✨Sagittarius SZN✨

Sag szn is here! Symbolized by the centaur, this sign is an adventurous traveller with a scholar’s mind. Let’s commemorate my sag moon and my sag sun sister by shouting out some authors and covetable gifts.

LITERARY EXPLORERS: SAGITTARIUS AUTHORS

Ruled by Jupiter, the planet of luck and abundance, those with prominent Sag placements are blessed with a winning disposition. This fire sign claims dominion over the following notable authors: Louisa May Alcott, Jane Austen, William Blake, Joan Didion, Emily Dickinson, George Eliot, Karl Ove Knausgård, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Mark Twain.

Below are three Sag authors you need to know:

Ellen N. La Motte - November 27, 1873:

Ellen La Motte, an American nurse, journalist, author, suffragist, socialist, anarchist, lesbian, and more(!), is credited as likely inspiring Ernest Hemingway’s writing style. In fact, some argue she was writing “like Hemingway before Hemingway.” She is a figure who is now largely forgotten, but her work was revolutionary, as she was criticizing war while it was happening, rather than after the fact when disillusionment had already set in.

Born in Louisville, Kentucky, La Motte trained as a nurse at Johns Hopkins against her family’s objections. Post graduation, she became the superintendent of the Tuberculosis Division at the Baltimore Health Department. It was here she published her first book: The Tuberculosis Nurse in 1914.

At the behest of her friend Gertrude Stein, La Motte travelled to Europe to volunteer as a nurse and treat soldiers during the first World War.* She was one of the first American nurses to do so. She immortalized her experiences in a book entitled, The Backwash of War: The Human Wreckage of the Battlefield as Witnessed by an American Hospital Nurse.*

The book highlights the harsh realities of war with brutal imagery and clean prose—the soldiers she encounters are scared, fearful of death. Upon publication, The New York Times said her stories bore no resemblance to “literary style” and were “told in sharp, quick style,” that revealed a “stern, strong preachment against war.”

One of the first stories La Motte highlights is of a young man who shoots himself through the roof his mouth on the battlefield. His suicide attempt did not succeed. In fact, “he made a mess of it” and was transported to the field hospital “cursing and screaming.” The nurses saved him only for him to be court martialled for his suicide attempt and sentenced to death by a firing squad.

Midway through her book she reveals her thesis: “Well, there are many people to write you of the noble side, the heroic side, the exalted side of war. I must write you of what I have seen, the other side, the backwash.”

Her writing was so powerful the book was immediately banned in England and France. In America, only after two years and multiple printings, was the book censored for it was thought the tome would be damaging to morale.

In 1916, La Motte travelled to Asia with Emily Crane Chadbourne, a divorced American heiress. The duo would be romantically involved until La Motte’s death in 1961. Evelyn Waugh met both women in Ethiopia in 1930 and said they were “two formidable ladies” whom “long companionship had made…almost indistinguishable.”

Her time in Asia unleashed a new passion. She became staunchly opposed to the opium trade and colonialism, writing six books and dozens of articles. She would lead an anti-opium campaign while astutely acknowledging, “The drug trade dies hard. Vast financial interest, both of nations and of individuals, are at stake.”

To conclude, I want to say that not only was she a great nurse, a powerful writer but she was also a business woman!!!!!! After Chadbourne’s financial adviser was caught in an embezzling scandal, La Motte took over and began earning more than $1 million in the markets. At 85, in 1959, she also helped to revitalize Chadbourne’s father’s ailing business. And, she did it all without business school.

Gita Mehta - December 12, 1943:

Gita Mehta was an author, documentary filmmaker, and one half of a literary powerhouse. She was married to Sonny Mehta, the former head of the Alfred A. Knopf publishing house, for 54 years. The couple divided their time between New York City, London, and New Delhi.

Born four years before partition, Mehta was a lone voice in the literary landscape as she presented an alternative view of India. I.e. One that was not written by white men.

In describing her own work to Publishers Weekly she said, "I wanted to make modern India accessible to Westerners and to a whole generation of Indians who have no idea what happened 25 years before they were born."

Her first book Karma Cola, published in 1979, mixed razor sharp observations with anecdotes for a satirical portrayal of Westerners who turn to the subcontinent for instant spiritual enlightenment. Considering the current landscape of wellness, I imagine this book’s observations still stand.

One of her fiction novels that interests me is Raj. It tells the story of a Rajasthani princess who must step into the role of Regent Maharani of Sirpur after her husband dies. Upon starting the novel, Mehta wanted to write a satire about the lavish lifestyles of Indian princesses in the 1920s. Instead, the novel explored the relationship between the colonized and the colonizer. She said, it became more about “the extent to which an imperial power can convince the colonized people that they are progressive insofar as they imitate their imperial masters, backward insofar as they remain native.”

I’d like to conclude with a quote she said to The San Francisco Chronicle in 1993 which I think highlights her spirit: “I’m lucky to be a writer coming out of a civilization like India. After all, ours is the civilization that based everything on relativity long before Albert Einstein came up with the physics of it. The notion of relativity, of time, of experience and of cognition is something we as writers can always tap into.”

Naguib Mahfouz - December 11, 1911:

Naguib Mahfouz won the 1988 Nobel Prize in Literature and is the only Egyptian to do so. His writing explored themes of existentialism with a realist slant. A prolific author, he wrote 35 novels, over 350 short stories, 26 screenplays, 7 plays, and hundreds of op-ed columns.

The youngest of seven, much older siblings, he grew up as an only child. Considering his strict Islamic upbringing, he often said, “You would never thought an artist would emerge from that family.” At the time of the Egyptian Revolution of 1919, he was seven and watched from the window of his home while British soldiers fired at demonstrators.

All 35 of his novels take place in Egypt.**** His novels centered ordinary people who were coping with the effects of modernization and the temptation of Western values. In regards to his oeuvre he said, “In all my writings, you will find politics. You may find a story which ignores love or any other subject, but not politics; it is the very axis of our thinking.”

Considering this sentiment, it will come as no surprise that some of books have been banned at one time or another. For example, The Children of Gebelawi, published in 1959, was banned throughout the Arab world except in Lebanon until 2006 when it was first published in Egypt.*** The novel recreates the interlinked history of the three monotheistic religions within a modern Cairo neighborhood.

In 1994, at the age of 82, the novelist was stabbed by an extremist outside of his Cairo home. The injuries from the attack left him with nerve damage in his right arm which diminished the amount of writing he was able to do.

The Naguib Mahfouz Project is reviving his work in Egypt with the aid of designer and artist Yousef Sabry. The Naguib Mahfouz Project and Sabry are creating brand new covers for the author’s 35 works that are fantastical and sleek. They look sick and I hope they do something similar for his English translations.

THE ULTIMATE SAGITTARIUS WISHLIST

Look to the below wishlist as an ideal gift(s) for your travel-obsessed, always down Sag friends or me.

• Sag girls know how to make a statement and as the weather is grim, gift them a coat that is just as adventurous as they are. I’m partial to the Peatrice coat by Stand Studio as well as this denim number by Fidan Novruzova. There’s also this cute MM6 shearling moment.

• The jet-setting Sag deserves a Missoni beach towel and I suggest this one. It’s giving Rothko. (Can be purchased on Shopbop here.)

• A good quality bathrobe for lounging is always a good idea.

• A Helmut Newton exhibition just opened in Coruña, Galicia, Spain and is on view through May 1, 2024. If you can’t buy your Sag friend a plane ticket to visit the show, might I suggest the Helmut Newton coffee table book?

• Mentally, I am decorating a non-existent condo:

  • Feeling a little partial to this Ann Demeulemeester chair. (Also comes in black.)

  • This pitcher would also be a cute.

  • And, who could say no to a sheep skin Wassily Marcel Breuer chair?

• With the New Year just around the corner, health and wellness are top of mind. The perfect supplement to anyone’s wellness practices is an at-home sauna but those are costly and cumbersome. Instead, might I suggest HigherDOSE’s Infrared Sauna Blanket?

• I don’t own any records, but I know that’s something people are obsessed with and it seems like the kind of cool thing a Sag would have as such, I present to you: Plattenkreisel’s circular record storing unit.

• Small trinkets: a Hermès lipstick, one single heart shaped earring by Justine Clenquet, a silk pillowcase, and a mint green scrunchie from Crown Affair which would pair so well with the Stand Studio coat.

*I was really confused as to how Stein and La Motte would have become friends — I read conflicting things online. One article said Stein and La Motte met in Paris but I also read that Stein was enrolled at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. Though Stein dropped out after failing a course in her fourth year, I think there would have been overlap between La Motte and Stein.
**Monetization free links!
***This book is sometimes published as Children of the Alley.
****Probably, because he did not like traveling - LOL!! However, he really liked visiting Belgrade.