A bagel in space

As mentioned in a previous post, I have published "Nightmare," a compliation of Morrie Scwartz stories, beginning with "Shrink." This effort, which involves a re-publishing of three stories that appeared previously with different publishers, is an effort to consolidate various earlier writings, most of which have never been published One effort will combine short pieces that appeared in this blog and a previous blogsite. I searched for a name for this planned compilation and came up with only prosaic possibilities. Last night around 4:00AM, in a half sleep state, the name "Bagel in Space" came to me. I don't know why.

In thinking about that name, it occurs to me that most of my writing is something like a bagel--hard on the outside, a trifle mushy beneath, and perhaps empty in the center. It goes out into (cyber)space with few responses in return. Whether it is filled with cream cheese or lox, it remains untasted. Pehaps my efforts at consilidation are ihtended to make them more palatable as well as more accessible.

It seems that consolidation goes contrary to the future of the universe. An astrophysicist at Berkeley, UCLA shared the Nobel prize for research demonstrating that the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate. This was contrary to his original belief that the universe should be contracting because of the pull of gravity among the various stars and planets. The measuremen required to draw this conclusion is not quite comprehensible to me. It involved the observation of supernovas exploding and their color which provides information about how many millions of light years away they were. Even public radio's Terry Gross, whom, I consider the brightest and best interviewer I've ever listented to, remarked to the physicist after one of his not to lucid explanations, "I'll just pretend I understand and let's go on." The entire thing is a mystery to me. The universe is usually described as infinite. Both contraction and expansion seems to belie the meaning of infinite. If it was infinite before its expansion and infinite after its expansion, apprently it really wasn't infinite before its expansion. In any event, I am contracting my feeble attempts at writing which are far from infinite...perhaps infinitesimal.

On second thought, perhaos I'll stick with the prosaic--"Blog log" or something like that.