WhimsyLand

More cosmology:  so I'm working my way through Andrew Hamilton's site (an astrophysicist, whose wife sells stuffed trophy heads in Boulder).  He explains (as Simon pointed out) that there's not much we can say in conventional terms about the singularity within a black hole (e.g., its mass).  Like electromagnetic radiation, gravity waves can't escape the black hole, either.  Yet, black holes (particularly the large ones) can exhibit very large gravitational force on neighbors, so how is that happening?  "Gravity moves at the speed of light, and cannot get from inside the horizon to the outside world. The gravity felt by a person outside a black hole is the gravity of the stuff that fell long ago into the black hole."  So, if it took a billion years for a black hole to ingest a million stars, every one of them is still contributing to the (considerable) gravity of the black hole.  I wonder how that works?

Joseph:  "What ought to unite the arts & the sciences in the modern world is a recognition of contingency."

Jonathan:  "I have a new system for work inspired by Seinfeld."

Gabe:  Why Not to Join a Literary Movement

Robert:  "What I’d like to most emphasize here is that when it comes to artistic expression, accessibility/difficulty is an important quality (or really a set of qualities, given different varieties of difficulty) which is independent of the aesthetic merits of a work, that is, independent of whether a work manifests something profound or beautiful, independent of whether a work successfully unifies the concrete and universal, the timely and timeless"

James: "Most recent poetry resists, or simply embarrasses, any attempt to ascertain a definition of what poetry in fact is."

Tricia:  "Can someone make this into a lolbear already? I mean, really."

~~~

The only J & B poem that didn't get into my chapbook manuscript:

Occidental

Junie fills the bullet hole with her little finger. She heard
Bill’s final words: I’m done with stories. It’s ma’am and ma’am
and then a man makes a pass but there’s dust on her chaps. Too many
years packed in a saddle bag, cramped quarters, all ears. It’s not
the stories, it’s the web of memory. The way men sort themselves
in a seine of convenience. When she passes the undertaker,
one of the bodies upright in the window winks and moves
his ring finger. This very afternoon, Barker feigned a heart
attack as they practiced Tai Chi with the Chinese laundryman.
She couldn’t figure out what to feel, bad draw or desire
from the fireworks. An old Indian takes her to the cemetery,
every life at most two lines. There’s an odd order to them,
re-interred and alphabetized . Perhaps it’s just the end
of the West. Not that it matters to the tickertape that feeds
the living, she thinks as she points her horse East.