From Free Will Astrology for next week

PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20):
Blessings will come if you cultivate as much stillness as possible. I'm not just talking about reducing the noise levels, although that's a good first step. Other things you might want to do: Cut way down on your use of the phone; text-message sparingly; surf the Internet 70 percent less than usual; avoid watching TV news altogether; and don't hang around people whose minds zip around like chimps on meth. As for your own monkey mind: See if you can enjoy some periods each day when the monkey gets to lie down in a soft place and watch the wide sky roll by.

hot damn

Falcon 1 flies

The Women: a review

I have to say that I disagree with most of the critics of the movie. At least Roger Ebert liked it, and even he missed the most important message in the movie. Apparently, people wanted the bitchfest that was the 1939 George Cukor version, but dammit those women made me cringe. They were mean and nasty and that was fine for Cukor's film.

It's a nice movie and it's kind of sappy. To quote rebert:

"The Women" isn't a great movie, but how could it be? Too many characters and too much melodrama for that, and the comedy has to be somewhat muted to make the characters semi-believable. But as a well-crafted, well-written and well-acted entertainment, it drew me in and got its job done. Did I say that there are no males at all in the movie? True, except for one shot.

The shot I liked was not the shot he was referring to...the scene that blew me away was between Mary and Sylvie and comes as the movie is rounding third and moving towards home. It made me ache for a limb that isn't missing. It has never been there at all.

This realization was sparked earlier in the week when matociquala pointed me to Scalzi's brilliant discourse on men, women and friendship.

from if: book thoughts on synthesis

kirsten reach:

I'm a very greedy reader. I want more of everything: I want to know how the literature is related to current events, how it's perceived by critics, who helped to edit the book, who the author's friends were, who was writing upon a similar theme at that time, whether the fiction is grounded in fact, and what other readers thought of the ending. To my delight, plenty of readers have usually broadcast their thoughts in a dozen formats.

It's hard to stay in print or on television for more than a minute, but entering readers' minds is a very real way to stay alive. While the doom and gloom of recent articles has made it sound like readers are on the verge of extinction, we could scarcely be further from it.

In fact, we are more literate, more capable, more connected, and more potentially engaged than at any time in human history. -Mark Bauerlein

eris and bast

I've been cruising the web looking for things on eris and bast.

In Hesiod's Works and Days 11–24, two different goddesses named Eris "Strife" are distinguished:

So, after all, there was not one kind of Strife alone, but all over the earth there are two. As for the one, a man would praise her when he came to understand her; but the other is blameworthy: and they are wholly different in nature.

For one fosters evil war and battle, being cruel: her no man loves; but perforce, through the will of the deathless gods, men pay harsh Strife her honour due.

But the other is the elder daughter of dark Night (Nyx), and the son of Cronus who sits above and dwells in the aether, set her in the roots of the earth: and she is far kinder to men. She stirs up even the shiftless to toil; for a man grows eager to work when he considers his neighbour, a rich man who hastens to plough and plant and put his house in good order; and neighbour vies with his neighbour as he hurries after wealth. This Strife is wholesome for men. And potter is angry with potter, and craftsman with craftsman, and beggar is jealous of beggar, and minstrel of minstrel.

Eris and the erisian principles are the foundation of discordia as described in the Principia Discordia.

In the PD we find out that Eris was framed...but she is not necessarily a vengeful bitch, because that requires taking life too seriously. She was snubbed however, and the Trojans deserved what they got.

Bast as goddess of cats, laughter, lesbians, perfume and beer is right up there with Eris in not taking things too seriously, although nothing can project being offended like an offended cat.

break, blow, burn

I picked up Break, Blow, Burn after reading Paglia's latest column in Salon. I realized when reading it that, although Paglia sometimes pisses me off, she's not stupid. She made a lot of good points in her discussion of Sarah Palin as feminist and told the Democratic party what it needs to do to stay in the game.

Let me be clear, I don't like SP and I am afraid of her being in the White House. But I realized that I have been maligning CP for years. It wasn't her book I through across the room, it was Who Stole Feminism, by Christina Hoff Sommers.

I was looking for a topic to occupy my mind this semester and I think I have found it. Eris, Bast and other goddesses, poetry, literature and women's spirituality...(I am looking for suggestions for my reading list.)

Paglia, C. (2005). Break, blow, burn. New York: Pantheon Books.

Table of Contents
Introduction

1. William Shakespeare, Sonnet 73
2. William Shakespeare, Sonnet 29
3. William Shakespeare, The Ghost's Speech
4. John Donne, "The Flea"
5. John Donne, Holy Sonnet I
6. John Donne, Holy Sonnet XIV
7. George Herbert, "Church-monuments"
8. George Herbert, "The Quip"
9. George Herbert, "Love"
10. Andrew Marvell, "To His Coy Mistress"
11. William Blake, "The Chimney Sweeper"
12. William Blake, "London"
13. William Wordsworth, "The World Is Too Much with Us"
14. William Wordsworth, "Composed upon Westminster Bridge"
15. Percy Bysshe Shelley, "Ozymandias"
16. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, "Kubla Khan"
17. Walt Whitman, Song of Myself
18. Emily Dickinson, "Because I Could Not Stop for Death"
19. Emily Dickinson, "Safe in Their Alabaster Chambers"
20. Emily Dickinson, "The Soul Selects Her Own Society"
21. William Butler Yeats, "The Second Coming"
22. William Butler Yeats, "Leda and the Swan"
23. Wallace Stevens, "Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock"
24. Wallace Stevens, "Anecdote of the Jar"
25. William Carlos Williams, "The Red Wheelbarrow"
26. William Carlos Williams, "This Is Just to Say"
27. Jean Toomer, "Georgia Dusk"
28. Langston Hughes, "Jazzonia"
29. Theodore Roethke, "Cuttings"
30. Theodore Roethke, "Root Cellar"
31. Theodore Roethke, "The Visitant"
32. Robert Lowell, "Man and Wife"
33. Sylvia Plath, "Daddy"
34. Frank O'Hara, "A Mexican Guitar"
35. Paul Blackburn, "The Once-Over"
36. May Swenson, "At East River"
37. Gary Snyder, "Old Pond"
38. Norman H. Russell, "The Tornado"
39. Chuck Wachtel, "A Paragraph Made Up of Seven Sentences"
40. Rochelle Kraut, "My Makeup"
41. Wanda Coleman, "Wanda Why Aren't You Dead?"
42. Ralph Pomeroy, "Corner"
43. Joni Mitchell, "Woodstock"

Biographical Notes
Bibliography
Acknowledgments
Permissions

hail eris

I am chaos. I am the substance from which your artists and scientists build rhythms. I am the spirit with which your children and clowns laugh in happy anarchy. I am chaos. I am alive, and I tell you that you are free.-Eris

from the Principia Discordia

poetry and philosophy and dreams…

I think Eris gets a bad rap…discord is necessary if you ever want to recognize harmony. Chaos is the underlying principle of the universe.