Eleanor Arnason's Web Log

Thor 2

2012-01-20T08:03:00.000-08:00

Patrick points out that I have written a synopsis, not an analysis. I am a story teller, not a critic. And strangely enough, the movie is complex enough to require description in some detail.

I use the word simple a lot in my synopsis. Myths are simple, and so are most comics, though comics can be complex. I used to think that one of things I liked about science fiction, including my own work, was a certain brightness and flatness, a lack of nuance. Compare a 1960s Abstract Expressionist painting to a 17th century Dutch painting. The abstract painting is big and bright and flat. The Dutch painting is small and has depth and detail, light and shadow, nuance. Both can be good, but they touch us differently.

The other thing to remember is -- the abstract paintings were done after the Dutch realistic paintings by artists fully trained in realism, light and shadow, plasticity, nuance and detail.

Simplicity can be a choice, not a failing; and there can be complexity within simplicity.

Getting back to the movie, I think Loki is the person who drives the plot step by step, through his tricks and plots. Odin is the over-arching consciousness: the person who understands what is going on. A key line is the movie is Frigga talking to Loki: "Your father always has a purpose." So Odin is the movie's Prospero, who moves the plot through a very limited number of key interventions: Thor's exile and his own retreat into the Odinsleep.

Thor as Othello and Loki as Iago, or Odin as Propero and Loki as -- what? Caliban the monster? Am I nuts?

Ah, what the heck. It's a good action movie.

Thor

2012-01-20T05:46:00.001-08:00

Switching to a more useful topic than MFAs in Creative Writing, I want to write about the move Thor. I just saw it for the fifth or sixth time. I really like it. Why? It's just another silly Marvel superhero movie.

I am going to talk about the entire movie. So this is a spoiler alert. Though of course you know how the movie will end already. Myths and comic books tend to come to the obvious ending.

I like the three realms that we see: Asgard, which is a science fiction city of the future combined with a Renaissance court; Jotenheim, which is cold and dark and bare, even spookier than the Old Norse realm of the frost giants as I imagined it from reading the myths; and Midgard, the realm of humans, which is an early 21st century American small town, set in the middle of the New Mexico desert.

I like the combination of superhero comic conventions and Norse myth. I think there's a touch of Shakespeare in the movie, courtesy of Kenneth Branagh, Anthony Hopkins and Tom Hiddleston, who are all Shakespearean actors. Tom Hiddleston, who is Loki, certainly lurks around like Iago.

I don't know the Marvel comic book well. So I go back to the myths and to Shakespeare: Like Othello, Thor is the story of a strong, simple man tricked by a devious and malicious man. In the myths, Thor ia a strong, simple, decent, not-too-bright god partnered with a trickster, who (like most tricksters) is sometimes good and sometimes evil. I think, in the movie, we are watching Loki descend into evil.

I like the story, which is mostly simple, though Loki -- trickster and plotter that he is -- makes everything a bit more complex.

Thor is young, strong, simple, arrogant and foolish. Like the mythic Thor, he is the monster slayer and (as it turns out) the friend of humanity. His good traits, which take a while to show up, are loyalty and decency.

Odin is the Allfather, the god who understands consequence and plans deeply.

Loki is the trickster, who by the end of the movie has betrayed everyone, even himself. He's an Iago with a motivation. He loves his father Odin and is jealous of Thor, who is -- Loki believes -- the favored son. Is this correct? That isn't certain.

The movie is a test of both Thor and Loki. Thor disobeys his father and attacks the realm of the frost giants, when his father had told him he wants peace. As punishment, he is sent to Earth in mortal form to learn what it's like to live without the hammer Mjolnir and the strength of Thor.

Soon after, Loki has a blazing row with Odin, because he has discovered he is actually a giant, adopted as an infant by the gods. In the middle of the quarrel, Odin collapses and falls into the Odinsleep, a deep sleep from which he cannot be awakened. Loki is left free to do what he'd do without his father around.

My theory is, Odin has discovered there are problems with both sons; and so he decides to test them: Thor by sending him into exile and Loki by going to sleep and leaving the stage free.

Thor must learn how to live without power, and Loki must learn to live with the power of a king.

Loki seizes the throne of Asgard and invites the king of frost giants into Asgard to kill Odin. But before the murder can be accomplished, Loki kills the giant king. As I say, he betrays everyone. He then attempts to destroy the frost giants' realm and kill an entire people -- having first lured their king into a direct attack on Odin, a more or less manufactured act of war. The giants are tall and green and unpleasant; none the less it's genocide.

Like Thor at the beginning to the movie, Loki is trying to win the approval of his father by saving Asgard from their enemy. Odin, who has known war, wants peace. It really is an anti-war movie.

On Earth Thor gets his arrogance beaten out of him. He now has to deal with people as an equal, instead of a god. He is still a formidable warrior, but he no longer has Mjolnir's power, and he learns that violence does not solve everything -- or even most things. (He could have learned the same lesson with Mjolnir, but it would have been far messier. Odin sends him to a place where he can learn the limits of power without destroying the universe.)

Loki visits him on Earth and tells him Odin is dead -- killed by Thor's disobedience and exile -- and their mother Frigga will not allow Thor back to Asgard. So now he has lost his divinity, his strength, his family and his home, and it all seems to be his fault.

Unlike Loki, he can learn from experience, and he can accept consequences. He accepts his exile on Earth in very ordinary ways -- by getting drunk with a human man and falling in love with a woman. Maybe, if he had more time, he would have mourned more. But he is young and strong and simple, and the movie is an action movie.

He has learned the limits of power, and he has learned to be human. The final lesson comes when Loki sends a robot to Earth to kill Thor. By this time Thor's buddies have shown up: the Warriors Three and the warrior maiden Sif. They still have their divine powers, but they can't stop the robot, which is destroying the small New Mexico town. So Thor learns the last lesson of being a king. If necessary, you sacrifice yourself.

He goes up to the robot and says, "This is between you and me, Loki. Leave these other people out. Kill me, if you find that's necessary."

The robot kills him.

And the hammer Mjolnir, which is conveniently nearby, returns to Thor, who comes back to life and defeats the robot. He really is a terrific killer of monsters; and the movie does a good job of reminding us that Thor is the god of storms. Earlier in the movie, he tries to get Mjolnir back from the US government in the middle of a thunderstorm, which arrives as if summoned; and he defeats the robot inside a tornado.

Then they all go back to Asgard, and Thor stops Loki from destroying the realm of the frost giants. To do this, he has to destroy Bifrost, the rainbow bridge. This isolates Asgard from the other realms. So Thor has lost Earth and the woman he now loves, and he has lost Loki, who is apparently killed in their epic fight.

He still loves Loki. One of Thor's virtues is loyalty. Like the Thor of the Old Norse myths, he is a very simple god.

MFAs

2012-01-15T09:18:00.001-08:00

Foxessa made this comment on my MFA post. I am copying it here in full, because she is spot on:

The main reason for getting an MFA is that in the realm of academic credentials, an MFA is considered a terminal degree. You must have a terminal degree in order to be considered for an academic teaching position of any kind.

Writers and artists get tired as they get older. They don't generally make much money from their art or their writing, nor do they get health insurance, pension or other benefits. At some point teaching in some form can help one transition into the next phase of life with some financial security.

There also all kinds of grants and fellowships and so on for which you can't even apply without a Ph.D. So I know more and more artists in various disciplines who are getting themselves Ph.D.s one way and another.

I knew about the need to have an MFA in order to teach. I did not know about needing a PhD in order to apply for grants. I find this horrifying. I'm not sure why it should seem worse to make a living by teaching creative writing than by being a court poet for a Renaissance prince. It's all patronage, and no worse -- more likely, better -- than painting for the awful New York art market.

I am stuck in the old avant garde idea of the artist as poor, but independent. La Boheme. Most likely, this is silly.

I want to write fiction that is both popular and political; and I don't want to be part of a system that produces ever larger numbers of MFAs, who can only survive by teaching in creative writing programs that produce ever more MFAs.

There is one problem with being a college professor or a court poet. You have to write work your patron likes. Maybe there is more to art than the world view of the patron.

And debt remains a problem. It's hard to be a free spirit, if you have to repay large student loans.

MFAs

2012-01-07T07:41:00.000-08:00

This is something I posted on facebook.

I've wondered about creative writing degrees for a long time. What is their purpose, except to train creative writing teachers? I mean, you get a degree in dental hygiene, and you can get a job. It used to be that a degree in journalism could help you get a job, and for all I know college training in business and technical writing are still useful. But creative writing?

I am prejudiced in this area. I have taken some classes in writing poetry, which were fine, though I'm not sure I learned much. (The best one was in Iceland, with awesome birdwatching.) Otherwise, I learned writing from reading a lot and studying English Lit. in college and being in writers' workshops, the kind that writers form to critique each other's work, not the for-pay kind with a teacher. One thing I have never learned is how to teach writing. When I've tried it, I'm not good. You might learn how to teach writing through a creative writing program, and that would be useful, if you wanted to teach creative writing.

The thing that strikes me outrageous is people are coming out of MFA programs with tens of thousands of dollars in debt. A lawyer or doctor has a good chance of paying off this kind of debt, but a creative writer? A poet? Or someone writing literary fiction, whatever that might be? -- I don't get the impression that most MFA programs are teaching people how to write romances and techno-thrillers. In any case, no matter what you write, most people in the field scrape by and a few people do well. The odds are never good.

This does not mean you give up. It means you think long and hard about starting a writing career with a lot of debt.

If your goal is to write, and you have no other career plans, a BA in something is a good idea, since a college degree is useful in getting a job, and you will need to pay the rent while building a writing career. These days you are going to pile up debt getting that. Piling up even more debt seems really unwise.

Note

2012-01-04T05:41:00.000-08:00

I wrote a lot more about class and language, and then decided I was taking Barbara Jensen's ideas in directions she had not intended.

So I will wait for her book, which comes out this July, and read it.

In the meantime, I deleted a couple of posts as being bullshit.

*

I had to add back part of what I cut, because the uncut version of my post on Barb appeared in The Twin Cities Daily Planet. I have to stand behind what I've said in public.

I continue to think about Barbara's essay and think of the ways different kinds of people use language. She is contrasting blue collar workers with professional intellectuals. These are two extremes, I think. Because class structure is complex, and many people have experiences with more than one class, there are all kinds of gradations in between.

I'm thinking of office workers from blue collar backgrounds, who have to deal with middle class bosses and customers, but also have to deal with their families. I was amazed by how easily my co-workers in Detroit moved between standard English and an African American dialect. I felt they were bilingual, while I knew only one language well.

Barbara Jensen, Class and Language

2012-01-03T08:39:00.000-08:00

I read one of Barb Jensen's essays online, after posting at Crooked Timber. Barb is a psychologist who writes about the different ways working class people and professional middle class people use language. This is from here essay, talking about the "condensed" way working people talk:

I think of the restricted code as an essential, condensed kind of communication, the kind that happens between intimates. It is the kind of speech where explaining things in a general and formal way would seem strange. A differentiated kind of speech creates a certain amount of distance between people. It is not that working class people do not like to talk, it is that when they do they produce narratives, they tell stories, rather than "download" information or produce abstract encapsulations of concepts. Again, the stories they tell are filled with implicit references to people and places in their lives ("localized meanings")

Elsewhere in the essay (I can't find the passage now) she describes middle class language as bricks, making a road or wall: everything is connected, an entire argument is built. Working people use words as buoys (a wonderful image) floating in a region of information that is shared, implicit, often conveyed non-verbally. I like "buoys" because they are tethered in important places. The buoys in the Mississippi tell you where the channel is. They are giving you information about what's going on below the surface of the water.

I also like the freedom in the image of buoys. Yes, they are tethered, but they have more motion than a brick in a wall. They are related to the other buoys, outlining the channel in the Mississippi, but they are not locked to the buoys, as bricks are locked to the other bricks (or words or ideas) around them.

The condensed remarks and the story telling seem right to me.

When I worked in the hat factory, and people were getting laid off, one guy said, "Even a horseshit union is better than no union at all." There was no further discussion. He had said it all; and his remark has stayed with me for 30 years.

Whenever I get pissed at unions, I remember Leo's line. It's like a buoy, showing where the channel is.

As for storytelling, if you hear something you don't agree with, you don't argue, you either remain silent or switch the topic or say, "Well, maybe, but let me tell you what happened to my brother Irv..."

A person who doesn't pick up on nonverbal messages can get in real trouble in a warehouse or many offices. (Like me in the office in my dream a few days ago. Part of the meaning of the dream was -- I wasn't picking up on nonverbal information.)

Finally, I'm going to quote myself. This is from A Woman of the Iron People, a member of my starship describing what messages from Earth are like after 200 years:

As far as I can tell, these people (on Earth) have no interest in any kind of system: political or economic or intellectual...Some of the factual material is okay. Such and such a star has gone nova. We have discovered a new kind of life on Titan.

But the theories! I told you these people have no interest in any kind of framework. That is problem number one. Number two is -- they don't seem to distinguish between fact and fiction -- or between material that is relevant and everything else. Some of the messages sound like poetry. Others are stories with no point that I can find. Others sound like gossip or a group a proverbs...

I hadn't read Barb when I wrote this, and I wasn't thinking about the people I'd met in Detroit and Minneapolis offices and Minneapolis warehouses. But in some ways I am describing condensed or restricted speech, from the point of view of someone who doesn't understand it.

Blog Comment

2012-01-01T11:19:00.001-08:00

I posted these on the Crooked Timber blog, in a discussion of whether the American working class was conservative.

I spent most of my working life (40+ years) as an office clerk or warehouse worker. My partner spent most of his working life as a med tech or a truckdriver. I figure we met a lot of members of the American working class. Some were conservative. Many were not. (My partner just said, “Talk to Denny and see how conservative he is.” He is one of the maintenance guys in our building. He’s a 75+ white guy, who is a Wellstone progressive. When we took off for Xmas, he said to us, “Are you going to Occupy or is this a vacation?”)

One of the other people commenting said the police and firefighters in Wisconsin were okay with Walker attacking union rights, till they realized their union rights were being attacked. I wrote:

If I am remembering correctly, Walker was going to exempt police and firefighters from the “death to unions” law. The cops and firefighters came out in Madison, none the less. Yes, there is false consciousness. But people are actually quite complex. Having just spent a week with the upper middle classes, I’d say the working class is often more complex. Working people have all kinds of ideas, which come from the mass media, pop culture, their own local culture and traditions. Minnesota Iron Rangers tend to be pro-union, pro-gun and anti-abortion, due to a history of union struggle, a hunting culture and a lot of Catholic ethnic groups. I don’t see this as consistent, but I am not a Ranger.

...The Iron Range is Democratic Farmer Labor. The local DFL politicians are pro-gun and anti-abortion, but Rangers stick with the state DFL, though the party is not pro-gun and anti-abortion. The lifestyle issues do not trump the class issues in this case. People are complex.

Dream

2012-01-01T07:53:00.000-08:00

I woke from a dream this morning, in which I had a dreary office job in an office full of young women, and the supervisor was firing me. She was doing it very slowly, unable to come to the point. The reasons? I talked too much and made personal calls on my phone. I had never been cautioned about either, nor had I been told there was company policy about phone use.

The supervisor said other women had complained to her about my talking. A couple came into the room where the supervisor and I were and realized I was getting fired. One of them said, "Good." I told her to walk out the door and keep walking.

Patrick was in the room, trying to eavesdrop. He had a job at the same place, doing maintenance or something similar.

I finally said to the supervisor, "Okay. You want to fire me. Can you put it some way that won't hurt my chances of getting another job?"

"But you were talking too much, and using the phone, and what about that?" she asked, pointing at Patrick.

At that point, I woke, hurt by the fact that the entire office disliked me. I had clearly not fit in, and I had never understood this, or the other people.

I told Patrick the dream and he said, "It's time to let go of your feelings about working."

I said it was hard when I'd just woken from a dream about working.

Where is the Future We Were Promised?

2012-01-01T07:36:00.000-08:00

You can see bits of future in Singapore and Shanghai, at CERN, maybe in Tokyo. But I grew up in the Midwest on the edge of the future, and while I am still in the Midwest, the future has receded. We are told we can't afford it.

I posted the NASA picture of the astronaut in space above the Earth on the Wyrdsmiths' blog, then added the above comment.

I've made my usual resolutions for the New Year: all the usual forms of self-improvement. Maybe I need to add another resolution: be absolute for a real future, a good future, work to promote and achieve it. This is very big, but why not try?

Why be content with a shoddy present, when the stars are available? Not to mention a decent society.

NASA APOD

2012-01-01T07:09:00.001-08:00

At about 100 meters from the cargo bay of the space shuttle Challenger, Bruce McCandless II was farther out than anyone had ever been before. Guided by a Manned Maneuvering Unit (MMU), astronaut McCandless, pictured above, was floating free in space. McCandless and fellow NASA astronaut Robert Stewart were the first to experience such an "untethered space walk" during Space Shuttle mission 41-B in 1984. The MMU works by shooting jets of nitrogen and has since been used to help deploy and retrieve satellites. With a mass over 140 kilograms, an MMU is heavy on Earth, but, like everything, is weightless when drifting in orbit. The MMU was replaced with the SAFER backpack propulsion unit.

NASA APOD

2011-12-30T07:46:00.000-08:00

The monster at the center of our Galaxy is about to get fed. Recent observations by the Very Large Telescopes indicate that a cloud of gas will venture too close to the supermassive black hole at the Galactic center. The gas cloud is being disrupted, stretched out, heated up, and some of it is expected to fall into the black hole over the next two years. In this artist's illustration, what remains of the blob after a close pass to the black hole is shown in red and yellow, arching out from the gravitational death trap to its right. The cloud's orbit is shown in red, while the orbits of central stars are shown in blue. The infalling nebula is estimated to contain several times the mass of our Earth, while the central black hole, thought to correspond to the radio source Sagittariaus A*, contains about four million times the mass of our Sun. Once it falls in, nothing is expected to be heard from the doomed gas ever again.

NASA APOD

2011-12-21T07:07:00.000-08:00

What's large and blue and can wrap itself around an entire galaxy? A gravitational lens mirage. Pictured above, the gravity of a luminous red galaxy (LRG) has gravitationally distorted the light from a much more distant blue galaxy. More typically, such light bending results in two discernible images of the distant galaxy, but here the lens alignment is so precise that the background galaxy is distorted into a horseshoe -- a nearly complete ring. Since such a lensing effect was generally predicted in some detail by Albert Einstein over 70 years ago, rings like this are now known as Einstein Rings. Although LRG 3-757 was discovered in 2007 in data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), the image shown above is a follow-up observation taken with the Hubble Space Telescope's Wide Field Camera 3. Strong gravitational lenses like LRG 3-757 are more than oddities -- their multiple properties allow astronomers to determine the mass and dark matter content of the foreground galaxy lenses.

From the Hubble Site

2011-12-17T11:02:00.000-08:00

ABOUT THIS IMAGE:

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope presents a festive holiday greeting that's out of this world. The bipolar star-forming region, called Sharpless 2-106, looks like a soaring, celestial snow angel. The outstretched "wings" of the nebula record the contrasting imprint of heat and motion against the backdrop of a colder medium.

Sharpless 2-106, Sh2-106 or S106 for short, lies nearly 2,000 light-years from us. The nebula measures several light-years in length. It appears in a relatively isolated region of the Milky Way galaxy.

A massive, young star, IRS 4 (Infrared Source 4), is responsible for the furious activity we see in the nebula. Twin lobes of super-hot gas, glowing blue in this image, stretch outward from the central star. This hot gas creates the "wings" of our angel.

A ring of dust and gas orbiting the star acts like a belt, cinching the expanding nebula into an "hourglass" shape. Hubble's sharp resolution reveals ripples and ridges in the gas as it interacts with the cooler interstellar medium.

Dusky red veins surround the blue emission from the nebula. The faint light emanating from the central star reflects off of tiny dust particles. This illuminates the environment around the star, showing darker filaments of dust winding beneath the blue lobes.

Detailed studies of the nebula have also uncovered several hundred brown dwarfs. At purely infrared wavelengths, more than 600 of these sub-stellar objects appear. These "failed" stars weigh less than a tenth of our Sun. Because of their low mass, they cannot produce sustained energy through nuclear fusion like our Sun does. They encompass the nebula in a small cluster.

The Hubble images were taken in February 2011 with the Wide Field Camera 3. Visible narrow-band filters that isolate the hydrogen gas were combined with near-infrared filters that show structure in the cooler gas and dust.

Deadlines

2011-12-10T09:36:00.000-08:00

I've been thinking about deadlines, because Timmi Duchamp gave me a one weekend deadline for a brief essay for the Aqueduct blog. I made it.

I don't like deadlines. For the most part, I write what I want at the speed I want and don't try selling fiction before it's done. When I have had deadlines for fiction, I have usually not made them.

The writing group I'm in -- the Wyrdsmiths -- has a majority of writers who do work to deadline; and I am rethinking my attitude. Sometimes I have genuine creative reasons for writing slowly and taking time off. I need to mull ideas or figure out how to reorganize a story, because it's not heading in a direction I like. But I also suffer from perfectionism and procrastination. I will avoid writing and stall on completing stories for fear the work is not any good.

I'm not as young as I once was. As Andrew Marvell wrote, "...At my back I always hear Time's winged chariot hurrying near: and younder all before us lie deserts of vast eternity." That being so, I'd like to write more rapidly, and this leads me to consider the merits of deadlines.

Since I am writing short stories these days, I am not going to have many deadline set by editors, unless I move into the theme anthology market. But I can set my own deadlines and be serious about meeting them. Or I can simply get serious about writing every day, making production...

Spontaneity and Honesty

2011-12-10T07:30:00.000-08:00

I have been reading Natalie Goldberg's book Writing Down the Bones. Goldberg is very much self-identified as a writer. Most of her work has about the process of writing. She is a writer who writes about how to write. She has also published poetry, which I don't find especially interesting, and a novel I didn't like. Her best work is either memoir or how-to writing books or a combination.

She studied Zen with Katagiri Roshi in Minneapolis, and what she describes is very much writing as a Zen practice. In fact, Katagiri told her writing was her practice.

She emphasizes spontaneity and honesty, writing that comes straight from the heart. I enjoy reading her and think about using her writing exercises. But in my own writing I value control and lying. My writing, especially my prose fiction, is not spontaneous; it's worked over, revised and refined. Most of my writing is fiction and untrue. In fact, it is is not even realistic. It is science fiction and fantasy. I keep thinking about the line from Hamlet: "By indirections find directions out." Using fiction, one finds or says the truth.

I draw on my own life, my experiences and feelings, but I don't show them directly. They are hidden in the tale. And my stories wander into unplanned places. In that sense, they are spontaneous. But control is always present. I am not going to become enlightened working this way. But I am reasonably happy with the stories.

NASA APOD

2011-12-10T07:27:00.000-08:00

These colorful images are of thin slices of meteorites viewed through a polarizing microscope. Part of the group classified as HED meteorites for their mineral content (Howardite, Eucrite, Diogenite), they likely fell to Earth from 4 Vesta, the mainbelt asteroid currently being explored by NASA's Dawn spacecraft. Why are they thought to be from Vesta? Because the HED meteorites have visible and infrared spectra that match the spectrum of that small world. The hypothesis of their origin on Vesta is also consistent with data from Dawn's ongoing observations. Excavated by impacts, the diogenites shown here would have originated deep within the crust of Vesta. Similar rocks are also found in the lower crust of planet Earth. A sample scale is indicated by the white bars, each 2 millimeters long.

NASA APOD

2011-12-04T05:54:00.000-08:00

For reasons unknown, star V838 Mon's outer surface suddenly greatly expanded with the result that it became the brightest star in the entire Milky Way Galaxy in January 2002. Then, just as suddenly, it faded. A stellar flash like this has never been seen before. It's true that supernovae and novae expel matter out into space. But while the V838 Mon flash appears to expel material into space, what is seen here is actually an outwardly moving light echo of the bright flash. In a light echo, light from the flash is reflected by successively more distant rings in the ambient interstellar dust that already surrounded the star. V838 Mon lies about 20,000 light years away toward the constellation of Monoceros the unicorn. In this Hubble Space Telescope image from February 2004, the light echo is about six light years in diameter.

Curiosity on Route to Mars

2011-11-30T05:13:00.000-08:00

Next stop: Mars. This past weekend the Mars Science Laboratory carrying the Curiosity Rover blasted off for the red planet atop an Atlas V rocket from Cape Canaveral, Florida, USA, as pictured above. At five times the size of the Opportunity rover currently operating on Mars, Curiosity is like a strange little car with six small wheels, a head-like camera mast, a rock crusher, a long robotic arm, and a plutonium power source. Curiosity is scheduled to land on Mars next August and start a two year mission to explore Gale crater, to help determine whether Mars could ever have supported life, and to help determine how humans might one day visit Earth's planetary neighbor.

NASA APOD

2011-11-29T08:41:00.001-08:00

A fantastic jumble of young blue star clusters, gigantic glowing gas clouds, and imposing dark dust lanes surrounds the central region of the active galaxy Centaurus A. This image from the Hubble Space Telescope has been processed to present a natural color picture of this cosmic maelstrom. Infrared images from the Hubble have also shown that hidden at the center of this activity are what seem to be disks of matter spiraling into a black hole with a billion times the mass of the Sun. Centaurus A itself is apparently the result of a collision of two galaxies and the left over debris is steadily being consumed by the black hole. Astronomers believe that such black hole central engines generate the radio, X-ray, and gamma-ray energy radiated by Centaurus A and other active galaxies. But for an active galaxy Centaurus A is close, a mere 10 million light-years away, and is a relatively convenient laboratory for exploring these powerful sources of energy.

Gratitude Post

2011-11-25T07:19:00.000-08:00

The sunrise today was good. Right now I am sitting in our living room and listening to MPR, which is no longer doing Thanksgiving programming, for which I am thankful. Soon I will go to exercise. I am beginning to almost like exercise... Not working for The Man or The Woman is a pleasure. I have some minor tasks today, then reading or writing or a walk along the river. It's a good river, not the Mighty Mississippi farther south, after the Missouri and the Ohio come in, but a fairly wide flow of clear, brown water. I think the brownness comes from tannin in the bogs up north.

Present and Future

2011-11-25T06:38:00.000-08:00

I just wrote the following on facebook:

Gratitude practice is something Buddhists do. I'm working on setting up a practice with a Buddhist friend. I live by to-do lists, which is a way of focusing on the future and forgetting about the present. Better to live in the present and say, "Ah, yes!"

After I wrote I realized this was an actual insight. To-do lists keep me focused on the future, and I do live by to-do lists. I wonder what I can do with the insight. Maybe keep another list -- a gratitude list -- of what's happening in the present.

I would hate to give up all lists.

A second insight might be: my love of science fiction also keeps me thinking about the future.

A third insight might be: it's not entirely bad to think about the future. That's where the consequences of our current actions will happen.

There must be a way to balance present and future.

Thinking About Occupy

2011-11-22T07:43:00.000-08:00

I have been trying to work out my response to Occupy. Of course, I am in favor of it. But what else? What is my analysis?

I am irritated by people who write essays on what Occupy should be doing. Occupy is a work in progress. The people doing the actual work in the parks and on the streets should make the decisions about what to do next. I think it takes a lot of arrogance to advise them. What I want is news about Occupy, not opinions about it.

To me Occupy looks like anarchism in action: a community with distributed power, that makes decisions collectively. I like this. I got interested in anarchists recently -- before Occupy -- because they were doing interesting things: running publishing houses and poster collectives, publishing good books, printing wonderful posters, running book fairs and even one science fiction convention. They have been alive, while the rest of the left looked asleep. (Maybe there were leftists working in places I couldn't see them... Well, I could find the anarchists.)

Occupy has shown great creativity and good humor: the tents suspended by balloons over Sproul Plaza at Berkeley were wonderful. The We Are the 99% tumblr site is fabulous. The UC Davis cop pepper spraying through time and space tumblr site is also fabulous, though not entirely nice. The cop must be feeling pretty unhappy by now. He shouldn't have done it.

We can see from the police response -- a gazillion cops with shields and helmets, like Imperial storm troopers out of Star Wars -- that Occupy is getting through to the establishment. The viral stories about dirty, violent hippies and dangerous homeless people also show how freaked the bosses and politicians are.
I have not been able to track these stories to specific events, except the Vet who killed himself in the Burlington, VT camp. That is one event in a nationwide movement. I suppose he came to camp in the hopes that it would help him with terrible depression, and it didn't. This is one event. It's tragic, but depression is tragic and happens to many people in this society, especially to vets. Our society does a really bad job of helping its troubled and vulnerable members. At least the Occupiers are trying.

I talked to Patrick about the menace of homeless people at Occupy sites. Patrick says homeless people usually keep to places they know and avoid places where they may attract police attention. It does not seem likely that they would trek in large numbers down to Wall Street. I did see one homeless guy at Occupy Minnesota. But downtown Minneapolis is small. He was not far from places that help homeless people. And he looked pretty harmless to me. Like most Minnesotans, he was looking for coffee and would be fine as long as he got it.

But the viral stories are equating Occupy with homeless people. Both threaten civilized life as we know it: people working underpaid jobs and living in underwater houses, watching their steps, afraid that they will lose what little they have.

I figure Occupy is a movement I want to watch and not analyze. They are shaking up the US. All I do is write science fiction.

2011-11-18T12:49:00.001-08:00

This colorful topographical map of the Moon is centered on the lunar farside, the side not seen from planet Earth. That view is available to the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter though, as the spacecraft's wide angle camera images almost the entire lunar surface every month. Stereo overlap of the imaging has allowed the computation of topographical maps with coverage between 80 degrees north and south latitude. The results have about a 300 meter resolution on the lunar surface and 10 to 20 meter elevation accuracy. Data closer to the north and south poles is filled in using the orbiter's laser altimeter. In this map, white, red, green, and purple represent progressively lower elevations. In fact, the large circular splotch tending to purple hues at the bottom is the farside's South Pole-Aitken Basin. About 2500 kilometers in diameter and over 12 kilometers deep, it is one of the largest impact basins in the Solar System.

Occupy Again!!!

2011-11-17T07:07:00.001-08:00

The blog Crooked Timber has a thread on Occupy right now. I wrote the following:

OWS is a work in progress. I have no idea how it will turn out. I don’t have advice. I bring coffee to the local Occupy group and wait and see. The Occupiers are raising the right issues and getting national attention.

Second, they are not a political party, vanguard or otherwise, they are a movement, like Civil Rights and the Anti-War Movement. I think we need to look at those for comparison re action and goals.

Third, in New York especially, OWS was/is creating an alternative society with housing, food, medical care, a library. It was/is a society that works by concensus, and it welcomed everyone, even the homeless. This strikes me as hugely important. A new world in the shill of the old. This is why the camps matter, and this may be why the camps are being destroyed.

Sandhills

2011-11-16T13:39:00.000-08:00

After all the political posts, I wanted a photo of country that's beautiful and empty. I found this on Wikimedia Commons.

Years ago Patrick and I were in the Black Hills and decided we had to see Carhenge. We dropped down into Nebraska and saw Carhenge (well worth a visit). Then we drove east through the sandhills. They were golden under a bright blue sky, almost empty of people, though there were cattle, and lovely.

Again and Yet Again Occupy

2011-11-16T06:36:00.000-08:00

An AP report from Digby's blog:

From Atlanta to Washington, D.C., officials talked about how authorities could make camps safe for protesters and the community. Officials also learned about the kinds of problems they could expect from cities with larger and more established protest encampments.

In Portland, for example, protests were initially peaceful gatherings. Then the city's large number of homeless people moved in, transforming the camp into an open-air treatment center for drug addiction and mental illness.

On Oct. 11, just five days after protesters set up camp, police chiefs who had been dealing with the encampments for weeks warned that the homeless will be attracted to the food, shelter and medical care the camps offered.

I read the last paragraph to Patrick, and he said, "So?"
I replied, "We don't want to treat the homeless."
Pat said, "I guess."

Even More Occupy

2011-11-16T06:05:00.000-08:00

This is via Digby's blog:

Over the past ten days, more than a dozen cities have moved to evict "Occupy" protesters from city parks and other public spaces. As was the case in last night's move in New York City, each of the police actions shares a number of characteristics. And according to one Justice official, each of those actions was coordinated with help from Homeland Security, the FBI and other federal police agencies.

The official, who spoke on background to me late Monday evening, said that while local police agencies had received tactical and planning advice from national agencies, the ultimate decision on how each jurisdiction handles the Occupy protests ultimately rests with local law enforcement.

According to this official, in several recent conference calls and briefings, local police agencies were advised to seek a legal reason to evict residents of tent cities, focusing on zoning laws and existing curfew rules. Agencies were also advised to demonstrate a massive show of police force, including large numbers in riot gear. In particular, the FBI reportedly advised on press relations, with one presentation suggesting that any moves to evict protesters be coordinated for a time when the press was the least likely to be present.

Now we know what Homeland Security is for.

Occupy Again

2011-11-16T04:38:00.000-08:00

I've been trying to figure out why city governments find Occupy so threatening. This is part of the answer, courtesy of a Lambert Strether post on Naked Capitalism. He is writing about the bulldozing of Zuccotti Park:

And that’s the story: Occupier self-organization. Self-organization is how the Tahrir Square organizers beat Murbarak’s baltigaya, and self-organization is how the Occupiers will beat the 1%. Because look what Bloomberg bulldozed: Not only a library, but:

A media center
A kitchen
A medical tent (in which a patient was being treated)

None of what Bloomberg bulldozed was or is about violence. All of those institutions are about solidarity, people helping people. (For the homeless or the hungry, these institutions are helping people who can’t get help anywhere else.) Perhaps that’s really what Bloomberg didn’t like?

Occupy

2011-11-16T04:27:00.000-08:00

I had an appointment in Minneapolis yesterday. On my way back, I stopped at Occupy Minnesota to see if they were still there. They were and needed coffee. So I bought a couple of "canteens" -- cardboard boxes full of coffee -- at the nearest coffee shop and brought them back, along with a dozen cookies. Buying cookies one by one from a coffee shop is expesnsive. At least they were big cookies.

The porta-potties are gone, and there seemed to be fewer tables than before. However, the sleeping bags were neatly stacked in one area of the plaza, and there were a lot of them. The woman at the food table said most people were off on a march, protesting the closing of Zuccotti Park.

The governments in every city have said the encampments are messy and dirty and attract homeless people. Was Occupy Minnesota messy? Yes, a bit, the way any public space is when it's used by the public. A flea market is messy. So is a beach in the summer. There was one guy who looked homeless by the food table. So what? He could get a free cup of coffee and be treated like a human being. Is there anything wrong with a person wanting that and getting it?

The woman at the food table said they are negotiating to stay day by day.

Occupy

2011-11-15T04:54:00.000-08:00

The police have cleared Zuccotti Park. They have done the same in other American cities. We will see what happens next.

Patrick says this is what the Minneapolis police have done to homeless camps for years. When they find one, they destroy it. Belongings are wrecked or taken away. When people come back to their home, they discover they -- who had so little -- have nothing now.

Society tolerates the homeless, so long as they remain perfectly homeless -- sleeping in doorways or in homeless shelters, run by others. But when they create their own shelters and communities and rules, they are attacked.

And for the same official reasons as are used against the Occupiers: the camps are messy and dirty and unsightly and dangerous.

SF Utopias and Dystopias

2011-11-15T04:18:00.000-08:00

There was a discussion over at the Crooked Timber blog about the idea that most good SF is dystopian, rather than utopian, most likely because it's hard to write a ripping action tale about a utopia.

I added my two cents:

It makes more sense to talk about better societies than utopias. A lot of SF is about societies that are better than our current world. Or worse. The point is examine the ways in which societies can be better or worse and to talk about the possibility of change. Give people a look at what a society that is less sexist and racist and classist might be like.

If you consider that James Hansen may be right and Earth may end up with the same surface temp as Venus, SF that has the planet habitable in the future may be utopian or at least very optimistic. Or consider Jame Lovelock who has said that the human population will be down to one billion at the end of this century… Writing a future that does not have a major die off is optimistic. Robinson’s Mars Trilogy is pretty cheerful, all in all, since I don’t see humanity as going into space in a serious way. Certainly nothing as epic as the terraforming of Mars.

I got curious later and checked an online dictionary:

Utopia: any visionary system of political or social perfection.

Dystopia: a society characterized by human misery, as squalor, oppression, disease, and overcrowding.

I'm not sure the words are true opposites. A utopia is perfect. A dystopia is only miserable. There are many societies on Earth today that are characterized (at least in part) by squlaor, oppression, disease and overcrowding. There is not one perfectly good society.

This leads me back to point above. It makes more sense to talk about better and worse societies here and in fiction.

I Love the Hubble...

2011-11-11T06:54:00.000-08:00

Big, bright, and beautiful, spiral galaxy M83 lies a mere twelve million light-years away, near the southeastern tip of the very long constellation Hydra. This cosmic close-up, a mosaic based on data from the Hubble Legacy Archive, traces dark dust and young, blue star clusters along prominent spiral arms that lend M83 its nickname, The Southern Pinwheel. Typically found near the edges of the thick dust lanes, a wealth of reddish star forming regions also suggest another popular moniker for M83, The Thousand-Ruby Galaxy. Dominated by light from older stars, the bright yellowish core of M83 lies at the upper right. The core is also bright at x-ray energies that reveal a high concentration of neutron stars and black holes left from an intense burst of star formation. In fact, M83 is a member of a group of galaxies that includes active galaxy Centaurus A. The close-up field of view spans over 25,000 light-years at the estimated distance of M83

Economics

2011-11-10T07:57:00.000-08:00

I should state the obvious. I read a lot about economics, but there is much I don't really understand -- in part, I think, because I worked in accounting for years. I think like an accountant: there are problems that need solution, and there are resources. One uses the resources to solve the problems. It's very simple.

Here is a quote from the economist Dean Baker:

Economics is about making simple things complicated. The complexity both excludes most of the public from policy debates and also gives economists their status as masters of a complex discipline.

Complexity also obscures power relationships and the issue of ownership. Why do some people have so much? Why do many people work so hard and end up with little or nothing?
If a society is facing a huge problem -- global economic collapse and global warning -- why is it not possible to mobilize all the society's resources. Why are we told that ownership is more important than the survival of the human race?

Anyway, I write about economics a lot because I think about it a lot. I am not an expert.

Quote from Patrick

2011-11-10T05:37:00.000-08:00

From Patrick, in honor of the Occupy movement:

Some days you're the bug. Some days you're the revolution.

In spite of my current bad mood, I am really cheered by Occupy, which is growing and developing new tactics: first occupations, then marches, anti-foreclosure actions, connecting with labor, moving money from banks.

As Big Bill Haywood liked to say:

The capitalist has no heart, but harpoon him in the pocketbook and you will draw blood.

Patrick

2011-11-10T05:20:00.000-08:00

Patrick got laid off from his current part-time job. It paid $12,000 a year and was his entire income. The nonprofit that employed him (on a contract basis, so he can't collect unemployment) had some kind of crisis and he was laid off, because they can't afford to pay him.

Remember that Patrick is the expert on adult homelessness in Minnesota. You'd think in this economy, with high unemployment and many people losing their homes, someone could find a way to use his knowledge.

Instead the US is killing itself with the Death of Ten Thousand Cuts.

In honor of all this I will quote from Hoover's Secretary of the Treasury, Andrew Mellon:

...Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate farmers, liquidate real estate… it will purge the rottenness out of the system. High costs of living and high living will come down. People will work harder, live a more moral life. Values will be adjusted, and enterprising people will pick up from less competent people.

We know how that turned out.

This may not be the most coherent post I have written. I am pissed.

NASA APOD

2011-11-10T05:19:00.000-08:00

In 185 AD, Chinese astronomers recorded the appearance of a new star in the Nanmen asterism - a part of the sky identified with Alpha and Beta Centauri on modern star charts. The new star was visible for months and is thought to be the earliest recorded supernova. This multiwavelength composite image from orbiting telescopes of the 21st century, XMM-Newton and Chandra in X-rays, and Spitzer and WISE in infrared, show supernova remnant RCW 86, understood to be the remnant of that stellar explosion. The false-color view shows interstellar gas heated by the expanding supernova shock wave at X-ray energies (blue and green) and interstellar dust radiating at cooler temperatures in infrared light (yellow and red). An abundance of the element iron and lack of a neutron star or pulsar in the remnant suggest that the original supernova was Type Ia. Type Ia supernovae are thermonuclear explosions that destroy a white dwarf star as it accretes material from a companion in a binary star system. Shock velocities measured in the X-ray emitting shell and infrared dust temperatures indicate that the remnant is expanding extremely rapidly into a remarkable low density bubble created before the explosion by the white dwarf system. Near the plane of our Milky Way Galaxy, RCW 86 is about 8,200 light-years away and has an estimated radius of 50 light-years.

The Current Financial Crisis in the US and Europe

2011-11-10T05:13:00.000-08:00

From Brad Delong's blog:

I have been complaining for some time now that Reinhart and Rogoff think that the time is always 1931 and that we are always Austria--that the great fiscal crisis is about to erupt and send us lurching down toward Great Depression II.

Well, right now guess what? The time is 1931, and we are Austria.

2011-11-07T08:21:00.000-08:00

Massive star IRS 4 is beginning to spread its wings. Born only about 100,000 years ago, material streaming out from this newborn star has formed the nebula dubbed Sharpless 2-106 Nebula (S106), pictured above. A large disk of dust and gas orbiting Infrared Source 4 (IRS 4), visible in dark red near the image center, gives the nebula an hourglass or butterfly shape. S106 gas near IRS 4 acts as an emission nebula as it emits light after being ionized, while dust far from IRS 4 reflects light from the central star and so acts as a reflection nebula. Detailed inspection of images like the above image has revealed hundreds of low-mass brown dwarf stars lurking in the nebula's gas. S106 spans about 2 light-years and lies about 2000 light-years away toward the constellation of the Swan (Cygnus).

Science Fiction

2011-10-25T08:24:00.001-07:00

Literary fiction clearly bugs me. Most likely because science fiction and fantasy still don't get the respect they deserve from most of the literary community. But I don't know enough about contemporary literary fiction to criticize it.

So I will talk about what I like about SF & F.

What people think is important. But I am more interested in how people act and how societies change. Technology is important, science is important, because both change our lives and how we think. NASA's Astronomy Photo of Day opens our minds, and lets us see the extraordinary beauty of the universe. It can move us -- mentally -- hundreds of thousands of lightyears. The Internet enables us to hold conversations that go around the planet. For the first time, we can find out what's happening at the level of individual experience everywhere. The New York Times ignored Occupy Wall Street at first, and has not covered it well since it began paying attention. But we have the videos of cops pepper spraying and beating demonstrators, which were taken by cell phones and put on line. We've seen what the demonstrators look like, heard what they have to say. Their signs and stories are all over the Internet.

When I was a kid in the truly strange 1950s, science fiction was the only fiction that explained the world I lived in, which might at any moment be destroyed by nuclear war. Most adults pretended the problem did not exist. Nuclear war was no worse than any other kind of war. All you needed was a fallout shelter in the back yard or a school desk to hid under. But I remember waking up terrified when a siren went off in the night. Science fiction was real. MAD magazine was real. Comic books were real. Because all knew reality was strange and scary and uncertain.

I subscribe to New Scientist and Technology Review. Science and technology are moving too fast for me to keep up; and it isn't one kind of science or technology that is moving fast. They are all going like gang busters. I figure SF is the best way to describe this astoundingly fluid world, changing from moment to moment in a hundred plus ways.

Did you know that slime molds can run mazes? And they could be used in city planning, though no one is doing this yet? They will find the most efficient way to go from A to B; you could use them to lay out a highway system. How do I know this? Some guy ran slime molds over a map of Tokyo. They laid out a highway system as well as city planners.

What do you do with a piece of information like that? I imagine using slime molds to plan cities. Someone is likely to do it. I also think of an organism that is usually single celled, but can become multicelled -- two different kinds of multicelled, if I'm remembering correctly, one a network and one a kind of hierarchy. The guys on top of the hierarchy get to reproduce. I am trying to imagine an alien society which is usually an anarchy, but can form two kinds of social organizations when needed. In a sense, Occupy Wall Street is like this: separate individuals coming together to form a network with distributed power.

I guess I will give one more example or pair of examples: Margaret Atwood's famous novel The Handmaiden's Tale and Suzette Hayden Elgin's far less well known science fiction novel Native Tongue.

I started The Handmaid's Tale, but gave up on it. Atwood established her idea: the US has turned into a religious patriarchy that enslaves women. But as far as I got into the novel, there were no more ideas, and I couldn't see why I should read a depressing book that was going to go on and on, with nothing new happening. (Many SF fans loved Atwood's book, by the way.) Elgin began with the same idea, then added her ideas about language, which are respected among linguists. (She was a linguist, teaching at the university level.) And she added aliens. I finished Native Tongue and read the sequel.

One idea is not enough in this world, where change comes from every direction, unless you are writing a short story.

Blogging and Facebooking

2011-10-25T08:10:00.000-07:00

I recently read a discussion on Jim Hines' livejournal about doing stuff on the Internet. I blog and am on facebook. I have mixed opinions re blogging. I have a blog so people can find me via Google. The blog has an email address attached so people are able to write me. Sometimes this is useful. Not everyone has a copy of the SFWA Directory. I keep the blog up, because it tells anyone looking for me that I'm still alive and still able to write.

But I am not a natural blogger. I find it hard to do, and it takes a lot of time. I think the effort I put in is obvious. My style is not fluid, chatty and fun. It's like chainsaw sculpture. Okay, this guy cut a bear out of a tree trunk. Well, it's not much of a bear. Looking at it, all you see is that it was hard to do.

But the blog gives me a place to put my poetry, and it gives me a place to think out loud, and people can find me. So it's worth it. I think.

I love facebook. Unlike the blog, where I mostly speak to silence, I get immediate feedback. The length constraints -- 420 characters -- mean I am forced to write short notes, mostly about the weather and what I had for breakfast and whatever I've done lately that was fun. I love how trivial all this is.

And I post links to articles and images I like, rather than writing about them. Here, this is the NASA photo of the day. Here, this is an article in The Guardian about Occupy Everywhere.

It can eat time, but I don't feel the effort I feel when I blog.

I don't think any of this is especially useful to my writing career. Yes, it has helped John Scalzi and Cory Doctorow, but they are exceptional. I figure, do what you want, so long as you still have time to do your real writing. It makes you more visible on the Internet, and a little visibility is not going to hurt.

This is Amazing

2011-10-24T08:18:00.000-07:00

What created the Waterfall Nebula? No one knows. The structure seen in the region of NGC 1999 in the Great Orion Molecular Cloud complex is one of the more mysterious structures yet found on the sky. Designated HH-222, the elongated gaseous stream stretches about ten light years and emits an unusual array of colors. One hypothesis is that the gas filament results from the wind from a young star impacting a nearby molecular cloud. That would not explain, however, why the Waterfall and fainter streams all appear to converge on a bright but unusual non thermal radio source located toward the upper left of the curving structure. Another hypothesis is that the unusual radio source originates from a binary system containing a hot white dwarf, neutron star, or black hole, and that the Waterfall is just a jet from this energetic system. Such systems, though, are typically strong X-rays emitters, and no X-rays have been detected. For now, this case remains unsolved. Perhaps well-chosen future observations and clever deductive reasoning will unlock the true origin of this enigmatic wisp in the future.

More About Literary Fiction

2011-10-22T20:28:00.001-07:00

I found this in my Internet wandering today, referenced in a comment in The Guardian. It's A Reader's Manifesto published in The Atlantic, an all-out attack on literary fiction. I enjoyed it, because it confirmed my prejudices. I should ask my friend Ruth about current literary fiction. She reads more widely than I do.

The author does not believe the point of change was the McCarthy Era. He likes a number of authors who were writing through the 1950s. Well, there was terrific art in the '50s, much of it done by the Abstract Expressionists. They had all been through the Great Depression, and many had been in the WPA. I got the impression many had leftwing politics, though they mostly talked about art. Mark Rothko told my mother he still carried his IWW card.

Things began to change in the 1960s. I remember my father saying, after we moved to New York, "I know there is interesting art out there, but I can't find it."

Maybe the 60s were when the commodification of culture and hostility to politics took hold. I know that's when serious money came into the contemporary art market, and the avant garde, so to speak, began creating art for the rich. Did something comparable happen in fiction? The market there is the educated middle class. I would have to do more research than I want to do to find out.

The essay does a trip on Don DeLillo, who is writing -- apparently -- about how sterile and empty consumer society it. Contempt of supermarkets comes in. I will agree that a farmer's market or small specialty stores are probably more fun. But I like food and try to like cooking, and I enjoy going to Byerly's. The description of DeLillo made me want to write about the pleasures of shopping. A science fictional shopping story?

Patrick noted that the movie Logan's Run did a terrific job of taking down the shopping culture. It's the future as people surviving inside a mall and thinking that the world outside is uninhabitable.

Anyway, cheap cynicism about grocery shopping doesn't sound very attractive. If you don't like it, then you don't like it. There isn't much more to say. Go to a farmer's market.

The essayist says modern literary prose is unreadable: clogged, repetitive, bland and imprecise. The examples he gave -- from DeLillo, Annie Proulx, Cormac McCarthy -- seem to prove his point.

An interesting take.

Literary Fiction

2011-10-21T18:44:00.000-07:00

I read a New York Times interview with the Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami. His work sounded interesting. The interviewer describes it as falling "into an oddly fascinating hole between genres (sci-fi, fantasy, realist, hard-boiled) and cultures (Japan, America), a hole that no writer has ever explored before."

I'd say the anime director Miyazaki has explored much of the same territory: realism in Whisper of the Heart, SF and fantasy in many other movies, western culture and Japan throughout. Castle in the Sky begins in a mining town based on towns in Wales. Kiki is set in a city based on a city in Sweden. Spirited Away seems very Japanese to me. Howl's Moving Castle is European.

In any case, Murakami sounds worth checking out, nothing like my idea of "literary" fiction.

Maybe I am wrong, and there is a lot more good lit in the New York Times and the New York Review of Books than I realize.

Fred Ho

2011-10-21T18:39:00.000-07:00

I love this photo of Fred Ho.

Fred Ho

2011-10-21T18:36:00.001-07:00

The wonderful saxophonist and composer Fred Ho is ill with cancer. He's 54, too young to be so ill. I wrote a poem:

Cancer shouldn’t take down
like guy like you,
six foot plus
and wide through the shoulders,
with a baritone sax like a machine gun --
like Monkey willing to shake up heaven
and travel ten thousand miles
to bring truth to the people.

You should outlast illness
like a Taoist sage,
kick ass
like a Shaolin master,
blow that sax
like it’s the International
sung by all the planet’s people together.

The dragon king
of the Eastern Ocean
should bow his crowned head
and carry you
beyond mortality.

The poem is flamboyant. So is Fred Ho. I am really hoping he beats this. He is someone we need. If I had a way to reach Monkey or the dragon king, I'd be asking for their help. Where are all the Taoist sages when you need them?

From Facebook

2011-10-21T11:27:00.000-07:00

I commented on facebook that "literature is not what it used to be."

One of my friends asked, "When was the golden age of literature?"

I answered:

I had to go away and think about your question. I would pick the 19th century as the golden age of the literary novel. However, as far as I know, the category of literary novel did not exist then. People like Dickens and Twain have been made ancestors of the literary novel, though they more properly belong in the history of popular fiction. I suspect that the true literary novel came into being circa 1900 with the James-Wells divide and then High Modernism. So maybe the golden age is Proust. I suspect the literary novel as we know it today came into existence after WWII, possibly in the post-war red-baiting era. (I'm talking about the US here.) Fear of the witch hunters made people careful about that wrote or painted. It was safest to do work that was inward or abstract or concerned with formal problems. Or you could turn to art for kids, trashy art, stuff no one took seriously: SF, comic books and Mad Magazine. Just an idea...

By "literature" I mean the writing that the commanding heights of culture -- the New York Times and the New York Review of Books -- take seriously.

The Guardian

2011-10-20T07:15:00.000-07:00

The Guardian has an interesting article on science fiction and literary awards. I found the comments mostly interesting and added my own:

Interesting discussion. I have read almost no "literary" fiction written in recent decades. Not sure why. It seems uninteresting to me. Maybe it's the recognition that Mieville is talking about. If I want to find out about the real world, I can read the news or nonfiction or talk to people or simply go outside.

Is science fiction formally conservative? Often, yes. Delany talks about this. When reality is uncertain, as it is in science fiction and fantasy, then an experimental style can make the narrative too confusing and unclear. Experimental sf can be done, as was demonstrated in the 1960s and 70s, but it's not easy. I once had to write a description of someone who was trapped in a half-hour-long time loop. Since she was inside it, she didn't realize what was happening. Every turn round the loop was new to her. And the novel was written from her perspective. So how did she figure out what was happening, and how did she get out? I nearly went crazy writing that section, and I have never been happy with the result. That's as much of a formal problem as I want.

I try to write good, clean language, drawing on the Icelandic family sagas as examples, and keep most of the weirdness to the ideas. I tend to think of science fiction as a fiction that takes place inside metaphors. The craziness, the disjunction, the surprises happen in the narrative line, rather than in the language.

A lot of science fiction and fantasy is not good, which has to do with commodification and the needs of people trapped in a not very pleasant society. You dream of escape, and the market gives you false and unobtainable and badly written dreams.

But from the beginning, whether you start with Mary Shelley or H.G. Wells, there has been sf which challenges the status quo intellectually and morally. The best is well written. Speaking of awards, I direct you to the Tiptree, science fiction's gender bending fiction award. Its winners and short list members are often interesting.

Writing Today

2011-10-19T18:58:00.000-07:00

I met Lyda and Naomi for writing at the coffee shop. I started with a headache, then added too much coffee and too much conversation, so I didn't get much writing done. I hope next week is quieter, and I am wise enough to lay off the coffee. Still, the conversations were interesting.

I have almost finished the current story, after many tiny revisions. It will go to the Wyrdsmiths this week.

Then I have nothing in the works except revising the novel. When I became unemployed, I had a huge stack of unfinished work. I have slowly reduced the stack.

Boy, it has been a long process.

Another Poem

2011-10-19T18:42:00.000-07:00

I'm writing poems at the moment. Here is one:

October Signs

On a day like this --
the low sky spitting cold rain,
November in October --
the demonstrators outside
the City-County building look miserable,
as does the guy
standing at the freeway exit ramp,
his sign asking for money,
theirs for justice.

I keep hoping this country’s heart
would be open and generous
like a golden autumn day,
not hunched down, closed in, cold.

I wrote it yesterday, riding the bus home from an appointment in Minneapolis. The day was, in fact, cold and gray, more like a November day than an October day.

Cosi fan Tutte

2011-10-14T07:34:00.000-07:00

I went to the opera last Sunday. It was Cosi fan Tutte, a Mozart opera about how women are all unfaithful. The two young heroes decide to test the loyalty of their girl friends by pretending to go away, then courting the girls disguised as Albanian soldiers. Of course the girls fall in love with the Albanians, and then the ruse is revealed. The master mind of all this, the cynic Don Alfonso, then says, "Cosi fan Tutte, thus do all woman," and suggests everyone get happily married. A noxious plot. So I wrote this poem:

The two girls married their soldiers
and settled down to be happy,
though their eyes still roved a little.

The baker’s boy had handsome shoulders.
That noble sat on his horse like a centaur.
Every dance was like a banquet table
spread with delicious dishes --
flourishing mustaches, lusterous hair,
bodies like Adonis, angel faces.

Only Don Alfonso seemed ugly.
Cynical and malicious, he was not invited
to either of their houses.

*

In spite of everything, they remained faithful,
asking only this of their husbands:
to come each night to the marriage bed
in costume:
Albanian soldiers. Turkish merchants,
Russians in furs, Indian sachems,
almost naked with feather crowns.

It cost a fortune.
How Don Alfonso would have laughed,
if he had known.
But the soldiers had learned their lesson
and kept quiet.

Every evening, as the girls dressed for bed
they wondered, who would visit?
A Chinese mandarin?
A prince from Africa?
And English lord, full of ice and manners?

“Cosi fan tutte,” they told their husbands.
“This is the way it is.”

Weather Report

2011-10-14T07:28:00.000-07:00

A lovely day, grey-white clouds and a bright blue sky. The current temp is 47.

The Denver police and Colorado state troopers broke up the Occupy camp in Denver.

I had a busy day yesterday, running errands in downtown Minneapolis, then attending a meeting of the Wyrdsmiths, my writing group. As always happens when the Wyrdsmiths meet, I drink coffee in the evening and can't get to sleep. Though one other member says she can't get to sleep, either, and it isn't caffeine, it's the buzz that happens when you have a good time with other people.

In any case, I woke up this morning tired and disinclined to do anything. Maybe a run to the grocery store. Maybe some work on writing.

I think, when I had a job, I paced myself; and I have to do the same now. I'm not one of those vibrate, active senior citizens, able to keep going all day. I need time to read and think and maybe nap.

Occupy Minnesota

2011-10-13T15:30:00.000-07:00

I had to be in Minneapolis today, so stopped by Occupy Minnesota. It's a small group right now, spread across the plaza, and they look as if they have settled in for a long stay. There's a food station, a first aid station, a media station and a sign-in table, also heaps of picket signs and bright blue tarps.

They said they needed coffee, so I went to a nearby Caribou Coffee and bought two cardboard containers of coffee and took them over to the food station. They thanked me and offered me food. I took a piece of a bagel. Next time I come, I will being bagels as well as coffee.

A woman handing out "Stop War" stickers told me there will be rally Friday at 3 pm.

Cops arrested 300 people at the Boston occupation, and New York is telling the demonstrators they have to move out of the Liberty Part while it is cleaned. After, they can come back, but cannot have tents or sleeping bags and cannot lie down on the ground or benches.

This is about what I figured would happen. If the demonstrations didn't simply wind down, the cities would close them down.

If the occupations can't be maintained, then I think there will have to be daily demonstrations and other actions.I'm trying to remember how this was done in the 1960s and what I've read about the 1930s.

Unemployment

2011-10-11T07:35:00.000-07:00

Results of a poll in Pennsylvania, via the blogger Atrios:

The poll found that one in four Pennsylvania residents has had someone living in his or her household lose a job or be laid off in the last 12 months - and two out of three had close friends or family members who were put out of work in that time.

More than three out of every four Pennsylvanians said they knew individuals or families who struggle every month to afford basic needs such as rent, utilities, health care, clothes, or food.

"The poverty question was startling," said Joseph Morris, a professor and director of the college's Center for Applied Politics, which conducted the poll, "as was the fact that a strong majority of Pennsylvanians have had to make lifestyle changes because of the economy."

This is something I've been saying all along. If you have 10% unemployment -- or almost 20%, if you use the U6 figures -- then almost everyone knows someone who isn't working or isn't working enough. The exception is the upper middle class, who have an unemployment rate of 3%. But the vast majority of Americans have family members, neighbors, friends unemployed or underemployed. Of course, we care. We worry for the people we love. And our own lives are changed. We have a son living in the basement. a buddy who can't go out for beer, a neighbor who's being foreclosed. Because most ordinary people are generous, we help if we can, and we worry, and we get angry.

Happy news from the government does not make this situation better.

The Stars Abide (Courtesy NASA)

2011-10-09T09:47:00.000-07:00

Thirteen years ago results were first presented indicating that most of the energy in our universe is not in stars or galaxies but is tied to space itself. In the language of cosmologists, a large cosmological constant is directly implied by new distant supernova observations. Suggestions of a cosmological constant (lambda) were not new -- they have existed since the advent of modern relativistic cosmology. Such claims were not usually popular with astronomers, though, because lambda is so unlike known universe components, because lambda's value appeared limited by other observations, and because less-strange cosmologies without lambda had previously done well in explaining the data. What is noteworthy here is the seemingly direct and reliable method of the observations and the good reputations of the scientists conducting the investigations. Over the past thirteen years, independent teams of astronomers have continued to accumulate data that appears to confirm the existence of dark energy and the unsettling result of a presently accelerating universe. This year, the team leaders were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for their work. The above picture of a supernova that occurred in 1994 on the outskirts of a spiral galaxy was taken by one of these collaborations.

OWS # 2 - Facebook Notes

2011-10-09T09:31:00.001-07:00

I went to the Occupy Minnesota demonstration Friday morning. When I was there, it was several hundred nice Minnesota people drinking coffee and chatting. Later on, apparently the group decided to march from the City-County Building to the Federal Bank Building and back. One guy told me he was planning to spend the night.

(Per Firedoglake, demonstrators are planning to stay at the Hennepin County Building plaza least three months, into the Minnesota winter. The key is good insulated sleeping bags.)

One of my facebook friends asked, "Is this finally it? Is this the socialist revolution?" I don't know what it is yet. But in the last half year we've had revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya, ongoing demonstrations in Syria, Yemen and Bahrain, strikes and demonstrations throughout Europe, the Madison mobilization and now demonstrations throughout the US. If nothing else, this is a lot of activity. It reminds me of 1968, but that was the end of something, and this feels more like the beginning.

I have been talking to old friends. We can remember when white working people were not supportive, when union members came after peace demonstrators with baseball bats. There were a lot of Americans in the 1960s who were not in favor of peace and civil rights.This looks much broader... And with better communication. I just found Occupy France. It is both an attempt to organize in France and to cover the US occupations for Francophones who don't know English.

One thing that heartened me Friday was a big tractor-trailer driving along one side of the plaza in Minneapolis, blowing its horn for the whole length of the block. A couple of minutes later, it showed up going the opposite direction, down the other side of the plaza and blowing its horn. Of course we all yelled and waved and raised our fists. I remember when truck drivers didn't much like young people with signs.

Massive student demonstrations in Chile, which I knew nothing about till ten minutes ago, when Patrick handed me a flash drive with two stories...

(The Chile protests have nothing to do with OWS, but they are part of many, many demonstrations worldwide.)

Bridge occupation in London today, protesting cuts to health care.They are using the "we are the 99%" slogan in solidarity with OWS.

OWS

2011-10-09T09:28:00.000-07:00

Friday, when Lyda and I went to the Occupy Minnesota demonstration in Minneapolis, was cephalopod awareness day.

Flyer for St. Paul Art Crawl This Weekend

2011-10-07T16:17:00.000-07:00

If you are wondering what the flyers are about, I signed up for a table at the St. Paul Art Crawl happening this weekend. It looks as if I will end up caring for the table on my own, since the other Wyrdsmiths can't make the event. The image is pulled off the website that Bill Henry designed for the Wyrdsmith Writing Group. As you can probably figure out, it's many of our book covers, attractively arranged. There's a little text, which didn't come through when I loaded the image. Anyway, it represents the rest of the group in absentia; and I will represent myself.

Flyer for St. Paul Art Crawl This Weekend

2011-10-07T16:15:00.000-07:00

I'm not crazy about the look of this, but the teeny print tells people they can find my work on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Kindle and Nook. Important information.

NASA APOD

2011-09-26T17:16:00.000-07:00

Part of Mars is defrosting. Around the South Pole of Mars, toward the end of every Martian summer, the warm weather causes a section of the vast carbon-dioxide ice cap to evaporate. Pits begin to appear and expand where the carbon dioxide dry ice sublimates directly into gas. These ice sheet pits may appear to be lined with gold, but the precise composition of the dust that highlights the pit walls actually remains unknown. The circular depressions toward the image center measure about 60 meters across. The HiRISE camera aboard the Mars-orbiting Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter captured the above image in late July. In the next few months, as Mars continues its journey around the Sun, colder seasons will prevail, and the thin air will turn chilly enough not only to stop the defrosting but once again freeze out more layers of solid carbon dioxide.

Sunspot - NASA APOD

2011-09-18T09:03:00.000-07:00

Here is one of the sharper views of the Sun ever taken. This stunning image shows remarkable details of a dark sunspot across the image bottom and numerous boiling granules which appear like kernels of corn across the top. Taken in 2002, the picture was made using the Swedish Solar Telescope operating on the Canary Island of La Palma. The high resolution image was achieved using sophisticated adaptive optics, digital image stacking, and other processing techniques to counter the blurring effect of Earth's atmosphere. Currently a sunspot group is crossing the Sun that is so large it can be easily seen by the cautious observer even without magnification.

Cucumbers

2011-09-17T11:52:00.000-07:00

The Farmers Market was gorgeous today -- tomatoes, green peppers, squash, apples, in broad trays and big baskets. I bought a baguette and some cucumbers. Amazing how happy this made me.

That led to thinking about Praxilla of Sicyon, a 5th century BC Greek poet. One of her poems became a proverb: "As silly as Praxilla's Adonis," because she had the dying Adonis speaking as follows of the world he was leaving:

Loveliest of what I leave behind is the sunlight,
and loveliest after that the shining stars, and the moon's face,
but also cucumbers that are ripe, and pears, and apples.

The ancient Greeks thought it was silly to mourn cucumbers and pears and apples. Only a woman would write anything this stupid.

Anyway, I wrote a poem titled "Revolutionary Cucumber Poem," in imitation of Praxilla:

It's one thing to raise the people's flag,
blood-red, from the hand of a fallen comrade,
and another thing to take joy in cucumbers
at the downtown Farmer's Market.

But what is the flag
without the cucumbers
and the farmers who grew them
and the people buying produce?

And what are the cucumbers,
thick and green and crisp
in their market baskets,
without the flag?

I'm not sure I'm making sense. I'm asking what the great ideas and causes are in the absence of ordinary life, and what ordinary life is in the absence of the great ideas and causes.

I'm still tinkering with the last verse.

Cucumbers are precious; so are pears and apples. Eat them when they are ripe, but not overripe.

Radical History

2011-09-17T08:08:00.000-07:00

Note on all that follows: the word "radical" comes from the Latin "radix" or "root." Radical change is change at the root. Radical history is a history of roots: the stuff at the bottom that anchors and feeds everything else.

Terry Bisson's talk was about the historical research he has done for various projects. Interesting stuff. He has led an interesting life, as well as writing truly wonderful science fiction. There was supposed to be a historian there, and he and Terry were supposed to talk about researching radical history. But the historian was at home, having done something terrible to his back. Anyway, I started thinking about history and science fiction. I'm going to make some huge generalizations, because I'm thinking out loud or maybe in electrons...

There are three fundamental lies told by traditional histories:

1) History is made by famous men, rather than by ordinary people.

2) The broad trends of history are smooth.

3) The broad trends of history are inevitable.

These are my thoughts in reply:

1) History to me is social change, and it is made by everyone. A lot of it is made by people changing their living habits, the tools they use, the crops they grow and how they grow those crops. According to the anthropologist Jack Weatherford, Russia and Prussia became great empires, because the potato was imported from the New World. It grows more reliably in northern climates than do grains. Before the potato, Russia and Prussia were subject to regular famines. After, they could feed their populations and their armies.

2) History tends to be taught in Ages, which are broadly described. This gives the illusion that history is smooth. Rome is followed by the Middle Ages, the Renaissance and Modern Times. Dum-dum-dum-dum. In fact, history is full of small changes and local variation. By ignoring these, historians give the impression that ordinary people have almost no part in history. They emerge -- briefly -- in great popular struggles and revolutions, and then disappear. The great demonstrations in Egypt this year, which brought down the government, were preceded by years of labor struggle, which was not covered in the US media. Often, these local struggles are lost. They rarely achieve everything hoped for. But they continue. The placid 1950s in America -- the golden age for conservatives -- had strikes by a union movement that was still comparatively strong, the struggle against McCarthyism, the early years of the Civil Rights Movement, the Beat Generation and the rise of rock music, which turned political in the 1960s and remains a form of popular expression.

3) History tends to taught as if it's mostly inevitable. In fact, it seems to me, it is often contingent. Things could turn out differently. This was where science fiction and alternative history come in: they show history as mutable. Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle is about an America where the Axis Powers won the war. Terry Bisson's Fire on the Mountain is about an America where John Brown succeeded at Harper's Ferry, and the final result is a black republic in the South.

Immanual Wallerstein argues that societies are usually stable, with periods of instability when they can change rapidly. This may be true. But the periods of instability are preceded by decades of struggle, that train people for change and keep hope alive. I would never argue that changing the world's superstructure is easy. But we must remember that the world is, in fact, changing all the time; and the small changes prepare us for the great convulsions.

So a radical history, it seems to me, ought to be popular, bumpy, turbulent, active and contingent. It ought to show the achievements of ordinary people, and the ways that ordinary life changes over time. All of American history is seething with struggle: labor wars, farmers movements, the Abolitionists, the struggle of American Indians to save some part of their native lands, Feminism, the fight of every ethnic group to overcome prejudice and establish new lives in a difficult environment. If you don't see these struggles and how they changed society and how people have been able to survive and sometimes win, then you will believe that the bosses always come out on top, and There Is No Alternative, as in the famous words of Margaret Thatcher.

Weather

2011-09-16T07:22:00.000-07:00

We've had two-three days of wonderful cool, bright weather. This morning is gray, but still cool. I'm going to the Y for exercise soon. After that, I have nothing on, except maybe a trip to the library and -- tonight -- a lecture by Terry Bisson, who is in town for an anarchist book fair. Terry is one of my favorite SF writers, so this should be fun.

Otherwise, I am rereading my Lydia Duluth stories, before doing a final revision of the two new ones, and doing a final source check of my new Icelandic story, before giving it to my writing group.

I keep having this restless feeling that I want to write something new -- maybe a fantasy novel. Maybe YA. Something fun and adventurous. No clear ideas have emerged. We will see.

It takes me a long time of mulling, before things actually happen.

Picture (Not Stars)

2011-09-09T16:08:00.000-07:00

Albert the Allosaurus by Lyda Morehouse

Say's Law

2011-09-09T10:28:00.001-07:00

I was going to do a post on Say's Law and supply side economic theory, which is what the serious people in Washington all seem to follow. But then I decided, why bother?

Weather Report

2011-09-08T14:17:00.000-07:00

A lovely day, a bit on the warm side -- 83F right now -- but dry, with a light wind. I walked by the river and looked at the planting around the Science Museum. Trees are turning just a little; milkweed pods are releasing fluff; goldenrod is blooming like crazy and the bees are going nuts collecting pollen. The air smells of dry vegetation. Late summer insects are making nosies in the grass.

It's cheering to be outside.

NASA APOD

2011-09-08T10:24:00.000-07:00

This view of the Apollo 17 landing site in the Taurus-Littrow valley was captured last month by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), the sharpest ever recorded from space. The high resolution image data was taken during a period when LRO's orbit was modified to create a close approach of about 22 kilometers as it passed over some of the Apollo landing sites. That altitude corresponds to only about twice the height of a commercial airline flight over planet Earth. Labeled in this image are Apollo 17 lunar lander Challenger's descent stage (inset), the lunar rover (LRV) at its final parking spot, and the Apollo Lunar Surface Experiments Package (ALSEP) left to monitor the Moon's environment and interior. Clear, dual lunar rover tracks and the foot trails left by astronauts Eugene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt, the last to walk on the lunar surface, are also easily visible at the Apollo 17 site.

I think NASA posts photos like this to make us feel bad. Where is our observatory on the moon? Where is our journey to Mars?

Question for the Day

2011-09-08T10:21:00.001-07:00

Sometime when I was very young, I noticed that as a nation moved toward a transforming crisis -- France at the end of the 18th century, Russia at the start of the 20th century -- the person in charge was an idiot. The question I had was -- did the crisis generate the idiot, or did the idiot make sure the crisis could not be solved? Looking at the US today, I still don't have an answer to the question.

Freedom and Information

2011-09-06T10:57:00.001-07:00

Notice -- when we talk about information and freedom, as I was earlier -- that two meanings of the words are entangled; and the Obama Administration is enforcing two kinds of laws. One group is laws that limit information in the interests of security and state power; the other group is laws that control information in the interests of property.

In one case, free means "not imprisoned or enslaved, at liberty" or "not subject to arbitrary interference by a government." In the other case, free means "costing nothing; gratuitous."

In the first case, the opposite of free is "subject to arbitrary interference by a government." in the second case, the opposite of free is "owned" or "costing money."

Two different meanings, having to do with property and political rights. But they are interwoven.

In the end, I suspect, they cannot be separated, and that it's impossible to have expansive property rights -- ones that extend beyond personal belongings and the tools one works with -- and political freedom at the same time.

Maybe for a while. But in the end, property will overwhelm freedom.

Writing News

2011-09-06T10:04:00.000-07:00

The current (October/November) issue of Asimov's has a story by me: "My Husband Steinn."

And the 28th edition of "The Year's Best Science Fiction" includes my "Mammoths of the Great Plains."

"Steinn" is a story based on Icelandic folklore and on the giant hydroelectric project in Eastern Iceland.

"Mammoths" is "Mammoths."

Other than that, I am trucking along on new Lydia Duluth stories and new hwarhath stories, and thinking of going back to a story I began years ago, titled "Nine Red Princes and a Yellow Demon."

And I still have to finish revising the sequel to Ring of Swords.

NASA APOD

2011-09-06T09:59:00.001-07:00

To some, the outline of the open cluster of stars M6 resembles a butterfly. M6, also known as NGC 6405, spans about 20 light-years and lies about 2,000 light years distant. M6 can best be seen in a dark sky with binoculars towards the constellation of Scorpius, coving about as much of the sky as the full moon. Like other open clusters, M6 is composed predominantly of young blue stars, although the brightest star is nearly orange. M6 is estimated to be about 100 million years old. Determining the distance to clusters like M6 helps astronomers calibrate the distance scale of the universe.

NASA APOD

2011-09-04T07:27:00.000-07:00

In the shadow of Saturn, unexpected wonders appear. The robotic Cassini spacecraft now orbiting Saturn drifted in giant planet's shadow for about 12 hours in 2006 and looked back toward the eclipsed Sun. Cassini saw a view unlike any other. First, the night side of Saturn is seen to be partly lit by light reflected from its own majestic ring system. Next, the rings themselves appear dark when silhouetted against Saturn, but quite bright when viewed away from Saturn, slightly scattering sunlight, in this exaggerated color image. Saturn's rings light up so much that new rings were discovered, although they are hard to see in the image. Seen in spectacular detail, however, is Saturn's E ring, the ring created by the newly discovered ice-fountains of the moon Enceladus and the outermost ring visible above. Far in the distance, at the left, just above the bright main rings, is the almost ignorable pale blue dot of Earth.

NASA APOD

2011-09-02T05:09:00.000-07:00

With a 3.5 meter diameter mirror, larger than the Hubble Space Telescope, ESA's Herschel Space Observatory explores the Universe at infrared wavelengths. Herschel is named for German-born British astronomer Frederick William Herschel who discovered infrared light over 200 years ago. Herschel's sensitive cameras have combined to deliver this spectacular skyscape looking toward the constellation of the Southern Cross. Spanning some 2 degrees the premier, false-color, far-infrared view captures our galaxy's cold dust clouds in extreme detail, showing a remarkable, connected maze of filaments and star-forming regions. Such observations are intended to unravel mysteries of star formation by surveying broad areas of the galactic plane.

More from Glenn Greenwald

2011-08-26T09:13:00.000-07:00

Ali Soufan is a long-time FBI agent and interrogator who was at the center of the U.S. government's counter-terrorism activities from 1997 through 2005, and became an outspoken critic of the government's torture program. He has written a book exposing the abuses of the CIA's interrogation program as well as pervasive ineptitude and corruption in the War on Terror. He is, however, encountering a significant problem: the CIA is barring the publication of vast amounts of information in his book including, as Scott Shane details in The New York Times today, many facts that are not remotely secret and others that have been publicly available for years, including ones featured in the 9/11 Report and even in Soufan's own public Congressional testimony...

A spokeswoman for the C.I.A., Jennifer Youngblood, said . . . ."Just because something is in the public domain doesn't mean it's been officially released or declassified by the U.S. government."

Just marvel at the Kafkaesque, authoritarian mentality that produces responses like that: someone can be censored, or even prosecuted and imprisoned, for discussing "classified" information that has long been documented in the public domain...

The Obama DOJ has continuously claimed that victims of the U.S. rendition, torture and eavesdropping programs cannot have their claims litigated in court because what was done to them are "state secrets" -- even when what was done to them has long been publicly known and even formally, publicly investigated and litigated in open court in other countries.

Information Wants to be Free. So Do People.

2011-08-25T14:06:00.000-07:00

When we ponder the mystery of Barack Obama, we should remember that he has been consistent in two areas: the expansion of war and the expansion of the security state. Guantanamo is still open. People are still being held without trial or charges in Gitmo and elsewhere, apparently forever. Whistle blowers and people who actually believe in free information are savagely prosecuted, as are people who peacefully oppose government policy.

The idea seems to be: shut down opposition, silence those who question the state, at the same time as the Administration expands bombing to Yemen, Pakistan, Libya and Somalia. The CIA cooperates with the NYPD to spy on New York's Muslim community. The FBI raids peace activists in the Midwest.

This is from a Glenn Greenwald post last week:

Several weeks ago, a New York Times article by Noam Cohen examined the case of Aaron Swartz, the 24-year-old copyright reform advocate who was arrested in July, after allegedly downloading academic articles that had been placed behind a paywall, thus making them available for free online. Swartz is now being prosecuted by the DOJ with obscene over-zealousness. Despite not profiting (or trying to profit) in any way -- the motive was making academic discourse available to the world for free -- he's charged with "felony counts including wire fraud, computer fraud, unlawfully obtaining information from a protected computer and recklessly damaging a protected computer" and "could face up to 35 years in prison and $1 million in fines."

The NYT article explored similarities between Swartz and Bradley Manning, another young activist being severely punished for alleged acts of freeing information without any profit to himself; the article quoted me as follows:

For Glenn Greenwald . . . it also makes sense that a young generation would view the Internet in political terms.

"How information is able to be distributed over the Internet, it is the free speech battle of our times," he said in interview. "It can seem a technical, legalistic movement if you don't think about it that way."

He said that point was illustrated by his experience with WikiLeaks -- and by how the Internet became a battleground as the site was attacked by hackers and as large companies tried to isolate WikiLeaks. Looking at that experience and the Swartz case, he said, "clearly the government knows that this is the prime battle, the front line for political control."

Greenwald ends his post as follows:

Economic suffering and anxiety -- and anger over it and the flamboyant prosperity of the elites who caused it -- is only going to worsen. So, too, will the refusal of the Western citizenry to meekly accept their predicament. As that happens, who it is who controls the Internet and the flow of information and communications takes on greater importance. Those who are devoted to preserving the current system of prerogatives certainly know that, and that is what explains this obsession with expanding the Surveillance State and secrecy powers, maintaining control over the dissemination of information, and harshly punishing those who threaten it. That's also why there are few conflicts, if there are any, of greater import than this one.

More on Writing

2011-08-21T07:39:00.000-07:00

I've been paying attention to how I wrote the current story, currently titled Kormak the Lucky.

It starts with an incident from the Egils saga: as an old man, Egil decides to hide two chests of silver so his son won't inherit them. He's eighty and blind, so he needs help. He takes two slaves with him to carry the silver and they go somewhere and hide the silver. Then Egil kills the slaves, so they can never tell where the silver is hidden. A remarkable achievement for an old, blind man, but hard on the slaves.

I have had an idea -- or image -- for some time. One of the slaves escapes, because an elf opens a door in a cliff and beckons him in. Egil can't see this, of course, and assumes that the slave has fallen in the crevice where the silver has been hidden.

So that is the start of the story: an incident from a saga and an image.

Then I had to figure out the rest of the story. My slave is Irish, as many Icelandic slaves were. I decided I want him to make it home to Ireland. But how? Well, he is underground in Elfland. Maybe there is an underground route to Ireland. So I take him through the country of the light elves, who are the elves of Icelandic folklore, and then through the land of the dark elves, who are mentioned in Snorri Sturlason's Prose Edda, but nowhere else. They may be dwarves, but we don't know for sure. So I can make up everything about them.

At that point, in the land of the dark elves, two things suddenly appeared in the story: one is an magical iron dog, who just walked out of the shadows. I didn't think I needed the dog and tried to get rid of him, but he was too interesting. He felt right. In the end, he stayed.

(I don't believe in talking about my characters as if they have wills of their own. They don't. However, my writing is not entirely a rational process. Sometimes images or ideas seem to come from nowhere, though I assume they come from somewhere in my mind.)

The next thing that came into the story was Volund the Smith, who appears in the Poetic Edda and also in Anglo-Saxon poetry and (I think) medieval German literature. It's a nasty story about violence and revenge. Since Volund is described as an "elf prince" in the Edda, he sort of fits in. I had a character tell it, to explain the iron dog, and then I extended the story of Volund, making it part of my hero's story, which ends in the land of the Irish fey and then -- finally -- in human Ireland.

I'm not going to add more detail. I hope to sell the story. You can read it then.

However, the point -- if there is one -- is that part of the story was rationally worked out; how to get my hero from the land of the Icelandic elves to Ireland was a rational problem: and part of it was intuitive: the original image of the door into Elfland, the iron dog and Volund.

There was no beginning-to-end plot. This particular story was made up as I went along, which means it's a picaresque journey. (If you make stuff up as you go along, you are likely to get a picaresque journey.) Of course, I had to go back and revise earlier parts, so they fit with the later parts.

This is the fourth story I have written that is based on Icelandic sagas or folklore. For some reason, they are all dark stories: three of the four spend a lot of time underground. I think they'd make a nice chapbook, titled The Hidden Folk, which is the Icelandic term for elves, although my stories are also about trolls, the devil and the undead.

Writing

2011-08-21T07:19:00.000-07:00

I've trying to pay attention to how I write. It turns out I spend a lot more time writing than I thought, if I add in research and mulling. When I exercise, I spend 30 minutes walking the track at the Y, since I find this less boring than a treadmill. While I walk, I think about the story I'm currently writing. I also think about the current story while doing anything that isn't occupying -- riding a bus, in bed at the edge of sleep.

Yesterday, I read the Havamal in a bad online translation, looking for a quote I could use in a story. I didn't find it. I am now going to read my at-home, much better translation and see if I missed something. (I just checked. I can't find what I want. Maybe I need to look at Auden's translation of the Poetic Edda.)

This is writing work, though I am not putting words on paper. I have to remind myself of this. Otherwise, I think I barely write at all.

I can write more and should, if I am going to finish all the projects I have lined up. But I also have to allow for the mulling and research time.

NASA APOD

2011-08-21T07:16:00.000-07:00

The dust sculptures of the Eagle Nebula are evaporating. As powerful starlight whittles away these cool cosmic mountains, the statuesque pillars that remain might be imagined as mythical beasts. Pictured above is one of several striking dust pillars of the Eagle Nebula that might be described as a gigantic alien fairy. This fairy, however, is ten light years tall and spews radiation much hotter than common fire. The greater Eagle Nebula, M16, is actually a giant evaporating shell of gas and dust inside of which is a growing cavity filled with a spectacular stellar nursery currently forming an open cluster of stars. The above image in scientifically re-assigned colors was released in 2005 as part of the fifteenth anniversary celebration of the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope.

NASA APOD

2011-08-17T08:33:00.000-07:00

Denizens of planet Earth watched this year's Perseid meteor shower by looking up into the moonlit night sky. But this remarkable view captured by astronaut Ron Garan looks down on a Perseid meteor. From Garan's perspective onboard the International Space Station orbiting at an altitude of about 380 kilometers, the Perseid meteors streak below, swept up dust left from comet Swift-Tuttle heated to incandescence. The glowing comet dust grains are traveling at about 60 kilometers per second through the denser atmosphere around 100 kilometers above Earth's surface. In this case, the foreshortened meteor flash is right of frame center, below the curving limb of the Earth and a layer of greenish airglow. Out of the frame, the Sun is on the horizon beyond one of the station's solar panel arrays at the upper right. Seen above the meteor near the horizon is bright star Arcturus and a star field that includes the constellations Bootes and Corona Borealis. The image was recorded on August 13 while the space station orbited above an area of China approximately 400 kilometers to the northwest of Beijing.

I want this photo for the cover of a book...

What If?

2011-08-15T12:23:00.000-07:00

There's been discussion on the Book View Cafe Blog: what if you had an adequate income from a patron, so money was not a consideration. What would you write? Would you write at all?

One of the comments, which I really liked, came from Nancy Jane Moore. She said she'd love to have the time to write -- and do all the things that nourish writing. Reading, thinking, spending time with music and art.

I wrote:

I like Nancy Jane Moore’s comment. It reminds me of all the things I need to do besides write: concerts, museums, walks, reading, thinking. Something else to structure into my life, now that I have time.

I spent most of my working life working part time or saving money and quitting to write full time, then getting another job when the money ran out. I knew I wanted to write, and I knew writing was financially risky. It seemed smarter to have a day job and write what I wanted, when I wanted. It meant that I never had enough writing time, but it enabled me to walk away from contracts I didn’t like and to take all the time necessary to do a good job.

It’s unsettling to know I may never have another day job. But I am writing more, and I think that’s my priority right now.

Why to I write? Because I always have, since childhood; and I like the attention; and I think making art is an important job, worth doing; and because it helps me deal with a difficult world.

NASA APOD

2011-08-15T07:53:00.000-07:00

What can the present-day terrain in and around large Endeavour crater tell us about ancient Mars? Starting three years ago, NASA sent a coffee-table sized robot named Opportunity on a mission rolling across the red planet's Meridiani Planum to find out. Last week, it finally arrived. Expansive Endeavour crater stretches 22 kilometers from rim to rim, making it the largest crater ever visited by a Mars Exploration Rover (MER). It is hypothesized that the impact that created the crater exposed ancient rock that possibly formed under wet conditions, and if so, this rock may yield unique clues to the watery past of Mars. Pictured above, the west rim of Endeavour looms just ahead of the Opportunity rover. Opportunity may well spend the rest of its operational life exploring Endeavour, taking pictures, spinning its wheels, and boring into intriguing rocks.

Quote

2011-08-13T20:08:00.001-07:00

“Do not waste your time on Social Questions. What is the matter with the poor is Poverty; what is the matter with the rich is Uselessness.”

George Bernard Shaw

Another Comment

2011-08-13T07:38:00.000-07:00

Modern economics pretends to be a science like physics. It is not, though many economists manage to produce a lot of math. However, the math in physics describes reality and can be tested against reality. (This is not true of superstring theory thus far, and this is the problem with superstring theory. But in general, science is tested in the real world.)

The advantage of pretending to be a science like physics is, it makes the system you describe look inevitable and unchangeable. If economics claimed to be a social or historical science, it would have to admit how much economic behavior is contingent and capable of change.

If economics is any kind of science (and it's possible it is largely fake), then it is a social and historical science, like sociology, anthropology, political science, history... All of these tell us human behavior is variable, and change happens. We are not living in the Paleolithic or in the Middle Ages. Society is different now.

Economists have a terrible track record in reality, as sane economists often point out. If they were physicists or janitors, they would lose their jobs for incompetence. (See Dean Baker on this topic.) There are a couple of reasons for this. One is, it's difficult or impossible to come up with mathematical models for something as complex as human behavior. The other is, economists get ahead by justifying the existing economic system and telling us, in the famous words of Margaret Thatcher, "There is no alternative."

Comment on the Post Below

2011-08-12T08:02:00.000-07:00

Can't is a dangerous word. Always examine it closely. Humans cannot fly unaided in the gravity at Earth's surface. As far as we know now, this cannot be done. But we can rebuild the world, and we can create a decent society. Strong forces oppose us, but they are human forces, not natural laws.

Visible Poverty, Invisible Wealth

2011-08-12T06:18:00.000-07:00

Somewhere on the Internet I read a description of flying into New York from Europe: how shabby, rundown and beat up Kennedy Airport looks compared to European airports. The same can be said about most -- maybe all -- of our public structures. Compare decaying American bridges to the amazing new bridges in China. Compare Amtrak to the bullet trains in Europe and Asia. Look at photos of skyscrapers in Shanghai, which are truly space age. Per one article I just glanced at, architects are coming from all over the world to work in Shanghai.

When I was a kid, the US was the bright and shiny modern country with new, state-of-the-art schools and new, state-of-the-art highways, a whole new way of life based on cars and suburbs and created by government spending. (You think the government didn't pay for all this? What about government built highways and water systems, which made the new suburbs possible? What about the government mortgages, that enabled people to buy homes? What about the GI loans that put a generation through college?)

Since then, over the last 30+ years, we have developed a culture of visible poverty. This can be seen in our public spaces and in the lives of most Americans.

(There was always poverty. That was the reason for the War on Poverty. But there wasn't a sense that the entire country was poor, at least after the Great Depression ended.)

Clinton got rid of traditional welfare, AFDC, which was an attempt to make sure families with children had a minimal income. Public housing projects have been written off as failures, and nothing has replaced them. (Public housing has actually worked quite well in the Twin Cities, which never built gigantic projects. But there isn't enough of it.) We have gotten used to homeless shelters and food shelves, to people begging and sleeping in the streets.

And we have gotten used to the stagnant income and eroding wealth of the middle classes. Now, we see boarded up houses in middle class neighborhoods and middle class families using food shelves or ending in shelter.

Obama is now getting ready to cut Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, which will increase poverty, especially among older Americans. We can look forward to seeing elderly Americans sleeping -- and dying -- in the streets.

As a result of all this -- the increasingly impoverishment of the poor and the middle classes, and a country that looks increasingly rundown -- we tend to think that the US has no money. This is not true. It's the richest country in the world. But its wealth is -- to a considerable extent -- invisible. We get glimpses on Fifth Avenue or Chicago's Golden Mile, but most of us don't go where the rich go to shop. We don't visit seriously wealthy suburbs and gated communities. We don't eat in seriously expensive restaurants. We don't fly on the same planes. They have private jets. We have Delta.

We know that movie stars and sports stars are rich, but we don't know how rich; and they are figures in People magazine, not entirely real to us. Mostly what we see is the upper middle classes, who look rich to us, but are merely more comfortable than we will ever be.

So, we have a country that is deteriorating at most levels, while a tiny sector of the population has vast wealth. And we are told this is real poverty, inherent poverty, the country does not have the resources to rebuild itself. BS.

2011-08-09T10:52:00.000-07:00

This is a comment I made on a post at Book View Cafe, which has an interesting blog, mostly about writing.

Writing never made me much money; I’ve never made a living at it; but I’m happier when I write. I did nonprofit accounting for years. I like it. But who I am is tied up in writing and in the writing communities I belong to. If I were asked what I did with my life, I’d say I wrote and made friends — and spent a huge amount of time thinking about and talking about politics. The last has been frustrating. But the writing and the friends have been satisfying.

Mars!!!

2011-08-08T18:57:00.001-07:00

What is causing these dark streaks on Mars? A leading hypothesis is flowing -- but quickly evaporating -- water. The streaks, visible in dark brown near the image center, appear in the Martian spring and summer but fade in the winter months, only to reappear again the next summer. These are not the first markings on Mars that have been interpreted as showing the effects of running water, but they are the first to add the clue of a seasonal dependence. The above picture, taken in May, digitally combines several images from the the HiRISE instrument on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). The image is color-enhanced and depicts a slope inside Newton crater in a mid-southern region of Mars. The streaks bolster evidence that water exists just below the Martian surface in several locations, and therefore fuels speculation that Mars might harbor some sort of water-dependent life. Future observations with robotic spacecraft orbiting Mars, such as MRO, Mars Express, and Mars Odyssey will continue to monitor the situation and possibly confirm -- or refute -- the exciting flowing water hypothesis.

Against Stupidity the Gods Themselves Contend in Vain

2011-08-07T11:59:00.000-07:00

The obvious explanation for Obama and the part of the capitalist class he represents is -- they don't really think global warming will happen. Or if it happens, it won't be bad. Or it will happen after they die, and their children don't matter.

The last actually sounds the most likely to me.

But I do have another explanation: they think it will happen and be bad, but they will survive. My current idea is, they will retreat into armored enclaves, guarded by private armies, and live comfortably while most of the rest of us die.

Imagine arcologies in the far north or far south, full of the rich and their servants: doctors, lawyers, scientists, engineers, plumbers, hair stylists, gourmet chefs... Around these settlements are military emplacements...

Now, the questions I have are the following: could these enclaves survive in the absence of a world-wide industrial civilization? Could they produce their own capital equipment and consumer goods? Could they do their own maintenance and repair?

Second, in the absence of national governments -- which would vanish in the collapse of human civilization, how could the rich maintain power? Why wouldn't their security forces simply turn on them?

Forests would be gone, except for what the archologies grew. The oceans would be mostly dead. There might be some agriculture left outside, but it would likely be subsistence, carried on by the few people who survived. If the rich needed metal they would have to send out armed expeditions to mine. Plastic would require petroleum. Maybe they could get bacteria to make it... If not, they would have to try drilling for it in depleted fields, while dust storms whirled around.

Law and government, if they existed, would exist only within the arcologies. Outside, there would be places like Somalia and Afghanistan, if that much remained.

Capitalism has survived and grown by exploiting natural resources and with the help of governments that protected and encouraged it. Could it continue to exist as isolated settlements?

Footnote on the Above

2011-08-07T10:50:00.000-07:00

Life in the armored enclaves would be very different from the life of the rich now: no trips to Paris and fabulous vacation spots, no shopping on Fifth Avenue, no opening nights at the Metropolitan Opera or the Metropolitan Museum of Art. At best, you would have the life of Prince Esterhazy, who built a palace -- a kind of minor Versailles -- in a swamp in Hungary and had his own orchestra, directed by Haydn. Very nice, but you can never get away to Vienna.

It would be like living in an upscale version of the movie Logan's Run.

The Mystery Man

2011-08-07T07:23:00.000-07:00

There seem to be two theories about Barack Obama. One is he's a spineless invertebrate and a terrible negotiator, who keeps being outmaneuvered by Mitch McConnell and John Boehner.

The other is he's fiendish Machiavel, who only pretends to be a Democrat and who achieves Republican goals while appearing to be outmaneuvered by Republicans.

I am not sure either is true. If you look at his behavior in areas where he has control -- foreign policy, war and security -- he has continued and expanded Bush policy. He has continued two illegal wars and added four more (Pakistan, Yemen, Libya and Somalia). He has kept the illegal prison at Guantanamo open. His Justice Department has refused to go after Wall Street criminals, but has been active is going after whistle blowers and peace and environmental activists. Check Glenn Greenwald's fine blog for details on all of this.

This makes him look like a Republican -- or a Democratic hawk, of which there have been many. His natural impulses seem conservative and authoritarian, and he is obviously interested in managing appearance, rather than changing reality.

However, when you look at his legislative history, which is not fully in his control, he looks less like a fiendish 11-dimensional chess player and more like a clueless idiot.

Look at the debt ceiling mess, which went on apparently forever and ended in a terrible deal and a downgrading of the country's bond rating. Obama looked dishonest and inept throughout.

There are other examples of ineptness -- The year-long struggle to create a national health plan which resulted in a godawful mess of a bill, which does not solve the main problem: the cost of health care.

His handling of the economic collapse doesn't look especially smart to me. And how is it fiendishly clever to ignore global warming? Is he planning to move to Mars?

Now -- you can say these are all signs that he's a weasel working for the bosses. But remember that capitalism is not monolithic. There are corporations that would benefit from infrastructure repair, clean energy, affordable health care, honest banks, and a planet which can be inhabited...

How is it good for capitalism to have a financial system that might collapse tomorrow, or an economy that may never recover, or a planet that is largely desert?

If you can't see and deal with obvious problems which threaten your existence, you are not much of a fiendish plotter in my book. My villains always have a clue.

Footnote from the Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms:

Machiavel [mak‐yă‐vel], a type of stage villain found in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, and named after the Florentine political theorist Niccolò Machiavelli, whose notorious book Il Principe (The Prince, 1513) justified the use of dishonest means to retain state power. Exaggerated accounts of Macchiavelli's views led to the use of his name—sometimes directly referred to in speeches—for a broad category of ruthless schemers, atheists, and poisoners. Shakespeare's Iago and Richard III are the most famous examples of the type.

NASA APOD

2011-08-07T07:03:00.000-07:00

The sands of time are running out for the central star of this hourglass-shaped planetary nebula. With its nuclear fuel exhausted, this brief, spectacular, closing phase of a Sun-like star's life occurs as its outer layers are ejected - its core becoming a cooling, fading white dwarf. In 1995, astronomers used the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) to make a series of images of planetary nebulae, including the one above. Here, delicate rings of colorful glowing gas (nitrogen-red, hydrogen-green, and oxygen-blue) outline the tenuous walls of the hourglass. The unprecedented sharpness of the HST images has revealed surprising details of the nebula ejection process that are helping to resolve the outstanding mysteries of the complex shapes and symmetries of planetary nebulas.

Nomination

2011-08-03T17:30:00.001-07:00

My story "Mammmoths of the Great Plains" has been nominated for the Carl Brandon Society's Kindred Award "for an outstanding speculative fiction work dealing
with race, ethnicity, and culture."

Pretty cool.

Letter to my Congresspeople

2011-08-03T06:33:00.000-07:00

I lay in bed last night and drafted a letter to my Congresswoman and two Senators on what Congress and the President are not dealing with:

1. Global warming. This is the big one. Failure to reduce greenhouse gases could lead to the planet being largely uninhabitable. This is not an exaggeration.

2. The financial system, which remains both crooked and fragile. Right now, there is good reason to believe most big banks are bankrupt. Only creative accounting makes them look solvent. We need to clean up this mess: take over the banks, determine what they are actually worth, break up the too-big-to-fail banks and create new banking regulations.

3. The economy. It looks as if we are sinking deeper into recession. Another Great Depression is possible, if the governments of the US and Europe do not intervene.
Intervening does not mean saving banks. It means saving people and countries.

4. Infrastructure. The basis of American society -- roads, bridges, water mains, sewer lines, buildings -- is falling apart. Everything needs to be repaired or replaced.

5. Health costs, which continue to rise and suck wealth out of the entire economy. The way to control costs (and provide health care to the nation) is a national health care system like Canada, the Western European countries, Medicare or the VA.

6. Sustainable energy. We need it.

7. Sustainable agriculture. We need it.

This is long enough list for now. All these problems can be solved. We have the resources. But we have to start soon.

Being on Panels

2011-08-02T09:32:00.000-07:00

I've decided to take a break from reading political news, because I find it depressing. But I still want to begin my day by reading on the Internet. So I've read a mixture of stuff, including Michelle Sagara's post on how panels are not about you, the individual, maybe-not-so-famous author.

I did a little cringing, because I was on a panel at Convergence on the short fiction of Eleanor Arnason, and I took the panel over. I don't know what came over me: a brief fit of madness, maybe. Anyway, I talked about current writing and future plans for writing and actually described plots. I don't usually do this, and I wish I had kept quiet and let the other panelists talk about me.

In any case, Michelle Sagara is right: telling the plots of your fiction is a no-no, though I have always done it. But not usually on panels.

But I'm still inclined to think the panels I'm on are about me and my ideas. I don't do panels unless I have something to say about the topic, and then I really want to say it. If I am lucky, the other panelists will be equally interested in the topic and eager to talk.

I should add that I spent years learning how to talk intelligently in front of an audience, and I usually do not walk into panels cold. I have thought about the topic and sometimes have notes.

NASA APOD

2011-08-01T04:36:00.000-07:00

What's that strange bright streak? It is the last image ever of a space shuttle from orbit. A week and a half ago, after decoupling from the International Space Station, the Space Shuttle Atlantis fired its rockets for the last time, lost its orbital speed, and plummeted back to Earth. Within the next hour, however, the sophisticated space machine dropped its landing gear and did what used to be unprecedented -- landed like an airplane on a runway. Although the future of human space flight from the USA will enter a temporary lull, many robotic spacecraft continue to explore our Solar System and peer into our universe, including Cassini, Chandra, Chang'e 2, Dawn, Fermi, Hubble, Kepler, LRO, Mars Express, Messenger, MRO, New Horizons, Opportunity, Planck, Rosetta, SDO, SOHO, Spitzer, STEREO, Swift, Venus-Express, and WISE.

Poem

2011-07-31T07:27:00.001-07:00

The Mars photo (and the current situation in Washington) remind me of the Shelley poem:

I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

NASA APOD

2011-07-31T07:09:00.001-07:00

What has the Opportunity rover found on Mars? While traversing a vast empty plain in 2005 in Meridiani Planum, one of Earth's rolling robots on Mars found a surprise when visiting the location of its own metallic heat shield discarded last year during descent. The surprise is the rock visible on the lower left, found to be made mostly of dense metals iron and nickel. The large cone-shaped object behind it -- and the flank piece on the right -- are parts of Opportunity's jettisoned heat shield. Smaller shield debris is also visible. Scientists do not think that the basketball-sized metal "Heat Shield Rock" originated on Mars, but rather is likely an ancient metallic meteorite. In hindsight, finding a meteorite in a vast empty dust plain on Mars might be considered similar to Earth meteorites found on the vast empty ice plains of Antarctica. The finding raises speculations about the general abundance of rocks on Mars that have fallen there from outer space.

I read the news this morning, which is almost always a mistake. I think we should vote every politician in Washington out of office and elect cats instead.

More on Writing

2011-07-29T11:21:00.000-07:00

I finished Natalie Goldberg's Writing Down the Bones and am still working on Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way.

There's a lot that I like in the Goldberg book especially. She is absolutely right when she says that you have to read a lot and write a lot, if you want to be a writer.

But both books still seem to argue that anyone can be a writer. I'm not sure. Most people in our society are literate and can put words down on paper. Does that mean they can become good writers? I've known people who worked for years on writing and never became very good. Why not? A refusal to listen to criticism, often. An unwillingness to study their craft closely. A lack of imagination. A lack of feeling for language. Maybe simply a lack of gift, whatever that may mean.

Cameron and Goldberg are both teaching people how to be saner, which is great. But the focus required to be really good at anything may not result in a well-adjusted person. I am very much a fan of sanity. I would never encourage anyone to be less sane and happy. But being good at anything requires a lot of time, a lot of energy, a lot of focus. It may make you a wee bit unbalanced.

For example, there is this story:

Olivia Gentile’s Life List is the remarkable story of Phoebe Snetsinger, a woman trapped by her life as homemaker, who found liberation in bird watching. Diagnosed with terminal cancer, she began traveling the world, not seeking a cure, but in search of rare birds—becoming a kind of ornithologist’s heroine, and living another eighteen years.

What this review (by A.M. Homes) does not mention is that Snetsinger flew the coop, left her family to chase rare birds. She was a very focused lady, whose achievements were remarkable.

She died in 1999 in a car accident in Madagascar. Her last bird, per Wikipedia, was the Red-shouldered vanga, only known to science since 1997.

Comments on the Previous Post

2011-07-29T11:08:00.000-07:00

Josh Lukin has pointed out that lousy right-wing politics did not start with High Modernism. There were many 19th century writers who had bad politics. I'm sure he's right. My post skips from the Romantics to the early 20th century, missing a lot. One problem is, there is a lot of 19th century western literature I have not read.

When I think of the 19th century, I think of Dickens, the Brontes, Melville. Twain, Dickinson and Whitman. That is hardly everyone.

Terry Garey says there is good writing which is recording, rather than an attempt to change anything. True enough. I would be hard put to do a political analysis of the following:

so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens.

or this one, also by William Carlos Williams:

This Is Just to Say

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

Writing # 1

2011-07-28T07:21:00.001-07:00

I finished Long Quiet Highway. A good book. Now I have started Writing Down the Bones. Like Julia Cameron, Natalie Goldberg sees writing as therapy or self-actualization or meditation practice, which I do not.

It can be. No question. But that isn't what it is for me. For me, the important part of writing is the work itself. I am an artist. I make art.

I started mulling over my idea of being an artist. First of all, you are not likely to be a Zen master, at least in the west. My ideas of art and the artist come from the Romantic tradition: the solitary genius, who gives all for art like van Gogh. The rebel, like Byron who died in the Greek revolution against the Ottoman Empire.

The mountains look on Marathon---
And Marathon looks on the sea;
And musing there an hour alone,
I dream'd that Greece might yet be free
For, standing on the Persians' grave,
I could not deem myself a slave.

Shelly writing, "Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world."

Shelley and Byron and Mary Shelley wrote in the shadow of the French Revolution. van Gogh is much later. His life is closer to the Bohemian and High Modernist ideas of art and the artist: the poet starving in a garret, Proust writing A la Recherche du Temps Perdu in a cork-lined room. There is a shift away from politics in the High Modern idea of art, which is why you can have major artists with lousy, right-wing politics. High Modernism is about art for the sake of art, pushing the limits of art, creating something genuinely new and individual. As archie the cockroach says:

expression is the need of my soul
i was once a vers libre bard
but i died and my soul went into the body of a cockroach
it has given me a new outlook upon life
i see things from the under side now
thank you for the apple peelings in the wastepaper basket
but your paste is getting so stale i cant eat it

archie is both a mocking of the idea of the solitary genius and a straight up, sympathetic portrayal of a starving artist, who is obsessed with his art.

boss i am disappointed in
some of your readers they
are always asking how does
archy work the shift so as to get a
new line or how does archy do
this or do that they
are always interested in technical
details when the main question is
whether the stuff is
literature or not