Beaver Supermoon

Native Americans named this moon for beavers, busy building lodges for the winter. It’s a supermoon when it’s a full moon that occurs near perigee, the point in its orbit closest to Earth. Of the three consecutive supermoons this year, in October, November, and December, this one is the brightest because closest of all, of the three, to perigee.

As I type this, a NYT notification chimes in to tell me that two objects were seen crashing into the moon. Why now? I think these collisions, small asteroids, happened a few days ago. I suppose the NYT editors decided that, in the gap between breathless developments, we could get some air. A point of interest. A point of reference. A break for and from fretful humans.

Last night, Democrats swept most/all of the off-year elections. Although I’m to the left of the Party, a Roddenberry alien on Earth, it’s good to see Democrats finding their feet again. I’m happy for Mamdani, in particular. His victory speech was rousing and unwavering. He mentioned Eugene Debs and FDR. He spoke of hope in tangible terms. I hope he can deliver people-centered progress for New Yorkers. He sounds like his convictions have both heart and spine.

If the project of contemporary US politics is to replace spin with spine, oligarchy with overdue popular sovereignty, Mamdani and his allies seem like the torchbearers, leaders finding a way ahead through the darkness.

You could say the moon finds a way ahead through the darkness, as does every orbiting orb unable, quite, to make its own light. Either finding a way ahead, falling onto the nearest surface of the strongest round around, or plunging into the nearest gravity well, if there is no surface as such.

A correction at the bottom of the NYT article about the lunar collisions:

A video caption with an earlier version of this article misidentified the likely causes of flashes on the moon. They were thought to be asteroids, not meteorites.

This bugs me. A quick Google search by the editors would have informed them that “asteroids” and “meteorites” are two names for the same rock. They differ only in location. They can’t be thought to be one or the other. The correction isn’t/can’t be about what the rocks are, but about what words mean.

Once you notice it, you see this kind of thing often. It betrays a widespread lack of curiosity about how language addresses the world (which parts are language, which parts world, and which the intermittencies between). It assumes a correction can/should always be fast, reflexive, uncritical: Oh shit, expert X said Y should be Z. Let’s make Y Z before anyone notices. (In the space between, no learning is done. As if there isn’t time to learn even the basics.)

I don’t mean to be a jerk. I just know this correction would make my high-school astronomy teacher wince.

It’s weird to live inside a behemoth/society that doesn’t like to think or learn, unless it pays immediately and often. Unless it subscribes. Unless there’s a following to be had. We have to leave most of the specialized knowledge to experts. In practical terms, that’s true. However buggy, impatient, or partial the process, and however ruined the phrase, it would be good for us, I think, if more people did their own research.

Research not taste-tested and spoon-fed by AI. If you don’t do some of the thinking yourself, I doubt much of the understanding will be yours, either.

Well, I’m rambling. I enjoy burying the lede. The lede is for people who make it this far. (Why thrust the lede at people who aren’t really interested?)

A review/proof copy of my first full-length poetry manuscript, Cosmosis, arrives in the mail today. I spent years sending it out to publishers, starting about 15 years ago. By now, it’s a dated artifact made of facts and fancies that brought me to the here and now. I spent some years thinking that self-publishing old manuscripts is what amateurs do, using that feeling against myself. A few weeks ago, it suddenly occurred to me: There’s no reason not to put Cosmosis and, next, Word Problems out there. I have other, newer manuscripts that I hope will interest publishers. I don’t have to keep the older books in perpetual limbo or lockdown just because I’m still looking for a publisher for newer work.

If you’re interested, you can purchase a copy here.