Another October Birthday

            I seldom think about aging until I see pumpkins and large bags of candy on sale, stacked at the end of aisles or cluttering the cashier counters. October is my birthday month, and I share it with many other cool Librans. Aging... I don’t have many complaints about it, and I don’t run to wrinkle cream counters at fancy department stores to buy elixirs from a pseudo clinician woman in a white medical coat, dispensing advice on eye shadows and “crow’s feet.” I can say I’m surprised at how great my life is, like that I’m enjoying my time and place here in Seattle. Yes, I’m really enjoying living in Seattle, despite the rapidly dropping temperatures now. I have wonderful friends, job, and home.
So I wonder if this is by chance or astrological designation. I found “Astrological Sign” info on Libras and it’s all flattering(see below)! Much of it is seems general enough that it applies to my Aloe Vera plant.

I wondered about compatibility with other signs, like Scorpio, or Gemini or Aries, and THEN things became more interesting. Apparently I’m attracted to Scorpio’s sex appeal, and Aries strength, archetypal figure, and polar opposite-ness . In general, I’m to stay away from ALL signs except Leo’s (“They're both barmy about beautiful things. Music will gush out at all hours of the day and night and their walk-in wardrobes will be bursting with all kinds of clothes”), Gemini (Gemini and Libra have so much in common that sometimes there's no needs for words. They both need to feel an intellectual rapport with their paramour, because neither can fall for fools”), Sagittarius (“Their social life will sizzle as they're inundated with invitations to parties and get-togethers galore“)and Aquarians (This couple click the first time their eyes meet across a crowded room, because it's mental magic when these two get together”). Stay away from the 9, stick to only these 4... Hmmmm

Maybe that’s why dating is slow... Apparently, most of the posts I read say Librans are good lovers and the “most quintessential romantics.” Yes, we can be. Did I mention dating is slow? I confess a certain Scorpio had his divine poison on me. But that summer fling seems to be wearing off. By chance or astrological designation?

I can say that I’m happy despite having a mellow bday. No big party this year. I decided to save up for my next bday next year, where I hope to spend it on a beach somewhere in PR or DR or Hawaii...

Who knows, maybe the beach will be littered with my 4 compatible signs, all gushing to inundate me with “beautiful things”, “intellectual rapport”, and plenty of “mental magic”. Let just say, however, I won’t hold my breath waiting. Crow’s feet, after all, make GREAT nibble in good old fashioned chicken soup.

 I posted a picture of my 1st birthday. It was a smashingly wonderful First World Country Birthday Party!

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http://www.gotohoroscope.com/libra-meanings.html


This sign of Libra is represented in symbolism as The Balance. The Sun, the ruler of our inner nature, falls in Libra, the exaltation of Saturn. Their love of justice, combined with the need to be fair and even-handed contributes to that characteristic difficulty such people find in making decisions quickly.

These people are rarely lazy. They work hard, and also demand that their partners work just as hard. They have a strong sense of justice and fair play. It is pretty unusual for them to express anger, but when they do it is usually a storm.

They are extremely positive and decisive in all their thoughts and actions. They have great foresight and intuition, and are generally seen at their best when acting on first impressions. The fear is usually well controlled so the typical representatives of this sign usually looks calm, collected, and in charge of the situation. Good natured and loving, they enjoy talking to people, yet can also be very attentive listeners.
http://www.astrology-online.com/libra.htm


Libra! About Your Sign...


Libra is the only inanimate sign of the zodiac, all the others representing either humans or animals. Many modern astrologers regard it as the most desirable of zodiacal types because it represents the zenith of the year, the high point of the seasons, when the harvest of all the hard work of the spring is reaped. There is a mellowness and sense of relaxation in the air as mankind enjoys the last of the summer sun and the fruits of his toil. Librans too are among the most civilized of the twelve zodiacal characters and are often good looking. They have elegance, charm and good taste, are naturally kind, very gentle, and lovers of beauty, harmony (both in music and social living) and the pleasures that these bring.


They have good critical faculty and are able to stand back and look impartially at matters which call for an impartial judgment to be made on them. But they do not tolerate argument, for once they have reached a conclusion, its truth seems to them self-evident. But their characters are on the whole balanced, diplomatic and even tempered.


Librans are sensitive to the needs of others and have the gift, sometimes to an almost psychic extent, of understanding the emotional needs of their companions and meeting them with their own innate optimism - they are the kind of people of whom it is said, "They always make you feel better for having been with them." They are very social human beings. They loathe cruelty, viciousness and vulgarity and detest conflict between people, so they do their best to cooperate and compromise with everyone around them, and their ideal for their own circle and for society as a whole is unity.


Their cast of mind is artistic rather than intellectual, though they are usually too moderate and well balanced to be avant garde in any artistic endeavor. They have good perception and observation and their critical ability, with which they are able to view their own efforts as well as those of others, gives their work integrity.

Vargas Llosa Is Awarded Nobel Prize in Literature

As much objection I have to his elitist Latin American views and his views on “those poor” and the “boot strap” theory of why  Latin America as a whole cannot progress, I applaud his CREATIVE work and his immaculate sense of language and rhythm. He joins his eminent colleagues Julio Cortázar, Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel García Márquez and Carlos Fuentes. Now if we could only get a FEMALE writer in that mix, wouldn’t that be amazing? Buen trabajo, viejo...

-vee
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Vargas Llosa Is Awarded Nobel Prize in Literature


By JULIE BOSMAN and SIMON ROMERO
Published: October 7, 2010
Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

Times Topics: Mario Vargas Llosa
Nobel Prizes

From the Archives: Winners of the Nobel Prize in Literature (October 12, 2006) Announcing the award in Stockholm, the Swedish Academy praised Mr. Vargas Llosa “for his cartography of the structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual’s resistance, revolt and defeat.”

Mr. Vargas Llosa, 74, is one of the most celebrated writers of the Spanish-speaking world, frequently mentioned with his contemporary Gabriel García Márquez, who won the literature Nobel in 1982, the last South American to do so. He has written more than 30 novels, plays and essays, including “The Feast of the Goat” and “The War of the End of the World.”

In selecting Mr. Vargas Llosa, the Swedish Academy has once again made a choice that is infused with politics. Recent winners include Herta Muller, the Romanian-born German novelist, last year, Orhan Pamuk of Turkey in 2007 and Harold Pinter of Britain in 2005.

In 1990, Mr. Vargas Llosa ran for the presidency of Peru and has been an outspoken activist in his native country. The news that he had won the prize reached him at 5 a.m., when he was hard at work in his apartment in New York, preparing to set out on a walk in Central Park, he told a radio station in Peru. Initially, he thought it was a prank.

“It was a grand surprise,” he said. “It’s a good way to start a New York day.”

He is currently spending the semester in the United States, teaching Latin American studies at Princeton University.

The prize is the first for a writer in the Spanish language in two decades, after Mexico’s Octavio Paz won the Nobel in 1990, and focuses new attention on the Latin American writers who gained renown in the 1960s, like Julio Cortazar of Argentina and Carlos Fuentes of Mexico, who formed the region’s literary “boom generation.”

In an interview with The Times in 2002, Mr. Vargas Llosa said that it was the novelist’s obligation to question real life. “I don’t think there is a great fiction that is not an essential contradiction of the world as it is,” he said. “The Inquisition forbade the novel for 300 years in Latin America. I think they understood very well the seditious consequence that fiction can have on the human spirit.’”

Beyond his own political activities, Mr. Vargas Llosa has explored in his novels how politics feels to ordinary people.

“They’re not only fantastic novels that read beautifully,” Ruben Gallo, a professor of Spanish-American literature at Princeton University, said on Thursday. “He’s one of the authors who in the 20th century has written the most eloquently and the most poignantly about the intersection between culture and politics in Latin America.”

Born in 1936 in Arequipa, Peru, Mr. Vargas Llosa first realized that he wanted to be a writer when he was a child, enthralled with adventure novels by Jules Verne.

He spent much of his early childhood in Cochabamba, Bolivia, then moved with his parents to a middle-class suburb of Lima. He studied law and literature at the University of San Marcos in Lima in the mid-1950s — a tumultuous and violent time in Peru — and later drew from the experience to write “Conversation in the Cathedral,” a novel published in 1969.

After college, he spent time writing for newspapers and, like many Latin American writers, began his literary career abroad, living in Paris, Madrid and London as a young man.

His work found a wide international audience in the 1960s with the publication of “The Time of the Hero,” a novel based on a Peruvian military academy that aroused some controversy in his home country. By the early 1980s, he was perhaps the best-selling Latin American writer in the world, having published “Green House,” “Conversation in the Cathedral” and “Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter,” among other works.

A brief and unsuccessful effort as an elected official came later. While Peru was besieged by high inflation and the attacks by the Maoists of the Shining Path in 1990, Mr. Vargas Llosa made a quixotic run for the presidency of Peru, opposing Alberto Fujimori, then a little-known agronomist.

Mr. Vargas Llosa was ahead in polls for much of his campaign, but some factors may have worked against him: his aristocratic bearing in impoverished Peru and his acknowledgment at one point in the race that in the largely Roman Catholic country, he was an agnostic.

He also expressed some ambivalence about abandoning his career as a writer to serve in public office.

“I’d like to campaign on the issues and then return to my office to write,” he said in an interview in 1988. “But I’ve accepted this as a moral responsibility. While I have the impression that I’m helping, I’ll keep going.”

Mr. Fujimori triumphed in the race, and the failed bid left Mr. Vargas Llosa with a sour taste for politics in his country. Mr. Fujimori ended up adopting many of Mr. Vargas Llosa’s market-oriented policy ideas. He later fled to Japan when his government collapsed and is now serving time in a Peruvian prison after being convicted of human rights abuses.

After Mr. Vargas Llosa’s foray into politics, his influence in the Spanish-speaking world became more widespread through a column he writes for El Pais, the Spanish daily newspaper in Madrid, called “Piedra de Toque,” or “Touchstone.” In the column, which is distributed in newspapers throughout Latin America, he explores themes including literature, travel and the politics of the Middle East and Latin America.

The previous Nobel laureate of the boom generation, Mr. García Márquez of Colombia, won his prize after wide acclaim for his masterpiece, “One Hundred Years of Solitude.” In a twist worthy of one of Mr. Vargas Llosa’s subplots, he and Mr. García Márquez, at one point close friends, had a violent falling out in 1976 in Mexico City.

The episode unfolded at a film premiere. When Mr. García Márquez approached Mr. Vargas Llosa to embrace him, the Peruvian writer instead punched him in the face, giving him a black eye, an image immortalized days later by the photographer Rodrigo Moya. Mystery shrouds what happened, but apparently the feud had to do with Mr. Vargas Llosa’s wife, whom Mr. García Márquez had consoled earlier in Paris.

Since 1901, 102 Nobel Prizes in literature have been awarded. The last American to win the prize was Toni Morrison, in 1993.

The awards ceremony is planned for Dec. 10 in Stockholm. As the winner, Mr. Vargas Llosa will receive 10 million kronor, or about $1.5 million.

Five Spot Politics Over Eggs

I had the breakfast special at Five Spot in Queen Ann, asked for the tortillas instead of toast and a side of salsa (a Pace Picante tasting type, by folks in San Antonion who know what peecaunee sauce should taste laahk!), looked up and saw Lady Liberty in her t-shirt which reads "EXCEPT IN ARIZONA."

I got up, centered my camera phone and took a picture, at which time a server with a nose ring asked, "Are you offended, or mad?"

I smiled and said, "Is the salsa a fake picante sauce?" She smiled and said, "Well you never know, some people get mad."

I wanted to ask if they were "mad" as the salsa or the defamation of the lady icon, or the bigoted law itself, or of the immigration debate that is never ending, or mad that extremely salted potatoes that garnished every plate.

What more can i say? I loved it. So again I'm inspired to post a poem. Ometeotl...
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Leonor
“Afraid of Husbands, and the Law; Deportation Risk Grows for Abused Illegal Residents”
-New York Times Headline, April 1999

On the street she hums a bolero, walking under a row of cypress trees with leaves that rattle the winds of April, a humid scent grows. A truck, dog barks, an ambulance far still. A song by Trio Los Dandy’s. Tall kids stop bouncing a ball against a building the color of old bananas. “Ella está loca... por eso la dejó el marido,” others whisper. Months now she hums to the wind, to herons and roses, even before he threaten to take the child, before he swung white knuckles, before she sought refuge, whispered help me... but nothing. Long sleeves and make-up covered the excess of nights before, and again, again, like before, until that afternoon when she returned home to empty dresser drawers pulled out, hangers bare by her heavy coat, valise without documents, El Santo Niño de Atocha faced down, her saving from tips that she hid between Psalms and Proverbs, the child’s knitted blanket: everything had disappeared. The siren of the ambulance louder now; she hides behind a cypress tree as it sings que sin embargo sigues, unida a mi existencia, y si vivo cien años,
                                                                cien años pienso en ti…



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