Author: Andrew Becraft

Author, poet, and technologist. Founder and Editor-in-Chief of The Brothers Brick.

Petra’s Al Khazneh in LEGO

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Cross-posted from The Brothers Brick.

One of my dearest memories of the summer in 1994 that I spent working on an archaeological dig in Jordan was a weekend trip to Petra. We arrived from Amman late in the evening, but several of my fellow archaeology students couldn’t wait until morning to see the amazing structures carved from the sandstone 2000 years ago, so we snuck across wadi after wadi, avoiding the main paths. Once past the guard posts, we walked through the narrow gorge known as al-Siq — pitch black at night — until the passage opened in front of us to reveal Al Kazhneh, lit only by starlight.

ArzLan built his LEGO version of the Treasury for the Hong Kong Animation Festival, and features Indiana Jones in his Last Crusade visit to this UNESCO Heritage site.

Al Khazneh

Cathedrals

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They stand black against the white bluffs
     rising beyond the river, monuments
          to miracles we performed
in their deep blue pools. Atoms flashed
     apart. Wonders appeared
          over cities in a distant land.

Their purpose complete, we encase them
     in stone. If you follow this road
          due north, you’ll find
the old school facing the water. Tumbleweeds
     flit by its empty windows like neutrons
          dancing toward their new life.

Wind and soldiers have taken the wood
     from homes left behind
          to make way for all this science.
Submarines rust in pits.
     The salmon don’t run. There are no
          signs to explain what this place means.

That shimmer you feel on the wind,
     the way the ground sometimes shudders —
          the power we achieved
in those black buildings hangs in the air
     and lingers in the soil. Out there on the horizon,
          they will remain when all of us are gone.

Read about the experience that created this poem in “Stuck in a Hanford reactor building elevator.”

STS-Last

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For my 12th birthday in 1986, my grandmother sent me a card covered in people doing grown-up jobs — fireman, policeman, doctor, teacher, and astronaut. Inside, the card informed me that I could grow up to be anything I wanted to be. A few short months after the Challenger disaster, Grammie had crossed off the astronaut and written, “Except this one.”

Despite all that the Shuttle has accomplished in the intervening 25 years, America’s relationship with the space program has never been the same, and human space flight at NASA has merely hobbled along — at least compared to the giant leaps taken in the 60’s and early 70’s. I may still believe that our 43rd president was the worst in our history, but one thing he did right was to set NASA’s sights beyond low earth orbit again, to the Moon and Mars.

The launch of Space Shuttle Atlantis on its final mission today marks the beginning of a strange gap in America’s history of human space flight.

http://cdn-akm.vmixcore.com/vmixcore/js?auto_play=0&cc_default_off=1&player_name=uvp&width=512&height=332&player_id=1aa0b90d7d31305a75d7fa03bc403f5a&t=V0g0CIwWcBbCFWFqDg7dlOIrlBJngtp24m

The Orion/Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle is still under development, as are the commercial launch vehicles designed to take astronauts and cargo to the International Space Station. Until these new systems come online, NASA astronauts must hitch rides aboard spacecraft built and launched by other countries. Perhaps we’re witnessing the birth of a new, more cooperative era, but it feels strange that NASA is no longer self-reliant.

In the footsteps of James Joyce and Leopold Bloom

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Bloomsday week in DublinMy favorites of Dublin’s many layers are those that bring to life its rich literary history. Today is Bloomsday, when the strata laid down by James Joyce come to light all across the city (in the photo on the right, banners for Bloomsday on O’Connell Street).

A full day at work followed by dinner with business partners from New Zealand precluded any participation in Bloomsday — a genuine disappointment, so perhaps I can embrace Philip Larkin’s source of inspiration.

Nevertheless, I’ve found myself following Joyce and Bloom all week long, and indeed earlier during my two previous visits in August 2008 and February this year.

My flight arrived early enough that my hotel room wasn’t ready, so I headed north on Grafton Street (“gay with housed awnings”), across the O’Connell Bridge, briefly into the General Post Office, then onto the James Joyce Centre. The museum preserves the front door of Number 7 Eccles Street, where Joyce’s friend J.F. Byrne lived in 1904 and which Joyce used as the home of Leopold and Molly Bloom in the novel.

Leopold Bloom's front door

Jetlag began to catch up with me as I finished the exhibits, so I took the offer of a free lecture at the Joyce Centre to hear a great deal about Phoenix Park that I’d never have learned otherwise. It’s now on my list of places to visit next time I’m in Dublin.

South on O’Connell Street, past Trinity College and the old Irish Houses of Parliament (already the Bank of Ireland in 1904), and back toward the hotel on aching feet…

The next afternoon, I headed north on Grafton Street again, but turned right onto Duke Street, where Davy Byrnes Pub exists in all its nonfictional glory.

Davy Byrnes - "Moral pub."

He entered Davy Byrne’s. Moral pub. He doesn’t chat. Stands a drink now and then. But in leapyear once in four. Cashed a cheque for me once.

There were far more mouthwatering options on the contemporary menu, but I set aside my disdain for tourist behavior and ordered the gorgonzola sandwich.

Leopold Bloom's gorgonzola sandwich

Mr Bloom ate his strips of sandwich, fresh clean bread, with relish of disgust, pungent mustard, the feety savour of green cheese.

As much as I missed doing something symbolically Joycean on Bloomsday itself, I realized that Ulysses is everywhere, all the time in modern Dublin, and the real Dublin suffuses Ulysses on every page. An evening in a Dublin restaurant with Antipodean colleagues may have been no less “Joycean” than turning the rusty knob of Leopold Bloom’s front door or eating bread topped with overwhelmingly green cheese.

You can see a more complete photo tour of Joyce and Bloom’s Dublin by Tony Thwaites of the University of Queensland, to whom I’m indebted for some of my own after-the-fact details and choice Ulysses quotes.