Halloween is a contraction of “All Hallows’ Eve,” a Christian descendant of the Celtic feast day Samhain (pronounced, in that mysterious way of Gaelic, “SOW-in”). Samhain marked the end of the harvest season and the beginning of the “dark half” of the Celtic calendar.
The pagan Celtic year was divided into quarters and these Bronze Age [...]
Archive for the ‘As Obliquity’ Category
Harvest’s End
Posted in As Obliquity, As Symbol, tagged growing season, harvest, seasons, solar cycle on October 31, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
Flower in Ulysses: Stuck in the Middle
Posted in As Obliquity, As Symbol, tagged Bloomsday, James Joyce, Ulysses on June 30, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
In honor of Bloomsday, June 16
IV.
The morning of December 16, 2004 is cold. Henry Flower sees this through his kitchen window, pausing in the middle of scrambling breakfast for his wife Moira, who was still in bed: a bright clear blue through the trees, though it was only 8 a.m. Still, implacable, its substance invisible, [...]
Meditation on Oleander
Posted in As Object, As Obliquity, As Symbol, tagged cure, delmhorst, lyric, oleander, toxin on April 26, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
Born a little soon, raised on too much moon,
learned to get by on “Leave me alone.”
Be the restless one, be the burning son.
Then you filled your hands with oleander and
all the strippings of pride gone astray.
All that secret work, all those pretty words
that still don’t hold you
Now you spend your days in the dappled rays
of [...]
Modernism in Bloom
Posted in As Obliquity, tagged Art, Literature on September 4, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
The Bloomsbury Group, a collective of aesthetes in early 20th century London, got their name from the section of Camden that surrounds Bloomsbury Square. The name is apparently derived from the many gardened squares that dot the neighborhoods. Thomas Wriothesley, the 4th Earl of Southampton, laid out the square in the 1660s. At the time [...]
