Constellation of the Month: Andromeda

 

Andromeda is a prominent constellation in the autumn evening sky, passing overhead for many of us in the northern hemisphere during the month of November.  Attached to Pegasus (Alpheratz is usually seen as common to both constellations), it is probably best known for the Andromeda Galaxy, also called M31 in the Messier catalog of deep space objects.  This galaxy is visible to the acute naked eye in places unencumbered by outdoor lights, but you can still easily view it with a good pair of binoculars. There seems to be a scientific consensus that the Andromeda Galaxy and our own Milky Way will collide sometime in the distant future, eventually combining to form a new, non-spiral galaxy.  Near M31 are two "companion" galaxies, M32 and M110...better use a telescope for those.  Andromeda represents the chained maiden in the ancient Greek Perseus myth, as the hero arrives on the winged horse Pegasus to rescue her from the sea monster.  All three are "in the sky" as constellations, along with Andromeda's mother Queen Cassiopeia and father King Cepheus.  Personally, I think all the old myths are kind of lame...they should reconfigure the night sky with figures from Stephen King stories, and throw in a few from Tolkien and some other more modern writers as well...

Next month: another constellation...

Just Finished Reading Traveling with Pomegranates by Sue Monk Kidd and Ann Kidd Taylor

In 2009 mother-and-daughter writers Sue Monk Kidd and Ann Kidd Taylor collaborated on the book Traveling with Pomegranates, in which each of them recount through alternating chapters their travels together from preceding years through Greece, Turkey and France.  I just finished reading it and can understand the wide range of reactions I subsequently discovered about it on the Goodreads review site.  Especially with the mother, they have this privileged air about them that it's nothing to just take off on trips to exotic places and have the locals there expected to cater to their every whim while they are totally focused on themselves, taking every statue, exhibit, painting, or happenstance occurrence and interpreting them in the most detailed ways about their personal selves...yes, this got tedious for me in a hurry.  Before I began reading it I thought it would be something of a travelogue of these two women's experiences, and to an extent it was, making me want to see and experience some of the things that they did.  Although I feel the two went way overboard about personalizing everything and everyone they encountered, as a reader I also understood that each of us has our own personal voyages, and to us these voyages are of the utmost significance and interest: it's just that I think that others probably aren't going to remotely share my own interpretations with the same enthusiasm that they mean to me.  You know what I'm saying: just think of someone in your own life whose entire conversational style with you is focused on talking about themselves, and you're just an unimportant bystander whose role seems to be to receive everything spoken with vigorous head-nodding and affirmatory verbal utterances.  On the other hand, Kidd and Taylor's book is clearly autobiographical in its theme, and let's face it: folks who write autobiographies are talking about themselves, which is why they're called autobiographies: the root "auto" means "self".  This very blog of mine has strong autobiographical elements to it as well...I share experiences that I feel have a possible universal application to others, and I imagine that what this book's authors are doing is very similar.  Each of them discusses a change not only in their life phases...Sue entering her elderly years while unsure about writing her first novel while Ann is a young adult unsure as well of her own future and depressed about recent rejection...but also their changing relationship to one another.  Both of them use their travel experiences with Greek mythological characters like Athena, Demeter, Persephone along with the widely different representations of Mary, Jesus' mother in Greece, Turkey and France to symbolize their own identities and life direction.  One thing that struck me was that, especially with Sue, they felt the need to travel to some exotic locale in order to experience an epiphany moment, but I remember the Robert Pirsig quote, "The only Zen you'll find at the mountaintop is the Zen you took with you." To that effect I have discovered that while traveling in itself is fun and meaningful, the greatest positive changes I've made in my life, along with the most profound introspective moments that revealed who I was, came about during my ordinary day-to-day living and routines.  But to each his own, and I enjoyed Traveling with Pomegranates.  And you have to grant this concession to the authors as well: when someone is baring their soul to you in an honest manner, they will also be revealing aspects of their personality and character you might find just a wee bit disagreeable...that shouldn't detract from the reading experience, but rather challenge the reader with their own introspection... 

Just Finished Reading Norse Mythology by Neil Gaiman

A few days ago I reviewed English writer Neil Gaiman's wonderful 2008 children's book Odd and the Frost Giants...today I'm discussing his latest venture, from just last year: Norse Mythology, listed in his bibliography as a novel but essentially a collection of short tales centering around the old Norse gods Odin, Thor and Loki from his own research of old documents.  In his introduction Gaiman explains that the stories he is presenting here are his own adaptations...and sometimes combinations...of what he discovered: worked for me!  He presents the Norse version of the beginning of everything...including the gods, giants, and humans...along with Yggdrasil the great tree connecting the nine worlds.  The various short stories feature primarily the exploits of Odin, Thor and Loki, some explaining how they got their treasures (such as Thor's vaunted hammer, for example), others focusing on their dealings with their foes the giants...although there seemed to be a lot of interbreeding between the two types (I'm still trying to figure out the logistics of that).  In many of the stories Loki, devious jokester, causes the problem and then has to figure a way out of it...often resulting in things unwittingly turning out better than when they began.  The stories toward the end, though, paint him in a much more sinister light as the final future battle of Ragnarok between the gods and all their foes (including Loki) approaches.  In Norse Mythology there is a lot of humor mixed in with the violence, and Gaiman in his gifted way manages to impart a sense of tenderness toward his characters...even when they're misbehaving (which is usually the case).  Odin the creator god is a conniving one-eyed wanderer, Thor the strongman has an unmatched appetite for both food and mead, and Loki often overdrinks, almost inevitably leading him into into the worst trouble.  I think you'll appreciate this latest literary effort of Neil Gaiman...but as I've said before it's hard to go wrong if you pick up any of his books...

Just Finished Reading Odd and the Frost Giants by Neil Gaiman

If you're familiar with frost giants then you might already guess from the title of the book I'm reviewing today that it has something to do with Norse mythology...I should have known since I'm also recently finished reading the same author's 2020 book, titled just that: Norse Mythology.  Odd and the Frost Giants is an earlier children's book of his, published in 2008.  Odd is the name of a little boy living somewhere in what is now Norway whose father, a Norse Viking farmer, died during a raiding expedition.  His Scottish mother (taken during an earlier raid) and he now live with his abusive stepfather...not a good thing.  One spring the warmer weather never arrives and Odd's village finds itself increasingly short of food in the midst of the continuing desolate winter weather...he furtively runs away to his father's old cabin, in which he discovers a strange block of wood with runes his dad had been carving: this has significance later in the story.  Odd comes across an eagle, a fox, and a bear and the story takes off from there in a completely different direction...or does it?  After all, it all comes back home as the explanation for the never-ending winter makes itself evident.  Odd and the Frost Giants is a short book, and it reminded it quite a lot of Roald Dahl's writing.  As far as Neil Gaiman's books are concerned...excluding any consideration of his numerous graphic novels which I haven't yet read...you can pretty much pick out any at random and you have for yourself an enjoyable reading experience ahead.  He has a gift of compassion in his writing, not only for the characters both good and bad, but also for the storytelling process as a whole.  I think you'll get a big kick out of reading this book no matter what your age... 

Constellation of the Month: Perseus

 

For December I picked as my Constellation of the Month Perseus, prominent for much of the year in northern nighttime skies, and which crosses the meridian around 9 pm this month.  It represents the Greek mythological hero who, riding the winged horse Pegasus, rescues the fair maiden Andromeda from the sea monster Cetus at Queen Cassiopeia's behest...all are represented by nearby constellations. The 1981 movie Clash of the Titans, starring Harry Hamlin as Perseus, presented one version of the story.  Perseus, although possessing no first magnitude stars, is nevertheless loaded with many bright ones, marked by Mirfak and Algol...the latter, "only" 93 light years away from us, is actually a triple star, with its variation in brightness caused by the stars taking turns eclipsing one another.  Mirfak is much further away and bigger.  Perseus is the focus of the annual Perseids, the most spectacular meteor shower of all and which takes place in the wee morning hours around August 11-13 as the Earth rotates into a cloud of dust particles along its orbit around the sun and ignites them within the atmosphere. I can't begin to count the times, though, in which I tried to watch it but for various reasons was thwarted...often from overcast skies, my schedule, or just falling asleep: let's see if I can't catch it in 2021! I've always welcomed seeing Perseus rising up in the northeastern sky (from my Florida latitude) as it presages the coming of the most interesting part of the celestial sky, that of the wintertime.  Next month there can be only one constellation that stands out above all others for January...well, even for the entire year, for that matter: can you guess which one it is?