Neil Gaiman on the Simpsons!

Gaiman pays a visit to Springfield

Recently, The Simpsons featured Neil Gaiman (owner of a remarkable personal library, and award-winning author) on an episode titled “The Book Job.” In this episode, Gaiman, referred to as the “British Fonzie” by Homer, joins the other usual suspects in attempting to perpetrate a “tween-lit” scam.

According to wired.com,

In the episode, Homer, Bart and a rag-tag group of Simpsons odds-and-ends characters team up with Gaiman to produce a book about teen trolls and then — when the publisher tries to change it — engage in an Ocean’s Eleven-esque plot to get their original version in bookstores (their publishing partner is voiced by Andy Garcia, naturally).

Hulu is only releasing this episode for a couple of weeks, so watch it now while you can. It’s incredibly funny, and Gaiman is a wonderful and oddly well-fitting addition. Here’s the full episode…

Enjoy!

JFK, the Umbrella Man, and Thomas Pynchon

A couple of days ago I wrote a post about revisiting once-read books, and all the dissonance that it can potentially cause. In that post, I referenced a conversation that I had with someone (Ken) who had just read The Crying of Lot 49 for the first time, and who did not particularly enjoy it. He asked me what it was that I liked about the book, and the general theme of my rather long-winded answer was nostalgia. I liked the book because of what it meant to me at a certain point in my life. Ok, I’ve already written about that, so why bring it up again… and what, if anything, does that have to do with JFK? Well, as a result of that post came quite an interesting conversation.

In that post I mentioned that COL 49 is essentially a book about entropy. It’s very much about the process of sifting information from noise and preventing the “system” (in this case, Oedipa’s life) from falling to entropy. One of the criticisms that Ken had leveled against the novel dealt with the way Pynchon addressed and introduced topics such as Information Theory or Maxwell’s Demon, seemingly haphazardly and half-heartedly. Through the course of the conversation, however, we agreed that the work itself, in postmodern fashion, was a true “open work.” That these seemingly casual mentions were really carefully placed “tools” that the reader would need to become an active participant in the text.

Throughout the narrative Oedipa Maas, our fearless protagonist, is essentially acting as Maxwell’s Demon, trying to create order and sense as everything around her becomes chaotic. In her quest for the truth, she is actively sorting information and staving off entropy. In fact, in the final scene where she searches the crowd for the secret bidder, in deciding to continue her quest, she effectively claims a (temporary?) victory against entropy.

“Oedipa sat alone, toward the back of the room, looking at the napes of necks, trying to guess which one was her target, her enemy, perhaps her proof.”

Mirroring this, as the novel progresses, the reader is also fed constant strings of information, and in order to make sense of things, as much as is possible, we, too become a Maxwell’s Demon and sort. Like Oedipa, the reader must realize that the only way to survive entropy is to continually try to create meaning. The structure of the novel itself leaves us no choice.

One thing that became apparent was that the more layers that Oedipa peeled away, the further away she got from any clarity.  Questions did not lead to answers, they led to more questions, and information became drowned out in a deluge of noise.

Now here’s where JFK and the Umbrella Man come into play. Last week, on the anniversary of Kennedy’s assassination, the New York Times released a short documentary by Errol Morris titled “The Umbrella Man.” 

The documentary did not add fuel nor fire to any of the extant conspiracy theories that still surround JFK’s death, rather, it referenced that in historical research, there may be a level analogous to a “quantum dimension,” where normal rules simply do not apply, that once a certain level of detail is reached, the thread of meaning begins to dissipate.  In other words, that the historian may find him or herself in a position similar to that of Oedipa Maas, peeling away layers only to find more questions and more possibilities. In reference to why he made the movie, and what it was about the Kennedy assassination that drew him in, Morris writes,

What is it about this case that has led not to a solution, but to the endless proliferation of possible solutions?

At very start of the documentary, Josiah Thompson states,

“In December 1967, John Updike was writing [the] ‘Talk of the Town’ [column] for the New Yorker and he spent most of that ‘Talk of the Town’ column talking about the Umbrella Man. He said that his learning of the existence of the Umbrella Man made him speculate that in historical research there may be a dimension similar to the quantum dimension in physical reality. If you put any event under a microscope, you will find a whole dimension of completely weird, incredible things going on. It’s as if there’s the macro level of historical research, where things sort of obey natural laws and usual things happen and unusual things don’t happen, and then there’s this other level where everything is really weird.”

And all that, of course, is under the assumption that what the “umbrella man” claimed to be true was, in fact, true. This could go on and on, ad infinitum. As Ken said last night, it’s almost as if Pynchon wrote the story of the umbrella man himself.

In the New Yorker column that Thompson referenced, Updike wrote,

We wonder whether a genuine mystery is being concealed here or whether any similar scrutiny of a minute section of time and space would yield similar strangenesses—gaps, inconsistencies, warps, and bubbles in the surface of circumstance. Perhaps, as with the elements of matter, investigation passes a threshold of common sense and enters a sub-atomic realm where laws are mocked, where persons have the life-span of beta particles and the transparency of neutrinos, and where a rough kind of averaging out must substitute for absolute truth. The truth about those seconds in Dallas is especially elusive; the search for it seems to demonstrate how perilously empiricism verges on magic.

What the umbrella man seemed to illustrate was that the historian, and, well, anyone who pokes and prods at the world around them in attempt to understand and establish “truth” has to essentially become their own Nefastis Machine or Maxwell’s Demon, and begin the Sisyfusian tasks of sorting the information from the noise and holding entropy at bay. We, like Oedipa Maas, must all keep striving daily to create meaning.

Here’s a short excerpt from the Morris’ “Umbrella Man.” The video in its entirety can be found here. Well worth watching.

60 Second Adventures in Thought

A short while back, the Open University in the UK came up with an incredibly witty and informative little series about the history of the English language, told in ten minute-long cartoons. Today I came across this article, that talked about a similar series from the OU, featuring six of history’s great thought experiments (Schrödinger’s Cat, Achilles and the Tortoise, among others). According to the Open University website,

Can a cat be both alive and dead? Can a computer think? How does a tortoise beat Achilles in a race? Voiced by comedian David Mitchell, these fast-paced animations explain six famous thought experiments, from the ancient Greeks to Albert Einstein, that have changed the way we see the world. Subjects as vast as time travel, infinity, quantum mechanics and artificial intelligence, are squeezed into 60-second clips that will tickle your funny bone and blow your mind.

So here go you, six minutes of food for thought on a Monday afternoon. Enjoy!

Moon and Venus

Moon and Venus Nov 26 2011, a set by thebadastronomer on Flickr.

A beautiful series of images of an impossibly thin crescent moon accompanied by Venus. Thank you Phil Plait for taking and sharing these photographs.

You can’t step into the same river twice… but what about books?

A few weeks ago, in response to my post about book covers, a fellow blogger linked me to this fantastic cover of Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49.  Every decade or so this book tends to find its way back into my mind and back into my hands, and linking me this image did just that, and a couple of weeks ago I reread the book.

I first read this book in college in a  class titled “Science and Literature, a joint effort of the English, Physics, and Biology departments, taught by multiple professors. I was a physics major with a Literature minor, and this class seemed to merge my interests seamlessly. We had finished a series of lectures on thermodynamics, and of course, my favorite, Maxwell’s Demon (that little imaginary guy that can stop a closed system from become entropic), then were assigned Pynchon’s novel.  I read it in day, then reread it again the next day, since I wasn’t sure about what I had just read at all. After I closed the book for a second time, I remember thinking that for such a small book, it sure packed one hell of a punch.

At the time it was a book that spoke to both my love of science and words. It was playful yet insightful, it included my guilty pleasure (lots of conspiracy theories… did the Tristero actually exist?), and it spoke to some universal truths about trying to stop our lives from becoming entropic, and about our constant struggle to separate real information from all the “noise” around us. In short, it was the right book at the right time.

So a couple of weeks ago I contentedly reread the words that had elicited such a powerful reaction from me so many years ago, yet, when I put the book down, I felt, I don’t know, different. It was not as powerful as I had remembered, and the story now seemed thinner, with far less substance. Then Ken borrowed and read the book, and upon returning it to me he asked what it was about the book that I liked so much. I found myself answering with one word, nostalgia. The book was a signpost in my life, it represented some aspect of who I was at 19. But I’m clearly not 19 anymore, I’ve experienced 20 years of life between then and now, and I began to realize, that the book had changed. Not the text, but what I brought to the text, and that, as Eco would undoubtedly agree, fundamentally changed my reading of the book.

Then last week I wrote about Byron. Here a similar but reverse thing had happened. When I first encountered Byron in high school, I thought he was trite, superficial, and clichéd. But it wasn’t Byron that was lacking, it was my lack of experience. I had nothing to reference. I had not loved nor lost love yet. How could I possible “feel” Byron without a life full of experience to bring to the reading? In the case of the poetry of Lord Byron, it was the wrong text at the wrong time, and it took a lot of living on my part to make it the right text for me. Once again, what I brought to the reading changed my experience of it.

Now just a few days ago, I read this article announcing that Jack Kerouac’s “lost” first novel, The Sea is My Brother, was about to be released. The next day, another blogger posted this, where he said that he probably won’t read it, that Kerouac exists in the past for him, and I thought, is he right?

There was a time when I lived and breathed the Beats.  from Kerouac and Ginsberg, and Ferlinghetti, to Corso, McClure, and Burroughs… all of them. I immersed myself in them and their lifestyle to such an extent, that I even began to write a book about them (an excuse to lose myself in their more intimate, personal material… letters, diaries, drawings). I got nearly 200 pages into the book before I stopped. I suppose that at the time I was using their lives more as an example then a cautionary tale (that would come later), and I just never finished it. Be that as it may, the Beats occupy a very important place in my personal history with books, and I’m afraid of attempting to step into that river twice. I share Chaz’s hesitation to read this new (well, old) novel, in the fear that it will change what he and the rest of them signify to me, I almost rather leave them untouched, frozen in time, where they are.

Ludwig Wittgenstein once wrote,

This book will perhaps be understood only by those who have themselves already thought the thoughts which are expressed in it – or similar thoughts. It is therefore not a text book. Its purpose would be achieved if there were one person who read it with understanding and to whom it gave pleasure.

and he’s absolutely correct. Books are experienced in light of what we bring to them, and our experiences of our texts are constantly reformed… as we change, so do they. Sometime for the better, as with Byron, and sometimes I suppose it’s better to leave the books where we first experienced them, our memory of them unmarred by the passage of time. This, however, should never stop us from enjoying all that books have to offer.  As Eco writes,

The “reader” is excited by the new freedom of the work, by its infinite potential for proliferation, by its inner wealth and the unconscious projections that it inspires. The canvas itself invites him not to avoid causal connection and the temptations of univocality, and to commit himself to an exchange rich in unforeseeable discoveries.

El día de las librerías… Yes, please!

Last night, as I was catching up with the blogs I follow, I came across this post by Promiscuous Reader.  In it, she talks about Spain’s first “Día de las librerías” (or Bookstore Day).

"Something's happening at my bookstore" ... one of the ads for Spain's Bookstore Day.

Spain has it right. The day of the bookstore, what a lovely idea.  It’s a holiday that is slated to continue every 4th Friday of November, in which bookstores stay open late and people are encouraged to spend time in them, and either begin or rekindle their love affairs with books. It’s also a day to celebrate the local bookseller, and the central role that is has, for so many centuries, played in our communities and our cultures. By participating in this holiday, one would be also be supporting one’s local economy, helping to create jobs locally, and, perhaps most importantly, simply fomenting a “cultural good.” According to  Fernando Valverde (head of  the Spanish Confederation of Bookseller Guilds and Associations, CEGAL), the main purpose of this new holiday is to remind people how critical books are to our lives.

Queremos que los que entren el próximo viernes en una librería experimenten lo buena que resulta la compañía  de los libros.

We want all those who enter a bookstore next Friday to experience how good the company of books can be.

Another ad... maybe we should do the same and start making bookstores and reading sexy again.

Our fourth friday of November is marked by throngs of people quite literally stampeding through any and all of the “big box stores.” We here in America have largely become a society of blind consumers of nearly everything, from actual objects to our very ideas. Gone are the days of neutral news-telling where the reader or viewer was required to draw their own conclusions. Now we watch those whose ideas mirror our own, and in turn spoon-feed us our opinions, creating a vicious cycle of non-thinking. Even our entertainment has become a kind of escape from real thought, seldom more than eye candy. But with a good book, there’s no escaping thinking.

A good book is and always will be food for thought, and any holiday that supports and promotes that (and at the same time promotes the support of local retailers, and local economies) sounds good to me.

If you understand Spanish, here’s a great video about Spain’s newest holiday…

The Legend of Lumpy Sue… And Why it Matters

It’s “Black Friday,” the unofficial national holiday of excess spending and rampant consumerism. Now, I have no real problem with that in and of itself, some people really seem to enjoy the “rush” of standing in long lines to wait for a discount on a television set, or of beating someone else to the better deal… who knows, maybe it all taps into some ancient hunter instinct.  Whatever it may be, I am decidedly missing that gene.  The thought of a crowded mall with people clamoring over each other sends chills down my spine, and when I read about stories like this, or this, or this,  I feel downright glad that I lack the “Black Friday” spirit.  Instead, I go to sleep content on Thanksgiving, knowing that after a day of giving thanks for what I do have, I can spend next day sharing a beautiful afternoon with those I love listening to wonderful music in inspiring surroundings. In other words, at least here in Miami, the Lumpy Sue Acoustic Music Fest, a free music festival that has been around for a little over 20 years.

Granted, the festival has an odd name… who is this Lumpy Sue, and what does she have to do with Thanksgiving and free music? Well, here is the “Legend of Lumpy Sue,” as told by the festival organizers…

On the day after a fine Thanksgiving in the early
1960s, a fat Massachusetts cop named Officer
Obie slid into his police cruiser and set out to
investigate a malicious pile of irritating garbage
which, according to an eyewitness, had been
dumped on state land by a band of hung over
hippies. Using his sharp but rural detective
skills, Obie would conclude his investigation on
that very day by pulling his .38 on a skinny
litterbug named Arlo Guthrie, earning himself in the
process a lengthy stay in folksong history.
Although the fact is little known, one of the
people who helped Arlo pick up that stank
Thanksgiving garbage went by the name of
Lumpy Sue. In a 60s sort of way, she became
radicalized on the spot as she cursed and
scooped the end products of our consumerist
society. Her consciousness continued to evolve
through the disco and punk eras, and she eventually
became an underground folk hero in her
own right without ever really explaining the
origins of the nickname “Lumpy.” The hippest
people in the country have long passed down
the tales of her late night conversations with the
ghost of Joe Hill, how she nursed to proper
health thousands of orphaned children at
Chernobyl, and her heroic rescue of seven
dolphins enslaved by navy scientists. In those
olden times, back before it was illegal for miners
to buy spray paint, her fans went to a lot of
trouble to scrawl her name on highway overpasses,
often right below “Clapton is God.”
Lumpy Sue came to North Miami Beach in
1982 where she was instrumental in founding, in
her own selfless and historical way, the annual
acoustic music fest in Greynolds Park which
appropriately bears her name.

If you haven’t heard Arlo Guthrie’s classic “Alice’s Restaurant” (Arlo is, of course, the son of Woody Guthrie, the famous American folksinger of “This Land is Your Land” fame), you should. I’ve included it below, although I have to warn you, its long. It’s a song about Alice, yes, and Officer Obie, but it’s also a song about peace, about protesting social injustice, and ultimately about coming together for what’s right and just.

And three people do it, three, can you imagine, three people walking in singing a bar of Alice’s Restaurant and walking out. They may think it’s an organization. And can you, can you imagine fifty people a day, I said fifty people a day walking in singing a bar of Alice’s Restaurant and walking out. And friends they may think it’s a movement.

As I was laying on the grass today listening to the music, watching the children dance, feeling the cool breeze on my face, I thought about our world today and just how terribly divided we all are. I thought about the Occupy movement, and the violence and derision with which it is so often met. I thought about Paul Krugman’s article arguing that the statement “We are the 99%” actually doesn’t go far enough. I thought about my daughter, and the kind of world that I would like to leave for her. And of course, I thought about Lumpy Sue, cleaning up someone else’s garbage, leaving things just a little better than she found it. And I looked around, and saw a group of people capable of doing the same, and I returned home just a little bit hopeful… and very glad to have avoided the malls.

As promised, here’s a little Arlo Guthrie to kick off the post-holiday weekend…

Enjoy! And lets all try to keep a little perspective as the holiday season unfolds.

A Wonderful Thanksgiving

The turkey is in the oven, the pumpkin pudding is cooling, and the table is set.  Finally a moment to sit and relax before getting ready for dinner.  For most of us, Thanksgiving is a day of family and enormous quantities of food, and yes, that’s part of what makes this holiday one of my favorites.  But it’s also a day where we should stop and really be grateful for all that we have.  It may not seem like much, specially in today’s world, but if we stop and really think about it, for most of us, our lives are pretty darn good.  I have a job that (most of the time) I really do love and that allows me to think and learn on a daily basis, I have a family that, despite their peculiarities, are a fine group of people who I know love and support me, I have a daughter who is smart, healthy, funny, and strong, and a relationship, where I feel loved and free to love. I have free time to spend with the people I love, and to read the books that are such an important part of my life. In short, despite my daily worries and fears, I am truly thankful for that I have, all who I know, and all that I get to do.

So in that spirit, I just wanted to wish all of you a very happy Thanksgiving.  May your evening be filled with good food, great wine, and wonderful company.

 

Love and Byron

The question of love has been very much on my mind lately. It sometimes feels as if we’re wired to love, but not equipped to deal with the pains that seem to be a part of truly loving someone, and for the last month I’ve been quietly seeking my answers in the poetry of George Gordon, Lord Byron.

I think like most people, I first met Byron in my high school English Literature class.  It was taught by this supremely elegant woman who seemed to have such command of every word, every nuance, and every theme.  My love of literature and poetry were awakened with her.  I fell in love with Chaucer (and in college proceeded to learn Middle English as a result), breezed through Shakespeare, sat horrified and riveted by Robert Browning, was mystified by Blake, and quite literally wept with joy at what Coleridge could do with simple words, all while under her spell.  Then we got to Byron, and the spell was broken.  He seemed trite, almost dismissive.  How could he be placed among greats like Keats and Shelley, I asked?  The answer wouldn’t come until much later.

That “later” came in college, where I took a course titled “Second Generation Romantic Literature.” I figured Byron would be the price to pay to get to fully immerse myself in Shelley and Keats for a semester. It turns out, however, that Byron was the prize. It was here that I began to see him in a different light.  I began to see beyond my high school perception of Byron as the handsome but superficial womanizer, and began to appreciate the subtle complexities of both his life and his work. His poetry, I realized expressed a heartbreaking innocence juxtaposed against a near knavish manner, an almost brooding darkness set against a childlike playfulness, his heroic actions contrasted against his physical deformity.  He was right when he said, “I am such a strange mélangé of good and evil that it would be difficult to describe me.” But what truly engaged me, what began my love affair with Byron was his passion, and not just in the obvious sense.  Yes, he clearly had a passion for women, but he had a passion for life, for words, and for feeling… for all that makes us human.  It was with this new perspective on Byron that I reread the first poem of his that I had so hated in high school, “She Walks in Beauty,”

She walks in Beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
And all that’s best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes:
Thus mellowed to that tender light
Which Heaven to gaudy day denies.

One shade the more, one ray the less,
Had half impaired the nameless grace
Which waves in every raven tress,
Or softly lightens o’er her face;
Where thoughts serenely sweet express,
How pure, how dear their dwelling-place.

And on that cheek, and o’er that brow,
So soft, so calm, yet eloquent,
The smiles that win, the tints that glow,
But tell of days in goodness spent,
A mind at peace with all below,
A heart whose love is innocent!

What had once seemed trite now seemed tender, seductive, rhythmic.  It made me long to be that woman described by someone so attentively and lovingly. The poem lost its “high school” simplicity and opened me up to what else Byron had to offer, such as this…

Think’st thou I saw thy beauteous eyes,
Suffus’d in tears, implore to stay;
And heard unmov’d thy plenteous sighs,
Which said far more than words can say?

Though keen the grief thy tears exprest,
When love and hope lay both o’erthrown;
Yet still, my girl, this bleeding breast
Throbb’d, with deep sorrow, as thine own.

But, when our cheeks with anguish glow’d,
When thy sweet lips were join’d to mine;
The tears that from my eyelids flow’d
Were lost in those which fell from thine.

Thou could’st not feel my burning cheek,
Thy gushing tears had quench’d its flame,
And, as thy tongue essay’d to speak,
In sighs alone it breath’d my name.

And yet, my girl, we weep in vain,
In vain our fate in sighs deplore;
Remembrance only can remain,
But that, will make us weep the more.

Again, thou best belov’d, adieu!
Ah! if thou canst, o’ercome regret,
Nor let thy mind past joys review,
Our only hope is, to forget!

I almost didn’t include the last two stanzas of this poem, “To Caroline,” because they invariably make me cry.  Such longing, sadness, love, passion… the desire to just lose themselves in each other is palpable, and one cannot help but feel it with them.  It makes one envious of that love shared, yet so afraid of enduring that kind of loss.  What beautiful contrast, and what beautiful emotion.

Byron’s way of describing such intimate feeling, elicits from us an equally powerful reaction, whether we are complicit or not. His understanding of human nature, of what moves us, of what we fear, and of what we desire, cause his poetry to seem to speak directly to our hearts and souls.  One of my favorite poems of his, “Solitude,” always seemed to highlight this understanding of who we are.

To sit on rocks, to muse o’er flood and fell,
To slowly trace the forest’s shady scene,
Where things that own not man’s dominion dwell,
And mortal foot hath ne’er or rarely been;
To climb the trackless mountain all unseen,
With the wild flock that never needs a fold;
Alone o’er steeps and foaming falls to lean;
This is not solitude, ’tis but to hold
Converse with Nature’s charms, and view her stores unrolled.

But midst the crowd, the hurry, the shock of men,
To hear, to see, to feel and to possess,
And roam alone, the world’s tired denizen,
With none who bless us, none whom we can bless;
Minions of splendour shrinking from distress!
None that, with kindred consciousness endued,
If we were not, would seem to smile the less
Of all the flattered, followed, sought and sued;
This is to be alone; this, this is solitude!

Last, before I go on too long, there is one poem that always shined like a ray of hope.  His “Stanzas to Augusta” (Augusta being his sister with whom he purportedly had an incestuous affair, this is Byron, after all), speaks to the power of love itself, to withstand adversity, to face all challenges, to give strength that seems impossible, and to pull the lovers through.

…Oh, blest be thine unbroken light!
That watched me as a seraph’s eye,
And stood between me and the night,
For ever shining sweetly nigh.

And when the cloud upon us came,
Which strove to blacken o’er thy ray -
Then purer spread its gentle flame,
And dashed the darkness all away.
The winds might rend, the skies might pour,
But there thou wert -and still wouldst be
Devoted in the stormiest hour
To shed thy weeping leaves o’er me.

…But thou and thine shall know no blight,
Whatever fate on me may fall;
For heaven in sunshine will requite
The kind -and thee the most of all.

Then let the ties of baffled love
Be broken -thine will never break;
Thy heart can feel -but will not move;
Thy soul, though soft, will never shake.

And these, when all was lost beside,
Were found, and still are fixed in thee;-
And bearing still a breast so tried,
Earth is no desert -e’en to me.

Still no answers to my questions about love, but one thing Byron does illuminate is the ability of love to transform us in ineffable ways.  Ineffable to us, maybe… it takes a poet like Byron to put into words that which exists only in our hearts.

The Fragile Oasis

Last week I posted a video of the earth as seen from the International Space Station. Yesterday, I came across a similar video, but with an important difference, this video is attached to a greater movement. Astronaut Ron Garan, who took the photos to create this time-lapse video, along with other stunning photos such as the one above, was so impacted by this view, that he set out to effect some change with it. On his site he writes,

Seeing humanity’s magnificent accomplishment against the backdrop of our indescribably beautiful Earth 250 miles below took my breath away. I wasn’t just looking down at the Earth.  I was looking at a planet hanging in the blackness of space.

It was very moving to see the beauty of the planet we’ve been given. But as I looked down at this indescribably beautiful fragile oasis, this island that has been given to us and has protected all life from the harshness of space, I couldn’t help thinking of the inequity that exists.

I couldn’t help but think of the people who don’t have clean water to drink, enough food to eat, of the social injustice, conflict, and poverty that exist.

The stark contrast between the beauty of our planet and the unfortunate realities of life for many of its inhabitants reaffirmed the belief I share with so many. Each and every one of us on this planet has the responsibility to leave it a little better than we found it.

What a beautiful and apt sentiment. Reminded me of Sagan’s “Reflections on a Mote of Dust.” Garan took this inspiration and created Fragile Oasis, a way to create a community with the “common goal of sharing our humanity and improving our world.” As a lover of science, a history teacher, and an inhabitant of this “pale blue dot,” its difficult for me not to want to get involved in some way. Moreover, watching the news lately and seeing how painfully divided we are, how quickly we resort to violence in the face of disagreement, and how little we are willing to work together to secure a better future for ourselves and our children, amplifies that desire to want to do something, anything to change our course. Check the link, look at the video, and become inspired to do whatever little we can each do to create a better place to live. It doesn’t take much.