Daily Archives: April 16, 2014

Weather +Climate, Writing

Short Story Collection

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Spring (?)                                                               Bee Hiving Moon

Two more rejections have come in on this decidedly unspringlike day.  I can’t tell how much we have now, but when I went out at 7 pm to retrieve the trash container I walked in snow that came over the top of my Sorels.  In one day the advance of the sun has been pushed back, nullified by white, a covering more mid-winter than Easter.

Right now I’m going through a curious process of trying to collect all the short stories I’ve written in one spot though it has proved difficult.  I’ve had several computers over the years and transferring files from one to the next has not always been seamless.  All my novels and parts of novels are in one file, but until today the computer files I have of short stories were all over the place.  The computer files now have a home.

However.  In going through my paper files I’ve found many stories no longer extant as computer files.  That’s ok, because I can just reenter them, but it makes centralizing my cache of stories a bit more complicated.  I’m not sure I’ve located all the paper stories yet since I have three file cabinets plus bankers boxes, but over the next few weeks I’ll get all I can find in one physical location.

This is important to me because I’m editing and revising them in preparation for sending them out to magazines.  I want to have a reasonable idea of what my trunk looks like.

I edited one today, “I Found An Altar, Black With The Ash of Sacrifice,” that I like a lot, but it’s one of the paper only stories so I’m entering it now into Scrivener.  This process will take some time.

GeekWorld, Latin, Literature, Myth and Story, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Science, Translating Metamorphoses, World History

Emergence, Complexity and Augustan Rome

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Spring                                                                 Bee Hiving Moon

Two projects are pushing themselves forward, aspects of work already underway.  After reading a recent batch of articles arguing against a crass materialism and insisting on looking at the world not only through reductionist goggles, I have decided now is a good time to reimmerse myself in the world of emergence.  Emergence is a concept that identifies emergent properties, things not predictable by the sum of a thing or processes immediately preceding a particular phenomena.

(Garni_Gorge Symphony of the Stones carved by Goght River at Garni Gorge in Armenia is an example of an emergent natural structure.)  wiki, emergence

The example that is most familiar to me is culture.  Culture is that society based phenomenon that weaves language, place, kinship, food choice, divisions of work, art, music and play into a whole that shapes the individual, makes them part of something, a culture, larger than themselves.  Culture does not follow from an examination of an individual or even a small group of individuals, it only begins to emerge in a larger group over a period of time.

Another and easier to grasp emergent phenomenon is the transition of a caterpillar to a butterfly.  Am I a butterfly or am I a caterpillar dreaming I’m a butterfly?

This also relates to the complexity movement in science.  Science proceeds by breaking things down to their most basic components, then discerning law-like behaviors.  Physics is the paradigmatic science in this respect.  But there are many phenomena, like emergence, that appear not as things are reduced to their simplest parts, but as things combine to create more and more complex materials and organisms.  Science has historically ignored those areas because they are difficult to quantify and/or difficult to study using usual scientific methods.

I’ve flirted with learning these two areas:  emergence and complexity theory, but have never devoted the necessary time to it.  It’s time.  This fits in my reimagining my faith project.

The second is broadening the scope of my learning about Ovid, his time, the Augustan period, other tellings of the same myths Ovid works with, and Augustan poetry more generally.  This is in service of the commentary/translation I plan to begin in earnest after this growing season ends and of a big novel still forming itself.