That dot is the Space Shutte Discovery and the International Space Station. They flew over my house this evening, a bright star in a starless sky racing from Northwest to Southeast. I think they waved at me as I raised high a pint of Guinness.
It’s hard to imagine anything cooler.
Here’s a link to NASA’s satellite sighting info site, which gives sighting info for almost anywhere in the world.
The sky, today, burns October clear, blue as flame beyond words
The wind, today, blows through cottonwood leaves, whispers of words
The birds, today, abandon my feeder, save a grackle, lost from his flock
I am lost for words today
Today, I am that grackle, those leaves, this sky, these words, lost in a flock of
Cottonwood leaves
See my post at In the Pink Texas: Come on Down to Crazy Tex’s for Low Interest Student Loans
File this under I meant to blog about it a week ago…
A week ago Friday, we caught Sonic Youth at Stubb’s. Great show, as always, made even better by the fact that they weren’t touring in support of any album. Their most recent release was the brilliant (perfect, wonderful) rerelease of Daydream Nation (my favorite album).
I love seeing a great band with a long history free to play whatever they want rather than focusing on the new material. This time around, they played a few tracks from their most recent ’06’s Rather Ripped, “The World Looks Red” from Confusion is Sex and spent the rest of their show playing songs from Daydream Nation. To put it in perspective for me, this would be like going to see Pink Floyd and having them play Dark Side of the Moon. Sheer bliss.
For years, I’ve kept track of the Daydream songs I’ve heard them play (I haven’t missed an SY show in Austin since ’92). I’ve heard “Teenage Riot,” “Candle,” and “Eric’s Trip,” but Friday at Stubbs’s we were treated to all of those along with “The Sprawl” and my favorite of theirs “‘Cross the Breeze.” They even closed their set with all three songs form “The Trilogy.” Brilliant.
They sounded great, enormous like jet planes flying too close to the ground, their feedback noise jams drawing the thinnest line between order and chaos across the night.
I even bought a shirt.
The Meat Puppets opened. I’ve never seen them. but I’ve heard them. After the show, I wodered why I don’t have more Meat Puppets on my iPod.
One of my cowokers loaned me a favorite book of hers, Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Sprituality by Donald Miller. The cover of the book was a deep shade of blue with a picture of the top of a bridge as if taken as the car was racing underneath. I’m such a sucker for a blue book.
While reading it, I had an overwhelming urge to listen to Wilco. It seemed to fit. At the end of the book Miller writes about what he was listening to while writing it. The Pogues were on the list and so was Wilco. Especially Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. I hadn’t ever thought about whether a book could sound like what the author was listening to while writing it, but I guess they can. This one sounds like Wilco. That’s a good thing.
Miller writes about how he came to be a commited Christian while somehow avoiding becoming one of the right-wing Republican Christian fundamentalists that seem to tick him off. He even laments the difficulties of being a Christian writer who refuses to write right wing rants (try that ten times as fast as you can).
The polictical stuff aside (which tended to make me like him even more) it’s a heartfelt and thought provoking book that shares the author’s struggles with the difference between religion and spirituality. Being a Christian vs. Christianity as an institution.
Two years ago today I started this blog. It seems especially amusing that I’m taking a break from not blogging to blog about how long I’ve been blogging.
I’m almost finished with the second draft of my novel, which means that in the next few days I’ll return to the ‘sphere while I let others pick apart the book. I no longer have any idea if I’m making it better or worse by working on it.
I look forward to writing again in the cheap thrills and instant gratification world of blog where the first draft is the final draft.
The title kind of gives it away, but Michael Grant’s The Fall of the Roman Empire was still interesting for me and at 235 pages a hell of a lot shorter than Gibbons’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. I guess the decline makes up for the difference in page count.
I bought this one at Half Price Books many years ago, when I was first teaching Caesar and wanted to refresh my memory of all things Roman. Except for the three years in Naples when school trips took us regularly to Pompeii and various other relics of Rome, I haven’t really given the Romans much thought.
Interestingly, Grant’s book made me think less about the Romans and more about the fall of empire in general. What really interested me was Grant’s examination not so much of the outside forces – barbarians, huns and Germans – that destroyed the Western Roman Empire, but the internal forces that brought it down.
The unwillingness of most Romans to serve in the army, the ever-widening gap between rich and poor, many of whom found themselves crushed under unpayable debts, the squeezing of the middle class, mistrust of the emperor, racial tensions and animosity towards immigrants, increasing numbers of people dropping out of society, increasing demands for theological conformity, and an amazing sense of complacency (we’re Rome, we’re number 1) all combined to leave a great society devided against itself and easy pickings for the enterprising barbarians.
Worst of all, much of this sounded familiar. Way too familiar.
Old folks around these parts tell of an abandoned settlement before Austin, before Waterloo.
An old journal, its pages yellowed and mouldy from the years, was discovered near Treaty Oak under the lesser known Agreement Oak (chopped down in 1881 to make room for a luxury high rise log cabin). The diary and a broken wagon wheel were all that was found among the bones and cattle skulls. The settlement had been wiped out, presumably by Comanches.
When they started reading the journal, which had to be translated from Spanish, the final entry sent chills down the spines of all who read it. It said (I’m paraphrasing, of course):
Everyone dead… All gone… Can’t… Breathe. No air. Eyes burning like hellfire. Ragweed… Fall Elm…
Nose running. Can’t see… Can’t… clear sinuses.
Drums… Drums in the deep…
Scholars presumed the text to be apocrypha from some breakaway sect’s Book of Mormon. Whatever it was, the warnings weren’t heeded.
(cross-posted at In the Pink Texas)
I so thoroughly enjoyed Danny Danziger & Robert Lacey’s The Year 1000, I read the (sort of) follow up, 1215: The Year of Magna Carta by Danziger and John Gillingham. It isn’t so much about the Magna Carta as it is about life in England during that time including the events that led to the rebellion against the intolerable King John and his signing of the Magna Carta despite the fact that the pope quickly deemed it unholy.
Like The Year 1000, 1215 is a popular history offering an overview of a complex society in a time of profound change, the period in which England became less French and more English. The authors (whose introduction blames any mistakes on each other) sacrifice depth for breadth and cover education, religion, warfare, forest law, trial by ordeal, the crusades, castles and a staggering number of other topics, always coming back to what the Magna Carta reveals about the thinking of the times.
Much is written also about the kings of the years leading up to 1215, particularly Henry II and Richard the Lionhearted, the immediate successors to King John. It is John’s errors and villainy, however, that led to Magna Carta, and I found it interesting how the writers managed to tie every one of their subjects into the larger issues of the day, leading ultimately to Runnymede.
I find it wonderfully exciting, suddenly diving back into European history, a subject I have given less attention than deserved since finishing the required courses in college. For years, the history I read was either modern or concerned itself with ancient America. Now, I find there is much I didn’t know, and much that I had forgotten (what a great thing to be reminded of knowledge I’d thought lost in the nooks and crannies of my mind!)
I am also surprised by how much I did know, though without context, the filing system that is my mind had treated history as scraps of paper full of interesting information scattered across a desk that hadn’t seen a clean in years. Creating narrative cleans the desk.
Sometimes I flip through my paper journal to see what I wrote in the past. Here’s the entry for 9.20.02…
So now, lounging in the cool outdoors,
September eve, and the trees do shake,
Clouds mix with vapor trails,
Marring the frank permanence of the autumn sky.
That permanence is an illusion.
When heat returns,
The sky shifts like a liar,
Remembering its whiter, plainer side.