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Matter & Beauty
Mythopoetry Scholar Ezine

The Burden of Beauty
The Jealous Martyrs & Other Tales of Unseemly Veils:
A Sketch of Questions
-Richard Lance Williams


Preliminary Remarks

Putting on Make-up (Salts, Crémes, Powders, Rouge: the Matters of Beauty Parlor Palaver)

This thing with beauty: Beauty & order: Harmony: Balance: Proportion: Power: Jealousy.

A study by Stephen Jay Gould in 1978 of the evolution of Mickey Mouse1 from the rat-faced hero of “Steamboat Willie” to the cloying round-faced spokesmouse of a conservative corporation demonstrated how Mickey’s decades in the making pen and ink sculpting to juvenile roundness engineered by his creators greatly enhanced the squeaky hero’s appeal to the masses while furthering the materialist argument that round (the primal O, zero, featureless, a priori of form, for even a point is round) is the archetypically preferred shape (maybe even funny,)2 unless one is an abstractly round spider (o the cruelty of concrete critics, spiraling pleasure makes the materialist world go round). Or to quote from Huxley’s Brave New World: Beauty’s attractive, and we don’t want people to be attracted by old things. We want them to like the new ones.

Humans like round. (In Plato’s myth, the first humans were round.3 The world being round, one might think saving it would be a popular endeavor, or perhaps, as further explored below, the iconoclastic perspective will have its way & the world, being but a shadow of the true ideal, must suffer a death for the Brave New World.) Humans also like proportional (except in the shape of a spider or a hook-nosed rat). photo oneA study of professional female models shows they have proportional faces. Perhaps there is a golden mean in there somewhere in the genetics of beautiful models. I venture to say that the same proportionalism applies to popular novels, essays, poems, cars, and vegetables. There was a recent study of top-rated movies that spoke of the ideal length of popular movie scenes.  Beauty has a time limit, which really comes as no surprise: o fading beauty, o strength of youth brought low, how we like to have our heroes retire at the top of their game (Michael Jordan or Jerry Seinfeld), be enshrined in our memories in a plastic surgeon’s mummification vas eternis. How horrific the garish face of the once gorgeous Gloria Swanson

as Norma Desmond ready for her close-up

in the brilliant Sunset Boulevard. Yet so, too, are some of us attracted to the misshapen, the grotesque, the perverted, finding an equal if not greater poignancy in the presence of what beauty prefers to defer: the aged beauty, the broken athlete, the mistakes, the refused. Is the essence of beauty narcissism? The qualities of beauty bridge to a terror & a hydra of truths: uncertain? Beauty has always been relative.

The essay form is not my forte. Paradox and gestures, whispers and innuendo, ambiguity and shrugs: these are my poetic hustles, my minimalist collagist essaying of what’s at hand. Beauty needs all her acolytes, even those whose plaint is that she wants all the attention. She is a harsh mistress, indeed, especially to a man who fidgets in constrictive formal clothes. My apologies: glib is a serious tool of critique. The following is a bouquet of disparate thoughts on the many diamond-faceted veils of mutable Beauty. But no spiders. Save maybe a reference to the net, the web of intrigue Hephaistos visited upon the faithless Aphrodite and Ares, the lord of beautiful ugly. (O, General George Patton loved the beautiful bastards of war &, yes, danger increases erotic desire: an action film is more conducive to romance than a romantic comedy: King Kong wanted to protect Beauty, eh? Danger is a good thing. “Twas beauty killed the beast.”)

* * *

(how lovely, the asterisk: ass, star, risk & the ter of terra firma or the terrere foundation of terroras in to shake or tremble: all beautiful things (o the risk when you shake yer booty))

All babies are beautiful. – from Joel and Ethan Coen’s film Raising Arizona

All matter is beautiful; if one has the eye for it the hands the tongue the ear the nose for it!

Yet battles over the nature of beauty, over the terms & conditions, over who is the arbiter of Beauty as a singularity, as a monolithic essence—archetypal gestures are reduced to having some pipsqueak attendant sally forth before them piping “THE!” every time she makes an appearance with or without her Keatsian brother Truth (she/he/it; i am loathe to gender, though it is disingenuous not to—are as pitched if not as bloody (o, there’s a debate, my Helen) as any Arian endeavor.

The Beauty The Truth The Savior The Book The Love

the the the the the—o the prick of The(o)—god god god god god.
 
The definite article: the mask riveted to the face: final: judged: the face that launched . . .
An indefinite article: an open face: with a face like that, you could get arrested . . .
You cannot look upon the face of god. Exodus 33:11.

Would it be a practical thing to kill the beautiful? No Helen, no thousand ships. Is the burka then a less draconian answer to the problem of beauty? Men fight for cattle (oil, gold, etc.), land (water rights, a place to hold the cattle, gold, oil), and women. Nuke the land? Slaughter the cattle? Jehovah asked that all enemies be destroyed (Greek Fire, Poison Arrows, and Scorpion Bombs, p. 34 by Adrienne Mayor). Save the women, children, & orchards (o, apple of my eye!) Is this a precursor to the call for apocalypse? The failure of matter to be perfect (beautiful & true or at least exploitable) calls for utter annihilation. Talk about beauty parlors on Desolation Row! Destroy even the sun! New Jerusalem needs no sun or moon! (Revelation 21) What ideal light for an ideal beauty! Yet, the souls will be clothed in bodies? Will they all look alike? What measure of perfection will be used? Ah! All in the image of god! Back to Adam & Eve before they fell from grace? Naked? O, my. What a conundrum.

Monotheism with its mono-visionistic proclivities would find itself siding with a monolithic idea of what constitutes beauty, would idealize a template of beauty & truth & all things. Plato’s ideal form as the metaphysical gauge by which all physical copies (already we have inferiority inherent in the philosophy) are judged as lesser efforts creates in the believer of such a philosophy a ready weapon that can be wielded in worlds as seemingly disparate as fashion and eugenics. (O world beware! O creative designer genes!) Always inadequate! Buy a better toothpaste! Liposuction! Maserati! Armor yourself with material goods! There’s the matter in beauty’s arsenal! Go shopping! Give Aphrodite her due & yet & yet always short (buy longer legs;4 or will we get there yet?), always lesser in time’s moving eye. O, how young women suffer comparing themselves with the genetically gifted, the Photoshop-enhanced, the eternal one eye of Nefertiti. Yet, practically they must compete! It is realpolitick! Beauty wants results. To die for. If lipstick on a pig works, then pucker up! (Then again, this is all about sex-appeal. The question of intimacy & beauty is another fish. Or is it? Fear, o fear, the wide-tentacles of the fearsome antagonist Ursula in the 1989 Disney film The Little Mermaid and the issues of familiar entanglement: issues of power & identity, having matching body parts!) The burka protects & the burka betrays. Who is served in display? Why in 1989 did a jury in Florida allowed a rapist to go free because his victim wore no underwear? Is display an invitation to abuse? Does beauty of itself call forth the violence of Ares? The violence of the iconoclasts? Is it true that beautiful women make men stupid?5

* * *

There will come a time when you won’t even be ashamed if you are fat! Wah wah wah wah. –Frank Zappa from “Take Your Clothes Off When You Dance” on the album We’re Only in it for the Money

the matter of beauty: beauty matters: what is the matter with beauty: which beauty matters: beauty exists beyond the eyes: why do the faithful not ban the sweetness of roasted meat, the perfume of frankincense, the shine of polished gold, the taste of ripe persimmons, the plump skin of young humans; beauty is that sense perfect expression of full engagement with being integrated with the underlying knowledge that it will pass, yet why does the eye carry the heaviest burden of jealousy? beauty in the eye (why one eye & not eyes? one eye, one god, one way, one time, one universe, one beauty) of the beholder, indeed, & if the objective eye of the psyche makes all subject to its objectification, then this bodiless eye inverts the jealousy of the body for immortality & thus a projected jealousy of the mortal falls back on the mortal itself

Does the soul have a form? Is it less than the ideal? Would soul simply melt in the presence of the judge? Is the no there there the essential beauty? Nothing is beautiful in its not being?

* * *

And he wrote a book in which he took away the palm of beauty from Argive Helen and handed it to poor Penelope. Poor Penelope. Penelope Rich. –James Joyce, from Ulysses, p. 149, speaking of Antisthenes 6

& what of the transfer from goddess to human of the great burden of beauty? What Platonic ideal can be borne by any creature? What perfect blue horse? What perfect smile? What form does beauty take, idealized & what does truth look like; what quality cuts the finest figure of faithfulness, courage, honor, good-humor? What object can personify an abstract trait? & yet . . .

The iconoclasts once smashed beautiful things, struck off the noses: image as e/veil.
Today men throw acid into the faces of beautiful women, women who have spurned them, women have had the temerity to not notice the lust rising in the soul of a total stranger. (O death, are you not just another thuggish prick snatching Persephone in her flower; jealous? needy? necessary?) Sometimes women even scar themselves with acid to gain the attention of a world that does not offer proper attention to the beauty of their essence.

Or what of the jealousy of a god who destroys 10,000 who seemingly spurn him for a dance before a golden calf?

this jealousy this envy of a perfection of harmony of an ideal that says physical manifestations of ideal forms (dreams/thoughts being physical but usually not visible to others independent of an interior recognition as generated by dream thought or word as in conversations or reading can generate a vision of a thingishness but that thing is not a classical physical manifestation
ala something that can be, say, ingested or burned or held in your arms pressed to
your chest your face warm or cool or wet or any sensation that collapses time
or to have a photograph made of its o so fey appearance o the dead)
are intimidating are arrogant are somehow an abomination
that offends the resident anima (the anger of the now)
a son jealous of the bride his mother was to his father
a father jealous of the attention the mother gives the child
the mother jealous of the girl she once was, the lost innocence
yet there is strong Penelope weaving & unweaving the son & husband
at a distance,  keeping the jealous suitors at bay with lies & food & drink:
entertaining them until the bloody conclusion where the unwanted perish at the hands
of a man who spent years in the arms of a goddess after returning from a war
fought to return ideal beauty to her “rightful” place as wife/mother
& not lover: the wife/mother is not “wanton” her desire
is sublimated into wifely & motherly duties
a desire to serve others (the pleasure of martyrs)
trumping the pleasure she takes & gives to a lover
her body sacrificed for an ideal body: the future body of the child
& the servant’s attention to a master: she is not equal to her husband
He simply has to receive & her joy is in the giving: There needs be no reciprocity of gifts
save protection from others who would require her to do the same duties were she to succumb.


What veil is this on beauty: the cultural veils of duty, the honor of literal walls: Stay in the house, woman: Speak to no one: O woe to the woman who is seen in the public unashamed! The witch hunts for women who danced naked under the moonlight (even this modest cloaking was too much for the totalitarian idealists & even here the exaggeration of women’s power of beauty outstrips the reality of women’s exerted power). The fantasy of beauty is a monster, indeed. It eats real women! Plug in your anima issues right here: All the men who treat real women abusively because real women can never compete with qualities of the individual’s anima creation. (“We want a lady in the street but a freak in the bed,” sings Usher.)

So what feminine goddesses are opposed to Aphroditic beauty; who prompts or countenances the acid in the face of beauty: Athena, Hera? (Recent research shows “[W]omen actually penalized female applicants for beauty.” Psychology Today, November/December 2010, “Can You Be Too Beautiful? p. 58) Are the polis & matrimony opposed to beauty & if beauty is ousted from the polis and the marriage bed, what then the measure, where the judges to fashion our sense of decorum? See how Aphrodite was caught in the bed of Ares by the maker of objects (again Hephaestus serving others’ needs, crippled as he is, the one thing he makes for himself, a net to serve his jealousy). How Aphrodite clues Hera how to keep Zeus in the marriage bed, how James Hillman speaks of the ugliness of the modern polis in his City and Soul. Does Athena herself countenance graffiti? Hera the acid in the face? Once deprived of beauty does the poor girl just enjoy the riches of motherhood & wife, the veil of the servant? The richness of a bloodbath defending her chattel status? Athena whispering in Odysseus’ ear how to abandon cleverness to brute force. When you bleed what is fructified? The gods want blood. The beauty of power pressing a wyrm under its heel. Bleed woman! Bleed man into earth, o beautiful blood of breeding, see my face? How wrenching the smile of pleasure when I come to you! O petite mort! O gushing display in the dark womb in the caves of Lascaux in the motel room. How brazenly Yahweh shows his ass to shame! How wondrously Aphrodite her own to entice!

o what the shade
the beauty lies
in darkness
as well as
in a light
lies he
says
a chemical
response a play
a display done for
now but oh the old man
declaims look! look! at bottom
beauty for the blind! the measure
in the spaces between (never
does one ever undone)
beribboned roads
waiting moves
& in moving
a smiling
beauty
dies
to
move on

What the shade: a psychologist claims the beauty of deeply dwelling fish proves the soul of beauty: Why else such invisible displays & the poet says why not & what else a rub between the moving of invisible skins: Psyche’s candle wax: Is all this iconoclasm & veiling simply caligynephobia or cacophobia? Are we afraid the beautiful will become ugly? The beautiful body with the skull face? O the matter of warts. A mole on the cheek so lovely, on the eyelid hideous.

* * *

He remembers a paper he wrote on the pitilessness of beauty: One reviewer hated it, another didn’t: thus his proposition was proved incorrect.

* * *

Hermione was Helen’s only surviving child. She became the wife of Orestes. Helen’s children with Paris did not survive. (Beauty is sufficient onto itself, is singular. Love not serving a larger audience is fruitless, has its own form of jealousy, will not share, is not, in a sense, promiscuous: thus the faithfulness of Penelope becomes analogous to the singularity of Aphrodite but accessible to humans) thus beauty enters the bedroom & the polis? A marriage of the three goddesses in Penelope? Where then goes the acid? Who is acid-tongued? Who will speak of bitter jealousy? Clytemnestra is the unfaithful counterpart to Penelope. She is murdered by Orestes. The son offended as much by his mother’s promiscuity as her murder of his father? Orestes believes that he is the snake in his mother’s dream. He is aided by Apollo, a most misogynous god & considered the god of male beauty (cold, powerful). Aphrodite was the goddess of love, beauty and procreation. Alongside Zeus and Hera, she was also the leader of the Theoi Gamelioi or gods of marriage. Apollo ... the whole ethic of Hellenic beauty was with him.

Apollo, the one who failed repeatedly at love. Yet, a fine rapist & murderer. & Dionysus, mad one, dramatic, the devil himself say the Christians. Yet, he was ever faithful to Ariadne. (O spider!)

One more thing: Hermione is associated with Persephone, thus the beauty of death is nestled in Aphrodite’s bosom. What else is it when Orpheus (son of Apollo) looks back into the dark? Has the beauty of Eurydice (daughter of Apollo!) changed? Will she still have those same cheeks having been touched by death? What is the depth of an attractive beauty? Where is the mirror of Theseus? The mirror, mirror of Hathor? Mirror, mirror on the wall, ever my youth is headed for the fall! As if the poison apple weren’t in the mouth of the babe from the start. O serpent of Eden! Knowledge shames the body. Apollo became Apollo when he killed the Python. Are the crazed music lovers clawing at the flesh to get to the essence of Orphean genius? The light hidden in the invisible? Some music behind the music? Again, the seeds of terror, of horror, wound in the DNA of beauty? These dualistic spiralings inherent in the myths & in the wisdom of the artists who see the beauty of a black empty plastic bag tumbled & tossed about in eddies of air circling as a mini-maelstrom in the driveway of a suburban home as videotaped by the son of a dogmatic cultural warrior in the film American Beauty. (Note the Marine closeted homosexual that brings death in this film. Note also the Hera Ganymede connection.  Is it a question of anima/animus projection? Is the dry, male misogyny of the brilliant homosexualized Greek consciousness the cause for the arrogance of beauty? Is this jealousy, this idealization, not of beauty herself, but rather beauty in the mirror of male creative jealousy? Are the women who mistreat beautiful women really just serving the male oppressors? “Apollodorus argued that this myth emphasized the victory of patriarchy over matriarchy. This showed that men did not need women to exist, therefore they did not need the attentions of women. The philosopher Plato used this myth to justify his sexual feelings towards male pupils.”)7 The hidden light. The hidden beauty. See her flee! O true lover to keep the light from her! Thus the veil. Thus the injunction against the image. If there is an image it can be unveiled. If unveiled, what secret shame will be revealed? The emptiness of not just the image but of what does not lie beyond the imaged?

Note the phantom beauty Hera arranges in Euripides’ Helen: “But Hera, indignant at not defeating the goddesses, brought to naught my marriage with Paris, and gave to Priam’s princely son not Helen, but a phantom endowed with life, that she made in my image out of the breath of heaven; and Paris thought that I was his, although I never was, an idle fancy! So I was set up as a prize for all the chivalry of Hellas, to test the might of Phrygia, yet not I, but my name alone.”8 O, a rose by any other name. O distracting beauty. We keep moving. Never too deep, never staying long.

* * *

. . . mercy of beauty . . . –James Joyce, from Ulysses, p. 274

we collapse—caught in her gravity—filled—o’erflowing—our senses exhausted—
mercifully we swoon before, exposed too long in her radiance, we die—
o fire o whirlwind o ass of a god alone on a mountain top
o Aphrodite Leucothea lend us your protective veil
o Yahweh in your burning bush sweet cheeks
o stout beauty of Baubo’s lewd succor
mercy of beauty, we come & go

* * *

A terrible beauty is born. –William Butler Yeats, “Easter, 1916”

(an ore of) holes gaps emptiness in breath in art memory constellations & (there!) the impulse (both) to fill them & leave them to their (blackness—the residue of processing gold) ore (o re o white cream between two circles of void sun o sheen a void) or how, panicked, we break broken shards (pots of absent mothers spinning (faster now the being here & not in th’ere) arms of negating light) in our (the hour of spiders the cave mouth closed) brazen hair nests of tangled  angels shattered glass a loneliness of unmarked shores to find the place that first wounds that gouges a hell as a hunger as it empties itself of its last want or how her eyes blind mountains to what a heaven costs

* * *

Hiesos Kristos the magician of the beautiful, the Logos who suffers in us at every moment.
–James Joyce, from Ulysses, p. 185

Or what of beauty’s pull: Beauty is a veil, the very veil—the seminal voila—of matter itself! & beauty is not a tease; she is a full frontal hammer, a fire sucking the oxygen from your white lung, the sidelong glance felling mountains, a slow melting lozenge of ambrosial Egypt: Hathor!

 Like a rich jewel in an Ethiope’s ear; beauty too rich for use, for earth too dear.
–William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, Act 1, scene 5



In the book The Alphabet Versus the Goddess by Leonard Shlain, the author argues persuasively that women and nature suffer as logos, the abstract written word, replaces the images of hieroglyphics & pictograms of earlier humans. Why does the abstract nature of the alphabet promote an anti-image consciousness? Does the abstract logos suffer in the matter of the mythos? To end its suffering, logos wreaks havoc on the material. O pouty mouth be veiled! Speak not his name. Show not his face. Show as little as possible. Be an O gone flat ___, a period .

* * *

The sense of beauty leads us astray.  –James Joyce, from Ulysses, p. 204

Look (look) beyond the matter of physical beauty, beyond your cultural markers to the essential beauty that lies within! Remember Chaucer’s hag in “The Wife of Bath’s Tale?” The princess & the frog? Are these tales of truly seeing beyond the hard demands of beauty, do they not bring the ugly under the deep shadow of beauty’s aegis, or do they see a value in a quality that is not measured by beauty’s touch & eye? Can any valued thing escape her grace? This is the question unanswerable & I could stop here still, the bait is looks . . . . The hag story is a faery tale. Remember how glamour was (is, ever) what bad faeries used to lure young men & women to their deaths! Behind that handsome/pretty face lurks . . . death! Think here of World War II films warning sailors, Marines, and soldiers of the dangers of syphilis.  O the priests how they only want to protect us. Abstinence-only education programs have (not unsurprisingly) a less than impressive success rate at achieving their stated goal of reducing pre-marital sex & unwanted pregnancy: Beauty will not be denied her pleasure. Note too the alarming abuse of pregnant women. O Dylan: those not busy being born (beautiful) are busy dyin’ (o ugly baby fat)! Is jealousy to blame?  Is the emotional psychological answer of the mono-visioned narcissist strongly implicated? Is this proposition seen by another eye of what constitutes an ethical beauty?

* * *

The sun unborn mars beauty: born, he brings pain, divides affection, increases care.
–James Joyce, from Ulysses, p. 207

in being who you are—the golden rule—consenting
adults—do nothing that physically harms another human
& remember the indifferent sun—how sorrow is never indifferent
how joy unbinds the fear-pressed soul—leap, leap!

trembling the feet tap smoke music
red grief the beauty of a wrapped room
an echo that never ends & followed opens &
opens to what is never seen ever reached & it slips
again & the thing will not dissolve save in a new rain
a woman leaning in to whisper some stone to turn inside
a child a far breaking wave laughing in a photograph in foam
in the tendrils of the hidden roots of grass the skin of a hill
the light stuttering in the moth in the mouth of a fish
caught when the old man curls his fingers as if
he remembers something shining in a field
freshly plowed & a bird flushed from
the ditch & the shouts the round
belly as the door closes—it is
a storm she says & the line
of trees bending when
the boy steps thru
the fire & all
the lonely
stars

holesinclouds

blue clarity the road rides the boy
west past russet autumn grass
tall leaning soft weeds then
the old laughter of sex
a marriage of rust &
these closed eyes
wetted with 
ropes of
liquid
light

(beauty is nothing
without sorrow)

& who
wants you
& those who
want & say they
want because not
saying you want is
not the same as not
wanting & there
are few who
say yes

(what gift wisdom
without silence)

wait long enough
to gather a fist
full of stalks
a bouquet
of grain
& shake
a red shift
paradox of
what burns to
know a far so close

(& nothing is
not a want)

a train of gold polished knows: to the far so close: carve new nights

& as if to want Love again the Forever Changes album
a CD would work he says knowing that phonograph
players are hard to come byhis in disrepair—
& he wants that dream with the toy house
that sets its own mechanical sequence
thick plastic walls & metal springs
tiny clown figurines with blue
white shadows & fat grins
(feed them grinning cats)
the café where Rilke
sits alone with
a plate of soft-boiled
eggs his grey morning suit
pressed perfectly crisp hatless
his hair cartoon stiff his thin mustache
comically vain bravely vain smartly vain at last
how the matter of beauty seems a redundancy as if
a gift is a gestural advocate for kind walls open windows
meaning fluid as water as sand on a beach a face in your mirror
the list of things you want: speak up be quiet speed up slow down
what serious grief answers when the boy says no sad music! & the phone rings

off the wall: want to answer that? the order of meaning the meaning of order or what does Schrodinger mean by that matter of factless cat? is beauty dead or alive? dare we look?

abstracted horse not blue but lines running
red a red shift sorrow of what calculates
the distance to what we cannot know
were you disappointed he did not
show up to tell you that you will
die the same as everything dies
but say it as if there were this
hidden out, this red shift slip
of a thin statistical possibility
it is all a matter of probability
the collapse of the wave that pops
things into one of a seemingly infinite
number of conditions at least for awhile
is that a measure too far—either the exact
position exact weight but never both—never?
ambiguity being being’s condition—an illusion
young coquette or old scarf-headed hag a Jesus or
a pot smoking Che Guevara dead cat living cat man
or God or lines on a flat sheet of processed tree flesh
every color but red a blue shape killed Franz Marc
as surely as Franz Marc is not dead nor ever if
wanting the fracturing of the plane between
what is possible & what will always die
or why we still ask of every
artist the trick of existing
here & not here alone
who would want to
be the last living
thing in a box
of blue light
a red spot
a bloom
curling
into
one
last
wave
a final
gasp of
pink beauty

As if beauty cares not even if it is unseen for a thousand years: A maker’s interests mean nothing to it: Miles beneath where light may peer or hidden in deepest space it never starts at being seen no exaggerated “finally” no needy “wait” at the close of a door: Beauty is its own blind reward.

Will they wrest from us, from me the palm of beauty?
–James Joyce, from Ulysses, p. 207

& beauty is—
we stop at that
 

30




notes

1. Stephen Jay Gould. A Biological Homage to Mickey Mouse, in The Panda's Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History. W.W. Norton & Company, 1980.

2. Quote from Raising Arizona by Joel and Ethan Coen: “Hey, these [balloons] blow up into funny shapes at all?” “Well, no. Unless round is funny.”

3. See page 2, which describes Aristophanes’ myth as explained in Plato’s Symposium.

4. Episode 901 of South Park, in which Mr. Garrison wants a new vagina and Kyle wants to be tall. “You see, Kyle, sometimes a person’s outside doesn’t reflect who they are on the inside.”

5. http://www.asylum.com/2009/09/04/beautiful-women-render-men-stupid/. 

6. References to Ulysses are from the Vintage 1961 edition.

7. Mia Gibson, “Ganymede” created on 13 March 1997; last modified on 12 February 2004.

8. Helen by Euripides translated by E. P. Coleridge
http://evans experientialism.freewebspace.com/euripides05.htm.

.................. ******* ******* *******Mythopoetry Scholar Ezine******* ******* *******


poet & cultural mythologer, Richard Lance WilliamsAuthor Bio
Richard Lance Williams
received his master’s degree in mythology with an emphasis in depth psychology from Pacifica Graduate Institute in 1998. Ric has edited the Litera listings of The Austin Chronicle since 1988. He wrote the “Poet’s Beat” column (interviews with local poets) for The Austin Light from 1987-1991. He edited for Ed Buffalo’s poetry anthologies Aileron and Vowel Movement in the late 80’s and early 90’s and was the associate editor from 1997-1999 for Alchemy on Sunday, the literary journal of Pacifica Graduate Institute. He has written and/or edited for the Austin Chronicle, Man! Magazine, and the Salt Journal. His interview with Larry McMurtry is included in Conversations with Texas Writers, published in March 2005 by UT Press.


Publications:

Secret Book of God
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poetry, 104 pages, soft cover
bookstore price: $14.95

December 2007 - Robert Bonazzi, critically acclaimed author and Poetic Diversity Columnist for the San Antonio Express-News, announced Ric Williams’ the secret book of god as the best book of poetry by a living Texas poet in his 2007 Poetic Diversity Awards. These awards intend to bring recognition to significant books that have been overlooked. Previous winners of the Poetry in Texas award are Paul Christensen (Hard Country, Thorp Springs Press) and Naomi Shihab Nye (You & Yours, BOA Editions, Ltd.).

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Woman In The Tower: Stories for the Wounded Child
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Fiction, 200 Pages, Hard Cover
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Richard Lance Williams reads from His novel:
WOMAN IN THE TOWER
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Website: ricwilliams.com

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