Arty Farty Friday ~ Burns Night

Robert ("Rabbie") Burns born in Scotland on 25 January 1759 - 260 years ago today. Burns wasn't a painter but he qualifies for the "arty farty" banner for his poetry and quirky style.

Most people will recognise a few of Burns' poems: Auld Lang Syne (a New Year favourite when put to music); My Love is Like a Red Red Rose, for instance.

Others need a wee bit of translation - To a Mouse is one of these. The poem is available at Wikipedia with "a modern translation".
The original last two verses go like this

But Mousie, thou art no thy lane,
In proving foresight may be vain:
The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men,
Gang aft a-gley,
An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain,
For promis’d joy.

Still thou are blest, compared wi’ me!
The present only toucheth thee:
But Och! I backward cast my e’e,
On prospects drear!
An’ forward, tho’ I canna see,
I guess an’ fear!


I like this summary explanation of the poem from Schmoop

The speaker is plowing a field and accidentally turns up a mouse's nest. The mouse is shivering and terrified. The man stops his work to try to comfort the mouse.

He tells her to relax. He didn't mean to break into her nest. But then the speaker starts thinking more about it—the mouse is, after all, pretty justified in being freaked out. Mice should be scared of humans. We set traps for them, we set cats after them, and we plow up their winter nests. The speaker apologizes on behalf of all humankind. He says that the mouse might steal little bits of food from human farms, but who cares? That one little mouse doesn't eat much. And now her little winter house is all in a ruin. He imagines the mouse planning ahead carefully for the winter—she worked so hard to make her nice little nest, and then, BOOM. The plow goes right over it.

But hey, says the speaker—that's life. Whether you're a mouse or a man, your plans—however well-laid—often get messed up. And after all, the mouse has it easy, compared to a human. Mice live in the present moment, while humans look to the past with the regret and to the future with fear. Lucky mouse.

Also notable:
John Steinbeck took the title of his 1937 novel Of Mice and Men from a line contained in the penultimate stanza: "The best laid schemes o' mice an' men / Gang aft agley" (often paraphrased in English as "The best-laid plans of mice and men / Go oft awry").

In Douglas Adams's Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy series, mice are the physical protrusions into our dimension of a race of hyperintelligent pan-dimensional beings who commissioned construction of the Earth to find the Question to the Ultimate Answer of Life, the Universe, and Everything. When their plans go wrong they lament that "the best laid plans of mice" don't always work out.

At the Burns Birthplace Museum in Scotland, there stands a piece of arty fartyness in tribute to the "Mouse" poem:

Fast-forward two and a quarter centuries: Alloway, Scotland in 2010. The Robert Burns Birthplace Museum was under construction, almost completed. Its caretaker, the National Trust for Scotland, had launched a competition to find an artist who could create a public work of art, to celebrate the poet, that would be situated on the walkway of the new museum. The contemporary Scottish sculptor Kenny Hunter received the commission; he had already established his name around the globe with large works of animals and people and skeletons that have been labeled ‘anti-monuments.’ The artist has noted his sculptures “look as if they have just popped out of a machine or a Kellogg’s cornflake packet—yet they are monumentalised and subversive.” For the winning work Hunter chose to pay homage to none other than Burns’s mouse, a seven-foot bronze that he titled Monument to a Mouse. In an interview, he said, shortly after hearing his proposal had been selected “my cat deposited a dead field mouse outside my door just before bedtime. It’s a common thing for cats to do of course, but the mouse was in just the right pose and unusually for my cat she had left it perfectly intact. So I put it in the freezer and took it to the studio in the morning to begin work on the model. It helped tremendously in developing the form that my monumental mouse would take.”
https://mouseinterrupted.wordpress.com/tag/kenny-hunter/

I've always enjoyed reading another of Burns' poems:
A Man's A Man For A' That.
Last verse:

Then let us pray that come it may,
(As come it will for a' that,)
That Sense and Worth, o'er a' the earth,
Shall bear the gree, an' a' that.
For a' that, an' a' that,
It's coming yet for a' that,
That Man to Man, the world o'er,
Shall brothers be for a' that.

Being translated:

Then let us pray that come it may
(As come it will for a' that)
That Sense and Worth over all the earth
Shall take the prize and all that!
For all that, and all that,
It is coming yet for all that,
That man to man the world over
Shall brothers be for all that.

I fear that the prediction in those final lines will still, even in 2019, be a long time coming. But ten out of ten to Rabbie Burns for his optimism!


Finally, recalling Robert Burns' wise, but unlikely to be granted, plea...:

Saturday and Sundry Thoughts

Has anyone noticed that the Sun has quietly slipped out of heat-drenched Leo into what will, I hope, turn out to be an ever so slightly cooler, better presented stint in zodiac sign Virgo?

Speaking of Virgo, Ogden Nash, a favourite writer of mine, once wrote a piece of poetry which, all unknowingly by the author (I guess) was a pretty accurate description of someone with a hefty dose of Virgo in their natal chart - not just the Sun in Virgo though. A true, recognisable Virgo-type needs strong natal emphasis on the sign in order to advertise clearly its attributes. A cluster of planets in the sign, particularly the personal planets (Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars) would do it. Virgo on the ascendant angle or angle opposite, or at mid-heaven or nadir of the chart would provide even more emphasis.

Here's what Ogden Nash wrote about a true Virgo-type, possibly without realising what he'd done. I suspect he was describing his wife, a friend, or a colleague!

A Stitch Too Late Is My Fate
by Ogden Nash

There are some people of whom I would certainly like to be one,
Who are the people who get things done.
They balance their checkbooks every month and their figures
always agree with the bank's,
And they are prompt in writing letters of condolence or thanks.
They never leave anything to chance,
But always make reservations in advance.
When they get out of bed they never neglect to don slippers
so they never pick up athlete's foot or a cold or a splinter,
And they hang their clothes up on hangers every night and
put their winter clothes away every summer
and their summer clothes away every winter.
Before spending any money they insist on getting
an estimate or a sample,
And if they lose anything from a shoelace to a diamond ring
it is covered by insurance more than ample.
They have budgets and what is more they live inside of them,
Even though it means eating things made by recipes
clipped from the Sunday paper that you'd think they would have died from them.
They serve on committees
And improve their cities
They are modern knight errants
Who remember their godchildren's birthdays and the anniversaries
of their godchildren's parents,
And in cold weather they remember the birds and supply them with
sunflower seed and suet,
And whatever they decide to do, whether it's to save
twentyfive percent of their salary or learn Italian or write a musical comedy or touch their toes a hundred times every morning before breakfast,
why they go ahead and do it.
People who get things done lead contented lives, or at least I guess so,
And I certainly wish that either I were more like them or they were less so.

Poetry & War

I notice that today, 24 July, was the birthday of
Robert Graves (24 July 1895 – 7 December 1985), an English poet, historical novelist, critic, and classicist.

[Robert Graves] developed an early reputation as a war poet and was one of the first to write realistic poems about the experience of front line conflict. In later years, he omitted his war poems from his collections, on the grounds that they were too obviously "part of the war poetry boom." At the Battle of the Somme, he was so badly wounded by a shell-fragment through the lung that he was expected to die and was officially reported as having died of wounds. He gradually recovered and, apart from a brief spell back in France, spent the remainder of the war in England.

Graves, however, didn't remain one of the better known World War 1 poets such as Rupert Brooke, Wilfred Owen, or Siegfried Sassoon (his close friend).

The Poets of World War 1 formed part of our high school syllabus in English Literature - back in the 1950s. I have faded memories of some of their works and histories. Looking back, it seems like a rather depressing study for young women to have undertaken, but as World War 2 was still fresh in memories of both students and teachers - and even World War 1 was recalled by some of the older ladies teaching us, I suppose it was no bad thing that the horrors of war be etched deeply into our subconscious minds.

Here are three of Robert Graves' war poems.

Hate Not - Fear Not

Kill if you must, but never hate:
Man is but grass and hate is blight,
The sun will scorch you soon or late,
Die wholesome then, since you must fight.

Hate is a fear, and fear is rot
That cankers root and fruit alike,
Fight cleanly then, hate not, fear not,
Strike with no madness when you strike.

Fever and fear distract the world,
But calm be you though madmen shout,
Through blazing fires of battle hurled,
Hate not, strike, fear not, stare Death out!



Give Us Rain

'Give us Rain, Rain,' said the bean and the pea,
'Not so much Sun,
Not so much Sun.'
But the Sun smiles bravely and encouragingly,
And no rain falls and no waters run.

'Give us Peace, Peace,' said the peoples oppressed,
'Not so many Flags,
Not so many Flags.'
But the Flags fly and the Drums beat, denying rest,
And the children starve, they shiver in rags.


1915

I’ve watched the Seasons passing slow, so slow,
In the fields between La Bassée and Bethune;
Primroses and the first warm day of Spring,
Red poppy floods of June,
August, and yellowing Autumn, so
To Winter nights knee-deep in mud or snow,
And you’ve been everything.

Dear, you’ve been everything that I most lack
In these soul-deadening trenches — pictures, books,
Music, the quiet of an English wood,
Beautiful comrade-looks,
The narrow, bouldered mountain-track,
The broad, full-bosomed ocean, green and black,
And Peace, and all that’s good.

Music Monday ~ The Poetry of It

Country music may be an acquired taste, I know that it is viewed with a certain disdain by some so-called liberals in the USA, perhaps due to the genre's connection to a perceived (rightly or wrongly) right-wing political flavour. I'm not a 'liberal', I suppose my label, if I must have a label, would be 'lefty', but I've loved country music from my first introduction to it in the late 1990s, back in Europe - not in the UK, but in the Canary Islands. There, of course, country music didn't have the taint of politics attached, so I experienced it clean and unadulterated.

What brought on that rantette? Well, I caught a few bars of a well-loved country song the other day, hadn't heard it for years. It struck me, once again, that there's a lot of poetry embedded in country lyrics! Rodney Crowell's lovely words in "'Til I Can Gain Control Again" are what inspired this post.


Just like the sun over the mountain top
You know I'll always come again
You know I love to spend my morning time
Like sunlight dancing on your skin

I've never gone so wrong as to telling lies to you
What you've seen is what I've been
There is nothing I could hide from you
You see me better than I can

Out on the road that lies before me now
There are some turns where I will spin
I only hope that you can hold me now
Till I can gain control again

Like a lighthouse you must stand alone
Landmark the sailor's journeys end
No matter what sea I've have been sailing on
I'll always roll this way again

Out on the road that lies before me now
There are some turns where I will spin
I only hope that you can hold me now
Till I can gain control again

Songwriter: Rodney J. Crowell.


The song has been recorded by numerous artists, as well as by its writer; best known recordings are by Emmy Lou Harris and Willy Nelson. Just for a change though, I enjoy hearing the Walker Brothers' cover version, I've always loved Scott Walker's voice:




Here's Emmy Lou's classic version:

V-Day

The Day of St Valentine is here once again. Daft, commercialised and a tad trite as it has become, it's basically all about love and good feelings...that could never be all bad.

No sloppy luv and kisses here, just a poem I especially like, dedicated to any and all whose words help in keeping me sane in this mad, mad world.




William Stafford's
A Ritual to Read to Each Other

If you don't know the kind of person I am
and I don't know the kind of person you are
a pattern that others made may prevail in the world
and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.

For there is many a small betrayal in the mind,
a shrug that lets the fragile sequence break
sending with shouts the horrible errors of childhood
storming out to play through the broken dyke.

And as elephants parade holding each elephant's tail,
but if one wanders the circus won't find the park,
I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty
to know what occurs but not recognize the fact.

And so I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy,
a remote important region in all who talk:
though we could fool each other, we should consider--
lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark.

For it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give--yes or no, or maybe--
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.

Dorothy Parker - In the American Manner

I stumbled upon this poem by Dorothy Parker the other day:

Poem In The American Manner

I dunno yer highfalutin' words, but here's th' way it seems
When I'm peekin' out th' winder o' my little House o Dreams;
I've been lookin' 'roun' this big ol' world, as bizzy as a hive,
An' I want t' tell ye, neighbor mine, it's good t' be alive.
I've ben settin' here, a-thinkin' hard, an' say, it seems t' me
That this big ol' world is jest about as good as it kin be,
With its starvin' little babies, an' its battles, an' its strikes,
An' its profiteers, an' hold-up men—th' dawggone little tykes!
An' its hungry men that fought fer us, that nobody employs.
An' I think, 'Why, shucks, we're jest a lot o' grown-up little boys!'
An' I settle back, an' light my pipe, an' reach fer Mother's hand,
An' I wouldn't swap my peace o' mind fer nothin' in the land;
Fer this world uv ours, that jest was made fer folks like me an' you
Is a purty good ol' place t' live—say, neighbor, ain't it true?

She was in full sardonic, sarcastic, satiric mode there, under cover of a bit of the good ol' folksy. Though her sentiments were rooted in her own century - the 20th - nothing changes!

Dorothy Parker has always been worth a second look, so here's something I blogged some years ago:

These days Dorothy Parker is remembered most for her witty and cynical poetry. She was not particularly proud of the poems, but they have survived in public memory long after her short stories and other writing has been forgotten. Some of her screenplays have survived. The screenplay of A Star is Born was her work, and nominated for an academy award. Three different versions of the story have been made, and have entertained three different generations. It's a bittersweet tale, the kind she knew well from experience.

Dorothy's poems are mainly reflections of her own disappointments and frustrations. She had a sad childhood, losing both parents at an early age. This shadow followed her throughout her life. Her lovers and spouses only seemed to add to her distress. Dorothy attempted suicide 3 times, eventually took to alcohol, and died alone in a New York hotel, aged 73. The New York Times printed one of its longest ever obituaries as a tribute. She left her estate to Martin Luther King Jnr, though she had never met him, and he had never heard of her! She supported many left-wing causes, civil rights campaigns and at one point joined the communist party, and found herself on the US government's blacklist.

DOROTHY PARKER Born 22 August 1893, West End, New Jersey, at 9.50 PM.



According to a couple of sources on-line Ms Parker's birth time was 9:50 PM, putting the ascendant angle in Taurus. It's said that the ascendant can give clues as to personal appearance. In this case it doesn't. Dorothy Parker is described as fragile looking, doll-like, almost elfin, quite the opposite of the sturdiness of Taurus. From what I've read about her personality, Taurus seems to have been well-eclipsed by Virgo and Gemini.

The Sun had just passed into Virgo, at 00 degree when Dorothy Parker was born. There are 2 other planets at 00 degree: Venus at 00 Libra, and Jupiter at 00 Gemini. Some astrologers consider that the first and last degrees of a sign carry more of the "pure essence" of it, which could be of some significance here, especially in the case of Virgo and Gemini. Dorothy's legendary sharp tongue, naturally critical and acidic attitudes are typically Virgoan. The two signs, Virgo and Gemini, both ruled by Mercury, provide her writer's "signature". It was as though the Sun and Jupiter had struggled to get into their proper places just in time for the birth - or she had waited to emerge until they were properly placed!

Sun is conjunct Mars - novelist Sinclair Lewis had Sun conjunct Mars too (he who said "When facism comes to America it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross"): two writers of the same generation who were not averse to expressing controversial views. Writers with a fighting (Mars) spirit! Sun in Virgo, Mercury in Leo are in mutual reception in Dorothy's chart too (each lay in the sign of the other's rulership), which adds even more emphasis to the astrological picture, showing a born writer.

Moon in Capricorn and Sun/Mars in Virgo, both in Earth signs forming a wide harmonious trine. This I find somewhat surprising. She doesn't seem to have been the solid, stable Earthy personality it indicates. However, Moon is in challenging square aspect to Saturn in Airy Libra, and Sun is square to Jupiter in Airy Gemini. Two Airy challenges stirring up dust! Without these square aspects people might never have remembered the name and personality of Dorothy Parker.

One of her best-remembered darkly cynical poems:

Coda

There's little in taking or giving,
There's little in water or wine;
This living, this living, this living
Was never a project of mine.
Oh, hard is the struggle, and sparse is
The gain of the one at the top,
For art is a form of catharsis,
And love is a permanent flop,
And work is the province of cattle,
And rest's for a clam in a shell,
So I'm thinking of throwing the battle ---
Would you kindly direct me to hell?

Her self-chosen epitaph: "Excuse my dust."

American Fable ~ "...The darkness drops again..."

As mentioned in Tuesday's post, more on a recent film in which Yeats' poem The Second Coming is recited in full.

There's American Beauty, American Graffiti, American Hustle, American Gigolo, American Gothic....and on, and on.... many more. 2016 delivered American Fable, written and directed by Anne Hamilton- it's her feature film debut. Ms Hamilton had studied philosophy and law before turning to her first love - film. She acquired internship with Terrence Malick on the set of The Tree of Life, and as was quite likely to happen, some of that director's technique embedded itself into Ms Hamilton's new-minted style. I'd categorise it as pleasantly arty-farty but still accessible on several levels.

American Fable - the "fable" part of the film's title has to be highly significant, so should be kept in mind while watching the story unfold. A fable = a short story conveying a moral, message or lesson, same kind of thing as a parable or allegory, often containing supernatural or mythical elements. This tale is set in Wisconsin farming country in the early 1980s, when farmers in the United States were confronted by an economic crisis more severe than any since the Great Depression. Many of those who relied on agriculture for their livelihoods faced financial ruin. The epicenter of the downturn was the Midwest.

The film's story is told from the perspective of "Gitty" (short for Gertrude), 11-year old daughter of farmer Abe and wife Sarah, young sister of Martin (an absolute psychotic monster of an elder brother if ever I saw one!) The performance of Peyton Kennedy, 13 year old actress playing the part of Gitty, is something to behold - and worth seeing the film for that alone. She's in almost every scene, and carries the weight as effortlessly and as skillfully as any seasoned actor or actress.

Getting down to brass tacks, as my grandmother used to say: (spoilers ahead) Gitty's father's farm is in deep, financial trouble, many neighbouring farms have already failed, land has been bought up by developers, rumours of suicides become common, any remaining farmers are desperate, trying to hold on to their legacy, and their way of life. As a way of fighting back, and with the help of a shadowy female character, Vera, about whom I'm still puzzled, Gitty's father has managed to trap, and hold captive in an old crumbling silo on the farm property, an official (CEO?) of a huge agribusiness development company. We suppose that the intention was to use hoped for ransom money to save their farm...though quite how this could work out wasn't clear to me! Never mind, this is a fable, with a message.

The captive guy, Jonathan, is played by lovely Richard Schiff (who, for husband and I, will forever be known as "Toby from The West Wing"). Scenes between Jonathan and Gitty are some of the best in the movie in my opinion. It is in one of these scenes that Jonathan reads William Butler Yeats' poem, The Second Coming [see Tuesday's post] to Gitty from one of the pile of library books she has brought for him - to assist in his escape rather than for literary reasons.

The main arty-fartiness in American Fable, comes from many dreamy, mystical shots and sequences, also in some colour coding, a particular colour is associated with each character. For me, the colour thing, discovered only after having seen the film, seemed a wee bit superfluous, not to mention pretentious. Who has sufficient immediate insight to be watching a movie for colour coding?

There's a trailer HERE - but I don't see it as a good representation of the movie.

Without giving any more of the plot's detail away, I'll move quickly on to try to define this modern fable's moral message/lesson - nutshell-wise, as I perceived it:

The ages-old right versus wrong, good versus evil contest has shades of grey rather than being a sharp, clean black and white affair. Who, in this fable, is good; who has a good side and a bad side; who is bad, simply out of necessity, and who is downright evil out of no necessity at all? Perceiving the differences in these fictional characters, in these fictional circumstances, should assist us, in real life, to see the grey shades more clearly.

Others could well perceive the film, and its fable's lesson differently, it is left largely up to the viewer to decide. A brief review of the film in USA Today included that: The timing of its release, within weeks of Trump's inauguration as the 45th president, makes it all the more prescient, given its look at the hardscrabble Rust Belt. From the same piece:

No, we aren't revisiting the jolting results of last month's presidential election, in which Donald Trump successfully railed against the elitist culture and punched a ticket to the White House. Many have hailed his ascent as redemption for the forgotten American, the Rust Belt.

But a generation ago, in 1982, the situation was eerily similar: Ronald Reagan had been ushered into the presidency in 1980 through the overwhelming support of what Richard Nixon famously coined the Silent Majority. But his populist message also had a downside.

"Yet, we still have to choose what kinds of people we will be and what we will fight for — without certainty," Hamilton says. "American Fable is about a girl making that choice, and it's a very difficult one. Even she gets blood on her hands."

"...Vexed to Nightmare..."

Irish poet William Butler Yeats was born on 13 June, in 1865. His natal chart and brief biography are at astro.com. William painted in words - his father, John Butler Yeats, was an artist in the more traditional sense.

Rather than concentrate on the story of W.B. Yeats, his life and loves, a ponder upon one of his poems:

The Second Coming. This is a poem containing several memorable phrases which tend to pop up here and there, in quotation marks, in the work of other writers, so evocative have they become. Today's ponderings were first made some three years past, in 2014. Since then I've noticed Yeat's poem coming up more and more frequently in writings on the internet, and in TV shows and, as it happens, it was quoted in full in a movie* we watched at the weekend, and about which I shall scribble in my next post.

The Second Coming was written in 1919, published in 1920. The title could imply a Christian theme, but Yeats was a mystic and occultist, not particularly impressed by organised religion, including Christianity. The poem goes deeper.

When Yeats wrote The Second Coming the world in general was in a state of shock in the aftermath of The Great War (1914-1918). His own, Irish world, was in the throes of upheaval as Irish revolutionaries, many of whom he counted as friends and/or lovers, attempted to rid Ireland of centuries of British rule. Those facts indicate the poet's state of mind and emotions as he wrote. This poem, though, can be enjoyed like a painting from which each viewer draws a slightly different meaning, or like some modern song lyrics which, on the surface, seem nonsensical, but from which each listener is able to find their own meaning.

THE SECOND COMING

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

The gyre, at the heart of this poem refers to something those keen on astrology's principles understand well - cycles - here further expanded to the form of an ever-widening sprial.


The gyre reaches a point wide enough that a symbolic falcon flies beyond control of its keeper and becomes destabilised. Astrology's 2,100-year Ages fit the gyre imagery, I think.

Yeats had lived through the opening of the 20th century - 2,000 years from the birth of Christ - and speculated that a new "coming", or awakening, or major change of some kind, was to be expected, though not an exact repeat of the last one. I understand that Yeats' book A Vision details his beliefs in this direction.

"Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold": each generation might see a different reference there. Things going too far....too much excess, too much progress, too much control, too much technology, more and more until..... "mere anarchy" emerges (the word 'mere' is used here in its ancient meaning of pure and unadulterated).

"The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity." We can all relate those words to something familiar today, to apathetic and passive citizens as against the overly intense on both sides of the political divide.

The second part of the poem proceeds to speculate "what next then?" The poet has a vision of what seemed like the Sphinx in the desert, birds wheeling overhead, but representing what? Life as it was lived before Christ - a pagan world? Then darkness fell as Christianity emerged to bring about change? 2,000 years on Yeats expected another "coming", some as yet unknown event or "beast" to emerge and change things yet again, as Christ's coming had changed things last time around.

The "slouching" imagery indicates to me a slow, murky advance with no glorious overtures. I can easily identify that something coming, advancing slowly, while the best of us lack all conviction, and the worst are full of passionate intensity; something which will, inevitably, change things for us all.

See? Time, even since 2014 ponderings, has given the poem a potential newer meaning, something which Yeats could never have envisioned in detail. An original meaning is still there, but exists a little further back on the loop of that ever-widening gyre. As the gyre continues to widen, scenes will further change.

Regarding that *movie I mentioned - more in next post.

Saturday and Sundries

We're currently re-watching the 1970s TV mini-series Centennial, via a DVD set. I never tire of this story - often think that it was my love of Centennial, and another mini-series and novel, Lonesome Dove, which set my mind on the right track for my move across the Atlantic, and at a late stage of life. I still wake up surprised some mornings, to find myself smack-dab on the Chisholm Trail! That cattle trail is not the exact one featured in a chapter of Centennial - but it's comparable.

On this viewing of the TV adaptation of James A. Michener's epic novel - we're two-thirds through the series, as I type this - what I've noticed most is how, though passage of time has brought massive changes in lifestyle, especially in the 21st century, in deeper aspects nothing much has changed. The pattern of killing, retribution killing, then killing again, remains. Much of today's killing is done far away from the USA in the Middle East; retribution occasionally occurs here at home as well as directly, abroad. It's as though this nation, born in blood, is fated to live on in blood. There were some good men then (fictional in this case, but actual also), there are good men now, but never enough - then or now.

My 2008 archived post on Centennial is HERE.

Husband's new blog/website Cabinet Card Photographers has taken him many long hours of research work, which he has enjoyed and pronounced addictive.

Fall foliage Prediction Map -

It's interactive - could come in useful for leaf-peepers.

MASSES
by Carl Sandburg

Among the mountains I wandered and saw blue haze and red crag and was amazed;

On the beach where the long push under the endless tide maneuvers, I stood silent;

Under the stars on the prairie watching the Dipper slant over the horizon’s grass, I was full of thoughts.

Great men, pageants of war and labor, soldiers and workers, mothers lifting their children—these all I touched, and felt the solemn thrill of them.

And then one day I got a true look at the Poor, millions of the Poor, patient and toiling; more patient than crags, tides, and stars; innumerable, patient as the darkness of night—and all broken, humble ruins of nations.

If an infinite number of rednecks
fired an infinite number of shotguns
at an infinite number of road signs,
they'd eventually recreate
the complete works of Shakespeare
in Braille.

 I discovered the truth of it when on vacation, meeting  Himself, in 2003.

Wot - no astrology?
This Twitter offering, from #Rejected Horoscopes, might be good for a titter:

Music Monday ~ The Poet and Janis

Patricia Spears Jones, African American award-winning poet, born in Arkansas in 1951, has lived most of her adult life in
New York. One of her poems:





Swimming to America—Half-moon Sky

Esther Louise and I were talking about Janis Joplin. We were talking about
how Janis Joplin sang as if she found a pain so wide it wounded her.
She sang loud and harsh. But the wound was big. The wound would not heal.
She sang as if nothing nothing could cauterize that wound.
She sang as if only only she knew the way to heal this wound was to burn.
Daily dousing flames from her mouth. Daily striking matches to her mouth.
She sang as if the only only way she could make her face
remove every trace of plainness was to burn burn burn.
She sang so hard and long and loud she came as close as she could
to the pain of those songs made in boxcars, juke joints
outside vaudeville tents home to deviants degenerates and the generous
family of hustlers, some of them women torched by the freedom of the road.
Oh yes, Esther Louise said, “that white girl can sing the blues.”
Janis sang as if only only she could sweep away dry Texas air and burn
out like a nova leaving traces of wild hair, Indian bracelets all the
way up her arm. Her neck wrapped in layers of beads from Persia,
beads from Navaho land, beads from West Africa.
When I first saw Ntozake Shange, I thought, Janis Joplin.

From Bomb Magazine.

Link to the poet's own website: http://psjones.com/

I felt sure I'd written a post about Janis Joplin, with astrology, but if so it has sunk without trace, wrongly tagged perhaps, in the archives. Janis was mentioned in a post I wrote after husband and I had visited his younger daughter and grand daughter in Austin, Texas, years ago - that one is HERE.

Arty Farty Friday ~ From Hopper House to McMansions to Rapunzel & Pringles

The Sun will soon leave zodiac sign Cancer, for this year, but before it does I notice there'll be an important American painter's birthday anniversary tomorrow, that of Edward Hopper. I've blogged about this artist on three past occasions: HERE, HERE and HERE, between 2007 and 2013. Today I'm drawing attention, again, to just one of his works:

The House by the Railroad (1925)

Edward Hirsch wrote a poem about that painting, it begins:

The House by the Railroad

Out here in the exact middle of the day,
This strange, gawky house has the expression
Of someone being stared at, someone holding
His breath underwater, hushed and expectant;

This house is ashamed of itself, ashamed
Of its fantastic mansard rooftop
And its pseudo-Gothic porch, ashamed
of its shoulders and large, awkward hands......

Full poem can be read HERE

It ends:

...This man will paint other abandoned mansions,
And faded cafeteria windows, and poorly lettered
Storefronts on the edges of small towns.
Always they will have this same expression,

The utterly naked look of someone
Being stared at, someone American and gawky.
Someone who is about to be left alone
Again, and can no longer stand it.


I was reminded of this particular Hopper painting after spending much time nodding and chuckling though a website/blog McMansion Hell. There's a section devoted to the 50 States of McMansion Hell, where the author, Kate Wagner, has begun taking readers through the architectural horrors and decor mis-demeanors of high-priced modern mansions in each US state. There are also sections devoted to architecture, McMansions 101, history, as well as some of general arty-farty type interest. A visit is highly recommended. From the home page, to access heading links to all the good stuff available, just click on the three little lines in the very top left-hand corner of the screen.

Edward Hopper's House by the Railroad wasn't, of course, a McMansion, but many of today's over-priced, piles, filled with pretensions to opulence and historical relevance do owe a lot to similar styles from decades past - it's just that they their designers didn't know when to stop - or where!

I've wondered if, in decades long past, builders used a common catalogue of styles available as "sets" - a bit like a Lego set. The customer would pick one from the "menu" and could also order from a list of "sides" - as happens in restaurants. Perhaps the same things happen today, in the case of McMansions, but menus now have a wider variety of sides, and McMansion customers have bigger appetites and fatter wallets.

 "Rapunzel Towers"

 McMansion "Pringle Can of Shame"

As we drive around, just through some of our neighbouring "fly-over" states, we often spy much older houses, either left unoccupied, or currently owned by people of fairly modest means, sporting what we've come to call "Rapunzel Towers"; Ms Wagner calls these "Pringles Cans of Shame". Kansans, especially, during past decades, seem to have had a liking for this "side" of architectural kitsch.

Pair of Poems by John Ciardi + A Birthday

I've stumbled across another poet not known to me before: John Ciardi. Some of his poems remind me of Ogden Nash's, others have a tinge of Shel Silverstein. I was not surprised, either , when I noticed that some of his books of poems, especially his children's poems, were illustrated by Edward Gorey, about whom I wrote a post a few years ago see HERE.

Here are a couple of poems by John Ciardi as tasters:





Philosophical Poem

The disease of civilization is not tools, citizen.
Ignorance might be closer to it.
Politics closer. But only Money
Will hit the brass tacks everyone wants to get down to
Squarely on the head.

Above all, I have no case against human nature.
Whatever that is, I like it.
I like mechanics with wrenches,
Taxi drivers' photos on licenses,
Drunks lighting cigarettes.
What the hell else is there to like
After you've kissed your wife and gone to sleep?

I like everything but important people being important.
And academic people being academic.
What I like least is bookkeepers
Spending their human eyes on accounts receivable,
Interest receivable, payment due, balance on hand.
And columns of soldiers marching.

Why Nobody Pets The Lion At The Zoo


The morning that the world began
The Lion growled a growl at Man.

And I suspect the Lion might
(If he'd been closer) have tried a bite.

I think that's as it ought to be
And not as it was taught to me.

I think the Lion has a right
To growl a growl and bite a bite.

And if the Lion bothered Adam,
He should have growled right back at 'im.

The way to treat a Lion right
Is growl for growl and bite for bite.

True, the Lion is better fit
For biting than for being bit.

But if you look him in the eye
You'll find the Lion's rather shy.

He really wants someone to pet him.
The trouble is: his teeth won't let him.

He has a heart of gold beneath
But the Lion just can't trust his teeth.

For any passing reader interested in astrology, Astrotheme has John Ciardi's 12 noon natal chart. He was born on 24 June 1916 in Boston MA.

I found it rather odd to see that he had Sun conjunct Pluto, and Venus conjunct Saturn - all in Cancer. That doesn't seem to fit the atmosphere of his poetry at all. Uranus was at 19 Aquarius in harmonious trine to Mercury in Gemini - there's his quirk!

PS Wishing A VERY HAPPY BIRTHDAY today, to my husband Anyjazz!

Speaking of Lions, as the poet was, husband happens to have Leo Moon and Leo rising to go with his Aries Sun - hot stuff!? I should keep in mind these lines from Mr Ciardi, I guess:
"The way to treat a Lion right
Is growl for growl and bite for bite."

"Sing, and the hills will answer; Sigh, it is lost on the air."

I'm tired of gloom and doom, political fear and frenzy, but I'm also tired of oft recommended self-help measures to deal with the aforementioned. Sometimes I get to the point of just not caring any more!

A century or so ago there was a poet who, in her day, acted much as self-help gurus do today, but whose words I much prefer:
Ella Wheeler Wilcox.

Unsophisticated, sincere, clear and optimistic, those are characteristics which shine through the poems of Ella Wheeler Wilcox. Let the literary elite scoff, her poems have pleased many more people than those of gloomy, suicidal, self-obsessed poets.

As well as a poet Ella was a mystic, and a Rosicrucian. She was born 5 Nov 1850 in Johnstown Wisconsin. Her Sun and Mars in Scorpio no doubt led her into mysticism, while Moon possibly in Sagittarius with Venus, led the optimistic attitude for which she became famous.

12 noon chart shown as no time of birth is known.



The writer's planet Mercury was in fair and balanced Libra, along with Jupiter. These two planets were opposed from Aries, Mercury by Uranus and Pluto, Jupiter by Saturn. The Mercury opposition was sweetened by harmonious sextile to Venus and trine from Venus to Uranus/Pluto, setting up a powerfully helpful configuration for her writing. The opposition between Saturn and Jupiter held Ella's exuberant hopeful spirit, which might otherwise have gone "over the top", in check and at a reasonably credible level.

"Ella Wheeler Wilcox is one of America’s great writers. Her prolific prose and poetry are a tour de force of optimism, of the triumph of hope over despair, of victory over failure, of good over evil, of kindness over selfishness. She gave no quarter to negativity. The harshness of life was but an opportunity to change lead into gold. She was a transcendental alchemist. She had a mastery of expressing with words the play of light and hope and creativity upon dreariness and hopelessness and destructiveness.

We have many good, more sophisticated writers. However, Ms. Wilcox’s strength is her simplicity. She had the knack of getting to the heart of the most complex of everyday human problems. Then, she’d come up with the most simply worded and highly potent answers. She’d do this in prose. She’d do it with a poem. For example, she appreciated the need for, and the beauty of, our diverse religious faiths. However, she recognized the danger of adherents of any one faith considering their faith the only true one for all humanity. Deftly, she steers her readers away from the dangers of divisiveness. She simply stressed the basic core of all faiths when she wrote:

So many Gods, so many creeds,
So many paths that wind and wind,
When just the art of being kind
Is all this sad world needs." (From HERE)

A quote from her poem "Solitude" - opening lines are well-known:

Laugh, and the world laughs with you;
Weep, and you weep alone.
For the sad old earth must borrow it's mirth,
But has trouble enough of its own.
Sing, and the hills will answer;
Sigh, it is lost on the air.
The echoes bound to a joyful sound,
But shrink from voicing care.

Rejoice, and men will seek you;
Grieve, and they turn and go.
They want full measure of all your pleasure,
But they do not need your woe.
Be glad, and your friends are many;
Be sad, and you lose them all.
There are none to decline your nectared wine,
But alone you must drink life's gall.

Feast, and your halls are crowded;
Fast, and the world goes by.
Succeed and give, and it helps you live,
But no man can help you die.
There is room in the halls of pleasure
For a long and lordly train,
But one by one we must all file on
Through the narrow aisles of pain.

Saturday and Sundry Nostalgia

Remembering, with sadness, my favourite astrologer, whose birthday was this weekend. Jonathan Cainer tragically died, far too soon, at the beginning of May this year. His nephew, Oscar, has taken over his astrological website and follows, very well, in his uncle's footsteps.

This is a sweet little seasonal commerial for London's main airport. Sadly I won't be following the wee teddy bears, there's nobody left, back there, to wait for me with open arms. (Sniffle).

“The past is a candle at great distance: too close to let you quit, too far to comfort you.”
― Amy Bloom, Away.

I've wondered which famous painting best brings out nostalgia, in me - came up with this one. My grandmother had a framed print of it in her "front room", it always intrigued me. After she died I kept the print, but it was lost along with everything else in a fire in 1996.

I wasn't aware of it, those long years ago, but the painting is by Sir John Everett Millais, and titled The Boyhood of Raleigh. Odd, that I ended up over the sea, probably in the direction the character in the painting is pointing.

NOSTALGIA by Billy Collins

Remember the 1340s? We were doing a dance called the Catapult.
You always wore brown, the color craze of the decade,
and I was draped in one of those capes that were popular,
the ones with unicorns and pomegranates in needlework.
Everyone would pause for beer and onions in the afternoon,
and at night we would play a game called “Find the Cow.”
Everything was hand-lettered then, not like today.

Where has the summer of 1572 gone? Brocade and sonnet
marathons were the rage. We used to dress up in the flags
of rival baronies and conquer one another in cold rooms of stone.
Out on the dance floor we were all doing the Struggle
while your sister practiced the Daphne all alone in her room.
We borrowed the jargon of farriers for our slang.
These days language seems transparent, a badly broken code.

The 1790s will never come again. Childhood was big.
People would take walks to the very tops of hills
and write down what they saw in their journals without speaking.
Our collars were high and our hats were extremely soft.
We would surprise each other with alphabets made of twigs.
It was a wonderful time to be alive, or even dead.

I am very fond of the period between 1815 and 1821.
Europe trembled while we sat still for our portraits.
And I would love to return to 1901 if only for a moment,
time enough to wind up a music box and do a few dance steps,
or shoot me back to 1922 or 1941, or at least let me
recapture the serenity of last month when we picked
berries and glided through afternoons in a canoe.

Even this morning would be an improvement over the present.
I was in the garden then, surrounded by the hum of bees
and the Latin names of flowers, watching the early light
flash off the slanted windows of the greenhouse
and silver the limbs on the rows of dark hemlocks.

As usual, I was thinking about the moments of the past,
letting my memory rush over them like water
rushing over the stones on the bottom of a stream.
I was even thinking a little about the future, that place
where people are doing a dance we cannot imagine,
a dance whose name we can only guess.

In ancient Rome today began the long festival in honour of Saturn known, unsurprisingly, as Saturnalia - there are several posts in the archives on this, accessible via the Label Cloud in the sidebar. The festival morphed into a similar shindig in other countries, later on - in England it was known as Lord of Misrule

 Hat-tip HERE