George

Baton Rouge Bluestocking Book Club

I’m looking forward to meeting with the Bluestocking Book Club this Wednesday, February 24, 2016, in Baton Rouge to talk about THE NIGHT OF THE COMET.

Here’s a picture of a woman with a blue stocking:

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See Five Planets Together. Five!

Hello, old blog. Here’s some interesting astronomy news. Beginning tomorrow, January 20, and continuing until February:

“For the first time in more than 10 years, it will be possible to see all five bright planets together in the sky. Around an hour or so before sunrise, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn, the five planets that have been observed since ancient times, will appear in a line that stretches from high in the north to low in the east.”

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Here’s the full article from phys.org

All Five Bright Planets Come Together in the Morning Sky
January 15, 2016 by Tanya Hill, Museum Victoria, The Conversation

For the first time in more than 10 years, it will be possible to see all five bright planets together in the sky. Around an hour or so before sunrise, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn, the five planets that have been observed since ancient times, will appear in a line that stretches from high in the north to low in the east.

The planets are visible from right across Australia in the dawn sky. You can start to look for the lineup from Wednesday, January 20 and it can be seen right through until the end of February.

Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn have been in the morning sky since the beginning of the year. Jupiter is bright in the north, next comes reddish Mars, followed by pale Saturn and lastly brilliant Venus, which shines above the eastern horizon. It is the appearance of Mercury that makes the family complete.

Mercury has just transitioned from an evening object to a morning object. At first it will appear quite low to the eastern horizon and of all the planets it is also the faintest, so it will be hard to see to begin with. However, Mercury will continue to rise higher each morning and by early February it will sit just below bright Venus.

Dates with the moon

If you need something a little more to get you leaping out of bed before sunrise, then here are the dates to mark in your calendar. From the end of January, the moon will travel by each planet and can be used as an easy guide for your planet-spotting.

On January 28, the moon will be right next to Jupiter. Come February 1, the moon (in its Last Quarter phase) will be alongside Mars, then on the following morning it’ll sit just below the red planet. On the morning of February 4, the crescent moon will be near Saturn. Then on February 6, the moon will be alongside Venus and on February 7, a thin sliver of moon will sit below Mercury.

In line with the sun

The line formed by the planets in the sky closely follows the ecliptic, the apparent path of the sun against the background stars. This path marks the plane of our solar system, visual proof that the planets, including Earth, all orbit the sun on roughly the same plane.

The ecliptic is bordered by the constellations of the zodiac and one of the most recognisable zodiac constellations is Scorpius. If you’re awake before the first rays of the sun begin to drown out the stars, then look for the curved outline of the scorpion between Mars and Saturn. In fact, sitting just above Saturn is the red supergiant star Antares, which marks the heart of the scorpion and its reddish colour makes it the perfect rival for Mars.

Rare oddity

It’s been a long time since the orbits of all five planets have brought them together to the same patch of sky. To make the best of the viewing opportunity try and get to a clear open space where you can see from the north all the way across to the eastern horizon.

As early February comes around, I also highly recommend checking out the flight path of the International Space Station via websites such as Heavens Above or NASA’s Spot the Station.

The Station will be flying morning passes over Australia during that time and current predictions for each capital city have it travelling right through or near the line of planets, for example: Darwin (February 3), Brisbane (February 5), Perth (February 6), Sydney (February 7), Canberra (February 7), Adelaide (February 8), Melbourne (February 9) and Hobart (February 11). The predictions can change slightly, so best to check the websites closer to the date and be sure to enter your precise location to obtain the most accurate timing for the pass.

Finally, there’s still more to come. This August the five planets will be together again, visible in the evening sky, so stay tuned for more planet watching in 2016.

A BOOK OF UNCOMMON PRAYER at New Orleans Book Festival

I’m looking forward to talking about A BOOK OF UNCOMMON PRAYER at the New Orleans Book Festival this Saturday, November 7. I’ll be on at 1:00-1:30 in Tent 2 at the Big Lake. Come find me!

A BOOK OF UNCOMMON PRAYER is an anthology of everyday invocations by 64 authors, from Outpost19 Press of San Francisco. Contributors include Wendy Brenner, Nic Brown, Jaime Clarke, Clyde Edgerton, Bob Hicok, Catherine Lacey, J. Robert Lennon, Rick Moody, Dawn Raffel, and Matthew Vollmer (who also edited). My two pieces are “For Aging Rock Stars” and “For a Teenage Girl Embarking Upon a Weeklong Carnival Cruise with her Parents.”

Susan Larson, of WWNO’s The Reading Life, says, “This book is AMAZING—moving and witty and sweet and sometimes even shocking—a little bit of everything we pray for in our private moments.”

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Happy Hour on Comet Lovejoy

NASA writes about a new report from French scientists on observations made of Comet Lovejoy as it passed around the sun early this year:

“‘We found that comet Lovejoy was releasing as much alcohol as in at least 500 bottles of wine every second during its peak activity,’ said Nicolas Biver of the Paris Observatory, France, lead author of a paper on the discovery published Oct. 23 in Science Advances.”

Here’s the first part of the NASA news release. Cheers!

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Researchers Catch Comet Lovejoy Giving Away Alcohol

Comet Lovejoy lived up to its name by releasing large amounts of alcohol as well as a type of sugar into space, according to new observations by an international team. The discovery marks the first time ethyl alcohol, the same type in alcoholic beverages, has been observed in a comet. The finding adds to the evidence that comets could have been a source of the complex organic molecules necessary for the emergence of life.

“We found that comet Lovejoy was releasing as much alcohol as in at least 500 bottles of wine every second during its peak activity,” said Nicolas Biver of the Paris Observatory, France, lead author of a paper on the discovery published Oct. 23 in Science Advances. The team found 21 different organic molecules in gas from the comet, including ethyl alcohol and glycolaldehyde, a simple sugar.

Comets are frozen remnants from the formation of our solar system. Scientists are interested in them because they are relatively pristine and therefore hold clues to how the solar system was made. Most orbit in frigid zones far from the sun. However, occasionally, a gravitational disturbance sends a comet closer to the sun, where it heats up and releases gases, allowing scientists to determine its composition.

Comet Lovejoy (formally cataloged as C/2014 Q2) was one of the brightest and most active comets since comet Hale-Bopp in 1997. Lovejoy passed closest to the sun on January 30, 2015, when it was releasing water at the rate of 20 tons per second. The team observed the atmosphere of the comet around this time when it was brightest and most active.

Walker Percy’s “The Moviegoer”: An Appreciation

Thanks to writer Kevin Rabalais for sharing this short tribute I wrote to Walker Percy on his blog Sacred Trespasses.

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Here’s the full text:

In Part 2 of our guest posts on reading New Orleans, novelist George Bishop discusses Walker Percy’s timeless novel of despair, movies and the search:

Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer: An Appreciation

New Orleans was always our Paris, our Emerald City, our Rome. I grew up a hundred miles away in the small town of Jackson, Louisiana, and then Baton Rouge, and the rare excursion to the big city was always an adventure for us. New Orleans was exotic, rich, dirty, dangerous, debauched, historic, decrepit, rowdy, bohemian . . . We loved it.

I eventually moved to New Orleans to attend college at Loyola University, and it was there that I first read Walker Percy. The Alabama-born author, who lived across Lake Pontchartrain in Covington, had once taught at Loyola, and his novels turned up regularly on reading lists in the English Department. I’m glad they did: Percy’s The Moviegoer, which won the U.S. National Book Award in 1962, became a revelation for me, offering a wholly new way of seeing the city.

The story, set in mid-century New Orleans, is narrated by Binx Bolling, a young single man who may or may not be suffering from PTSD after military service in Korea. Binx is on a quest, his “search,” as he tells us early on:

“What is the nature of the search? you ask. Really it is very simple, at least for a fellow like me; so simple that it is easily overlooked. The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life. . . . To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair.”

And from there, without any drama or gun fights or chase scenes (there’s one car wreck, but a mild one), Binx pokes around, wandering here and there, in and out of the city, its neighborhoods and movie houses, looking for . . . something. The evidence that he’s not alone, the small events and accidents that might lift him and others out of the numbing everydayness of their lives. He’s Holden Caulfield grown up and moved from New York to New Orleans, his red hunting cap traded for a stockbroker’s suit, his Central Park replaced by Audubon Park, but his dissatisfaction and skepticism the same.

This, I thought, was a New Orleans I might feel at home in.

I went on to read everything else of Percy’s I could get my hands on, and finally, after decades of travel, I moved back here. I live and write in the Bywater neighborhood now, and I still like to re-read The Moviegoer from time to time. It helps remind me that besides its hurricanes and floods, its Mardi Gras and Bourbon Street, its tourists and drunks, its stubborn poverty and violence and racism and classism, New Orleans can also provide, for those who need it, a quiet, thoughtful, brooding place.

A good place, Binx would say, for searching.

* * *

George Bishop is the author of Letter to My Daughter and The Night of the Comet. The Night of the Comet has received widespread praise since its release, with glowing reviews in People, The New York Post, Kirkus Reviews, Shelf Awareness and Publishers Weekly, among others. It was a featured selection in Reuters “Book Talk” column and was chosen as the September book of the month for National Public Radio’s “The Radio Reader.” Kirkus Reviews named it one of the “Best Books of 2013.”

Booklist calls The Night of the Comet “A quiet, occasionally bittersweet novel about the differences between desire and disappointment, expectation and reality.”

With thanks to Rhoda K. Faust for permission to reprint her photograph of Walker Percy.

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Reading Between the Wines on Sept. 2, with Kent Wascom

I’m looking forward to visiting Pearl Wine Co. again next week for a tag-team reading with author Kent Wascom, whose new novel Secessia has won rave reviews.

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When: Wednesday, Sept. 2, 7:00 – 8:00
Where: Pearl Wine Co., 3700 Orleans Ave., New Orleans

The event’s sponsored by the indefatigable Candice Huber of Tubby & Coo’s Mid-City Book Shop. Free and open to the public. Wine and food available and encouraged.

The Hindu on the South India Writers’ Ensemble Festival, Kerala

Nice piece in The Hindu last week on the South India Writers’ Ensemble Festival in Kerala. I get the first paragraph.

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Of Flights of Fancy, Verse and Bestsellers
by S. Anandan
July 27, 2015
The Hindu

“I’m Jack Fleming, 25, a Mechanics student in New York, and I love adventures of all variety,” said Rinish Muhamed, a local lad, stepping into the shoes of an imaginary character.

The scene was a writing workshop led by American author George Bishop at the South India Writers’ Ensemble (SIWE) where he asked the attendees to profile an imaginary character and take on questions on the character’s traits and life story.

“Craft is as important as content and I wanted them to have an elementary understanding of imagining up a character and the situations that have infused meaning into his life,” said the best-selling author.

At Pampa, a hall by the Pampa river where the workshop was held, Robin S. Ngangom, English poet and academic based in Shillong, treated literary enthusiasts to some of the finest pieces of poetry from the region.

Reading Manipuri poet Thangjam Ibopishak Singh’s poem, ‘I want to be killed by an Indian bullet’, which he had translated into English, he demonstrated the sheer power poetry from the region packs in it. When ‘the five’ — fire, water, air, earth, sky — come looking for the poet in order to shoot him to death for penning ‘gobbledygook and drivel’, the poet says he wants to be killed by an Indian bullet – a wish that cannot be granted as “we don’t use guns made in India. Let alone guns, India cannot even make plastic flowers”.

The poet escapes death thanks to his insistence. “It’s such a wonderful poem,” said P.C. Vishnunath, MLA, as the audience kept asking the poet to recite more and more poems. The last session of the day was a bit of a dampener, with the panellists, Pankaj Dubey and Preeti Shenoy, more or less agreeing that it was okay to play to the gallery and adapt to the demands of the market while Benyamin was bent on guarding the freedom of the author. On the moral questions staring the author in the face from corporate market forces, Ms. Shenoy and Mr. Dubey said regardless of the social ills brought about by a corporate entity, if would be okay to take its handholding for publishing a work if the entity were to do it as a means of social responsibility. “Only, I wouldn’t allow anyone to tamper with my draft, unless for some grammatical correctness,” Ms. Shenoy said.

A fitting reply to the contention was given by poet Kalpetta Narayanan at the valedictory address when he said while every age had produced its best-selling authors – citing Changampuzha Krishna Pillai as the best-selling writer of his time – it would be dangerous to woo the market as a damsel (as earlier suggested by Mr. Dubey) as she could soon turn into a yakshi .

“There’s nothing wrong in creating bestsellers. But an awareness about the dialectical tension between the ethical questions and the market demands would do a world of good,” he said, amid thunderous applause. “Had it all been market-driven James Joyce would not have been a published author. And, Jorge Borges only managed to sell 300 copies of his first work.”

The literature festival next year would focus on Tamil and Malayalam while there would be participation from the North East and other south Indian States, said festival director T.P. Rajeevan.

Next edition of South India Writers’ Ensemble to focus on Tamil and Malayalam literature.