#mark vanhoenacker

[comtedemoney]

At the Solstice, in Praise of Darkness

Whatever your feelings about the longest night, the winter solstice is worth pausing to savor.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/16/opinion/sunday/solstice-praise-for-darkness.html

From the opinion piece:

What stops at the December solstice is the sun’s apparent southward and night-lengthening (or night-shortening, in the Southern Hemisphere) march across the sky. The true meaning of “solstice” — indeed, the word’s Latin roots refer to the stilling of the sun — was made clear to me by George Greenstein, emeritus professor of astronomy at Amherst. From his home in Pelham, Mass., Professor Greenstein has a good view of the western horizon. He asked me to imagine a continuous movie composed of photographs that capture the position of the setting sun (the rising sun would work equally well) throughout the year.

In this movie — with a soundtrack by Max Richter or Ludovico Einaudi, I’m thinking — the setting sun would migrate back and forth between its southernmost and northernmost positions on the horizon. The sun would accelerate toward the middle of its journey (around spring and autumn, when the lengths of the day and the night change most quickly) and slow down toward the extremes. Once the sun reached an endpoint, it would at last come to rest — as it will on Thursday — before its motion reversed. Earth orbits the sun continuously, of course. But the sun’s apparent annual motion is more like the pendulum of a great clock, one that steadily counts off the planet’s years, and ours too.

The poet Annie Finch is the author of “Winter Solstice Chant” (“the edge of winter sky/leaning over us in icy stars.”). During a phone call from her home in Portland, Me., she pointed out how neatly the solstice accounts for late December’s rich spiritual bottleneck of festivities and traditions in so much of the ancient and modern world. However we may celebrate the return of light to our skies and lives, she continued, we might also wish to pause to honor the darkness that will give way to it: “If you don’t experience the darkness fully then you are not going to appreciate the light.” A pause, of course, is just what we’ll be given on Thursday.

[eelhound]

The language of the cockpit is technical, obscure – and irresistibly romantic – Mark Vanhoenacker | Aeon Essays

High above London, Tokyo and Cairo, the language of the cockpit is technical, obscure, geeky – and irresistibly romantic

"I like the word atmosphere, for no other reason than because we so rarely think of the air as a sphere, one that floats just above and envelops the heavier world of land and water. In place of what would otherwise be a control tower of Babel, there is a sphere of English, too, that sits as simply as air around the whole planet. Planes and words move quickly through it, above all the places where people wake up in the morning and speak Tagalog or Finnish or Hausa without any reason to think of the language above them."

[rozmorris]

What do you read when you’re writing? It's complicated

What do you read when you’re writing? It’s complicated

You’d think a writer would have the best excuse to read all the time – an unrestricted diet of anything and everything. But I find my relationship with books is somewhat complicated.

Like everyone, I have a stack of titles I’m eager to read – and never get to them unless I declare a special read-what-I-like holiday. Otherwise, my reading is on a permanent specialised regime.

A book in progress…

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[bookreviewsrus]

Skyfaring: A Journey with a Pilot by Mark Vanhoenacker - A review

Dates - 26th - 28th August

Number of 2016 - 41 of 65

Synposis -

A poetic and nuanced exploration of the human experience of flight that reminds us of the full imaginative weight of our most ordinary journeys—and reawakens our capacity to be amazed. The twenty-first century has relegated airplane flight—a once remarkable feat of human ingenuity—to the realm of the mundane. Mark Vanhoenacker, a 747 pilot who left academia and a career in the business world to pursue his childhood dream of flight, asks us to reimagine what we—both as pilots and as passengers—are actually doing when we enter the world between departure and discovery. In a seamless fusion of history, politics, geography, meteorology, ecology, family, and physics, Vanhoenacker vaults across geographical and cultural boundaries; above mountains, oceans, and deserts; through snow, wind, and rain, renewing a simultaneously humbling and almost superhuman activity that affords us unparalleled perspectives on the planet we inhabit and the communities we form.

My thoughts -.

Vanhoenacker talks about the joys of flight from the perspective of a Captain. One of the most interesting things to see is that you can still be fascinated by flight even though you do it every day.

At its heart, this is a love letter to flight and its possibilities. 

What I did find was that the first two chapters were much for procedural and a little robotic but when you got to the third and fourth chapters, and they are very long chapters, more sections that chapters,  Vanhoenacker took off in terms of the quality of the prose and the love of the subject and it was no surprise that he mentioned in the epilogue that it was these chapters that had been written first and it felt that the first part of the book was their more to pad out the length of the book, albeit there were some very interesting parts in those chapters as well. 

Would I recommend it - Yes

[wanderingwords]

Skyfaring: Halfway Checkpoint

I haven't read much (the shame!) but here's my Halfway Checkpoint post for #WordsandGeeks! #BookBlogger

Reading Status: Page 21 After my action-packed week in Cornwall followed by a week of flu, I’ve read a grand total of twenty-one pages of Skyfaring.  Ouch.  Weirdly all I want to do when I am poorly is watch The Great British Bake Off, Hotel Inspector and YouTube videos, which doesn’t leave much time for reading! Anyway, what I’ve read so far I have really really enjoyed.  I had no idea when I…

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[wanderingwords]

September Book Club Introduction: Skyfaring

Skyfaring by Mark Vanhoenacker Goodreads | The Book Depository Summary: Think back to when you first flew. When you first left the Earth, and travelled high and fast above its turning arc. When you looked down on a new world, captured simply and perfectly through a window fringed with ice. When you descended towards a city, and arrived from the sky as effortlessly as daybreak. In Skyfaring,…

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[totheescapement]

Place lag

Mark Vanhoenacker, in his book Skyfaring, describes a phenomenon that should be familiar to anyone who has ever traveled any large distance at all. He calls it “place lag.” Like time lag, place lag comes upon us when we travel faster than our brains can handle.

Here are a few quotes from the book:

Place lag doesn’t require the crossing of a time zone. It doesn’t even require an airplane. Sometimes I’ve been in a forest, for a hike or a picnic, and then later the same day I have returned to a city. Surrounded by cars and noise and blocks of concrete and glass, I’ll find myself asking, how is it that I was walking in the woods this morning? I know it was only this morning I was in that different place; but already it feels like a week ago. (page 23)

I sometimes think that there are cities so different in sensibility, culture, and history — Washington and Rio, Tokyo and Salt Lake City — that really they should never be joined by a nonstop flight; that to appreciate the distances between them such a journey should be broken into stages, and that the imaginative distance might be better discerned if such flights took ten weeks, not ten hours. But no matter which pair of cities the plane links, almost all air travel can feel too quick. We pretend that it’s normal, that London, the place where we were, the place that surrounded us in every respect, has transformed itself into Luanda or Los Angeles, as if it was not us who moved, but rather the place that flowed around us, because after all, no one could move this quickly. (page 24)

It is right that our first hours in a city feel wrong, or at least bewildering, in a way we can’t quite specify. We are not built for speed, certainly not for this speed. When we cross the world some lower portion of our brains cannot understand what has, we might say, taken place. I can matter-of-factly say to myself: ‘I flew from home to Hong Kong. Clearly, this is Hong Kong: the destination signs on the fronts of buses, the rivers of pedestrians, the surface of the harbor where the lights of so many boats race over the heaving, blurred reflections of skyscrapers.’ Equally, I know that a day or two ago I was at home. I have the everyday memories, the receipts to prove it. Yet, just as with two disparate times from my own past, I am the connection between these wildly different places across 6,000 miles of intervening continent. Somewhere in my lower-brain consciousness, I am the most obvious answer to question of what these places, separated not by an inconceivable distance but by mere hours, have in common. And that makes no sense at all. (page 25)

[totheescapement]

Although place lag is more a feature of a pilot’s life than jet lag, it retains analogies to time. When I see an old black-and-white photograph, I have to remind myself that the world was in color when it was taken; or that to the people in it, the moment captured felt as much like the present as the moment in which I am now looking at the photograph. Place lag is the geographic equivalent of this chronological effect, a dislocation only airplanes are fast enough to conjure from the present moments that run not chronologically down through the past, but horizontally, across the geography of the earth. It’s our experience of a truth we could never have evolved to grasp easily: that the whole world, every place, is going on at once.

Mark Vanhoenacker, Skyfaring