Beauty Vs. Sublimnity

From Michaelangelo & the Pope's Ceiling, by Ross King, a note that I'm quoting to remember for later:

One way to understand the differing styles of the two artists is through a pair of aesthetic categories developed two and a half centuries later by the Irish statesman and writer Edmund Burke in his Philosophical Enquiry Into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, published in 1756. For Burke, those things we call beautiful have the properties of smoothness, delicacy, softness of color, and elegance of movement. The sublime, on the other hand, comprehends the vast, the obscure, the powerful, the rugged, the difficult- attributes which produce in the spectator a kind of astonished wonder and even terror. For the people of Rome in 1511, Raphael was beautiful but Michaelangelo sublime.


The best part of reading is when one book leads me on to another.

Seven Stanzas At Easter

Make no mistake: if He rose at all
it was as His body;
if the cells’ dissolution did not reverse, the molecules
reknit, the amino acids rekindle,
the Church will fall.

It was not as the flowers,
each soft Spring recurrent;
it was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled
eyes of the eleven apostles;
it was as His flesh: ours.

The same hinged thumbs and toes,
the same valved heart
that–pierced–died, withered, paused, and then
regathered out of enduring Might
new strength to enclose.

Let us not mock God with metaphor,
analogy, sidestepping, transcendence;
making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the
faded credulity of earlier ages:
let us walk through the door.

The stone is rolled back, not papier-mâché,
not a stone in a story,
but the vast rock of materiality that in the slow
grinding of time will eclipse for each of us
the wide light of day.

And if we will have an angel at the tomb,
make it a real angel,
weighty with Max Planck’s quanta, vivid with hair,
opaque in the dawn light, robed in real linen
spun on a definite loom.

Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are
embarrassed by the miracle,
and crushed by remonstrance.

-John Updike

Happy Easter, everyone!

Capitol

Orson Scott Card's Capitol is an early, uneven short story collection that has several interesting pieces. Many of the stories were later reprinted (some with adjustments) in The Worthing Saga.

It's a future history of a space empire whose most important feature is suspended animation. A drug called Somec allows people to be suspended agelessly for any length of time. This enables space flight, but its real function is social: important people can sleep for one year out of two, or three out of five, or nine out of ten, based on their status. This creates a society where the rich and powerful seem ageless; even though their experienced life is no longer than anyone else's, they can watch lesser people age and die while they're still young.

This illusionary immortality (and one of the nice touches is the way that its enthusiasts uncritically think of it as "immortality," when obviously it's not) becomes all-consuming: people are either on Somec, or desperate to get on it, which gives the system an unbreakable hold on society.

The stories don't necessarily fit together well. The first two are set on Earth, and feel strangely off-topic. We don't need to know how Somec was invented, and the Soviet invasion of the US seems too large a topic to just introduce and then forget.

Most of the remainder are set on the planet Crove, later renamed Capitol, and these flow better. (Well, most of them. "Burning" is interesting in terms of its later place in The Worthing Chronicle, but in this context it makes no sense. Where did these telepaths come from, what part do they play, why are they never mentioned again?)

The two best stories are "Skipping Stones," which sets up the dilemma of Somec and its effects; and "Breaking the Game," about a celebrity video game player. The latter is effective because Card, with minimal detail, succeeds at making the game interesting! You can actually believe that people would spectate, and pay to play in it.

(It also reminds me of the political message boards in Ender's Game- another detail of the internet that Card predicted, accurately if not completely.)

The Worthing Chronicle is a better, neater collection of most of this material, which I suppose is why they republished it that way. But it was interesting to see this alternative framing. And Worthing gives only a brief and unsatisfying summary of "Breaking the Game," which deserves a fuller treatment.

Star-Maker

Olaf Stapleton's Star Maker is interesting in several ways, and one of them just occurred to me: it probably could not be published today. Not because of any retrograde politics or language, necessarily, but because of the style.

There is basically no plot. There are almost no characters. I don't believe there's a single line of dialogue in the entire novel. It's basically a travelogue and summary of several different alien planets. And this seems to be normal for Stapleton- his Last and First Men seemed like a collection of worldbuilding notes rather than a conventional story.

Science fiction was much smaller and less-established in the thirties, and people could write weird sf novels like this and actually get them past an editor. I don't know that it's possible anymore. At any rate, I don't know of any modern sf writers like Stapleton.

The narrator is an Englishman who is taken out of his body on a kind of astral journey. He wanders immaterially through space for a long, long time before learning how to find planets with intelligent life. He descends to a world, telepathically learns about its people, and recruits some to come with him. This repeats many times, and we see various aliens at different stages of development.

(This is a big deal! One of Stapleton's themes is that all intelligent life evolves through stages towards unity, peace, and wisdom- unless their racial obstacles defeat them and cast them back down the evolutionary ladder, which happens all the time. No Whig History here- Stapleton's a big believer in "Rise and Fall," both here and in LaFM.)

The book's title refers to God. The spirits' quest is to find the Star Maker, and try to understand why He made the universe. As he collects more travellers, they unite spiritually into a group mind and become more and more advanced themselves, even as the universe seems to grind down into failure.

The narrator goes to some lengths to stress that the final scene is incomplete; that we cannot possibly understand what he experienced, since (restored to his human form) he can't even clearly remember it himself. He's too small now. His final understanding of God is... problematic?

It's really neat to see that C.S. Lewis' Perelandra was written as a response to this novel! I can read Weston's monologue there and see exactly what he was talking about- God isn't necessarily good or loving or wise, He's just the being at the top of the spiritual food chain. That's pretty much Stapleton's takeaway, which is not meant as a criticism- as far as Stapleton's concerned, being at the top means that the Star Maker deserves our worship. Which Lewis rightly tore into as power-worship.

Like I said, there are basically no characters, plot, or dialogue. Hardly anything human. But there are amazing vistas, and a sense of scale that's hard to find anywhere else- Stapleton is excellent at evoking the size and age of the entire universe.

Swamp Thing Lives!

From Wired:

Green Sea Slug Is Part Animal, Part Plant

SEATTLE — It’s easy being green for a sea slug that has stolen enough genes to become the first animal shown to make chlorophyll like a plant.

Shaped like a leaf itself, the slug Elysia chlorotica already has a reputation for kidnapping the photosynthesizing organelles and some genes from algae. Now it turns out that the slug has acquired enough stolen goods to make an entire plant chemical-making pathway work inside an animal body, says Sidney K. Pierce of the University of South Florida in Tampa.

The slugs can manufacture the most common form of chlorophyll, the green pigment in plants that captures energy from sunlight, Pierce reported January 7 at the annual meeting of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology. Pierce used a radioactive tracer to show that the slugs were making the pigment, called chlorophyll a, themselves and not simply relying on chlorophyll reserves stolen from the algae the slugs dine on.

“This could be a fusion of a plant and an animal — that’s just cool,” said invertebrate zoologist John Zardus of The Citadel in Charleston, S.C.

Well, cool and sort of creepy.

The Long Way Home

I went hunting through the used bookstores the other day, and came out with Poul Anderson's 1958 novel The Long Way Home. It's about a group of explorer-astronauts who are trying out an experimental new spacedrive- by taking a trip several thousand light-years away.

Their experiments in the solar system seemed to indicate that the drive was instantaneous, so they're shocked and appalled when they get home and discover that 5000 years have passed. In retrospect, they realized that puzzling errors of measurement meant that the trip was only instantaneous for them.

You really have to take this with a grain of salt- it's the same kind of pulp-sf assumption that lets the Fantastic Four fly out into space solely on Reed Richard's smartness, rather than an organized mission plan with ground support from NASA. But if you can get past that, it's pretty good escapist fun.

The future, incidentally, is a stulified caste society with a computer overlord. Needless to say, Anderson's hero gets over his future shock and makes short work of everyone around him.

Are Short Stories Scientific?

I was at the bookstore today, in the SF/Fantasy section as usual, looking at the anthologies that are lined up between "New Books" and the A's. They were all science fiction.

As I thought about that, it occurred to me that almost all the sf/f short story anthologies I'd seen were science fiction rather than fantasy. Fantasy, on the other hand, seems to have all the super-long Jordan/Goodkind epics.

Why is that? Is it just a quirk of publishing history- i.e. if Jordan had been an SF writer, we'd have a lot of encyclopedia-length science fiction imitators? Or is there something in the vaguely-defined difference between the two that selects for story length?

Did I Know, Did I? No.

Yet another youtube link! This one is to a presentation called "Do You Know," full of statistics about the accelerating pace of things. It's pretty interesting.

But- perhaps it's a sign that I'm getting old- it does not inspire me with a sense of wonder so much as a sense of dread. A sense that "This cannot last."

"We are living in exponential times," it says: and that is true enough. But there are several exponential curves in human experience; none of them last forever, and most of them end in crashes. To cite the most obvious example, we're in the middle of an economic crash following what seemed like endless exponential growth.

It cites examples of the massive increase in information flow, which is undeniably impressive; but past a point, you have to wonder what is the point? We're already at the stage where information filtering is a big deal; an exponential information increase won't help that at all. It'll simply be wasted, for the most part.

Oh, well. Like I said, I'm probably just getting old. Or maybe it's the atmosphere of the times, which is so much more pessimistic than it was a few months ago.

The Monotone With a Million Eyes!

Here's the opening sequence to Roger Corman's epic The Beast With a Million Eyes. It's Roger Corman, really, which tells you everything you need to know.

But I love the matter-of-factness of it. "I feed on fear; live on human hatred," he intones, in the almost-cheerful tones of a school documentary film about the wonders of natural science.

The Disappointing Lexcorp Bailout

Lex Luthor's bailout application, here!

It starts off strong; regrettably, it doesn't stay that way. I wonder why not?

Hmm. The initial joke is the idea that Luthor is a standard corporate CEO. In that context his various anti-Superman plots are pretty funny to listen to, since they're so convoluted and, well, comic-bookish. The humor lies in Luthor's own deadpan lack of awareness; he doesn't seem to realize how absurd it all sounds.

But then the skit suddenly turns metatextual: "I'm Lex Luthor, that's what I do," which doesn't work at all. The shift of tone loses the thread of humor, especially since there doesn't seem to be any real joke involved.

It's a shame, as it starts out pretty strongly. But the ending joke is good!

The Exoplanet Catalog

I've followed with interest the discoveries of planets outside the solar system; but I had no idea that astronomers had discovered quite so many.

The Exoplanet Catalog is a helpful listing (complete with details and animations!) of all the planets so far discovered. And there are a lot.

I get a real geeky pleasure of the thought that, at last, there are enough planets that we need a guidebook to keep them straight.

Jeremiah 5

I've been meaning to do Bible excerpts since... well, since I started this blog, actually. Somehow I never got around to it. But better late than never, and Jeremiah is very fitting for our present circumstances.

All quotations are from the excellent Bible Gateway website.

----------------------------
Jeremiah 5: 26-31:

...For among My people are found wicked men;
They lie in wait as one who sets snares;
They set a trap;
They catch men.
As a cage is full of birds,
So their houses are full of deceit.
Therefore they have become great and grown rich.
They have grown fat, they are sleek;
Yes, they surpass the deeds of the wicked;
They do not plead the cause,
The cause of the fatherless;
Yet they prosper,
And the right of the needy they do not defend.
Shall I not punish them for these things?’ says the LORD.

‘ Shall I not avenge Myself on such a nation as this?’
“ An astonishing and horrible thing
Has been committed in the land:
The prophets prophesy falsely,
And the priests rule by their own power;
And My people love to have it so.
But what will you do in the end?

The Lost Temple of 9000 BC

From the Smithsonan Magazine:

Six miles from Urfa, an ancient city in southeastern Turkey, Klaus Schmidt has made one of the most startling archaeological discoveries of our time: massive carved stones about 11,000 years old, crafted and arranged by prehistoric people who had not yet developed metal tools or even pottery. The megaliths predate Stonehenge by some 6,000 years. The place is called Gobekli Tepe, and Schmidt, a German archaeologist who has been working here more than a decade, is convinced it's the site of the world's oldest temple.

This catches my imagination; it's deep, deep history. (Or rather, prehistory.) It was before metals, before agriculture, before any of the basic things we'd assume people used to support a major building project.


...The abundant remnants of wild game indicate that the people who lived here had not yet domesticated animals or farmed.

But, Peters and Schmidt say, Gobekli Tepe's builders were on the verge of a major change in how they lived, thanks to an environment that held the raw materials for farming. "They had wild sheep, wild grains that could be domesticated—and the people with the potential to do it," Schmidt says. In fact, research at other sites in the region has shown that within 1,000 years of Gobekli Tepe's construction, settlers had corralled sheep, cattle and pigs. And, at a prehistoric village just 20 miles away, geneticists found evidence of the world's oldest domesticated strains of wheat; radiocarbon dating indicates agriculture developed there around 10,500 years ago, or just five centuries after Gobekli Tepe's construction.

To Schmidt and others, these new findings suggest a novel theory of civilization. Scholars have long believed that only after people learned to farm and live in settled communities did they have the time, organization and resources to construct temples and support complicated social structures. But Schmidt argues it was the other way around: the extensive, coordinated effort to build the monoliths literally laid the groundwork for the development of complex societies.

Which is a startling thought.
But it makes sense in many ways; people sometimes have the grandiose idea first, and only later get around to solving the many practical problems that vision creates.

But:

What was so important to these early people that they gathered to build (and bury) the stone rings? The gulf that separates us from Gobekli Tepe's builders is almost unimaginable. Indeed, though I stood among the looming megaliths eager to take in their meaning, they didn't speak to me. They were utterly foreign, placed there by people who saw the world in a way I will never comprehend. There are no sources to explain what the symbols might mean. Schmidt agrees. "We're 6,000 years before the invention of writing here," he says.

So we don't really know, and probably never will. Which is part of the fascination of the find, oddly enough.

A Bad Day

You know what's a sign that you're having a bad day? When you pull your pants out of the laundry and your ipod falls out of the pocket.

(Grrrr!)


You know what's another sign that you're having a bad day? When you're in school for radio maintenance, and you set the radio on fire.

(Well, kind of. There was smoke. Lesson learned: it's a bad idea to set the card you're troubleshooting in a position where it can accidentally touch the radio's power supply.)

Florida-Bound!

Well, not exactly. I'm off the ship, but still formally stationed in Norfolk until the 10th. The ship left this morning, off to adventure and excitement on the high seas, while I slept late.

There's an odd feeling of disconnection. It's not just that I've left the people I've worked with for four years (though that's certainly part of it.) But I've had obligations of all kinds over the past few years, and none of them apply to me now. It's low-stress, I suppose, but also isolated and rather boring: I feel like I'm spinning my wheels.

Oh, well. Soon to Florida! (With a stopoff at my parents' to see my dog and my bouncy, train-loving nephew.) And soon I'll be muttering about the complications of radio tech manuals.

We Are The World (Or Its GDP)

Another weird map, which unfortunately is too large and lengthwise to be shown here. (But click and see!)


So, basically, the names of the states have been replaced by the names of countries with a roughly-similar Gross Domestic Product. Which gives us the bizarre view of an America made up of an entirely-different kind of states.

It's fun to look at, but it doesn't really tell us much as a map, for a couple of reasons. The most prominent states (aside from the one you live in, I guess) are going to be the geographically-largest ones; and California and Texas excepted, size doesn't equate to economic strength. Notice how the tiny northeastern states are crowded with developed-world nations, but the large-scale west has nations like Bulgaria.

Secondly, but closely-related: geographic size doesn't tell us anything about population, and population is much more of an economic indicator than landmass.


But, still. It's fun and interesting to gawk at; if only because the replacements give me geeky parallel-earth imaginings.

(Are there any other kind?)

The Future, Systematically Presented

A Comprehensive Map of All Possible Human Futures.

Yikes! But it does have a sort of rough-hewn, Darwinian get-right-to-the-point kind of plausibility about it.

Whoops, New Year!

I haven't exactly been hibernating (ah, that would have been nice...) It's just been extremely busy as I prepare my move to sunny Florida.

But hopefully I'll be posting again, now that I'm home. I've got a couple of things saved up that I'd meant to blog about.

Bolt

I saw it this weekend. It was funny and clever, and well-done in the Pixar style. (Sample clip here.)

Bleah. My head cold has left me too fuzzy to say anything substantial. More later!

HR8799?

From cnn.com:

Astronomers capture first images of new planets

The first-ever pictures of planets outside our solar system were released today in two studies.

Using the latest techniques in space technology, astronomers at NASA and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory used direct-imaging techniques to capture pictures of four newly discovered planets orbiting stars outside our solar system.

"After all these years, it's amazing to have a picture showing not one but three planets," said physicist Bruce Macintosh of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, California.

"The discovery of the HR 8799 system is a crucial step on the road to the ultimate detection of another Earth," he said.

None of the planets is remotely habitable, scientists said.

Both sets of research findings were published Thursday in Science Express, a journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

A team of American and British astronomers and physicists, using the Gemini North and Keck telescopes on the Mauna Kea mountaintop in Hawaii, observed host star HR8799 to find three of the new planets.

Scientists estimate that HR8799, roughly 1.5 times the size of the sun, is 130 light years from Earth in the constellation of Pegasus. The individual planets in this planetary family are estimated to be seven to 10 times the mass of Jupiter.

Astronomers say the star is too faint to detect with the human eye, but observers could probably see it through binoculars or small telescopes.

"This discovery is the first time we have directly imaged a family of planets around a normal star outside of our solar system," said Christian Marois, the lead astronomer in the Lawrence Livermore lab study.

It continues to amaze me that we can detect extrasolar planets now. Granted, they're humongous superjovian planets, but still. Planets! It gives me a continuing geeky thrill.

I just wish we had a better name for the star- or, rather, any real name at all. HR8799? That isn't a star, that's a bill before Congress.