Everyone thinks this will be a great year according their wish-predictions from last week, but the triskadecaphobic (sic) index is high, as it is also Mayan 360-day year 13.0.0 now, as we all learned during last month's Mayan calendar tutorials.
Some show on NPR last week would have us name 1913 as the end of the cultural 19th century because of atonal music scandals, and then fateful 1914 (such a beautiful summer...) should count as the first _real_ year of the 20th century in the cultural timeline.
According to a numerological conceit I thought up in the early 1980's, the years that mark cultural mileposts are the ones that add up to 1, many of which seem meaningful to my willfully biased reckoning, 1945, 1954, 1963, 1972, 1981, 1990, 1999, 2008... there seems to be some predictive power in this foolery if we consider the last couple of ticks in the count. This scheme puts 2013 at the midpoint in a cycle.
But why should the nature of things conform to year counts? Because art (or at least artifice) improves reality. Reality smells of dirt and disillusion, it is cold wind in the face, it takes more patience than we can afford if we want to have our nightly comforts, say I with prissy prose....
If you think it's going to be a good year, you can make it so, just don't let down your guard as per reality, as it is defined in its sourpuss sense.
Some show on NPR last week would have us name 1913 as the end of the cultural 19th century because of atonal music scandals, and then fateful 1914 (such a beautiful summer...) should count as the first _real_ year of the 20th century in the cultural timeline.
According to a numerological conceit I thought up in the early 1980's, the years that mark cultural mileposts are the ones that add up to 1, many of which seem meaningful to my willfully biased reckoning, 1945, 1954, 1963, 1972, 1981, 1990, 1999, 2008... there seems to be some predictive power in this foolery if we consider the last couple of ticks in the count. This scheme puts 2013 at the midpoint in a cycle.
But why should the nature of things conform to year counts? Because art (or at least artifice) improves reality. Reality smells of dirt and disillusion, it is cold wind in the face, it takes more patience than we can afford if we want to have our nightly comforts, say I with prissy prose....
If you think it's going to be a good year, you can make it so, just don't let down your guard as per reality, as it is defined in its sourpuss sense.
