Evening Star

Which would you prefer, a gay son, or no relationship with your son at all? In this work of philosophical short story fiction, Robert and Grace are high school friends. Both are bullied. Robert for his long hair and the rumor he is gay, and Grace, for her short hair, and the rumors she is too. Robert is gay, Grace is not. While preparing their midterm English performance, Robert decides he is going to use the performance as the way to finally come out to the school and tell them about the trauma he has been experiencing from his family the last several years. It does not go well as both are sent to the office, and their parents are called in. Robert escapes with his father’s gun. When Grace finds out she steals her mother’s car and goes looking for him. She finds him at a hotel. They briefly talk and the police show up. Before Grace realizes what has happened, Robert has killed himself.

The Moon and the Planets in Classical Greece and Rome

While the moon naturally featured in Mediterranean cultures from time immemorial, principally noted in the earliest literature as a marker of time, time-dependent constructs such as the calendar, and time-related activities, awareness and recognition of the five visible planets came relatively late to the Greeks and thence to the Romans. The moon underlies the local calendars of the Greeks, with documentary and literary evidence from the Late Bronze Age through the Imperial Roman period, and there are signs that the earliest Roman calendar also paid homage to the moon in its divisions of the month. However, although Homer in the 8th century BCE knows of a Morning and an Evening Star, he shows no indication of realizing that these are one and the same, the planet Venus. That particular identification may have come in the 6th century BCE, and it appears to have been not until the 4th century BCE that the Greeks recognized the other four planets visible to the naked eye—Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, and Mercury. This awareness probably came via contact with Babylonian astronomy and astrology, where identification and observations of the planets had figured from the 2nd millennium BCE and served as a basis for astrological prognostications. But it is time, not astrology, that lies at the heart of Greek and Roman concerns with the moon and the planets. Indeed, the need to tell time accurately has been regarded as the fundamental motivation of Greek astronomy. A major cultural issue that long engaged the Greeks was how to synchronize the incommensurate cycles of the moon and the sun for calendrical purposes. Given the apparent irregularities of their cycles, the planets might seem to offer no obvious help with regard to time measurement. Nonetheless they were included by Plato in the 4th century BCE in his cosmology, along with the sun and moon, as heavenly bodies created specifically to compute time. Astrology then provided a useful framework in which the sun, moon, planets, and stars all combined to enable the interpretation and forecasting of life events. It became necessary for the Greeks, and their successors the Romans, to be able to calculate as accurately as possible the positions of the heavenly bodies in order to determine readings of the past, present, and future. Greek astronomy had always had a speculative aspect, as philosophers strove to make sense of the visible cosmos. A deep-seated assumption held by Greek astronomers, that the heavenly bodies moved in uniform, circular orbits, lead to a desire over the centuries to account for or explain away the observed irregularities of planetary motions with their stations and retrogradations. This intention “to save the phenomena,”— that is, to preserve the fundamental circularity—was said to have originated with Plato. While arithmetical schemes had sufficed in Babylonia for such calculation, it was a Greek innovation to devise increasingly complex geometric theories of circular motions (eccentrics and epicycles) in an effort to understand how the sun, moon, and planets moved, so as to place them more precisely in time and space.

„Pal/ palid” ca epitet metaforic în poezia lui Eminescu / „Pale/ pallid” as metaphorical epithet in Eminescu’s poetry

The epithets pal “pale” and palid “pallid” could have been linked here by a conjunction. Instead, they are placed at the same level (pal/ palid) because of their semantic identity in Eminescu’s lyrics. Their importance has been already highlighted by several critics, and especially by I. Negoițescu, who referred to the epithets of pallor as a symbol, and systematically returned to them. By simply identifying these epithets with death or the myth of death, with the angelic purity, but also with the purity of the demon, within expressions such as androginie difuză a morții “diffuse androgyny of death” and demonul palorii “the demon of pallor”, there is no poetic symbol, but only a vague image. Associating these adjectives with characters such as the Poet, the Monarch, the Sleep and the Demiurge, usually at an intuitive level, does not reveal the intended meaning. These epithets appear in Eminescu’s poetry with non-metaphorical meaning as well, that is with denotative or connotative meaning. Instead, the metaphorical meaning belongs to the extra-existential world. The strong occurrence of these adjectives in Mortua est! and the debates around them within this poem since its first publication focused the attention not only to the final version of the text but also to its variants. Pal/ palid does not have a unique meaning in this poem, but we may assume that the connotative meaning is not transcended in any of its versions, including the last one. As a metaphorical epithet, pal/ palid is associated with the lyrical creation as act and as purpose, as well as with the pure ideal which is situated outside the dichotomy of life–death (being–non-being), either as a reality of the poetic thought or as a mythical reality. The poems in which pal/ palid carries this metaphorical meaning are: Venere și Madonă/ Venus and Madonna, Epigonii/ The Epigons, Luceafărul/ The evening star, Povestea magului călător în stele/ The story of the magician who travels to the stars, Mureșanu. Tablou dramatic/ Mureșanu. Dramatic tableau and Memento mori. The metaphorical ʻextra-existential’ meaning differs from any concept of overcoming the antagonism being–non-being which is highly represented in Eminescu’s poetry. It supposes placement outside this antagonism.

The Morning and the Evening Star

Freud said that Americans are immature because they channel their libido into moneymaking. In Babbitt (1922), Sinclair Lewis seems to agree. It is generally thought that his 1927 novel, Elmer Gantry, continues the critique, exposing American religiosity as itself fundamentally commercial. I argue that Lewis’s project is deeper and more complicated than the standard reading admits and that it derives ultimately from Dante’s idea of the aspirations and errors of love. (Dante is a favorite author of Lewis’s and figures in Babbitt as the one notable from the past who is conjured up in the Babbitts’ séance.) Novels that shock are often read crudely at first, and Lewis’s novels are no exception. I argue that Lewis ultimately agrees with Elmer’s sermon: love is indeed “the morning and the evening star.” As in Dante, so in Lewis: love can aspire, but it can also be deflected and stunted in many ways. Moneymaking is one form of stunting; excessive interest in sex is another (and a better one in Dante’s view, because it is closer to what really matters). And perhaps worst of all, it can be blinded by intellectual pride, a vice from which the agnostic novelist and former ministerial student was in no way free. The novel does criticize George Babbitt the avaricious, it does criticize Elmer Gantry the libidinous, but it reserves its deepest and saddest condemnation for the Lewis surrogate, Frank Shallard, who cannot find anything worthy of his love.

Victorian Women Wood Engravers: The Case of Clemence Housman

In this essay, Lorraine Janzen Kooistra explores the career of an important yet neglected artist whose work in the illustrated press deserves more concentrated attention. From 1885 to 1895, Clemence Housman (1861–1955) worked as an engraver for the Graphic (1869–1932), but by the mid-1890s there was little work in the trade since most papers were converting to systems of photomechanical reproduction. She then transitioned to fine-art wood engraving in the book trade, producing several exquisite titles in collaboration with her brother Laurence Housman, including The Were-Wolf (1896). She continued working the field until the 1920s, eventually producing her masterpiece, an engraving of James Guthrie’s ‘Evening Star.’ The trajectory of her career not only demonstrates how new reproductive technologies altered women’s work in the periodical press over the course of the nineteenth century but also reminds us of the thousands of other women who contributed to this industry but have been largely overlooked in press history. Indeed, as Janzen Kooistra’s essay makes clear, women were not just the subject matter or intended audience for periodical advertisements and illustrations; they were actively engaged in the production of the images that proliferated throughout the Victorian illustrated press.

The Moon and Planets in Indigenous California

Anthropologists distinguish the U.S. State of California as a primary zone of prehistoric and tribal North America—it was one of the most linguistically and cultural diverse regions on earth. The original population of Native California and traditional cultures were decimated by the Spanish, the Mexicans, and the Anglos, who successively settled California and transformed it. For that reason, knowledge of the character and function of astronomy in what is now California prior to European contact in the 16th century is incomplete and fragmented. Traditional astronomical lore is preserved in a few ethnohistoric commentaries, in some archaeological remains, and in ethnographic research conducted primarily in the early 20th century, when elements of indigenous knowledge still survived. Throughout Native California, the moon’s conspicuous brightness, movement, and systematically changing appearance prompted its affiliation with seasonal change, the passage of time, and cyclical renewal, and most California tribes monitored and counted lunations in one way or another, but not necessarily throughout the entire year. In some cases, individual lunations were affiliated with and named for seasonal circumstances. There is little evidence, however, for even minimal interest in or recognition of the planets visible to the unaided eye, with the exception of Venus as the “Morning Star” or “Evening Star.” Venus, like the moon and other celestial objects, was personified and regarded as a fundamental and active agent of the cosmos. There is no evidence, however, for detailed monitoring of Venus and quantitative knowledge of its synodic behavior.