A reason for poetry

Artistic and creative types do have more sex, a British survey suggests. (Is it really speaking only of men, as all the examples suggest?)

Promiscuous Picasso, Lord Byron the philanderer, Dylan Thomas the boozy womaniser: these were not simply bonking Bohemians, it seems, but artists doing what their genes told them to do. According to the researchers the greater the artistic endeavour, the larger the sexual appetites. (There are some obvious exceptions to this rule: Julio Iglesias once boasted that he had had sex with 3,000 women, but has never yet sung a decent song.)

Well, of course. This explains why high-school literary magazines survive. It’s not the quality of the writing, but the fact that one is a writer. Ditto garage bands and more.

In the political realm, meanwhile, say the authors of Nation of Rebels, art and coolness become a substitute for, y’know, actually knowing something about economics and politics.

Heath and Potter criticize such theorists as Michel Foucault and Theodore Roszak. Under their influence, “Traditional leftist concerns, such as poverty, living standards and access to medical care, came to be seen as ‘superficial,’…[compared to] ‘the psychic liberation of the oppressed.'” The boring old Left never stood a chance against the new one: “Doing guerilla theater, playing in a band, making avant-garde art, taking drugs and having lots of wild sex certainly beat union organization as a way to spend the weekend.”

Both links via Arts and Letters Daily. Tags: , , ,

Semester’s end

I wander around to departmental offices and snack on pizzelles and potica. In a previous job, I was told that no wedding in Pueblo, Florence, or Cañon City was valid if pizzelles were not served at the reception. (This rule does not apply in Penrose, Colo., where the bride and groom exchange horses, motorcycles, or broken-down school buses.)

Seeing pizzelles, you know it’s a holiday. As for potica, a little goes a long way, as with most of that solid bojohn cuisine.

Writing students drift in and drop off their portfolios. During the one full-blown 2.5-hour final exam that I must give, I look out the west window over the lawn. On the slope in front of the bandstand, a man in a parka walks back and forth, sweeping the grass with his metal detector. I wish I could go out there and see how he is doing with his treasure hunt.

I still call them “Christmas cards”

When I was new to the Pagan movement, I was militant about saying “Yule” instead of “Christmas.” I managed to train one of my sisters to employ the same usage when speaking to me; the other one never really noticed.

This year, we are enjoying this hyped-up controversy over the “war against Christmas,” in which elements of the nation’s religious majority strike the pose of persecuted victims.

One voice of reason is Ed Quillen, the only Denver Post op-ed columnist who lives outside the Denver metroplex. In today’s column he writes:

The impulse not to say “Merry Christmas” comes from good intentions. The theory is that non-Christians might feel offended. I’ve yet to encounter a Jew, Buddhist, Wiccan, Unitarian, atheist, agnostic or humanist who does feel offended by the sentiment, but then again, I live in the boondocks, and people might be more easily offended in civilized metropolitan areas where they have diversity trainers. [Link may expire.]

Considering that I might be one of the Wiccans that he has in mind, I couldn’t agree more. I’m not offended. If I drop a few dollars in the Salvation Army kettle, I expect the bellringer to say “Merry Christmas.” After all, the Salvation Army is in fact a Christian denomination.

It is a little funny that President and Mrs. Bush are criticized for sending out cards saying “Happy Holidays.” I’m not on their mailing list, but I did receive my own mass-produced card today from Senator Ken Salazar, and guess what it said: “Happy Holidays.” But then he’s a Democraft, so he must be an evil secularist, some on the far right would say. The president, on the other hand, is supposed to wave the banner of Christ, if you listen to some of his more extreme supporters.

Although I myself only send cards that don’t say “Christmas” but rather “Season’s Greetings” or the like, I still find myself calling down to where M. is sitting at her desk, “Did you use up all the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation Christmas cards?”

Maybe that’s syncretism or bricolage or something. May the Great Elk bring you Yule stockings of Christmas joy. That’s how we do it in the boondocks.

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In dreaming, truth?

A couple of nights ago I dreamt I was talking with the dean of the university’s library, with whom I have generally had a good collegial relationship.

Teaching, I told her in the dream, was like getting married and divorced twice in every year.

On waking, I thought that that simile was a little overstated. Over the top. Overblown.

Granted, I can think of at least two students whom I hope that I will never see again. Both have the quality of being psychic-energy sinks. In a big lecture class of a hundred bodies you would not know it, but in a small seminar or workshop of eight or ten, their very presence seems to lower the temperature in the room.

Then too I wonder if I could somehow have done more with them. But in the case of one of the students, another professor in her major department told me that he felt he could not teach her anything, so I wasn’t the only one. In the other’s case, the chair of his major department said frankly, “We’re just babysitting him.”

Yet was I too unfocused? Stretched too thin? Thinking too much about my own writing, about The Pomegranate, about some special project for my dean? (Standard teacher self-criticism, all of it.)

Now the wheel has turned, and it is time to think about spring-semester classes. Last spring I lost two months to the flu, feeling only half-alive through February and March. All I want is a semester that goes well without nasty surprises.

None of this explains why my Dreaming Self chose the dean of the library as the other party.

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Stop not making sense

Like Ray Lashley of Bristol (comments section), I was surprised at how many of these I actually could understand. Perhaps that ability comes from a decade of reading student writing.

Jewish Paganism

A writer for the Forward samples Jewish paganism and ponders its ethical emplications.

But, I asked the rabbi, how do we know that we’re not in danger of precisely that which so many sacred texts warn about? The answer, he said, is ethics. “You know it’s holy eros because it leads to ethics. People help each other, work with each other. That’s the litmus test.” And the opposite? “A KKK rally,” Gafni answered. “Lots of bonfires, lots of energy. No ethics. That’s the distinction between holy paganism and idolatry.”

What we might be looking at here though is small-p paganism, a collection of embodied and place-centered religious practices, more than self-consciously polytheistic Paganism.

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Wiccan chaplains

The Sacred Well Congregation, a Texas Wiccan group with a lot of military connections, has just reached a bureaucratic milestone:

As of 3 December 2005, The Sacred Well Congregation has been entered to full membership as an endorsing body in the Committee on Ministry in Specialized Settings (COMISS). COMISS is the primary organization with responsibility for establishing which civil organizations may present an Ecclesiastical Endorsing Agent (EEA) to the military chaplaincy. Through its subsidiaries, the National Council on Ministry to the Armed Forces(NCMAF) and the Endorsers Conference for Veterans Affairs Chaplains(ECVAC), COMISS is the endorsing path for military chaplains, and VA chaplains, respectively.

As I understand the announcement, this is the first step towards putting forward qualified Wiccan military chaplains. I expect more information to be forthcoming later.

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Cold Weather

I came home Tuesday evening and found that M. was upset because one of the dogs was missing. Shelby is a collie-mix who was one step above feral when we got her, and although she has learned to appreciate having her own bed, regular meals, and belly rubs, she will still wander onto the national forest looking for carcasses to scavenge.

M. had looked for her already, but I volunteered to go out too. The temperature was about 10 degrees F. (-12 C.) and dropping. Light, powdery snow was falling. I changed clothes, grabbed a walking stick, and headed up the Forest Service road into the Mason Gulch Burn, stopping occasionally to call and whistle.

From last summer’s forest fire to this: the snowy ground, the black skeletons of pine trees like nervous pencil marks on white paper, the lowering clouds, and the failing light. All was silent except for the whisper of snow on the fabric of my coat.

If any scene exemplified the phrase “dead of winter,” that was it.

When it started getting too dark to see, I went home, dogless. As it turned out, she was hanging around a neighbor’s house. In her doggie brain, she must think like this: “Life is good now, but if these people fail me, I had better have a Plan B. And a Plan C. As God is my witness, I’ll never be hungry again.”

Cross-posted to Southern Rockies Nature Blog.

“The Dark Side”

Andrew Sullivan links to this video clip from Trading Spouses: the fundamentalist Christian mom’s meltdown. Moral: beware of people who pronounce Tarot to rhyme with “carrot.” According to the network’s episode synopses (here and here), she did take the tainted, demonic money in the end.

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Bringing back The Faerie Shaman

Anne Hill of Serpentine Music updates us on the progress of a new CD of Pagan songwriter Gwydion Pendderwen’s music.

There is nothing like producing an album to make you absolutely sick of whatever music it is you’re producing, no matter what you thought of it before….I definitely hit the wall with listening fatigue towards the end as I always do, but I also came away with a renewed respect for Gwydion’s accomplishments as a songwriter and recording artist.

Earlier post here.

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