Io Saturnalia!

Amici et amicae, I want to take a brief moment on this fourth day of Saturnalia to once again wish you a happy round of winter festivities.  Tonight being the start of winter, it seems an especially auspicious time to both commemorate and briefly contemplate this end of year season.  In cosmic terms, of course, the eccentricity of the Earth's rotation is a relatively minor affair, and indeed even on our own sphere its significance is hardly universal (Southern hemisphere shoutout!)

Ain't no party like a Saturnalia party

Of course, pedantry about astronomical phenomena is never a good reason to call off  a party.  And I am in favor of any occassion that serves as a reminder  that every darkness must fade again into light.  Judging from the Christmas lights I can see from my window, most of my neighbors are in agreement with this sentiment.  Yet being the pagan that I am, there is something I find particularly attractive about Saturnalia.  Christmas (and its Hallmark-approved compatriot, Hanukkah) seem to me at least to be about the affirmation of the world order.  Insofar as there is anything out of the ordinary in these stories, it comes from the intervention of the divine into the human sphere through miracles and portents to right wrongs and put everything back on track for the divine plan.   Saturnalia, by contrast, was the time when all convention and order were overthrown.  Beggars became kings, masters waited on slaves, and drunkenness and carousing were the general rule.  

Say what you like, your family holiday get-togethers are probably still better than the Caesar's

There is something valuable, I think, about throwing our norms and seeing how much of the order we live by depends on convention.  If nothing else, it might serve as a nice bit of perspective for the high and mighty to see how the other half lives for a time.  Certainly, given the human propensity for being blind to one's own circumstances, perhaps it is too much to hope that one holiday can produce such a big change.  At the very least, though, something to ponder while we wait through the night for the dawn.  

Friday Odds & Sods Goes Home Again

Dear Reader, as we approach the darkest night of the year, now is the time to rally around our loved ones be they near or far and await the return of sunnier days. Your Interlocutor has heeded this advice, leaving the gloomy confines of the Metropolis for warmer and sunnier climes.   My sincerest hopes that you, too, will soon be in the company of those that you love and enjoying this week's Odds & Sods.

• For fans of music from the American South, the arrival of the Oxford American's music will be a nice holiday treat.  This year's issue covers the music of Texas and some of the articles have already been posted online. 
• This weeks reading list concerns itself with faith, or perhaps more accurately belief in things unseen: The hard lot of saints in the early 20th century and the use and abuse of the idea of repressed memories.  
• An amusement that can make killing time a much more colorful experience 
• For this weeks musical number, a collaboration between Messrs. Crosby & Armstrong:

Friday Odds & Sods is Bundled Up

The first snow of the year has come and thankfully gone here in the Metropolis, leaving behind only a few puddles and pleasant memories of snow falling in front of streetlights.  A good reminder of the rapid approach of another winter and with it the end of another year. Still, though, let us not rush through the rest of 2014 simply in order to more quickly reach '15!  Savor these dying days of the year with this weeks Odds & Sods

• For your weekend reading pleasure, the pictorial evolution of an anti-semitic trope, how humans became urban animals, and proof that it is never too late to turn over a new leaf.
• An interesting website showing where, how, and in what number the British married in 2014.
• Longtime readers will of course know of your host's love affair with Greek philosophy. If anyone needs to bone up on their Attic, I've found a handy resource to do just that.
• And finally, a song for those dreaming of warmer days:

Friday Odds & Sods is Out the Chute and Bucking Hard

A thought occurred to me the other day in the vicinity of Union Square, where I was sipping coffee and waiting for a second party to rendezvous, an activity that seems to occupy many of my waking hourss: How much of a life does anybody actually live?  Consider how many mundane moments of a day are passed over in a haze and linger for hardly an instant in the memory before disappearing forever.  How much of life is the biological and social processes that sustain us and how much is the awareness of ourselves and the surroundings we are in?

• Some reading this weekend for the classic movie fan (or obsessive?): The relentless pursuit of a rare Godard film and a first look review of the top film of 1977
• As a proud philhellene, I've for a long while had a passing awareness of the bull-jumping cult of ancient Crete.  What the frescos of Knossos don't depict, of course, are the gorings and scars that such a practice must inevitably have produced.  One wonders what, in 2,000 years time, our descendants will make of the practice of junior rodeos
• A song for February that works, I think, just as well at this point in December