Jump cut

Larry stuffed his face cheeks like a bulging squirrel. It tickled him to skip through the dark rain-slicked streets of Brussels, Belgium the same way as the long-toothed rodentry gnawing nuts in the treetops. This vacation was the last of his earnings from the landscaping job he'd had. Since the fall of communism Larry must have sodded, trimmed and mowed 453 golf courses across northern Rhode Island. His father was a bartender, his mother a dancer. In 1968 Larry took his first trip to the zoo and thereafter dealt by aping any animal he saw. He fell short of storing anything for the winter: stackable cans of tin, rice sacks, comedy clips, potable water, flint, steel, pot, lube. Nothing that would get him through it. But while the animals were still in the wild he'd have his way, even if all in the city were pigeons. A stroll along the canal earlier had in fact yielded a hunch-shouldered falling-forward scurry of the river rat. He got excited. Chicks liked it when you're happy. The next leggy Walloon that passed didn't buy it, not with his two front teeth jutting over his lower lip. Discouraged Larry pulled his pieds into the corner cafe, where he failed also to catch the eye of the barrista. A sparrow poked around his table, hoping for scraps. Not the first time an animal aped him. He dabbed his wet brow. Tomorrow I'll take the train to the lowlands, he announced. Find me some weird Eurobeast and make it mine.

Murphy

This novel from Nobel laureate (1969) Samuel Beckett was his last in English before he switched to writing exclusively in French and letting, for the most part, others translate his new works back into his native tongue. This extended to his theatrical works. His most famous, Waiting for Godot, was written first in French, and Beckett said that he enjoyed writing in the L2 (this being linguist for second language) because it freed him from stylistic considerations. Murphy is also the last of Beckett's novels to have a discernable plot before his oblique experimental style took over, something that also occurred in his playwriting. Murphy's opening paragraph:

The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new. Murphy sat out of it, as though he were free, in a mew in West Brompton. Here for what might have been six months he had eaten, drunk, slept, and put his clothes on and off, in a medium-sized cage of north-western aspect commanding an unbroken view of medium-sized cages of south-eastern aspect. Soon he would have to make other arrangements, for the mew had been condemned. Soon he would have to buckle to and start eating, drinking, sleeping, and putting his clothes on and off, in quite alien surroundings.

And this from Chapter 4, where a civic guard (C.G.) breaks up what he thinks is a fight between a teacher, Neary, and his old pupil, Wylie:

They drew up behind the statue. A crowd gathered behind them. The C.G. leaned forward and scrutinised the pillar and draperies.
"Not a feather out of her," said Wylie. "No blood, no brains, nothing."
The C.G. straightened up and let go Wylie's arm.
"Move on," he said to the crowd, "before yer moved on."
The crowd obeyed, with the single diastolesystole which is all the law requires. Feeling amply repaid by this superb symbol for the trouble and risk he had taken in issuing an order, the C.G. inflected his attention to Wylie and said more kindly:
"Take my advice, mister----" He stopped. To devise words of advice was going to tax his ability to the utmost. When would he learn not to plunge into the labyrinths of an opinion when he had not the slightest idea of how he was to emerge? And before a hostile audience! His embarrassment was if possible increased by the expression of strained attention on Wylie's face, clamped there by the promise of advice.
"Yes, sergeant," said Wylie, and held his breath.
"Run him back to Stillorgan," said the C.G. Done it!

The forecast calls for poisonous radiation

Space is a vacuum where no one can hear you scream as you skiel a totally wicked curl on the solar wind. Where you can dress in a solar flare for the elegant. Where you must batten down the hatches along with the sharp silverware during a geomagnetic storm. Where today the 19th there were 836 reasons for you to duck and cover the figurines on your knickknack shelf from potentially hazardous asteroids. Whoa doggie! Space weather is far out.

A million tons of Venus

In an article in the Sydney Morning Herald, a Nobel winning chemist has stated that injecting sulfur into the stratosphere will counteract the global warming effects of greenhouse gases. Some environmentalists are concerned this would create more acid rain.

I don't know if the theory has reason but it is good science is coming up with possible solutions.

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A Drink of Water

A piece on memory from Field Work by Seamus Heaney

She came every morning to draw water
Like an old bat staggering up the field:
The pump's whooping cough, the bucket's clatter
And slow diminuendo as it filled,
Announced her. I recall
Her grey apron, the pocked white enamel
Of the brimming bucket, and the treble
Creak of her voice like the pump's handle.
Nights when a full moon lifted past her gable
It fell back through her window and would lie
Into the water set out on the table.
Where I have dipped to drink again, to be
Faithful to the admonishment on her cup,
Remember the Giver fading off the lip.

Martian water

Now available by the gallon or for delivery to home and the office. Scientists have photographic evidence of water on the ultimate spring break destination, planet Mars. What better way to wow your fellow drunken youngsters than by sporting the season's hot collectible, wet rocks from another planet! That cute bartender will ask for more than your order when she sees you with one of these. Accessorize with your gravity bong for an interstellar theme night as you blather in unsourced poetic assertions about our galactic tapestry! Hurry online or to a mall kiosk near you.

Estuary Ending

The rest of the week passed uneventfully. I spent my days with Pumala and his family. Ours was a reciprocal relationship based on selfish needs. For myself I enjoyed the status of Pumala's company in the village. For Pumala he had the attention of an ostensible academic and a westerner.

In accepting me, feeding me, and housing me, Pumala's family made me think there is no bond like the one created when living so closely off the land.

Pumala's daughter became, as I knew she would, an unrequited love. Is it too strong a word, love, for a woman I spoke to only indirectly? I once suggested it might help her English to take over for Malu as my translator. Her parents never hinted on her hand in marriage, a chance for America, an opportunity to send money home.

I lost the need to keep up the pretense of an academic. I had little desire to go beyond the village but one day I agreed to follow Malu to a site. Malu fled Cambodia and it's because he's not from a participating village that he is an outsider here. The marriage was allowed to an outsider. His wife is his link to this place but he has no role in its society.

We go to a digging site. The earth is soft. The day is hot. I'm out of water from the hike. Malu knows a clear spring. He leaves and is gone a long time. I begin to suffer exhaustion before he returns. It seems my body must work harder to stand straight against the pull of gravity. He followed the spring to the source from underground and it's a good thing bc there was a dead animal in it. Then he had to hike to another one. Here is the canteen. I take it and pour some out in my hand to check its cleanliness, then I splash my face. I drink. I have found nothing. He suggests I can try another support stone on the mostly crumbled and lost wall. I find something nearly right away. The ground was undisturbed there, but did Malu know that was the correct spot from the start while I exhausted myself?

I don't know where Malu is going to take this, but it's at least enough to go on for now.

At the festival that night after the exhaustion I meet all of Pumala's ten children. Pumala has a father in law who makes no secret of his intentions toward his brother's wife.

This is Pumala's little world. He boasts of sex with his wife and sometimes with the women of his village. This has upset the men of his village in the past bc their brothers are now married to girls of his village, which accounts for giving Pumala a wide berth, somewhat, bc he is also respected. He's respected bc the elders respect him as an athletic champion. He brings prestige with his victories. Pumala would like to gain some western recognition. He enjoys sharing his skill with me as my instructor as much as he enjoys sharing it with an audience as a performer. He promotes his sport which in turn promotes himself as the best practitioner. In my world he is trying to better me personally. Pumala is a hedonist and sensualist who wrings every last uncouth drop out of life.

At Malu's prompting, Pumala gives me lecture on skill of his sport at festival. I would rather be talking to his beautiful daughter, a template of beautiful youth. Malu knows, Pumala is oblivious.

Pumala and his wife grew up in different villages and speak different languages. They learned some of each others' and made up their own words for things they both understood. The way Pumala talks to his wife is to say do I have to hit you? His wife says, I hope not with a smile.

The girl, the daughter, wants to marry a boy from the same village as her dad bc he will speak English and be more worldly. Ignoring the value of tradition to them, this gives me hope. She speaks four languages: mother's, father's, regional lingua franca, and english.

The adventure comes in throwing oneself off whichever burning building one must escape from. The landing is an ending. My adventure was the journey that brought me to Borneo. In the furthest reaches of humanity there was selfishness, agenda. It limited my experience. Experience is gained through people, and I've preferred their voice on paper. I am in Kuala Lampur awaiting my lift to the airport.

Henderson

Call this one Henderson, the Rain King, or How Saul Bellow Made Me Chuck Another One. Bellow (1915-2005) was a Nobel (1976) winning author whom many thought the finest American novelist in the post-Hemingway/Faulkner period. Myself I always had problems with books and I could never seem to get into the stories. I tried but didn't finish Augie March and Herzog. I did finish Seize the Day, but it was only around 100 pages and didn't do a thing for me. But this past week pressed for something to keep my mind occupied I cracked open Henderson, the Rain King and was instantly sucked in.

By the fifth chapter my heart was sinking. Bellow, it seems, already tackled the themes, characters, and situation I was attempting in my on-hold story Estuary, and Bellow wrote it 100 times better than I could. He set up the same deal: a listless American travels to a far off land (in this case, Africa) in search of something he can't define. He encounters natives, has adventures, gains wisdom, and returns a changed man. But Bellow's achievement is to present a protagonist who is entirely self-aware of his faults and all, and yet who continues to let his passions fly even when he knows in the back of his brain that he'll only get into more trouble. Bellow's descriptions of his setting destroy what I could do, as do his characterizations of the natives. See for yourself:

"To have found a man like Romilayu, who sensed what I was looking for, was a great piece of luck. He was in his late thirties, he told me, but looked much older because of premature wrinkles. His skin did not fit tightly. This happens to many black men of certain breeds and they say it has something to do with the distribution of the fat on the body. [note what these asides tell us about the protagonist -ds] He had a bush of dusty hair which he tried sometimes, but vainly, to smooth flat. It was unbrushable and spread out at the sides of his head like a dwarf pine. Old tribal scars were cut into his cheeks and his ears had been mutilated to look like hackles so that the points stuck into his hair. His nose was fine-looking and Abyssinian, not flat. The scars and mutilations showed that he had been born a pagan, but somewhere along the way he had been converted, and now he said his prayers every evening..."

and

"The rainy season had been very short; the streams were all dry and the bushes would burn if you touched a match to them. At night I would start a fire with my lighter, which was the type in common use in Austria with a long trailing wick. By the dozen they come to about fourteen cents apiece; you can't beat that for a bargain. Well, we were now on a plateau which Romilayu called the Hinchagara--this territory has never been well mapped. As we marched over that hot and (it felt so to me) slightly concave plateau, a kind of olive-colored heat mist, like smoke, formed under the trees, which were short and brittle, like aloes or junipers (but then I'm no botanist) and Romilayu, who came behind me through the strangeness of his shadow, made me think of a long wooden baker's shovel darting into the oven. The place was certainly at baking heat."

There's no sense in finishing Estuary the way I'd intended. If I want to tell that story, I need a different way in or a new point of view or use a new prose style.. something. Tomorrow I'll post a collapsed ending for Estuary to put that baby to bed.

Lunachill

NASA has unveiled plans to put a lunar outpost on the moon in the next twenty years. This is the kind of shiot that would make the Planetary Society throwdown like Ibiza in the 90s, except that a manned mission to Mars is their druthers. Ah well, this sprightly bunch of cadet corps will take it.

"NASA officials for the first time provided details of their plans for returning to the Moon, as specified in the Vision for Space Exploration. The emerging consensus among both engineers and scientists, they reported, points to the establishment of a permanent outpost at one of the lunar poles around the year 2024.

The Planetary Society, which had long advocated the construction of a lunar outpost as a "way station" on the road to Mars, welcomed the NASA proposals. Nevertheless, Planetary Society Executive Director Louis Friedman expressed concern that too strong an emphasis on lunar settlement and exploration would divert NASA from the ultimate goal – a human mission to Mars and beyond."

Moonfluence

The Moon has played more than a bit part on the evolution of life on Earth. The Moon formed from the debris of a massive impact of an asteroid the size of a small planet against the Earth. Initially the Earth spun many times faster than it does now, making for a chaotic and inhospitable climate. The Moon, which used to be much closer than it is today (and it's currently leaving us at the rate of one meter each century), slowed the Earth's rotation, which slowed and stabilized its weather.

The Moon's pull on the tides of the ocean at one time caused enormous waves the size of mountains to crash against the land's rocky surface and then pull back. Sediment full of minerals was pulled into the oceans, forming the primordial soup. All of that unthinkable churning, mixing, and crashing of the ocean water wrought molecular change. Mineral-rich water, churned up, created new molecules that evolved into life.

The Earth's tilted axis causes our seasons, but without the Moon to stabilize that rotation the Earth would rock to and fro. Such climatary chaos would destroy life as we know it. It's fascinating how the effects of the formation of a moon just the right size made for the right conditions to birth humanity. It's also fascinating how when sliced it is like a delicious Roquefort.

Cat's Cradle

My favorite writer is the Midwest's own Kurt Vonnegut, born in 1922 in Indianapolis and reigning over Manhattan today. His books are funny, heartbreaking, and philosophical, they address the whole of the human soul, and a half dozen of them are to my mind perfect.

He has a post-Hemingway prose style but his voice is uniquely his own, one of the few writers you can read a random paragraph of and instantly identify. No one chooses words like the mighty KV. This from his 1963 classic (title above), and the chapter Secret Agent X-9:

Dr. Breed made an appointment with me for early the next morning. He would pick me up at my hotel on his way to work, he said, thus simplifying my entry into the heavily-guarded Research Labratory.

So I had a night to kill in Ilium. I was already in the beginning and end of night life in Ilium, the Del Prado Hotel. Its bar, the Cape Cod Room, was a hangout for whores.

As it happened--"as it was meant to happen," Bokonon would say--the whore next to me at the bar and the bartender serving me had both gone to high school with Franklin Hoenikker, the bug tormentor, the middle child, the missing son.

The whore, who said her name was Sandra, offered me delights unobtainable outside of Place Pigalle and Port Said. I said I wasn't interested, and she was bright enough to say that she wasn't really interested either. As things turned out, we had both overestimated our apathies, but not by much.

Before we took the measure of each other's passions, however, we talked about Frank Hoenikker, and we talked about the old man, and we talked a little about Asa Breed, and we talked about the General Forge and Foundry Company, and we talked about the Pope and birth control, about Hitler and the Jews...

The bartender was very nice to Sandra. He liked her. He respected her. He told me that Sandra had been chairman of the Class Colors Committee at Ilium High. Every class, he explained, got to pick distinctive colors for itself in its junior year, and then it got to wear those colors with pride.

"What colors did you pick?" I asked.

"Orange and black."

"Those are good colors."

"I thought so."

Life from the Kuiper belt

Scientists have analyzed a well-preserved meterorite that contains the building blocks of life. This evidence supports the theory that meteor strikes on Earth's surface millions of years ago led to.. us. From this article in Scientific American:

The ratios of the nitrogen and hydrogen isotopes in the hollow globules, measured with a spectrometer, indicate the "organics are completely indigenous to the meteorite" and did not come from Earth contamination, according to team member Michael Zolensky.

The isotope composition also provides evidence that the globules formed at near-absolute zero. This type of "exotic environment," team member Scott Messenger says, never existed in the region of the solar system where Earth formed or near the asteroid belt; these cold temperatures, however, do persist in its outer reaches, the so-called Kuiper belt, and beyond. The globules' rare isotope composition and the presence of particles from other stars that managed to survive the chaotic environment of the early solar system indicate the organic matter likely originated in the cold molecular cloud that gave birth to the planets.