Published: Postcard Shorts

Another flash story of mine, "Foresight", is now online at Postcard Shorts. This is another potential on-line venue for writers of ultra-short fiction. As the title suggests, submitted stories have to fit in a postcard sized panel (stated limit is 1500 characters, roughly 250 words). For more info, see their homepage, here.

Just in time for Christmas

The short fiction anthology, Story.Book, is now available from the publisher, Unbound Press. The upside: my most recent flash story, "Inspiration", is in it. The downside: you have to purchase directly from the publisher's UK website, and it's kinda clunky. But for a mere £10.80 (= $15.30) + shipping you get nearly 50 other stories, all prize winners—and you'll be helping to support a small press.

Published: 100 word story

Nothing like the imperative of self-promotion to bring me back to blogging. Just a quick note that a 100 word story of mine, "Interstate", is now online at...100 word story. I suggest that flash fiction fans and writers, if you haven't heard of it already, might want to check out the rest of this web journal, which is updated monthly. As the title suggests, all stories submitted are required to contain 100 words, no more, no less. Read, write, submit.

Mother's Day 2011

There's something about this picture of my mom that I really like. Taken in August 1942, before she got married; before my brother and I were even a concept, let alone conceived—before my father died, leaving her to raise us on her own—the photo shows her in simple, crisp attire, possibly dressed for work. She might be worried about something, or just letting her mind wander.

Julia Helen Pactovis Levery (1916-1998)

Not that she didn't absolutely love being our mother, nor that she ceased having an inner life when my brother and I were born (quite the contrary), but somehow I enjoy this mystery about her, from a time when we didn't know each other, a past life before motherhood and going to work primarily for her children's sake took the lion's share of her time and energy. Here, to my eyes, she appears thoughtful, unposed, her attention miles away from the process of being photographed. I have no idea where she is standing; the neighborhood is unfamiliar to me; and I am happy to leave this moment in my mother's life private and unreachable, hers alone.

While this is a day to remember mothers (which should of course be more than one day a year), my thoughts are especially with single mothers everywhere, because I was raised by one.

Japan

I was going to write something yesterday about the earthquake and tsunami that struck northern Japan on Friday. The initial shock at 2:46 pm (Tokyo time) was followed by repeated aftershocks, while waves as high as 30 feet inundated cities along the coast of northern Honshu, the largest island in Japan. The epicenter of the 8.9-magnitude quake, one of the most severe in recorded history, was about 100 miles east of Sendai, and 230 miles northeast of Tokyo. It was the biggest to hit Japan since they began keeping records in the 1800s. Millions around the world spent some part of Friday watching videos of the devastation on television and the internet. There is no lack of news about it, so there is no point recounting any further details here. I would only recommend that people motivated and able to donate to disaster aid organizations try the Red Cross or Doctors Without Borders. I realize that Japan has the world's third largest economy, and my understanding is that they have not specifically asked for help; nevertheless, the disaster is extensive and these organizations, as well as others like them, are on the ground there.

Rant: Here is the part where I talk about what kept me from writing yesterday, and you can stop reading if you aren't interested in what pisses me off. Naturally, in trying to gather information about the disaster, I went to the internet, where there is plenty of news, along with more commentary than anyone could possibly handle. Some of what I read was certainly valuable, and for the most part the comment stream expressed only empathy and a desire to help. However, there is a segment of humanity (and I use the term loosely) that uses any occasion to vomit their ignorance and bile into the web. In this case, I am referring to hateful braindead comments to the effect that this disaster is some kind of karmic payback for Pearl Harbor. I got my first inkling on a visit to Pharyngula, who had appended to his post a collage of such comments culled from Facebook. "Tsunami/Pearl Harbor!!!Karma is a bitch" says one. "Apparently God hasn't forgotten about Pearl Harbor either...." says another. These are from people not too ashamed to have such shite posted under their real names with photos that show them to be under 30. It didn't take long to find others expressing similar sentiments. This is something only a total fuckwit would say: "...all of the Japanese people who are caught in that tsunami are totally the same ones who bombed pearl harbor/ordered it." It would be understandable, perhaps, if such comments came from WWII veterans or others whose losses during the war are still too painful to leave behind; it doesn't make sense coming from people born long afterwards. Pearl Harbor was 70 years and several generations ago. The Japanese people paid dearly for Pearl Harbor and even worse crimes committed up to and during WWII by the actual participants, who are mostly long gone. The rest of the world, while not forgetting the historical facts and human costs, has moved on.

Let's get it straight: there is no Karma and there is no God behind natural disasters. Japan is located along a subduction zone; there are others located, for example, off the coasts of North and South America. Last Friday it was Japan; tomorrow it could be the US. We live on a restless planet. Earthquakes happen because of Plate Tectonics; they are not due to the machinations of karma nor the wrath of some invisible all-powerful being who feels the need to punish homosexuals or some poor country that supposedly made a pact with the Devil in 1791. If there really were a God, idiots who promote and repeat such stupid and hateful ideas would be instantly struck by lightening or swallowed up by the earth like Dathan (Num 16:31). Unfortunately, they are not.

Glenn, don't forget the Packers...

are a non-profit, community-owned franchise. That's a collective, so I assume they fall into group three of Beck's New World Order...and ya know, how many of those cheeseheads could be hiding a kufi underneath? Well, actually, there wouldn't be anything wrong with that at all, not that Glenn would have any idea. In any case, collective ownership, that's so un-American, it couldn't possibly work! Oh, wait, didn't they just win Superbowl XLV? Not to mention 13 league championships altogether. Pretty suspicious, maybe they don't even win the American way, maybe they get their playbooks every year from the Muslim Brotherhood or, who knows, Karl Marx himself.

Glenn Beck explains how unions in Wisconsin are creating chaos "on the backs of the workers" (did I hear that right?)

Well, let's get a couple of things straight; the New World Order, Republican style, is no control over corporate lawlessness, no state or federal services, no funding for non-profit healthcare providers, especially if they're providing services to women, and definitely no unions. And right now the ones trying to get over on the backs of workers are Gov. Scott Walker and the Wisconsin Senate Republicans, in their blatant attempt to strip collective bargaining rights from state employees under the guise of balancing the budget. Yes, I think everyone understands that financial sacrifices have to be made to keep the the State afloat, but this isn't merely about wages and benefits, but legislating away the right to collective bargaining, which is a cornerstone function of worker's unions. I'm heartened by seeing state workers refusing to roll over (yes, Glenn, there was some angry rhetoric, but the protests at least through Friday, have been non-violent, and I didn't hear anyone threatening to bring guns if their wishes aren't granted); by the show of solidarity by the Firefighter's Union, the (albeit temporary, as it must be) protest departure of Senate Democrats; and, frankly, by the results of an opinion poll that shows the majority of Wisconsin residents oppose Walker's bill. Unfortunately, it looks like it will pass, and it is too late for those who granted the Republicans control of the State House, the Senate, and the Assembly, and who now say they disagree with the upcoming legislation, to take their votes back.

Nosing around Nørrebro (15)

Feeling lazy, so make up your own stories if you want. Random photos from the past couple of years, in no particular order:

"Rainbow" (Back of traffic sign, Sortedams Dossering, 11 April 2009)

A patron saint of something or other...? (Building on Blegdamsvej, overlooking Sankt Hans Torv, 14 February 2010)

"Cops In Jail!!!" (Graffiti along path under Dronning Louises Bro, 23 August 2009)

A graffitic remnant of "Klimakonference 15" (COP15) that took place in København 07-19 December 2009 (Somewhere along Fredensgade, 11 July 2010)

"Spyo (Heart) Afeks*...on State Support" (Apartment building, Guldbergsgade, 22 May 2009)

*Near as I can figure, these are the nics of a couple of graffiti artists operating around Nørrebro. For what it's worth, note that one S in the middle of "Statsstøtte" is superfluous.

The will of the people...

Congratulations to the Egyptian people on not backing down until their dictator had no choice but to remove himself. Of course this is just a first step toward democracy, but the most important one. Of course we don't know what will happen next. Will it be like America in 1776? Or just a continuation of the same military rule with different faces. Or the next Iran 1979? Or something completely different. Whatever happens, it is for Egypt to decide, and other democracies in the world will accomplish a lot more in their own interest by showing support and respect for the Egyptian people and their revolution than by succumbing to hysterical predictions, anti-Muslim fearmongering, and conspiracy theories. If we show some trust, perhaps instead of Egypt becoming the next Iran, we will see Iran becoming the next Egypt.

(Reuters, 11 February 2011)

The will of the people is the only legitimate foundation of any government, and to protect its free expression should be our first object.

--Thomas Jefferson

Better than the Comedy Channel...

If you haven't seen this already, check out Glenn Beck and Bill O'Reilly heatedly discussing the popular uprising in Egypt (as of the 31 January 2011 edition of "The O'Reilly Factor" on Fox News) as though either one had a clue. After a couple of minutes of mostly checking off points of agreement (O'Reilly: "All right, let's connect the dots, here...so Mubarak, bad guy, right?"), Beck starts to veer wildly off the reservation around 2:30, and we get the spectacle of a mere fanatic like O'Reilly trying to throw a lasso around fellow pundit Beck, who is actually discussing the history of some other planet, and what he really needs here is to get fitted for a tinfoil cowboy hat.

My question is, why would O'Reilly even bother bringing Beck on his show after viewing 20 minutes of this:

No further comment except that the ongoing feud between Beck and Bill Kristol has me LMFAO.

The alternate universe of Michele Bachmann

Listening to Michele Bachmann's astounding readings of American history is like watching one of those episodes of Star Trek where the Enterprise crew stumbles into some parallel dimension with an alternate reality; world events have followed a diffent path, everyone's role is reversed, Kirk is a mass-murderer, and instead of the Federation there is an evil Terran Empire. Parts of her recent speech to Iowans for Tax Relief (sorry, it was just too long to embed here in its entirety--the scathing critique from CNN's Anderson Cooper will have to do) reminded me of that Ray Bradbury short story, "A Sound of Thunder"; it was as if someone had gone back to the Cretaceous era on a Time Safari, accidentally stepped on an insect, and changed the Earth's history.



Everyone arriving on America's shores has had the same status since its founding? Our Founding Fathers "worked tirelessly until slavery was no more in the United States"? Did I wake up last Friday on some alternate Earth? What kind of drug does Bachmann put in her Kool-Aid? Her cluelessness would be laughable if she wasn't an elected official with real power. And she says she wants "to be in the conversation" for the 2012 Presidential campaign? One vote for this ignorant, fact-challenged, McCarthy wanna-be would be too many.

Educated? Yes. Ruling class?....I don't think so.

Here is the great populist Rush Limbaugh on his radio show last Thursday, tearing into Brit Hume, Charles Krauthammer and Chris Wallace for their positive comments on President Obama's Arizona eulogy (verbatim remarks transcribed via HuffPost: Rush Limbaugh Rips Fox News Panel For 'Slobbering' Over Obama Speech, Panel Responds).

Limbaugh: "They were slobbering over it for the predictable reasons," he said. "It was smart, it was articulate, it was oratorical. It was, it was all the things the educated, ruling class wants their members to be and sound like."

Krauthammer later responded: "As one of the three slobberers...I find it interesting that only the ruling class wants a president who is smart articulate and oratorical in delivering a funeral oration...it's an odd and rather condescending view of what the rest of America is looking for in their president."

Well, as one who is both educated and appreciates a President who can express coherent thoughts in complete, grammatically correct sentences, let me affirm that Rush is indeed correct except for one small detail: he has more wealth and power in his fat left pinkie than me and all of the educated people I know put together. I have about as much power as my single vote entitles me to, and influence no one who doesn't already more or less agree with me. I am not rich and most assuredly not part of the "ruling class". Am not now and have never been.

And how much is Rush Limbaugh worth? Something like $400 million over 8 years through 2016? Which is in turn based on the presumed breadth, wealth, and influence of his listenership? And he represents the underclass? Or does this lying hypocrite represent, more likely, the media bigshots who pay his humongously inflated salary (yeah, I know Clear Channel has recently been on the brink of bankruptcy, but its owners are still Limbaugh's corporate masters)?

Welcome to Pakistan Arizona

How much further comment does this really need? "TUCSON — Representative Gabrielle Giffords, an Arizona Democrat, and at least 17 others were shot Saturday morning when a gunman opened fire outside a supermarket where Ms. Giffords was meeting with constituents. Six of the victims died, among them John M. Roll, the chief judge for the United States District Court for Arizona, and a 9-year-old girl, the Pima County sheriff, Clarence W. Dupnik, said." (In Attack’s Wake, Political Repercussions, Marc Lacey and David M. Herszenhorn, NYT 08 January 2011).

First of all, my thoughts are with the victims (at this writing Giffords is still alive but in critical condition with a bullet wound to the head, while the dead include her director of community outreach, Gabriel Zimmerman, 30; a nine-year old girl identified as Christina Green; John M. Roll, 63, the chief judge for the United States District Court for Arizona; Dorothy Morris, 76; Dorwin Stoddard, 76; and Phyllis Schneck, 79) and their families.

What's wrong with this picture? Only last Tuesday, Salmaan Taseer, the governor of Punjab, Pakistan’s most populous province, was assassinated by one of his own bodyguards, who by his subsequent statements implied that this act was justified by Taseer's campaign to have Pakistan's anti-blasphemy laws amended. Doubtless many of us, if we noticed the event at all, took the occasion to reflect on what a savage country Pakistan must be, where the course of history appears hostage to conspiring conservative politicians and fundamentalist religious lunatics.

Lucky for us, we don't live in such a place! But maybe we can get there yet. On the one hand, as many have already noted, there is growing in the US, especially since runup to the 2008 Presidential election and afterwards, a palpable atmosphere of "Violence-laced political rhetoric" promoted by right wing politicians, pundits, and bloggers. Thus the main intended victim, Congresswoman Giffords, was a Democrat squarely in the cross-hairs of right wing incitement. On the other hand, I have seen numerous comments suggesting that the captured gunman, Jared Lee Loughner, is actually a Liberal. Some of his classmates suggested as much. What is readily apparent is that he is a lunatic; but whose lunatic is he? Listed among Loughner's favorite books are Mein Kampf, We the Living, Plato's Republic, and the Communist Manifesto. The last, it has been suggested, is evidence for his Liberal fanaticism. Of course the author of Mein Kampf was also a well known Liberal (I've read explicit comparisons to President Obama, I suppose by people who don't know their left from their right), but what to make of We the Living, Ayn Rand's semi-autobiographical, anti-communist first novel? Does that make Loughner an Objectivist assassin?

Further evidence I've seen put forward for Loughner's supposed lefty associations: Giffords is a centrist, a Blue Dog Democrat, not a strong supporter of gun-control nor of open borders; and Judge Roll was a 1991 GHW Bush appointee. But how does that stack up against Giffords' 100% positive rating by NARAL and her strong support for renewable energy? Loughner apparently has no known Tea Party or other organized right-wing associations; fair enough, he's not that kind of crazy, just one more psychopath who brought his paranoid delusions to a deadly end with a 9mm Glock pistol carrying 30 rounds in the magazine. Maybe it's arguable whether or not the climate of violent rhetoric somehow provided a facilitating or suggestive atmosphere for Loughner's acts (personally I wouldn't shrink from arguing the pro side of that question); however, there's a bigger issue than eliminationist rhetoric at stake here, something much more fundamental and long-standing: why is it so easy for these crazy fuckers to get guns?

52 Books In 52 Weeks

Last 01 January, mindful of how few books I've read in recent years, I made a New Year's resolution: to average a book a week throughout 2010. As it happens, I actually read 53. For what it's worth, my list follows, in reverse chronological order:

Tariq Ali, The Protocols of the Elders of Sodom and Other Essays
William Kennedy, Ironweed
Cormac McCarthy, The Road
Robert Alter, Necessary Angels: Tradition and Modernity in Kafka, Benjamin, and Scholem
David Shields, Dead Languages
Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go
Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything Is Illuminated
Carolyn Forché, Gathering the Tribes (Yale Series of Younger Poets)
Jonathan Franzen, The Twenty-Seventh City
Nathalie Sarraute, The Use of Speech
David Albahari, Götz and Meyer
Claude Simon, The World About Us
Michael Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
Alan Furst, Blood of Victory
Charles Simic, Night Picnic: Poems
Lawrence L. Langer, Editor, Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory
Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation
Roland Huntford, Scott and Amundsen
Claude Lévi-Strauss, Totemism
Fanny Howe, Selected Poems (New California Poetry, 3)
James Tate, Worshipful Company of Fletchers
Hjalmar Söderberg, Doctor Glas
Charles Simic, A Wedding in Hell
Paul Auster, The Invention of Solitude: A Memoir
Howard Goldowsky, Editor, Masters of Technique
Jacobo Timerman, Chile: Death in South
Stephen Jay Gould, Urchin in the Storm: Essays About Books and Ideas
Don DeLillo, White Noise
Kenneth R. Miller, Only a Theory: Evolution and the Battle for America's Soul
Hans C. Ohanian, Einstein's Mistakes: The Human Failings of Genius
Susan Sontag, On Photography
Philip Roth, The Plot Against America
Jacobo Timerman, Cuba: A Journey
James Tate, Dreams of a Robot Dancing Bee
Jo Walton, Farthing (Small Change, #1)
Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews (revised 1985 edition in 3 volumes)
Orhan Pamuk, The White Castle
Russell Edson, The Tunnel: Selected Poems of Russell Edson
Charles Simic, Orphan Factory: Essays and Memoirs
Roberto Bolaño, Amulet
Roberto Bolaño, By Night in Chile
Philip Roth, The Humbling
Kim Addonizio, Lucifer at the Starlite: Poems
Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove (Remembrance of Things Past, No. 2, Vintage)
James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science
Fumiko Enchi, Masks
André Malraux, The Royal Way
Amos Oz, To Know a Woman
James Tate, Riven Doggeries (American Poetry Series; V. 18)
Lawrence D. Kritzman, Auschwitz and After: Race, Culture, and "the Jewish Question" in France
Nicholson Baker, The Anthologist
William Gibson, Mona Lisa Overdrive (Sprawl Trilogy, #3)
James Edward Young, Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust: Narrative and the Consequences of Interpretation

This the first resolution I've ever successfully met. So I'm going to renew it for 2011.

Published: Just in time for the New Year

A new flash story of mine, "Fear" just went up at the website "Litsnack" (if you follow the latter link to the Litsnack home page, you can reach the story through the "Fiction" link). It will be the top story there for about a week, then move down as new stories are published.

"New" is a bit of a misnomer, since it took 4 years for me to find a home for it. Actually a "classic" case where a change of point of view (from first to third person) seemed to have finally done the trick. It's only 455 words, so there's no excuse, y'all better read it! And if you like it, please leave a comment there so the editor will see for sure he didn't make a mistake.

More Snow

Holed up in Gloucester, MA, after the blizzard; still snowing actually. This was my first attempt ever to blog directly from my primitive three year old mobile phone, which took this photo of Good Harbor Beach from my room at the Vista Motel. Because I didn't bring my real camera. Well, okay, done....

R.I.P. Captain Beefheart

Saddened by the news that Don van Vliet, AKA Captain Beefheart, passed away on Friday, of complications from multiple sclerosis. He was 69.

He was a true original. I was fortunate to have discovered him relatively early, acquiring "Trout Mask Replica" not long after it came out in 1969; to see him twice in live performances with incarnations of The Magic Band, and to see him one final time with Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention on their joint 1975 "Bongo Fury" tour. I still listen regularly to "Trout Mask Replica", "The Spotlight Kid" (1971) "Clear Spot" (1972), and the joint Zappa/Beefheart/Mothers "Bongo Fury" (1975). It's not for me to recount his whole biography here (Wikipedia does a pretty decent job, with appraisals of all his albums and numerous references); real fans know what he's been up to since his retirement, and I've been blessed with friends who are also fans and know enough send me stories and links when they come across them. A number of us can still recite from memory long stretches of the strange, compelling poetry in those albums.

My master's thesis (Northeastern University, Chemistry, 1976) contains the following epigraph taken from the back of The Spotlight Kid:

The stars are matter

We're matter

But it doesn't matter

- Don Van Vliet

It was reported to me a couple of months after my defense that this quotation had the professors in the Chemistry Department exchanging puzzled looks ("Who is Don van Vliet?" "Captain Beefheart." "Who? Who the hell is that?"), which I took at the time as a clear indication of its absolute rightness. Aside from stretching the possibilities of rock and blues, Beefheart spoke my language--before I really knew what that language was. But that's about me, and I'd rather leave you with these lyrics from "Steal Softly Thru Snow" (Trout Mask Replica"):

The black paper between a mirror breaks my heart

The moon frayed through dark velvet lightly apart

Steal softly through sunshine, steal softly through snow

The wild goose flies from winter, breaks my heart that I can't go

Energy flies thru a field 'n the sun softly melts a nothing wheel

Steal softly through sunshine, steal softly through snow

The black paper between a mirror breaks my heart that I can't go

The swan their feathers don't grow - they're spun

They live two hundred years of love - they're one

Breaks my heart to see them cross the sun

Grain grows rainbows up straw hill

Breaks my heart to see the highway cross the hill

Man lived a million years 'n still he kills

The black paper between a mirror breaks my heart that I can't go

Steal softly through sunshine, steal softly through snow

- Don van Vliet

Chaos (A Belated Review)

Finally got around to reading James Gleick’s book Chaos, which has sat on my shelf in a succession of houses and apartments I’ve inhabited since I bought the book in 1988, about a year after it came out. [1]

Don’t ask me why I waited so long, but it’s a terrific book. Gleick has a great facility for making abstruse scientific ideas understandable, for putting the evolution of concepts into a coherent continuum of historical and logical development, and for providing insightful glimpses of the social and intellectual context in which science actually advances: the variegated and colorful personalities of scientists, their inner thoughts (covering the wide range from deeply penetrating or utterly mistaken), and the many ways they interact with each other. In addition, I really appreciate his ability to interweave examples from art and science where they can provide mutual illumination of a difficult topic. A particularly delightful example brought Wallace Stevens into a discussion of the work of the French physicist Albert Libchaber, who was performing fundamental studies on the onset of disordered flow (turbulence) inside an elegant experimental system consisting of liquid helium trapped in a rectangular stainless steel convection cell, “about the size of a lemon seed.” Early in this chapter, Gleick invokes Stevens to make a scientific point about the nature of “the abstract, ill-defined, ghostly thing called flow.” [1]

“The universality of shapes, the similarities across scales, the recursive power of flows within flows—all sat just beyond reach of the standard differential-calculus approach to equations of change. But that was not easy to see. Scientific problems are expressed in the available scientific language. So far, the twentieth century’s best expression of Libchaber’s intuition about flow needed the language of poetry. Wallace Stevens, for example, asserted a feeling about the world that stepped ahead of the knowledge available to physicists. He had an uncanny suspicion about flow, how it repeated itself while changing:

‘The flecked river
Which kept flowing and never the same way twice, flowing
Through many places, as if it stood still in one.’

Stevens’ poetry often imparts a vision of tumult in atmosphere and water. It also conveys a faith about the invisible forms that order takes in nature, a belief

‘that, in the shadowless atmosphere,
The knowledge of things lay round but unperceived.’ ” [2]

Later in this passage, about “These experimenters, the ones who pursued chaos most relentlessly, succeeded by refusing to accept any reality that could be frozen motionless.” Gleick continues, “Even Libchaber would not have gone so far as to express it in such terms, but their conception came close to what Stevens felt as an ‘insolid billowing of the solid’:

‘The vigor of glory, a glittering in the veins,
As things emerged and moved and were dissolved,

Either in distance, change or nothingness,
The visible transformations of summer night,

An argentine abstraction approaching form,
And suddenly denying itself away.’ ” [3]

It’s not difficult to figure out why discussions of chaos theory and practice readily evoke affinities and analogies with the visual, sonic, and literary arts; much about the creative process has to do with alternately submitting to and organizing chaos; finding patterns in apparent disorder; observing and analyzing nature (or one’s own thoughts), and discerning previously unsuspected relationships (and inventing new ways to describe them). The relationship between music and mathematics, which underpins the fields of physics and chaos, is well known; nor is it surprising that Mandelbrot patterns are appealing, that depictions of turbulence are staples of the visual arts, or that writers learn to travel knowingly along the contiguous territories of chance and purpose. “Chance seems to us then a good and useful thing, for we discern in it as it were rudiments of organization, of an attempt to arrange our life….” [4]

If you have a decent background in elementary physics and mathematics, and aren’t already acquainted with such terms as “Mandelbrot set”, “fractional dimensions”, and “strange attractors”, but they sound like things you really would like to know about; or if you are a layperson just wanting a glimpse (the pictures are cool!) into the world of “non-linear behavior”, “boundaries of infinite complexity”, and “organized chaos”, this book, even more than two decades since its appearance, is still a good place to start. [5]

[1] James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science (New York: Penguin Books, 1987), pp.195-196. See also footnote [5].

[2] Gleick quoting Wallace Stevens, “This Solitude of Cataracts,” The Palm at the End of the Mind, ed. Holly Stevens (New York: Vintage, 1972), p. 321.

[3] Gleick quoting Wallace Stevens, “Reality Is an Activity in the Most August Imagination,” The Palm at the End of the Mind, ed. Holly Stevens (New York: Vintage, 1972), p. 396.

[4] Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove (C. K. Scott Moncrieff, translator), Remembrance of Things Past [À la Récherche du Temps Perdue/In Search of Lost Time] Volume II (New York: Vintage Books, 1970), p. 293.

[5] Note that there is a more recent edition of the book out since 2008: James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science—20th Anniversary Edition (New York: Penguin Books, 2008). ISBN: 0143113453.

Denmark Day 745

København's Søerne ("The Lakes") have been frozen solid for weeks, now, but I haven't had a chance to pay much attention, camera-wise, since I've had some more important things to worry about, like where I was going to live after 31 January. That problem's been solved for the moment, so here goes:

Sortedams Sø and Sunday morning traffic on Øster Søgade.

Taken from my 3rd floor room in a University gæsteobolig (guest home). The lakes are pretty shallow, so there's no doubt they're frozen solid all the way to the bottom; basically they've been turned into a giant ice tray, with a layer of snow on top. Only under a couple of the bridges is there any unfrozen water remaining.

Buildings on Søtorvet.

Taken from somewhere on Sortedams Sø.

Sectional couch, island on Sortedams Sø.

I'm sure this little island has a local name, which I don't know, but the key thing is that this happens to be one of those years when it's accessible on foot. The couch looks kinda comfy.

Statues on Dronning Louises Bro.

That's Peblinge Sø behind them, with Søpavillionen in the far background. I'm sure she's saying something like "Damn, it's frickin' cold out! Why are we sitting here without our coats on?"

All photos taken 14 February 2010.

Denmark Day 739

This photo (not mine) says it all about biking around in Copenhagen in the dead of winter, which has been colder than usual this year.

(Photo and quote credit: Hebster. "Alone. Or as alone as it is possible to be on Fredensbro on a sunday afternoon. Shot on a shit-cold second sunday in [February] 2010.")

Late evening the same Sunday this picture was taken, it's around -10 C (14 F), and I'm walking SE over the very same Fredensbro (this is one of the bridges over the Søerne—the lakes that form the western border of downtown København). Mildish 10 mph headwinds, not very challenging if you're just walking around (and your last place of residence was New Hampshire), but the air is, after all, coming off a frozen lake. When I'm about halfway across, I hear a young woman exclaim in accented English to her friend as they cycle past on my left, "This is NOT very wonderful...I'm killing my bike NOW!"

And IMRISL (rolling in the snow laughing).

Haiti....

As usual, I'm about 48 hours behind the news curve, but what does it matter? The point is that they will need a lot of aid now and over the next few weeks, and the only question is which organization can make the best use of whatever one can donate. A good idea is to go with organizations that are already set up, have a good record with % of donations that actually goes to those who need it, and are already on the ground in the disaster area. I went on-line with the Danish Medicins Sans Frontieres/Læger Uden Grænser (www.msf.dk) Haiti Emergency Fund. If anyone wants, the corresponding Doctors Without Borders site is here.