Category: People
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Freddie Mercury
Freddie Mercury tops of my list of rock singers. His voice is iconic, along with his style and energy in performance. He was electric and riveting on stage but, according to the current biopic of his his life with Queen, was not an easy person to live with. Nor was he comfortable with himself and…
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Gifts for Mankind: Petra, from John Lewis Burckhardt.
Johann Ludwig (also known as John Lewis, Jean Louis) Burckhardt was a Swiss traveller, geographer and orientalist, best known for discovering the ruins of the ancient city of Petra in Jordan. Born in Lausanne, Switzerland on 29 November 1784. There is no birth time so I have set it at midday. The Man and his Mask The chart has two…
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James Joyce. Stream of Consciousness.
James Joyce was an Irish novelist, short story writer and poet who is regarded as the first modernist English writer. He wrote in a great variety of literary styles such as interior monologues, but most famously in what is called stream of consciousness. He is best known for Ulysses. His other well-known works are Dubliners, Portrait…
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The Armistice, 100 years on
The signing of the Armistice to end the First World War, also known as the Great War, took place in a railway carriage at Compiègne, France on 11.11.1918, at 11.00 am. Every year since, remembrance of those who died in this most bloody and dreadful war, and in all subsequent wars, has been made in…
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Samuel Becket. The Revelation of the Absurd.
Beckett was an Irish avant-garde novelist, playwright, theatre director and poet. He spent most of his adult life in Paris, writing in both English and French. His work offers a bleak, tragicomic sense of human existence. Widely regarded as among the most influential writers of the 20th century, Beckett was a key figure in the Theatre of the Absurd.…
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Walking the Maze of Borges’s Consciousness
In this article, Jorge Luis Borges takes us on a walk through the maze of his consciousness. As a master of the fantastical, his interpretation of his consiousness might not always meet the demands of reality. [See also previous post on Borges.] Here is my chart on which you can get an insight into aspects…
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Bookish Borges.
Jorge Luis Borges was an Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator, and also a key figure in Spanish-language literature Even though his hundreds of short stories are based on fact, he would often change fact into the fantastical with themes such as dreams, labyrinths, libraries, mirrors, fictional writers, thrillers, philosophy and religion. His works contributed to both philosophical…
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Franz Kafka
Kfor Kafkaesque. Just like the word ‘Orwellian’ is part of our vocabulary, so is ‘Kafkaesque’, but where Orwell names the threat to humanity – Big Brother or the Thought Police – Kafka’s is faceless. ‘Kafkaesque’ could mean (but not only mean): weird, mysterious, tortuously bureaucratic, nightmarish, horrible, apprehensive or anxious. Franz Kafka was a Jewish Bohemian…
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Kim – Trump
June 12, 2018 will be a day of negotiations between Donald J. Trump (DJT) and his team vs. the North Korean delegation in Singapore. I am nervous as I consider that the fate of our country to be in the hands of such a leader as Donald j. Trump. Having considered how he tries to…
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George Orwell. The Talent behind Nineteen Eighty-Four.
George Orwell, pseudonym for Eric Blair, was an English novelist, essayist, and critic famous for his novels, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, which was turned into a disturbing film in 1984. It is a profound anti-utopian novel that examines the dangers of totalitarian rule. Introduction When I read Nineteen Eighty-Four for the first time in the Seventies, it filled me with a sense…
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Gifts for Mankind. Troy and Mycenae – from Heinrich Schliemannn
There is no exact birth time for Heinrich Schliemann, the man considered the father of Archaeology after his groundbreaking excavations at Troy, Mycenae and Tiryns. I have set his birth time at midnight, based on several events that coincided with the progression of his Age Point: the death of his mother; the end of his…
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Anaἲs Nin. A veiled Eros.
Known as a diarist, novelist and writer of erotica, Anaἲs Nin was a woman of many faces. In her diaries of 35 000 pages, kept over 55 years, we see a daughter hurt by her father, a woman married to a banker, a bigamist later in life when she had two husbands, a femme fatale, a…
The Astrological Psychology of Bruno & Louise Huber 