Evidently it’s the season for surveys. This one comes from researchers at the University of Warwick. I recognize one of the names, a sociologist of religion who has published in The Pomegranate.
If I take it, I will say that I do not engage in petitionary prayer very often, preferring to think in terms of invocation, of invitation, or of attuning one’s self to the deity’s “frequency,” so to speak.
I taught writing for twenty years. I heard some shocking stuff—especially in the “Creative Nonfiction” class, which occasionally produced some, shall we say, highly confessional material.
And there was one outright psycho student who, lucky for me, fixated on a different professor as the cause of all her problems—not to mention accusing him in her writing (for me) of being a Satanic serial killer—and showed up at his house one night at 2 a.m. with a large knife.
I even had freewriting assignments that might have resembled “a place for a writer to try out ideas and record impressions and observations,” [containing] “freewriting/brainstorming” and “creative entries.”
But no one ever used his or her journal to discuss his or her sexual attraction for me (sigh).
If a student had done so, I would never have described the writing as “unlawful.” Immature or inappropriate maybe, but not something that would get a student kicked out of not just my class, but all his on-campus classes.
But Pamela Mitzelfeld, who teaches English 380, “Advanced Writing,” at a school in Michigan, felt she had to swing the big PC hammer on student Joseph Corlett.
Oakland University near Detroit has suspended a student for three semesters, barred him from campus, and demanded he undergo “sensitivity” counseling because he wrote in a class assignment that he found his instructors attractive. While the course specifically permitted students to write creatively about any topic, the university bizarrely chose to classify his writing as “unlawful individual activities.” Joseph Corlett came to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) for help.
To call the university’s decision to suspend Corlett for three semesters for his thought crime a “wild overreaction” is putting it mildly. I hope that FIRE roasts them.
The philosopher Hypatia faced a similar problem with unwanted sexual attraction, the story goes, and dealt with it much more directly.
As part of a seasonal celebration of Imbolc — it’s about creativity, right? — I took a day and cleaned my big home office desk. Took everything off the top, stained the scratches with Old English Scratch Cover, and then polished the mahogany-veneer top with paste wax for protection against spilt coffee, tea, and whiskey. After sort and organizing all the papers, etc., I felt ready to begin a new season.
Part of that cleaning is cleaning out drafts of blog posts, such as this one:
At Academy Mercenary, Amy Hale holds up adjunct teaching against the concept of “the portfolio life” and thinks that they are compatible. (Plus more about the recent AAR annual meeting.)
In the past week or so I have been particularly inspired by the notion of the “portfolio life”, which is the idea that we start to see ourselves less as “having jobs” and more as possessing a variety of skills and interests that we can add to our portfolio. We can use our portfolio for marketing ourselves and also for making decisions on how we want to spend our time and resources. Portfolio lives also require knowing what resources you need, because the income streams are seen less as an identity anchor and more of a way to finance how you want to live. Although the portfolio life is frequently used to promote active retirement, I think there are plenty of ways for those of us not working 9 to 5 jobs to use this idea to use this concept to consider a more integrated life that is less defined by our jobs, and more defined by what we love. For people not engaged in standard employment, or do not have a single institution based position, this can be a very empowering life reframing exercise.
I graduated with what amounted to a BFA in Creative Writing, although Reed College called it a BA in English. I certainly knew that that degree offered no clear career path—having the concept of the “portfolio life” might have been helpful when I was in my twenties.
As it happened, I did pretty much what “the voices” told me to do, and it has worked out OK, so far.
Meanwhile, at Inside Higher Education, two essays imagine a new model, where both full-time professors and overworked adjunct professors leave the university to form guilds of academic ronin.
I will go to a cafe with wi-fi and pay cash for a cup of coffee.
Your tax dollars at work in Eric Holder’s Department of Justice.
M. and I work together on many editing projects. Yesterday, the author of a journal article, reading her galleys, said that she thought that expressions such as “sui generis,” “axis mundi,”* and “Weltanschauung” should be italicized as foreign expressions. (I had them in roman.)
I consulted the holy scriptures, where in chapter 7, verse 52, I read, “Foreign words and pases familiar to most readers and listed in Webster’s should appear in roman (not italics) if used in an English context. . . . German nouns, if in Webster’s, are lowercased.”
I assume that the online Webster’s is all right. But what about “most readers”?
I propose “the New Yorker rule.” Although The New Yorker is not an academic journal, its writers and editors seem to expect a level of comfort with common phrases from other major world languages (Chinese excepted, thus far).
Therefore, if The New Yorker puts a phrase like “sui generis” in roman, so shall we. A quick search of the phrase on their website will tell us. They do capitalize Weltanschauung when writing in English, however, which is a deviation from the true Chicago path.
Did you ever get into a discussion of the possibility of reincarnation only to have someone announce, “Reincarnation is impossible because there are more people alive now than have ever lived”?
And then they sit back smugly. Or perhaps they quote George Carlin, the favorite sage of the Barstool Philosopher.
It is true that if you delve back into the mists of time, the population of Earth was tiny in comparison to today and logically it might seem plausible that the living outnumber the dead.
Picking the right starting point seems to be crucial, and there is a certain amount of hand-waving involved, but see for yourself.
At The Mead Muse, reviews of a different Pagan musician or group each day for 28 days during February.
First came Sharon Knight and Pandemonaeon, a solid choice.
A short documentary on contemporary Siberian shamanism from the Russian television channel RT.
The interesting part is a young shaman and his friend composing a sort of “house” music (or so the narrator describes it) to try to bridge contemporary sounds with the shamanic tradition, which was almost destroyed by seventy years of atheistic Communism. A little throat-singing comes in as well.
“Music helps me withdraw from the [trance] state,” says the shaman-musician.
The relationship between the revival of Siberian shamanism and Michael Harner’s Foundation for Shamanic Studies is briefly hinted at.
This link will take you to six-minute video wherein Oberon Zell of the Church of All Worlds and the Grey School of Wizardry discusses the school and role of the wizard in the modern world, with cameo appearances by two of the students.
There is also brief mention of the “unicorn” era of the 1980s.
Although he cannot help being labeled a “real-life Dumbledore,” I do think that Oberon and his partner Morning Glory deserve some kind of Pagan Lifetime Achievement award. They have lived the life of priest and priestess, author, editor, teacher, artist, etc. for more than forty years, with a little help from their friends but while remaining firmly “alternative” the whole time.
If you want, you can sign a petition against or about the treatment of contemporary Paganism on The Learning Channel and The Discovery Channel.
I’m glad that I don’t have cable TV, y’know?