Victorian Slind-Flor puts the “Loaf” in Lammas, with photos of the Palouse region and, even closer to my heart, the sacred Corn Palace of Mitchell, South Dakota, one of the great Roadside Attractions of the northern Plains.
A quick flashback to a 1980s cross-country drive with M.: camping in the Black Hills and the Badlands, Wall Drug, and then showing her the Corn Palace–all memories of boyhood years spent in Rapid City.
Pagan performance-studies scholar Jason Winslade is interviewed at the TheoFantastique blog on Witchcraft and the entertainment industry:
Let me first say that I have a hard time coming up with any examples of “real witchcraft” or “real magic” in television or films. As you rightly state in your blog, any portrayals of these phenomena are inevitably fantasy with fancy special effects and things flying around. Any practitioner will tell you that this does not happen. At least they do not in the waking world. (Of course, this begs the question what “real magic” actually is – ask 3 practitioners and you’ll get 5 answers. Certainly “real” magic, with the exception of ritual, is much more of an internal process, and thus doesn’t lend itself to special effects extravaganzas). Some programs may incorporate sound magickal philosophy and metaphysics but their application is ultimately fantastical.
TheoFantastique is written by John Morehead, who also writes Morehead’s Musings, where he has a special interest in Christian evangelism to new religious movements.
When I mentioned Ward Churchill, I forgot the TV series that he inspired. But I have forgotten a lot about the Seventies.
In the heart of the English Fen County, Pluvialis is spitting . . .
. . . chips and blood. I am crackling with furious static. Any minute now, small pieces of paper, coins and pens are going to drag themselves across the tabletop, bent and pulled towards me by the immense, bending-the-laws-of-physics fury I’m experiencing right now.
She has been reading Jason Pitzl-Waters’
comments on the upcoming film version of Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising.
Let’s set it in America?
Let’s get rid of “all the Arthurian and Pagan stuff”?
Let’s give Will Stanton a twin brother, stolen by the dark?
The Rider a love interest?
Time to dump some hot links in the stew pot:
¶ Crikey! Ambulance Driver has done it again! The man’s a bloody bloggin’ gawd.
¶ I have always been fascinated by Ozti the iceman, whose body was found on an alpine pass between Austria and Italy. I think it was Konrad Spindler, an Austrian anthropologist, who suggested that Otzi was fleeing some kind of inter-clan or inter-village or inter-personal conflict when he died. That Otzi bled to death from wounds suggests that Spindler was right. This book probably applies
¶ So you are interested in Celtic Studies? Here is your starter kit. Or maybe you just want this 
¶ Everybody wants to belong somewhere!.
¶ Having recently visited the Mendocino coast, M. and I are now watching movies filmed there. Last night it was The Russians are Coming the Russians are Coming!, a classic Cold War comedy with Carl Reiner (not one of my favorites), a young Alan Arkin, and Eva Marie Saint as a typical early-1960s perky female lead.
Its message is the eternal comic one since Plautus’ day: “The grown-ups are silly, but love will conquer all.” Arkin and Theodore Bikel, as the commanders of a Russian submarine, gesticulate and scream at each other like comic-opera Italians, nothing like the careful professionals aboard the Red October.
Next, Johnny Belinda with Jane Wyman. Just think, in a parallel universe she was our First Lady during the 1980s.
Another reconstructed longship is on the whale path headed west, and it has made it to the Orkneys.
The plan is to sail through the Orkney Islands in order, among other things, to avoid the Pentland Firth. That this is not a sailing strategy of recent date is evident from the old Nordic texts. They also describe the dangers of Péttlandsfirdi and speak of the shipwrecks in Svelgr “the most gigantic of all whirlpools”.
A running historical commentary is here.
Animal, Vegetable, Miracle is novelist Barbara Kingsolver’s new nonfiction book about her family’s year of eating locally. Or to quote the blurb: “With characteristic poetry and pluck, Barbara Kingsolver and her family sweep readers along on their journey away from the industrial-food pipeline to a rural life in which they vow to buy only food raised in their own neighborhood, grow it themselves, or learn to live without it.”
The book has a Web site with more information, recipes, and local contacts. All good.
But consider this excerpt from the late-June chapter on Kingsolver’s experiments with cheese-making:
I’m not sure why, since it takes less time to make a pound of mozzarella than to bake a cobbler, but most people find the idea of making cheese at home to be preposterous. If the delivery guy happens to come to the door when I’m cutting and draining curd, I feel like a Wiccan.
Wiccans (a) do clandestine things in the kitchen, (b) make cheese, (c) are preposterous, (d) all of the above?
The University of Colorado has fired Ward Churchill, plagiarist, pseudo-American Indian, and intellectual thug.
In case you have not guessed, I am happy about that.
If a student had committed as much plagiarism as Churchill did, he would flunk the course. (My course, at any rate.)
Some people will try to argue that Churchill was fired for political speech, but he was not. Yes, as some of Ann Althouse’s commenters note, the political speech may have caused his other behavior to be investigated.
It is sort of like being stopped for speeding after you robbed a bank.
I learned about Churchill’s methods when I was a graduate student at CU-Boulder in the 1980s. He led the lynch mob against a religious-studies professor whose work on Native American religion displeased him, and he played the race card every chance that he had. What an irony that he was faking it.
Churchill wanted to be the dictator who could declare whose scholarship was politically acceptable and whose was not. I suppose that is why Russell Means and some other Indian activists are supporting him–they would like to have that power too.
More recently, the American Indian Movement has given Means the shove. And they have an interesting Web page on Ward Churchill, too.
On the Kamchatka Peninsula in Russia’s Far East (across from Alaska), indigenous people are engaged in a work of cultural survival.
“Everyone of my generation speaks the Koryak language, knows the customs, dances, dishes like in the ancient times. But some of our children don’t know anything at all,” said folk performer Lidia Chechulina, slightly breathless after dancing to the beat of a deer-skin drum and the music of her own voice.
Her songs, sung in a guttural language reminiscent of Chinese, describe the beauty of the tundra, volcanoes and the sea, she explains. She adds that songs, one for each person, accompany Koryaks all their lives and act as a charm.
Soviet Communism, with all its Marxist talk about the dignity of labor, etc., had about the same effect on the Siberians peoples as Christianity did on the American Indians–especially when the Bureau of Indian Affairs used to hire missionaries as Indian agents. But then both Christianity and Marxism are monotheisms, in a sense.
Megan McArdle examines the failures of magics and economics in the Harry Potter books.
Yet in the Potter books, the costs and limits are too often arbitrary.
A patronus charm, for example, is awfully difficult–until Rowling wants a stirring scene in which Harry pulls together an intrepid band of students to Fight the Power, whereupon it becomes simple enough to be taught by an inexperienced fifteen year old. Rowling can only do this because it’s thoroughly unclear how magic power is acquired. It seems hard to credit academic labour, when spells are one or two words; and anyway, if that were the determinant, Hermione Granger would be a better wizard than Harry. But if it’s something akin to athletic skill, why is it taught at rows of desks? And why aren’t students worn out after practicing spells?
(Via Instapundit.)