It’s 5 am and my huge pot of water is boiling way — my winter hobby. The squirrels are still sleeping (I think they live in my attic). At the moment, I’m listening to The Dream of the Blue Turtles (I’ve developed a thing for the song “The Black Seam” — the link takes you to a really cool video that goes from Sting’s rehearsal studio to the live stage); speaking of blue, while working with Anatoly on the Book of Blue website. I got back in from Philadelphia late last night (the Loving More winter conference, called Poly Living 2010), and tonight I am heading to the NCGR astrology conference in Cambridge.
NCGR is every two or three years, so it’s a fairly rare event. I’ll be there with bells on my wingtips, joined by Amanda Painter, who is trekking down from Maine, and others in the Planet Waves network who turn up. If you’re coming to the conference and want to help out or just say hello, look for the Planet Waves table someplace visible; we’ve got a big red and white banner to decorate the thing.
Wednesday I will be at Richard Tarnas’ full-day workshop on astrology and comedy, a subject I started emailing him about spontaneously a couple of months ago before I knew he researched and taught that subject. I remember why — Steve Colbert did a 30 second impression of those nuclear test videos, with the test dummies and the trees swaying and all of that, only he did it with his body and face. I opened an email and for some reason started writing to Rick: did you see that!!???
He wrote back — yep. He was equally impressed. He said he was teaching the archetype of the comic genius at CIIS (California Institute for Integral Studies, in San Francisco); and that’s being taken on the road to Cambridge on Wednesday as a pre-conference intensive, complete with audio and video clips to illustrate the astrology.
I’ll be doing some live blogging through the week, as well as audio blogging. I am also on the faculty of the conference. My own presentation — on working with the new planets — is Saturday afternoon; I will record it and make it visible for about one day, and then I’ll be offering it as a pay download.
Between now and then I have a weekly horoscope to write, Sarah and I get to pack my traveling digital flea circus into some more suitcases, and I plan to arrive in Cambridge in the late evening. If you plan to be at the conference and want to contact me, in case anyone hasn’t noticed, I’m usually on the Net like an obsessed teenager; email me at my ‘dreams’ address, and if you don’t hear back in about one to three hours, please email again.
I will probably interview him and I trust, sample the workshop.
Would that I could be a fly on the wall while you hear Tarnas. Hope you have a good interview, if he’s available.
I don’t know what the heck it is. That’s why I’m going to sit at the table with Rick Tarnas and listen.
There was your one liner.
We are talking about the Jester, and I believe, something Promethean. The usual theory of humor is that it’s a powerful Saturn function. Colbert (for example) drips with Saturn. But I am going to take a wild, untamed guess and suggest that Rick has a Uranus/Prometheus theory as well: the ability to steal the fire back from the gods who stole it from us. That is to say, humor is a special form of the power to tell the truth and not get killed. Colbert again, at the National Press Club dinner a few years back.
That said, I am looking forward to a day of astrology school to find out what he really thinks.
eric:
OK. This is too good. What IS the archetype of the comic genius?
I hope I’m not setting myself up for a astrological one-liner.