Life’s a Beach
You’ve seen this slogan as kitsch, as travel brochure, and all, but have you considered that beaches are “a model civic space: tolerant, playful, self-regulating”?
More here, from the people who invented going to the beach. (Thanks to Arts & Letters Daily.)
And don’t forget the special debt owed to beach-goers by the publishing industry.
Pagans invented the wheel
Well, yes, of course, if you think about it–presuming that you equate pre-Big Name Religion (Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, etc.) with “Pagan.” But first, let me acknowledge publication of Pagan Pride, a book of short readings (in unusual square format) “honoring the Craft and Culture of Earth and Goddess.” Its premise is that we self-defined contemporary Pagans can be proud (and celebrate Pagan Pride Day) because our religious predecessors, if not literal ancestors, gave the world so much: democracy, pottery, the Sphinx of Egypt, spinning and textiles, calendars, the Parthenon, etc.
Item 40, “Rhetoric,” strikes a note similar to my first-day-of-class remarks in my “advanced composition and rhetoric” course, in fact.
At the same time, playing with the rhetorical notion of kairos, I have note the unspoken claims that such a book makes by its very existence. (And I have made them too.) In other words, this book–its title, subtitle, and content–make a statement in an ongoing conversation about these claims:
1. There is a religious mode called paganism/Paganism that underlies all religion and yet stands apart from “revealed” religion. (That is one of the claims made by Michael York in Pagan Theology.
2. This mode can be defined to include almost all ancient, Classical, animistic, “native” religions as well as the self-consciously revived or created “new” Paganisms of today.
3. Paganism is–or will become–the de facto civil religion of the entire globe as environmental crisis worsens. That is the argument York is developing in a book chapter that will be excerpted in the next Pomegranate. I would argue that contemporary Pagans started making this argument right about the time of the first Earth Day and continued emphasizing it from the 1970s onward. (The “ownership” of Earth Day is somewhat “contested,” as we academics say, but that is another story.)
Two more novels that carry the lingering strand of Victorian or Edwardian literary “paganism” forward into the 1930s and 1940s are Forrest Reid’s Uncle Stephen (1931) and Jocelyn Brooke’s The Scapegoat.
Uncle Stephen was the last of a trilogy, but it was written first and can stand alone. Reid then provided the earlier history of his protagonist, Tom Barber, in two more books: The Retreat (1936) and Young Tom (1944), written in reverse-chronological order. In Nick Freeman’s words, they “offered a celebration of youth and sexual freedom alongside rhapsodic natural descriptions and the putting aside of quotidian responsibility,” together with various supernatural elements.
I describe the Tom Barber novels as “Kennth Grahame (talking animals) meets Henry James (supernatural elements, lots of interiority) meets Mary Renault (evocations of Classical Paganism, much unconsummated homoerotic longing).”
As for The Scapegoat (1948), it’s hard to improve on Peter Cameron’s line in the afterword to the 1988 edition: “almost unbelievably subversive and kinky.”
Earlier entries here, here, and here.
You know who you are
Dear blogger and/or Web designer:
Making the text on your Web page white on a black background does not thereby make your site “witchy,” or “alternative,” or “goth”; nor does white-on-black text honor the Dark Side, the Dark Mother, or the Dark Wombat.
Instead, it just cuts readability by about 70 percent. Even with my nice new LCD screen, it is excruciating, especially if I have been reading other pages before yours. Learn from the masters. Repeat after me: Dark Text, Lighter Background. There. That still leaves you more than one color combination to work with.
Legal novels
As opposed to illegal novels? No, these are works of fiction, pre-John Grisham, with legal office or courtroom settings, part of a “Law in Popular Culture” project at the University of Texas law school.
Greek Pagans in the Sun
The Web site of the Supreme Council of the Gentile Hellenes, a Greek Reconstructionist Pagan group in Greece, has posted video clips of a NBC news feature about Greek Pagans–tied to the Olympics coverage, of course. (The compressed clips total about 30 megabytes.)
Coverage includes an Orthodox priest saying that Greeks can’t go back to idol-worshiping and footage of a vandalized Athens bookstore that sold Pagan books.
“The Witches Next Door”
Crisis, a conservative Catholic magazine, offers a new article on evangelizing Pagans, which such quotes as these:
“Why should Catholics care about a religious system so alien to ours? The simple answer is: It’s there, it’s growing, and some ex-Catholics find it attractive. (A more flippant answer: Look at what we have in common; after all, we’ve both had problems with Protestant Fundamentalists and been maligned in Jack Chick comics.)”
It all comes down to the usual stuff: Jesus trumps the Horned God. Catholics should set aside any distaste with Paganism long enough to drag us back into the True Church.
But Crisis has bigger image problems right now: editor Deal Hudson has had to resign as President Bush’s liason with Catholic voters after some skeletons fell out of his closet, as revealed by the National Catholic Reporter here.
(Thanks to Wendy Griffin for the original link.)
Another witchy movie
Keeping up with the theme of small-p pagan books and movies (see entries here and here), M. and I have now watched I Married a Witch, released in 1942 and starring Veronica Lake in her prime–all long blonde hair and sleepy, scratchy voice.
Robert Benchley, a well-known humorist of the time, plays best friend to the bridegroom, Fredric March.
The plot revolves around the stereotypical idea of the witch giving up her powers to marry a mortal, which meant that I had to endure M. making gagging noises every time Lake’s character, Jennifer, would say something like, “I want to be good wife, darling.”
The South African-born actor Cecil Kellaway, who plays Jennifer’s sorcerer father, Daniel, apparently once had a guest role on the 1960s TV sitcom Bewitched, which was based on much the same premise.
Portability
Walking past the Chemistry building on my way to the parking lot yesterday, I had a random thought that it was 20 years since I had bought my first personal computer, a Kaypro II.
Offering a state-of-the-art 64k memory (that’s kilobytes, not megabytes), it was also portable, which is to say that it had a handle riveted to one side, and its two sections could be snapped together to make something the size and weight of a heavy suitcase. I traveled with it belted into the passenger seat of my ’69 VW bus.
But it got me through numerous freelance writing assignments , graduate school, and the production of Iron Mountain: A Journal of Magical Religion, a forerunner of The Pomegranate.
And I am happy to say that the editorial copy for Pomegranate 6.2 went off to the copy editor in England today, meaning that we should have copies in hand in time for the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion and the Pagan Studies conference.
Almost pagan
Thanks to Nick Freeman, whose paper, “The Shrineless God: Paganism, Literature, and Art in Forties England,” will appear in the next issue of The Pomegranate, I have been watching and reading some classics of literary, if not self-consciously religious, small-p paganism.
One was the film A Canterbury Tale, made during World War II by the writing-directing team of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger (a Hungarian refugee in England).
One appreciation of the film includes this comment: “Strange and poetic, A Canterbury Tale combined Christian metaphysics with a celebration of England’s rural past that at times seemed almost pagan.”
Powell and Pressburger also made The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, which Winston Churchill allegedly hated, about an honorable but intellectually hidebound British officer.
M. and I also enjoyed the Foyle’s War series, set on the south coast of England early in World War II. I am starting to think that its writers mined the Powell-Pressburger vein–not for plots, but for plot elements. Just so far I have noticed these in episodes of Foyle’s War:
1. A band of small boys collecting scrap paper for the war effort find a document that aids the protagonist (A Canterbury Tale.
2. An aging Army officer, now reduced to serving in the Home Guard, who is outwitted in a war game by a less scrupulous younger counterpart (Colonel Blimp).
Most of Powell and Pressburger’s films are available as mail-order rentals through Video Library.
Cutting-edge Pagan Music
Check the playlist for Jason Pitzl-Waters’ next “Darker Shade of Pagan” radio show (also webcast) — he is the magister of contemporary Pagan DJs.
‘Where You At?
Rebecca of “What’s in Rebecca’s Pocket?” blog rediscovers the “Where You At?” bioregional information quiz, which first appeared in CoEvolution Quarterly, later known as Whole Earth Review, in 1981. I am glad to have done my part in disseminating it within the Pagan community.
(Whole Earth Review is no more, but the Web site still exists.)