Trapped on Block Island

"Block Island" -- portion of a cartoon from the June 27, 1994 New Yorker magazine

Randy Cassingham makes the argument: “There is no such thing as writer’s block” and invokes the “10,000 hour rule.”

I used to tell students, “The first million words are just for practice.” But you can count blog posts on your way to the million.

Cassingham’s version of a traditional exercise:

But one day he told me he was “blocked” and hadn’t written anything for weeks. I went over to his house and said, “Want me to fix that for you?” He didn’t know what I was up to, but he definitely wanted help, so I gave him this assignment: sit his ass in front of his computer and start writing — right now! I told him that I would come back in half an hour. Here’s the key to my method: I said if he could think of nothing else to write, he was to type “I have nothing I want to say” over and over and over again, until he had something better than that to write.

 

The Very Model of a Pagan Intellectual

Nothing about Wikipedia in it, but Brendan Myers has a little fun with Gilbert and Sullivan: “I am the Very Model of a Pagan Intellectual.”

And if that does not make you chuckle, you need to acquaint yourself with the original, from HMS Pinafore.

Of course, rhyming “Wikipedia” would be a challenge.

Wikipedia and the Pagan Academics

Last weekend Cara Schulz wrote a piece on the trouble some Pagan writers were having with Wikipedia.

It started when people noticed some Pagan-related entries, such as “Paganistan” being flagged for deletion. Much editorial chat ensued.

Brendan Cathbad Myers, author of The Other Side of Virtue and other books, saw his entry flagged as insufficiently notable.

It looks as though some on Wikipedia are trying to introduce more rigor to the entries, although I would hate to see Pagan-related entries suffer because of that.

Academics, meanwhile, have tended to shun Wikipedia. Many advise their students never to cite it as a source because of its alleged unreliability.

So it caught my attention when I read that some psychologists have decided to embrace it.

Anthony G. Greenwald, a professor of psychology at the University of Washington who was watching the editing demonstration, said he has asked seven students in his “Implicit and Unconscious Cognition” course to work on Wikipedia articles as part of the coursework. “This is repair work,” he said. “There is so much in Wikipedia that is inadequate.” Or plain inaccurate, said Alan G. Kraut, the association’s executive director.

But getting academics to fix it is a tall order,[Harvard psychology professor Mahzarin R.] Banaji admitted. “I know my colleagues won’t really want to write Wikipedia articles. It just won’t be seen as important, because it isn’t going on their CV,” she said.

So the solution is to have graduate students write or revise the Wikipedia entries.

Well, that approach might work for Pagan studies grad students too. I think it is time to propose such a move.

Zing that Taupe Floozy

And twenty-three other words first recorded in English in 1911.

Lexi-blogger Dave Wilton has started an ongoing series of new words of the year on his blog Wordorigins.org, which I will be adding to the blogroll here.

I tried to select twenty-six words, one for each letter of the alphabet. But in some cases I’ve got more than one for a particular letter, in others none. My selection is not scientific or systematic; it is based on what I think is interesting; Sometimes they are words that appear earlier or later than I would have thought; others have a particular historical affiliation for that year or represent some historical trend; and others are just odd words. I’m avoiding back-formations and variations on existing words. Again, be warned that the coining of a word does not necessarily coincide with the invention of a concept. Often, there will be older words that express the same sense.

Creative Visualization Doesn’t Work?

Or so claim researchers who publish in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.

Or is it just fantasies (winning the lottery, etc.) that don’t work?

But ultimately, Happes and Oettingen believe that positive fantasies are likely to scupper your changes of obtaining your goals. “Instead of promoting achievement, positive fantasies will sap job-seekers of the energy to pound the pavement, and drain the lovelorn of the energy to approach the one they like,” they write. “Fantasies that are less positive – that question whether an ideal future can be achieved, and that depict obstacles, problems and setbacks – should be more beneficial for mustering the energy needed to obtain success.”

What do you think of the experiment design compared to an actual visualization?

And this zinger at the end:

This study isn’t the first to explode the myth of a traditional self-help tool. A 2009 paper found that repeating positive mantras about themselves led people low in self-esteem to feel worse.

Pope: You Can’t Dance

Sister Nobili, the dancing nun (BBC News)

Sister Nobili, the dancing nun (BBC News)

A century or more ago, the anarchist Emma Goldman told one of her earnest lefty comrades that dancing and “the revolution” were not incompatible, which became the source of various mangled quotations attributed to her.

But evidently the pope feels that nuns who won’t stop dancing don’t fit in with the Roman Catholic church.

And an ex-fashion designer abbot? Very suspicious.

No kinetic stuff! Just genuflecting!

Gaulimaufry with Pulleys and Cables

• The force of Artemis is strong in this one.

• The Renaissance Faire as spiritual experience: “These days I’m more inclined to find the spiritual in the secular, and to look for it in places you might not ordinarily expect to find it, than I am to go seeking out a prepackaged religious experience.”

• A list of the “Pagan Mom blogs” that need your votes at the Circle of Moms.

V.S. Naipaul’s Rules for Writers

V.S. Naipaul’s rules for writers—some of them are very apt for the Web—start with “1. Do not write long sentences. A sentence should not have more than ten or twelve words.”

I made Naipaul’s acquaintance, in the literary sense, as a fifth-former at déCarteret College in Mandeville, Jamaica, which I briefly attended.

Mr. Stanley, the English master, handed me a copy of The Middle Passage: Impressions of Five Societies – British, French and Dutch in the West Indies and South America with a comment to the effect of “Read this and learn about where you are.” [more than 12 words there!]

I did to the best of my 16-year-old ability, but the book fixed an idea in my head of Naipaul only as a writer of nonfiction works, which does not do him justice. [I can break the rule if I keep the paragraph short.]

Witches and Politics, Nigerian Style

Imagine reading this article with the names changed.

Let’s see…

The Witches and Wizards Association of America (WITZAA), has deployed 500 witches to Washington and other parts of  the East Coast to prevent any tragic occurrence and ensure peaceful inauguration on January 15.

According to its national co-ordinator, Dr.  Raven Moonstone, the decision was taken after an emergency meeting at Salem, Mass. WITZAA also warned President Tim Pawlenty to take adequate security as bad  people and disgruntled politicians are planning to cause problems.

It would really spice up the writing at blogs like Pagan + Politics, no? (Did you ever notice the typo in their URL?) [UPDATE: At least the URL has been repaired.]

Apparently Dr. Iboi has learned to herd at least some cats.

Caroline Tully Interviews Ronald Hutton

Australian blogger and graduate student Caroline Tully interviews Ronald Hutton on her blog, Necropolis Now.

One excerpt:

In that case what is your relationship with Paganism?

It has been long and close. As I mentioned in my book Witches, Druids and King Arthur, I was in fact brought up Pagan, in a modern English tradition which combined a reverence for the natural world with a love of the ancient Greek and Roman classics. I have been acquainted with Wiccan witches since my teens: I learned some things from Alex Sanders in his hey-day, and attended my first Wiccan rite at Halloween 1968. I have never undergone a conversion experience to any religion, and so my relationship with others, such as Christianity, is one of entirely benevolent neutrality. Over the years, I came to build up friendships with more or less all of the leading figures of British Paganism. For example, Doreen Valiente’s respect for me meant that I was one of the few people whom she specified should be invited to her funeral, a gesture which still deeply moves me.

My attitude to the history of modern Pagan witchcraft has altered with changing knowledge of it. Back in the 1960s I believed, following scholarly orthodoxy, that the witchcraft of the early modern European witch trials was a pagan religion. In 1973 I debated against the historian Norman Cohn (author of Europe’s Inner Demons (1975), the work that accused Margaret Murray of having tampered with her sources to make them conform to her ideas about witchcraft) at Cambridge University, where I defended the historical legitimacy of Charles Godfrey Leland’s ‘witches’ gospel’, Aradia, and was floored by him. After that, as I read more and more of the new research and checked the original records (for England and Scotland) myself, my belief in the idea that witches were members of an ancient pagan religion gradually evaporated.

So, you are not actually hostile to Paganism as some people seem to think?

The story of my life would be inexplicable if that were the case.

The forthcoming issue of The Pomegranate, now in press, will carry a review essay by Hutton—a retrospective of his own work and a response to some of his critics—as well as some related reviews on the topic of Wiccans and their relationship to history.

Some of this material will be available free on the Web, and I will post links as soon as I can.