50 Years From Sputnik

Just a short note today, since I'm busy with all manner of things, but I would be remiss if I didn't mention October 4th's coolest birthday, the 50th anniversary of the launch of Sputnik and the real beginning of the space age. Anyone with an interest in science, science fiction or both should look to the skies today and remember that only half a century ago, there were no satellites, no space stations, no shuttles. We are 50 years old today as an orbiting, space-going race, and that seems almost impossibly young. It's a good day to reflect on what we've accomplished in those 50 years, not least the first two space superpowers avoiding blowing each other up. It's also a good day to reflect on what we haven't done. Within 12 years of the Sputnik launch, a man was standing on the moon, but we only went back a handful of times, and no human has set foot on the moon in 35 years. I used to work in the desert, where on a clear night you could look up and see dozens of satellites criss-crossing the sky at what seemed like ridiculous speeds. Now, from town, they're hidden from me, but I'll still take a minute tonight and look out the window, knowing that the metal children of our fifty-year flirtation with space are out there.

Formality

Well, as I am once again in more regular web contact, I'll be trying my best to post here more often. I submitted a poem today to Trellis Magazine, the first time I've sent anyone any formal poetry, and it got me thinking. Formal poetry gets a bad rap. So many poets I know look down on poetry with rules, and the stricter the form is, the more they seem to despise it. Why? Isn't some of the greatest poetry in history written in the confines of structure, meter and rhyme? I'm not saying that free verse doesn't have its place - it certainly does. I both read and write free verse. But, personally, I really like writing in the confines of structure sometimes, especially an invented structure like the one in this last poem. There's something appealing to my nerdier side in sitting down, coming up with a set of alphabetical, metrical and/or rhyming rules, and then taking an idea and making it fit within them. Maybe its my science background. Oh well. Anyway, the yes-letter from Coyote Wild yesterday got me off my kiester and back to sending stuff out, so that's good. I've been concentrating so much on writing it this summer that I've forgotten the part where other people read it.

In other news, Happy Birthday to the CD. It will likely be the last dominant physical form for commercial music before it becomes entirely digital, or at least the last that sells anywhere near 200 billion copies. That's enough CD's that if you stacked them up, they would circle the Earth over 6 times. I love useless facts. By the way, for those keeping score, you can't stack them all up because my ex-girlfriend once broke one of my CDs in half. So, if you were planning on trying, blame her. I like CDs - a huge improvement over tapes, anyway, and digital downloads lack the joy that is liner notes, a loss that cannot be overestimated.