Daily Archives: May 19, 2013

Garden, Literature, Weather +Climate

Root and Branch

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Beltane                                                                       Early Growth Moon

Water and heat.  Sun and soil.  Roots, stalks and leaves.  There you have it.  And we’ve got it this week.  Rain, rain, rain.  Then some heat.  Seeds germinating, bursting up, ready to transubstantiate.  All for the great cycle of life, churning, moving, flowing, surging.  I can feel it, smell it at this time of year.  And I love it.

Just finished Dan Brown’s Inferno.  If you read the NYT review, you will discover that Dan has a mundane talent for words.  And that’s true.  The reviews I read didn’t add, but they should, that he throws in potted art history and architectural criticism, not to mention some odd rant on transhumanism.  Yet, did you notice, I finished it.  Why?  Well, reading like a writer, this guy knows how to plot.  He can make you wonder what’s coming next.

He pulls off one big twist in this novel and it’s a dandy, but it feels very contrived even though he sucked me in completely with it.  That’s sort of the thing he’s got going, you can see the holes in his works, where I wondered were the editors who could have easily fixed much of this, but you pass them by to find out what happens next.  That’s story telling and it’s the true game which every writer plays.

(Lucifer, trapped in the 9th circle. Canto 34, lines 20–21  Gustave Dore)

Hey, listen!  Have I got something to tell you.  Clumsy sentences, wooden metaphors, filler pages, yes, they matter, but in the end not as much if you keep me interested.

coda next morning:  I will buy and read your book if you can entertain me.  Whether I remember it or learn from it and, most important, whether I will return to it, however, depends on those skills Dan Brown seems to shunt aside as unnecessary.  No, I won’t be re-reading any of his work.

Cooking, Latin, Translating Metamorphoses, Writing

Beets, Romans and High Fantasy

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Beltane                                                                       Early Growth Moon

Kate has been trying to reconstruct an amazing beet pureed soup we had at Fika in the American Swedish Institute.  The chef gave us some of his or her ingredients, all of them?  I’m not sure.  But Kate’s done a good job of closing in on it.  It’s delightful, tangy and creamy with a great feel in the mouth.

I’ve spent the Sunday beginning to check my Latin translations against the commentaries and entering notes into the file I’m keeping for the commentary Greg and I may write.  This is fun work, finding better words, puzzling over the thoughts of Ovid scholars.  Once I’ve finished the recheck, I’m going to start reading the Ovid scholarship I’ve collected.

In the afternoon I’ve proceeded with the revision, rewrite of Missing.  I’m well into the first third, adding thicker description, plumping up character development, making the narrative a more coherent whole.  This is fun, too.

Even so, my mind can only take so much fun before the brain that supports its work begins to wear out the rest of my body. That’s where I am now.  Tired. Enough for the day.

 

Commentary on the news, Dogs, Travel

Mars. We Are There.

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Beltane                                                             Early Growth Moon

Got outside yesterday during the sunny hours and put a pollen patty on for the bees, laid down some weed preventer and left Kona outside.  She stuck around the house, though, wondering when she could get back in, but not, I imagine, very unhappy with being left on her own.

Kate and I watched a Disney special on the Opportunity and Spirit rovers sent to Mars in 2004.  This film was made in 2006, so I went to the NASA websites to check up on them.  Spirit stopped phoning home in 2010 and NASA stopped revival efforts in 2011.  Even so, that means Spirit went exploring for 6 years, 5 years and 9 months past its mission plan.  Even more remarkable, Opportunity continues to motor along,

In fact, just yesterday it relayed data:

Mars Rover Opportunity Examines Clay Clues in Rock

Rock Target ‘Esperance’ Altered by Wet History (False Color)

The pale rock in the upper center of this image, about the size of a human forearm, includes a target called “Esperance,” which was inspected by NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity.

PASADENA, Calif. — NASA’s senior Mars rover, Opportunity, is driving to a new study area after a dramatic finish to 20 months on “Cape York” with examination of a rock intensely altered by water.

The fractured rock, called “Esperance,” provides evidence about a wet ancient environment possibly favorable for life. The mission’s principal investigator, Steve Squyres of Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y., said, “Esperance was so important, we committed several weeks to getting this one measurement of it, even though we knew the clock was ticking.”

Opportunity on May 16th also broke the existing NASA record for distance traveled on either the moon or Mars by going over 22.2 statute miles, longer than Apollo 17’s Eugene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt drove their Lunar Roving Vehicle.

(curiosity rover parachute flapping view from Mars Reconnaissance)

Curiosity, the most recent Mars rover, landed in 2012, and on May 9th proceeded to a second round of drilling at a site where “(In February) Curiosity took the first rock sample ever collected on Mars…called “John Klein.” The rover found evidence of an ancient environment favorable for microbial life.”

Also in orbit and currently at work is the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, launched in 2005, arriving Mars, 2006.