The loneliness of the long-distance columnist

Jason Pitz-Waters looks at some of the press coverage that newWitch magazine is receiving and wonders why no one mentions his music column.

Ain’t it the truth. You shoot these columns off into the dark and wonder if anyone ever reads them.

Some years back, I wrote a weekly fishing-hunting-outdoor recreation column for a small Colorado daily newspaper. Then I quit that job in order to teach part-time at a community college and work on a book. About a year later, someone stopped me at the supermarket and asked me to mention his organization’s upcoming event in my column. It would have been appropriate for the column, too, except I haven’t written one for the last year, you illiterate idiot. Like it’s obvious that you are one of my faithful readers . . . not..

OK, I didn’t say that, but I felt like saying it.

Religion being made

An interesting thread on Erynn Laurie’s blog shows a group of Celtic Reconstructionist Pagans attempting to move beyond the idea of “personal gnosis” (“It’s right for me.”)

In comparison to Greek religion, for example, we have almost nothing on Pagan Celtic religion that was actually written down by Pagan Celts, so any discussion about sources tends to get sidetracked into the question of how much the material was cleaned up or otherwise massaged by Christian monks, well-meaning Victorian folklorists, or other persons–hence the large part played indeed by personal gnosis.

So it is fascinating to watch people try to find some common ground in creating what is a 98.5-percent new Pagan religion.

“Revisioning the Past: Reconstructionism, Revitalization and Ethnicity”

The call for papers for the 2005 Conference on Contemporary Pagan Studies is now online here.

The CCPS will be Friday, 18 November 2005, in Philadelphia: that is the day before the American Academy of Religion–Society of Biblical Literature annual meeting begins. Registration for the AAR-SBL meeting is not actually necessary to attend CCPS, which has its own lesser admission fee.

Loving the trees

These young Scandinavians are taking the idea of erotic nature religion to its logical conclusion. Their public actions get attention too. (Not safe for work.)

Who is marginal now?

We Pagan academics struggle with feeling marginal, but as Elizabeth Carnell comments, consider how you would feel to be the only person with a doctorate in trolls?

But no doubt in Finland there are job opportunities.

No more crones on broomsticks

So says Brooks Alexander, author of the latest anti-cult ministry book on contemporary Paganism (hey, we dropped the “Neo-” a while back), Witchcraft Goes Mainstream.

“The old crone on a broomstick is gone,” says Alexander. “In her place is a young, hip, sexually magnetic woman who worships a goddess and practices socially acceptable magic.”

Rich Poll of Apologia Report crows over the book’s favorable mention on a Pagan blog: “Praise from one’s opponent is high praise indeed.”

The author claims “personal experience in the occult,” but then that can mean anything from a detailed study of Neoplatonic theurgy to merely having used a Ouija board once, so who knows?

Fellowship 9/11

Stop what you are doing, take 14 minutes, and watch this:

Michael Moore’s searing examination of the Aragorn administration’s actions in the wake of the tragic events at Helm’s Deep.

In memorium

Word came yesterday of the passing of Asphodel Long, a “grandmother of the Goddess Movement in Great Britain.”

Feuilletons

I had never encountered the literary-journalistic term feuilleton until I started reading some of Mircea Eliade’s autobiographical writing: he used to write them for Romanian newspapers as a (precocious) teenager. I had to look up the word and its etymology:

[French, from feuillet, sheet of paper, little leaf, diminutive of feuille, leaf, from Old French foille, from Latin folium.]

John Holbo of John & Belle Have a Blog quotes this definition . . .

The feuilleton writer, an artist in vignettes, worked with those discrete details and episodes so appealing to the nineteenth century’s taste for the concrete. But he sought to endow his material with color drawn from his imagination. The subjective response of the reporter or critic to an experience, his feeling-tone, acquired clear primacy over the matter of his discourse. To render a state of feeling became the mode of formulating a judgment. Accordingly, in the feuilleton writer’s style, the adjectives engulfed the nouns, the personal tint virtually obliterated the contours of the object of discourse. In an essay written when he was only seventeen, young Theodor Herzl identified one of the chief tendencies of the feuilleton writer: narcissism.

. . . as part of a wildly discursive entry on theory, the feuilleton, and Herman Hesse’s Glass Bead Game, which I attempted as a teenager because the serious university students were reading it–only I was not Mircea Eliade, and I think I sort of bounced off the book. Perhaps I should give it another try.

Meanwhile, does blogging encourage the “feeling-tone” to dominate “the matter of [the] discourse”?