Western Wind, when wilt thou blow,
The small rain down can rain?
Christ, if my love were in my arms
And I in my bed again!
Month: December 2016
Via A Reader, Alex Beam At The New York Review Of Books-‘When Pushkin Came To Shove: How Nabokov And Edmund Wilson Fell Out Over A Poem’
‘By 1958, Wilson was past his prime and so were his cherished subjects, Marxism and modernism. But throughout the 1920s and ’30s, he had written selflessly and gorgeously about his contemporaries, literary and otherwise, making a contribution to American literature as large as, and much broader than, Nabokov’s brilliant but narrow one. It’s not surprising that Nabokov’s reputation has endured while Wilson’s has faded. Personality sells. But it would be a shame if “The Feud,” so brisk and entertaining, provided a reader’s only glimpse of one of America’s best critics.’
I got nuttin’, so thanks…reader.
Friday Quotation-Mark Twain
‘Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please.’
The Great Ones-Some Links To Earthquakes On the Cascadia Subduction Zone
There was a good Kathryn Schulz piece at the New Yorker entitled: ‘The Really Big One,’published in July 2015, which Nick Zentner at Central Washington University uses as his jumping-off point for discussion.
The above hour-long talk is designed for lay-people and starts with the basics, catalogues the current evidence, and leads to current understanding:
On average, every 250-500 years or so, the Cascadia Subduction Zone can rip {partially or} at once, and can generate an earthquake (with tsunami) of potentially 9.0 or greater {if all at once}. The last big one is known to have occurred 316 years ago, on January 29th, 1700.
Oh boy…
-This timeline is not exactly reassuring…
-People are keeping track of these {local} things.
-Out on the coast, there are layers of rocks, sediment and mud indicating a momentous and terrible night.
-Monitor all current seismic activity here.
**Fun fact: There’s also a different fault right under Seattle (running roughly along I-90), that let loose around 900 A.D., and sunk a whole flank of Mercer Island, leaving a ghostly underwater forest.
Because Seattle was under a glacier not that long ago, it’s a long way down to bedrock, and this means bad news for transferring energy during earthquakes: A big bowl of mud and looser glacial deposits, drumlins and hills prone to landslide, ending abrubtly in water, does not a good recipe make.
Check it out: