The Market And Energy Page, Part 2, T+299 -- November 16, 2017

Saudi: it is being reported that Prince Salman will become king of Saudi Arabia as early as next week.

• born: August 31, 1985; 32 years old (2017)
• Zodiac sign: he is a Virgo (August 23 - September 22, inclusive)
• horoscope as of November 16, 2017:

Until November 22nd:

The Sun continues to highlight your solar third house--a time of the year in which you are most likely to be a "busy bee".

Communications, short trips, errand-running, and general busy-ness feature now.

You could have a finger in many pies, so to speak, as your curiosity is piqued by a larger variety of things than usual.

Used well, this could be a period in which you come up with solutions to a number of problems. You are more inclined to take pride in your intellectual accomplishments and/or your ability to socialize and make connections.

From November 22nd forward:

With the Sun spotlighting your house of family and home, these areas are your instinctive focus during this period. Your family, home, property concerns, roots, and heritage come into focus and become a source of pride.

You are likely quite preoccupied with feelings of security and your inner experiences.

This is a time when you send down roots and seek a feeling of belonging. You could be thrust into a position of leadership on the home front.

Ego confrontations with family members are possible now, but the best way to handle this energy is to do your best to strengthen your relationship to your family and your home base.

This is a time to do what you can to build trust in your family life and a strong foundation within yourself, so that regardless of what you meet in the outside world over the next months, you have a secure place to return to. Besides spending more time tending to domestic affairs, the focus can be on cultivating and nourishing your inner foundations that support you and your growth. This is a time to collect yourself--to fill your well, so to speak.

So to speak.

I can't make this stuff up.

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The Literary Page

Every time I come across the "best book ever," it seems, I find another book that becomes "the best book ever."

I've blogged about this book before: A New Literary History of America, edited by Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors, c. 2009, by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.

These are new essays, specifically written for this book. This is not an anthology of older essays. It has a slight "leftist" tilt but all-in-all, incredibly good. In fact, I prefer the slight "leftist" tilt rather than a centrist or "alt-right" view of US literature.

There are 119 essays (assuming I counted correctly). I have read less than a dozen of the essays, picking and choosing the ones I might find most interesting, or most relevant to that with which I am already most familiar. (That last sentence is the reason why we need to abolish the rule to "never end sentences with a preposition.)

It would be tedious and would take too long to list each of the 119 essays, so I will every 20th essay, starting with #1, #20, #40, and so on.

The essay is preceded by the year in which the particular item was written.

1507: The name "America" appears on a map.

1773: Phillis Wheatley

1826; 1927: Transnational Poetry

1851: Moby-Dick

1884: Mark Twain's hairball

1900: Henry Adams

1920, August 10: Mamie Smith's "Crazy Blues"

1930, October: Grant Wood's American Gothic

1940: "No way like the American way"

1952, April 12: Elia Kazan and the blacklist in Hollywood

1965, September 11: The Council on Interracial Books for Children

1995, Philip Roth

2008, November 4, Barack Obama (#119)

Along the way, some interesting observations or essays that caught my eye for some reason:

1692, The Salem witchcraft trials

1777, The Declaration of Independence

1796, Washington's farewell address

1801, Jefferson's first inaugural address
 
1846, late July, Henry David Thoreau

1851, Uncle Tom's Cabin

1865, March 4, Lincoln's second inaugural address

1875, The Winchester Rifle

1881, January 24, Henry James, Portrait of a Lady

1906, April 18, 5:14 a.m., The San Francisco Earthquake

1925, The Great Gatsby

1925, August 16, Dorothy Parker

1935, June 10, Alcoholics Anonymous

1943, Hemingway's paradise, Hemingway's prose

1945, August 6, 10:45 a.m., The atom bomb

1947, December 3, Tennessee Williams, essay by Camille Paglia

1951, The Catcher in the Rye

1955, December, Nabokov's Lolita

1957, Dr Seuss

1961, January 20, JFK's inaugural address and Catch-22

1970; 1972, Linda Lovelace

1982, A Boy's Own Story, essay by Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum

2005, August 29, Hurricane Katrina

2008, November 4, Barack Obama