While I wait for some uploading issues to be sorted out, here are follow-ups to two recent posts.

First, I mentioned on January 1 the book Nightmare Alley as possibly inspiring or prefiguring Anton LaVey’s Church of Satan in the 1960s.

I have now read Nightmare Alley, and the short answer is, I don’t think so. It certainly is not the blueprint for the CoS that Stranger in a Strange Land was for the Church of All Worlds at about the same time. Nightmare Alley does involve a shrewd, glib carnival mind reader who becomes a fraudulent Spiritualist minister, and it is appropriately cynical about the human condition, however.

Second, Mary Beard’s The Invention of Jane Harrison, mentioned on January 14, disappointed me, perhaps because I was hoping for more of an intellectual biography that assessed Harrison’s study of ancient Greece and also positioned her–as Ronald Hutton briefly did in The Triumph of the Moon, as one of the foremothers of today’s Pagan revival.

Instead, the reader gets more of “who had a spat with whom in 1889.” Beard, who teaches Classics at Cambridge University (in Harrison’s footsteps, so to speak), offers some interesting light on how Classics as a field was presented and was evolving in late-Victorian and Edwardian Britain. She also spends much effort in a sort of meta-biography, writing about the problems of writing a biography of Harrison. And she dances around the topic of sex, saying several times that we cannot impose the term “lesbian” on the Victorians; but, on the other hand, was she or wasn’t she?

As a study of the rise of academic celebrity–Harrison as a sort of public intellectual–it is interesting, and Beard’s style is fluid and entertaining.