In the Heavens...

Our especially brilliant Morning Star these days is Venus, nearly at its westernmost "elongation" (i.e., distance from the sun), which will, for this year, actually occur sometime tomorrow.  Precious, argotic astronomers always give their Mother-Latin a twist, to make her mean what they mean--lest, I suppose, the world forget, that there would be no vast, austere body of impersonal, absolute astronomical knowledge without the devoted formulative groundwork of individual--quirky, and sometimes even cute, though of course entirely self-effacing--particular astronomers.  The wonder is that any female astronomers at all have mastered the ceremonial linguistic flutings and flutterings of the Noble Science.  

Referencing now our Google doodle for this date, a major minimalist work by one Agnes Martin, whose 102nd birthday it is (or would be if she had not died ten years ago) today, and who called herself an "abstract expressionist."   There are Imperial shills, stooges and lickspittle whores (art critics and pundits made fashionable by the New York Times) who may claim to see in her work the genius and skill equivalent of a Mary Cassatt or a Berthe Morisot, and who will call my derisive hoots and rude guffaws, jeers and sneers--at the fatuous absurdity of such a comparison--philistine.   I find that reassuring.