His name’s not George (unless it really is)

Although it is a bit off this blog’s stated purpose, I have published earlier (here and here) on the joy of transcontinental travel by Amtrak sleeping car.

Sometimes I think of what were the glory days of train travel, when the Pullman Company owned the sleeping cars (leasing them to railroads) and hired the attendants — “porters,” as they were called then — freed black slaves at first, in the latter part of the 19th century.

But the relationship between the porters and the company was far from simplistic. By 1925, the Pullman Company was the largest single employer of blacks in the nation, and the company’s involvement in communities as a good corporate citizen, especially its contributions to black churches, had bought it considerable goodwill among influential black leaders, particularly the ministers in the big churches in large cities. Well-placed advertisements in black newspapers helped as well. Recipients of the company’s largess were loath to call for organized opposition to their benefactor.

They were paid less than white railway workers, of course, and they not only had to serve but to be subservient as well. Hence, in the 1920s, they struggled to unionize as the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, a “craft union” that would eventually, in the 1930s, become part of the American Federation of Labor.

For that story, you might look for a made-for-television (Showtime channel) movie, “10,000 Black Men Named George,” starring Andr? Braugher as organizer Philip Randolph and Mario Van Peebles as one of his associates. Charles S. Dutton’s character helps earn the film an “R” rating. Sure, it’s a TV movie and it’s a little two-dimensional and cleaned up, but how many such movies on labor history are there?

Some Updates

While I wait for some uploading issues to be sorted out, here are follow-ups to two recent posts.

First, I mentioned on January 1 the book Nightmare Alley as possibly inspiring or prefiguring Anton LaVey’s Church of Satan in the 1960s.

I have now read Nightmare Alley, and the short answer is, I don’t think so. It certainly is not the blueprint for the CoS that Stranger in a Strange Land was for the Church of All Worlds at about the same time. Nightmare Alley does involve a shrewd, glib carnival mind reader who becomes a fraudulent Spiritualist minister, and it is appropriately cynical about the human condition, however.

Second, Mary Beard’s The Invention of Jane Harrison, mentioned on January 14, disappointed me, perhaps because I was hoping for more of an intellectual biography that assessed Harrison’s study of ancient Greece and also positioned her–as Ronald Hutton briefly did in The Triumph of the Moon, as one of the foremothers of today’s Pagan revival.

Instead, the reader gets more of “who had a spat with whom in 1889.” Beard, who teaches Classics at Cambridge University (in Harrison’s footsteps, so to speak), offers some interesting light on how Classics as a field was presented and was evolving in late-Victorian and Edwardian Britain. She also spends much effort in a sort of meta-biography, writing about the problems of writing a biography of Harrison. And she dances around the topic of sex, saying several times that we cannot impose the term “lesbian” on the Victorians; but, on the other hand, was she or wasn’t she?

As a study of the rise of academic celebrity–Harrison as a sort of public intellectual–it is interesting, and Beard’s style is fluid and entertaining.

Apologies

Blogging has been interrupted while DrakNet, where I park this blog, changes servers again. “This is only a test.”

Haifa Wehbe Watch

Ever since my original post about Lebanese singer Haifa Wehbe
(or Wahbi), this blog has been receiving sporadic hits from the Middle East: Israel, Syria, Egypt, Dubai . . .

Apparently she and some of her peers have really undermined traditional Arab ideas of beauty.

But I say this to her fans:

“Some would say an army of cavalry, others of infantry, others of ships, is the fairest thing on the dark earth, but I say it’s whatever you’re in love with.”

Those lines are from the ancient Greek poet Sappho. Read Sappho, and understand.

Where the weekend went

To the detriment of my students, I spent most of the past weekend editing the first issue of the “new” Pomegranate: The Journal of Pagan Studies. To help the process go faster, I asked the aid of my old friend Michael McNierney, who not only teaches but has written for The Pom in the past, as well as possessing strong editorial skills. Peer-reviewers of academic journals are normally paid in the coin of glory, but I was happy to share food, drink, and some of the old .45 ACP ammunition that I inherited from my late father.

The Revealer

When I left (I thought) journalism to go to graduate school in religious studies, I thought that one possible later career path would be to be journalist specializing in real religion reporting, as opposed to merely retyping churches’ news releases.

That path was not taken, but others have taken it, and a new way to follow religion-reporting is The Revealer, a blog based at New York University.

From a current entry:

“The religious language with which Disney sold its Celebration [planned community in Florida] and with which buyers bought it isn?t coincidental. The town was — is — the most stunning example of civic religion aestheticized, an extreme-case scenario of gated communities and ?new urbanism? throughout the country, the realization the impulse to create through quaint, storybook settings the community once provided by more stringent faiths.

“But all good things must come to an end, and so Disney embraces evolution rather than creationism by putting its Garden of Eden on the block and announcing plans to build elsewhere.”

I am flattered that Revealer’s “Links–Pagan” page includes this blog and also The Pomegranate, which is taking a lot of psychic energy now as I prepare the first issue with our new publisher.

The Revealer

When I left (I thought) journalism to go to graduate school in religious studies, I thought that one possible later career path would be to be journalist specializing in real religion reporting, as opposed to merely retyping churches’ news releases.

That path was not taken, but others have taken it, and a new way to follow religion-reporting is The Revealer, a blog based at New York University.

From a current entry:

“The religious language with which Disney sold its Celebration [planned community in Florida] and with which buyers bought it isn?t coincidental. The town was — is — the most stunning example of civic religion aestheticized, an extreme-case scenario of gated communities and ?new urbanism? throughout the country, the realization the impulse to create through quaint, storybook settings the community once provided by more stringent faiths.

“But all good things must come to an end, and so Disney embraces evolution rather than creationism by putting its Garden of Eden on the block and announcing plans to build elsewhere.”

I am flattered that Revealer’s “Links–Pagan” page includes this blog and also The Pomegranate, which is taking a lot of psychic energy now as I prepare the first issue with our new publisher.

The Revealer

When I left (I thought) journalism to go to graduate school in religious studies, I thought that one possible later career path would be to be journalist specializing in real religion reporting, as opposed to merely retyping churches’ news releases.

That path was not taken, but others have taken it, and a new way to follow religion-reporting is The Revealer, a blog based at New York University.

From a current entry:

“The religious language with which Disney sold its Celebration [planned community in Florida] and with which buyers bought it isn?t coincidental. The town was — is — the most stunning example of civic religion aestheticized, an extreme-case scenario of gated communities and ?new urbanism? throughout the country, the realization the impulse to create through quaint, storybook settings the community once provided by more stringent faiths.

“But all good things must come to an end, and so Disney embraces evolution rather than creationism by putting its Garden of Eden on the block and announcing plans to build elsewhere.”

I am flattered that Revealer’s “Links–Pagan” page includes this blog and also The Pomegranate, which is taking a lot of psychic energy now as I prepare the first issue with our new publisher.

The Revealer

When I left (I thought) journalism to go to graduate school in religious studies, I thought that one possible later career path would be to be journalist specializing in real religion reporting, as opposed to merely retyping churches’ news releases.

That path was not taken, but others have taken it, and a new way to follow religion-reporting is The Revealer, a blog based at New York University.

From a current entry:

“The religious language with which Disney sold its Celebration [planned community in Florida] and with which buyers bought it isn?t coincidental. The town was — is — the most stunning example of civic religion aestheticized, an extreme-case scenario of gated communities and ?new urbanism? throughout the country, the realization the impulse to create through quaint, storybook settings the community once provided by more stringent faiths.

“But all good things must come to an end, and so Disney embraces evolution rather than creationism by putting its Garden of Eden on the block and announcing plans to build elsewhere.”

I am flattered that Revealer’s “Links–Pagan” page includes this blog and also The Pomegranate, which is taking a lot of psychic energy now as I prepare the first issue with our new publisher.

Inventing Jane Harrison

I have received Mary Beard’s The Invention of Jane Harrison–there goes the evening. (And all hail the interlibrary loan staff for producing it so quickly.)

Ronald Hutton writes of Harrison in his book The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft:

“Savagery and barbarism both frightened and excited her. She admitted that ‘ritual seizes me: a ritual dance, a ritual procession and vestments and lights and banners, moves me as no sermon, no hymn, no picture, no poem has ever moved me.'”

She was both Puritan and would-be Bacchante in the same body, a fascinating character, described when lecturing at Cambridge as “a tall figure in black drapery, with touches of her favorite green and a string blue Egyptian beads, like a priestess’s rosary.” Hutton suggests that she did much to create the notion of a Great Goddess who preceded the familiar Greek pantheon. He quotes Beard, so now I will see what Beard has to say.

Beard herself describes the myth of Harrison thus in her preface:

“Jane Ellen Harrison changed the way we think about the ancient Greeks; she infuriated the academic establishment at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries with her uncompromising refusal to play the submissive part; she fell repeatedly and hopelessly in love–usually with entirely unsuitable men, who were also her academic colleagues; she gave some of the most remarkably theatrical lectures that the University of Cambridge has ever seen; in the very male intellectual world of a century ago, she put women academics and women’s colleges (dangerously) on the map.”

An interested bystander

. . . is all that I am in the Kennewick Man case, but I enjoyed this post from Moira Breen’s Inappropriate Reponse blog. You might like this post as well on the whole sacred-lands issue. British Pagans, for instance, continue to pester English Heritage, etc., about sacred sites management–wanting a say, at least–but, in my experience, most are eager to learn what archaeology tells them. Unfortunately, it’s not always that way.