You learn something new every day.

Theoretically.

Here are some random pictures of weird witchy Salem stuff:

Holy! My blog got quoted in the September 7, 2007 print edition of the Chronicle of Higher Education. I’m not sure how long the google cache will last, but let’s hope forever!

Incidentally, this is the post that was quoted on the topic of Mitt Romney, the occult history of Mormonism, and the American double standard when it comes to faiths founded in the New World.

Digging through a pile of unread books, I uncovered a copy of Charles R. Cross’s Heavier Than Heaven: A Biography of Curt Kobain (2001). I bought this because a review in The New Yorker made it seem like there was a lot of depth. There isn’t. Sometimes a dead rockstar is just a dead rockstar.

However! Heavier Than Heaven is marked by the best/worst first paragraph I’ve ever read. And I’ve read (the first page) of John Cowper Powys’s A Glastonbury Romance.

Here we go:

“The first time he saw heaven came exactly six hours and fifty-seven minutes after the very moment an entire generation fell in love with him. It was, remarkably, his first death, and only the earliest of many little deaths that would follow. For the generation smitten with him, it was an impassioned, powerful,and blinding devotion–the kind of love that even as it begins you know is preordained to break your heart and end like a Greek tragedy.”

Wow!