A sach mentshen zehen, nor vainik fun zai farshtai’en: Many people see things but few understand them.

AQUARIUS (JANUARY 21—FEBRUARY 20):

Ruled by wild and erratic Uranus, Aquarians are associated with inspiration and originality. Your symbol, the water-bearer, is a bit misleading—you’re not, in fact, a water sign, but rather an air sign. But unlike fellow air signs Libra and Gemini, Aquarius is a fixed sign, meaning you possess the intellectual acumen and curiosity of the others but aren’t nearly as mercurial.

Aquarius is also the sign of contradictions. Before the discovery of Uranus in 1781, Saturn was your ruler, representing order and conformity. Uranus, with its unusual rotation and orbit, rules rebellion, risk, and individuality. The planet is associated with invention and innovation, as well as a latent ability to perceive the future—which is what it means to be at the dawning of the Age of Aquarius.

Aquarians are patient, intuitive, devoted, and dependable, yet drawn to the unconventional. Your clear-headed determination and knack for reason make you an excellent reformer. But your detachment from your emotions and dispassionate approach to relationships—as well as your keen memory for detail—often cause you to hold grudges. Your understanding of human nature runs the risk of being purely intellectual. Feh!

The new moon in your sign on February 9 favors innovation, exploration of the unknown, and experimentation. With Saturn in retrograde from February 18 until July 8, consider reexamining any outmoded ways of thinking and dealing with unfinished business—you can do so much more than you thought possible. The love planet Venus is in your sign until February 25th, so expect the thrills of freedom and independence. You might not find your beshert in time for Valentine’s Day, but some trial and error may be enough to awaken those dormant romantic impulses.

Famous Aquarius Jews: Gertrude Stein, Martin Buber, Michael Bloomberg, Neil Diamond, Paul Newman, Seth Green, Louis Zukofsky, Carole King, Philip Glass, Felix Mendelssohn, Jack Benny, Stella Adler, Paul Auster, Jonathan Lethem, Art Spiegelman, Betty Friedan, Darren Aronofsky, Judy Blume, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Jerry Springer, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Pauly Shore, Regina Spektor, Zosia Mamet

PISCES (FEBRUARY 21-MARCH 20): Things may get worse before they get better—Aider es kumt di nechomeh, ken oisgaien di neshomeh. Mars and Mercury move into your sign in February, making compassion and dreaming the order of the day. Pisces can be gluttons for punishment, but if you stand up for yourself without equivocating, the people you need most will rush to your side in solidarity.

ARIES (MARCH 21-APRIL 20): It seems like the universe is conspiring to put all of your plans on the back burner. During February your ruling planet Mars will be transiting through Pisces, the planet of compassion and empathy, which doesn’t exactly jive well with your typical warrior stance. However, ven men darf hoben moiach, helft nit kain koiach—when brains are needed, brawn won’t help.

TAURUS (APRIL 21-MAY 20): You may be feeling cautious in romantic pursuits for fear of rejection, making your prospects appear stalled and limited. But reality is more of a give-and-take than you realized. Before you can experience mekheye, you’ll need do some serious assessment about what you really want out of love.

GEMINI (MAY 21-JUNE 20): While you’ve been trying to focus on your career, mental Mercury’s move into Pisces on February 5 ignites your fantasies and dreams. Practicality may seem boring—if not hazardous—but rather than voglen (wander around aimlessly), be honest with yourself and others about what’s going on in that head of yours.

CANCER (JUNE 21-JULY 20): Cosmic energies are insisting that you broaden your horizons. So ease up and let yourself go—your sanctimonious tendencies often push others away. An epiphanic moment may be in store for you, transforming the way you view your place in the universe.  

LEO (JULY 21-AUGUST 20): Although it seems like everything is working against you right now, this trial by fire could be a blessing in disguise. While domestic matters may take center stage, you’ll be strengthened by the realization that you’re a light that won’t go out. You’re the richtiker chaifetz (the real McCoy), you feisty felines—just hang in there and the method to this madness will eventually reveal itself.

VIRGO (AUGUST 21-SEPTEMBER 20): As charming as you can be, you’re often guilty of haken a chainik (talking for the sake of talking). The only way to get close to people is to interact with mutual regard and empathy. Try listening for a change and the rest will follow.

LIBRA (SEPTEMBER 21-OCTOBER 20): A wise man once said, “the world is a tragedy to those who feel, but a comedy to those who think.” Since Libra is the sign of balance, you would do well to find a way to mediate between thinking and feeling. After all, heaven and hell can both be had in this world—ganaiden un gehenem ken men baideh hoben oif der velt.

SCORPIO (OCTOBER 21-NOVEMBER 20): You’ve been oysgemutshet (worked to death, tired out) for far too long. Don’t hate the player, hate the game: examine the source of your frustration. The truth has many faces—der emess hot a sach ponimer—and admitting that the past just isn’t through with you will help you make the changes you need for a brighter future.

SAGITTARIUS (NOVEMBER 21–DECEMBER 20): Freud interpreted the dual nature of Sagittarius as the ego’s way of navigating the warring id and superego. For fiery Sagittarians, it is often oder gor oder gornit (all or nothing). Rather than force something that just wasn’t meant to be, try to rise above the shtuss and learn to love the dueling sides of yourself.

CAPRICORN (DECEMBER 21–JANUARY 20): With your ruling planet Saturn in retrograde from February 18 to July 8 and planets moving out of your sign, you may feel a particular sense of loss and confusion. For now, focus on your health—mental, spiritual, physical—rather than gesunte tzores. Gather your strength, for soon you’ll regain equilibrium.

What’s Your Sign?
Capricorn, the Cardinal Earth Sign
Sagittarius, the Adventurous Archer
Stinging Scorpio
Lovely, Lawful Libra
Virgo, the Anxious Maiden
Leo, King of the Jungle

(Art by Margarita Korol)

***

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The post Jewcy Horoscopes: Aquarius, Sign of Contradictions (Jan. 21—Feb. 20) appeared first on Jewcy.

Philip Roth thinks the novel is going extinct, but Paul Auster disagrees.

Who’s right?

The post When Writers Argue (Sorta): Paul Auster Vs. Philip Roth appeared first on Jewcy.

Anybody who knows me knows that I’m a Paul Auster apologist. He’s one of my favorite writers, and I’ve spent a lot of time defending him to friends who don’t share my enthusiasm. I have been a fan of his for years, but my interest blossomed into some kind of obsession roughly two years ago, upon the looming publication of Invisible, when I decided I wanted to interview him. When I asked Auster for an interview at one of his readings, he flatly and unsurprisingly said no. In response, I launched a year-long campaign of following him through the city, attending readings, events and parties I thought he might show up to. In the end, I succeeded—I managed to convince his publicist to grant me access—and it was, at the time, the highlight of my literary life. During the interview Auster mentioned the book he had just finished writing, describing it as a novel about a group of twenty-somethings living in an abandoned house in Brooklyn, to be called Sunset Park.

A brief aside: Around the time when I received the Sunset Park galley, I was rounding out a two-month obsession with the Gilmore Girls. I always thought the Gilmore Girls was annoying when it was on TV: The two characters around which the show revolves—quick-witted single mother Lorelai Gilmore and her overly-intellectual daughter Rory—seemed unbearable to watch. But one frozen Sunday I sat down and watched three episodes of the Gilmore Girls in a row. For the next eight weeks I found myself spending an embarrassing amount of time with Lorelai and Rory Gilmore, and becoming completely invested in their fictional lives. Amy Sherman-Paladino, who modeled the main character after herself, wrote and directed the show for six years, flawlessly crafting emotionally complicated and dynamic characters that were not only pleasurable to watch, but easy to relate to. That is, until she quit the show after learning of the producers’ decision to tack on a seventh season after Paladino had planned to terminate it. A new writer was brought in to replace Paladino for the last 18 episodes. It was an undisputed disaster.

As I watched the Gilmore Girls egregious seventh season—uneven characters, contrived dialogue, unrealistic plot twists that seemed to go against the very ethic of the show—I was struck: My disappointment was palpable, and matched only by my disappointment in Sunset Park. Like Amy Sherman-Paladino, it was as if the Paul Auster I know and love had left the building and was inexplicably replaced by someone going through the motions. It looks like Auster and sounds like Auster—it looks like Lorelai and (sort of) talks like her—but it isn’t, not really.

Sunset Park, like so many other Auster novels, plays with the ideas of chance, destiny, luck and memory. It is predominantly a story of wreckage and ruin—broken houses, families, economies, relationships, hope, belief, humanity. Miles Heller, a tortured young man haunted by the death of his brother and racked with guilt at the possibility of having caused it, is the character around which the novel revolves. After dropping out of a prestigious school on the East Coast he moves to Florida and takes a job “trashing out,” going through houses that have been abandoned upon the threat of foreclosure and ridding them of all remnants of their former residents. He is, in effect, a collector of garbage, but also a collector of memories, stories, refuse—all that is, or was, attached to the objects he disposes of.

In reality, Miles is the broken thing the others in the story painstakingly try to repair, or at least understand. After his brother’s accident, Miles went into hiding, isolating himself from his friends and family, including his publishing tycoon father Morris Heller who is by far the most well-rounded and sympathetic in a cast of damaged, misguided and self-involved characters. After meeting and falling in love with his muse—a brilliant and bookish seventeen-year-old girl named Pilar, though as a reader I detected no signs of the intellectual depth and maturity the author so often refers to—Miles is forced to relocate due to forces beyond his control. And he does, to a derelict house in Sunset Park with three other lost souls: Bing Nathan, a gentle giant and the leader of the pack who runs the Hospital for Broken Things, a repair shop for obsolete items of a bygone era; Ellen Brice, a young woman with self-esteem issues, her own guilt surrounding a tryst with a minor and a mind full of perversions; and Alice Bergstrom, the hyper-intellectual graduate student with a part-time gig at PEN America. Systematically, Miles’ new roommates all fall in love with him in various capacities, though the reader is given almost no insight into what makes Miles tick. Auster explicitly shows and tells us that Miles is an introvert, unwilling to expose himself to those around him—even to his beloved Pilar—but he deprives the readers of too much. His pain is familiar to those who have read Auster’s previous novels, and is centered around a certain denial, but unlike Adam Walker, the protagonist of Auster’s last novel Invisible, there are far too few redeeming qualities about Miles and, as a result, I found him undeserving of the affection, admiration and devotion of his peers.

The structure of the novel is so classically Auster—disjointed, slightly post-modern but incredibly methodical. It is broken up into sections about each of the five central characters, and narrated in the third person, creating an even greater distance between the reader and the subjects. Interspersed throughout the story are anecdotes about baseball players who have either been the victim of, or the beneficiary of, fate including Jack “Lucky” Lohrke, who cheated death time and time again, and Herb Score, whose career was cut short by a baseball to the face. Miles loves these characters, these casualties and heroes of destiny, and while he tells their stories freely, he tells us nothing of himself.

What Auster has created, in his preoccupation with broken things, are a set of broken—or better yet, incomplete—characters. What we know of them is so flimsy, and so heavily based around their fixations on Miles, that the development of each is shallow.

There are moments of sincerity—the ritual of Morris and his son eating at a local diner when Miles was a boy—but other than that, Sunset Park was wholly disappointing. Like the Gilmore Girls. The difference is, the last episode of the seventh season of the Gilmore Girls was sort of alright—Rory got the job she deserved, Lorelai ended up with the right guy and I was able to, if not forget the contrivance that was the previous seventeen episodes, at least appreciate the last one for doing right by loyal fans and followers. By contrast, Auster’s packs all of the action missing throughout the rest of  Sunset Park into the last ten pages of the novel, which ends in a cacophonous, disastrous dash through a cemetery.

So, if you’re a planning on reading Sunset Park, you should probably just watch the Gilmore Girls instead.

The post Paul Auster Meets Gilmore Girls In This Review Of “Sunset Park” appeared first on Jewcy.

Not sure you’re headed to Midtown Manhattan for the Bernie Madoff auction today, but in case you are, keep an eye out on the library that’s being sold en bloc, that includes books by some good names like Philip Roth and Paul Auster.

Pretty good chance King Scumbag had some nice first editions and autographed books in his collection, but you might have to wade through the crap like John Grisham and the seventeen copies of “Screwing People Over For Dummies.”

The post Bernie Madoff: Total Prick, Good Taste In Books appeared first on Jewcy.