Welcome to Parnassus On Wheels, a blog site where you can put  your cleft feet up and indulge in some of the true, blushful hippocrene while the Sisters take to the podium to do a quick two-step or a jive.  Hippocrene you say, what the heck is that? Well in general terms it’s the wine of poetic inspiration, coming from the early 17th century: via Latin from Greek Hippokrēnē, Hippou krēnē, literally ‘fountain of the horse’ (from hippos ‘horse’ + krēnē ‘fountain’).   Whew!  That was a mouthful wasn’t it?  Anyway, it all renders down to the name of a fountain on the nearby Mount Helicon, sacred to the Muses. According to legend it was produced by a stroke of Pegasus’ hoof.  So stick a grape-vine behind your floppy ears and soak in that …

The Scribbler

And if this were the back of a book it would perhaps say:

Andrew Stuckgold is a writer and photographer living in Erskineville, South Sydney, Australia. He has a BA in English and Linguistics, Philosophy and Legal Studies from Macquarie University (1979), and an MA in Creative Writing from Sydney University (2016). He is currently a poetry reader for Overland Magazine and is working on his own first book. Over many years, Andrew has travelled extensively in Europe, the Mediterranean, the Middle East, the Indian subcontinent, and South East Asia.

But its not. Ah well, who knows, one of these days …

More Bio-degradable details

“… you might say I’ve always had quite eclectic reading tastes – that has led to a broad education – so broad in fact that it is almost falling apart …”

Current Interests

Christina Stead, Helen Garner, David Ireland, Marcus Auerelis, Ursula LeGuin, Leonora Carrington, Margaret Atwood, Roberto Callasso, Robert Wood, Clive James, Claudia Rankin, Allan Ginsberg and the Beats, Phillip Levine, B. H. Fairchild, Galway Kinnell, Alice Oswald, Kate Tempest, Carol Anne Duffey, Dante Alighieri, Peter Boyle, MIchelle Cahill, Les Murray.

Recent Publications

“On his aching knees”, Meanjin June 2014, “Sunflowers”, Cordite June 2014, “A Drowning in the Tiber”, Writing to the Edge – Prose Poems and Microfiction, Spineless Wonders, July 2014, “Venetia”, The Way to the Well, Australian Poetry 2014, Central Coast Poets Inc, August 2014, “Taken”, Mascara, May 2016, “Operational Matters” & “At the Western Station”, Meanjin, July 2016

And the Rest of It

World Mythology and Religions; Anthropology and Archaeology; the History of Modern Art; Classical Greek Poetry and Drama; Alan Garner, Robert Holdstock, C S Lewis, J R Tolkien, Edgar Alan Poe, Christina Rossetti; Pre-Christian Art and History, Modern European Painting and Sculpture, Indian Art, Renaissance Art; Chaucer, Shakespeare, Ben Johnson, Middleton and Rowley, John Ford, Congreve, Gay, Bernard Shaw, 17th Century Poetry; Alexander Pope, Browning, Tennyson, Yeats, WIlfred Owen, T. S. Eliot, Ted Hughes, Slyvia Plath, Anne Sexton; Cavey, Elizabeth Bishop, Borges, Leonard Cohen; Kenneth Slessor, Michael Dransfield, Dorothy Hewitt, Bruce Beaver, Bruce Dawe, W H Auden, Wyatt, Malory, Phillip Larkin; Daniel Defoe, Thackery, Henry Fielding, Emily Bronte; Christina Stead, Xavier Herbert, Eve Langley, Thea Asterly, Tim Winton, Bruce Beaver, Peter Boyle, Michelle Cahill, Kenneth Slessor, D H Lawrence; Robert Graves, Stoecism and Epicurianism, Tacitus, Thuycidides, Josephus, Homer, Hesiod; Apollonius Rhodius, Vergil, Plutarch, Socrates, Sophocles, Plato, Sappho, Aristophanes, Descartes, Boethius, Phenomenology, Existentialism and Humanism, Marxism; Bertold Brecht, Chekov, Ibsen, Dario Fo, Becket, Joe Orton, Pinter, Peter Brooks, Theatre of the Absurd; Northrop Frye, I A Richards, Jan Kott; Steven Berkoff, Tom Stoppard; George Orwell, John Fowles, Umberto Eco, Robert Hughes, Isabelle Allende, Ruth Jhabala Prawer, Salman Rushdie, Hanif Kurnesh, Mary Renouf; Charles Dickens, Virginia Woolf, Lawrence Durrell, Text in Performance, Puppetry, the Literary Uses of Language; The History of English; Computing, Law, The Sociology of Deviant Behaviour, Ornithology, History through Maps, Popular History, Astronomy and Physics…

If you find you have an interest in any of the titles above, Dr Google be thine guide ..

It’s early days in the Agora on top of the Parnassus. We haven’t raised the Temple yet or settled on the nature of the Polis’ Constitution; particularly in terms of what the duties and obligations of our Citizens may be. Do however visit us again at a later date – say a little closer to the Thirty b.c.e, or maybe even the year Zero: no doubt by then we will have settled all these important matters.

In the mean time, be careful out there: the Spartans have established a military checkpoint at Marathon in Argolid and its rumoured that there’s a whole host of Persians on the roads this time of year.

But as you are in the neighbourhood  just now,  here are some fun facts gleaned from The Horse, the Wheel and Language by David W. Anthony,  a mind-blowing,  head-numbing treatise on the evidence for the origins of Proto-Indo-European (maybe we’ll just say “Aryan”), the reputed linguistic ancestor of many of the Western world’s languages today.

Domestication of the Horse: circa  2,500 BCE. Invention of the cart circa 3,000 – 1,500 BCE  (so the French have it kind of right when they say the cart comes before the horse). 4,500 – 3,300 BCE, invention of the potters wheel and the earliest wooden wheels (disks with a hole for the axle); earliest wheeled vehicles, 3300–2200 BCE culminating in the invention of the spoked wheel and the Chariot.

There you go: how about a drink after that?

A 3D mock-up of Delphi, nestled on the side of the Parnassus

Two Muses a la Mode at Erskineville. The photographs were taken during a live street theatre event during The Tiny Stadiums Festival in 2011. The festival is  an emerging artists’ event curated by the PACT Theatre. The backdrop features the original Alan’s Cake Shop and Bakery on the corner of Prospect Street and Erskineville Road, now the Erskinevilla Pop Up venue. The canvas was actually draped over the upturned face of the old building itself.  Both girls came to Sydney from Melbourne especially for the event.