Beware the Idles of March

Yeah, I'm lazy. It's taken me three weeks to get around to updating the March batch of folklore arrivals in your bookstores. If I were to find a bookstore well-stocked enough to have all of these titles, I just might have to move in!

• Myths, Legends & Heroes: Essays on Old Norse and Old English Literature - Daniel Anlezark, ed. Part of TONIS: Toronto Old Norse-Icelandic Series. This is a festschrift for the professor John McKinnell of Durham.
• The First Fossil Hunters: Dinosaurs, Mammoths, and Myths in Greek and Roman Times - Adrienne Mayor. A study of mythological stories as recognition that monsters once did roam the earth.
• The Columbia Anthology of Chinese Folk and Popular Literature - Victor H. Mair & Mark Bender, eds.
• Blood Will Tell: Vampires as Political Metaphors Before World War I - Sara Libby Robinson. From the series Out of the Series.
• The Myths of the Gods: Structures in Irish Mythology - Alan Ward.
• The Mute Immortals Speak: Pre-Islamic Poetry and the Poetics of Ritual Myth - Suzanne Pinckney Stetkevych. Cornell University Press's series "Myth and Poetics." A study of the Bedouin poetic cycle the 'qasidah,' which has long served as a profane parallel to the Qur'an.
• The Ravenous Hyenas and the Wounded Sun: Myth and Ritual in Ancient India - Stephanie Jamison. Paperback edition, which is also from the Cornell series "Myth and Poetics."
• Monsters of the Gevaudan: The Making of a Beast - Jay M. Smith. In the 1760s in rural France, a legendary beast terrorized the local population, this is the story of the legend and the facts.
• Tracking the Chupacabra: The Vampire Beast in Fact, Fiction and Folklore - Benjamin Radford. A study of a more recent monster.
• Myths and Legends of Ancient Greece and Rome - E. M. Berens.
• The Essential Asian Folklore Collection - Various. Well, it does say 'essential,' so it better be on your shelf soon! :)
• Folklore and Legends of Rochester: The Mystery of Hoodoo Corner and Other Tales - Michael Keene.
• Gentlemen and Amazons: The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory, 1861-1900 - Cynthia Eller.
• The Oldest Irish Tradition: A Window on the Iron Age - Kenneth Hurlstone Jackson. Reprint of the 1964 Rede Lecture.
• Dostoevsky and the Russian People - Linda Ivanits. I saw Prof. Ivanits give a guest lecture on Dostoevsky and Turgenev in grad school, and I found myself disagreeing wholeheartedly with the premise of her lecture. However, she did write one of the greatest books on Russian folklore, so this book is still a must-buy! (I think the Rusalka on the cover of "Russian Folk Belief" would make a kick-ass tattoo!)
• You Did What in the Ditch?: Folklore of the American Quilter - John L. Oldani.

As an aside, if you are ever in the Boston area, these used bookstores have a pretty good selection of academic folklore: McIntyre & Moore, Brattle Books and Commonwealth Used Books (both locations). Always worth checking these stores out.

Folklore Friday

Why folklore on Friday? The alliteration, silly. And I have Fridays off from my day job.

• Vadim Rossman discusses how contemporary Russian anti-semitic writers are using misinterpretations of Russian folklore - in particular overplaying the role of the "Khazar Yoke" in Russian history - in an article entitled "Discussion of Gumilev's Theory By Russian Nationalists" from the collection "Russia Between East and West." I particularly appreciated the analysis of the bylina "Ilya Muromets and the Yid," which I had either previously overlooked or had never seen before (you know, because of the Jews!).
• Are you a student and/or a scholar? There are a bunch of prizes up for grabs! The Richard Reuss prize is awarded to the best paper on the history of folklore studies. The Raphael Patai Prize in Jewish Folklore and Ethnology is for the best unpublished paper in said field. The deadlines are approaching!
• It's a couple of months old, but the wonderful blog New England Folklore has an interesting post about the Loup-Garou!
• I wrote my master's thesis on jazz narrative in the prose of Toni Morrison and Vassily Aksenov. Imagine my delight when I stumbled upon this book that combines my love of Toni Morrison and folklore! This blurb from the site is a ton more succinct than I can ever be:

  • Forms of rhetorical indirection that appear in the context of folklore, such as signifying practices, masking, sly civility, and the grotesque or bizarre, come out of the mouths and actions of these writers' magical and magisterial characters. Old traditions can offer new ways of discussing issues such as sexual expression, religious beliefs, or issues of reproduction. As differences between times and cultures affect what "can" and "cannot" be said, folkloric indirection may open up a vista to discourses of which we as readers may not even be aware. Finally, the folk women of Morrison, Ní Dhuibhne, Hurston, and Lavin open up new points of entry to the discussion of fiction, rhetoric, censorship, and folklore.
    

Alan Lomax on Fresh Air

I am as far behind in my podcast listening as I am to updating this blogarooni. A few months ago Fresh Air re-broadcast Terry Gross's interview with Alan Lomax.

It was a pretty good interview - I am a fan of Ms. Gross's interview style. While not the infamous Gene Simmons interview, they did touch upon some controversy.

Terry Gross calls Lomax out on attaching his name to Ledbelly's (and others') songs. In my opinion, his answer reeks of disingenuity. It makes me wonder if anyone has seriously reproached Pete Seeger for his copyright shenanigans. I've had some professors really express a dislike for Seeger (and other popularizers of so-called folk music). It might be more reflective of the split between academia and the artist - artists make money by performing and actually creating and academics make their money by commenting and babbling on about someone else's work.

Check out the full NPR interview here.