A Grace & Fury Assortment

Kicking off with bit of a re-do from years past; then a couple of related cartoons, poems, and vintage "representative" photographs from husband's collection:

Famous 15th century Italian artist Raphael painted The Three Graces (right). The three graces in mythology were goddesses, daughters of Zeus and Eurynome, said to rule beauty and charm in nature and humanity. Other artists and sculptors have depicted the three sisters too. A related damaged sculpture (above left) now in The Louvre, Paris dates from around two centuries before Christ.

The graceful sisters: Aglaia, who represented radiance or splendor. Euphrosyne - joy. Thalia represented fruitfulness or good cheer. If the sisters were to be represented astrologically, I guess the Sun would be obvious to represent radiance and splendor; Venus for joy, and Jupiter for fruitfulness or good cheer - the three graces in planetary form?


Another, contrasting set of three exists in mythology: The Three Furies. This painting is by W. Bouguereau "Orestes and the Furies". The Greeks knew them as Erinyes, daughters of Gaia (Earth) sprung from the blood of Uranus. They were Tisiphone (avenger of blood), Alecto (the implacable), and Megaera (the jealous one). Said to be merciless goddesses of vengeance whose punishments continued after death.

Which planets might carry the attributes of these three lovelies? Mars, Saturn for the first two; but how about "the jealous one"? Moon, perhaps? I tend to give the Moon positive interpretation, but in tarot The Moon card isn't one of the true "goodies". The Moon is changeable, temperamental, could easily become jealous. The Moon might represent "the jealous one".

So then, each planet, except Mercury, would have a Grace or a Fury to its name. Mercury has the job of bouncing around between them all.

Graces and Furies - we all have them all within us, somewhere !

Hauled into the 20th/21st centuries:

Clarifying caption:  Any man who loves and reveres his mother and his country should idolize, if he worship at all, the three graces,  Suffrage, Preparedness and Americanism.

 From a version of Dante's Divine Comedy

A HYMN TO THE GRACES by Robert Herrick

When I love, as some have told
Love I shall, when I am old,
O ye Graces! make me fit
For the welcoming of it!
Clean my rooms, as temples be,
To entertain that deity;
Give me words wherewith to woo,
Suppling and successful too;
Winning postures; and withal,
Manners each way musical;
Sweetness to allay my sour
And unsmooth behaviour:
For I know you have the skill
Vines to prune, though not to kill;
And of any wood ye see,
You can make a Mercury.

SEE HERE.


SONG OF THE FURIES (from "The Eumenides")
by Aeschylus (translated by Henry Hart Milman.)

3 verses - full poem is HERE

Up and lead the dance of Fate!
Lift the song that mortals hate!
Tell what rights are ours on earth,
Over all of human birth.
Swift of foot to avenge are we!
He whose hands are clean and pure,
Naught our wrath to dread hath he;
Calm his cloudless days endure.
But the man that seeks to hide
Like him, his gore-bedewèd hands,
Witnesses to them that died,
The blood avengers at his side,
The Furies' troop forever stands.

For light our footsteps are,
And perfect is our might,
Awful remembrances of guilt and crime,
Implacable to mortal prayer,
Far from the gods, unhonored, and heaven's light,
We hold our voiceless dwellings dread,
All unapproached by living or by dead.

What mortal feels not awe,
Nor trembles at our name,
Hearing our fate-appointed power sublime,
Fixed by the eternal law.
For old our office, and our fame,
Might never yet of its due honors fail,
Though 'neath the earth our realm in unsunned regions pale.

The Graces?

 I'm tagging this trio as The Furies!

And...as though we don't have enough to contend with via Graces and Furies, The Fates and The Sirens are determined not to be forgotten!

Arty Farty Friday ~ Dave Hickey, Art Critic.

I came across the name
Dave Hickey among commentary at a politically-slanted website recently. Hickey, I learned, is an art critic. I was impressed by the quote of his offered by a commenter, and later wondered if Mr Hickey might be a subject for Arty Farty Friday. It'd make a change from posting about actual painters, photographers, illustrators etc.

Material on the net concerning Mr Hickey, found via Google, was not hard to come by - in fact there's a almost too much of it. I got the impression, after dipping in here and there, that Dave Hickey loves to talk, loves to write, loves to be interviewed, enjoys name-dropping, is highly opinionated, loves to pontificate - but not in an unpleasant way. He seems to be an engaging writer, with many books to his name. He has that easy affectation in his style reminiscent of the writing often found on the back of LP album covers, way back when. I enjoy a little bit of this style - though a little does go a long way. Dave Hickey is really better than that though, it's just one facet of his style.

Anyway, having decided to feature him on Arty Farty Friday I hit a stumbling block. How to slant the post. There's so much material online, one could drown in it. Then I found that one of his books is tited "Stardumb" :

Art Under Covers
by Suzaan Boettger

Artspace Books has published the delicious Stardumb, with art by East Village artist John de Fazio and stories by Las Vegas-based art critic Dave Hickey. This modest, square volume comes with a hard paper cover like a children's book and weighs only ten ounces. The title makes a punning connection between astrology and art-world stardom; its 12 tales of the art city, set in Chelsea and Santa Monica, each putatively illustrate Zodiacal personality traits.

De Fazio's drawings, which have a bright collaged density that combines scientific illustration and psychedelic designs into faux occult imagery, are lite fun. Hickey's framing of art world types as astrological signs is obliquely interpretive but unnecessary -- his sharply observed stories stand on their own. His attitude toward avaricious artists, compromised collectors, eccentric critics, and yes, the rest of us in the art world just making it, is less fashionably ironic than lovingly wry. This is a treasure you'll hate to see end.

Well, well, well! I've ordered a used copy from E-bay. Sounds like a fun read. I shall report back, one day!

I don't intend to get into paraphrasing online material about Mr Hickey and his personality - instead here are just a couple of pieces to give any interested readers a taste of this guy. And a video (there are many more at YouTube)

Art critic Dave Hickey has never been shy about dissenting
Dave Hickey calls art and culture like he sees it, writing and stirring opinions well past 'retirement.'
By Deborah Vankin in the LA Times

Dave Hickey's Politics of Beauty
By Laurie Fendrich.

He has some hard things to say about Texas in this one!

ASTROLOGY (briefly) ~

Born on 5 December 1940 in Fort Worth, Texas. Chart is set for 12 noon.

With last week's re-airing of thoughts on Via Combusta still in mind I wondered straight away if Dave Hickey would have any personal planet(s) within the Burning Road - he certainly has credentials for it! Let's have a look at his 12 noon chart.

Yep! We find Venus and Mars conjoined, and in the first 15 degrees of Scorpio which make up part of Via Combusta.

A time of birth in the early hours, or at least well before noon would put natal Moon in Aquarius - that'd be a good fit for someone as opinionated as Mr Hickey!

Uranus, rebel planet is in opposition to his intense Scorpio Mercury, from Taurus. That probably supplies something of a balancing act in his nature: rebellious yet earthy practicality in the area of the arts (Taurus is Venus-ruled) balanced by frequent emotionally tinged outbursts in his communication with the public (writings and interviews).

Sun in jovial Sagittarius lightens, softens and makes more palatable any stubborn intensity about issues he holds dear.

Ecliptically

There's a penumbral lunar eclipse today.
Explanation HERE.

Here are Astrology King's astrological thoughts on the eclipse.

I like the Yod the astrologer points out (I have a thing for Yods!) This one links Aquarius Moon to Aquarius' ruler, Uranus with the Yod's apex at the Jupiter/Mercury conjunction in Virgo. The astrologer talks about a karmic mission - not sure about that - but if it floats your boat, fine!

And: another astrologer's take on this eclipse: Kate Rose at Elephant Journal.

Blogging On Foot

This video led me to blog a tiny celebration of....FEET, today:

FOOT PUPPETS

 Feet of an Apostle by Albrecht Durer

 by Edgar Degas

 Jesus Washing Feet of Peter by Ford Maddox Brown

"The human foot is a masterpiece of engineering and a work of art."
Leonardo da Vinci

"Who you know will get your foot into the door. What you know will keep your foot out of your mouth. "
Unknown

"Here men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the Moon. July 1969 AD. We came in peace for all mankind. "
Neil Armstrong

 So were mine!

AND (see HERE)

Expectedly...or not

I wander into a blog called Mock Paper Scissors occasionally. Yesterday they had numbers. Their post is linked to the origin of numbers featured there. I was going to write that those numbers make depressing reading, but any indication that a President Trump is becoming increasingly unlikely can't really be said to be depressing.....and yet, and yet...

Only something quite unexpected is likely to change current prospects. What, for instance?

Trump withdrawing for whatever reason/accusation he might offer, real or imaginary? Trump being ousted by the RNC through some newly minted RNC law, tailored for just such a purpose?

In either of those situations Trump's chosen VP, Mike Pence would probably be slotted in as candidate, or, if it were indicated that someone who had, at least, had votes cast for them at some point...Ted Cruz...or even Mitt Romney? Whether any such change would make a Hillary Clinton landslide in the General election more or less likely could be hard to estimate. I'd say a landslide in favour of Clinton would be likely reduced to a slight rockfall, its strength depending on name of the new candidate.

If something unexpected should cause change, on the Democratic candidate's side - for instance: Hillary Clinton's health issues? If such issues do exist, and were to become more obvious, calls could arise for more detailed medical examination with publication of results. New revelations regarding her e-mail debacle or the Clinton Foundation shenanigans, more damaging to Hillary Clinton than any before (via Wikileaks)? If circumstances in either scenario were serious enough, her chosen VP, Tim Kaine would come into more intense focus, perhaps acting as candidate. Or, the DNC might decide to choose, as replacement, someone for whom public votes have been cast, or someone of proven ability at national level: Bernie Sanders, Joe Biden? I doubt the DNC would ever countenance Senator Bernie Sanders as candidate, no matter how many states he carried in the primaries, Wall Street and the oligarchs who rule the DNC wouldn't allow it. Joe Biden though could, I suspect, improve slightly the Dems' chances in the General. Fewer voters, especially former Bernie Sanders supporters, hate him with the same intensity they hate, or distrust, Hillary Clinton. Tim Kaine, though...not so sure, nobody really knows him. A more likely scenario, should some unexpected event(s) befall Clinton, would be to somehow, if at all possible with the current president's influence, push her through the difficulties and into the presidency, then worry about other issues arising.

Unexpected general changes: a non-candidate related "October Surprise"? Some national emergency, for example major terrorist activity; major emergency due to climate/earthquake/massive-scale never before experienced flooding....etc; or unexpected uprising of some major sector of the population - from whatever cause, with martial law being declared: General Election postponed.

Those are a few possibilities, however unlikely they might seem right now. Astrologers would be looking for Uranus, planet of the unexpected to be involved, somehow, at some stage, in some natal or national chart. We shall see...or not. As some character in a TV series we watched last night said, "Sometimes things work out - don't question the universe!"

Rolling with the Flow

A wander up another shady river's course, a river somewhat similar to the literary river featured in an earlier post. (HERE).

The mouth of the earlier literary river was a movie, "The Painted Veil" , the mouth of this river has many cinematic tributaries. I've chosen, from the many, the 1998 movie "Sliding Doors".

Two Different Paths - “Sliding Doors”
Everyone wonders what would have happened if they made the other decision instead of the one they chose, and this movie shows both sides for the main character Helen. Depicting parallel universes in which Helen either misses or catches a train and the results of that fateful action, “Sliding Doors” brings to life a concept that everyone wonders about. Great cast performances make it entertaining to watch how Helen’s separate lives differ, all while raising philosophical questions about fate and free will.

"Sliding Doors" wasn't adapted from a novel though many of the movies of similar theme were. In common: one small change has a ripple effect, resulting in massive changes.

Wandering back a short way along this river's course, I find that"Sliding Doors" reviewers have said that the film is a simpler version, more appealing to the general public, of a couple of other movies: Blind Chance and Run, Lola Run.

Numerous movies, and novels have comparable themes - many are listed on line, here or here for instance - from which it becomes clear that the theme has a "feline" cousin.

The "what if" and alternative reality tropes all base stories on a roughly similar idea, which, if we follow the literary river further back towards its source, likely gleaned inspiration from words and ideas originating many centuries ago: a proverb-turned-poem with its origins as far back as the 14th century (older than print). Probably the best-known version is that which appeared in Benjamin Franklin's Poor Richard's Almanac: (HERE)

For want of a nail, the shoe was lost;
For want of a shoe, the horse was lost;
For want of a horse, the rider was lost;
For want of a rider, the message was lost;
For want of the message, the battle was lost;
For want of a battle, the kingdom was lost,
And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.

Is it possible the literary source goes back even further? Didn't the Greeks have a useful relevant theory ? They had them for just about everything!
How about this?

Although Heraclitus argued for eternal change, his contemporary Parmenides made the radical suggestion that all change is an illusion, that the true underlying reality is eternally unchanging and of a single nature. Parmenides denoted this reality as τὸ ἐν (The One). Parmenides' idea seemed implausible to many Greeks, but his student Zeno of Elea challenged them with several famous paradoxes. Aristotle responded to these paradoxes by developing the notion of a potential countable infinity, as well as the infinitely divisible continuum. Unlike the eternal and unchanging cycles of time, he believed that the world is bounded by the celestial spheres and that cumulative stellar magnitude is only finitely multiplicative.

“Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world's great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs.
I am haunted by waters.”
~ Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It and Other Stories

Remembering that it's Music Monday, staying with the river theme:

Combustibly

I bought a junk store book while away last week: The Buchwald Stops Here, it's a collection of Art Buchwald's newspaper columns: "...observations about the body politic and impolitic in the Jimmy Carter age - incisive, outrageous and downright hilarious"...the blurb on the cover says. I wouldn't go that far, from the little of it I've sampled, but then I wasn't here in the Jimmy Carter age. Anyway, what the book did was to encourage me to trawl through my posts to discover whether I'd posted about Mr Buchwald in the past. I hadn't featured him exclusively, but I did include him in the following post hauled out from March of 2007. The post was a follow-up on one a few days earlier, which is linked in the first sentence.

I've had a fairly lazy bee in my bonnet about Via Combusta from first reading about it. (Via Combusta includes degrees between 15 Libra and 15 Scorpio - there are, from some sources, variations on the exact degrees). Clicking on "via combusta" in the label cloud in the sidebar will bring up other relevant posts.

The re-airing follows:

Continuing the line of thought from Saturday's post, I've been doing more research regarding planets in the (supposed) Via Combusta degrees, specifically in charts of journalists, commentators and authors who regularly express highly critical views on politics and politicians. I've checked a few more natal charts and come up with the information below. These degrees certainly seem to contain some extra "fire", which could be utilised in many ways, I guess. The journalistic slant presented itself quite by accident.

As in most things astrological, there is no single theory about Via Combusta - where it is/was, why it has/had an unfortunate connotation. Some sources explain that the Via Combusta's reputation stems from the allegedly malefic, or unfortunate, fixed stars in the same area. But...there's the problem of precession. Is Via Combusta still where it used to be? I think that depends on whether the effects observed by the ancients stemmed directly from fixed stars, or from some other "cause". I prefer to think that there is something special about that section of space, and its relation to Earth. In ancient times the area was identified by the fixed stars lying within it - perhaps now it is just space.

In Skyscript's Glossary of Terms we are told that :

Al Biruni wrote of it: "The combust way is the last part of Libra and the first of Scorpio. These two signs are not congenial to the Sun and the Moon on account of the obscurity and ill-luck connected with them and because each of them is the fall of one of the luminaries. They also contain the two malefics, the one by exaltation (Libra, Saturn) the other by house (Scorpio, Mars)." This may be a very ancient aphorism, originating from the period when 15 Libra corresponded with the autumn equinox.

Whatever the reasons for the bad reputation of this stretch of our zodiac, I shall keep an eye on it in future. If the area has special significance for the Sun and Moon in horary astrology, then I'd conclude that there has to be something special about it in general. Could it be simply that these degrees carry a more concentrated version of accepted Scorpio traits ?

I don't see the common thread, observed in the named individuals, and in the three females discussed in Saturday's blog entry, as exactly unfortunate, or malefic. A tendency towards maliciousness, perhaps. An overly passionate desire to get points across, deeply held opinions with a need to express them in exaggerated fashion - yes! Unfortunate only for the objects of their commentary.

For much of 1925 Saturn hung around the Via Combusta degrees of Scorpio, it was a fertile time for the birth of acerbic journalists ! (Assuming that Via Combusta "The Burning Road" stretches from 15* Libra to 15* Scorpio.)

Gore Vidal

Born 3 Oct. 1925. West Point, New York. (SATURN 12*SCORPIO)

Art Buchwald

Born 20 Oct. 1925. Mount Vernon, New York. (SUN 26* LIBRA, MERCURY 5* SCORPIO. SATURN 14* SCORPIO)

Nat Hentoff

Born 10 June 1925, Boston, Mass. (SATURN 8* SCORPIO)

William F. Buckley

Born 24 Nov. 1925. New York City. (MARS 7* SCORPIO)

Pat Buchannan

Born 2 Nov. 1938, Washington DC. (SUN 9* SCORPIO)

Bill O'Reilly

Born 10 Sep 1949 New York City. (VENUS 25*LIBRA)

Rush Limbaugh

Born 12 Jan. 1951, Cape Girardeau MO. (NEPTUNE 19* LIBRA)

Michelle Malkin

Born 20 Oct 1970 Philadelphia PA. (MERCURY 22* AND SUN 26* LIBRA, JUPITER 12* SCORPIO)

Others, who are not journalists:

Martin Gardner (well-known skeptic and author) Born 21 Oct. 1914, Tulsa, Oklahoma (SUN 27* LIBRA, MARS 15* SCORPIO)

Dennis Kucinich (presidential candidate) - 8 Oct 1946, Cleveland, Ohio. SUN, MERCURY, JUPITER AND MARS ALL IN VIA COMBUSTA.

Other presidential candidates -Hillary Clinton has Venus and Mercury there, Barrack Obama has Neptune there, John Edwards has Neptune and Saturn there.

[A 2016 addition: Bernie Sanders has Venus there.]

(The illustration at the top of this post (from a book cover) is a Jack Davis cartoon of Art Buchwald, who died in January 2007.) [Adding that Jack Davis died this year, 2016]

Arty Farty Friday ~ George Luks + a Conundrum

An arty farty conundrum: which natal chart best suits American painter George Luks? Wikipedia has his date of birth as 13 August 1867, but other websites state 13 August 1866. Checking at Ancestry.com, the genealogy website, the question remains without a clear answer. The artist's gravestone states 1866, as does a passport application, yet there is still confusion; several documents state 1867 or "about 1868", muddying the waters further.

Here are a few lines from a couple of biographies to give some idea of the artist's personality, which could provide an astrological clue to an accurate birth year...or not.

Wikipedia:

Luks was a born rebel and one of the most distinctive personalities in American art. "He is Puck. He is Caliban. He is Falstaff," his contemporary, the art critic James Gibbons Huneker, wrote. Like many of the later Abstract Expressionist men, he made a great display of his masculinity and could seldom retreat from a dare. He took pride in being known as the "bad boy" of American art, liked to characterize himself as entirely self-created, and downplayed the influence of Robert Henri, or any contemporary, on his artistic development. He was given to hyperbolic statements and was often intentionally vague about autobiographical details, preferring to maintain an aura of self-mythologizing mystery. He was equally at home at a prize fight or in a tavern as in a museum or a gallery. Luks was always a heavy drinker, and his friend and one-time roommate William Glackens often had to undress him and haul him to bed after a night of drunken debauchery. Although many sources confirm this tendency, they also characterize him as a man with a kind heart who befriended people living on the edge who became subjects for his works of art. Examples of this are numerous: e.g., Widow McGee (1902) or The Old Duchess and The Rag Picker (both of 1905), in which Luks depicted with sensitivity elderly, down-and-out women who knew the harsh realities of the street. Luks was a paradox: a man of enormous egotism and a great generosity of spirit.

George Luks created striking paintings of slum-dwellers before dying a mysterious death at a speakeasy in 1933.
BY David J. Krajicek

SNIP

A few years back, a Sotheby’s auctioneer banged his gavel on a $1.9 million winning bid for an oil painting of a little girl named Lily Williams, a red-cheeked ragamuffin from the East Side slums whose blue eyes sparkle like sapphires. The artist was George Luks, an Ashcan School painter who a century ago stalked the tattered precincts of New York for subjects.
“A child of the slums will make a better painting than a drawing-room lady gone over by a beauty shop,” Luks said. “Down there, people are what they are.”

Eight decades after Luks died mysteriously in a midtown doorway, his star is ascending. In November, another of his slum urchin portraits, “In the Corner,” sold for nearly $800,000. The artist would be mystified. And he might just poke some fancy-shmancy fat cat art snob in the schnoz, for the heck of it.

Luks was the bad boy artist of his era, a brawler and boozer who loved nothing more than to light into the smarty-pants set. In one headline example, he called art patrons suckers during a drunken lecture at the Artists’ Cooperative Market in Manhattan in 1932.

“This country has been imposed upon by French superior salesmanship,” Luks growled. “It is the victim of cheap little lawyers who become diplomats, and financiers who let their wives buy pictures from dealers who perfume them with bombast and saddle them with trash.” When people hooted, he put up his dukes and called on his alter-ego.

“If you don’t like my talk get out,” he said. “You’re not talking to George Luks now. You’re talking to Chicago Whitey, the best amateur boxer and barroom fighter in America.” Luks had done some boxing in his younger days, but he was 65 years old. And time would prove that he was no better than America’s second-best barroom fighter.

He was born in Williamsport, Pa., two years after the Civil War ended. He was the son of immigrants, a Polish father and Bavarian mother.

Noon Chart for 13 August 1867, Williamsport, PA.

Noon chart for 13 August 1866, Williamsport, PA.

On balance I like the 1867 chart better than the 1866 chart for George Luks - my choice is based on the necessary premise that Moon was in Aquarius - a birth around, or after, noon would be required for that. Early Aquarius Moon would put it in semi-sextile to Jupiter in Pisces. This aspect would combine the rebelliousness of Aquarius with the generosity of spirit, hyperbole, yet an underlying softness from Jupiter in Pisces. Those are characteristics described in the excerpts quoted above.

Leo Sun trines Neptune in both charts, which might relate to his apparent addiction to alcohol.

Mars, said to represent masculinity and energy, in the 1867 chart would trine Aquarius Moon if born around, or after, noon. That could be a link to his wished-for "bad boy brawler" reputation.

Though there are possible arguments for the 1866 chart too, I don't get quite the same rebellious feel to it overall as for the 1867 chart, provided it had Moon in Aquarius, requiring noon or later birth-time. I'm not equipped to calculate a likely rising sign from a possible Moon in Aquarius - perhaps commenter mike would assist on that? Rising sign is another important piece of missing information which could make a big difference in choosing which chart is the better fit.

This blog, of Poul Webb, has a selection of Luks' paintings nicely displayed. Or, for an overall look at his paintings see Google Image HERE.

I especially like:

 Spring Morning, New York.

and

 Girl Under Arched Bridge

Guest Post ~~~ Dis-ease

GUEST POST: words from occasional commenter "JD":

When I glanced at the piece by Andrew O'Hehir [linked in Tuesday's post this week] the thing that leapt out at me was this -

"America is experiencing a health crisis on an enormous scale — a crisis that is simultaneously physical, psychological and spiritual and is hardly ever understood in holistic terms."

That is more or less a summary of what John Michell wrote in "The New View Over Atlantis" where he spoke about how the first and all subsequent European immigrants destroyed or ignored the sacred places of the Native Americans without learning any of the 'secrets' of the land -

"The catastrophic results of the North Americans' failure to inherit the geomantic lore of their predecesors is now becoming apparent in the endemic restlessness and unease of the present inhabitants and in the approach of sterility to both land and livestock through the application of naive agricultural theories, together with the disregard on the part of politicians, generals and industrialists for the living, and therefore vulnerable, nature of the country they inhabit."

The result was and still is that same psychological and spiritual dis-ease which O'Hehir speaks about. It will never be healed until there is an acknowledgement by the Powers That Be of their disastrous error.

The idea of the land being sacred is very old and deep rooted all over the world. From ancient Greece via the various Holy Wells in Britain and Ireland up to and including the location of the burial place of Crazy Horse which the Lakota Sioux, to this day, will not reveal to anyone.
Sacred spaces and places are very real.

(In South America the invaders did what Christian missionaries had always done; they built their churches on those sacred spaces and co-opted the local traditions and forms of worship into a new blend of Christianity effectively taking possession of the old religion)

Alan Watts said the same thing years ago, this is a nation dedicated to the destruction of life.

Hillary or Trump: what a dismal prospect for the future! Is it too late to hand the country back to the Crown and apologise for the mess you have made? (Says he with tongue stuck firmly in cheek)

Driving by Hart Crane, poet.

It's becoming ever more difficult to find something, or someone, to blog about who or which hasn't already been "done", often numerous times. Example, the other day I set about looking for another lesser-known poet to investigate via bio, poems and natal chart. Hart Crane came up. He seemed like an interesting, yet tragically short-lived poet; he led a life of variable excesses, gay or bi-sexual, alcoholic... then put an early end to it himself.

Nutshell version from learner.org:

Hart Crane's reputation rests primarily on his extraordinary craftsmanship and sweeping vision. In The Bridge, Crane set out to write an American epic that unified past and present, East and West, myth and reality. Crane's poetic vision, based on views that alcoholic and sexual excesses were a way to achieve a perception of unity of all things, led to self-destructive behavior, and his short, turbulent life ended in suicide.

From poets.org

Born on July 21, 1899, in Garrettsville, Ohio, Harold Hart Crane was a highly anxious and volatile child. He began writing verse in his early teenage years, and though he never attended college, read regularly on his own, digesting the works of the Elizabethan dramatists and poets Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Donne, and the nineteenth-century French poets Vildrac, Laforgue, and Rimbaud. His father, a candy manufacturer, attempted to dissuade him from a career in poetry, but Crane was determined to follow his passion to write.

Living in New York City, he associated with many important figures in literature of the time, including Allen Tate, Katherine Anne Porter, E. E. Cummings, and Jean Toomer, but his heavy drinking and chronic instability frustrated any attempts at lasting friendship. An admirer of T. S. Eliot, Crane combined the influences of European literature and traditional versification with a particularly American sensibility derived from Walt Whitman.

His major work, the book-length poem, The Bridge, expresses in ecstatic terms a vision of the historical and spiritual significance of America. Like Eliot, Crane used the landscape of the modern, industrialized city to create a powerful new symbolic literature. Hart Crane committed suicide in 1932, at the age of thirty-two, by jumping from the deck of a steamship sailing back to New York from Mexico.

Forgetfulness

Forgetfulness is like a song
That, freed from beat and measure, wanders.
Forgetfulness is like a bird whose wings are reconciled,
Outspread and motionless, --
A bird that coasts the wind unwearyingly.

Forgetfulness is rain at night,
Or an old house in a forest, -- or a child.
Forgetfulness is white, -- white as a blasted tree,
And it may stun the sybil into prophecy,
Or bury the Gods.

I can remember much forgetfulness.
Harold Hart Crane


Carmen de Boheme

Sinuously winding through the room
On smokey tongues of sweetened cigarettes, --
Plaintive yet proud the cello tones resume
The andante of smooth hopes and lost regrets.

Bright peacocks drink from flame-pots by the wall,
Just as absinthe-sipping women shiver through
With shimmering blue from the bowl in Circe's hall.
Their brown eyes blacken, and the blue drop hue.

The andante quivers with crescendo's start,
And dies on fire's birth in each man's heart.
The tapestry betrays a finger through
The slit, soft-pulling; -- -- -- and music follows cue.

There is a sweep, -- a shattering, -- a choir
Disquieting of barbarous fantasy.
The pulse is in the ears, the heart is higher,
And stretches up through mortal eyes to see.

Carmen! Akimbo arms and smouldering eyes; --
Carmen! Bestirring hope and lipping eyes; --
Carmen whirls, and music swirls and dips.
"Carmen!," comes awed from wine-hot lips.

Finale leaves in silence to replume
Bent wings, and Carmen with her flaunts through the gloom
Of whispering tapestry, brown with old fringe: --
The winers leave too, and the small lamps twinge.

Morning: and through the foggy city gate
A gypsy wagon wiggles, striving straight.
And some dream still of Carmen's mystic face, --
Yellow, pallid, like ancient lace.
Harold Hart Crane

 Data from astro.com

Having discovered that much, and a couple of his shorter, simpler poems, see above, I looked at his natal chart, noted the T-square linking Pluto/Neptune to Saturn with Mars at the apex. Then Google threw up a blog called Astrology of a Trainwreck, the blogger had noticed that Hart Crane and Ernest Hemingway shared a birthday. Here's a link to that post:

Birthday twins July 21 Ernest Hemingway and Hart Crane Genius and Suicide.



Hemingway, by the way, had Virgo rising, according to astro-databank HERE, also Moon in Capricorn.

So someone got there before me - again - and had found an interesting side issue. The post isn't dated year-wise, but appears to come from a few years ago.

Other notables from Crane's natal chart: If time of birth is reliable: Pisces rising, Sun and Venus in Cancer, and Jupiter in Scorpio - all the highly emotional water signs are represented. A strict Capricorn Moon opposing Cancerian arty Venus strikes a discordant note.

Neptune and Pluto close together in Gemini and opposite Saturn would have played a part in a whole group of people's nativities, those planets being slow movers. It's the fact that, in this case they link up to a quicker moving, so personal planet, Mars which makes the resulting network here personally significant to Crane.

Trumpily

During the time we were away from home, last week, we saw more politically-slanted TV fare than has been the norm all through this year. I've avoided all politics on TV, apart from the primary debates and results programmes, minus the waffle from MSNBC and CNN which followed them.

Ye gods! How can people watch this garbage? Most of what I saw was all Trump all the time - not pro- but supposedly avidly anti- with the very occasional neutral-sounding commentary.

TV, newspapers, and much political material on the internet are in full Trump mesmeric mode. They use their time putting all his many and varied faults on display, front and centre, over and over and over again, leaving Hillary Clinton's many and varied faults, and the dangers inherent in her presidency mostly hidden, relegated to minor, semi-critical articles in the backwaters. Major space and air-time is being taken up by Trump, Trump, Trump. (Note: I haven't ventured to watch or read on overt Republican sites or TV channels where, of course, there'd be a different emphasis.)

Thought provoking piece by Andrew O'Hehir:
Trump Is Channeling a Deep-Seated American Urge Toward Self-Destruction
Is Trump sabotaging himself? Wrong question — he's channeling a deep-seated American urge toward self-destruction.

SNIP

Donald Trump’s suicide mission is not personal, first of all. If I had to guess, I would say that he wants to be president but doesn’t know why, and has no idea what he would do with the office if he wins. Trump wishes only for his own glorification; he isn’t intelligent enough or complicated enough to yearn for his own destruction. Whether that translates in practice to a desire to lose the election, with the side benefit of endangering democracy by claiming that the system is corrupt and the results were rigged — well, that sounds like a pretty good guess, but as I said earlier I don’t know and I don’t really care. Trump’s suicide mission is ultimately about something much larger than his own presidential campaign, and also much larger than demographic clichés about the declining white majority.

America is experiencing a health crisis on an enormous scale — a crisis that is simultaneously physical, psychological and spiritual and is hardly ever understood in holistic terms. If Trump is the most prominent symptom of this systemic disorder at the moment, he is not its cause or even its leading indicator. For starters, this crisis encompasses epidemic rates of obesity and epidemic rates of suicide, dramatic evidence of a wealthy country that is literally killing itself. It’s about a nation of worsening social isolation and individualized info-bubbles and pathological delusion, a nation that spends more per capita on healthcare than any other major Western power to achieve worse outcomes, and where Baconator Fries are $1.99 at Wendy’s.

Trump, his campaign, and his supporters, are often accused of authoritarianism. A piece at Counterpunch, by Bernard Weiner , yesterday is an example: Trump and Authoritarianism. Most will accept what they read or hear on this, and could be right to do so. Yet the Clinton campaign is not innocent in this same regard. The following comes from a report by a Democratic delegate who attended the Democrats' convention. It's a single anecdote, but smacks of the general atmosphere.

I gave one woman, a Clinton delegate, a sign that said ‘I Support Palestinian Human Rights.’ She wanted to wear it, but her friend said, ‘We can’t do that, we’re not allowed to.’ They don’t want to question party leadership on any level. Even the simple thing of taking a button and putting it on your body is a big no-no for them. I didn’t think the party was this authoritarian.

From commentary about a different report by another Dem. delegate, taken from naked capitalism website

3.14e-9
August 8, 2016 at 8:42 am

Re: Bernie delegates speak out, it’s all in this one line:

[Party leaders] assume that we’re irrelevant for the long term.

They get told to shut up, their signs are confiscated, they’re threatened with revocation of their credentials, the Clinton delegates treat them like a communicable disease, and they know the Democratic Party will never accept them. And still, they’re going to vote for her, because we must defeat Trump.

I’ve read tweets and F[ace]B[ook] posts from by a couple of other delegates, one of whom had her arm twisted so hard by a Hillary supporter that it left her with a huge bruise. The entire time, she was surrounded by security, who even followed her into the ladies room.

But if we don’t defeat Trump, he’ll turn our democracy into a fascist dictatorship.

Carolinian:
August 8, 2016 at 9:21 am

Sounds like Sanders delegates were getting the roughing up that so upset many when it was applied to protestors at Trump rallies. Who’s the fascist again?

In other news: things I learn by reading online:

TL;DR, or tl;dr = short for "too long; didn't read". Internet slang to say that some text being replied to has been ignored or as a signifier for a summary of an online post or news article.

The abbreviation is based on the principle that, if the writer does not invest the time to convey their message concisely, the reader is justified not investing the time to read it. Alternately, it might mean that there is insufficient material of value or interest to justify the time required to read it. (Wikipedia)

If this post rates a tl;dr - what can I say?!

(ME: By the way, Wiki, it should be "alternatively", not alternately.)

And:

Betteridge's Law of headlines is an adage that states: "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no." It is named after Ian Betteridge, a British technology journalist, although the principle is much older. As with similar "laws" (e.g., Murphy's law), it is intended as a humorous adage rather than always being literally true.

Jiggity Jig....

Home again, home again....

Our trip to find higher, cooler ground seeking relief from Oklahoma's sizzling heat was, "like the curate's egg - good in parts". After a night in Amarillo in the Texas panhandle we headed for our chosen higher ground in New Mexico, that state's Las Vegas - nothing like its counterpart in Nevada, from what I've read of it. This Las Vegas, a medium sized town, is not far from Santa Fe, which though lovely, would be choked with tourists at this time of year, so we gave it a miss.

We took a couple of scenic circular drives around the Santa Fe National Forest area, upon which Las Vegas borders. Temperatures were mostly mid to high 70s to mid 80s during the day, felt just right to yours truly! Las Vegas' elevation is 6,424 ft, it felt fine for us. We probably drove through much higher altitudes, with no ill effects.

We had intended to return via a different route, visiting some towns in the northern Texas panhandle: Borger, Pampa, Dalhart and Dumas, with overnights in Borger, and in one or t'other of the latter two. Here we hit mild snags. It appears that, in this part of Texas, authorities are dipping into a rather big budget-pot to carry out extensive road repairs and road re-bulding. In both Dalhart and Dumas traffic was absolutely chaotic, due to ongoing road repair through main thoroughfares. Dalhart was especially bad with, in addition to road repair and re-building, some very deep holes being excavated to hold pipework.

So, on we drove further south, to Childress, Texas. Dang me though - the first two hotels we enquired for a room were both full! I asked if some festival or fair was going on in town, but was told, no - many hotel rooms had been taken over by squads of construction workers. These were not yer old fashioned car outside-the door motels, by the way, they were the Hampton Inn, Holiday Inn type! Ah well...it's good to know the workers are being well looked after, for working in this triple-digit heat can be no easy task!

So...on we had to go, yet again, this time to try our luck in Vernon, Texas, a little further south and, actually not that far from home. It was getting late, though, husband was nearing, or had passed, his driving limit for the day. We found a very nice room in Vernon, decided to stay for 2 nights giving us time to explore the area, including Seymour, Texas, with its history of discovery of dinosaur bones in the area. We didn't actually see anything of reptilian interest, the museum was closed when we came upon it. We shall return when the weather cools down.

Checking in at the Vernon hotel, the couple ahead of us, guy and gal, very tanned, in sleeveless tops, bandanas atop heads, had obviously been travelling by motor cycle. They told us, when we met in the elevator later, that they had driven from Louisiana that day and were headed for Montana. Yikes! And in this heat! Temperatures in the afternoons in this part of Texas were ranging from 104 to 107 according to our car's gauge and roadside signs.

We noticed, in small towns we passed through, that many stores hadn't bothered to open, including any antique stores we came across. I guess that keeping the stores cool enough to welcome shoppers would be too expensive, and would cancel out any small profits. We did find one or two antique stores open, struggling to cool using fans, but that wasn't working - we could stay inside for only a short time. Some tiny towns seemed completely closed down - not a body to be seen, human or animal!

We'd have been wiser to have stayed in New Mexico longer, and returned home via the quickest route. Hindsight!


A few photographs from husband's camera are below. Most of the best scenic views couldn't be captured, because of winding roads with dangerous drops on one side. There were disconcerting road signs here and there warning of falling rocks. We've never had a problem with this, but I do recall that, once in Tenerife, Canary Islands, on vacation from the UK years ago, seeing results of the fall of a very large rock which had barrelled down a cliff side, directly hitting a coach full of tourists, crushing the 'bus, killing passengers. So I don't take those signs lightly - fingers are crossed while driving through such areas.

Clicking on images should bring up a better view.

The once Black Hotel in Borger, Texas, about to be demolished. See story HERE.

So there really are non-Republicans in Texas (in addition to commenter mike!) Registration tag blurred - to protect the innocent.

This was a surprise roadside attraction as we passed through Shamrock, Texas: The U-Drop Inn, also known as Tower Station and U-Drop Inn and Tower Café. It was built in 1936, along the historic Route 66 highway. See Wikipedia's page.

 Himself.

Music Monday

Back in a few! We're hoping to find some slightly less sizzling heat for a day or two, in order to enjoy a little of this summer in the open air - higher ground!