Next year, a total eclipse

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Wikimedia — Click on map for higher resolution

Next year, most of us in the U.S. will have a chance to see a total eclipse of the sun without traveling too far. The eclipse will be Aug. 21, 2017.

Here’s a web site with all the details: eclipse2017.org

I think I’ve already figured out where I’ll want to go to watch the eclipse. The path of totality crosses a magical spot in the mountains of North Carolina, down at the point where the borders of three states meet — Tennessee, Georgia, and North Carolina. This is Deliverance country. Spooky, no?

A couple of book reports

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The old translation and the new

Plato: The Complete Works. Edited by John M. Cooper, Hackett Publishing, 1997. 1838 pages.

For years, my only volume of Plato was the translation by Benjamin Jowett, first published in 1871. I bought the volume in a used bookstore. It seemed like a good find at the time. From the pencil markings in the front, it appears that I paid $12 for it. Most of my previous reading of Plato was from the Jowett translation. The Phaedrus dialogue, in particular, figures into my Ursa Major novels. One of my two main characters even is named Phaedrus.

Now I know that relying on such an old translation was a huge mistake. An academic friend happened to mention a couple of months ago that the Jowett translation is badly bowdlerized. Instead of Jowett, we now have a new and far superior translation, published in 1997. It’s edited by John Cooper, and it isn’t bowdlerized. It also isn’t cheap. The hardback will cost you over $50.

Benjamin Jowett, by all accounts, was a heck of a scholar. He was at Oxford. But he also was a theologian and a 19th Century evangelical. Do you hear the alarm bells going off? It means that Jowett can’t be trusted not to censor the Greeks. I’ve not spent that much time on side-by-side comparisons of the translations, but it was easy enough to see that where Jowett used the English word “love,” the Cooper translators used the word “sex.” Now that’s a very different thing, isn’t it? And one of the areas in which we most don’t want to misunderstand the Greeks is on the distinction between love and sex. Sex is discussed quite a bit in the Plato dialogues. It’s discussed very casually and without the slightest sign of the squeamishness that is detectable in the Victorian translation. Jowett’s theology prevented him from understanding this. I sometimes wonder how Greek literature even survived the long, dark Christian era. My guess is that it’s only because Christianity required the fetishization of Rome, and along with Rome, Greece. We’re lucky that the squeamish made do with mere bowdlerization, though I have little doubt that some lost texts were lost because it was thought best to copy over something so un-Christian.

There’s another, more subtle, difference in the translations. That is that, in an archaic translation, Plato himself seems archaic. But, in a modern translation, Socrates and his young men seem thoroughly modern. Their wonderful sense of humor seems just the same as ours. Human foibles, it would seem, haven’t changed a bit. And so, reading Plato in a modern translation makes us realize that the distance between (ahem) us smart folk and the Greeks is about a millisecond. They were just like us in a great many ways, and that’s incredibly endearing. There is nothing at all formal about the dialogues. They’re super-casual, just the guys sitting around talking, jesting, and trying their wits against each other. You realize that Socrates was popular not just because he was smart, but also because he was funny, always kind (even to the gym rats with their modest intellects), and fun to be around.

So, as a smart folk and as a reader of this blog, you do keep a volume of Plato by your bed for fill-in reading, don’t you? If you have the Jowett translation, slip a card into it with a warning to the next owner about bowdlerization, sell it to a used bookstore, and get yourself the new Cooper translation.

Don’t fret too much over the The Republic. Utopias as a form of literature are interesting, but their shelf life is terrible. Instead, browse the other dialogues according to your mood.

If you’re new to Plato, I would offer a warning. It’s sometimes difficult to tell when Socrates is being serious. He sometimes elaborates on arguments that he doesn’t believe, at all. This is certainly true in The Phaedrus. If we were sitting at Socrates’ feet, no doubt he’d wink at us from time to time, and he’d sometimes be interrupted by laughter that isn’t mentioned in the dialogues. It’s like listening to Mozart. Frequently Mozart wants you to laugh at his music, just as Socrates wants you to laugh at some arguments. So one needs to be very careful about taking snippets of Plato out of context. It’s possible to get him exactly backwards.

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The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction. By Matthew B. Crawford, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016. 320 pages.

This is a strange book, difficult to review. I’d call it philosophy, but Crawford says that it’s more a polemic. The author wants you to take control of your own attention instead of allowing your attention to be dominated by the many forces that have such clever ways of usurping your attention for their own purposes. The author also wants you to be less abstract, less concerned with representations of the world (the most extreme of which would be virtual reality) and more concerned with the world right under your nose.

Crawford’s philosophical position naturally leads him to a great respect for skilled practice, both for the way it requires our attention and the way it requires us to pay attention to the real world, the world outside our heads. He mentions many skills — cooking, gardening, motorcycle riding, pretty much anything that requires the use of tools. He talks about how quickly you can get killed if your attention lapses while racing a motorcycle. He detests “drive by wire” automobile engineering, in which the brake pedal isn’t truly connected to the brakes, or the steering wheel barely connected to the steering. This, by the way, made me appreciate once again how much I like the honest Mercedes engineering of my Smart car, in which the driver is truly connected to the road. It helped me realize how good design — for example the design of my Nikon professional cameras — makes the camera feel like a natural extension of the body and the body’s visual system.

Having made his case in the first part of the book, he devotes his last chapter to the art of organ building, as an illustration of his message. As an organist, I found this fascinating. If Crawford himself is a musician, he didn’t say so. But the work and time that he put into understanding the craft of organ building made me realize that he is almost certainly equally diligent about whatever else commands his attention.

I’m appending a couple of paragraphs about the organ, not because it summarizes the book but because it’s funny, and it’s a great piece of writing.

“Pipe organs are to the Baroque era what the Apollo moon rockets were to the 1960s: enormously complex machines that focused the gaze of a people upward. Pushing the envelope of the engineering arts, a finished organ stood as a monument of knowledge and cooperation. Installed in the spiritual center of a town, a pipe organ mimics the human voice on a more powerful scale, and summons a congregation to join their voices to it. The point is to praise something glorious that transcends man’s making. Yet the congregants can’t help but notice that this music of praise, like the instrument that carries it aloft, is itself glorious.

“A big pipe organ thus expresses both humble piety and vaunting pride at once. It can be shockingly indiscreet in this later role; the organ often dwarfs the ostensible altar. But perhaps these tendencies get blurred together in the life of a congregation. When the choir is at full song, the stained glass is rattling loose, and the whole house seems ready to launch, what then? Then the organist pulls out all the stops. He shifts his weight to the right. His left foot is poised over the leftmost pedal, the low C, and now he stomps it, sending a thousand cubic feet of air per minute through massive pipes to blast heaven’s favorite pigeons out of the rafters. Now the very pews transmit joy to women’s loins, and the strongest man in the congregation feels himself reduced to a blushing bride of Christ. Now one feels it is God’s own organ that fills the sacred chamber, and when this happens, praise comes naturally: hallelujah!”

Political insanity and religious insanity

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Televangelist Kenneth Copeland

While the 2016 presidential election puts on full display the political insanity of much of the American population — not to mention the insanity of the Republican Party — let’s not fail to point out another insanity that is just as prevalent: religious insanity. Let’s also note how closely the two are connected.

The quote below is attributed to televangelist Kenneth Copeland, in a recent appearance on the Trinity Broadcasting Network:

“If Christians don’t support Trump, they are risking the wrath of God. Trump has been chosen by God, and by rejecting him, they are rejecting God. They could be punished with barrenness, poverty or even having a gay child.”

And the quote below is attributed to Anne Graham Lotz, on the air with right-wing radio host Steve Deace:

“Our nation seems to be shaking its fist in God’s face and telling him to get out of our politics, get out of our schools, get out of our businesses, get out of our marketplace, get off the streets. It’s just stunning to me the way we are basically abandoning God as a culture and as a nation. … I think that’s why God allows bad things to happen. I think that’s why he would allow 9/11 to happen, or the dreadful attack in San Bernardino, or some of these other places, to show us that we need him. We’re desperate without him.”

What a nice god! Though he must be incredibly busy running the universe, he also has time to punish earthlings for not voting Republican. That god also kills people — or at least allows people to be killed — to remind us how much we need such a violent, vindictive god.

As the philosopher and neuroscientist Sam Harris has pointed out, this kind of religious delusion and narcissism are prevalent among plenty of people who might see Kenneth Copeland and Anne Graham Lotz as a bit extreme. Harris has beautifully pointed out the narcissism of people who think that God is intimately involved in the details of their lives. Not only does God actually tell them what he’s thinking, it’s remarkable how much these people and their god are alike: pure nasty. While your God was finding you a parking space, Harris says, or answering your prayers for enough money to pay your credit card bill, how many children did that same God allow to die in Africa while their helpless parents watched and prayed? That’s narcissism on top of the nasty.

I’m fully on board with freedom of religion and freedom of speech. But those freedoms also mean that the rest of us are free to tell these people that they’re vile and sickening, and that their god is even worse.

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Anne Graham Lotz

Tomato sandwiches, all home made

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The garden is producing beautiful tomatoes in generous quantities. Who can resist tomato sandwiches? Though I bought a loaf of bread for the ceremonial first tomato sandwich of the summer, I just couldn’t eat any more bad bread. This is organic sandwich bread made from a recipe in Peter Reinhart’s The Bread Baker’s Apprentice, the best book on breadmaking I’ve ever seen.

Home-grown organic tomatoes, homemade bread, and homemade pickles. You can’t go wrong.

The penalty for stealing eggs: Move down to the river

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Every summer, black snakes stake out the territory near the chicken house and steal eggs. When Ken is here, they don’t get away with it. This snake was the second egg-stealing snake that Ken has caught this summer and moved to the river. He catches ’em, puts ’em in a bucket, and releases them down near the Dan River.

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The crazy is bottom up, not top down

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Charlotte Observer

I have no idea what Fox-watchers and Limbaugh listeners are being told — probably the usual stuff about Benghazi and whatever it takes at the moment to keep Republicans angry, disinformed, and motivated to vote. But it’s pretty clear now that the mainstream media have fully realized that Donald Trump is a dangerous madman and that the possibility of his being elected president is an existential threat to the United States (if not to the world, if Trump gets his hand on the button).

All that is true. But there is one very important thing that the mainstream media and its pundits still are not acknowledging. That is that Donald Trump is not the source of the political insanity that has long been evident in this country, not just during this campaign. The political insanity is in the Republican Party itself and in the media that feed, inflame, and constantly deceive Republican voters. When you understand that this is bottom up, not top down, then it’s clear that only a crazy man like Trump could have gotten the Republican nomination in the first place. It’s also clear that the implosion of Trump’s campaign, though it will head off the present emergency, will not solve the problem that makes this country half insane and almost ungovernable.

We might hope that the younger sons of Rupert Murdoch might have plans for Fox News that would bring an end to the 24/7 paranoia and deception that has been fed to Republican voters for the past 18 years under Roger Ailes and which has made many, if not most, Republican voters delusional and driven by rage and paranoia. But we can’t count on it. Rush Limbaugh’s career will eventually end. But we have no idea when.

With the Dumpster fire of Donald Trump’s campaign safely behind us, we might imagine that we’d be out of the woods. But we would not be out of the woods. Nothing but the destruction of the Republican Party as it is today, a total reform of its pundits, mass firings at right wing “think tanks,” and calling out the meanness of some churches and theologies would ensure that we’re really out of the woods.

Below: Just one day’s worth of Trump headlines from the Washington Post.

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Also:

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Update 6:30 p.m. Aug. 4:

For some graphic evidence that the crazy is bottom up, have a look at this New York Times video from Trump rallies. If you’ve ever been verbally assaulted by a right-winger, you know that they get their words from the right-wing media, because they don’t have the knowledge or intellect to come up with their own. But the crazy, and the hatred, were already there before someone like Trump or Limbaugh put words in their mouths.

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Road trip to Green Bank

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I’ve made some fine road trips in my day, in several countries. But I believe the road trip that I just returned from was one of the best ever. The trip was mostly on back roads from Stokes County, North Carolina, through the Blue Ridge Mountains into the New River Valley, thence into West Virginia to Green Bank.

My primary mission was to see the Green Bank radio telescope, the largest fully steerable radio telescope in the world. To go see the telescope seemed like a no-brainer, since it’s not that far away and since I’m a space nerd and a radio nerd. Getting there was half the fun.

I am not well traveled in West Virginia. We all know that parts of West Virginia are environmental sacrifice zones, chiefly for coal but also for natural gas. This road trip took me through a very different part of West Virginia — a still-natural and well-preserved countryside, much of it in national forests.

The wildflowers! The trip would have been worthwhile for the wildflowers alone. The roadsides and pastures were dense with wildflowers at the peak of summer. I was green with envy at the rainfall the area has had and how green everything was. In between the mountains, the ridges of which tend to run north to south, are wide valleys, extremely fertile. It’s perfect pasture land. And, judging from the size of the farmhouses, that pastureland made lots of farmers rich. These are not the small subsistence farms that were much more common in the American southeast.

Morning temperatures ranged from 68 to 75 degrees F. Afternoons might have been warmer except that clouds and showers seem to descend on the area pretty much every summer day. There was hardly any traffic on the roads. I drove with the windows down, enjoying that sense of freedom (in my Smart car) that car commercials always try to give — the idea that there’s no one on the road but you. The road trip was almost freeway-free. GPS did the navigating, but when presented with alternate routes I always chose the routes that followed rivers or that avoided populated areas.

The telescope is fascinating. I have been plotting the third book of the Ursa Major series, and in book 3 Jake and Phaedrus actually will find themselves at Green Bank, having gotten there by mule, for some action scenes that require the use of the telescope, though the telescope had been idle since the calamity struck (in the first novel) that wiped out 6 billion of the earth’s population and returned the survivors to the Iron Age.

The telescope is extremely sensitive to radio interference. It’s located inside the National Radio Quiet Zone, and the surrounding mountains also keep out radio interference. I lost my cellular signal 50 miles south of Green Bank. Upon arriving in Green Bank, hoping to find accommodations to spend the night there (there are no such accommodations), I stopped at the public library, hoping to use WIFI. They library staff told me that they’re not permitted to have WIFI because it would interfere with the telescope. If you visit Green Bank, try to arrive early in the day, do the tour, and then leave yourself time to head east toward Charlottesville or south toward Blacksburg, if you want something to eat or a place to sleep — or Internet access.

The tour takes an hour. You’ll start in the auditorium with an undemanding scientific briefing from your tour guide, and then a video. Then you’ll board a bus and be driven to a point near the base of the telescope. The tour guide will explain that the bus uses a diesel engine, because the spark plugs in a gas engine would create radio interference.

It’s hard from photographs to grasp the scale of the telescope. It’s 485 feet tall, 60 percent higher than the Statue of Liberty. The size of the dish is almost three acres. It weighs 8,500 tons, but it can be rotated and tilted (azimuth and elevation) with extreme precision.

There were nine people in the tour group I was in. Six of them were Dutch, two were British, and I was the only American. Why are Americans so incurious? Once again I was reminded why I have so often said that I have much more in common with the average European than with the average American. I returned to Trump country — Wytheville, Virginia, to spend the night.

Driving south toward Wytheville, about an hour from Green Bank, I got cellular service again. A text message arrived from Ken, who was holding down the fort at the abbey: “Four foot long snake has been relocated. Raccoons ate all orchard apples. Lily is well. .15 Inches rain. Hope you’re having fun.”

Wytheville was not much fun, to tell you the truth. Wytheville was once a sleepy place, but major new roads have turned it into a travel hub. Watching an ill-mannered, incredibly unhealthy bunch of Americans descend on a free Ramada Inn breakfast made me want to emigrate to Scotland as quick as I could pack my bags. I was conflicted about where to have dinner in Wytheville. The many restaurants were mostly about “family” food, or they were chain restaurants. I finally settled on the Sagebrush Steakhouse & Saloon. It appeared to be locally owned, and I liked the “saloon” part of the name. I confess that I had a filet mignon with garlic mashed potatoes and broccoli. It was superb. I felt as though I was having supper in a well-run Irish pub. If you ever find yourself in Wytheville, I recommend it.

Places like Fries, Virginia, are depressing. Fries is a classic example of a textile town that is now poor, culturally and otherwise. In other words, Trump country. In 1940, its population was 1,555. It’s now 469. Years ago, most of the people worked in the cotton mill, which was powered by a hydroelectric dam on the New River. The dam is still there; the old mill has been demolished. The mill closed in 1989 and put 1,700 people out of work. The roads around Fries are a classic, and depressing, example of Trump-supporter impoverishment. The housing is dilapidated, with junk in the yards and dogs on chains. The nasty little churches seem to be the few remaining businesses. One of the churches even seemed aware of the fact that it’s just a business selling heavenly comfort into the squalor. “Under same management for over 2,000 years,” said the church’s sign out front. Harrumph.

But how different the economy of West Virginia used to be! Not only were there prosperous farmers living on fertile land, there were many resorts, most having to do with springs. The grandest resort I saw was Sweet Springs, designed by Thomas Jefferson and once a hangout of the rich and famous.

Upon arriving home, I said to Ken that the road trip put me in mind of thoughts he describes in Trespassing Across America. Ken uses much more refined and nuanced language, but this road trip made me both love and hate America. Wonders such as the Green Bank Telescope are a reminder of what Americans have accomplished. Sweet Springs — not to mention those beautiful farms and the national forest — is a reminder of what America once was and promised to be. But now there are Trump signs amid the ruins of our old economy. As for the new economy in places this remote, it appears mostly to have to do with big highways and the sublimely ugly service and retail development that springs up along those highways. A brush with Europeans is a reminder of just how ignorant and culturally impoverished most Americans are.

You know what I think would make this country great again? An educated and informed population, the opposite of what Donald Trump and his political party stand for. I got the heck out of Fries and Wytheville and hurried back to the abbey, a tiny Fox-free bubble of books and imagination in the foothills.

So why will Jake and Phaedrus find themselves at Green Bank in book 3 of the Ursa Major series? A calamity threatens — an act of sabotage that would destroy an incoming ship loaded with E.T. VIP’s from the galactic federation. Unless Jake and Phaedrus can succeed in transmitting a radio signal out to the vicinity of Neptune to prevent the detonation, earth will get itself into yet another deep pickle, as earth is wont to do.

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The tour guide uses a Faraday cage and a spectrum analyzer to show how even a digital camera can create radio interference.

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The nicest of the many churches I passed

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What else is new? Outside money is always seeking to turn what’s left of natural America into a sacrifice zone.

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Sagebrush Steakhouse & Saloon at Wytheville

New game camera!

All the neighbors have game cameras. So it seemed like a no-brainer for the abbey to have one, too, to learn more about the many wild critters who live here. On its first night, the camera was set up for deer, but no deer showed up. Instead there were only shots of Ken setting up the camera and retrieving the memory card, while bringing a tomato from the garden.

I’ll post photos from the game camera when there are good ones.