“that Barbarous Crew”
Cronica reports that “Indians” are not allowed in Boston unless they are incarcerated. The law in question dates from 1675.
Commenters raise a question: could the law mean that Dr. Patel the internist should be thrown into prison? “Original intent” would have to be examined.
World Dream Bank
At last, a safe place for your Antarctica dream dollars. (Link courtesy of Shamanic Shifting around the Web.)
Shamanic links
Can shamanism and blogging co-exist? The Shamanic Ways blog is trying to find out.
The Eighteenth Century goes to the movies
“Candidus,” the Colonial movie critic, takes on Hollywood’s treatment of the 18th century. Here he is on The Patriot:
“In the real war, loyalist civilians were treated as horribly as any patriot civilians. But, you don’t hear about that. No, no. Can’t have that!”
When it comes to The Last of the Mohicans (1992), it is hard, however, to say much about James Fenimore Cooper that Mark Twain has not already said in his essay “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses.”
The only reason that Cooper must have made it into the American literary canon was that the competition was, somehow, worse.
Twain does not tackle The Prairie, but there is a completely silly book. Evidently JFC never saw a prairie. His characters–so-called pioneers–wander in circles. They are 200 miles from civilization, then 400 miles, then 200 miles. The plot repeats itself: captured by Indians, prairie fire, escape from Indians, captured by Indians.
Any literature student asked by a teacher to read Cooper should demand extra credit.
In the movie of Last of the Mohicans, I thought I detected a continuity lapse in a scene where there were X people in a large canoe in one scene, and then X -1 in the next scene. But I was watching in a theatre, so I could not back up and look again. Such a lapse would have been true to Cooper’s spirit, though.
Why was the shoe in the well?
I love this sort of news.
These should be easy times
The semester refuses to let go. The director of composition dumps a file folder of papers on me, which I am to read to help her evaluate one of the part-time faculty.
I feel for the instructor, a “freeway flier,” someone teaching part-time for miserable Colorado wages ($1,300-$1,500 per course) at several colleges in order to try to make a living. S/he might be teaching as many as seven courses, which is two people’s work load for writing classes.
Meanwhile, a former student, a “non-traditional” (in his 40s) stopped by today. He wants to enter the M.A. program.
“So you can make $1,300 per class teaching in the community college?” I asked.
“It beats $6 an hour,” he said. Maybe. But perhaps he could get a better-paying job in a rural high school, many of which are desperate for teachers as the Baby Boomers retire. It is possible now to be hired and then to pick up the education courses.
I should be sitting back to read Alan Cameron’s Greek Mythography in the Roman World to learn something about how the Greek myths were massaged (and invented) to suit Roman religio-political uses. But I also need to explore why the wipers on my old Jeep CJ-5 have quit. (No, I don’t think it’s the switch or the fuse that is bad.) Jeep first, then Classics.
Pagan Studies in the Academy
A list of papers to be presented at the Pagan Studies program unit of the American Academy of Religion annual meeting in November is posted on the Pagan Studies web site.
The AAR has not yet published its program book with times and places; that information will be added as soon as it becomes available.
The missing hyperlink
It is customary in the blogosphere to link to items that you are quoting–unless you are afraid, apparently, that your readers might actually follow that link.
For instance, conservative Catholic blogger Amy Welborn (my cyber-neighbor at Blog Heaven) recently viewed with alarm a Wiccan’s writing on sexual predators in the Wiccan community.
The comments are . . . interesting.
But what is missing? There is no hyperlink. Had she placed one, readers might have seen that essayist Lisa McSherry mentioned Catholic sexual predators as well. (Read McSherry’s entire essay here on the Witches’ Voice site.) Everything else that Welborn posts is hyperlinked–until she deals with Wicca.
Selective quoting works best when no one can double-check you.
Vintage clothing patterns and a need to be bitchy
My mother at one point in her life was a high-school home-economics teacher. My older sisters, therefore, learned to sew. They had as much choice in the matter as young Joseph Ratzinger had in joining the Hitler Youth. Clothing patterns were part of the domestic landscape when I was young, which is why I was so delighted with Threadbared, a site born from “a love of all things vintage and all things snarky.”
Student paper gets it right
The Orion, published at California State University-Chico, published an article on Wicca that gets the history right–no “unbroken tradition from the Stone Age” stuff.
Perhaps that’s because they interviewed one of the leading scholars, who is right there on their campus.
And don’t miss the hard-hitting article on campus squirrels.