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Friday, May 31, 2019

A Sense of Doubt blog post #1564 - True Journey is Return - Ursula K LeGuin

A Sense of Doubt blog post #1564 - True Journey is Return - Ursula K LeGuin

Last day of May calls for a share.

I have been thinking a lot about Ursula K LeGuin lately. I need to reread some -- Earthsea and Left Hand of Darkness -- and read some of her work that I never got to before she died -- The Dispossessed.

But reflect on those words.

To be whole is to be part. Unity of self connects to the universe and everything, of which we are all a part but not the whole.

True voyage is return - our life journey returns us to the original source. It's the hero's journey. APOTHEOSIS.

Two shares. Enjoy.

https://vandanasingh.wordpress.com/2018/01/26/true-journey-is-return-a-tribute-to-ursula-k-le-guin/

http://rrhorton.blogspot.com/2018/01/true-journey-is-return-ursula-k-le-guin.html


from -

https://vandanasingh.wordpress.com/2018/01/26/true-journey-is-return-a-tribute-to-ursula-k-le-guin/

True Journey is Return: A Tribute to Ursula K. Le Guin



It is difficult to put into words what I am feeling at this moment, at the death of a great writer and a great human being.  That Ursula K. Le Guin happened to have taken an interest in me and my work is part of why my grief is personal, but not entirely.  She was a generous human being and a kind mentor who took interest in the works of multiple authors, so my story of our association is, I am sure, not unique, except, perhaps, in the particularities of the interaction.  We met three times, (once for six whole days during a writing retreat), and we corresponded about a couple of times a year on average.  But in my life she had a disproportionate effect, and it is safe to say that I would not be the writer or the person I am without the deep and abiding influence of who she was and what she wrote.
So what follows is an account made somewhat incoherent by the aftershocks of grief, for which I apologize in advance.

In the great six-book saga of Earthsea, which is to modern fantasy what, perhaps, the Mahabharata is to epic literature, there are many gifts for the reader.  One of them is the landscape – so beautifully detailed in words and maps that it lives as vividly in my imagination as the great epics I first heard as a child. Another is that most of the characters in the books are brown – not in any overt way, but because it is, well, normal in that world.  That representation matters can hardly be overstated – I am thinking of Nichelle Nichols, Lieutenant Uhura of Star Trek, and how she inspired generations of African Americans to take up science, and/or the pen.  But unlike Star Trek, Le Guin went beyond tokenism to present genuinely different perspectives arising from different cultural moorings.  Her upbringing as the daughter of one of America’s most famous anthropologists, Alfred Kroeber (an experience she recounts in fascinating detail in her essay collections), enabled her to be aware of the multiple ways different social groups structure themselves and their worlds.  Eventually she was instrumental in bringing down the walls around the almost exclusively male, boys-with-toys shoot-em-up club that was golden age science fiction.

I didn’t discover her through the Earthsea series, however.  I came to her work late, in my early thirties.  I had always loved SF, having devoured, by the age of ten or eleven, Asimov, Clarke, a number of Hindi tall tales and some truly awful Tom Swift novels.  Later, there was Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, which showed me that science fiction could be literature.  But in my late teens I abandoned the genre for reasons that remained unclear to me for years.

My brother had been insisting for some years that I read a book called The Dispossessed  by a writer called Ursula K. Le Guin.  When I finally picked it up, I was a mother in my early thirties, living near Portland, Oregon, trying my hand for the first time at writing with a view to publication.  I had always told stories, thanks to the vociferous demands of my younger sister when she was little, a skill I had already started practicing for my daughter.  Science fiction seemed a natural fit for someone with a physics Ph.D., so I had returned to the genre, although with some trepidation.  When I closed The Dispossessed with what must have been shaking fingers, a new universe lay open before me, and I was overcome by feelings I could not articulate.  Soon after, I read the first three books of the Earthsea series.  It gradually became clear to me that what I was feeling was a homecoming – that science fiction was my country too.  That the futures, trajectories and philosophies imagined in the books of Asimov, for example, were not the only choices at hand.  The possibilities were endless – not merely in terms of external markers like skin color, but in alternate ways of being, social relationships, worldviews.  Here was the true revolutionary potential of imaginative fiction.

I was born in a free India, but the country was only 15 years free when I was born.  I had the benefit of being raised in a family with an open intellectual tradition; I had relatives who had been freedom fighters, and my grandparents, parents, aunts and uncles encouraged us to ask questions and seek learning.  I had grown up reading great Hindi writers like Premchand, who questioned social norms like caste and class.  Later, in my teens I was part of an environmental justice action group in India that helped me see first-hand how the lives of the rural poor were intimately connected to the environment, and to state and social violence.  In this context we were able to question the dominant paradigm of development.  But I first became conscious of the need to decolonize that last frontier – the mind – while journeying through the worlds of Ursula Le Guin’s imagination.

I tell this story because I want to emphasize that Le Guin, by presenting worldviews, and indeed worlds, as constructs, provincialized the default Western traditions as merely one of many possibilities.  Other writers had been dreaming up other planets and gadgets and gizmos since the birth of SF.  But the heroes were for the most part, white and male, and they thought in ways that reflected the birth culture of their writers. Westerns in space.  The language and plot lines of colonization.  Even writers sympathetic to the fate of the colonized – I’m thinking of Ray Bradbury’s beautiful Martian Chronicles, a meditation on colonization – rendered their alien wives as one-dimensional servers of dinner and emotional support.  What Le Guin did was to take down the walls around the imagination, and to set us all free.  To shift the paradigms, the conceptual constructs by which we make sense of the world, is no small thing.

Soon after reading Le Guin, I had a chance to meet her at a writers’ conference in Portland.  There was a mini writers’ workshop, conducted by her, Molly Gloss and Tony Wolk. She turned out to be a small, sprightly woman with an intensely intelligent, yet kindly gaze, and a rapier-sharp wit.  Waving away our fannish adulations, she insisted we call her Ursula. After the workshop she encouraged me to write to her, and to apply to a writers’ retreat, Flight of the Mind, in the Oregon forest.  She thought a writers’ critique group would help me, and Molly said she would introduce me to a friend of hers.  So began my first writers’ group, and my journey as a writer.

I did go to Flight of the Mind in 1999, after we had moved away from Oregon.  Six days with some sixty women, in the middle of the great temperate rainforests of Oregon was an unforgettable experience.  I was one of twelve who had signed up with Ursula – we would walk across a bridge over the river to Ursula’s cottage, sit on the floor in a circle, and talk, and do writing.  Gradually our awe at being in her presence gave way to ease.  There was a lot of laughter.  We wrote, critiqued, went for walks through the woods, and ate vast quantities of food.  My memories of the time are filled with the sound of the river (a constant backdrop to our conversations) and an unforgettable trek through the woods with Ursula.  The forests of Oregon are magical indeed – we discovered an enormous tree stump in the shape of a dragon during our wanderings.  Ursula was our guide to this world – she knew the plants and the birds, and the huge, moss-covered trees.

Languishing in a suburban desert (literally and metaphorically) in Texas some years later, I had collected a few rejections, which, however personal and nicely worded, were still rejections.  I was in a difficult personal situation, had been exiled from academia for almost a decade, and my family was thousands of miles away in India; my only joys were my daughter and writing.  Perhaps it was time to give up writing for the world, and simply scribble for myself.  In the midst of this crisis I gathered up my courage and wrote to Ursula.  We had already exchanged a few letters by this point.  I mentioned that I didn’t think I had it in me to be a writer – you know, the kind who writes for everyone, not just herself.  Ursula asked me to send her a sample of my latest.  So I did.

It was her crucial encouragement at this low point in my life that led to my first short story publication, followed by a children’s book that came out first in India and then the US (for which Ursula wrote a blurb) and ultimately a steady trickle of science fiction and fantasy short stories.  Every once in a while Ursula would ask to read my latest publication, and send back comments and congratulations.  For a great doyen of the field to take notice of an obscure Indian writer-wannabe in the vast sea of America was no small thing for the writer in question.  Her loyalty to her craft was such that any praise given was praise earned, and her advice was always sound and to the point.  I learned from her, for example, the importance of reading one’s work aloud, and how that enables one to become sensitive to the sound of language, to the rhythm and flow of sentences.  Her fine book on the tools of writing, Steering the Craft, is one I still recommend to new writers.

Over the years my correspondence with Ursula shifted from paper to emails,  Our exchanges, though infrequent, were always interesting.  We talked about writing, but also about our mutual interest in non-human others.  We talked at length about climate change (my academic work having moved to that area), the significance of the term Anthropocene (she had been invited to a conference on the subject by Donna Haraway), the meaning of happiness.  We discussed the tendency of modern humans to succumb to the techno-fix, even for complex issues like climate change.  I think it was clearer to her than to most people that  technology by itself can never solve anything (it is more likely to create new problems) if the underlying paradigm remains unchanged.  But also, modern technology can be a distraction and an addiction; that we have a lot to learn from indigenous peoples, and from other species, is apparent in her work, from essays to fiction.  Probably one of her most underrated novellas is one called A Man of the People in the collection Four Ways to Forgiveness.  Set on the world of Hain, which has the longest history and the greatest technological sophistication of any world in the galaxy of her imagination, it brings to life a pueblo culture that one might call low-tech despite the presence and availability of high-tech.  To me this illustrates the possibility of technology arising from and serving the needs and values of the culture, rather than the other way around. We are so familiar with modern technology as the instrument of power, changing and arranging our lives without our participation and consent, that we can’t imagine what it would be like to not live this way. I think Ursula saw earlier than others the kinds of dangers that behemoths like Amazon and Google pose to the world – the arrival of the corpocracy and the undermining of democracy and the artistic imagination.  Her fiery speech at the National Book Awards ceremony in 2014 is testimony to that.  They must still be beating out the flames from the walls.  “We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.”
As Timmi DuChamp notes in her tribute, Ursula Le Guin possessed a quality that places her among the greatest of writers and seers – a moral imagination.

I got to see Ursula for the third and last time in January 2014.  I had gone up to Portland for an academic conference, and we had lunch, Molly and Ursula and I, at a very nice restaurant.  We talked about everything in the universe and more.  Later, we took pictures with my camera, but there was something wrong with it, so only one of the pictures materialized, a lovely one of Ursula and Molly.  I remember us standing at the edge of the street in Portland; there was snow in the cracks on the sidewalk, a row of cars parallel-parked, and the bare-armed trees lining the narrow road.  We were laughing in the afternoon light, saying goodbye, and the snow-topped visage of Mt. Hood was somewhere in the sky, although I can’t remember if it was visible from that particular street at that moment.
Molly_Ursula_Jan2014

When, in 2015, the Science Fiction Research Association invited me to be one of their three keynote speakers, I chose to speak about the relevance of one of Ursula’s most famous short stories “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas.”  I had a certain interpretation of it in the light of what I’d learned about climate change and the history of science, and I was nervous about revealing half-baked ideas before a bunch of literary scholars.  I also wanted to end my talk with a wolf howl. So I emailed Ursula and aired my thoughts, which she validated and complicated for me.  “Howl if you feel like it!” she wrote.  She told me she had hooted like Great Horned Owls, in the Library of Congress.  So, of course, I did.

The last time I heard from Ursula, last year, she hadn’t been very well; she said that she would not always be able to respond to my emails, but they were still welcome.  During the year I sent a couple of missives.  Then,  on January 23, 2018, I heard the news of her passing the previous day.
In the Earthsea series, there are two great ruminations on death.  The Farthest Shore is the first one, and the last book, The Other Wind is the second.  In the Farthest Shore, Cob, an old mage who fears death, has made himself immortal, but only at the cost of life itself and the balance of the world.  The hero Ged makes a great journey across the seas and islands of Earthsea, seeking the place from which to restore the balance.  Eventually he and his companion find themselves in land of death – ‘the dry land,’ separated from the place of the living by a stone wall, where the stars never move and lovers pass each other like strangers in the streets. Here they find Cob, who declares that his body will not decay and die. Ged says to him: “A living body suffers pain, Cob; a living body grows old; it dies.  Death is the price we pay for our life and for all life…. You sold the green earth and the sun and stars to save yourself.”

The struggle that ensues is not the stuff of sword-and-sorcery, but a struggle to overcome fear, to be complete in the world, to be free.  By freeing Cob, at great cost to himself, Ged restores the balance of the world.

To me this is one of the finest illustrations of the power and relevance of imaginative literature.  Consider our present world – the madness of the potentates, the corporate coup d’etat of nations worldwide, the taking apart of the planetary systems that sustain life on Earth.  I wonder if behind all the machinations of the super-rich and the escapes and addictions and imperatives of modern industrial civilization – if behind all these phenomena lies a pathological fear of death, and of suffering.  Death and suffering are fearsome indeed, but would you sell the green earth and the sun and the stars to be free of them?

In the last book of Earthsea, Le Guin returns to the land of death to unbuild the last wall.  By the end of the book, the dead, condemned for so long to walk in a pale imitation of life endlessly through the streets of the dry land, are set free. They are free to be sunlight and leaves and water, to return to the great cycle, the dance of the cosmos.

I’m turning the pages of The Other Wind, trying to find the quote I am remembering, because my words fall short of what I want to say.  In Tehanu’s words, then, near the end of the book –
“… when I die, I can breathe back the breath that made me live.  I can give back to the world all that I didn’t do.  All that I might have been and couldn’t do… to the lives that haven’t been lived yet.  That will be my gift to the world that gave me the life I did live, the love I loved, the breath I breathed.”
Thank you, Ursula Aunty (as you used to sign your emails to me) for your gift to the world and to me.  I will look for you in the sunlight and the wind, and in the faces of people at the next great uprising. See you on the Overfell, in Earthsea.

Running List of Links to Remembrances : 
Only in Silence
I may have read everything Le Guin ever published. I certainly tried to. It seems greedy of me, given what a vast and rich compendium of work she gave us, to be bitter that there won’t be any more.  And yet, here I am, greedy and bitter and bereft.

As a parent, there’s a little voice in the back of my head, any time I’m spending time with my children. The voice says, “You don’t know what’s going to stick, what little things you say or do, that will end up what they remember. Your words and actions constantly act to affect and shape their personality. Be aware.” I first encountered Le Guin’s work at a formative age, then revisited it over and over again. Ursula didn’t necessarily have the answers, but she kept asking, and kept me asking, all the right questions, all the hard questions.  She shaped me as a person, as deeply as my own parents did.

The best tribute I can give Le Guin, as a writer, is to honor her teaching and be conscious of what messages I’m putting out into the world.  Am I asking the hard questions?  Are there hard questions I’m avoiding?

We sing rounds at the end of WisCon, after the SignOut that officially ends the con, just standing in a circle in the hallway on the second floor. We do it because we can’t bear for the Con to be over, because we are so sad to go. It’s become a tradition these last few years, singing ourselves out. People come and join us, both friends and strangers; people wander off again to collect suitcases and hugs.

We end with a round written by Benjamin Newman, set to words by Ursula. Singing helps the sadness, a little.

“Only in silence the word,
Only in dark the light,
Only in dying life:
Bright the hawk’s flight
On the empty sky.”
—“The Creation of Éa,” Ursula K. Le Guin

If you’re doing it as a round, the second voice comes in on ‘dark’.
Mary Anne Mohanraj is the author of The Stars Change (among other titles), the founder of Strange Horizons, and director of the Speculative Literature Foundation.
  • A tribute from Anil Menon that he posted in an unlinkable elsewhere, reproduced with permission:
One of the things that happened when I began to do writerly things is that I also began to meet those writers whose work had inspired me and helped shape my writing. At first, that was one of the best things about taking writing seriously.

But these encounters often turned out to be under-whelming, if not downright depressing. Then I’d remind myself that it’s always a bad idea to confuse a writer’s work with the writer. Actually, it is a terrible idea. Nevertheless, the temptation to do so is almost impossible to avoid. Sometimes such disappointments lead to a cynicism about art and artists. Other times it leads, as in my case, to a reluctance in meeting the people who created the work one loves.

So when I got the chance to spend some time with Ursula K. Le Guin (at the 2004 Worldcon, I think), I was really hesitant. I appreciated her kindness, of course. But I discovered it was more than kindness. As her readers will agree I think, Le Guin’s work radiates compassion. A compassion for the world as it is, but always informed by how it could be. But it didn’t stop there. By some quiet miracle, this writer could be confused with her work. In her presence, in conversing with her, it was possible to suspend the assumption that being and making were two different things. Ursula K. Le Guin embodied her work. Her work embodied her.

I suspect there was a lot more to Ursula K. Le Guin than this saintly halo I’ve thrust on her head. But I met her a few other times and though my understanding got more nuanced, I never saw any reason to fundamentally revise the original impression.

In any case, I don’t think there’s no real reason to mourn her passing. A cause for grief, yes. She’s dead, after all. But a reason to grieve? No. When we reach for her work, it is there we, her inheritors and beneficiaries, will always find her.
  • A tribute from Nisi Shawl here  – “But I keep turning to Ursula’s earlier, lesser-known words for comfort as I let go of my denial that this hero could die. They appear in her 2000 novel “The Telling,” in a passage where the heroine journeys to a landscape whose main feature is Mount Silong, a mountain so large that no one person alone can comprehend it:
     “As she and the barrow man stood gazing, others stopped to help them gaze. That was the impression Sutty got. They all knew what Silong looked like and therefore could help her see it.”
    How should we remember Ursula Kroeber Le Guin? Together.”



http://rrhorton.blogspot.com/2018/01/true-journey-is-return-ursula-k-le-guin.html

Tuesday, January 23, 2018

True Journey is Return: Ursula K. Le Guin (1929-2018)

True Journey is Return: Ursula K. Le Guin (1929-2018)

Like all of us, I think, I’m stunned and saddened to hear of Ursula Le Guin’s death. She was one of the greatest writers in the world. A writer central to my reading from my teens.

I say stunned and the news is stunning, but we must remember that Ursula Le Guin was 88, and had a remarkably full life, active in the mind until the end. (It does appear she had been in failing health for some months.) So I hope this can be seen as more a celebration of a great life – from the only point of view I can take myself, that of a lover of her writing.

I can still easily call up in my mind the cover of The Dispossessed, in front of me on the cafeteria table at Naperville Central High School some time in 1975, as I read it during lunch hour. Malafrena was a gift from a friend – I read it eagerly, and loved it – it’s a young person’s book, I think, an ardent book – I understand it was her earliest written novel to see publication, and that shows, but it is still one of my favorites. And her last novel, Lavinia, from 2008, is also one of my favorites, a beautifully written and moving and involving story of the wife of Aeneas. I read the Earthsea books in high school as well, and wrote a term paper on them, despite my teacher’s skepticism about Fantasy. Her prose was truly elegant, truly lovely. Her speculation was rigorous and honest and fruitful in itself. Even from the earliest she was striking – the story “Semley’s Necklace” (the opening segment of Rocannon's World, her first published novel) is heartbreaking and powerful. And her first story in an SF magazine, “April in Paris”, is sweet and lovely and romantic … I don’t know how it was received at the time but to me it must have seemed an announcement: “This is special. This is a Writer.”

So many of her short stories are special to me … “Winter’s King”, “Nine Lives”, “The Stars Below”, “Another Story”, “Imaginary Countries”, the Yeowe/Werel stories, all the fables of Changing Planes. Some 20 years ago an online discussion group asked what was the greatest single author story collection in SF (not counting Collected Stories books or Best Of books), and my choice was then, and remains now, without question, The Wind's Twelve Quarters.

I never met Le Guin. I reprinted one of her stories, “Elementals”, in the 2013 edition of my Best of the Year book. And I feel particularly fortunate to have written her towards the middle of 2017, asking her about Cele Goldsmith. I didn’t expect a response, but she sent one, absolutely helpful and gracious. I had mentioned I was working on a long piece about Goldsmith – I still am! – and she said she hoped she would be able to read it. I promised to send it to her and I feel particularly sad that she will not see it – though the loss is mine, not hers.

I am an emotional reader at times, and one thing Le Guin could do, repeatedly, was bring me to tears – tears of awe and wonder, tears of sadness, tears of love. I leave with some of my favorite quotes:

“Kaph looked at him and saw the thing he had never seen before, saw him: Owen Pugh, the other, the stranger who held his hand out in the dark.” (I tear up just typing this.)

“Stars and gatherings of stars, depth below depth without end, the light.”

“But all this happened a long time ago, nearly forty years ago; I do not know if it happens now, even in imaginary countries.”

And, of course, as Le Guin’s journey on this Earth has ended, we remember, from The Dispossessed: “True journey is return”.



























































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- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 1905.31 - 10:10

- Days ago = 1427 days ago

- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I plan to continue Hey Mom posts at least twice per week but will continue to post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.

Thursday, May 30, 2019

Hey, Mom! Talking to My Mother #1170 (SoD1561) - Throwback Thursday for 1905.30

summer fair 1966
Hey, Mom! Talking to My Mother #1170 (SoD1561) - Throwback Thursday for 1905.30

A few random bits this week. Not much to say.

Melancholy.


WRITTEN ABOUT HERE -
https://ew.com/tv/2019/05/21/george-r-r-martin-game-of-thrones-finale-books/

text below from by George RR Martin
http://georgerrmartin.com/notablog/2019/05/20/an-ending/

An Ending

MAY 20, 2019

The last night, the last show.   After eight epic seasons, HBO’s GAME OF THRONES series has come to an end.
It is hard to believe it is over, if truth be told.   The years have gone past in the blink of an eye.  Can it really have been more than a decade since my manager Vince Gerardis set up a meeting at the Palm in LA, and I sat down for the first time with David Benioff and D.B. Weiss for a lunch that lasted well past dinner?  I asked them if they knew who Jon Snow’s mother was.   Fortunately, they did.
That was how it started.  It ended last night.
I had no clue, that afternoon at the Palm, that I was about to embark on a journey that would change my life.   I had optioned books and stories for television and film before.  Some had even been made   There was no way to know that this one was going to be different, that this pilot would not only be shot,  but would go on to become the most successful show in the history of HBO, win a record number of Emmy Awards, become the most popular (and most pirated) show in the world, and transform a group of talented but largely unknown actors into major celebrities and stars.   Even less did I imagine that I would somehow become a celebrity as well… and if truth be told, I’m still not sure how that happened.
It has been a wild ride, to say the least.
I want to thank people, but there are so many.   There were forty-two cast members at the season eight premiere in New York City, and that wasn’t even all of them.   And the crew, though less visible than the cast, were no less important.  We had some amazing people working on this show, as all those Emmys bear witness.   David & Dan assembled a championship team.   The directors were incredible as well.   I should start naming names, but then I’d miss someone, there were so many.   But I do need to mention David Benioff, Dan Weiss, Bryan Cogman (the third head of the dragon, as I said in the recent VANITY FAIR piece about him), and of course the great team at HBO, headed by Richard Plepler.   Any other network, and GAME OF THRONES would not have been what it became.  Most other networks, this series never gets made at all.
I could go on and on… and have, as I’ve been writing this post in my head… but there’s really too much to say.   Parting is such sweet sorrow, the Bard wrote.  In the weeks and months to come, I may post about some of my favorite moments from the making of this show… now and again, when I am feeling nostalgic… but just now, there are so many memories, and no time to do them all justice.
Let me say this much — last night was an ending, but it was also a beginning.   Nobody is retiring any time soon.   David and Dan are going on to STAR WARS and other projects beyond that.   Amazon scooped up Bryan Cogman, and put him to work on developing shows of his own, as well as helping out on their big Tolkien project.   Our brilliant cast has scattered to the four winds, but you’ll be seeing a lot of them in the years to come, in all manner of television shows and movies.   Our directors are keeping busy as well.   I suspect that you have not seen the last of Westeros on your television sets either, but I guess that all depends on how some of these successor shows turn out.
And me?  I’m still here, and I’m still busy.    As a producer, I’ve got five shows in development at HBO (some having nothing whatsoever to do with the world of Westeros), two at Hulu, one on the History Channel.   I’m involved with a number of feature projects, some based upon my own stories and books, some on material created by others.   There are these short films I am hoping to make, adaptations of classic stories by one of the most brilliant, quirky, and original writers our genre has ever produced.   I’ve consulted on a video game out of Japan.   And then there’s Meow Wolf…
And I’m writing.   Winter is coming, I told you, long ago… and so it is.   THE WINDS OF WINTER is very late, I know, I know, but it will be done.  I won’t say when, I’ve tried that before, only to burn you all and jinx myself… but I will finish it, and then will come A DREAM OF SPRING.
How will it all end? I hear people asking.   The same ending as the show?  Different?
Well… yes.  And no.  And yes.   And no.   And yes.   And no.   And yes.
I am working in a very different medium than David and Dan, never forget.   They had six hours for this final season.   I expect these last two books of mine will fill 3000 manuscript pages between them before I’m done… and if more pages and chapters and scenes are needed, I’ll add them.   And of course the butterfly effect will be at work as well; those of you who follow this Not A Blog will know that I’ve been talking about that since season one.   There are characters who never made it onto the screen at all, and others who died in the show but still live in the books… so if nothing else, the readers will learn what happened to Jeyne Poole, Lady Stoneheart, Penny and her pig, Skahaz Shavepate, Arianne Martell, Darkstar, Victarion Greyjoy, Ser Garlan the Gallant, Aegon VI, and a myriad of other characters both great and small that viewers of the show never had the chance to meet.   And yes, there will be unicorns… of a sort…
Book or show, which will be the “real” ending?   It’s a silly question.   How many children did Scarlett O’Hara have?
How about this?  I’ll write it.   You read it.  Then everyone can make up their own mind, and argue about it on the internet.


Current Mood:  melancholy






















This photo may have been taken on this exact day 34 years ago.


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Reflect and connect.

Have someone give you a kiss, and tell you that I love you.

I miss you so very much, Mom.

Talk to you tomorrow, Mom.

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- Days ago = 1426 days ago

- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 1905.30 - 10:10

NEW (written 1708.27) NOTE on time: I am now in the same time zone as Google! So, when I post at 10:10 a.m. PDT to coincide with the time of your death, Mom, I am now actually posting late, so it's really 1:10 p.m. EDT. But I will continue to use the time stamp of 10:10 a.m. to remember the time of your death, Mom. I know this only matters to me, and to you, Mom.

Wednesday, May 29, 2019

A Sense of Doubt blog post #1560 - Brown Dwarf Atmospheres support life?

https://exoplanets.nasa.gov/news/1450/scientists-improve-brown-dwarf-weather-forecasts/
A Sense of Doubt blog post #1560 - Brown Dwarf Atmospheres support life?

https://science.slashdot.org/story/19/05/30/0257253/brown-dwarf-atmospheres-as-the-potentially-most-detectable-and-abundant-sites-for-life

Brown Dwarf Atmospheres As The Potentially Most Detectable And Abundant Sites For Life


RockDoctor writes:Yet another provocative paper emerges onto Arxiv from Harvard's Lingam and Loeb. Today they estimate the volume of space occupied by habitable zones (regions where liquid water is stable) in brown dwarf not-quite stars. They find that it could be orders of magnitude greater than the volume in the atmospheres of Earth-size planets. Brown dwarfs are masses of gas which are too small to sustain nuclear fusion (so, they're not stars), but can have a brief period of fusion of deuterium or lithium shortly after formation (so they're not planets; the boundary size is under debate). After this burst of energy, they slowly cool, for billions of years. This leads to a large volume of the star's outer body -- or atmosphere -- with potentially attractive temperature and pressure. If the brown dwarf is orbiting with a larger star, there may be enough light to allow photosynthesis. Supply of chemicals is uncertain, but not impossible. 

While this paper is speculative, the prospects for detecting such life by spectroscopy are plausible with observational instruments being designed at the moment. Previous work on abiogenesis and the origin(s) of life has speculated that life could persist in the atmospheres of Venus and Jupiter, using comparable pressure-temperature arguments. In this respect, the proposal is more conventional.






TO EXPLORE MORE

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_dwarf

https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2017/nasa-funded-citizen-science-project-discovers-new-brown-dwarf/

http://www.astronomy.com/news/2016/08/when-does-a-small-star-become-a-brown-dwarf

https://phys.org/news/2017-05-brown-dwarf-planetary-mass.html

https://science.howstuffworks.com/brown-dwarf-isnt-failed-star-magnetic-powerhouse.htm



https://blog.backyardworlds.org/2017/02/24/brown-dwarf-the-object-you-should-start-to-love/

Brown Dwarf: The object you should start to love…








FROM -
http://coolcosmos.ipac.caltech.edu/cosmic_classroom/cosmic_reference/brown_dwarfs.html

Brown Dwarfs

Brown dwarfs are objects which are too large to be called planets and too small to be stars. They have masses that range between twice the mass of Jupiter and the lower mass limit for nuclear reactions (0.08 times the mass of our sun). Brown dwarfs are thought to form in the same way that stars do - from a collapsing cloud of gas and dust. However, as the cloud collapses, it does not form an object which is dense enough at its core to trigger nuclear fusion. The conversion of hydrogen into helium by nuclear fusion is what fuels a star and causes it to shine. Brown dwarfs were only a theoretical concept until they were first discovered in 1995. It is now thought that there might be as many brown dwarfs as there are stars.
Brown dwarfs are very dim and cool compared with stars. The best hope for finding brown dwarfs is in using infrared telescopes, which can detect the heat from these objects even though they are too cool to radiate visible light. Many brown dwarfs have also been discovered embedded in large clouds of gas and dust. Since infrared radiation can penetrate through the dusty regions of space, brown dwarfs can be discovered by infrared telescopes, even deep within thick clouds. Recently, 2MASS(Two Micron All Sky Survey) data revealed the coolest known brown dwarf. To the left is an infrared image of the Trapezium star cluster in the Orion Nebula. This image was part of a survey done at the United Kingdom Infrared Telescope ( UKIRT) in which over 100 brown dwarf candidates were identified in the infrared.
The discovery of objects like brown dwarfs will also give astronomers a better idea about the fate of our universe. The motion of the stars and galaxies are influenced by material which has not yet been detected. Much of this invisible dark matter, which astronomers call "missing mass", could be made up of brown-dwarfs. Our universe is currently expanding, due to the Big Bang. If there is enough mass, it is thought that the expansion of the universe will eventually slow down and then the universe will start collapsing. This scenario could mean that the universe goes through an endless cycle of expansions and contractions, with a new Big Bang occurring every time the universe ends its collapse. If there is not enough mass for the universe to collapse, then it will expand forever. We will only know the fate of the universe when we can accurately estimate how much mass the universe has in it. The detection missing mass objects, such as brown dwarfs will likely be a key to answering this question.
Brown Dwarfs were only a theoretical concept when the Spitzer Space Telescope was first proposed. Since the mid-1990s, various infrared telescopes and surveys have identified a few hundred of these objects. Spitzer will devote much of its time to the discovery and characterization of brown dwarfs. It is expected that Spitzer will study thousands of these objects, including those only slightly larger than Jupiter. This will provide astronomers with enough data on brown dwarfs for good quality statistical studies.

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- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 1905.29 - 10:10

- Days ago = 1425 days ago

- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I plan to continue Hey Mom posts at least twice per week but will continue to post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.

Tuesday, May 28, 2019

A Sense of Doubt blog post #1559 - Vonnegut - first reviews of Slaughterhouse Five

A Sense of Doubt blog post #1559 - Vonnegut - first reviews of Slaughterhouse Five

Even though Slaughterhouse Five was the first Vonnegut book I ever read, the only one I have taught is Cat's Cradle. Articles like this inspire me to consider teaching Vonnegut again. Also, it's a bucket list project to own copies of all the Vonnegut and read it all as well as re-read some favorites, like the two aforementioned books along with Sirens of Titan, Mother Night, and Player Piano.

Arguably, I am weak on the books starting in the late 1970s.

I have a copy of Wampeters, Foma and Granfalloons (1974) on my Kindle and have read only a little of it.

One of the best author events I have ever attended was to hear Vonnegut speak.

I wish he was still with us.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_Vonnegut

https://bookmarks.reviews/the-first-reviews-of-slaughterhouse-five/




The First Reviews of Slaughterhouse-Five
ON THE OCCASION OF THE FIFTIETH BIRTHDAY OF VONNEGUT'S MASTERPIECE
April 1, 2019  s

Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt.

A half-century ago this week, Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five—a darkly comic, throughly batshit, semi-autobiographical anti-war novel about a fatalistic young American soldier who survives the firebombing of Dresden and becomes “unstuck in time”—was first published. A bestseller upon its release, the book has gone on to become one of the most beloved and influential (not to mention challenged) works of contemporary American fiction. It has also enjoyed a storied pop culture life, appearing or being namechecked in everything from The Wonder Years to The SimpsonsFootloose to Varsity Blues. There was even a 90s folk-rock duo called Billy Pilgrim who weren’t half bad.

Before it joined the ranks of the immortals, though, Slaughterhouse-Five had to run the book review gauntlet just like any other novel. Below, we look back at five of the earliest critical takes.

“Kurt Vonnegut Jr., an indescribable writer whose seven previous books are like nothing else on earth, was accorded the dubious pleasure of witnessing a 20th-century apocalypse. During World War II, at the age of 23, he was captured by the Germans and imprisoned beneath the city of Dresden, ‘the Florence of the Elbe.’ He was there on Feb. 13, 1945, when the Allies firebombed Dresden in a massive air attack that killed 130,000 people and destroyed a landmark of no military significance.
Next to being born, getting married and having children, it is probably the most important thing that ever happened to him. And, as he writes in the introduction to Slaughterhouse-Five, he’s been trying to write a book about Dresden ever since. Now, at last, he’s finished the ‘famous Dresden book.’
In the same introduction, which should be read aloud to children, cadets and basic trainees, Mr. Vonnegut pronounces his book a failure ‘because there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre.’ He’s wrong and he knows it.

Kurt Vonnegut knows all the tricks of the writing game. So he has not even tried to describe the bombing. Instead he has written around it in a highly imaginative, often funny, nearly psychedelic story.
The odd combination of fact and fiction forces a question upon the reader: how did the youth who lived through the Dresden bombing grow up to be the man who wrote this book? One reads Slaughterhouse-Five with that question crouched on the brink of one’s awareness. I’m not sure if there’s an answer, but the question certainly heightens the book’s effects.

“I know, I know (as Kurt Vonnegut used to say when people told him that the Germans attacked first). It sounds crazy. It sounds like a fantastic last-ditch effort to make sense of a lunatic universe. But there is so much more to this book. It is very tough and very funny; it is sad and delightful; and it works. But is also very Vonnegut, which mean you’ll either love it, or push it back in the science-fiction corner.
“We live in an age of great seriousness. We are accustomed to getting our art in heavy, pretentious doses. Anything funny is suspect, and anything simple is doubly suspect. Here we come to the second difficulty with Kurt Vonnegut. His style is effortless, naive, almost childlike. There are no big words and no complicated sentences. It is an extraordinarily difficult style, but that fact is lost on anyone who has never tried to write that way.
“He writes about the most excruciatingly painful things. His novels have attacked our deepest fears of automation and the bomb, our deepest political guilts, our fiercest hatreds and loves. Nobody else writes books on these subjects; they are inaccessible to normal novelistic approaches. But Vonnegut, armed with his schizophrenia, takes an absurd, distorted, wildly funny framework which is ultimately anaesthetic. In doing so, his science fiction heritage is clear, but his purposes are very different: he is nearly always talking about the past, not the future. And as he proceeds, from his anaesthetic framework, to clean the shit off, we are able to cheer him on—at least for a while. But eventually we stop cheering, and stop laughing.
A Vonnegut book is not cute or precious. It is literally awful, for Vonnegut is one of the few writers able to lift the lid of the garbage can, and dispassionately examine the contents. In Slaughterhouse-Five, the author quotes his father as saying, “You never wrote a story with a villain in it.” This may be true, but Vonnegut never wrote a story with a hero in it, either. In Slaughterhouse-Five he also says, ‘Nobody was ridiculous or bad or disgusting,’ and it is within this framework that he writes about an event that should qualify for all those adjectives— the firebombing of Dresden, which Vonnegut experienced as a prisoner of war in Germany.
There is every indication that this book represents, for Vonnegut, a final statement of his thoughts about this experience. He says so explicitly, just as he says the project is doomed to failure (‘There is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre’). The book also brings together characters and locales from other books—Howard W. Campbell, Jr., Eliot Rosewater, and Ilium, N.Y., giving the novel a faintly anthological flavor. The book is written in the brief segmental manner he developed in Cat’s Cradle, organized as a collection of impressions, scattered in time and space, each told with the kind of economy one associates with poetry. It is beautifully done, fluid, smooth, and powerful.
There is also some business about a distant planet and flying saucers, but that does not make the book science fiction, any more than flippers make a cat a penguin. In the final analysis the book is hideous, ghastly, murderous—and calm. There are just people, doing what people usually do to each other.”



“Kurt Vonnegut introduces his seventh novel, Slaughterhouse-Five, apologetically, calling it a failure. Coming from most writers, an apology like that would be inadequate; a writer can always take a vow of permanent abstinence from writing, and there is a shortage of cabdrivers. Mr. Vonnegut’s penitential gesture is objectionable because it implies that he might have succeeded in solving a problem that he properly represents as insoluble. In 1945, a German prisoner of war, he lived through the American and British bombing of Dresden, in which a hundred and thirty-five thousand people died—nearly twice as many, he notes, as were killed by the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, whose devastation was at least officially honored by a Presidential announcement. Slaughterhouse-Five is Vonnegut’s tribute to the strain imposed on his conscience by the fact that he survived, and by his increasing awareness, since the war, of the scope and variety of death. The vibrant simplicity of the book to which he finally surrendered his emotion makes his apology seem disingenuous, like Alexander the Great putting himself down for not dedicating his life to untying the Gordian knot. Besides, any book that is touted as a ‘masterpiece,’ ‘long-awaited,’ and ‘twenty years in the making’ can’t be all bad if it turns out to be just a neat hundred and eighty-six pages long.
Acknowledging the rich past and the bright prospects of death, Vonnegut cuts through his prodigious obsession with calculated diffidence, offering a lament and a protest in the disguise of a fable with no moral.
“In the opening chapter, Vonnegut vouches for the truth of the Second World War characters and incidents in Slaughterhouse-Fiveand then proceeds to demonstrate, by exchanging feeling for outer-spatial detachment, how outrageous the truth is. Under cover of the bland narration, the facts and the science fiction are equally plausible, but blandness gives characters like the crazy colonel and the forty-year-old ex-hobo an edge over the Tralfamadorians, who are, after all, green and shaped like plungers. Vonnegut concedes the difference, in effect, by interrupting the story of Billy Pilgrim twice to say, ‘I was there.’
The short, flat sentences of which the novel is composed convey shock and despair better than an array of facts or effusive mourning. Still, deliberate simplicity is as hazardous as the grand style, and Vonnegut occasionally skids into fatuousness.”

“A bullet makes a small to entry and a messy exit. Enormities in the mind do the same. ‘Everything is supposed to be very quiet after a massacre and it always is, except for the birds. And what do the birds say? All there is to say about a massacre, things like “Poo-tee-wee.” ‘ So how is the mind to cope with an experience like Dresden where it is known, if not comprehended, that 130,000 civilians were incinerated overnight and the huddled survivors shot up next morning? The oddest and most directly and obliquely heart-searching war book for years proves how art, in its own good time, can find a way. Here is war as a ridiculous ogre trapped by its own braces on the pillars of the firmament. Here are the dead of Dresden. Catch-22 was a splendid, savage but abstract joke compared with the irony and compassion of Mr Vonnegut’s.
“It is a stark and comic rendering of scarecrow men-children as lost in war as the babes of the Children’s Crusade who were fodder for African slave-markets when they thought they were bound for the Holy Sepulchre. It is the story of mind crying Stop! to Time before the corpses fill the corpse mines, and of gangling Billy Pilgrim, later successful optometrist of Ilium, Ill., former Chaplain’s assistant taken prisoner before there was time to fit him out with boots; who survived Dresden in an underground abattoir and had, somehow to live with it.
He becomes a time-traveller, is taken by the little green men to their planet, taught not to fuss so when there is no beginning or end, no moral, no cause or effects; just bugs in the amber of eternal Now. The time warp throws up jumbled memories, precognitions, visions. With the new eyes he sees Dresden in reverse, the fires dying out, buildings reconstructed, bombs sucked back into bomb-bays, shipped home ‘where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals. Touchingly it was mostly women who did this work. The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them into the ground, to hide them cleverly, so they would never hurt anyone ever again.’
In the rubble of liberated Dresden a released American is shot by Americans, for purloining a teapot. Billy’s hippy son straightens out, becomes a Green Beret. Truman applauds the A-bomb; a pre-war guide points out Dresden’s charms – sequence and order are immaterial to the time-traveller who is now naked in a cage on Tralfamadore with a movie queen, now excavating the bodies until it is decided to seal them in. The frontispiece carries a verse from ‘Away in a manger’ and nothing in this devastating and supremely human book makes it seem out of place.”

Slaughterhouse-Five, with its time jumps, trips to other planets, the firebombing of Dresden, and the casual mingling of the current history of the author with that of his fictional world, remains, when all of its wearisome inventiveness is done, one of the most unsurprising, self-indulgent little books ever to work so hard at being selfless and memorable. Not one character emerges from it with anything like the grotesque clarity which, say, Malaparte gave to a briefly encountered soul caught in the inferno of World War II; not one attitude in all of Vonnegut’s darkly humorous anecdotes of life and death stays in the mind except the infantile stoicism exemplified by the recurrent and infuriatingly Olympian phrase ‘and so it goes.’ There is no intimation in this book of a sensibility which understands what is relevant to the conjunction of history and personal imagination, understands, finally, how carefully balanced a book must be that wishes to encompass the annihilation of millions and the mental caprices of one dull hero.
“It would be unjust to harp on the conclusions of Vonnegut’s mental odyssey through Slaughterhouse-Five if the voyage itself had had some interest. After all, a book is under no obligation to come to any conclusion at all about itself. Slaughterhouse-Five, however, seems to be nothing else but conclusion. The tone of judgment surrounds all the events of the book, jostling the reader again and again into an atmosphere of self-pity, into moments thick with unearned, lyrical agonies. Along the way, Vonnegut tries to come up with a moment or two to justify his reputation as a black satirist. But his imagination is not so much antic as it is willful, an imagination which does not disguise the fact that, however swaggering and adventurous in tone, it is in the service of a moralist too easily satisfied that the world confirms his point of view. This might be artistically excusable if that point of view were at all complex or idiosyncratic, but it is, rather, much too obvious and commonplace to need so much baroque substantiation. For all his notoriety, Vonnegut never really goes further than the poor estimate society has about itself even in its most official pronouncements. He therefore stops where an intelligent imagination ought to begin.”



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- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 1905.28 - 10:10

- Days ago = 1424 days ago

- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I plan to continue Hey Mom posts at least twice per week but will continue to post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.