Oh yes, learn to write

Walter Russell Meade on advice for new college students and their parents—if you are on of those, raise your hand.

Good stuff, such as “The real world does not work like school” and “Choosing the right courses is more important than choosing the right school.”

It’s actually a classic defense of liberal-arts education, including science, politics, economics, history, geography.

And this, of course:

Fifth, learn to write well.  This paradoxically is going to be more important than ever for the next generation.  I can’t tell you how many editors at how many famous magazines have told me over the years that most professors and academics simply cannot write, and bemoan the immense amount of time they must devote to impose some kind of intellectual structure and comprehensible prose on the crabbed drafts they get from, often, fairly well known people.

This will not last.  Publications are not going to be able to continue paying editors to spin straw into gold; if you want to have a public voice in the next generation you are going to have to learn to write well.  This is a hard skill to acquire, but it can be taught.  Most schools don’t do this well; it is expensive and academics generally don’t value clear and attractive prose writing as much as they should.  This is important enough that I would recommend you use it as a factor in choosing a college, but for those of you already enrolled, make a point of seeing what your school offers in this area.

A lot of what I do these days is helping people unlearn the bad, formulaic  writing that they picked up in graduate school.

Word Follies Like It’s 1929

Dave Wilton keeps prowling the Oxford English Dictionary to see when new terms entered the language:

1927: It’s some kind of woodhenge but it ain’t much in the way of interior design.

1928: That putz has some Rube Goldberg scheme to seduce his Girl Friday.

1929: Jeepers, that effing Sasquatch is in my jalopy again!

Five Childhood Archetypes You Don’t See in the Movies

Cracked, now Cracked.com, is better now than when I was in the snarky 13-year-old demographic.

Consider this article. Sample:

This wasn’t a normal, here’s-my-little-kid-arsenal-that-I-keep-under-the-bed-in-case-of-ninja-attack; the Psychopath had real, honest to God weapons, and nobody knows where or how he got them. He owned swords, small caliber pistols and knives — oh, so many knives. He would happily explain why he needed each one — here’s a skinning knife, this one’s a deboner (tee hee), this here is a Bowie, better for slashing, and that’s a stiletto, mostly for stabbing — but there was only ever one real reason: His dad died in the army and his mom couldn’t afford therapy. Or maybe she just drank, or maybe it was his older brother that died; totaled his Trans-Am in a drag-racing accident. There were logical reasons for his behavior, but somehow, looking in Mickey’s eyes, you just kind of knew that he was born a little off.

Declaring War on Bikinis and Pyramids

Why is this not surprising news? With the “Arab Spring” fading into the long hot summer, the Islamic militants in Egypt are focusing on their favorite targets (besides Coptic Christians): women, eroticism, and Paganism.

Some slight changes will be made in public beaches, to make the situation better than it was before,” Ali Khafagy, youth director of Freedom and Justice [part of the Muslim Brotherhood] in Giza, told The Media Line. “Bathing suits and mixing on the beach are things that go against our tradition. It’s not just a matter of religion. When I go to the beach I don’t want to see nudity.”

Right. “Slight changes.” There speaks the voice of incipient dictatorship.

And then there is Egypt’s big money-maker: tourism. A lot more people come to see the ruins of Pagan Egypt than to see any mosque in Cairo, but do the radical beardies care about that?

But bathing suits are not the only worry of Egypt’s Islamists. Abd Al-Munim A-Shahhat, a spokesman for the Salafi group Dawa, has said that Egypt’s world-renowned pharaonic archeology – its pyramids, Sphinx and other monuments covered with un-Islamic imagery – should also be hidden from the public eye.

“The pharaonic culture is a rotten culture,” A-Shahhat told the London-based Arabic daily A-Sharq Al-Awsat on Wednesday, saying the faces of ancient statues “should be covered with wax, since they are religiously forbidden.” . . . .

The Islamist challenges to the tourism industry in post-revolutionary Egypt have led to the establishment of the Coalition to Support Tourism, whose members also met with [Muslim Brotherhood official] Al-Katatny on Monday. The coalition, which includes a broad array of travel industry organizations and figures, argued that the real problem isn’t modesty but the absence of any strategy on the part of Egypt’s new parties to protect the country’s faltering tourism industry.

Would you book a cruise up the Nile right now? I doubt that many people are.

Another Blowhard Religious Leader, But Pagan

To Bo, the current Arthur Pendragon, “the nom d’épée of deluded old sponge John Rothwell,” holds up a Pagan mirror to religious leaders everywhere.

And in the long run, the attempt by some British Pagans to play the NAGPRA-derived “reburial of the sacred dead” card is going to be a public-relations disaster.

Aiiee, the Dominionist Burning Times Are Upon Us!

Kenaz Filan brings a little perspective: “In my experience to date (well over 20 years of same), every Pagan fraudster and exploitation-artist I have encountered has used ‘Christian persecution’ as a shield.”

And there is this:

“The prose is execrable: if the English language were Ed Hubbard’s dog, he’d be sharing a prison cell with Michael Vick.”

The snark is strong with this one. Read it all.

Mother Goddess Temple or Brothel?

From the fascinating”mortuary archaeology” blog Bones Don’t Lie, diverse explanations for the collection of babies’ skeletons in a ruin from Roman Britain.

Dr. [Jill] Eyers continues to argues for the brothel hypothesis, finding that further research and the combination of the human remains with archaeological evidence only further supports her conclusions. However this has been called into question by archaeologists, like Brett Thorn, who argue that the site also has evidence of a Mother Goddess cult, and may represent an area where women went to give birth.

Read more.

Sociologists Flummoxed by Las Vegas

Recently the American Sociological Association had to relocate its annual meeting to Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas.

You would think that Las Vegas was a hotel buffet of raw material awaiting the sociological investigations, “the best spot in the world to do sociology,” as a member of the department at the University of Nevada, Las  Vegas, said. (There is apparently a university attached to the basketball team.)

But you would be wrong. You don’t know academics:

Lisa Dawn Wade, assistant professor of sociology at Occidental College, said the conference was her first trip to Vegas, and she described the experience in terms that corresponded with Jones’s assessment.

“There’s so much here,” Wade said, “and I feel like I don’t have the tools to process it… . There are stories here about consumption and about leisure and about social class that are really interesting, and I just feel kind of at a loss to say anything really smart about it.”

To borrow her blog’s subtitle, she must have experienced a failure of sociological imagination.

But some UNLV faculty members found themselves disappointed by what looked to them like knee-jerk reactions from their visiting colleagues. Las Vegas, they said, is a complex and multifaceted city too quickly written off by those who don’t really understand it at all — and many of the conference attendees, they said, hadn’t even tried.

I would never have called Las Vegas “too much the real world,”  but as Wade added in a carefully nuanced way,

Wade said it might not be a bad thing if the city made its visitors uncomfortable. Academics, she noted, tend to lead “pretty cushy” lives, and spending a few days in a difficult and even disturbing environment could prompt them to think about the “real people” who call the city home — and about the fact that, in many ways, Las Vegas is just a distilled and amplified representation of the world we all live in. “There’s a little bit of Vegas in all of us.”

I think I will suggest it as a venue for the American Academy of Religion. These meetings are planned seven or eight years ahead, but  you never know, a hotel workers’ strike might cause AAR to change its plans too.

Between Life and Death, No Balance

That was the title of a post that I wrote yesterday evening on my other blog.

I wish that I could think of some cool animistic perspective to take, but  cannot. When you are trying to save one critter, you kill others. I think that is called “being in the world.”

The Wild Hunt Gets Some Respect

It is nice to see that Jason Pitzl-Waters’ The Wild Hunt blog has gotten a major shout-out at Get Religion, the site for people who wonder why the mainstream media handles religion so ignorantly.

I predict that as Pagan traditions become more visible, our activities will be covered by the usual motley crew who went to journalism school instead of, y’know, actually learning anything about anything—history, science, economics, politics, religion, you name it.

Well, good for Mollie Ziegler Hemmingway, one religion writer who knows the difference between a Mormon and  an evangelical Christian.

See, blogging is easy. All you have to do is put out good content on an almost-daily basis while writing polite and informed comments at the sites that you hope will notice yours. Nothing to it.