Imagine, if you will, that in every room in your house there is a vacuum cleaner -- in fact, imagine that at no point in your life are you ever more than, say, ten feet from a vacuum cleaner -- at work, in the bathroom, the kitchen, the bedroom, the car, everywhere. And further imagine that the vacuum cleaner nearest you is always running, so that at no point in your day can you not hear the sound of a running vacuum cleaner. You must constantly talk to be heard over it. You must turn the TV on loud enough to be heard over the vacuum cleaner, or you must wear headphones cranked high enough to overcome the noise.

This, according to Scientific American, illustrates the noise level on the International Space Station. A running vacuum cleaner produces a sound level of roughly 75 decibels. According to NASA, the worst sound levels in the Station are a consistent 70-72 decibels (in the Russian module), with the levels in the American module in the 50-60 decibel range. The United States Navy, on the other hand, limits regular exposure to ship-board noise over 60 decibels. This is a growing problem for the ISS, as well, because more and more equipment is being taken up and installed.

The Russians have proposed a joint mission to Mars. I am all for this; I believe that four or five hundred years from now this era will be chiefly remembered because this is when humanity's exploration of the stars began. A joint mission sounds exciting, and is probably the way to go, as a mission of this magnitude is quite probably beyond the capacity of any single nation or agency to mount. A few questions, though:

:: What would be the actual point of such a mission? If we're merely looking to explore the Martian surface, that would be much better achieved -- and much more cheaply, too -- by further enhancements of the robotic missions that have already taken place. Despite the well-publicized failures of a few Mars missions, we have had great success exploring Mars remotely -- the Sojourner vehicle was a triumph, as were the Viking landers. If the point is an Apollo type mission -- go there, snap a few pictures, collect some rocks, come back, and then say "Well, we can go there. What's next?" -- then I must wonder if that's the best reason to go. The only reason such a mission would make sense, as far as I can see, is to serve as a precursor to actual colonization of the Red Planet. Is that the case? I don't know. But if we're looking to start colonization of other worlds, perhaps the Moon would be a better place to start.

:: Can the Russians really meet the financial obligation of this mission? They've had problems coming up with the money and materials they pledged for the International Space Station, and a Mars mission would be far more expensive.

IMAGES OF THE WEEK





The Signing of the Declaration of Independence, John Trumbull.





The Declaration of Independence, by Thomas Jefferson. (Click on the image for a transcription of the Declaration.)

A Concord Hymn
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)

By the rude bridge that arched the flood,
Their flag to April's breeze unfurled;
Here once the embattled farmers stood;
And fired the shot heard round the world.

The foe long since in silence slept;
Alike the conqueror silent sleeps,
And Time the ruined bridge has swept
Down the dark stream that seaward creeps.

On this green bank, by this soft stream,
We place with joy a votive stone,
That memory may their deeds redeem,
When, like our sires, our sons are gone.

O Thou who made those heroes dare
To die, and leave their children free, —
Bid Time and Nature gently spare
The shaft we raised to them and Thee.

In the new issue of Science Fiction Chronicle, novelist Alan Dean Foster provides a review of Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones. Of course, this is somewhat old hat since the film has been in release for over six weeks, but still it's an interesting review. Foster gives the film a fair-minded review. For example, he says that the film's love story is "neither as grating as the majority of critics contend nor as passionate as it ought to be". This seems fair to me, although I am still not convinced that Lucas was ever striving for passion in the first place. Foster gets a couple of details wrong about the film -- he states, for instance, that during the arena scene Anakin and Obi Wan do not use their Force powers to try to confuse their attacking beasts, but Anakin clearly does just that (it's how he is able to calm the beast long enough for him to jump onto its back). Foster also utilizes the (sp?) tag after every Star Wars proper noun in his lengthy review, but throughout he spells "Anakin" wrong, rendering it as "Annakin". (No, that's not a critique of the review content; rather, a pointing-out of a funny detail.)

Finally, Foster points out in passing what could be an interesting plot point: that we don't necessarily know that Luke and Leia have the same father; we only assume they do. I'm not sure about this. In Return of the Jedi, Obi Wan specifically tells Luke that the "other Skywalker" is his twin sister. How they could be twins and not have the same father is beyond me, unless it turns out that Luke or Leia is actually a clone. (Now, that might be an interesting twist indeed.)

POETICAL EXCURSION #5

"Annabel Lee", by Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849).

It was many and many a year ago,
In a kingdom by the sea,
That a maiden there lived whom you may know
By the name of Annabel Lee;
And this maiden she lived with no other thought
Than to love and be loved by me.

She was a child and I was a child,
In this kingdom by the sea,
But we loved with a love that was more than love--
I and my Annabel Lee--
With a love that the winged seraphs of Heaven
Coveted her and me.

And this was the reason that, long ago,
In this kingdom by the sea,
A wind blew out of a cloud by night
Chilling my Annabel Lee;
So that her highborn kinsmen came
And bore her away from me,
To shut her up in a sepulchre
In this kingdom by the sea.

The angels, not half so happy in Heaven,
Went envying her and me;
Yes! that was the reason (as all men know,
In this kingdom by the sea)
That the wind came out of the cloud, chilling
And killing my Annable Lee.

But our love it was stronger by far than the love
Of those who were older than we--
Of many far wiser than we--
And neither the angels in Heaven above
Nor the demons down under the sea
Can ever dissever my soul from the soul
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee:--

Fore the moon never beams without bringing me dreams
Of the beautiful Annabel lee;
And the stars never rise but I see the bright eyes
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
And so,all the night-tide, I lie down by the side
Of my darling, my darling, my life and my bridge,
In her sepulchre there by the sea--
In her tomb by the sounding sea.

This poem first captivated me when I read it in my eleventh grade English class, and my appreciation of it has only deepened throughout the years (fifteen of them, to be precise). Chiaroscuro -- the alternation of light and dark -- is one of the oldest of tools in visual art, and it is also frequently employed by poets through their imagery. Poe's "Annabel Lee" is no exception.

The "light" of the poem is found, at first, in the construction of its verse. Just reading this poem aloud, with no attention paid at all to the meaning, is pleasurable. Poe uses alliteration and repetition of words to maximum effect, starting in the very first line: It was many and many a year ago. His scansion is masterful, creating a lilting sense of rhythm and beauty. The "light" of Poe's chiaroscuro in "Annabel Lee" is found in the language and its rhythm. Reading this poem seems soothing at first, as if Poe has created a mere tribute to a particular love.

Chiaroscuro, though, also involves darkness, and in this poem the darkness of the content -- Poe's message -- stands in stark contrast to the "light" of the soft and pleasing form the poem takes. Consider the first stanza: in just the first two lines, Poe creates a feeling that is almost mythological -- he could be talking about Helen or Dido or Guenivere, some beauty from long ago. But the name of the beloved, Annabel Lee, somehow undermines that construction. It is not a name that one would associate with "many and many a year ago" in "kingdoms by the sea". The last sentence gives an indication of the narrator's possessive nature: a maiden who lives with no other thought than to love the narrator and provide an object for his affection. We are on treacherous psychological ground already, setting the stage for the darkness that is to come upon us, quite suddenly, at the end of the second stanza when the narrator's idyllic love story is revealed to be something that the angels covet.

We are told in the third stanza that a wind came to chill Annabel Lee, and thus her kinsmen came to take her away and shut her up in a sepulchre / In this kingdom by the sea. Note Poe's construction here: not, "She died and was buried by the sea", but rather that she has been taken away from me by her kinsmen -- specifically, her high-born kinsmen. In one easily overlooked phrase, the narrator suggests that Annabel Lee's love for him is illicit .

Then things become still darker in the fourth stanza. The narrator blames the angels for sending the chill that killed Annabel Lee, but again, Poe's construction suggests something else. Note the narrator's Yes! at the beginning of the third line, as if he has grasped onto a new explanation and already decided that this must be the correct answer. He also employs the parenthetical as all men know.... in an attempt to give his lie the credibility it needs. Only then, at the end of this particular stanza when the narrator has deflected the blame for Annabel Lee's death from himself, does he admit in specific language that she is dead.

The psychology becomes even more urgent in the fifth and sixth stanzas, when the narrator reveals the depth of his obsession with Annabel Lee. He tells us that his and her souls are now intertwined, that neither the angels nor the demons Can ever dissever my soul from the soul / Of the beautiful Annabel Lee. The narrator dreams of her constantly; he sees her face in the sky. Four of the poem's last fifteen lines end in breathless pauses, and the repetitions in the sentence construction mount, impelling us forward to the poem's conclusion, when the narrator tells us that each night he sleeps beside Annabel Lee In her tomb by the sounding sea. Is this meant literally? Is Poe telling us that the narrator actually enters her tomb and sleeps at her side, or is he merely using the ghoulish imagery to further suggest the level of his obsession? It seems to me that the latter is more likely, given the poem's careful psychological construction and its lack of such stark "death" imagery until that point. Of course, Poe was no stranger to writing about the "unquiet coffin", as Stephen King would call it, so the possibility of the former cannot be ignored.

"Annabel Lee" is a masterpiece of Gothic literature and truly representative of Edgar Allan Poe's genius.

(NOTE: In some editions of the poem -- notably, that published by the Library of America in its collection of Poe's poetry and tales -- the last line of "Annabel Lee" reads, In her tomb by the side of the sea. This is actually the final line according to Poe's finished manuscript of the poem, with In her tomb by the sounding sea existing in earlier drafts. Whatever Poe's feelings and reasons for changing this line, I simply prefer the earlier version over the later, "complete" version.)

This book was written with the world's finest word processor, a Waterman cartridge fountain pen. To write the first draft of such a long book by hand put me in touch with the language as I haven't been for years.I even wrote one night (during a power outage) by candlelight. One rarely finds such opportunities in the twenty-first century, and they are to be savored.

--Stephen King, author's note to Dreamcatcher.

I was thrilled when I read this statement by Stephen King, one of the world's most popular storytellers, just as I was excited when I learned that Neal Stephenson, author of the brilliant SF novel Cryptonomicon, is writing his next novel in longhand with a fountain pen. Why did these revelations excite me so? Because I write all of my own fiction first drafts with a fountain pen, as well as occasional notes for my longer posts to Byzantium's Shores. Of course, this is no superstition on my part; my decision a few years ago to write with a fountain pen was not borne of some desire to be like the Big Boys who also use them. I have very real and (to me) practical reasons for using a fountain pen.


Parker Duofold Fountain Pen

I recently took an online typing test and discovered that I type at around 70-80 words per minute. This, apparently, is a decent rate -- although I do generate a fairly large number of typographical errors; luckily, I am also a fairly decent proofreader, so these errors are almost always fixed. So why not just type my first drafts on the computer? Well, there is the general factor of comfort. After sitting in front of a computer screen at a day job for eight hours, I find it very hard to summon the desire to do the same at home. Writing longhand allows for the "change of scenery" that is so often needed. Plus, it allows a level of portability that is unavailable to anyone not lucky enough to own a laptop (and a fountain pen's ink reservoir makes writing possible for far, far longer than the standard laptop battery). I can pack up my pages and my pens -- I always have two of them filled with ink -- and go, say, to the library or to a restaurant or even to a park to sit and write. This flexibility is wonderful.

My other main reason for writing longhand is connected to that typing speed test I spoke of above. While my fingers can type at that speed, I find that except in very rare cases my brain cannot keep up with my fingers. Lines of dialogue do not come fast enough; adjectives and descriptors tend to be pedestrian; and in the worst cases I can stall completely on a crucial plot point. I find that typing speeds up my process to a degree that my muse simply cannot meet, and thus writing by keyboard suffers. Writing longhand seems to slow down the physical process enough that my brain can keep up.

I also have an aesthetic reason for writing longhand: because a few years back I became fascinated with fountain pens. A fountain pen is an elegant tool, pleasurable in the hand and also in the way the pen interacts with the paper. A good fountain pen almost feels like a paint brush when writing, and it is fun to watch the line of wet ink left behind by the pen dry and become permanent. Fountain pens also adapt to the hand of their owner over time; the tip wears a certain way, owing to the amount of pressure applied and the angle of the pen utilized by the user. After a long enough period, a fountain pen becomes truly its user's pen; another person picking up the same pen might find it scratchy and barely usable, because the pen has adapted to its user's hand.

Fountain pens are also lovely objects in themselves, some of the finest ones available being art objects in their own right. Witness this stunning Omas pen, hand-carved in a 30-pen limited edition for the 500th anniversary of Christopher Columbus's discovery of America:



Absolutely beautiful. Of course, I don't own a single pen of this sheer beauty, but as with wine one does not need to sample the highest end products to take pleasure in them. Even the cheaper fountain pens -- a good, "introductory" pen will run between $25.00 and $35.00 -- may seem ridiculously expensive at first, but one is very unlikely to lose a fountain pen, and with proper care a fountain pen will last for many, many years. If you're looking for some small antidote to the "disposable society", a fountain pen is a fine place to start.

Here are a couple of links to fountain pen sites:

:: Levenger is a catalog company that deals in a lot of high-end office supplies. If you want a portfolio in soft-grain leather, for instance, this is the place to go. They also carry a large selection of writing instruments, including some of their own make. Their True Writers are beautiful pens, but my favorite is still my Gotham fountain pen with its art-deco styling.

:: Swisher Pens does nothing but pens, and they do them extremely well. A very fine site.

:: The Fountain Pen Page is precisely that. This is a good source of general information about fountain pens and pen collecting, with suggestions on good pens for beginners, advice on pen selection and care, and a comprehensive set of links to pen-related sites.

I complained the other day about a particular bit of incompetence on one of Buffalo's local news stations. Well, one of the other stations was not to be outdone. On Saturday, as everyone probably knows, President Bush underwent a colonoscopy during which he transferred power to Vice President Cheney, for all of about an hour. Bush was back on the job by mid-afternoon. However, this didn't stop Channel 2 from cutting its primetime news promos as follows:

"President Bush undergoes a medical procedure and is forced to transfer power to the Vice President! When will the President return to power? The latest information on his condition, live at eleven!!"

I'm wondering if this isn't just the type of thing that Chevy Chase was skewering when he would say, "This just in: George Washington is still dead."

Another interesting bit from NPR last week, courtesy the fine program Fresh Air with Terry Gross (which I don't get to hear often enough): an interview with food writer Robert Wolke, who has written a new book about the science of cooking. Among other things, he describes just why grilled food tastes so good and just how a certain manufacturer of cooking sprays -- made from vegetable oil -- can be called "non-fat" on their labels.

Music therapy was the topic on the second hour of this week's edition of Talk of the Nation Science Friday on NPR. Music therapy is a fast-growing field as more and more science uncovers links between music and healing and health. The NPR program featured a number of music therapists and experts on neuroscience, including Dr. Oliver Sacks of Awakenings fame discussing the latest research on music and how it is processed in our brains. Charles Darwin, it turns out, may have been completely wrong when he wrote: "As neither the enjoyment nor the capacity of producing musical notes are faculties of the least direct use to man in reference to his ordinary habits of life, they must be ranked amongst the most mysterious with which he is endowed." In short, Darwin is saying that musical production does not seem to have any overt survival benefit from an evolutionary standpoint. Contemporary research, as the NPR program demonstrates, suggests otherwise: that music is extremely important to survival.

Parenthetical to this topic is a quote by English composer William Byrd (1543-1623), entitled "Reasons briefely set downe by the auctor to perswade every one to learne to singe".

First, it is a knowledge easely taught, and quickly learned, where there is a good master, and an apt scoller.

Second, the exercise of singing is delightful to nature, and good to preserve the health of Man.

Third, it doth strengthen all parts of the brest, and doth open the pipes.

Fourth, it is a singuler good remedie for a stutting and stamering in speech.

Fifth, it is the best meanes to procure a perfect pronunciation, and to make a good orator.

Sixth, it is the onely way to know where Nature hath bestowed the benefir of a good voyce, which guift is so rare, as there is not one among a thousand, that hath it; and in many, that excellent guift is lost, because they want Art to expresse Nature.

Seventh, there is not any musicke of instuments whatsoever, comparable to that which is made of the voyces of Men, where the voyces are good, and the same well sorted and ordered.

Eighth, the better the voyce is, the meeter it is to honour and serve God therewith: and the voyce of man is chiefely to be employed to that ende.

Since singing is so good a thing, I wish all men would learne to singe.

(quoted from The Esstential Canon of Classical Music by David Dubal.)

IMAGE OF THE WEEK





Cover of "Paradox", by Paul Gulacy.

One of the most durable creative collaborations in any medium is that of writer Doug Moench and artist Paul Gulacy. These two men are responsible for many of the finest comics and graphic novels of the last three decades. They are best known for their 1970s work on Marvel's Master of Kung-Fu series. Other favorites of mine by Moench and Gulacy include Six From Sirius (from which I derived my screen name), Slash Maraud, Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight, and James Bond 007: Serpent's Tooth. Gulacy's work is notable for its photographic realism and his ability to create static images of cinematic scope. He is one of comics' finest artists.

The image links to an informative site about Paul Gulacy.

I don't think I've ever lived in a place where the local television news stations were not held by the locals to be generally incompetent or at least moderately goofy. Surely, then, the Buffalo news stations are not unique in this. I'm sure the stations in other cities all find some way to justify calling themselves "the number one news station in Chicago" or Memphis or Tulsa or Denver or wherever, despite the apparent logical contradiction in there being more than one "number one news station". And I'm sure that in other cities, news stations frequently open a given bit of reportage with the breathless statement that "You heard it here first!"

The occasion for this little bit of rambling and ranting? Well, tonight Buffalo's CBS affiliate (WIVB, Channel 4, for those curious persons) did a story about one particular pair of old Buffalo buildings that, despite being on the National Registry of Historic Landmarks, are in serious disrepair. My problem with the story? Channel 4 aired this story during its 11:00 p.m. newscast, and as is general procedure they had a reporter actually on the scene, in the vicinity of the two buildings in question. Fair enough (although surely the same material could have been delivered by the anchor). But then this reporter begins: "Behind me you can see the two towers of the Richardson Complex." Unfortunately, given that this report was shown live at about 11:15 at night, nothing at all could be seen behind the reporter! She actually gestured to the buildings, but because of the darkness -- coupled with the fact that the buildings in question were built with dark granite -- she seemed to be indicating the empty air.

Keep up the good work, Channel 4.

I recently read a new book about the craft of writing: Lessons From a Lifetime of Writing: A Novelist Looks at his Craft by David Morrell. Morrell, the author of such novels as First Blood, has written here a lively volume of writerly advice. Not all of it is new: I have yet to see a book on writing that doesn't counsel a would-be writer to actually write and do so each and every day. Some lessons, though, bear repeating -- especially with regard to writing, an activity where it is frightfully easy to allow a day or two to pass without once committing words to paper. The best sections, to me, were the sections on dialogue -- like Stephen King, Morrell advises us to avoid adverbs like the plague, especially in dialogue attribution -- and the section on voice, where Morrell analyzes some of the problems inherent in writing fiction in the first person.

The book's later chapters address the life of a writer. Here we are told, of course, not to quit our day jobs; however, Morrell goes farther than that. He gives advice on money management for the writer, and in one particularly penetrating passage he describes the life of a writer who is on a book tour. This is in an attempt to disavow any aspiring writers of any illusions of fame or glamour that are to come with writerly success. Most interesting is his description of the book warehouse he toured that was heated by a giant furnace in which remaindered books were being burned. Ouch.

Morrell's book is not as good as Stephen King's On Writing (still the gold standard for writing books, as far as I am concerned), but it is still a worthwhile volume. I recommend it.

Fantasy comprises a large portion of the fiction that I read (along with science fiction, horror, and so-called "interstitial" fiction). Every genre, though, has subgenres, and within fantasy I have a particular fondness for works based on the legends of King Arthur and, going farther back, on the mythology of ancient Britain -- particularly Wales.

The Welsh national epic is called The Mabinogion, and one of its finest tellings -- by Evangeline Walton -- has been reissued in hardback. Walton is one of the leading lights of twentieth century fantasy, and her Mabinogion cycle -- consisting of The Prince of Annwn, The Children of Llyr, The Song of Rhiannon, and The Island of the Mighty -- is a towering masterpiece by one of twentieth century fantasy's leading lights. I was fortunate enough to acquire this work in its last reissue ten years ago, but I am thrilled that the work is again available. Any lover of fantasy and mythic fiction must read Walton's Mabinogion.

Sadly, it appears that essayist Paul Riddell -- of whom I wrote last week -- has decided to pull the plug on his website, The Healing Power of Obnoxiousness, one week before his hosting arrangement was to expire. Therefore, I have removed the permanent link to HPoO, and replaced it with Sci-Fi Weekly.

Here's hoping that Riddell returns to form soon.

I've added another nice blog that I found recently: It's All About Books!. This one is about, well, it's about....

NASA has received a fair amount of criticism in recent years for its stubborn over-reliance on the space shuttle and the resultant basis of almost our entire space program on technology that dates to the early and middle 1970s. The Space Administration has done little more than put new launch vehicles on the drawing board; except for a handful of prototype test firings, the shuttle is all NASA has. And now they've been forced to ground the entire shuttle fleet, pending analysis and repair of microscopic cracks that have turned up the shuttles' propellant lines. Not good news for a space program that has been lacking in focus pretty much since the conclusion of the Apollo mission.

I know it's early -- it's not even July 4 yet -- but I think I know one of the things that I want for Christmas. Oh, what a hoot!!

No, it's not time for the Image of the Week yet, but I had to show this item: the teaser poster for The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, which is due out this winter.





The title, for those of you who are not as up on your Tolkien as you should be (You know who you are, he said ominously), refers to the places at the center of action in LOTR's second installment. The tower in the foreground of this poster is Minas Morgul, which guards the entrance into Mordor through which Frodo and Sam must pass. The other tower (the one in the background) is Orthanc, the citadel of Saruman in the land of Isengard where the turncoat wizard held Gandalf captive and created his Orc army in the first film. I've also linked the poster image to an AICN page were a series of links to mirror-sites containing the latest trailer for The Two Towers can be found.

Between the completion of Star Wars and the release of Lord of the Rings, the next couple of years are going to be good ones for the movies.

(ADDENDUM: According to the film's trailer, the first tower is actually Barad-dur, the stronghold of Sauron, and not Minas Morgul. The books themselves say that Minas Morgul is one of the Two Towers, in the closing message at the end of The Fellowship of the Ring. Peter Jackson evidently made this change to fit into his idea that Saruman is an ally of Sauron's.)

Remember a few months back, to when some researchers announced that they had determined the average color of the Universe to be turquoise? And then, they had to backtrack because of a bug in the code they used to make this determination, and instead announced the color of the Universe to be a shade of beige?

Well, they have apparently decided on a name for the Color of the Universe: Cosmic Latte. (Yes, you read that right. Our Universe is the average color of a menu item at Starbuck's.)

For details (including some techinical information behind the whole project), go here.