Letters, yeh

What I enjoy as far as writing and reading are concerned is letters.  How’s that for a probably grammatically incorrect sentence?  But that’s the thing about letters, they are a free-form creative writing experience.  My aforementioned schizophrenic-diagnosed cousin is the only person these days who I receive actual letters from on a regular basis.  He doesn’t wax schizophrenic in his letters except once in a while.  Usually he makes positive comments (“I love you very much, David!” “God bless you and your brothers and families!”) with a few current events in his life thrown in, in about a half-page letter.  He has a good memory, and when my brother Jeff and I visited him last weekend at Van Buren Health & Rehab (danged big place) one thing he asked about was who was in the auto accident in Missouri.  That would be Jeff, in 1976, when he was returning with a friend for a visit to Westminster College, from which he'd graduated the previous year. (Jeff’s spleen was removed, but before the surgery was done, it was touch-and-go because of internal bleeding and  Jeff had to be airlifted from a small town hospital to Springfield.  Jeff and I were living together in Little Rock at the time, but that night I was staying in Pine Bluff with two of my younger brothers when the small-town doctor called, asking for Jeff’s father.  For some reason, maybe the tone of the man’s voice, I said I was Jeff’s father.  The doctor was pissed when he found he’d told the info to Jeff’s brother, but I told him I’d get my parents, which I promptly did.  They were at an annual Charity Ball on Main Street, in that era when such things still took place in Pine Bluff.)

But the point here is, (Jeff's friend wasn't seriously injured, by the way) what I’m interested in is at least one person to correspond with.  More than one would be fine.  Yeh, I mean e-mail, not actual handwritten letters, although that is what I really like to write and receive. This thing of having comments made and responded to in the public way of the normal blog, no thanks, not for me.  I'm an inveterate letter writer--that's about all my fragmented mind can concentrate on.  Well I did finish a short story recently, after...eight years.  Have a good Memorial Day.

(note added in proof:  yes, I do exchange e-mail with family and friends, but except for a few good ones such as Pat's below, they are pretty much utilitarian.  and on the other hand, i'll have to say some people, including me sometimes, can write blog posts that are very creative-literary-letter-like.  i even fantasize on occasion that some such other people were thinking of me in some way.  that's like a fantasy letter substitute for the real thing, I guess. )

Ghost(s) at the Saenger Theater

The Saenger Theater in Pine Bluff, built in 1924, has been mentioned in the statewide newspaper lately because the building is deteriorating and needs its roof repaired to the tune of $150,000 to prevent its imminent demolition.  This news comes at the same time a historic building in Morrilton that was still in use collapsed this week, killing a two year old girl and seriously injuring her mother. (Unlike that building, the Saenger is not still in use.)  The statewide paper, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, reminisced in an editorial today on the heyday of the Saenger and lamented that it has not been restored like one of its sister theaters in Texarkana (it was a Saenger theater also, but is now the Perot Theater, due to Ross Perot putting up a million dollars to help get the theater restored).  The Pine Bluff Saenger was close to being restored eight or ten years ago, when a Pine Bluff film festival was still in existence, but has since further deteriorated.

Anyway, today's editorial didn't mention the legend of the ghost in the theater.  Supposedly an electrician was electrocuted while working overtime in order to get the final connections made for the theater to open.  Also supposedly, his wife was waiting outside in their car so they could leave immediately for a vacation.  This would not mean much at all to me, except for the fact that my best male friend in junior high and high school, Pat  Calkins, worked as the Saenger's assistant manager for several years and has told me he saw the ghost.  He's not one to make up something like that.  The cleaning ladies also told him they'd seen this ghost.  Apparently, strange noises were common in the theater late at night, but sightings of the ghost were not.

Last year I asked Pat to tell me about his sighting of the ghost and to provide if he could any leads I might follow relating to other people having seen it.  I was thinking of writing it up as an article for the Jefferson County Historical Quarterly.  Pat is a word person, but not so much a sentence or punctuation person.  Here is his email to me about the ghost:

Maybe Commonwealth Theaters  could check old employee files and find the old gals. what I saw , Every night after everyone had left the theater The Projectionist Zappy turned on the auditorium light and left I locked all the doors leaving my keys in the lock on the front door next to the boxofice then same routine as always I walk through the foyer taking a look in the auditorium for sleepers lovers drunks then hit the light switch under the stairs that led to the balcony , but that night I saw a figure coming up the isle I stopped looked and it was the ghost he was wearing a smock and carrying a tool box as if he was simply on the way out. It shocked the piss out of me I ran to the door unlocked it stopped out locked it back jumped in the old Flag car drove off with tears in my eyes checking the back seat. The next Coke Show I asked one of the maids if they ever saw anything unusual in there and she grabed my arm and said you seen him didn't you then started laughing and said look at those goose bumps I'll tell you exactly what you seen ,describing him exactly followed byhow he got there and he didn't bother anybody like the mean one up in the balcony . I'm running out of library time so so long adju to you  Pat

Anti-Social Network, no aneurysm detected, light

I started an Anti-Social Network some months ago.  So far it's been very successful!  No one at all has signed up.

This very blog which you are reading by some set of unlikely circumstances or perhaps accidentally is rather anti-social itself.  No comments allowed for all to see and perhaps for some even to further comment upon.  "Send him an email, huh!" you say. "That  a-social a-hole, who'd bother?"  Ha.  One significant person is all I'm fishin' for.  Yep, statistics are against me (only out of many comments, procured by being widely read, says statistics, would you likely encounter that significant one).  But if someone likes his life like it is, why should he cast his net upon the statistical muddied waters?

I've also kept a journal for thirty years.  Compare that!  Not even available to be read by anybody.  Not until I publish parts of it, if I ever do.

My brother and his family in Birmingham & Tuscaloosa, from whence I received my current best friend, Jessie, are fine, thanks

Me too.  I actually imagined I possibly had an abdominable aortal aneurism, like Dr. Einstein did, but by a convoluted set of circumstances and in the end by no doing or asking on my part (3rd time was charm), I was checked via sonography for that ailment and others on Tuesday at my gastroenterologist's office, and was sent away with a clean bill of health.  No, he didn't do the test himself, like the MD giving the chest X-rays does in A Serious Man. 

What is light, or a better question would be how is light that we see generated, and what kind of properties does it have?  We get into statistics in answering those questions.  Spontaneous emission and stimulated emission (of light from atoms) are the ways it's generated.  But it's also scattered by "objects," meaning all the things we see that are not sources of light.  Light from the sun or from an incandescent or fluorescent lamp, or from this screen you're reading, is nearly all generated by spontaneous emission.  Laser light is almost all generated by stimulated emission (thus Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation is where it gets its name).  The statistics of "counting photons" in different types of light is what we will stumble into next time.  Oh, yes and also eventually the all-important concept of superposition in quantum mechanics and its role in Schroedinger's Cat and the EPR problem.

Back to my booth at the Pine Bluff Business Expo for now.  Peace.

Albert's Aortal Aneurysm; and Evelyn, R.I.P.

Well, if he hadn't died on a Monday, I probably wouldn't bother with this. But he did, and it's again a Monday so here it is, from the penultimate chapter of Einstein: His Life and Universe, by Walter Isaacson, published in 2007.  Albert died at Princeton Hospital, yep, in good old New Jersey.  We zoom into his hospital room late on Sunday night: 

He worked as long as he could, and when the pain got too great, he went to sleep. Shortly after one a.m. on Monday, April 18, 1955, the nurse heard him blurt out a few words in German that she could not understand. The aneurysm, like a big blister, had burst, and Einstein died at age 76.

I can't highly recommend Isaacson's book, except for the factual information it contains.  You can get an idea of the problem from the quote above.  Definitely skip the first chapter, read the second chapter, and then just for fun, read the last chapter, "Einstein's Brain and Einstein's Mind," about the  removal of Einstein's brain without permission of his relatives by Thomas Harvey, the pathologist on duty lo those many years ago.  Fifty six, to be exact.

Also, which I didn't know before reading the footnote about it in Isaacson's book, Einstein's eyes were removed by (or given to) his ophthalmologist, Henry Abrams:  "...Abrams happened to wander into the autopsy room, and he ended up taking with him his former patient's eyeballs, which he subsequently kept in a New Jersey safe deposit box."  I would surely like to know what then happened to those soulful looking eyes, but mainly it's not pleasant to think they were even removed.  Unlike Einstein's extracted brain, which has a bizarre and much-written-about history (see the book Driving Mr. Albert, for instance), his eyes receive no further mention that I have yet found in the historical record (okay, what I mean is, I just now did a search and didn't see anything relevant).  Albert's body was cremated as he'd requested and, according to Isaacson, his ashes were scattered in the Delaware River.

The oddest thing of all I learned from reading the last chapter of Isaacson's book is that Einstein may have a still-living daughter.  Einstein was 57 in 1936 when his second wife Elsa died.  He never remarried, but as Isaacson says, "was spending time with a variety of women."  (Uh, well, yeh, he did that also when he was married to Elsa, but not as much maybe.)  Sometime in the early 1940s, Einstein's oldest son, Hans Albert, a hydraulics engineering professor at Berkeley, adopted a baby girl, who then of course became the step-granddaughter of Albert, an addition to the several actual, bloodline grandchildren, some of whom I guess are still around.  The question of that moment of adoption, 1941, would be, why the heck would H.A. and wife adopt another kid, especially one born in Chicago?  Hmmm.  Anyway, the adopted one's name is Evelyn Einstein. (How many Evelyn's have you known?  Not many I bet--there's another mystery: the choice of her name.)  In 1998, she was "divorced, marginally employed, and struggling with poverty," Isaacson says.  Whether that's changed, I don't know.

Well, just now googling her name, I find she just died at age 70!  Whew, how bizarre is that? The obituary being in today's New York Times online! (I wrote this part and the remainder on the 19th of April, actually.)  Anyway, Evelyn could not have a DNA test done to determine Einstein's paternity or lack of it, Isaacson says, because the way Thomas Harvey embalmed Einstein's brain "made it impossible to extract usable DNA."

The oddness of this very likely possibility of Einstein having had a post-marital daughter is only made stranger by the fact that he and his first wife, before they were married, had a daughter who was given up for adoption or left with her mother's relatives in Serbia. Quoting Isaacson from the list of "main characters" in his book:  "Lieserl Einstein (1902-?). Premarital daughter of Einstein and Mileva Maric.  Einstein probably never saw her.  Likely left in her Serbian mother's hometown of Novi Sad for adoption and may have died of scarlet fever in late 1903." 

Albert and Mileva, once they were married, had two sons.  Besides Hans Albert (1904-1973) there was, again quoting Isaacson: "Eduard Einstein (1910-1965).  Second son of Mileva Maric and Einstein. Smart and artistic, he obsessed about Freud and hoped to become a psychiatrist, but he succumbed to his own schizophrenic demons in his twenties and was institutionalized in Switzerland for much of the rest of his life."  Eduard, whose nickname was Tete, never married or had any kids.

(I would say "schizophrenia demons" instead of "schizophrenic demons."  Could be a typo in the book. Have you noticed typos are more common these days, appearing in even the best of publications?  What's up with that?)

Evelyn does, in the 1960 photo in the NYTimes obit, seem to have Einstein's eyes.

The Image in the Aperture

I was going to post more excerpts from Hiroshima, but like the blurb on the cover of my paperback copy of the book says (quoting a review from the Saturday Review of Literature), "Everyone able to read should read it."  And if you read it a good while ago, I suggest re-reading it.  I have dog-eared so many pages I'd be posting quotes from here to next week--okay that's beginning in a few hours, technically, so let's say from here to next month, at my current rate--if I excerpted passages from all the pages I marked.  It's a slim book, even with the added 1985 chapter.

Another slim book, slim for a textbook at 200 pages, is one I bought recently through the auspices of Edward R. Hamilton bookseller, called Introduction to the Theory of Coherence and Polarization of Light.  It's written by Emil Wolfe, and contains this as an epigraph for the first chapter:  "...the image that will be formed in a photographic camera--i.e. the distribution of intensity on the sensitive layer--is present in an invisible, mysterious way in the aperture of the lens, where the intensity is equal at all points."  The quote is from Frits Zernike's discussion of the concept of optical coherence in a lecture published in Proceedings of the Physical Society (London), Vol. 61, No. 158, 1948.

Wolf is rather well-known, partly for his research publications in optics and partly due to coauthoring two classic upper level physics textbooks:  Principles of Optics (with Max Born) , and Optical Coherence and Quantum Optics (with Leonard Mandel).  He is on the faculty at The Institute of Optics, U of Rochester. Here's what interests me mainly about the Intro book.  In the preface, and also included in the info about the book in the ERH bookseller catalogue, there's a statement saying it has recently been discovered that coherence and polarization of light "are two aspects of statistical optics which are intimately related and can be treated in a unified manner."  Recently means not long before the book was published in 2007.  Exciting stuff!

Next, or at least sometime soon, we must discuss the idea of superposition in quantum mechanics, before getting back to the cat, the strangeness of which is due to the unavoidability of superposition of states in quantum theory. 

Excerpts from first chapter of Hiroshima

The four chapters of Hiroshima as it was originally published in 1946 are:  A Noiseless Flash, The Fire, Details Are Being Investigated, Panic Grass and Feverfew; the new 1985 chapter is The Aftermath.  The experiences documented in the book are those of Miss Toshinki Sasaki, Dr. Masakazu Fujii, Mrs. Hatsuyo Nakamura, Father Wilhelm Kleinsorge, Dr. Terufumi Sasaki (no relation to Toshinki), and Reverend Mr. Kiyoshi Tanimoto.  Some excerpts from Chapter One:

            As Mrs. Nakamura stood watching her neighbor, everything flashed whiter than any white she had ever seen.  She did not notice what happened to the man next door; the reflex of a mother set her in motion toward her children.  She had taken a single step (the house was 1,350 yards, or three quarters of a mile, from the center of the explosion) when something picked her up and she seemed to fly into the next room over the raised sleeping platform, pursued by parts of her house.

            Timbers fell around her as she landed, and a shower of tiles pommelled her; everything became dark, for she was buried.  The debris did not cover her deeply. She rose up and freed herself.  She heard a child cry, “Mother, help me!,” and saw her youngest—Myeko, the five-year-old—buried up to her breast and unable to move.  As Mrs. Nakamura started frantically to claw her way toward the baby, she could see or hear nothing of her other children.

                                                                  _________________

            Dr.Fujii was the proprietor of a peculiarly Japanese institution: a private, single-doctor hospital.  This building, perched beside and over the water of the Kyo River, and next to the bridge of the same name, contained thirty rooms for thirty patients and their kinfolk—for, according to Japanese custom, when a person falls sick and goes to a hospital, one or more members of his family go and live there with him, to cook for him, bathe, massage, and read to him, and to offer incessant familial sympathy, without which a Japanese patient would be miserable indeed.

                                                                ___________________

            After the terrible flash—which, Father Kleinsorge later realized, reminded him of something he had read as a boy about a large meteor colliding with the earth—he had time (since he was about 1,400 yards from the center) for one thought:  A bomb has fallen directly on us.  Then for a few seconds or minutes, he went out of his mind.

            Father Kleinsorge never knew how he got out of the house.  The next things he was conscious of were that he was wandering around the mission’s vegetable garden in his underwear, bleeding slightly from small cuts along his left flank; that all the buildings round about had fallen down except the Jesuits’ mission house, which had long before been braced and double-braced by a priest named Gropper, who was terrified of earthquakes; that the day had turned dark; and that Murata-san, the housekeeper, was nearby, crying over and over, “Shu Jesusu, awaremi tamai! Our Lord Jesus, have pity on us!”

                                                                  _________________ 

           Dr. Sasaki shouted the name of the chief surgeon and rushed around to the man’s office and found him terribly cut by glass.  The hospital was in horrible confusion:  heavy partitions and ceilings had fallen on patients, beds had overturned, windows had blown in and cut people, blood was spattered on the walls and floors, instruments were everywhere, many of the patients were running about screaming, many more lay dead.  (A colleague working in the laboratory to which Dr. Sasaki had been walking was dead; Dr. Sasaki’s patient, whom he had just left and who a few moments before had been dreadfully afraid of syphilis, was also dead.)  Dr. Sasaki found himself the only doctor in the hospital who was unhurt.

            Dr. Sasaki, who believed that the enemy had hit only the building he was in, got bandages and began to bind the wounds of those inside the hospital; while outside, all over Hiroshima, maimed and dying citizens turned their unsteady steps toward the Red Cross Hospital to begin an invasion that was to make Dr. Sasaki forget his private nightmare for a long, long time.

                                                              ____________________

            Then a tremendous flash of light cut across the sky.  Mr. Tanimoto has a distinct recollection that it traveled from east to west, from the city toward the hills.  It seemed a sheet of sun.  Both he and Mr. Matsuo reacted in terror—and both had time to react (for they were 3,500 yards, or two miles, from the center of the explosion). Mr. Matsuo dashed up the front steps into the house and dived among the bedrolls and buried himself there.  Mr. Tanimoto took four or five steps and threw himself between two big rocks in the garden.  He bellied up very hard against one of them.  As his face was against the stone, he did not see what happened.  He felt a sudden pressure, and then splinters and pieces of board and fragments of tile fell on him.  He heard no roar.

                                                                    ____________________

            … She thought that before she began to make entries in her lists of new employees, discharges, and departures for the Army, she would chat for a moment with the girl on her right.  Just as she turned her head away from the windows, the room was filled with a blinding light.  She was paralyzed by fear, fixed still in her chair for a long moment (the plant was 1,600 yards from the center).

            Everything fell, and Miss Sasaki lost consciousness. The ceiling dropped suddenly and the wooden floor above collapsed in splinters and the people up there came down and the roof above them gave way; but principally and first of all, the bookcases right behind her swooped forward and the contents threw her down, with her left leg horribly twisted and breaking underneath her.  There, in the tin factory, in the first moment of the atomic age, a human being was crushed by books.

A Japanese Doctor's Comments

It's remarkable reading Hiroshima to be reminded of how much the effect of the atomic bomb was like an earthquake:  Buildings are knocked down.  In the case of Hiroshima, after the houses and other buildings were flattened by the bomb's shock wave (or blast effect), various small fires started and resulted in the total conflagration that consumed the city and killed most of the people who died in the bombing.  Others were killed immediately by being hit by flying debris, especially glass, and near the center of the blast by the heat of the bomb.  Others died later from the acute exposure to high levels of gamma rays and from the horrible flash burns that were seen then for the first time.

But in reading the book, there are many descriptions of people being trapped in rubble, of people digging their way out of rubble.  I will post some excerpts from the book later, including excerpts from letters written by the two doctors who are among about the six people John Hersey documents in the book.  First, a letter from a Japanese doctor that was posted as a comment in March on Yahoo's news site, concerning the recent earthquake and tsunami:

Dear friends all over the world

Thank you for your encouraging comments

I am in very neighbor of outrageous disaster of the quake.

And under tremendous fear of spreading nuclear substance from damaged nuclear power plants in Fukushima in Japan.

First thing which I want to say is that this quake and Tunami is unexpected things, besides we surveyed last 300 hundreds years. One can argue it is not enough periods for setting effective countermeasures, but in some town very close to coast set up breakwater over than 10 meters. However, the Tunami very overcame it and swallowed so many people with over than 10.000 casualties. Nightmere.

I must admit that we should have much more careful about managing nuclear plant about huge quake. I am very sorry, but I think that unexpected thing may be happened and, in general, very positive attitude is that help each other and look into real and effective resolution of serious problem. Please give us your talented knowledge and technique to manage deadly consequence of the quale for the appropriate Japanese staff.

We, Japanese, for sure will hang on this problem and would like to welcome all of you to Japan with traditional hospitality as it went before the accident.

With warm regards

Yoshihiko Tomita MD