Sherry Chandler

from the NYTimes last week, a clue to what the rebuilt New Orleans will look like:

The Small Business Administration, which runs the federal government’s main disaster recovery program for both businesses and homeowners, has processed only a third of the 276,000 home loan applications it has received.

And it has rejected 82 percent of those it has reviewed, a higher percentage than in most previous disasters, saying that many would-be borrowers did not have incomes high enough, or credit ratings good enough, to qualify. The rejections came even though the Federal Emergency Management Agency has referred more than two million people, many of them with low incomes, to the S.B.A. to get the loans.

To a large degree, that high rejection rate appears to reflect a mismatch between existing government aid programs and the large number of low-income people affected by this year’s hurricanes. Despite the widespread poverty in the most damaged regions, the Small Business Administration has not adjusted its creditworthiness standards, which are roughly comparable to a bank’s.

In fact, the loans that have been approved appear to be flowing to wealthy neighborhoods in New Orleans but not to poor ones, according to a list of loans released by the government and mapped by The New York Times.

Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning has announced it line-up of classes for Winter 2006.

Follow the link to find the schedule or download a PDF here.

I am reading a history of astrology – no really, it’s a serious history by a serious historian, Benson Bobrick – called The Fated Sky (Simon & Schuster, 2005).

Astrology/astronomy, like so much we call western civilization, seems to have originated in ancient Mesopotamia, the area that we now call Iraq. Those famous walls and towers of Uruk that Gilgamesh loved so well were used to make observations of the planets and the stars and to map their patterns. There were also towers in Ur (of the Chaldees) where Abraham came from.

By 700 B.C.E., astrologers in ancient Nineveh (Mosul) had, according to Bobrick, “more or less traced the ecliptic; divided it into four parts according to the seasons; drawn up a list of constellations whose heliacal rising corresponded to the various months; distinguished the planets from the fixed stars; followed their course; and ‘approximately determined the duration of their synodic revolutions.’” They could predict lunar and solar eclipses. If they thought they could predict human events too, well, I’m not going to say they couldn’t. There may be more to a wise prophet than is reflected in his star charts.

All this with the naked eye. Of course, they didn’t have “House” and so had to be content with the slow spectacle of the seasons for entertainment. Also, the stars were probably brighter then, the earth being so much darker and less populated.

The ancients determined four fixed signs/constellations, the four corners of the year: at that time, the vernal equinox was in Taurus, the autumnal equinox was in Scorpio, the summer solstice was in Leo. The winter solstice – which is arguably the real reason for the season, the early church having decided to co-opt rather than compete – was in Aquarius.

In almost three thousand years, the solstice has moved out of Aquarius and the Greeks, ever cynical, reduced the constellation that had been the mighty controller of the Tigris and Euphrates and the floods of the Nile. They identified Aquarius with Ganymede, cupbearer to the greater gods. (I think he may have provided other services, too.)

The better, I suppose, to bring you wassail.

Now Aquarius moves closer to the vernal equinox and when it gets there, in say 50 – 100 years, we will be at the “dawning” of the Age of Aquarius.

Whatever your mid-winter rites, I hope they succeed, as they always have, in bringing the sun back into a warmer constellation. And, because I was born in Aquarius, I wish you

Harmony and understanding
Sympathy and trust abounding
No more forces of derision
Golden living dreams of visions
Mystic crystal revelations
And the mind’s true liberation …

And let us hope that Nineveh survives its liberation.