Welcome to Light On Light Through, Episode 75, in which I explain why Neil Armstrong, James Lovell, and Eugene Cernan are right to criticize Obama's cutting of the humans to the Moon space programs.   The long and the short of it is we'll never know who were are, never understand what we are doing here in this Universe, from our vantage point here on Planet Earth, and humans on the Moon are a crucial step to getting off this Planet.

Links:

1. my recent blog posts on this subject at Infinite Regress, Open Salon, and the Daily Kos, and the spirited discussion in the comments
2. Obama's 2011-2015 budget and mission plans for NASA
3. full text of Armstrong, Lovell, and Cernan letter to Obama
4. MPAndonee's comment in the Huffington Post discussion
5. my 2003 book, RealSpace

home page: http://paullevinson.info

more blogs: http://InfiniteRegress.tv

more podcasts: http://Levinsonnewsclips.com                                         

videoclips: http://www.youtube.com/user/PLev20062006

published on 3 September 2009:  New New Media

my latest novel: The Plot to Save Socrates

"challenging fun" - Entertainment Weekly

"Da Vinci-esque thriller" - New York Daily News

and Brian Charles Clarke says The Plot to Save Socrates "resonates with the current political climate . . . Sierra Waters is sexy as hell . . . there's a bite to Levinson's wit"-- in Curled Up With A Good Book

FREE audiobook of The Plot to Save Socrates from Audible special trial offer!

1. my blog post: Forty Years from the Moon, and Still Counting
2. my book: Realspace

home page: http://paullevinson.info
more blogs: http://InfiniteRegress.tv and http://open.salon.com/blog/paul_levinson                      
more podcasts: http://Levinsonnewsclips.com                                          videoclips: http://www.youtube.com/user/PLev20062006

coming in Summer 2009:  New New Media

my latest novel: The Plot to Save Socrates
"challenging fun" - Entertainment Weekly
"Da Vinci-esque thriller" - New York Daily News

and Brian Charles Clarke says The Plot to Save Socrates "resonates with the current political climate . . . there's a bite to Levinson's wit" -- in Curled Up With A Good Book

Read the first chapter of The Plot to Save Socrates .... FREE

1. Levinsonnewsclips.com
   
2. InfiniteRegress.tv
   
3. The Silk Code podiobook - my award-winning novel, read by Shaun Farrell, available free -  at http://thesilkcode.blogspot.com or http://podiobooks.com
4. http://artofgraciousliving.com Patsy Terrell's podcast - Patsy does the Light On Light Through - Blubrry id 
5. The Plot to Save Socrates   (click on the above title to get to Amazon) ... and if you'd like an autographed copy at no extra charge to you, just send me an e-mail at PaulLevinson@LightonLightthrough.com for details
6. Sputnik's 50th Anniversary - my blog post
   

videoclips: http://www.youtube.com/user/PLev20062006
                                                                           

The Plot to Save Socrates - my latest novel
"challenging fun" - Entertainment Weekly
"Da Vinci-esque thriller" - New York Daily News

Notice that I didn't say Soviet or US above, because it doesn't really matter. Humans in space is what counts. But everyone of course knows that Sputnik - Russian for "fellow traveler" - set off the space race which we in the US eventually "won" in 1969. Prior to then, Telstar was our only first accomplishment.

And what did that victory get us? A space shuttle, with brave astronauts, some of whom lost their lives. But no one has gotten too far beyond this planet. We've sent robots to Mars, and that's exciting, but robots neither laugh nor cry - they're not human.

And so, as the 50th anniversary of Sputnik arrives, I can only hope that we start doing a little better. Civilization is filled with examples of major inventions that stayed dormant for centuries - even millennia. The Chinese invention of the printing press in 700 or 800 AD, and its failure to be used for a mass print and popular culture, is one of the most vivid examples. (I wrote about this way back in 1977, in my essay, "Toy, Mirror, and Art: The Metamorphosis of Technological Culture" - it was reprinted in my 1995 Learning Cyberspace - and I'll try to post the essay here in the next few weeks.)

Let's not wait 700 more years to really get out into space. The Universe awaits us...

========================
See also Realspace: The Fate of Physical Presence in the Digital Age, On and Off Planet

Translations ... in some ways, they are the most exciting, profound thing that can happen to an author.   Your words translated into another language, read by people halfway or even completely around the world.

I've been pretty fortunate with translations of my books.  I was just looking them over.   Here are some stats and details [updated April 2011]:

You might wonder why there is much more translation from Eastern Europe than Western Europe.  There are at least two reasons.  One is that more people read English in Western Europe than in Eastern Europe, so translations are less necessary.  Another is that the end of the Cold War has led to a remarkable intellectual renaissance in the former Soviet block...

Of course, speaking of reading English, I'm not fluent in most of these languages - I can't really read even a single word in a few - so I have no way of knowing if I'd be happy with the fidelity of the translations...

But I have confidence in the cosmos.

A few covers follow ... I'll add more as I get a chance to scan them, or find them on the Web...

I was interviewed by Greg Morago in yestersday's Hartford Courant  about the 10th anniversary of Princess Diana's death...

... A.E. Housman's poem "To an Athlete Dying Young" couldn't have said it better: Dying in your prime is exceptionally stunning.

"There's something incredibly poignant about someone dying at the top of their game, at the peak of their success, whether it's an athlete or a movie star or a princess," said Paul Levinson, chairman of the department of communications and media studies at Fordham University. "As horrible as it sounds, there's something magical about it."

That magic could have something to do with the fact that a celebrity dying young means an adoring public will never have to see them crippled by time. "You will never see them getting older," Levinson said. "It's a way of keeping them young forever."

And free of scandal in an increasingly complicated world. "Once a person is dead, they're safe. They can't disappoint us by doing anything wrong," Levinson said....

---

And the key lines from A. E. Houseman ...

Eyes the shady night has shut
Cannot see the record cut...

See also Anna Nicole, Phil Ochs, and A. E. Housman

As some of you know, I write both fiction and non-fiction.  I try to do as much damage as possible.

To some extent, I lead two separate lives as an author.  There are many people who know me only or primarily as a science fiction writer, and many who know me mostly as an author of books on the history, evolution, and social impact of communications media.

I'm sometimes asked why I don't write under two separate names.  The logic is that I might be taken more seriously in my non-fiction if I wasn't also known as a science fiction writer.

Actually, this may have once been a problem - long before I started writing.  Back in the 1950s, Isaac Asimov claimed he ran into difficulties with colleagues at Boston University - where he taught in the chemistry department - because of his science fiction.  But Asimov went on to have fabulous careers as both a science and a science fiction writer, both under the name of Isaac Asimov.  (He did publish a few novels under the pen name Paul French.)

Nowadays, I don't know who would really think that being a science fiction author could detract from how seriously readers take your non-fiction.   If anything, I think most of the world recognizes that science fiction, though fun, often deals with the most profound issues in the universe - our place in the cosmos, our capacity to create machines that think (which leads us to contemplate what we mean by intelligence, thought, consciousness), etc.  You know, those sorts of things...

So I would never write under a pseudonym for that reason - that it might hurt my nonfiction career to be known as a science fiction writer - even if I were so inclined, which I'm not.

Some writers, unhappily, have no choice but to write under a pseudonym - for economic reasons.   They have sold so poorly under their real name, that the only way bookstores will stock their books is if they are packaged under a new name.  Fortunately, and thank my lucky stars, that hasn't happened to me (yet).

But there is one transcendent reason which will keep me, I'm sure, from ever writing under a pseudonym.  It does not have to do with the profundity of science fiction, nor with my level of success as writer.

It has to do with the girl who sat next to me in social studies class in
7th grade.  (And there may have been one in 6th grade, and in 9th grade, too.)   She is the reason I would never ever write under a pseudonym, regardless of any good reasons.

She pretty much ignored me back then, and I want to maximize the chances that when she walks into a bookstore somewhere today or tomorrow, she will notice, out of the corner of her eye, my name on a book on a shelf.  And at that moment, she will realize all that she could have had back in our junior high school class....

  yeah, that's the reason...

The single most frequent question I get as a writer is not where I get my ideas or how does an author find a publisher - though those two questions are certainly high on the list.

But the most popular question is: what do I do, what kind of physical or mental activity do I recommend, to encourage or facilitate writing?

The preamble and proviso for my answer to this question is: Not all writers are the same.  Different writers like and rely upon a different things.

But here's my secret: walking.

A mile or two or three, around the long block near my house (3-4 times around the block is a mile).  I find there's nothing like it when I need to think through a story or a scene, decide where a character should go or be when I'm feeling stumped.

I like driving, too.  I guess there's something about motion that gets my creative energies flowing.

But I like walking even better - mainly because it not only gets my mind and imagination going, but makes me feel physically good, too.

So there you go.  Next time you're stuck in a story - take a hike!

I've been interviewed by many major media - you can see the details on my Wikipedia entry - but I've found, over the years, that local interviews are often the best.

I had lunch last Saturday with Michael Pellegrin of the White Plains Times.  We talked about everything from the New York Yankees to The Plot to Save Socrates to the First Amendment.  I found the interview one of the most engaging and enjoyable I've ever had.

Here are the results ...

From Socrates to Science Fiction

Prolific Local Writer, Professor Champions Everything From Quality Television to Croc Shoes

By: Michael Pellegrin

Published: August 10, 2007

Paul Levinson is used to getting strong responses to his work. His first novel, “The Silk Code,? won the Locus Award for Best First Novel in 1999. The first time he posted a blog about television, he got dozens of responses almost immediately, and his podcasts attract thousands of listeners. And as a professor at Fordham University in the Bronx and chair of the university’s department of communication and media studies, he’s used to challenging and getting strong responses from his students....

Actually, that's just the first paragraph.  You can find the whole interview on the White Plains Times web page, City People section - From Socrates to Science Fiction.

My hibiscus tree is in full bloom.  I told you last week about my myrtle ... I guess every plant has a story ... or, at least, I have a story for just about everything I've ever planted...

We bought this hibiscus as a sickly sapling about 15 years ago.  It was on sale, and something about it looked promising, even though it looked as it had just been cured of some kind of insect attack.

I planted it on a low-maintenance side of our property (actually, our property could be described as all low-maintenance).  The hibiscus tree - with soft, crumply pink-lavender flowers - struggled for the first five-ten years.  But it always came back the next year, and managed to come through with some splendid blooms.

Last year, we had a decrepit white birch cut down - that's always the key.  A little bit more sun, maybe the hibiscus was ready, who knows.

But this year, for the first time, the hibiscus really looks like a tree.   It looks as if it more than doubled its size from last year.   All feels good in this tiny corner of the cosmic.  The hibiscus has claimed its proper place.

6:36 this evening.  Endeavor lifts off from Cape Canaveral into space. On board is Barbara Morgan, age 55, who trained along with Christa McAuliffe, the teacher who died on the Challenger in 1986.

Gifted teachers, these two. Not just imparting wisdom to their students. Imparting wisdom to the whole human species, by flying as our emissaries out into space.

Emissaries of a species - as far as we know, unique on this planet, and likely unique in this solar system, and maybe beyond - who yearn to go beyond where we were born. A species that looks up to the sky, and wonders what is out there, beyond that, and what role we will play, just cosmic toddlers now, in that future. 

Teachers usually convey knowledge that others have discovered. Christa McAuliffe was set to discover and convey what she saw at the beginning of the vast world of space beyond our planet- when her journey was interrupted.

Barbara Morgan resumed that journey a few hours ago. We'll wait back here on Earth, eyes to the sky, to learn from her vision.

I was thinking about the dandelions in my garden, and how I like them every bit as much as the flowers and bulbs I've deliberately planted.

I've never understood the general dislike of weeds that flower - ranging in some cases to a mania to want to pull them out.  If the color is nice, if the flower adds some sparkle to your lawn, why pick a fight with that?

I could understand if the unplanted flowers were so aggressive that they took over everything you carefully planted.  But dandelions, though a stubborn species, pose no threat to most planted flowers.   In fact, they do just fine with daisies, black-eyed susans, and violets (which I guess, in some quarters, are also considered weeds).

Bottom line (of plants) for me:  dandelions and violets are really no different than more exotic wildflowers.  It's good to see them - for when they pop up, you're seeing the result of a what some breeze blew over, and it's nice to see the cosmos at work in that...

Ever wonder why people cry their eyes out at a movie or a television show?   Not just children, but men and women, fully grown?  Not about a documentary about a slain president or a real-life princess who died too young, but about characters and plots that are purely fiction?

Hey, ever wonder why you have cried during such presentations, and I bet there is nearly no one on this planet who has not?

Samuel Taylor Coleridge had the answer – even though he was writing a good fifty years before the invention of motion pictures.

In his Biographia Literaria, published in 1817, the man who wrote the "Rime of the Ancient Mariner"? talks about "that willing suspension of disbelief, for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith"?.  (Interestingly, later in the same paragraph, Coleridge also disparagingly mentions "the film of familiarity and selfish solicitude"? which can get in the way of that willing suspension, but he of course is not talking about our kind of film.)

Let’s substitute "filmic"? for "poetic,"? and see how Coleridge’s observation explains our tears in front of screens.

First, Coleridge recognizes that we approach a movie or television show – as indeed we do a poem, a short story, or a novel – with a healthy degree of skepticism or "disbelief"?.  We do not believe for an instant that what is up there on the screen or down there on the page is really happening.

We have to be coaxed or persuaded to pretend that it’s real.  The disbelief, in other words, is not only suspended or put aside, but knowingly so.  We become, literally, double-minded, one part knowing that what we’re looking at is not really happening, the other part playing along with the illusion that it is.

This point is absolutely crucial, and by the way makes appreciation of fiction very different from propaganda, in which the goal of the communicator is to make us suspend our disbelief and forget that we ever had it in first place.

In contrast, we can cry our eyes out, get frightened at a horror movie, all from the safe vantage point of knowing, just a stone’s throw away in our mind, that there’s nothing really, truly to cry or get scared about.

Now, admittedly, there may be other things that go into this mix – willing suspension of disbelief need not operate in solitude.  We might cry at a movie or television show because it reminds us of something sad or tragic that happened in our lives, or our world, and there would be no disbelief making us cry in that.  We would be crying because our experience, sadly, made what we saw on the screen all too believable.

Or we might cry because we see something on the screen which relates not to a real experience, but evokes a similar emotion we felt about some other experience – grief, like all human emotions, is easily transferable.   If we cried in real life because we were jilted, we might well cry about some other kind of loss we see depicted on the screen.

Willing suspension of disbelief, then, is not only something which does not operate in isolation, it is usually part of complex continuum of experiences we had and did not have, all drawn into the emotional festivities by the poet or filmmaker.

And, if we with agree with Coleridge, it all lasts but a moment.   Pretty powerful, high-octane stuff.  The spice of life – and art.

I was looking for a place to put in some late tomato plants around Chez Levinson today, and I noticed the Myrtle - no, not Moaning Myrtle, even though I’ve been posting a lot about Harry Potter.   This one's Trailing, and has its own story…

Yeah ... about seven or eight years ago, I took a sprig of Trailing Myrtle (known also as Vinca minor or Periwinkle - great names - looks a lot like the above) and planted it on the side of our house that receives almost no sun. It was so shady there that even the few deep-forest ferns I planted were struggling. You could almost hear them gasping for sunlight. There were so few roots around that every good rain or melting snow - or worse, a hard rain after a deep freeze - had a fair chance of flooding our crawl space.

I pretty much forgot about the ferns and Myrtle, both.

But some of our trees were trimmed last Fall, and I just noticed on the side of our house that the struggling plants are doing splendidly. The ferns are big and feathery. Trailing Myrtle covers almost a entire, formerly vacant area. Bright green leaves and little purple flowers are everywhere.

And it did rain cats and dogs last week, and, come to think of it, the crawl space got wet but not flooded.

Not to make too much of this, but I think there's a lesson here - sometimes it's good to just do one little thing, and then let it go, and see where the vagaries of nature and trimmed trees take it...

I mentioned in my Conversation with science fiction author Rob Saywer here a few weeks ago that we might have gotten to Mars in 1965.

Here are some further details, as Freeman Dyson laid them out at the Guggenheim in New York City a few months. He might have been on the mission. He helped design it. This isn't science fiction.

In the immediate aftermath of the Sputnik 1 in October 1957, the door was wide open in America for all kinds of projects that might give us a jump on the Soviets in space. No mean goal, since the Soviets obviously had a healthy head-start.

Project Orion was one of those projects. Use atom bombs not as weapons but fuel for a rocket to the solar system. The rocket would travel fast enough to get us to Mars in two swift months. With a cargo hold as big as an auditorium.

The project had drawbacks. People were concerned about political fallout that would result from nuclear fallout from the fuel. Of course, in those days - the 1950s and 1960s - nuclear testing was already dumping lots of dangerous radiation into the atmosphere. Orion's contribution to that would have been neglible. But it was too much, politically.

The project also died of competition from Apollo. Politicians had one-track minds in those days - commitment to one space project was more than enough. Orion got an initial green light in 1958, only to be killed by JFK in the early 1960s - the same JFK who set us on a trip to the Moon via Apollo.

Is it too late for Orion to be resuscitated? According to Dyson, its time has passed. Nuclear power is still too slow a propellant for trips to the stars. Laser sails are better for that. And although it still takes four times longer to get to Mars by chemically-launched vehicles today than it would have by the nuclear-powered ship Dyson and his colleagues were building, we've mastered the production of our current chemical ships to the point that it wouldn't pay to go back to Project Orion.

So it's history, now. A moment in time when Dyson apologized to his little boy George that there probably wouldn't be room on the ship for him - Freeman Dyson was that serious about making the trip himself.

A moment in time. A golden opportunity. Lost.

We need to make sure we don't let that happen again.

Useful links:

Project Orion: The True Story of the Atomic Spaceship George Dyson's account of his father's project

And on the need for us to get out into space, far more than we already have, you might also enjoy...

Hello Solar System - What on Earth Are They Doing to Poor Pluto? - and welcome to Episode 17 of Light On Light Through, where we consider the semantic fate of Pluto, standing vigil at the edge of our solar system, recently demoted to dwarf-planet status by the International Astronomical Union... Who should decide the status of Pluto: scientists in disagreement among themselves, or humanity?

Michael Burstein joins me for an interview.  He is an award-winning short story science fiction writer, a former secondary school science teacher, and head of the Pluto Is A Planet organization.

You'll also hear a few bars of Alpha Centauri, a song written in March 2000 by Pete Rosenthal and me.

Helpful links:

1. http://www.plutoisaplanet.org/ and http://mabfan.livejournal.com/ (Michael Burstein's journal)
2. http://www.claycenter.org/astro February 4th live debate about Pluto at the Clay Center in Boston
3. Is Pluto a Planet? Historical Journey Through the Solar System - good background reading by David Weintraub
4. Neil deGrasse Tyson's 1999 plea for "demoting" Pluto
5. http://odeo.com/audio/5617383/view listen to Alpha Centauri (with notes and lyrics) - or look for the player to your right, about half way down this page ->

Enjoy...

Paul

web: http://paullevinson.info
blogs: http://www.myspace.com/twiceuponarhyme and http://paullevinson.blogspot.com

videoclips: http://www.youtube.com/user/PLev20062006
Light On Light Through podcast: http://paullev.libsyn.com

Levinson news clips podcast: http://Levinsonnews.podshow.com

Ask Lev 2-5 min pieces of advice on writing, succeeding, and tea

words and music by Paul Levinson readings, performances,
recordings, and interviews about my music and fiction

live on radio (Sundays, 7:15am, Pacific time): www.knx1070.com

The Plot to Save Socrates - my latest novel
"challenging fun" - Entertainment Weekly
"Da Vinci-esque thriller - New York Daily News  

Happy New Year!  And welcome to Episode 15 of Light On Light Through:  The Stuff of the Cosmos ... Carl Sagan, who died ten years ago at the end of December, said that, because we come from the cosmos, when we look out at the cosmos with our telescopes, we are but the stuff of the cosmos looking back at itself ... in this New Year's podcast we explore the meaning and impact of Carl Sagan's thought, including his dual pursuit of knowledge and fame ... and we look at the need of our species to get beyond this planet and out into the cosmos, our truest home...

Also in this episode: a medley of our music from our podcasts since October (which was the beginning of Light On Light Through), including samples from Idris Elba, Ebony Moore, Jeffrey Foucault, and B J Cunningham - look at the show notes for previous episodes, for details about where to find and hear more of their music.

I'll be back again next week, in 2007.  In the meantime, enjoy...

Paul

web: http://paullevinson.info
blogs: http://www.myspace.com/twiceuponarhyme and http://paullevinson.blogspot.com

videoclips: http://www.youtube.com/user/PLev20062006
Light On Light Through podcast: http://paullev.libsyn.com

Levinson news clips podcast: http://Levinsonnews.podshow.com

Ask Lev 2-5 min pieces of advice on writing, succeeding, and tea

words and music by Paul Levinson readings, performances,
recordings, and interviews about my music and fiction

live on radio (Sundays, 7:15am, Pacific time): www.knx1070.com

The Plot to Save Socrates - my latest novel
"challenging fun" - Entertainment Weekly
"Da Vinci-esque thriller - New York Daily News