Archives for 2014

I Used to Think… But Now…

March 21, 2014 by John Leave a Comment

[Image: “On second thoughts…,” by Tim Norris on Flickr. (Click to enlarge.) Used under a Creative Commons license.]

Insight roams the sea of the unconscious like the Loch Ness monster, a rumor whose wake occasionally becomes visible, but even then it’s mystifying and scarcely believed.

(Diane Ackerman [source])

…and:

Words are substance strange. Speak one and the air ripples into another’s ears. Write one and the eye laps it up. But the sense transmutes, and the spoken word winds through the ear’s labyrinth into a sense that is no longer the nerve’s realm. The written word unfolds behind the eye into the world, world’s image, and the imagination sees as the eye cannot see — thoughtfully.

(Dan Beachy-Quick [source unknown])

…and:

Inspiration is not the exclusive privilege of poets or artists generally. There is, has been, and will always be a certain group of people whom inspiration visits. It’s made up of all those who’ve consciously chosen their calling and do their job with love and imagination. It may include doctors, teachers, gardeners — and I could list a hundred more professions. Their work becomes one continuous adventure as long as they manage to keep discovering new challenges in it. Difficulties and setbacks never quell their curiosity. A swarm of new questions emerges from every problem they solve. Whatever inspiration is, it’s born from a continuous “I don’t know.”

(Wislawa Szymborska [source])

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The Uncertain Sum of Definite Parts

March 14, 2014 by John Leave a Comment

[Image: “I dreamed about a human being,” by Fran Simó (original on Flickr; used under Creative Commons license. For more information, see the note at the foot of this post.]

From whiskey river:

The Life of a Day

Like people or dogs, each day is unique and has its own personality quirks which can easily be seen if you look closely. But there are so few days as compared to people, not to mention dogs, that it would be surprising if a day were not a hundred times more interesting than most people. But usually they just pass, mostly unnoticed, unless they are wildly nice, like autumn ones full of red maple trees and hazy sunlight, or if they are grimly awful ones in a winter blizzard that kills the lost traveler and bunches of cattle. For some reason we like to see days pass, even though most of us claim we don’t want to reach our last one for a long time. We examine each day before us with barely a glance and say, no, this isn’t one I’ve been looking for, and wait in a bored sort of way for the next, when, we are convinced, our lives will start for real. Meanwhile, this day is going by perfectly well-adjusted, as some days are, with the right amounts of sunlight and shade, and a light breeze scented with a perfume made from the mixture of fallen apples, corn stubble, dry oak leaves, and the faint odor of last night’s meandering skunk.

(Tom Hennen [source])

…and (italicized portion):

The brain’s dynamo runs millions of jobs, by mixing chemicals, oscillations, synchronized rhythms, and who knows what else. It is like looking at a mosaic or a pointillist painting in motion. Study the whole and the parts disappear; study the parts and the whole disappears. Maybe stronger brains will solve that problem in future days. I believe consciousness is brazenly physical, a raucous mirage the brain creates to help us survive. But I also sense the universe is magical, greater than the sum of its parts, which I don’t attribute to a governing god, but simply to the surprising, ecstatic, frightening everyday reality we all know. Ultimately, I find consciousness a fascinating predicament for matter to get into.

(Diane Ackerman [source])

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I’ve long held that a story I’ve started writing must reach a certain “critical mass” in order for me to carry it through to completion. This critical mass might be defined as the written length — the word/page count — beyond which I will not, can not stop writing. A story which might become a novella (or longer), for instance, seems to hit critical mass at about 10,000 words. At this point, the narrative has so much momentum in my head that it’s a force in its own right: I know enough about the characters and the story to know how little I really know about them, and how much I want to find out.

(I’m pretty sure many/most other writers feel the same way, incidentally, although we’ve probably all got different critical masses.)

Mostly, this is just a descriptive figure, not a prescriptive one. It’s an observation which seems to have held true in the past and (as I expect) will likely hold true in the future, not a make-or-break target.

For the piece I’m working on now, though, I seem to be approaching — perhaps have already crossed — a different and perhaps unquantifiable threshold: a critical mass of research.
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The Immediate, The Real

March 7, 2014 by John Leave a Comment

From whiskey river:

We begin so aware and grateful. The sun somehow hangs there in the sky. The little bird sings. The miracle of life just happens. Then we stub our toe, and in that moment of pain, the whole world is reduced to our poor little toe. Now, for a day or two, it is difficult to walk. With every step, we are reminded of our poor little toe.

Our vigilance becomes: Which defines our day — the pinch we feel in walking on a bruised toe, or the miracle still happening?

It is the giving over to smallness that opens us to misery. In truth, we begin taking nothing for granted, grateful that we have enough to eat, that we are well enough to eat. But somehow, through the living of our days, our focus narrows like a camera that shutters down, cropping out the horizon, and one day we’re miffed at a diner because the eggs are runny or the hash isn’t seasoned just the way we like.

When we narrow our focus, the problem seems everything. We forget when we were lonely, dreaming of a partner. We forget first beholding the beauty of another. We forget the comfort of first being seen and held and heard. When our view shuts down, we’re up in the night annoyed by the way our lover pulls the covers or leaves the dishes in the sink without soaking them first.

In actuality, misery is a moment of suffering allowed to become everything. So, when feeling miserable, we must look wider than what hurts. When feeling a splinter, we must, while trying to remove it, remember there is a body that is not splinter, and a spirit that is not splinter, and a world that is not splinter.

(Mark Nepo [source])

…and:

Place to Be

Days the weather sits
in the endless sky,
the clouds drifting by

The winter’s snow,
summer’s heat,
same street.

Nothing changes
but the faces, the people,
all the things they do

’spite of heaven and hell
or city hall —
Nothing’s wiser than a moment.

No one’s chance
is simply changed by wishing,
right or wrong.

What you do is how you get along.
What you did is all it ever means.

(Robert Creeley [source])

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Everyone’s Excited About the New Cosmos

March 3, 2014 by John Leave a Comment

Or so it appears. Yesterday, it was the guys from the “Get Fuzzy” strip who brought their fractious relationship to bear on the mysteries of time, space, and everything in between.

First couple of panels are shown here. See the whole strip over on the Washington Post‘s site.

The Surface, Transcended

February 28, 2014 by John Leave a Comment

[Video: “Surface Tension,” an improvisation by pianist Eve Egoyan with artist David Rokeby. For more information, see the note at the foot of this post.]

From whiskey river (from which I could have quoted everything this week):

We inhabit a deeply imagined world that exists alongside the real physical world. Even the crudest utterance, or the simplest, contains the fundamental poetry by which we live. This mind fabric, woven of images and illusions, shields us. In a sense, or rather, in all senses, it’s a shock absorber. As harsh as life seems to us now, it would feel even worse — hopelessly, irredeemably harsh — if we didn’t veil it, order it, relate familiar things, create mental cushions. One of the most surprising facts about human beings is that we seem to require a poetic version of life. It’s not just that some of us enjoy reading or writing poetically, or that many people wax poetic in emotional situations, but that all human beings of all ages in all cultures all over the world automatically tell their story in a poetic way, using the elemental poetry concealed in everyday language to solve problems, communicate desires and needs, even talk to themselves. When people invent new words, they do so playfully, metaphorically — computers have viruses, one can surf the internet, a naive person is clueless. In time, people forget the etymology or choose to disregard it. We dine at chic restaurants from porcelain dinner plates without realizing that when the smooth, glistening porcelain was invented in France a long time ago, someone with a sense of humor thought it looked as smooth as the vulva of a pig, which is indeed what porcelain means. When we stand by our scruples, we don’t think of our feet, but the word comes from the Latin scrupulus, a tiny stone that was the smallest unit of weight. Thus a scrupulous person is so sensitive he’s irritated by the smallest stone in his shoe. For the most part, we are all unwitting poets.

(Diane Ackerman [source])

…and (italicized portion):

The Greatest Grandeur
(excerpt)

But it is the dark emptiness contained
in every next moment that seems to me
the most singularly glorious gift,
that void which one is free to fill
with processions of men bearing burning
cedar knots or with parades of blue horses,
belled and ribboned and stepping sideways,
with tumbling white-faced mimes or companies
of black-robed choristers; to fill simply
with hammered silver teapots or kiln-dried
crockery, tangerine and almond custards,
polonaises, polkas, whittling sticks, wailing
walls; that space large enough to hold all
invented blasphemies and pieties, 10,000
definitions of god and more, never fully
filled, never.

(Pattiann Rogers [source])

…and:

And so it happened again, the daily miracle whereby interiority opens out and brings to bloom the million-petalled flower of being here, in the world, with other people.

(Zadie Smith [source])

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Midweek Music Break: A Science-Fiction Mini-Mix, from Stanley Kubrick

February 26, 2014 by John 1 Comment

[Images: Keir Dullea, in 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Malcolm McDowell, in A Clockwork Orange]

Stanley Kubrick made two films unabashedly science-fiction in nature: 2001: A Space Odyssey, and A Clockwork Orange. I think they’re both classics, but will concede that 2001 is more commonly listed as such by people who’ve seen both; indeed, Clockwork Orange comes across as a little too, well, repellent for many people.

(Understandable: the film’s protagonist/narrator, Alex, is something of a beastly creature — at once sadistic and self-pitying. That he’s also wry, charming, often quite funny, a victim of circumstances, etc… Well, easy enough to overlook all that if you’re so inclined.)

Whatever one thinks of the films, the soundtracks worked very, very well as veritable works of art in their own right. The one from 2001 appears never to have been released — or at least, is no longer available — as a single collection. Luckily, all or most of it came from individual performances (most/all) which are available, sometimes in slightly different arrangements, by the same artists.

Because I’m working on a new SF story, I’ve found myself using these soundtracks quite a bit recently. And I thought I’d share a mini-version of the combined lot here, as a Midweek Music Break.

#	Composer/Title	Film	Length
1	R. Straus: Also Sprach Zarathustra	2001	1:47
2	Rossini: The Thieving Magpie	Clockwork	5:57
3	Tucker: Overture to the Sun	Clockwork	1:47
4	Beethoven: Suicide Scherzo (9th Symphony, 2nd Movement) (abridged)	Clockwork	3:09
5	R. Straus: The Blue Danube Waltz	2001	11:47
6	Freed/Brown: Singin’ in the Rain	Clockwork	2:37

(Note: The playlist goes automatically from start to finish, once you click the little Play button. To skip to the next number, once a song is playing you’ll find a little fast-forward button to the right of its progress meter — and a fast-rewind to the left, for that matter.)

[audio:2001_alsosprachzarathustra.mp3, clockworkorange_thievingmagpie.mp3, clockworkorange_overturetothesun.mp3, clockworkorange_suicidescherzo.mp3, 2001_bluedanubewaltz.mp3, clockworkorange_singinintherain.mp3|titles=’Stanley Kubrick Mini-Mix’|artists=Various Artists]

Eye-Openings

February 21, 2014 by John 2 Comments

[Image: “Awakening in the Snow,” by user InnocentEyez on Flickr.com (photograph of sculpture, The Awakening, by J. Seward Johnson). Reproduced here under a Creative Commons license.]

From whiskey river:

Franz Kafka is Dead

He died in a tree from which he wouldn’t come down. “Come down!” they cried to him. “Come down! Come down!” Silence filled the night, and the night filled the silence, while they waited for Kafka to speak. “I can’t,” he finally said, with a note of wistfulness. “Why?” they cried. Stars spilled across the black sky. “Because then you’ll stop asking for me.” The people whispered and nodded among themselves. They put their arms around each other, and touched their children’s hair. They took off their hats and raised them to the small, sickly man with the ears of a strange animal, sitting in his black velvet suit in the dark tree. Then they turned and started for home under the canopy of leaves. Children were carried on their fathers’ shoulders, sleepy from having been taken to see who wrote his books on pieces of bark he tore off the tree from which he refused to come down. In his delicate, beautiful, illegible handwriting. And they admired those books, and they admired his will and stamina. After all: who doesn’t wish to make a spectacle of his loneliness? One by one families broke off with a good night and a squeeze of the hands, suddenly grateful for the company of neighbors. Doors closed to warm houses. Candles were lit in windows. Far off, in his perch in the trees, Kafka listened to it all: the rustle of the clothes being dropped to the floor, or lips fluttering along naked shoulders, beds creaking along the weight of tenderness. It all caught in the delicate pointed shells of his ears and rolled like pinballs through the great hall of his mind.

That night a freezing wind blew in. When the children woke up, they went to the window and found the world encased in ice. One child, the smallest, shrieked out in delight and her cry tore through the silence and exploded the ice of a giant oak tree. The world shone.

They found him frozen on the ground like a bird. It’s said that when they put their ears to the shell of his ears, they could hear themselves.

(Nicole Krauss [source])

…and:

We read of spiritual efforts, and our imagination makes us believe that, because we enjoy the idea of doing them, we have done them. I am appalled to see how much of the change I thought I had undergone lately was only imaginary. The real work seems still to be done. It is so fatally easy to confuse an aesthetic appreciation of the spiritual life with the life itself — to dream that you have waked, washed, and dressed & then to find yourself still in bed.

(C. S. Lewis [source])

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Pure (But Minor) Geek Stuff: Font Problem (Ubuntu, Chrome)

February 15, 2014 by John Leave a Comment

I’m currently running Ubuntu 12.04 as my main operating system, and primarily use Google Chrome for Web browsing. (The “About Chrome” page says it’s version 32.0.1700.107.) I haven’t added any goofy font-management packages — or goofy fonts, for that matter. And I’d never noticed any problems with the same setup on my older computer, replaced last summer: same OS, same browser.

For the record: Chrome under Windows did not display the same problematic behavior.

But on this computer, oy. On certain pages, particularly Wikipedia pages, I could see a very vexing problem. (The problem occurred only with Chrome, not with Firefox or Opera.) To illustrate, here’s a partial screen capture of a current Wikipedia article as I saw it when I first browsed there a little while ago (click to enlarge); the red ellipses highlight problematic areas on the screen:

As you can see, especially (but not only) on lines containing boldface text, adjacent characters — sometimes entire words — appeared to overlap. I could sorta-kinda read this text, but it was getting very, very tiresome to puzzle it out when I was really in a hurry to get to a page’s content without having to fight its form.

I did some research, saw that others had experienced the same problem, but the specific solutions proposed (often involving the installation of new software and/or fonts) didn’t interest or even apply to me. Yet the focus on fonts did…

Short answer:

In Chrome, go to the Settings page and click on the Show advanced settings… link at the bottom.
Scroll down to the section headed Web content. Click on the Customize fonts… button.
Look at the default sans-serif font. Does it say Arial? If so, use the drop-down list to change it to one of the generic substitutes; I picked FreeSans.
Reload the problematic Web page.

At least in my case, the improvement was immediate (click to enlarge):

I can’t promise you identical results if you’ve got a similar problem. This one just worked for me.

And now, at last: back to researching minor planets, Chthonian planets, hot Jupiters, trojan planets, Lagrangian points, and yes, planetary cores…

The (Generally Sweet) Awakening

February 14, 2014 by John 2 Comments

[Image: the Yeti crab. (See here, here, and here for more information.) I’m no connoisseur of deep-sea life, but this fairly recent discovery — 2005 — woke even me up. Gently. In a way, it woke up even its discoverers.*]

From whiskey river:

In order to awaken, first of all one must realize that one is in a state of sleep. And in order to realize that one is indeed in a state of sleep, one must recognize and fully understand the nature of the forces which operate to keep one in the state of sleep, or hypnosis. It is absurd to think that this can be done by seeking information from the very source which induces the hypnosis.

(George Ivanovich Gurdjieff [source unknown])

I should say that I couldn’t find a source for these specific words. But this passage is a coda of sorts to Gurdjieff’s tale of the magician and the sheep, recounted in various places around the Web.

…and:

When you consider something like death, after which (there being no news flash to the contrary) we may well go out like a candle flame, then it probably doesn’t matter if we try too hard, are awkward sometimes, care for one another too deeply, are excessively curious about nature, are too open to experience, enjoy a nonstop expense of the senses in an effort to know life intimately and lovingly. It probably doesn’t matter if, while trying to be modest and eager watchers of life’s many spectacles, we sometimes look clumsy or get dirty or ask stupid questions or reveal our ignorance or say the wrong thing or light up with wonder like the children we all are. It probably doesn’t matter if a passerby sees us dipping a finger into the moist pouches of dozens of lady’s slippers to find out what bugs tend to fall into them, and thinks us a bit eccentric. Or a neighbor, fetching her mail, sees us standing in the cold with our own letters in one hand and a seismically red autumn leaf in the other, its color hitting our sense like a blow from a stun gun, as we stand with a huge grin, too paralyzed by the intricately veined gaudiness of the leaf to move.

(Diane Ackerman, A Natural History of the Senses)

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