All posts by Steve Stern

The transit of Venus

Around home, Bay Area Walks, Current Affairs, Religion, Science

Michele and I went up Russian Ridge to watch the transit of Venus. I have read about the transit of Venus across the sun several times in the last couple of days, but Michele has been talking about it for a month. Since it was going to be at sunset, I suggested that we go up where we could see the sun sink into the ocean with Venus in transit. It turned out to be colder than we both thought it would be – in the mid 40’s when we got back to the car after standing outside for an hour – but the light was golden and then sun sank right on cue.

As it sank, Michele got the picture she wanted: Venus visible against the setting sun on the lower right hand side right where she knew it would be.

I got what I didn’t expect, the wonder of seeing Venus as a round object – not just a bright star – twenty three and a half million miles from us….crossing in front of the sun.

 

Paul Fussell R.I.P.

Art, War

Paul Fussell died a week or so ago and I didn’t know until Michele read his obit in Time late last night. Fussell was a writer who I very much admired. Not so much for how he wrote – although he was a very good writer winning a National Book Award and a National Book Critics Circle Award – but for what he wrote about. At a time when most writers glorified war with books like A Band of Brothers, he wrote – in Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War and The Boys’ Crusade – about the horror of war, about  how people die in war in agony,  mutilated, and disfigured. Fussell wrote about a war that was not honorable, a war that is is gruesome.

He knew first hand, having been a front line infantry officer in Europe when the turn over in junior officers was 100% every six months. One story that is burned into my psyche is how his platoon slaughtered a group of trapped Germans. And that was not the gruesome part, the gruesome part was that the story of the slaughter became a joke told to cheer people up when they were down, Remember the turkeyshoot? when we killed all those Germans trapped in the basement?

Fussell also wrote about Class in America, a topic I know by personal experience to be taboo. His book Class: A Guide Through the American Status System is a classic and, even twenty years after it was written, still dead on.

I won’t say that I will miss him – like I miss David Foster Wallace – but I am saddened that he is no longer with us.

Some reflections on a very short stay in Las Vegas

Americana, Photography

I am not a Las Vegas guy, it seems both very expensive and more like an adult Disneyland than a Sin City. Even more than Disneyland, it seems like a giant version of the cruse ship written about by David Foster Wallaace in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again. It is an entire city of distractions. I can safely state that after four hours of walking the Strip from one end to the other without even getting a drink (camera in hand and in full voyeur mode). I don’t mean to say that there isn’t real Sin – when I got back to my hotel at about 10:30, there was a old, gentlemanly looking, Chinese, guy checking in with a staggeringly good looking, improbably tall, black woman barely contained by a very short dress – but that somehow, the Sin doesn’t seem real, somehow it seems passionless.

That is not to infer that everybody is there for the Sin, most people are in Vegas for the shopping, and the dining, and the shows, and the gambling. And Vegas bends over backwards to make all that easy. There are elevated walkways that cross the streets and deposit the walker directly into buildings; the Strip is designed to be walked, it is as walker friendly as any place I have ever been. In the end, Vegas turned out to be a great place to take a walk.