Discovery

Scott Rolle, Brad Meltzer, Christine McKinley, and Buddy Levy. by Eric Ogden

Tune in to the History Channel Thursday evening for the first episode of Decoded, which features a team of historical investigators including WSU faculty member Buddy Levy.

A ten-part series, Decoded will examine persistent historical questions, such as whether Meriwether Lewis really committed suicide and the location of the lost Confederate treasury.  With mechanical engineer Christine McKinley and lawyer Scott Rolle, Levy is sent out by history enthusiast and best-selling author Brad Meltzer to track down answers to the questions uncovered in the course of his research.

Levy is a clinical associate professor in the English department, teaching writing and literature.  He is also the author of Conquistador: Hernan Cortes, King Montezuma, and the Last Stand of the Aztecs (Bantam Dell 2007) and American Legend: the Real-Life Adventures of David Crockett (Putnam 2005).  A forthcoming history, River of Darkness: Francisco Orellana’s Legendary Voyage of Death and Discovery Down the Amazon (Bantam Dell) is due for release in early 2010.

As a freelance journalist, Levy has covered adventure sports around the world and is a frequent contributor to a number of magazines.

Decoded premieres December 2 at 10 p.m. on History.

The Daily Evergreen ran a story on Dec. 1 about the show, including some interviews with Levy’s students.

UPDATE: The New York Times also has a good article about the show, “Searching for Clues in History’s Nooks.”

Watch the trailer:

Jeff Vervoort’s research is running hot and cold, in a good way.

Last week, he contributed to a paper in Science showing tropical rain forest biological diversity went up, not down, during a period of global warming 56.3 million years ago. Vervoort, an associate professor in the School of Earth and Environmental Sciences, was one of nearly two dozen contributors to the paper and played a key role in dating the materials studied.

Now he’s going on an extended expedition on the bottom of the earth to put a finer point on the age and origin of the Antarctic continent. He and fellow researchers from the U.S. and Australia will face sub-zero temperatures, crevasses, and 30 mph katabatic winds flowing off the ice cap. But in the samples of rock they collect, they might confirm that Antarctica used to be our neighbor on the supercontinent Rodinia, about 1 billion years ago. (Read more in the winter 2008 Washington State Magazine.)

“This will be quite an adventure and I am quite excited,” says Vervoort. “I am originally from northern Minnesota and have gone winter camping in temperatures colder than this, but haven’t been out in tents for six weeks before at these temperatures.”

Image courtesy of Michael Studinger, Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory

The mountains of Antarctica are difficult to study, lying for the most part several thousand feet beneath a sheet of ice. Radar has given researchers some idea of their contours, as seen in the exaggerated image above. Researchers on this trip, which is being led by the University of Minnesota-Duluth’s John Goodge, will collect rock from exposed areas and boulders encased in the ice. Vervoort will use his expertise in radiogenic isotopes and geochronology to date the rock and get a better idea about its origin.

Previous work on glacial rocks by Goodge, Vervoort, and an Australian colleague showed the materials were different from those found in outcrops near the surface. Moreover, the chemistry of the rocks was similar to those seen in North America, buttressing thinking from the early 1990s that Antarctica, Australia and North America were once next-door neighbors in Rodinia. The team on this trip hopes to clarify the geological composition for a large part of Antarctica and further test ideas about how the supercontinent puzzle fits together.

Visiting Writers Series, Installment #3—November 4, 7:30pm

It is Thursday evening, November 4, 2010, and the skies are clear with that definitive chill in the air that indicates it is fall in Pullman.  WSU faculty and students gather into Kimbrough 101 to listen to a reading given by Tod Marshall, the last visiting writer of the fall semester to participate in the English Department’s Visiting Writers Series.

Tod Marshall is the author of two books of poetry, including Dare Say (University of Georgia Press 2002) and The Tangled Line (Canarium Books 2009). These two books are filled with unique poems bearing titles such as “Describe KFC to Icarus,” “No Nightingales in Kansas” and “St. Jude and the Tomatoes.”  He has also published a book of interviews that he did with contemporary poets—Range of the Possible (EWU Press 2002)—as well as an anthology of poems by these same contemporary poets, which he edited—Range of Voices (EWU Press 2005). Tod received his Ph.D. from the University of Kansas in 1996 and currently resides in Spokane, Washington, where he is an English teacher at Gonzaga University.

Tod gives an hour long reading from his books, interspersed with some insight into the background and inspiration behind his writing.  He finishes the evening by reading from some newer poetry that he is currently working on.  Afterwards, I meet briefly with this local poet to get some insight into the creativity behind his writing.

INTERVIEW WITH TOD MARSHALL

Angela: Do you purposely go out into the world to experience unique things, or do you just let things happen to you? Where does the majority of your subject matter come from?

Tod Marshall

Tod: Well, I don’t think that I do anything exotic in order to go find poems out there in the world.  I think if you looked at my life on the outside you’d [see] kind of a boring life.  But I think it’s important not to turn down new experiences.  There’s that Eleanor Roosevelt quotation: “Try something every day that you’re afraid of,” or something like that.  So, I think that that’s important just to remind us that we’re alive, and to keep us fully alive. A lot of my poems come out of[a] combination of the normal things that I do and reading and things that I read about.  I steal things that I read about and blend them together so it’s all a blender that mixes those things, and hopefully comes up with something interesting.

Angela: In your book The Tangled Line (2009), you did a lot of juxtaposing of really bizarre things that don’t seem to go together [“divorce and martinis,” “custody and omelets,” “fly fishing and Marie Antoinette”].  Why did you decide to do that exactly?

Tod: The first reason I decided to do it is because I had just finished my first book and I was kind of stuck getting going on new poems, so I did it as an exercise.  I’m going to give myself this template that I’ve got to write poems within—“describe something to something else” [as in, “Describe divorce to Martinis”].  Eventually, after lots and lots of failed attempts—probably fifteen, twenty poems that just never really went anywhere— I started to find commonalities and threads. In the course of that book they describe a historical book.  I also think that description can be a form of containment—if we’re trying to describe something, we’re trying to get control of it.  Life doesn’t usually let us do that, so there’s [an] artificial control in [the] section of the book that has to do with Daedalus the maker. [He is] the grand artificer wanting to get control over all these circumstances that are really beyond his control.  There are lots of riffs there on different types of violence—from the violence of our country at war to the violence that happens in a custody fight over a kid.  You try to find ways to control your life when it’s out of control, and one of them is through coming up with a template.

(more…)

Josh Ritter headed out to be a scientist but became a singer-songwriter.

His parents are longtime Washington State University neuroscientists, as well as the people Josh credits with being “the single greatest influence on my music.”

The worlds of science and music combine in “The Curse,” a song on Josh’s latest album, “So Runs the World Away.” Brought to video by drummer-puppeteer Liam Hurley, it’s the love story of an archaeologist and a mummy. In the hands of a nuanced writer like Josh, or in the mind of a nuanced thinker like his father Bob, the story is prone to varied interpretation.

Somehow that came up during a recent dinner with the parents Ritter as we researched a recent feature for Washington State Magazine on their lives and work. Bob said he thought of the song as a parable of science—the investigator embraces a subject for a lifetime but grows old and passes. Meanwhile, science continues apace.

“That song is like a person that has her career and the career kind of consumes her. In other words, the mummy is dead. She finds the mummy, displays the mummy and becomes so involved with the mummy and spends her life with the mummy. The mummy kind of comes to life and of course she gets old and dies. That’s the way I see that song. The science goes on. The mummy goes on. But the investigator becomes a thing of the past. That’s not a bad thing. It’s just the love and the attention she devotes consumes her and makes her discovery a household word.”

We asked Josh to comment on his theory, and since we were working on a personality profile, we asked what kind of eclectic mind might have such an interpretation. His response is indirect but intriguing.

“The luckiest people get a vocation.  They are called to do the things they do, to commit our lives to specific endeavors.  Often they themselves are the only ones hearing the voice and what they do seems crazy to other people, but they do it anyway because they are called and because they love it.  The world is filled with these people who have been lucky enough to find their vocation.  They find it because we are influenced by the people who have come before them.  Science is no monolith, it’s the continuing process of discovering and passing down knowledge from hand to hand over the course of millennia.  They’re light-bearers, and this, in the grand scheme of things, is about the best thing any of us can hope to be.”