The Witching Well

It’s going to be a long, sad day for me today. I just heard that we lost Dave Cockrum this past weekend.

When I first started reading comic books, I couldn’t have named a single comic book artist (or writer for that matter). I was too young to realize that real people actually made the books that my brother and I spent as much time fighting over as reading.

But years before I even knew his name, Dave Cockrum had a huge impact on my life. Because Dave Cockrum was one of the team that revamped the X-Men in 1975.

Simply put, I hold Dave Cockrum responsible for my first ever crush on a fictional character. I was ten when Giant-Sized X-Men #1 came out. I took one look at Nightcrawler — the pointy-eared, three-fingered teleporter with the German accent and the prehensile tail — and I was doomed. A decade later, when I was dating the man who later became my husband, he used to joke that Kurt was his biggest competition. And he was right.

And anyone who’s known me for any length of time knows that I’m still a squealing fangirl when it comes to the fuzzy elf. I’m pathetically grateful to Cockrum for inventing the original concept, and to DC for not seeing enough in those early sketches to add that proto-character to the Legion of Superheroes, and to Marvel for realizing he belonged in the X-Men.

Without Dave Cockrum and his art, my life would have been less joyful. So, though I never met the man, I mourn his passing. Rest well, Dave.

Our house is, according to Google Maps, 1.3 miles from the site of this explosion yesterday morning. Yes, it woke us up. No, there wasn’t any damage in our neighborhood.

Andy says his first thought was that our house had been struck by lightning. I thought it just sounded like a big thump; I didn’t even feel the vibration — but then I’m a much heavier sleeper than my husband. We looked out the window and listened for a moment, and when nothing else happened, we went back to sleep.

Two hours later, I got up and discovered that our interior porch door had been blown open into the hallway, and our kitchen door (across from it) was open, too. Man, was our kitchen cold! (Yes, I know, we should lock the door at night, but I’m hardly worried about intruders, as we have a sizable and protective dog.)

Honestly, I didn’t think much about it. The porch door is old and doesn’t really latch at all, and the kitchen door is old and sometimes doesn’t catch completely — the dog can push it open with his nose more often than not. I assumed the boom I had heard was just a sudden gust of wind slamming the doors open. It had never happened before, in the five years we’ve been here, but it wasn’t inconceivable.

It wasn’t until Andy was up and turned on the news that we found out what had happened (which explains why I didn’t blog this yesterday). All I can say is thank the Gods no one was killed.

The rumor mill has been grinding this one for a few days, but I may start believing it, now that IMDB is reporting it: Christopher Eccleston will be appearing on Heroes. No one will confirm it, of course, but the Whovian fanbase is obviously hoping that he’s been cast as the elusive and twisted serial killer, Syler.

Thank the great god Balki! You’re finished! You scored 25 out of a possible 30 Accuracy Points, and you earned an extra 10 Bonus Points!

The Think you remember the 80’s? Test written by jahazarak on OkCupid Free Online Dating, home of the The Dating Persona Test.

It’s been ages since I did a Witches Weekly.

When did you first realize that the pagan path was for you?

I started questing at a pretty young age. My parents raised me Catholic, but were very encouraging of my curiosity about other religions. Maybe that’s because Mom was raised Methodist, but her mother was originally Lutheran and her father Catholic. Or maybe it was that Dad was non-practising himself, though he took my brother and me to Mass when Mom couldn’t.

I’d read the entire Man, Myth & Magic encyclopedia by the time I was 12. I was especially fascinated by the articles on European magical traditions, from folk magic to the Golden Dawn. And growing up in Salem, Massachusetts, attending the same junior high school as Laurie Cabot’s daughter Penny, I was exposed early on to Wicca. Or at least to the existence of Wicca. From what I’d read in MM&M, though, it seemed to me that Witches did an awful lot of naked dancing, and I wasn’t so interested in that.

So I leaned toward Golden Dawn-style ceremonial magick first. I guess its Qabalistic roots and Judeo-Christian overtones made it a good intermediate stage for me. I didn’t have to let go of my early monotheism but I could explore the magickal nature of the universe. I read Eliphas Levi, Israel Regardie, and Dion Fortune. I devoured the poetry of W.B. Yeats. I even attempted to slog through Aleister Crowley’s Magick in Theory and Practice in high school. I learned the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram.

Eventually, though, the lack of a real feminine divine in all of this wore me down. Somewhere deep down inside, I knew that God was not exclusively male nor sexless nor manifest in only one form. And I was rapidly coming to the conclusion that the physical aspects of the world were not necessarily an impediment to spirituality, something to divest oneself of in the quest to “ascend” to enlightenment; that the dualities that monotheistic symbolism was rife with didn’t always line up for me the way they were supposed to. So I thought maybe I just wasn’t spiritually cut out for a magickal path.

And then I happened to pick up a copy of Margot Adler’s Drawing Down the Moon. And I discovered that there was a lot more to Wicca than I’d previously thought. And that there were more flavors of modern Paganism out there than I had ever dreamed. Which got me exploring again and eventually put my feet on my current eclectic path.

Yes, another book meme. This one I picked up from Twenty Sided. (The intend-to-read category is my own addition.)

In 2005, Time magazine picked the 100 best English-language novels. Mark the selections you have read in bold. If you liked it, add a star (*) in front of the title; if you didn’t, give it a minus (-). If you feel totally indifferent or just can’t remember, give it a question mark (?). If you haven’t read it but intend to, mark it with a plus (+). Then, put the total number of books you’ve read in the subject line.

The Adventures of Augie March - Saul Bellow
All the King’s Men - Robert Penn Warren
American Pastoral - Philip Roth
An American Tragedy - Theodore Dreiser
*Animal Farm - George Orwell
Appointment in Samarra - John O’Hara
Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret - Judy Blume
The Assistant - Bernard Malamud
At Swim-Two-Birds - Flann O’Brien
Atonement - Ian McEwan
Beloved - Toni Morrison
The Berlin Stories - Christopher Isherwood
+The Big Sleep - Raymond Chandler
The Blind Assassin - Margaret Atwood
Blood Meridian - Cormac McCarthy
Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
The Bridge of San Luis Rey - Thornton Wilder
Call It Sleep - Henry Roth
*Catch-22 - Joseph Heller
*The Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger
*A Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess
The Confessions of Nat Turner - William Styron
The Corrections - Jonathan Franzen
The Crying of Lot 49 - Thomas Pynchon
A Dance to the Music of Time - Anthony Powell
The Day of the Locust - Nathanael West
Death Comes for the Archbishop - Willa Cather
A Death in the Family - James Agee
The Death of the Heart - Elizabeth Bowen
Deliverance - James Dickey
Dog Soldiers - Robert Stone
Falconer - John Cheever
The French Lieutenant’s Woman - John Fowles
The Golden Notebook - Doris Lessing
Go Tell it on the Mountain - James Baldwin
Gone With the Wind - Margaret Mitchell
The Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
Gravity’s Rainbow - Thomas Pynchon
*The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
A Handful of Dust - Evelyn Waugh
The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter - Carson McCullers
The Heart of the Matter - Graham Greene
Herzog - Saul Bellow
Housekeeping - Marilynne Robinson
A House for Mr. Biswas - V.S. Naipaul
I, Claudius - Robert Graves
Infinite Jest - David Foster Wallace
+Invisible Man - Ralph Ellison
Light in August - William Faulkner
+The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe - C.S. Lewis
?Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
*Lord of the Flies - William Golding
**The Lord of the Rings - J.R.R. Tolkien
Loving - Henry Green
Lucky Jim - Kingsley Amis
The Man Who Loved Children - Christina Stead
Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
Money - Martin Amis
The Moviegoer - Walker Percy
Mrs. Dalloway - Virginia Woolf
+Naked Lunch - William Burroughs
Native Son - Richard Wright
+Neuromancer - William Gibson
Never Let Me Go - Kazuo Ishiguro
*1984 - George Orwell
+On the Road - Jack Kerouac
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest - Ken Kesey
The Painted Bird - Jerzy Kosinski
Pale Fire - Vladimir Nabokov
A Passage to India - E.M. Forster
Play It As It Lays - Joan Didion
+Portnoy’s Complaint - Philip Roth
Possession - A.S. Byatt
The Power and the Glory - Graham Greene
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie - Muriel Spark
Rabbit, Run - John Updike
Ragtime - E.L. Doctorow
The Recognitions - William Gaddis
*Red Harvest - Dashiell Hammett
Revolutionary Road - Richard Yates
The Sheltering Sky - Paul Bowles
*Slaughterhouse-Five - Kurt Vonnegut
+Snow Crash - Neal Stephenson
The Sot-Weed Factor - John Barth
The Sound and the Fury - William Faulkner
The Sportswriter - Richard Ford
The Spy Who Came in From the Cold - John le Carré
The Sun Also Rises - Ernest Hemingway
Their Eyes Were Watching God - Zora Neale Hurston
Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe
*To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
To the Lighthouse - Virginia Woolf
Tropic of Cancer - Henry Miller
Ubik - Philip K. Dick
Under the Net - Iris Murdoch
Under the Volcano - Malcolm Lowry
**Watchmen - Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons
White Noise - Don DeLillo
White Teeth - Zadie Smith
Wide Sargasso Sea - Jean Rhys

I actually wasn’t going to to do this meme, but then I saw Watchmen on the list, and I just had to. Yay for the folks at Time, for realizing that graphic novels can be as important/meaningful/enjoyable as prose-only novels!

And I thought I was unproductive with my free time lately!

Check this out.

Scarfed from rabidsamfan.

Now that there will no longer be a Republican majority in the House, Donald Rumsfeld has the good sense to run like hell. Unfortunately, Bush’s nominee to replace him is probably going to be just as bad. I say this mainly because, well, Bush picked him. I seriously doubt that anyone that Dubya would nominate would do anything but what he’s told. No one inside the White House has the sense, or the courage, or the humanity needed to speak truth to power.

In other words, I’m thrilled Rummy’s leaving, but I’m not holding my breath waiting for any real improvement.

Massachusetts just elected its first black governor, and is first Democratic governor in what seems like millenia. We also voted “no” on all three ballot questions, two of which I voted “yes” for.

And now, I don’t have to listen to any more reorded messages from the Kerry Healey campaign about how Deval Patrick will give “special rights” to illegal immigrants. One of the priviledges of being an unenrolled voter is both major parties think I’m a potential swing vote — which I most definitely am not. The only reason I’m not a registered Democrat is that they generally aren’t liberal enough.

Nationally, it looks like the Dems have gained 29 seats in the House and 5 in the Senate. At least, that’s what the Boston Globe is reporting at this hour.

And 5 states appear to have voted to ban gay marriage. Which saddens and angers me to no end, because you would think this country had had enough tyranny of the majority back during the fight for black civil rights. But, no. Gays are the new blacks, and it’s still socially acceptable to push them to the back of the bus.