BOOM! Three Sunday Discoveries

Mary Gaitskill, Sun sign essences, and a Babylon playlist.

Jun 26, 2022

👁‍🗨 AUTHOR MARY GAITSKILL is now on Substack. This is the equivalent of Virginia Woolf keeping an online journal if we all lived back in the late 19th Century—and the internet was a thing. If you never read Veronica—a finalist for the National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle—I envy you because I would love to read it for the first time again and experience the book’s non-stop flow of frissons. Gaitskill is a Scorpio, (with a potent stellium in the sign) and is somehow able to conjure language for life’s most ineffable feelings and experiences. Much of her syntax qualifies as poetry, but not in a precious or pretentious way. My favorite post on her new SS is: The Hidden Life of Stories.

👁‍🗨 I CONTRIBUTE QUARTERLY to New York clothing designer Dan Snyder’s Corridor, NYC journal. My latest essay for the summer just went live. A close read on Sun sign astrology and the importance of the Sun’s harmonizing influence in the horoscope. I detail pointers, for each sign, too.

“Sun sign astrology—the kind where you say, “I’m a Virgo. My boyfriend’s a Sagittarius”—is a fairly recent phenomenon. It began in the 20th century and has dominated the imagination of popular culture ever since. But why? Doesn’t it seem nonsensical to claim that the entire global population can be divided into 12 different typologies that share a common set of traits?
My friend, the late great British astrologer Jonathan Cainer once explained it this way: He suggested that we consider the signs of the Zodiac as symbols, or totems, for 12 different tribes on planet Earth. Depending on what season we are born—the month and the day—we each fall into an ‘atmospheric’ pattern—depending on the Earth’s relationship to the Sun at that particular time.”
Read it here.

👁‍🗨 MY LATEST PLAYLIST on Spotify is up to 338 songs. 21 hours’ worth of new sounds. Time to unplug! Chill and listen to some music. The week’s been hellish enough—do you really want to do any more doom scrolling?

Love,