Just let it out

Writing is rewriting.

No need to think about style and elegance, not at first. Just write.

Write the first draft with your heart, refine it later with your head.

It's already inside you, like Michelangelo's David was already inside the marble. Let it out.

It was Ernest Hemingway who said writing is rewriting. Those of you who have read Hemingway know how succinct he could be. At times, perhaps too much so. But then, he was his own worst critic, finally resorting to a shotgun when liquor proved too slow.

The late George Plimpton became famous for his interviews and for his first-hand experience reports. In an interview with Ernest Hemingway, the famous author mentioned that he had rewritten the ending to "A Farewell to Arms" 39 times. When Plimpton asked him why so many times, Hemingway responded simply that he wanted to get the words right.

I can't remember ever having rewritten anything 39 times, but neither does anything I write ever appear in the original form.

A century or so ago I once worked for a couple of years at a small radio station, and like the other sales staff had to churn out copy under a deadline gun. So I did learn to write things in my head as I typed and make it come out right the first time. Or at least acceptably right for a radio commercial, containing just the right number of cliches to make it come out to exactly 30 seconds. If one wanted his stuff produced that evening, one learned to write fast and get on with the next 30 seconds of forgettable drivel. But that kind of crap writing makes for pretty weak story lines.

I no longer want to write things that will make you have an irresistible impulse to run out and buy new carpet or eat at certain restaurants, and so I don't write like that anymore. I find I have become more like Papa Hemingway. Minus the shotgun, of course.

Writing is rewriting.

High Flight

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I've climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
Of sun-split clouds - and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of - wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov'ring there
I've chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air.
Up, up the long delirious, burning blue,
I've topped the windswept heights with easy grace
Where never lark, or even eagle flew -
And, while with silent lifting mind I've trod
The high untresspassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand and touched the face of God.

—Gillespie Magee
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[Photos of Neil Armstrong and moon print courtesy of NASA]

Observations from the far side of the moon

Electricity is actually made up of extremely tiny particles called electrons. You cannot see these with the naked eye unless you have been smoking pot. Then everything becomes crystal clear. You can even slow them down in time so you can examine them more closely. Even then it does no good to try and talk to them; they are on a mission. Sometimes I think I understand everything in the universe. Then I regain consciousness.
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One of the first things the Soviets did to show up the USA back during the Cold War when artificial satellites were the latest cool thing, was to send one to orbit the moon and take pictures of the dark side of the moon. Mankind had never seen a picture of the "back" of the moon - the moon always shows the same face to the Earth. It is just as barren and cratered as the side Earthlings can see, but the features are different. No Sea of Tranquility back there.

Actually there is no real "dark" side of the moon; the sun lights up that side too, but you just can't see it. I have a copy of one of the pictures of the other side of the moon that the Ruskies took a long time ago, but I am not going to show it to you because you are not paying attention.

That's a big fat lie. Unless you are blind you have already looked at the photo above. You just didn't know how sublimely awesome it was, did you? Now you know. Beethoven never saw this. William the Conqueror never saw this. George Washington never saw this. You did. Just a little dividend for being alive at this point in history.

But the USA got the last laugh because they won the Space Race. See, there used to be a competition to see who could land a man on the moon first. The Soviet Union had a really big head start. All the USA seemed proficient at was blowing up rockets on launching pads. It was quite embarrassing. But then our scientists, both home-grown and ex-Nazi, got down to business and, just in time to save JFK from being a liar, put men on the moon before the decade was over, as he had promised.

And then we did it again. And again. And again.

And then we played golf on the moon. At least Alan Shepherd hit one up there. A nice little 1200-yard drive. I don't think NASA knew he had sneaked a club and ball into the LEM. Maybe they did. But contraband wasn't new. The astronauts, after all, were American, and that meant ingenuity and free enterprise. Rumor had it that as early as Gus Grissom, they were carrying rolls of coins into space and then selling them for a premium. Space dimes. Come and get 'em while they're hot. And let us not even TALK about the little moon rocks that didn't make their way into the hands of our scientists. Or so they say.

And the Ruskies? It has become very apparent that the only way they are EVER going to get to the moon is if we take them.

Sigh.
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Alan Shepherd was the first American in space in 1961, but many remember him as the man who played golf on the moon 10 years later.





[The photograph at the top of this post was taken by NASA and is not a copy of the photo taken much earlier by the USSR. If you click on the photo, you can make it MUCH larger.]

Hump day

Goodbye to an era: voice of "The Right Stuff" passes

A man who lived in my state in recent years, and who was the voice of the early NASA broadcasts has died.

Paul Haney, who was known as the "voice of NASA's Mission Control" for his live televised reports during the early years of the space program, died last Thursday of cancer at a nursing home in Alamogordo. He was 80.

Haney became NASA's information officer in 1958, only three months after the agency was formed. Haney pioneered a real-time system of reporting events as they happened in the first manned flight program, Project Mercury. In 1962 he became the public affairs officer of the Office of Manned Space Flight and moved to Houston to work in what is now Johnson Space Center.

Later he went on to manage information from the Gemini and Apollo flight programs. During those early years, Haney worked in the Mission Control Center, where he broadcast live to television viewers, and the news media covering launches. If you are old enough to remember watching the Mercury flights on television in your high school cafeteria when they used to let classes out because of the importance of those events, then you have heard Paul Haney's voice.

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I have a thirst for new knowledge and am constantly searching. Not all that I come across is worthy of taking up brain-cell space. Here is some interesting (and not-so-interesting) information in my travels around the internet; things you simply MUST be aware of...

There are 200 million Blogs which are no longer being undated (3 years ago)

More than one in eight people in US shows signs of addiction to the internet (how could you know something like that?)

Fathers tend to determine the height of their child. Mother’s tend to determine the weight. (I doubt that. Unless you are talking about parental supervision and not genetics)

Panspermia is the idea that life on Earth originated on another planet (for scrabble players, no?)

The Mona Lisa used to hang on the wall of Napoleon’s bedroom (but then, Napoleon use to sleep in the Louvre, right?)

Barbie’s full name is Barbie Millicent Roberts (I'm trying really hard to think of something I care less about. Nope.)

Cows can have regional accents according to a Professor of phonetics. (Who wants to bet me that he got a grant from the U.S. Government to study that crap?)

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Photo credit: The New Mexico Museum of Space History, Alamogordo.