Stingy Kids

Flap Your Wings

Chaos theory teaches us that small events can have enormous consequences. An opening title informs us that butterfly flapping its wings in Asia could result in a hurricane halfway around the world. Yes, although given the number of butterflies and the determination with which they flap their little wings, isn't it extraordinary how rarely that happens?

Indulge me one more great sentence from Roger Ebert's review of The Butterfly Effect.

And there's a certain grim humor in the way the movie illustrates the truth that you can make plans, but you can't make results.

Ahhh...I love Ebert's reviews of bad movies, especially this one, since The Butterfly Effect is backed by a pretty compelling concept. The notion that minute alterations of the past (like squashing a cockroach before its time) can catalyze catastrophic changes, was more or less introduced by Ray Bradbury. Bradbury's story "A Sound of Thunder" argues that history's intricate and complex pattern of causality must never be underestimated. (Yes, even the life of an itty bitty cockroach has a critical place in the tapestry of Time.) Not all time travel narratives take chaos theory as seriously. Audrey Niffenegger's The Time Traveler's Wife chronicles the love-affair of Claire and Henry, who has Chrono-Displacement Disorder, and focuses primarily on the effects of time on their relationship. There are other books as well, including a bit of erotica on the subject. On the other hand, a book about time travel that considers all possible effects would be a mammoth text. (I know of only one.)

I would love to travel through time, almost as much as I would like to live on the moon or Mars (just for a vacation, David!). But I just can't reconcile with the idea that time travel only seems to alter exterior time, while you, the traveler, continue to age. Any solution to this problem would be greatly appreciated.

*Ebert's review mentions a cockroach variant of the butterfly effect, but I cannot locate the reference. Any ideas?
*Play around with the Lorenz Attractor!
*What happens when there is a sudden "intrusion of non-linearity"?
*And last but not least: The Story of John Titor (infamous internet chrononaut)

Bookmark: Gennady Aygi

The word makes sense and sound, and something more. It's the force that holds all the world’s words together. Left all alone, the word can't do much, it's dead. It only can when it is activated by that force. When I realized this, I became aware that the way you handle a word depends on where you put it in relation to the other words. At one time, a pretty long one I'd say, I couldn't squeeze a line out of myself, nor was I comfortable in church. One day at church, I looked around to see the congregation gripped by a sort of shared emotion. While that impression was still hot, I wrote a poem, People Are Like Candles in the Church. "Like candles, their souls light one another." A single line. Quite seriously, it's really more than just a line, it's a great thing. And it has a point of gravity, too. It's title and, of course, there's the subscript, "January 6, 2002, Christmas Eve, Romashkovo Village." This is part of the verse, and the three of them do a common job. I gave you the simplest example I could.

"A Poet is No Different from Other Dogs, Except that He is a Talking Dog"

Roethke-Strand (Remix)

A recent repartée with Nedlog at Jazz Gallery yielded a crazy fusion:

I knew a woman, lovely in her bones, When she moved, the air rushed in, to fill the spaces where she had been.

The Robert Glasper Trio began their second set. I watched Glasper's fingers dance across the piano and took this fusion a little further.

We all have reasons for moving. She moves to keep things round.

You can try this at home with Roethke's "I Knew a Woman" and Strand's "Keeping Things Whole." Though if you are one of those "too much poetry" types, I'm sure that you are constantly untangling poems.