Professor Woland, left, and What Would I Do Without You?, right

One of my favorite literary genres is whatever you'd call books wherein devoting oneself to occult forces solves all one's problems but ushers in a whole new set of problems instead. Leonora Carrington's The Hearing Trumpet and Olga Tokarczuk's Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead are both in this category, but the book that best exemplifies this tendency is The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Afanasyevich Bulgakov. The devil and his retinue come to Moscow, expose the pettiness and hypocrisy of the Soviet literary establishment, humiliate a lot of people, and in the process reunite estranged lovers, liberate women from domestic servitude, and crack a lot of jokes. It is a fantastic book.

Last winter I had a dream that cast Björk in the role of the devil, descending upon my hometown to wreak havoc on everyone's relationships, sprinting through the snowy streets in a red cloak. I woke up, thinking that I'd never really sat down and listened to an entire Björk album start to finish, and put on Vulnicura while trying to organize my art supplies, not realizing it was her divorce opus. I sat on the studio carpet crying through “Lionsong,” amazed to hear another mind so clearly articulating thoughts I'd had myself. Björk is, of course, a Scorpio.

I researched Kate Bush's influences a little too thoroughly and now I'm two or three nervous breakdowns away from becoming a theosophist. Our Kate! Her wisdom has buoyed me through many tempestuous waters.