Eric O. Scott
@ericoscott
Raised by Witches. Mostly writes about Paganism. Union thug, technically a doctor, editor at The Wild Hunt:
26. The Táin, Ciaran Carson Oddly, despite my love of mythological epics, I'd never read this one. It's a banger, full of high tragedy and more than a little low comedy. Need to look into ancient Irish attitudes toward homosexuality because the Cú Chullain/Fer Diad chapter feels quite homoerotic.)
25. Early Irish Myths and Sagas, translated by Jeffrey Gantz I'm not sure it was a good idea in retrospect to listen to this book chock full of unfamiliar Irish names as an audiobook. I'm definitely not sure it was a good idea to listen to it at 1.5x speed.
Does anyone have a photo or a reference to the statue this Sacred Source statue of Lugh is based on? Their website just says "Berlin Staatliche Museum, c. 100 CE," but I haven't been able to find anything on their website. (Granted, my total lack of German might be a factor there.)
mfw I switch to a badgermole cub deck and immediately start climbing the ladder.
24. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce I feel the same way about this as I do about Pet Sounds - I recognize how revolutionary it was in historical terms, but it's just not that appealing to me in isolation. I'm glad Joyce later realized that he was at heart a comedic writer.
23. Common Sense, Thomas Paine Maybe this doesn't count as a whole book, but whatever, I read it for the 4th of July while slamming as many different covers of Tom Paine's Bones as I could. Paine is the only good founding father (and even then he says some questionable shit.)
22. Voodoo: Past and Present, Ron Bodin Not a fan of this one! There are some pretty interesting primary sources included in here that I think are useful, but the actual essay up front recapitulates a primitivist image of Voodoo that I thought had dried up by the 1950s.
21. Foundling Fathers, @megelison.bsky.social I am not exactly an unbiased reader, but: 'tis a banger. Get one for yourself, your mom, and your friend who is suspiciously into cottagecore.
20. Dubliners, James Joyce I've read (and taught) this one several times before, but I wanted to reacquaint myself with Jim before our trip to Ireland. It is, of course, a masterpiece. The Dead remains tied in my canon of the best short stories in the language with Baldwin's Sonny's Blues.
19. The Odyssey, Homer (Emily Wilson) It's been about 20 years since I read the Fagles translation; this one reminded me of just how little space the episodes we think of as "the odyssey" take up in the poem. Wilson's translation struck me as a little too economical, but the apparatus is great.
18. Black Magic: Religion and the African American Conjuring Tradition, Yvonne P. Chireau I am glad I read this one, even if it wasn't precisely related to my research interest. Chireau offers a lot of insight into how Conjure and Christianity coexist within Black American culture.
17. Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver, Mary Oliver The collection makes the interesting decision to order the poems new to old, so one works through her career backwards. I started to see certain formulae repeating, but I still found myself putting stars by many lines.
16. Voodoo: An African American Religion, Jeffrey E. Anderson Fantastic - extremely readable overview of what is known about Voodoo in the Mississippi River valley, from New Orleans to St. Louis. Argues Voodoo died out in the 1940s and today's is a reconstruction - fascinating to me as a Heathen.
15. Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global, @laurainparis.bsky.social As a failed philologist, I'm fascinated by Proto-Indo-European, and this is a strong narrative account of how its children spread. Especially liked the historiography; wish there was more about the comparative method.
14. The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot, @robgmacfarlane.bsky.social Not quite as cohesive as Is a River Alive?, but perhaps that's meaningful - like footpaths, the prose snakes and meanders, guiding the reader to one unexpected wonder after another. Obviously I love the bits about pilgrimage.
Thank you for the biggest laugh I've had all week, @basicmountain.bsky.social.
That's a song I've heard literally hundreds of times before; I'm a proud St. Louis boy and The Great 28 was one of the first CDs I ever owned. But it wasn't until I listened to it in this context that I had the conscious thought...
Although the title says that the theme is "Voodoo," modern commentators would likely read most of these songs as more "Hoodoo" (though as the book I'm currently reading notes, the "Voodoo/Hoodoo" distinction was not nearly as clear historically as we talk about it today.)