Where to Watch the Eclipse
NASA has the map for Sunday’s celestial event. It looks like we will get a glimpse before sunset.
Pentagram Pizza for May 15, 2012
• At The
Allergic Pagan, a three-part series on Neopaganism in America (link goes to the third part) with a lot of “whatever happened to?”.
• Jason Pitzl-Waters uses the reunion of the band Dead Can Dance (one of my favorites) to look back at the history of Pagan music.
• A new blog devoted to the history of Chicago occultism has me excited, since I will be there in November.
Ask Academic Abby
“Ask Academic Abby” is a service of the American Academy of Religion, so it is slanted towards graduate students in religious studies, but a lot of the advice is applicable to academic generally. But it appears only in the online Religious Studies News.
Yeah, Public Altars . . .
I want to see them.
It’s Time for my Winter Coat . . .
. . . at the Beltania festival, where the temperature is about 45° F with rain now and again.
I spent the morning at one of the volunteer fire department’s monthly training day, helping more people become familiar with the whole process of drafting water from a creek (hydrants? we don’t need no stinking hydrants) and pumping it into our two 2,500-gallon summer storage tanks (in case the creek goes dry).
Then off to the festival, not too far away, successfully negotiating the Pagan equivalent of the TSA. Merchants Row seemed sort of forlorn — no one was buying all the colorful gauzy garments, for some odd reason. Even those who sometimes swelter under the Colorado sun while dressed for the Scottish Highlands were wearing extra coats today.
But once the dogs are fed we will go back for the concerts — if the rain holds off.
Pagan festivals are becoming more “tribal” in one sense: you can have people doing some kind of ritual thingie while right next to it, folks are feeding their faces, drinking wine from the bottle, braiding feathers into the air, slouching around like bored teenagers if in fact they are teenagers, and just starting into the warming fires. It’s not like you have to be all churchy and attentive.
POST-CONCERT UPDATE: M. and I had to miss some of the Saturday night music, but we did hear at times the Orpheus: the Pagan Chamber Choir of Colorado, a little of S.J Tucker, Forest of Azure, and Sharon Knight and Pandemonaeon. All good. And Pandemonaeon cleared the skies before midnight—can’t beat that.
Pentagram Pizza for May 1
Four toppings this evening. . .
• Some occult-cult films from the past reviewed by Peg Aloi.
• Teaching a course in “world religions” is not as simple as it looks, once you start sorting out “religion,” “religious,” and questions of group identity.
• In the “Finding a God” chapter of Triumph of the Moon, Ronald Hutton describes the rise of Pan in Victorian literature. Sometimes he personified an idealized countryside while at others he was “a battering-ram against respectability.” He appears in America during that period too — this time as sculpture.
A Professional Writer’s Approach to the Job
Kathy Shaidle is not the first person to say that the successful writer is not necessarily the most talented writer, but in this post at PJ Lifestyle she offers some guidance for being a successful freelancer.
One of the reasons I’m a freelance writer is that, frankly, I don’t “play well with others.” I am too introverted, tactless, demanding, opinionated, and “masculine” to fit in with today’s feminized workplace — a pink and purple extravaganza of giggling, weekly birthday parties, crying-in-the-bathroom, “diversity training,” “team building,” and boring baby pictures/anecdotes — everything, it seems, except actual work.
And today, “fitting in” with the company “culture” (of bridal showers and non-stop conversations about food and “stupid husbands”) is prioritized over competence and intelligence.
Yet somehow, even a curmudgeon like me can manage to remain polite, helpful, and engaged for the length of that email or phone call with a client.
So just imagine how impressed they’ll be with a genuinely nice person like you!
Good links, too. The part about working regular business hours is important, I think, if you have clients who expect to reach you by telephone during their regular business hours. For the person working around another job, it might not be so easy.
Somewhere out there is advice for writing after you have just spent three hours grading essays. When I find it, I will post it.
How Many Gods Are There? Vote Now!
It must be a slow news day, because the Denver Post’s daily news poll is about God . . . or Goddess . . . or the Gods.
“Hard” polytheism is running at less than 2 percent, so if you can’t vote early, vote often.
I doubt than anyone is going to do anything useful with the data anyway.
Again, Punctuation Matters
Likewise, the difference between “Let’s eat Jennifer” and “Let’s eat, Jennifer” is whether Jennifer will be in a stew pot or a dining chair. You saw the comma there, right?
Pagan Studies Conference Timed for Pantheacon
Announcement of a new conference:
Pagans in Dialogue with the Wider World: A Pagan Studies Symposium
Friday, February 15, 2013 at San José State University (semi-concurrent with PantheaCon, February 15-18, 2013, DoubleTree Hotel, San Jose, California)
Sponsored by San José State University, Humanities Dept., Comparative Religious Studies Program. Organizers: Lee Gilmore (SJSU) & Amy Hale (St. Petersburg College)
Contemporary Paganism, in all its varieties, stands at a unique cultural and religious intersection that can provide insights for a wide range of global, social, and political subjects, beyond its own inward facing concerns. For this symposium, we are calling for scholarly submissions that focus on Paganism’s contributions to and engagements with broader cultural and religious dialogues in an increasingly pluralist world. These could include, but are not limited to, explorations of Paganisms’ endeavors in community, economic, media, health, legal, social justice, and institutional development work, as well as activist, applied, interdisciplinary, and interfaith work.
More generally, all submissions that critically examine Paganism(s) in relationship to categories such as religion, culture, gender, identity, authenticity, power, and ritual — among other possible frameworks — are welcome. In addition, all papers presented at the symposium will be considered for publication in a special issue of The Pomegranate: The International Journal of Pagan Studies.
All proposals & queries should be sent to pagansymposium@gmail.com
Deadline: September 15, 2012
More info, including submission requirements & a pdf of this call, may be found at the site.
