From an interesting post by Anne Hill, chock full o’ links, called “How to Blog and When Not to Blog,” I was led to this one by Jane Friedman, “Please Don’t Blog Your Book.”
In other words, most plans for turning blog posts into books do not work. A few have. There might be a few exceptions, she suggests, such as self-help topics. If it’s going to work, she says, you have to be “laser-focused.”
Not me. No lasers here.
British SF writer Liz Williams explores the social position of “paganism” (yeah, the Brits can’t find the shift key) at The Guardian and asks if we are coming in from the cold.
In essence, Pagans are muddling through, what with our tolerance for eccentricity, etc.
(And if we are, who is “Control“?)
The August animist blog carnival had the there of Birds, and you can find it linked on Animist Jottings here.
There is quite a bit there, so go visit.
Indianapolis blogger Roberta X muses on the literary sub-genre known as “Weird West.”
Sometimes that means sort of H. P. Lovecraft-meets-Wyatt Earp, sometimes other things.
My introduction was the online graphic novel Tex Arcana, back when the Web was still young.
If your reading tastes don’t go that direction, here are Montana novelist Ivan Doig’s favorite Western reads.
Once when I asked a prominent historian what he thought of the many writings by Stegner, novelist and English-department star at Harvard and Stanford, about the background and the West, he didn’t hesitate: “He hits the nail on the head every time, damn him.”
Yep, every book that Stegner built (they always feel “built,” like Robertson Davies‘ stuff, but that is a Good Thing) was solid as the proverbial brick shithouse.
Via Scott Simpson, who is quoted in it, “Pre-Christian Slavic Beliefs are on the Rise in Poland” (PDF file), from the Krakow Post.
“The native faith movement as a whole is loosely organised and doesn’t
have a strong dogmatic component, it is actually less about faith – as in
‘correct belief’ – and more about being faithful, living the lifestyle,” said
Scott Simpson, a scholar of religious studies at the Jagiellonian University,
and a co-author [sic] of a recent study of Eastern European neo-paganism.
Scroll to page 22 and watch out for extraneous commas.
This is what happens when a parasitologist/archaeologist muses on the origin of mythology. It gets interesting at about the 6:30-minute point.
And this is a very famous turd in English archaeology.
Many things come to mind when I think of Druids, but sex magic is not one of them.
Silly me. I did not know about “fundamentals of Celtic sex magic,” etc.
Actually, Ronald Hutton was planning to put this in his next book, but now someone has beaten him to it.
Some of the eighteenth-century hermits employed by rich landowners were in fact characterized as “Druids.”
Campbell clearly had fun with his quest for real hermits. At Hawkstone in Shropshire, a bare-footed and venerable Fr Francis regularly posed with his stock-in-trade: a skull, an hourglass and book. Although replaced at times by an automaton, Hawkstone’s hermit – a hereditary post – may have survived into the twentieth century. The impecunious Charles Hamilton reputedly advertised for a hermit for his Gothic hermitage at Painshill in Surrey, offering a fee of 700 guineas (some reports say 500) to anyone able and willing to meet his stringent conditions over seven years: to go barefoot in a woollen robe, never to cut beard or nails, or to speak with the servant who brought his food. Although the advertisement cannot now be traced, the hermit undoubtedly existed, and Campbell’s exhaustive enquiries confirm how ubiquitous hermits were in Georgian Britain.
Maybe there is still a niche waiting to be exploited here, for either philosophy majors or designers of animatronic hermits.
Some photos of the coven headed by Eleanor “Ray” Bone. Possibly from the weekly magazine Tit-Bits. Here is a Wikipedia entry about her.
In 1964, you could wear a white shirt and tie in circle, if you came straight from the office, I suppose.
(Remember, witches in England were hung, not burned during the Early Modern period, the height of the witch trials.)
(with examples from religious studies)
Mark Goodacre at NT Blog makes the argument for blogging’s benefits, part of a series of blogger responses (links in his post):
I sometimes wonder whether one should think of publication as being on a continuum, from tweets to blogs to critical notes to articles to introductory books to monographs. The summit of all publication is the monograph, and the well-written monograph actually takes some real skill and effort. Tweets, on the other hand, at the other end of the spectrum, are forgotten almost as soon as they are uttered. Blogs are somewhere in between. They take a bit more effort than a tweet but like them they are pretty ephemeral. It’s remarkable just how quickly we forget them, and that’s if we ever read them in the first place.
Now, back to the monograph.