¶ After reading this article, I think I will write something for Fate magazine about how Tenochtitlan was really a Mexica overlay on a forgotten Roman colony. Should be good for a few chuckles.
¶ After a long hiatus (in comic book years), Asterix the Gaul returns.
¶ An old acquaintance, Loretta Orion, pops-up in this Samhain-themed article, “Phantoms of the Hamptons.” She is the author of Never Again the Burning Times: Paganism Revived (1994).
When M. and I read this item in the Colorado Springs Gazette, our hearts soared. When we were newlyweds and bought our first house (a barely winterized 1920s cottage, 740 sq. ft.), it was just outside the lower left boundary of this photo of Iron Mountain in Manitou Springs, Colorado.
Iron Mountain is just a foothill, really, but when you look up from below, it blots out the higher ridges behind it.
Before we bought the house, we rented it, and our landlord was Tom McGee, who would later build “The House on Iron Mountain.” (I think the article’s date is wrong; we recall it being built around 1984.)
Before then, we would climb to the summit, where there was a natural stone throne, sometimes using it as a ritual site.
The coven we headed in the early 1980s was the Iron Mountain Coven, and Iron Mountain gave its name to a certain zine of the mid-1980s — Iron Mountain: A Journal of Magical Religion.
I put out only four issues, but they helped to inspire Fritz Muntean to start his own zine called The Pomegranate, and look at it now.
As for the McGees’ house, not only did it ruin “our” ritual site, but it was not even architecturally interesting. So they are razing it today? Hurray! And if that land upon which technically we trespassed becomes public open space, someone else can sit in the “throne,” if it is still there. I suspect that the rock outcropping survived the construction project.
The Los Angeles Review of Books offers a review of two books on Ray Palmer, the Shaver Mystery, and pulp-esoteric publishing of the 1940s–50s: The War Over Lemuria and The Man from Mars : Ray Palmer’s Amazing Pulp Journey.
From the review:
Of course, the underground worlds of Richard Shaver did not spring full grown from his brain, no matter how fevered it might have been. Subterranean adventure has long been a staple of science-fiction. Even more to the point, the belief in the existence of subterranean civilizations itself has a long history, and not just among the ancients who believed in one form or another of an underworld abode of the dead. Indeed, there are other instances in which fictional stories about the underworld have been regarded by some readers as revealing a hidden, sometimes religious truth. The Shaver Mystery, it turns out, is not without precedent. John Cleve Symmes’s hollow-earth novel Symzonia (1820), Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s Vril: The Power of the Coming Race (1871), and Willis George Emerson’s The Smokey God (1908) are all examples of fictional tales of underground civilizations that have been treated as true accounts and the source for religious belief by some members of the Theosophical and occult communities. Shaver’s stories are darker than the similar works that preceded them, but Palmer’s claim that Shaver’s tales contained truths about the hidden world under our feet is part of a long tradition.
Ray Palmer went on to found Fate magazine, which has done several retrospective articles on the Shaver Mystery over the years. Until 1988, Fate was published in Chicago, which just adds to that whole “occult Chicago” meme. (See also the work of occult journalist Brad Steiger.)
Some bookmarked links are piling up, so let’s clear them away.
¶ Lee Morgan: What happens when a writing project turns mysteriously magical:
It wasn’t long before the story, its characters and underlying mythic themes came to life in very tangible ways for me. Not only did I start to dream about the characters who would inform me of what their ‘future’ should hold, but other friends dreamed about them and sometimes it wasn’t easy to tell if they were the character from the book or being ‘gloved’ by a spirit or god they were aligned to mythically in the book. The characters have become what is known in the western Occult tradition as “egregores’” or thought-forms.
¶ Via Forging the Sampo, a link to a post on “The Survival of Animism in Russia — and its Destruction in the West,” which, given the source, you know will focus on Finnic peoples,
¶ But never underestimate Russian xenophobia, now aligned with resurgent Orthodoxy, which has led, among other things, to the closing of the only Mari-language primary school that served this partly-Pagan nation.
¶ The list of polytheistic devotional books (and some Pagan SF) published by the Biblioteca Alexandrina continues to grow. I have one and should get a couple of others.
Two articles that seem to relate to each other.
1. Having gotten the majority of the book market through aggressive discounting, Amazon is (surprise) raising prices, although their prices on academic books are still often under the publisher’s list price.
Bruce Joshua Miller, president of Miller Trade Book Marketing, a Chicago firm representing university and independent presses, said he recently surveyed 18 publishers. “Fourteen responded and said that Amazon had over the last few years either lowered discounts on scholarly books or, in the case of older or slow-selling titles, completely eliminated them,” he said.
2. Google, Facebook, and Twitter want to create “closed gardens” for their users, as America Online, Compuserve, etc. tried to do twenty years ago. You go to the site, and you stay there. Hence Google’s elimination of Google Reader: RSS and Atom feeds are free, low-maintenance, and don’t make money.
Google Reader is just the latest casualty of the war that Facebook started, seemingly accidentally: the battle to own everything.While Google did technically “own” Reader and could make some use of the huge amount of news and attention data flowing through it, it conflicted with their far more important Google+ strategy: they need everyone reading and sharing everything through Google+ so they can compete with Facebook for ad-targeting data, ad dollars, growth, and relevance.
RSS represents the antithesis of this new world: it’s completely open, decentralized, and owned by nobody, just like the web itself. It allows anyone, large or small, to build something new and disrupt anyone else they’d like because nobody has to fly six salespeople out first to work out a partnership with anyone else’s salespeople.
How did I miss this? Embarrassing moments in book cover design.
Items that deserve more commentary, but are not getting it today:
• From MIT Technology Review: When we read books on paper, do we retain more than when we read on a screen?
• Re-creating the sound of ancient musical instruments, sometimes with synthesizers.
• A review of Apocalyptic Witchcraft, from Scarlet Imprint.
• At The Journal of Hofstadr Hearth, Alfarrin rethinks the blot in terms of Neolithic and Paleolithic, Aesir and Vanir, reciprocity and sharing. With a big shout-out to Paul Shepard!
• Related issues here at “Heathens in the Military: An Interview with Josh and Cat Heath, Part One,” at the Norse Mythology Blog.
Modern Pagan and Native Faith Movements in Central and Eastern Europe, edited by Kaarina Aitamurto and Scott Simpson, has now been released in hardcover. (No paperback edition appears to be coming in the near future.)
You can read the complete table of contents and see ordering information at Acumen
Publishing’s website.
Also being released in June — Pop Pagans: Pagans and Popular Music, with contributions from some of the people on my blogroll, I am happy to say.
The same publishing arrangement applies, one of the reasons that my series co-editor and I said farewell to Acumen.
Maybe if I had a bookish teenage daughter I would know this, but the boarding-school-for-vampires (etc.) genre has exploded.
Here is a typical cover blurb:
Two years after a horrible incident made them run away, vampire princess Lissa and her guardian-in-training Rose are found and returned to St. Vladimir’s Academy, where one focuses on mastering magic, the other on physical training, while both try to avoid the perils of gossip, cliques, gruesome pranks, and sinister plots.
Margot Adler and I were discussing vampire books about four years ago, when her quest to read them all had passed ninety titles. Cradle-Marxist that she is, she was trying to understand the vampire craze as being somehow a critique of capitalism.
I don’t think so—and definitely not in the Young Adult classification. Check out this list of suggested titles, linked from a website of a public library near me.
It could be more work for Joseph Laycock, the go-to guy in religious studies for vampire-ology, but he has moved on to otherkin, of which more anon.
Freelance journalist Nate Thayer’s blog post about his experience with The Atlantic has made some waves.
In short, Thayer was pretty annoyed when Olga Khazan, an Atlantic editor, asked him to re-write a piece published elsewhere for The Atlantic — for free. Thayer reproduced their email exchange, which included him reminding her that “exposure” does not pay any bills:
I am a professional journalist who has made my living by writing for 25 years and am not in the habit of giving my services for free to for profit media outlets so they can make money by using my work and efforts by removing my ability to pay my bills and feed my children. I know several people who write for the Atlantic who of course get paid. I appreciate your interest, but, while I respect the Atlantic, and have several friends who write for it, I have bills to pay and cannot expect to do so by giving my work away for free to a for profit company so they can make money off of my efforts.
Then a more senior editor, Alexis Madrigal, got involved, feeling Thayer’s pain but explaining how, gosh, publishing is in a tough spot and he just doesn’t have any budget for freelancers, even as he wanders the halls and ponders the magazine’s past glories
If I open up one of our musty tomes at the office, I can get sucked in for an hour just looking at the ads, or marveling at the eloquence of W.E.B. DuBois. When I look back at old Ta-Nehisi posts or see Fallows in the halls, I can get emotional. I was watching Ken Burns’ National Parks documentary, and he notes, offhandedly, how stories that ran in our magazine helped preserve Yosemite for future generations.
Commenters saw it differently:
I just love reading lengthy self-justifications from people who have full-time jobs taking other people’s work for free.
And
Congratulations: you’ve made your magazine’s arrogant, sorry-not-sorry half-apology and made it into a full out non-apology. The amazing thing is that you think you’re articulating a defense of the profound self-worship of The Atlantic, when actually, you’re engaging in it.
A lot of the comments does engage the money issue in intelligent ways, so if you are trying to write for money, it’s worth reading them.