more-to-be-added

The Left Hand of Darkness*, Ursula Le Guin

” The Left Hand of Darkness*, Ursula Le Guin. 50th Anniversary Edition.

wECclub: I am trying out this online book club run by the delightful musician-science-literary nerd Elle Cordova. You can find out about the club here, as well as back her many creative activities. This is the first book that I will have read, but the second in the club series. The first is “I Robot,” by Isaac Asimov. I suspect I will go back and read that.

Author’s Note

A very nice opening note by Le Guinn, worth seeking out if you do not have a 1976 or later edition. She argues that SF is not about primarily about extrapolating from the present (though she admits extrapolation can play a role), but rather it is primarily a description of a thought experiment.

About extrapolation, she says memorably “Almost anything carried to its logical extreme becomes depressing…” ibid. xvi

About the androgynity in the book, she says she is not predicting, but rather:

I’m merely observing, in the peculiar, devious, and thought-experimental manner proper to science fiction, that if you look at it us at odd times of day in certain weathers, we already are.”

—ibid., xvii (1976)

Nice turns of phrase:

A flaw of rain runs sparse and hard upriver (p 7)
the crowds began to move like a rocky shingle rolled by a slow tide (p 7)
Our border now is no line between two hills, but the line our planet makes when circling the sun.” (p 86)
One is respected and judged only as a human. It is an appalling experience. (p 95)
The door squealed open and it was broad day, the sun like a knife in the eyes, bright and frightening. […] …and I was no longer a refugee. I was set apart from those nameless ones with whom I fled down a dark road and whose lack of identity I had shared all night in a dark room. I was named, known, recognized; I existed. It was an intense relief. I followed my leader gladly. (p 110-111)
I was glad to be driving sedately at twenty-five miles an hour through vast, straight-furrowed grainlands, under an even gray sky, towards a capital whose goven-ment believed in Order. (p 112)
…roofs pitched steep as praying hands… (p 113)

The Book – Précis

C1: A Parade in Erhenrang

Genly Ai, the narrator participates in a royal parade, during which he has ample opportunity to describe himself, his role (an ambassador of sorts from the Ekumen), the people and society he is visiting, and the extremely wretched weather of this world.

We also see awkward conversation with Estraven, his primary supporter and informant, that show, in spite of months (or more?) of that communication, though fluent, is hampered by very basic understandings that are not shared — the mutual only partially-understood incomprehension reminds me of CJ Cherryh’s Foreigner series, though of course Le Guinn is preceding this by a couple of decades. In any case, it gradually becomes clear that Estraven is warning Genly Ai that he has fallen out of favor (and/or is perhaps abandoning him). The last line of the chapter: “I was cold, unconfident, obsessed by perfidy, solitude and fear.

C2: The Place Inside the Blizzard

This is a story or legend (the book is a collection of accounts, one a memoir, and others seeming anthropological documents assembled by investigators). This story describes a relationship (kemmering) between two brothers, the goes wrong. One brother commits suicide, the other curses their region; at the end, the brother relents, and lifts his curse.

C3: The Mad King

Genly Ai has an audience with the mad King, just before which he learns that Estraven has been exiled and condemned to death. During the audience, he learns that he has not been condemned and is granted freedom of the realm, but at the same time he is not believed, or, if he is believed, is feared and shunned. Genly Ai decides that he is going to leave the capital city, and visit some of the remote fastnesses to exhibit the odd non-religion that practices foretelling.

C4: The Nineteenth Day. This story is about a person who purchases a fortelling of the day of his death, but is dissatisfied with the answer, which is analogous to “On a Wednesday.” He falls into a depression, and so his lover purchases a foretelling of how long his lover will live, but again the answer is unsatisfactory: “Longer than you.” Disappointed, the first kills the second, and then goes mad and hangs himself a week later (on a Wednesday). Again we are exposed to the concept/state of kemmering.

C5: The Domestication of Hunch

It is becoming clear that Genly Ai is, if not an outright misogynist, attributes a lot of negative characteristics to women. Well — what else is a misogynist — he’s clearly one… it will be interesting to see the intensity and nature of it. We see more of the world, its larger structure and modes of transportation, and get an introduction to Fastnesses and the Handdarata religion. Nusuth — the ubiquitous ambiguous negative of the Handdarata. Genly Ai has a foretelling and the ritual occurs and he is told that Winter will join the Ekumen within five years. At the end, we learn from Faxe. the Weaver. that the purpose of foretelling is “To exhibit the perfect uselessness of knowing the answer to the wrong question.” And the chapter ends with this statement, again from the weaver: “The only thing that makes life possible permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next. “

C6: One Way into Orgoreyn. xxx

This chapter begins with Lord Estraven learning of his exile, and needing to leave quickly without money or supplies, and eschewing aid so as not to endanger his friends. His (former) kemmering, Ashe, tries to aid him, but he rejects him and the aid and hurries on on his own. He reaches a port city, where he had hoped to catch a foreign vessel, but as none are in port he steals a rowboat and heads across a gulf towards Orgoreyn. Injured by a sonic gun as he escapes, he is picked up by a ship that takes him to Orgoreyn, headless of the price on his head. He is cared for in a hospital, and then released to do manual labor as an indigent; at some point, he comes to the notice of government officials who know him, and he is ‘adopted’ into the household of Commensal Yegevy and his partner Obese. They know him from past diplomatic contacts, appear to trust him, and discuss his fears about what is going on between Charade and Orgoreyn and how it may lead to conflict — in the course of this discussion we get some glimpses of shifgrethor (primarily by it being waived).

C7: The Question of Sex

A report by a member of the first landing team on the nature of the Gethen hermaphrodites (it is theorized that the planet was an abandoned experiment) and the way sex and gender works in their society. This both provides a lot of basic information that will be useful as the novel unfolds, but also provides a way to provide some commentary on sex and gender roles relative to the rest of the Ekumen which embodies what we view as ‘normal’ gender roles. Speculations about the absence of gender roles include:

More equality — anyone can do anything
No psychosexual complications between child and parent
No unconsenting sex; no rape, and seduction must be very well timed.
No division into dominant/submissive, strong/weak, etc
A lack of ambition — ‘What would a society of eunuchs achieve?’
Perhaps the goal of the ‘experiment’ was to eliminate war.

“Our entire pattern of sociosexual interaction is non existent here. They can’t play the game. They do not see one another as men or women. … One is respected and judged only as a human. It is an appalling experience. ” (p 94 … 95)

Interestingly this report is identified as being written by a woman.

C8: Another Way into Orgoreyn

Genly Ai spends the summer in rural Karhide talking to people. Towards the end of the summer he learns the King is pregnant, and that his regent will be Tibe, Estraven’s enemy. Fearing that this will lead to bad things, and knowing he has to cross the passes before winter, Genly Ai sets out for Orgoreyn. He crosses into that country, but is caught in a raid by Ehrenrang people just after he enters Orgoreyn. After a brief period of imprisonment (he has lost his papers), he is recognized*, and brought to the capital and put up in Commensal Shusgis’ luxurious home. There he begins to talk to various members of the ruling class, and also encounters Estraven.

* Genly Ai is recognized, and everything changes at that moment. He leaves those he spent the night with, without a backward glance or further thought:

The door squealed open and it was broad day, the sun like a knife in the eyes, bright and frightening. […] …and I was no longer a refugee. I was set apart from those nameless ones with whom I fled down a dark road and whose lack of identity I had shared all night in a dark room. I was named, known, recognized; I existed. It was an intense relief. I followed my leader gladly.

ibid., p 110-111

This chapter contrasts Orgoreyn with Karthig, presenting the former as a a dull but well-ordered bureaucracy, where having an identity is everything, as we just saw above. “I was glad to be driving sedately at twenty-five miles an hour through vast, straight-furrowed grainlands, under an even gray sky, towards a capital whose goven-ment believed in Order.“

The chapter ends with this reflection regarding Estragen:

And it crossed my mind, though I dismissed the idea as baseless, that I had not come to Mishnory to eat roast blackfish with the Commensals of my own free will; nor had they brought me here. He had.
— ibid., 121

Clearly Le Guinn often ends her chapters with a bit of a punch.

C9: Estraven the Traitor

An old story about a love affair between the descendents of two rival lords. One was murdered, but not before he had slept with the other, who bore a child. The child was returned to his grandfather (the father of the murdered one), and eventually became the heir. Later, he made peace with the other Lord (his other grandfather). for this he was called a traitor.

C10: Conversations in Mishnory

Genly Ai, ensounced in comfort in Mishnory, has various conversations with the political movers and shakers of Mishnory, especially the Open Trade faction, explaining his presence and goals. Some appear to believe him, and wish to use him for their own ends; others are skeptical, and/or believe he is a danger. He also meets with Estraven, of whom he has formed a bad opinion; but he is unsettled by Estraven’s warning that others will seek to use him for their own ends. He also learns of the Sarf, the internal police force…

C11: Soliloquies in Mishnory

A soliloquy by Estraven, in which he mulls over the situation, and comes to suspect that he and Genly Ai understood one another far less than he’d anticipated — this was triggered by the apparent failure of Genly to realize that the offering of advice Estraven was an insult to his shifgrethor. Now he imagines that Genly Ai’s shifgrethor must be “founded, and composed, and sustained altogether differently that ours.” Estraven is now able to live indendently due to the money Ai brought, and is working and re-learning and practicing various ‘skills’ — fasting, meditation, etc. — that he used to be good at. He reflects on the factions and purposes of the varoius players, at one point noting “To oppose something is to maintain it.” After a time Estraven grows increasingly worried that no news is being broadcast about Genly Ai or his mission. All communication channels are under control of the Sarf, and so no one wants to have Ai call his ship. Estraven believes that Genly Ai’s life is in danger.

C12: On Time and Darkenss

A myth about Meshe, sort of a a god of the universe, one who is at the center of time and know all things. A footnote suggests that this is a mythological version of the expanding universe theory.

C13: Down on the Farm

Estraven is arrested after failing to heed Estraven’s warnings and instead confiding in Shusgis. He is taken to prison, and injected with drugs and questioned. The he is put in a truck with other prisoners, and over a period of several days is conveyed to a prison farm. There he works without adequate food, and is drugged and questioned every few days; the drugs are bad for him, and he is slower to recover after each session. It seems clear he is headed towards death.

C14: The Escape

Estraven blackmails Shusgis and finds out where Genly Ai has been taken, and then goes to the embassy and has the information sent back to Argaven in Karhide. Then he forges papers and sets off to where Genly is being held, knowing that Genly will not survive the winter. He joins a party of trappers, gets to the vicinity of the prison and rescues Genly Ai. The chapter ends with Estraven telling Genly Ai that the wants to learn mind-speech so that they can trust one another.

C15: To the Ice

Genly Ai recovers somewhat; Estraven steals food and supplies; the set off across the ice. They will have to make a certain distance each day, on the average, to make it to Karhide before they run out food. In this chapter, they are doing pretty well.

C16: Between Drummer and Dremegole

xxx

Afterword by Charlie Jane Anders

EP #17: When I was a Child…, Marilynne Robinson

When I was a Child I Read Books, Marilynne Robinson, 2012. This is book #17 in the Essay Project, a series of reading I am doing with CT. It marks a return to literary essays after an epistolary detour into the letters of Olive Sacks, and only a temporary return as we have plans to finish the rest of Sacks’ work…

My Thoughts on the Book — TBD

I must say, having just read the Preface and the first essay, I am beginning with a rather unfavorable impression. However, I will hope that her initial writing, which seems to me to quite polemical, will give way to more measured and approachable topics.

Nice Phrases

Say we are a warm puff of breath in a very cold universe. By this reckoning we are either immeasurably insignificant or incalculably precious and interesting. p. 36
It [ideology] is a straight-edge ruler in a fractal universe. p. 49.
It was also Mrs. Bloomsburg who trudged us through Cicero’s vast sentences, clause de pending from clause, the whole cantilevered with subjunctives and weighted with a culminating irony. p. 87
I remember kneeling by a creek that spilled and pooled among rocks and fallen trees with the unspeakably tender growth of small trees already sprouting from their backs… p. 88

Preface

In the preface, Robinson reflects on America and democracy, and offers a rather dispirited mediation on how things are going. She wrote this in 2012, and I can only imagine that she is far more disconsolate.

Robinson begins with a long quote from Whitman (circa 1870) about the greatness of America and Democracy, and about his worry that “savage, wolfish parties” acting from within will degrade the spirit and ideals of democracy. Robinson, writing in 2012, seems to find these concerns truer than ever, and comments on the decrease in tolerance for multiple viewpoints. “We have seen bad times and we will see more of them,” she laments. Well, that certainly seems apposite today.

Clearly, Whitman’s concerns were not realized, or are only being realized very, very slowly. Robinson admits the US has experienced a healthy and stable dynamicism, and attributes it to the long period of prosperity and advancement that is possible through domestic piece. She returns to Whitman, quoting his paen to Democracy, and suggests that his words highlight how far our vocabulary has drifted over the generations. She laments a shift to seeing capitalism as the dominant driver of our social history, and the loss of religious and spiritual language as a way of reflecting on our history and culture. She also sees capitalism, and its emphasis on economics and optimization as corroding everything it touches — this is a rare moment when I am in accord with her thinking.

If she had such a dismal view of the future in 2012, I can hardly imagine her views now. That is not to say that she is wrong, of course.

Essays

Freedom of Thought, p. 3

Overall, I’m not quite sure of the point of this essay. She takes a lot of shots at science, does battle with what seem to me straw men with regard to scientific thought. I end up unimpressed by her arguments, and feel she casts herself in, to me, a rather bad light. All that said, I’m not sure where we end up. She doesn’t seem too pleased with current religious discourse either. She ends with “Science can give us knowledge, but not wisdom. Neither can religion, until it puts aside nonsense and distraction and becomes itself again.

Focusing a bit on her comments about ‘science,’ and the sort of thought it fosters:

She begins this essay remarking that she has spent her years of writing and teaching trying to free herself of constraints. By this she appears to mean that she has tried to move beyond the ‘narrow’ ‘scientific’ conception of human beings and human life. She draws examples from her undergraduate education, but her examples — “moldy theories … memorized for the test and never thought of again;” and (faux) research with rats in the behaviorist paradigm – seem to me to cast aspersions on the institution where she was educated, and on her own commitment to learning, rather than establishing the case that college somehow imposes constraints on thinking. Similarly, her claim that the curriculum held up Freud’s thought (and others) for admiration simply because it was thought by Freud, seems jaw-droppingly simplistic: Freud is important because he had a vast influence on the thought of his time, contributed many concepts to an emerging discipline, and influenced (and antagonized) a vast network of intellectuals during his lifetime and later. One might argue that other thinkers had less impact for reasons that had nothing to do with quality of their thought, and that it is a disservice to breadth and diversity to ignore them, but that is not the argument she makes. Anyway, this left me with a poor impression of her character, and her qualities as an intellectual.

She is also rather careless with facts. The nth hand account (‘I have read that…’) she gives of the use of infant rats as reinforcements in an operant conditioning experiment seems dubious, and, indeed, although there is plenty of research on rat ‘infants’ (or “rat pups”) as they are called in the literature, I can find nothing remotely similar to what she describes. I think this is a story that someone invented, and I have the sense that the truth of it is not of importance to her — it is simply a usefully shocking image that plays into her rhetoric. Another very trivial example is that at one point she says she has read that the number of neurons in the human brain is greater than the number of stars in the milky way. That’s not correct — what she probably read is that the number of interconnections in the human brain is greater, etc.. This does not impact her argument, but does illustrate a certain carelessness and the absence of an external fact-checker.

There is more, but I’m sufficiently unenthralled by the essay that I don’t feel like pursuing it.

Imagination and Community, p. 19

I liked this essay much more than her previous one, and it largely eliminated the poor impression I had formed based on her “Freedom of Thought” essay — although I still do not like that essay.

She begins by writing about what she likes about books, and libraries of books. Here she strikes a chord with me. Then she goes on and introduces the apophatic — knowledge or reality than can not be expressed in words. She is very attracted to this notion, taking, I think, as sort of a holy mystery and reveling in it: “the unnamed is overwhelmingly present and real for me.” I’m not quite sure what to make of this. Certainly words, narrative, stories, are not the same as the reality of nature, but… so what? Why should they be? Language, like any representational system, is good at representing some things, and not at others. The representational mechanism of the calculus does a fine job of allowing us to deal with the infinite and the infinitesimal, where words — for example, in Xeno’s paradoxes — founder in a seemingly paradoxical fashion.

What I like most in this essay are her reflections on community, and the imaginative aspects the underlie it. She does not appear to be familiar with, or at least does not cite, Benedict Anderson’s seminal work on “Imagined Community.” While there is resonance with that, she also reflects on her relationship — as an author of fiction — with wholly the thoughts, feelings and actions of wholly imaginary characters.

I would say, for the moment, that community, at least community larger than the immediate family, consists very largely of imaginative love for people we do not know or whom we know very slightly. This thesis may be influenced by the fact that I have spent literal years of my life lovingly absorbed in the thoughts and perceptions of who knows it better than I?— people who do not exist. And, just as writers are engrossed in the making of them, readers are profoundly moved and also influenced by the nonexistent, that great clan whose numbers increase prodigiously with every publishing season. I think fiction may be, whatever else, an exercise in the capacity for imaginative love, or sympathy, or identification.

—ibid., p 21

Austerity as Ideology, p. 35

While I can’t say I enjoyed reading this essay, it exhibits her strengths as a writer and thinker. As I read, the thought that kept recurring was ‘If she was this disturbed in 2012, how must she feel now?’ It seems to me that every concern she has articulated seems to have intensified tenfold. Yikes.

She is good a diagnosing and describing, but I see little in the way of prescription or hope. Austerity and fear have fused into a single driving ethos, and are the motive force behind the destruction of various public institutions that were designed to benefit a broad range of people. While she notes an alternative approach at the end of her essay, it seems more wistful than hopeful. Of course, there is no requirement that she solve problems or offer hope.

Much of what she said was familiar to me, but I found a couple of her explorations thought-provoking. One had to do with the cold war period, and how threatening the US and UK must have seemed to the Russians. And, following on from that, the ‘competition’ between the US and the Soviets in arts, culture and science. The cultural competition, she thinks, helped us; the military competition was disastrous for both.

… reading break ….

Open Thy Hand Wide: Moses and the Origins of American Liberalism, p. 59

When I Was a Child, p. 85

My favorite essay so far. It has to do with growing up in the west — Idaho — and some of the perspectives that that gave her. In particular she has some interesting remarks about being unattached to particular traditions, and about loneliness being, if not a good thing, at least something with positive connotations. She suggests that loneliness and unattachment, while they have become associated with dysfunction in the general culture, still have positive associations that can be seen in the aloof heros of westerns, and the protagonists of country-western songs.

She segues into a discussion of Housekeeping, her novel (seemingly assuming that of course her readers will be familiar with it). I found that a little irritating, but not without interest.

We have colonized a hostile planet, and we must stanch every opening where cold and dark might pour through and destroy the false climates we make, the tiny simulations of forgotten seasons beside the Euphrates, or in Eden. At a certain level housekeeping is a regime of small kindnesses, which, taken together, make the world salubrious, savory, and warm.

ibid. 93

and

I remember kneeling by a creek that spilled and pooled among rocks and fallen trees with the unspeakably tender growth of small trees already sprouting from their backs, and thinking, there is only one thing wrong here, which is my own presence, and that is the slightest imaginable intrusion feeling that my solitude, my loneliness, made me almost acceptable in so sacred a place.

– ibid. 88

The Fate of Ideas: Moses, p. 95

Wondrous Love, p. 125

The Human Spirit and the Good Society, p. 143

Who Was Oberlin: Cosmology, p. 183

The Disordered Mind…, Eric R. Kandel

The Disordered Mind: What Unusual Brains Tell us about Ourselves, Eric R. Kandel, 2018.

Kandel is an eminent neuroscientist, known for his work on the low-level mechanisms of learning and memory as demonstrated in Aplysia. He’s won a host of prizes, including the Nobel for this work. Interestingly, as an undergraduate he majored in humanities, and afterwards became a psychiatrist, before migrating into neuroscience. Now in his 90’s, he is writing about larger themes, and addressing himself to more general audiences.

Basaltic Volcanoes, G. Walker

January 2025

I am told this is a classic papper. Here are some notes / excerpts:

“Basaltic magma is derived by incongruent partial melting of mantle peridotite, favoured in tectonic settings (e.g. hotspots and rifts) where mantle rock rises adiabatically to relatively shallow levels, or in subduction-zone settings where volatiles decrease the melting temperature of mantle rock.”
Important magma parameters (pretty uniform for basaltic volcanos)
- Magma density relative to lithosphere density — helps deter- mine the positions of magma chambers and intrusions;
- Viscosity and yield strength determine the geometry and structures of lava flows and intrusions;
- Gas content + viscosity + rheology controls the explosive violence of eruptions by determining the ease with which gases escape from magmas.
Parameters responsible for diversity: magma-supply rate and involvement of non- magmatic water.
”Basaltic systems have a source in the mantle from which magma ascends, mainly because of its positive buoyancy but sometimes aided by tectonic forces, toward the surface. They have one or more conduits by which the magma ascends. Polygenetic volcano systems generally possess a high-level magma chamber, situated at a neutral buoyancy level, which stores magma and modulates its delivery to the volcano and to sub-volcanic intrusions. Deep storage reservoirs may also exist.”
Types of volcanos
- Shield volcanos
- Stratovolcanos
- Central Volanos.
- Monogenetic volcanoes. These consist of clusters of scattered and mostly small (> 2 km3) volcanoes, each generated by a single eruption. Most commonly a volcano con- sists of a cinder cone associated with outflows of aa lava, but some are lava shields of scutulum- type (e.g. Rangitoto Island, Auckland, and Xitle in M…, and many that occur near the coast or close to lakes are phreatomagmatic tuff-rings or maars.
- Flood basalt fields consist of monogenetic volcanoes erupted from widely scattered vents, but their lava flows cover wider areas, overlap or are superposed to form parallel-stratified successions, and have much greater volumes. Giant flood-basalt fields are distributed through geological time at average intervals of 32 Ma (Rampino & Stothers 1988), and each one formed at the time of inception of a hotspot, on arrival of an ascending mantle plume at the asthenosphere/litho- sphere boundary.
Volcano Collapse due to instable foundations, layers of pyroclastic or hydrothermally-altered material, intrusive dykes, local updomings in central volcanoes, severe marine erosion.
Polygenetic vs. monogenetic. “In the polygenetic volcano systems, magma batches ascend sufficiently frequently along the same conduit that the conduit walls are maintained in a hot condition and provide magma with a thermally and mechanically very favour- able pathway toward the surface. In the monogenetic and flood basalt systems magma batches ascend at such long time inter- vals that the pathway taken by one batch has effectivelycooled by the time that the next batch is ready to ascend.”
Fissures / Rift systems. ‘Most basaltic eruptions occur from fissures, and virtually all basaltic volcano systems have eruptive fissures. Fissures are opened very easily by the hydraulic jacking action of magma, and are the ‘natural’ underground conveyance for low- viscosity magma (Emerman & Marrett 1990). They commonly extend for tens of kilometres and are typically concentrated into rift zones. Magma solidified in fissures forms dykes. Dykes have a high survival potential, and in deeply eroded areas may be virtually all that survives of the volcanic system.
xxx

2025 ILSG Kilauea &c Field Trip Prep Notes

Volcanic Rock Types

B (Basalt)—Use normative mineralogy to subdivide.

O1 (Basaltic andesite)

O2 (Andesite)

O3 (Dacite)

R (Rhyolite)

T (Trachyte or Trachydacite)—Use normative mineralogy to decide.

Ph (Phonolite)

S1 (Trachybasalt)—*Sodic and potassic variants are Hawaiite and Potassic Trachybasalt.

S2 (Basaltic trachyandesite)—*Sodic and potassic variants are Mugearite and Shoshonite.

S3 (Trachyandesite—*Sodic and potassic variants are Benmoreite and Latite.

Pc (Picrobasalt)

U1 (Basanite or Tephrite)—Use normative mineralogy to decide.

U2 (Phonotephrite)

U3 (Tephriphonolite)

F (Foidite)—When possible, classify/name according to the dominant feldspathoid. Melilitites also plot in this area and can be distinguished by additional chemical criteria.

(*)Sodic as used above means that Na₂O – 2 is greater than K₂O, and potassic that Na₂O – 2 is less than K₂O. Yet other names have been applied to rocks particularly rich in either sodium or potassium—as are ultrapotassic igneous rocks.

Lava flows from Mauna Loa

Palagonite

About Palagonite

Palagonite is an alteration product formed from basaltic glass (tachylite); concentric bands of it often surround kernels of unaltered tachylite, and are so soft that they are easily cut with a knife. In the palagonite the minerals are also decomposed and are represented only by pseudomorphs.

Palagonite soil is a light yellow-orange dust, comprising a mixture of particles ranging down to sub-micrometer sizes, usually found mixed with larger fragments of lava. The color is indicative of the presence of iron in the +3 oxidation state, embedded in an amorphous matrix.

Palagonite tuff is a tuff composed of sideromelane fragments and coarser pieces of basaltic rock, embedded in a palagonite matrix. A composite of sideromelane aggregate in palagonite matrix is called hyaloclastite.

Formation of Palagonite

Phreatomagmatic. Palagonite can be formed from the interaction between water and basalt melt. The water flashes to steam on contact with the hot lava and the small fragments of lava react with the steam to form the light-colored palagonite tuff cones common in areas of basaltic eruptions in contact with water.

Weathering. Palagonite can also be formed by a slower weathering of lava into palagonite, resulting in a thin, yellow-orange rind on the surface of the rock. The process of conversion of lava to palagonite is called palagonitization.

Tachylite

About Tachylite (tachylyte)

Tachylite (from ταχύς, meaning “swift”) is a form of basaltic volcanic glass formed by the rapid cooling of molten basalt. It is a type of mafic igneous rock that is decomposable by acids and readily fusible. The color is a black or dark-brown, and it has a greasy-looking, resinous luster. It is often vesicular and sometime spherulitic. Small pheoncrysts of feldspar or olivine are sometimes visible. Fresh tachylite glass often contains lozenge-shaped crystals of plagioclase feldspar and small prisms of augite and olivine, but all these minerals occur mainly as microlites or as skeletal growths with sharply-pointed corners or ramifying processes.

All tachylites weather easily and become red to brown as their iron oxidizes.

Formation

Three modes of occurrence characterize this rock. In all cases they are found under conditions which imply rapid cooling, but they are much less common than acid obsidians. (Alkaline rocks have a stronger tendency to crystallize (i.e. not form glass), in part because they are more liquid and the molecules have more freedom to arrange themselves in crystalline order.)

Scoria

The fine scoria (aka cinders) thrown out by basaltic volcanoes are often spongy masses of tachylite with only a few larger crystals or phenocrysts imbedded in black glass. Basic pumices of this kind are exceedingly widespread on the bottom of the sea, either dispersed in the pelagic red clay and other deposits or forming layers coated with oxides of manganese precipitated on them from the sea water. These tachylite fragments, which are usually much decomposed by the oxidation and hydration of their ferrous compounds, have taken on a dark red color (scoria is from σκωρία, skōria, Greek for rust.); this altered basic glass is known as “palagonite.” [see above]

Lava flows

In the Hawaiian Islands volcanoes have poured out vast floods of black basalt, containing feldspar, augite, olivine, and iron ores in a black glassy base. They are highly liquid when discharged, and the rapid cooling that ensues on their emergence to the air prevents crystallization taking place completely. Many of them are spongy or vesicular, and their upper surfaces are often exceedingly rough and jagged, while at other times they assume rounded wave-like forms on solidification. Great caves are found where the crust has solidified and the liquid interior has subsequently flowed away, and stalactites and stalagmites of black tachylite adorn the roofs and floors. On section these growths show usually a central cavity enclosed by walls of dark brown glass in which skeletons and microliths of augite, olivine and feldspar lie embedded

Dikes and Sills

A third mode of occurrence of tachylite is as margins and thin offshoots of dikes or sills of basalt and diabase. They are often only a fraction of an inch in thickness, resembling a thin layer of pitch or tar on the edge of a crystalline diabase dike, but veins several inches thick are sometimes found. In these situations tachylite is rarely vesicular, but often shows pronounced fluxion banding* accentuated by the presence of rows of spherulites that are visible as dark brown rounded spots. The spherulites have a distinct radiate structure and sometimes exhibit zones of varying color. The non-spherulitic glassy portion is sometimes perlitic, and these rocks are always brittle. Common crystals are olivine, augite and feldspar, with swarms of minute dusty black grains of magnetite. At the extreme edges the glass is often perfectly free from crystalline products, but it merges rapidly into the ordinary crystalline diabase, which in a very short distance may contain no vitreous base whatever. The spherulites may form the greater part of the mass, they may be a quarter of an inch in diameter and are occasionally much larger than this.

Fluxion banding

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_banding

Flow banding is caused by friction of the viscous magma that is in contact with a solid rock interface, usually the wall rock to an intrusive chamber or the earth’s surface.

The friction and viscosity of the magma causes phenocrysts and xenoliths within the magma or lava to slow down near the interface and become trapped in a viscous layer. This forms laminar flow, which manifests as a banded, streaky appearance.

Flow banding also results from the process of fractional crystallization that occurs by convection if the crystals that are caught in the flow-banded margins are removed from the melt. This can change the composition of the melt in large intrusions, leading to differentiation.

From GPT:

Fluxion banding results from shear forces within a moving magma body. This can happen in several ways:

1. Differential Flow in Lava. As lava moves, its viscosity varies due to cooling and crystallization. The outer layers, which cool faster, may develop a plastic or solid crust, while the inner material remains fluid. This difference in viscosity causes layers of magma to stretch and deform, forming elongated bands.

2. Crystal Sorting and Alignment. “ As magma flows, mineral crystals within it may become aligned due to shear stress. This is common in silicic lavas like rhyolite and dacite, where feldspar and quartz can form parallel bands.

3. Magma Mixing and Compositional Banding. If two magmas of different compositions mix, they may not completely homogenize, leading to streaks of contrasting compositions that appear as bands.

4. Intrusive Settings. In some plutonic rocks, fluxion banding may form as a result of late-stage magmatic flow, where crystals and melts segregate due to convection or deformation.

Kilauea: Dynamics of eruptions; Magma types

over the last 4 decades Kilauea has been very active, erupting both from Haumaumau crater on its summit and various rifts on its east side.
in 1983 Kilauea longest and most voluminous outpouring of lava from Kīlauea’s East Rift Zone in over 500 years. It resulted in the creation of the Pu‘u ‘Ō‘ō cone and extensive lava flows that covered significant areas, destroyed numerous structures, and added new land to the island.
Kilauea erupted on 4 May 2018 — it was an east rift zone eruption following the collapse of the Pu’u O’o vent. The rift eruption was driven by collapse of the central (shallow) magma chambers
The 2018 rift eruption had at least three different magmas:
- a highly evolved cool (1110°) viscous lava presumably from sources in the rift system [May 3-9]
- a less evolved hot (1130°) more fluid lava [May 17-18…]
- a very hot (1145°) magma lacking the cargo of low temperature crystals of the previous lavas, but with olvine with high levels of MgO indicating magma > 1250° somewhere in the feeder system

“The first two were the chemically evolved basalt of the initial fissures and the highly viscous andesite. Both are volumetrically minor sources that represent distinct pockets of old residual magma from Kīlauea’s east rift zone that evolved for more than 55 years, cooling and crystallizing at depth. The third and volumetrically more substantial source was less-evolved and hotter basalt of fissure 8. This source was similar in composition to the magma erupted at Kīlauea in the years before 2018 and was ultimately derived from the summit region. Draining and collapse of the summit by this voluminous eruption may have stirred up deeper, hotter parts of the summit magma system and sent mixed magma down the rift..”

Things I’ve learned re eruption dynamics and magmas

Not all lava from Hawaiian volcanoes is basaltic
Even that that is basaltic, changes in composition; each eruption features at least one, and often several, unique lava compositions.
Magma chambers are not homogeneous; this is presumably even more true of rift systems, where greater cooling can generate mushes of crystals
The 2018 Kilauea rift eruptions were driven by collapse of summit magma chambers.
The 2018 Kilauea rift eruption exhibited periodicity of 2-3 days (surges that began within minutes of caldera collapses 40 K upslope) and 5-10 minutes (pulses driven by local outgassing changes )
The dynamics of an eruption can be mapped into several stages
Lateral injection of magma into a rift zone (which forms, in Hawaii, due to volcano flanks sliding into ocean) leads to initial eruption
Pressure in the rift system leads to its elaboration – advancing dikes may capture pockets of highly evolved magma with mushes of low temperature crystals.
Magma injection into rifts, if large enough, can trigger slip on caldera ring faults
Ring fault slippage can add pressure to rift system and drive eruptive behavior at the rift
The central magma chamber appears to be vertically zoned. Initial eruptions of the rift zone (after flushing out pockets of magma that have evolved in the rifts) are composed of younger magmas from lower in the chamber; summit eruptions are fed by older, more evolved magma, higher up in the chamber.
The 2018 Kilauea eruption produced lava at volumes of 100 meters³/sec
Stages of Hawaiian volcanoes: pre-shield (alkalic basalt & basanite); shield (thoelitic basalt derived from both shallow plumbing system and deep plumbing system adjacent to mantle); post-shield (alkalic basalt from deep plumbing system adjacent to mantle (shallow plumbing has crystalized)); post erosional/rejuvenated (alkalic basalt, basanite & nephelinite from ???)

Order and nature of basaltic mineral & crystals

Common minerals that crystallize from basaltic magma, ordered by the temperatures at which they typically form:

*Olivine (Ca2(Mg,Fe)4O4): This is one of the first minerals to crystallize at the highest temperatures, typically around 1,200°C to 1,300°C. Olivine is rich in magnesium and iron and is often found in the earliest stages of crystallization in basaltic magmas.
*Olivine crystals are olive-green to yellow-green color. It often has a glassy or vitreous luster, and the crystals can be angular or rounded, with a granular texture when present in volcanic rocks. When olivine crystals are large enough, they often appear as transparent or translucent, sometimes with visible crystal faces, which are usually in a near-rectangular shape.
When olivine is exposed to oxidation, especially under conditions of high temperatures or in the presence of oxygen, it can alter to a yellowish or brownish hue, sometimes developing a reddish or rusty tint due to the formation of iron oxide minerals.
*Pyroxene (e.g., augite, diopside): Pyroxenes crystallize at slightly lower temperatures, generally around 1,100°C to 1,200°C. These minerals are composed of chains of tetrahedra and are rich in iron and magnesium.
     *Augite crystals are dark green to black, often with a shiny, almost metallic luster. It crystallizes in short prismatic crystals, which are often rectangular or blocky in shape. Augite crystals are typically larger than many other basaltic minerals and can be quite visible in coarse-grained basalts.
     Augite, being rich in iron, may undergo partial oxidation upon exposure to the atmosphere. The oxidation often causes a darkening of the color to a more brownish or reddish tint, though it rarely forms the rusty, reddish color seen in olivine. Augite may also exhibit a duller or more matte luster when oxidized.
     *Diopside is another pyroxene mineral, typically appearing as light green to pale green, although it can also be colorless or pale yellow. It forms prismatic crystals that are often transparent or translucent. Diopside crystals have a glassy or vitreous luster and typically display distinct striations or fine parallel lines on their crystal faces.
*Plagioclase feldspar (labradorite, anorthite): Plagioclase forms between 1,000°C and 1,100°C in basaltic magmas. This mineral can range from calcium-rich (anorthite) to sodium-rich (albite) compositions, with the more calcium-rich varieties crystallizing at higher temperatures.
* Plagioclase crystals vary from white to gray, and often have a glassy luster. They are typically tabular or blocky in shape and can show distinctive twin planes (known as albite twinning).
Magnetite (Fe3O4): Magnetite crystallizes at around 1,000°C to 1,100°C and often forms alongside other iron-rich minerals. It is a common accessory mineral in basaltic magmas.
* Crystals not typically visible in lavas
Ilmenite (FeTiO3): Ilmenite forms at slightly lower temperatures, typically around 900°C to 1,000°C. It is a titanium-iron oxide mineral and often occurs in basaltic lavas.
* Crystals not typically visible in lavas
Spinel (MgAl2O4): Spinel crystallizes at lower temperatures, usually around 900°C. It is a common accessory mineral in basaltic rocks, often forming in the lower temperature range of basaltic crystallization.
* Crystals not typically visible in lavas

These minerals crystallize according to Bowen’s reaction series, where early-formed minerals (like olivine and pyroxene) are typically more magnesium- and iron-rich, while later-formed minerals (like plagioclase and spinel) are more silica-rich due to depletion of Mg and Fe.

Other Notes

TBD

Snow Crystals, Kenneth Libbrecht

Snow Crystals: A Case Study of Spontaneous Structure Formation, Kenneth Libbrecht, 2022

This is Libbrecht’s magnum opus, at least on snow; this goes deep into the science. …and I love that he has ordered the references by date, so you can see the history of the science leading up to Libbrecht’s work.

Notes still in progress…

A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf

Reading on my own, circa Fall 2024.

This book or extended essay is based on a lecture on Women and Literature that Woolf gave, or at least that is the framing of it in the book. She approaches the topic by explaining how she came to develop her thoughts about it:

“At any rate, when a subject is highly controversial–and any question about sex is that–one cannot hope to tell the truth. One can only show how one came to hold whatever opinion one does hold. One can only give one’s audience the chance of drawing their own conclusions as they observe the limitations, the prejudices, the idiosyncrasies of the speaker. Fiction here is likely to contain more truth than fact.”

She begins with an account of going to Oxbridge, and walking about the colleges. She notes that, being a woman, she is barred from walking on the grass, and is not welcome in the library. She has lovely descriptions of the landscape and colleges:

To the right and left, bushes of some sort, golden and crimson, glowed with the colour, even it seemed burnt with the heat, of fire. On the further bank the willows wept in perpetual lamentation, their hair about their shoulders. The river reflected whatever it chose of sky and bridge and burning tree, and when the undergraduate had oared his boat through the reflections they closed again, completely, as if he had never been.

And as we accompany her, she recounts her thought process. I love her metaphor (more extensive than the excerpt I quote) of thinking as fishing…

Thought — to call it by a prouder name than it deserved — had let its line down into the stream. It swayed, minute after minute, hither and thither among the reflections and the weeds, letting the water lift it and sink it, until–you know the little tug–the sudden conglomeration of an idea at the end of one’s line: and then the cautious hauling of it in, and the careful laying of it out?

Pausing in my account here, but passages that I like for various reasons follow:

“Lamb is one of the most congenial; one to whom one would have liked to say, ‘Tell me then how you wrote your essays?’ For his essays are superior even to Max Beerbohm’s, I thought, with all their perfection, because of that wild flash of imagination, that lightning crack of genius in the middle of them which leaves them flawed and imperfect, but starred with poetry.“

“Many were in cap and gown; some had tufts of fur on their shoulders; others were wheeled in bath-chairs; others, old though not past middle age, seemed creased and crushed into shapes so singular that one was reminded of those giant crabs and crayfish who heave with difficulty across the sand of an aquarium. “

“Fiction must stick to facts, and the truer the facts, the better the fiction — so we are told. “

“It was the time between the lights when colours undergo their intensification and purples and golds burn in window-panes like the beat of an excitable heart; when for some reason the beauty of the world revealed and yet soon to perish (here I pushed into the garden, for, unwisely, the door was left open and no beadles seemed about), the beauty of the world which is so soon to perish, has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder. The gardens of Fernham lay before me.”

“I thought at last that it was time to roll up the crumpled skin of the day, with its arguments and its impressions and its anger and its laughter, and cast it into the hedge. A thousand stars were flashing across the blue wastes of the sky. One seemed alone with an inscrutable society.”

TBD –The first chapter is brilliant, and I have high hopes for the rest of the book, but have gotten distracted! But I shall return.

EP#15: The Making of the American Essay*

*EP#15: The Making of the American Essay, John D. Agata (Graywolf Press, 2016)

Favorites are indicated by ** – there is only one: Blood Burning Moon.
* indicates those that I found something notable in, though I was not keen on them
(*) indicates something previouly read that I still like.
Frankly, I did not care for most of the essays (or, really, most were not essays, but presumably informed or influenced American essayists) in this volume.

This is the 15th volume CT and I have taken up in our essay reading project. Here we return to the type of book we began with — the broadly historical anthology. This differs from previous anthologies we’ve read in that it appears that the editor introduces each piece, something we’ve wished for in the past, especially when we’ve been mystified by why an essay was selected.

Later: Now that we’re farther into it, I’m a little less keen on it. A lot of the material in here are not actually essays: there are short stories, one sermon, a book chapter or two, and some very long pieces (Mark Twain’s A Letter from Earth), none of which strike me as essays. I had hoped for essays, or at least short essay-like pieces… and there are some, but quite a lot is other material. Although his initial introductions were pretty good at situating selections, as the book moves on the introductions are less about the selections, per se, and instead his sort of personal arc through American History. He is also quite fond of experimental work — work that, while it might have raised questions at the time, or contributed to discourse among the literati, is difficult to imagine anyone reading for pleasure or even enlightenment.

LS: Land Above the Trees: A Guide to American Alpine Tundra, Ann Zwinger & Beatrice E. Willard

February 2024…

This book was recommended in Kim Stanley Robinson’s The High Sierra: A Love Story, as a good guide to the ecology and botany of the Sierra Nevada (and the upper portions of other North American ranges). And, indeed, it is beautifully written with a narrative style in which the reader moves through landscapes with the authors, looking at this and that, in contrast to what I had expected would be more of a catalog or encyclopedic approach. The book is divided into two principle parts: part 1 examines elements of ‘above the trees’ ecosystems, like fellfields or krumholtz; part 2 looks at particular North American tundra ecosystems, with one chapter being on the Sierra Nevada.

LS*–The High Sierra: A Love Story, Kim Stanley Robinson

November 2023

The High Sierra: A Love Story, by Kim Stanely Robinson. 2022.

* I was reading this for other reasons, but nevertheless it fits well into my project to read essays that focus on landscape and natural history.

TL;DR: I love this book. But it is not for everyone. On the other hand, it is organized in such a way that readers interested in particular topics — geology, history, etc. – could skip through the book attending to one or a few themes that interest them. It has great pictures, too.

I’m a big fan of KSR, and think it likely that I’ve read everything he’s written, although it is possible that that omits a few early science fiction novels that were retroactively published after he became better known. I like the complex characters he develops, the intensely developed worlds he portrays, and especially his attention to geology, climate, economics, politics, and the role of large institutions – themes that are uncommon in much science fiction. Also unusual is that he sometimes ventures beyond the borders of SF, as with his novel Years of Rice and Salt, and especially with this book, which is multi-threaded work the interweaves memoir, geology, natural history and history.