Tag Archives: publishing

Pentagram Pizza: Academic Edition

• “Three Things You (Probably) Didn’t Know about Google Scholar” at GradHacker. I did not know about a couple of these features, like being able to track how often something you wrote has been cited, which can be either an ego boost or give you the feeling that you have been spitting into the Grand Canyon.

• The early issues of The Pomegranate, those edited and published by Fritz Muntean in Vancouver, BC., are now online. Go here and scroll down to the numbered issues 1–18 at the bottom. Yes, Equinox is (Brit. are) charging for articles, but book reviews and the readers’ forum downloads are free, and remember what I said about interlibrary loan.

• Egil Asprem reviews Stepchildren of Science, a book on the history of parapsychology in Germany. “In the fascinating last chapter Wolffram shows how the struggle between parapsychologists and academic psychologists also led to attempts, by both sides, to pathologise the other.” That sounds so familiar.

How I Spent My Afternoon

I don’t know where the morning went — this and that, some fire department communications — but then I started assembling the next issue of The Pomegranate, and immediately encountered the Lithuanian typography issue.

As in, some of the special characters, such as e-with-a-dot-over-it, are not in our normal font, Book Antiqua.

But ah, Book Antiqua is derived from Palatino (my favorite default font), and my installation of Palatino has all those characters.

So it’s point-and-select-and-change fonts for about half an hour until every special Lithuanian character in the article is changed to Palatino, which is slightly narrower but has about the same x-height as Book Antiqua.

And, oh yes, the bibliography has to be checked and uploaded to the Equinox website for some indexing purposes and also sent to the guy in England who does the Digital Object Identifiers.

At which time it is beer-thirty.

This is after all the original editing, the selecting and working with peer reviewers, the interaction with the two authors, and the re-editing.

And there are people who complain about the cost of academic journals and who think that everything should be free.

Well, you naïve whiners and whingers, who is going to do what I have been doing for no pay whatsoever? I’m nowhere near finished. There will be more hours of work in Adobe InDesign and on the web before the issue is ready for the printer — who also expects to be paid, and not in rainbows and unicorns.

You, impoverished graduate student, haven’t you learned how to do interlibrary loan yet? Get a librarian to show you how, or go the university’s library website.

And if you do not have a university affiliation are you not aware that many public libraries have inter-library loan librarians? Or that you can walk into most state university libraries, make nice, and get a “patron” card that includes various borrowing services?

You only have to pay retail for downloaded articles from academic publishers if you need them right now.

“Essential” Pagan Books

The trouble with book lists — like this list of “27 essential Pagan books” — is that no two readers’ lists are the same.

On the other hand, I am pretty pleased with number 16.

And I am happy to see Michael Strmiska getting some recognition too.

An Anthology on Priestesses

Announcement

It is with great enthusiasm that we announce a new anthology to be published by Goddess Ink. This anthology comprises works of, about and by priestesses, and will be edited by Dr. Candace Kant and Dr. Anne Key.

As priestesses and scholars, we endeavor to create an anthology that will serve as a resource and a source of inspiration to both those engaged in and those interested in the role of priestesses. The anthology will contain material addressing ancient and modern priestesses including academic pieces, ritual, essay, poetry, meditations and artwork.

We seek submissions that express the experience and knowledge of priestessing, particularly, but not limited to, the priestess’ role in ritual and group leadership.

Submissions may be in any printable form, including scholarly essays, personal essays, poetry, artwork, chants, rituals, meditations, invocations, or other genre.  For prose submissions send a 150 word abstract outlining your approach to the subject.

Submissions other than prose should be sent in finished form. For poetry, up to three poems of no more than 50 lines each.

Previously published work will be considered, but authors must hold all rights and have written proof from previous publisher .

Include author bio of up to 200 words at end of submission Please submit proposals and any inquiries by email to <submissions@goddess-ink.com> .

Deadline for submissions: July 1, 2012

Planned publishing date for the anthology: January 2013.

Contributors will be compensated with one contributor’s copy of the anthology and reduced pricing on additional copies purchased at the first run.

Dr. Candace Kant and Dr. Anne Key Managing Editors, Goddess Ink, Ltd.

The Top Ten Grimoires

The British newspaper The Guardian spins an article off historian Owen Davies’ recent book, Grimoires: A History of Magic Books.

But newspapers and magazines love “top ten” list stories, and here is The Guardian’s. (Obviously, I missed the original publication.)

Number one on the list?

1. The Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses

Although one of the more recent grimoires, first circulating in manuscript in the 18th century, this has to be number one for the breadth of its influence. From Germany it spread to America via the Pennsylvania Dutch, and once in cheap print was subsequently adopted by African Americans. With its pseudo-Hebraic mystical symbols, spirit conjurations and psalms, this book of the secret wisdom of Moses was a founding text of Rastafarianism and various religious movements in west Africa, as well as a cause célèbre in post-war Germany.

But a certain American writer from Providence, Rhode Island, gets a shout-out too.

And Where Is Goudy, Under the Sofa?

Cats as fonts.

The “New Yorker rule”

M. and I work together on many editing projects. Yesterday, the author of a journal article, reading her galleys, said that she thought that expressions such as “sui generis,”  “axis mundi,”*  and “Weltanschauung” should be italicized as foreign expressions. (I had them in roman.)

I consulted the holy scriptures, where in chapter 7, verse 52, I read, “Foreign words and pases familiar to most readers and listed in Webster’s should appear in roman (not italics) if used in an English context. . . . German nouns, if in Webster’s, are lowercased.”

I assume that the online Webster’s is all right. But what about “most readers”?

I propose “the New Yorker rule.” Although The New Yorker is not an academic journal, its writers and editors seem to expect a level of comfort with common phrases from other major world languages (Chinese excepted, thus far).

Therefore, if The New Yorker puts a phrase like “sui generis” in roman, so shall we. A quick search of the phrase on their website will tell us. They do capitalize Weltanschauung when writing in English, however, which is a deviation from the true Chicago path.

* I have read too much Eliade to ever put axis mundi in italics anyway.

 

On Not Crying for Borders Bookstores

From Rune Soup, a post to follow Jason Pitzl-Waters’ recent discussion of the Borders closing’s effect on Pagan publishers.

It is, as the man says, a “huge rant.”

The Tibetan Book of the Dead—A Biography

At The Magonia Blog (which I am adding to my blogroll), a review about W.Y. Evans-Wentz’s well-known translation of The Tibetan Book of the Dead. Only it was not his translation nor even, precisely, the “Tibetan Book of the Dead”:

Walter Yelling Wentz – it was only as an adult that he adopted in addition his mother’s maiden name of Evans – was born in Trenton, New Jersey, in 1878, and later moved to southern California with his family, where he would receive a diploma from the Raja-Yoga School and Theosophical University at Point Loma. He later obtained an M.A. in English from Stanford University, travelled to Europe, and was awarded a Bachelor of Science in Anthropology at Oxford. Having spent most of the First World War in Egypt, he travelled to India, where he became “a great collector of texts in languages he never learned to read”.

In Darjeeling he purchased some Tibetan block prints, and had them translated by Kazi Dawa Samdup, an English teacher at a boy’s boarding school in Gangtok, the capital of the small Himalayan kingdom of Sikkim, who worked on them every morning before lessons for two months. These provided Evans-Wentz with the material for three books, The Tibetan Book of the Dead (1927, the title an imitation of the Egyptian Book of the Dead published in England by Wallis Budge). Tibetan Yoga and Secret Doctrines (1935), and The Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation (1954). One point that was not made clear in the first of these was that it was only a small portion of a large corpus of similar works, and did not include the part most commonly used in Tibet.

Princeton University Press is doing a series about the “lives” of famous religious texts, of which this is one: “the bible of the hippie movement,” as the reviewer calls it.

Walt Whitman and His Sock Puppet

I have been collecting links on writing and plan to toss them out piecemeal over the next week.

Here is a New York Times piece on literary self-promotion from times past:

The most revered of French novelists recognized the need for P.R. “For artists, the great problem to solve is how to get oneself noticed,” Balzac observed in “Lost Illusions,” his classic novel about literary life in early 19th-century Paris. As another master, Stendhal, remarked in his autobiography “Memoirs of an Egotist,” “Great success is not possible without a certain degree of shamelessness, and even of out-and-out charlatanism.” Those words should be on the Authors Guild coat of arms. . . .

American authors did try to keep up. Walt Whitman notoriously wrote his own anonymous reviews, which would not be out of place today on Amazon. “An American bard at last!” he raved in 1855. “Large, proud, affectionate, eating, drinking and breeding, his costume manly and free, his face sunburnt and bearded.” But nobody could quite match the creativity of the Europeans.

Read it all—for ideas!