, and pie boxes. I find the last example surprising: Can’t she just buy pie boxes?
“You can buy pie boxes, obviously,” she says. “But the ones we found didn’t look enough like pie boxes.” When functional objects from real life don’t serve the aesthetic needs of performed life, Merrick must create new objects. If compelling items cannot be found in catalogues or among the piles at the warehouse, she must use yards of fabric, inflatable animals, and scraps of hardware to create larger-than-life objects: a pie box pie-boxier than any cardboard container that has ever held a pie, or an enormous ball of yarn that could crush a real cat to death. While we often understand how everyday objects are made—we see the man at Yorkside fold the boxes, and we watch the kitten unravel the yarn—props exist outside of effort and function. On stage, they seem so real, so alive, so magical that without an occasional glimpse of the dusty, discarded head of an inflatable duck, one can almost believe that they are.
Dig It
In bird hall on the top floor of the Peabody Museum, surrounded by stuffed waterfowl, a young man named Tim Fasano sits behind a box of crayons and a stack of cardstock. Today is the last Saturday in February, and there are still a few hours to go until the end of Dinosaur Days 2006, an annual week-long event dedicated to the giant reptiles that roamed the Earth over 65 million years ago. Fasano is a senior at Hopkins School who has volunteered at the Peabody Museum for the past two years. “All of the events run together” he reminisces, “but I remember the hats.” His booth offers Peabody visitors the chance to construct dinosaur headgear. A gloating toddler struts by wearing a Tyrannosaurus rex hat—by this time in the afternoon, Fasano has run out of that particular species.
Celebrated for over twenty years, Dinosaur Days is the longest-standing annual event at the Peabody. Today, excited youngsters trailed by bedraggled parents fill the Great Hall, built in 1929 to house the enormous Apatosaurus skeleton that still dominates the space. A five-year old girl startles herself while gazing at the giant skull of the long-extinct carnivore, while two slightly older boys point excitedly to the smoking volcanoes and swooping pterodactyl depicted in The Age of Reptiles mural above.
This year’s Dinosaur Days is especially significant due to the recently unveiled bronze Torosaurus latus sculpture gracing the Museum’s lawn. The dinosaur’s likeness is scattered throughout the museum’s interior—and on its inhabitants’ heads. A sign on the second-floor landing proclaims: “Torosaurus: A Peabody Dinosaur.” David Heiser, the museum’s Event Coordinator, proudly explains how Peabody visitors recently had a chance to use the clay left over from the sculpture’s full-scale model to create their own Torosaurus sculptures.
Dinosaur Days is a kid’s dream. Volunteer Fasano believes that, if the museum can get kids interested in natural history on a basic “I-like-hats” level, they may develop a real passion for the subject as they grow older. Fasano would know He attributes his own desire to learn about natural history to the toy dinosaurs he played with as a child.
In the Hall of Mammals, the fossils buried in the 3’ x 3’ sandbox are real, and each child can take one home in an envelope with a description of its type and age. Shekar Menon, one of several volunteers monitoring the mini paleontologists, explains, “their favorites are the shark teeth” as he shakes his head at a greedy three-year old who wants to take home more than one. When I request to join in, Menon kindly explains that, while I have outgrown the fossil dig, there are plenty of Dinosaur Days activities aimed at an older audience. Elaine Hitt, a volunteer at the hat display, agrees. “Lots of times we have three generations,” she says, gesturing at the families making hats together. Just for a while, I try to act my age and read placards, but after four or five scientific descriptions of giant turtles and flightless birds, I want to be a kid again.
Variations on a Theme
"Gentlemen, in all probability you are writing better now than you will ever write again." The year was 1952, and Edward Weeks, a guest lecturer at Yale and then-Editor-in- Chief of Atlantic Monthly, stared down from a podium at an attentive group of Yale men: star students from the English Department’s Daily Themes class. Gaddis Smith peered back. Now Professor Emeritus of History, Smith believes Weeks was right. He and his classmates probably never regained the intense “spontaneity and energy” that breathed so freely through their best themes. In 1952, Daily Themes was already a legend, and over the years it has only become more mythic. Along with Smith, legendary men of letters such as Calvin Trillin and William F. Buckley have graced its roster and gone on to write about the course in their memoirs.
The class first appeared in the Yale curriculum as “Short Themes” in 1903 and was christened “Daily Themes” by Assistant Professor of English C.S. Baldwin in 1907. John Berdan taught from 1907 until 1941 and as Professor Smith recalls, he was the man who really “invented Daily Themes.” In Calvin Trillin’s 1966 New Yorker article about the class, he lists Berdan’s eight slogans: “Individualize by Specific Detail! Vivify by Range of Appeal! Characterize by Speech and Gesture! Clarify by Point of View! Unify by a Single Impression! Combine Details for Coherence! Charge Words with Connotation! Choose Words for their Sounds!” Richard Sewell, a revered English professor and the first master of Ezra Stiles College, echoed Berdan’s maxims when he took over the course in the 1940s. As described by Trillin, Sewell’s words at a teaching conference highlighted his predecessor’s legacy: “Sewell called ‘Individualize by Specific Detail’ the eye opener in Daily Themes’ attempt to revive the sensitivity to detail…a ‘return to the vivid, honest, and direct observation of children.’” Half a century after taking the class, Smith still clearly remembers being taught to characterize through detail: “Do not write: ‘John was an angry man.’ Write: ‘John kicked the dog down the stairs.’” The example is a critical lesson for any serious writer. After a decline in the sixties culminated in the course’s two-year absence from the curriculum, John Hollander revived the class in 1979.
Today’s Daily Themes students must attend lecture every Tuesday and write a 250-300 word theme every weekday, and discuss their written themes in a weekly tutorial. Each week focuses on a different aspect of writing: Point of View, Diction, Journals, Sentence Rhythms, and so on. According to the current professor of Daily Themes Bill Deresiewicz, some of these topics focus on “writing at the most atomic level; some are forms of narrative, and some are elements of narrative.” At the lecture, the professor reads selections by authors who have tackled the week’s topic with particular aplomb. Sometimes, the writers themselves took the course.
And yet not everyone in Daily Themes wants to pursue writing professionally. Although few will actually become novelists, poets, or journalists, Professor Deresiewicz treats all as if they will. He believes that “to be a writer is to live a certain kind of life. It’s about learning to look at the world, taking a responsibility for the truth. If you are deciding to do that, you are throwing the weight of your soul behind it.” For a single semester, Daily Themes’ students are united with each other and with their predecessors by their common decision to make a commitment to the writing life.
As the Daily Themes student sits down every night at a laptop, staring in haggard anguish at the cursor ticking across a blinking white screen, an insatiable lover whispers in his ear, relentlessly goading. The lover is notoriously brutal, but perversely sweet. The writer must continually rekindle passion, refine emotion, plumb experience: He recalls the generations of Yale students before him as they too must have stared at blank paper, absently fiddling with fountain pens. Encouraged by this bond, the student might begin: “Charles stared at the blank white door to his study. He knew Katerina had heard him come in; he could hear her arranging the folds of her dressing gown across the sofa, every detail calculated to unsettle him into submission. But he could only sigh. For the hundredth time, his hand twitched on the doorknob. Daily, he could not resist her.”
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