Friday's Folklore Roundup

It may appear that I only do Folklore Friday on every third Friday of every third month. But that is not true. I sometimes post it on a Thursday. It's half-assed, I know, but I ain't getting paid for it or anything. So enjoy, my three readers!

• The Pennsylvania German Folklore Society of Ontario celebrate their 60th anniversary this year. If there is one thing I love to read about, it is the migration pattern of Germans. I knew about the Pennsylvania German settlements down the Shenandoah Valley, but I did not know that they went North as well. I wish the society another successful sixty years!
• As I type this, the AFS meeting is going on at Indiana University. Back when I was a lowly graduate student I never made it to one of those meetings, but I reveled in hearing my mentor tell me stories about who was drunk at the bar during the meetings. Henry Glassie is giving the keynote this year. I should iterate that Prof. Glassie was never reported as drunk. In fact, I had the honor of being introduced to him by my mentor. It was like meeting a Beatle.
• The JAFL has recently posted a not-too-glowing review of the book "African American Folktales."
• Are you at the AFS meeting? Then tomorrow you can assert folklore's relevancy by attending the discussion of Occupy Wall Street hosted by Jason Baird Jackson and Christina Barr. I spent some time the other day at Occupy Boston and was moved to tears by some of the signs (a folk art if ever I saw one).
• I think the headline says it all: "Materials from AFS Undergraduate Education Project Available." Click if you're interested in that sort of thing - you probably are if you've read this far. I really liked the well-written and well-thought out comment from Robert Bethke. Doesn't he know that the comment sections on websites are for trolling and snark, not intelligent discussion.
• If I was at the AFS meeting, this is the poster I would check out first.
• Lithuanian-American folklorist Jonas Balys has passed away.
• Banjoist Wade Mainer has also passed on.

Exelsior!

Hey, here are some folklore books

Time for the round-up of folklore books appearing this month. I wants to read them all, I tells you.

• Living Folklore, 2nd Edition: An Introduction to the Study of People and Their Traditions - Martha Sims and Martine Stephens. Utah State University Press. "Living Folklore moves beyond genres and classifications, and encourages students who are new to the field to see the study of folklore as a unique approach to understanding people, communities, and day-to-day artistic communication."
• Through the Schoolhouse Door: Folklore, Community, Curriculum - ed. by Paddy Bowman and Lynne Hamer. Paperback edition, Utah State University Press. "Through the Schoolhouse Door offers a collection of experiences from exemplary school programs and the analysis of an expert group of folklorists and educators who are dedicated not only to getting students out the door and into their communities to learn about the folk culture all around them but also to honoring the culture teachers and students bring to the classroom."
• Tama in Japanese Myth: A Hermeneutical Study of Ancient Japanese Divinity - Tomoko Iwasawa. University Press of America. "Informed by phenomenological hermeneutics, Iwasawa shows that the concept of tama lies at the core of Japanese religious experiences."
• Supernatural Youth: The Rise of the Teen Hero in Literature and Popular Culture - ed. by Jes Battis. Lexington Books. ". . .addresses the role of adolescence in fantastic media, adventure stories, cinema, and television aimed at youth. The goal of this volume is to analyze the ways in which young heroic protagonists are presented in such popular literary and visual texts."
• Wise Woman of Kildare: Moll Anthony and Popular Tradition in East of Ireland - Erin Kraus. Paperback, Maynooth Studies in Local History, Four Courts Press. "Moll Anthony of the Red Hill was a woman who allegedly had supernatural powers which enabled her to make potions which could cure paralysis, fits, strokes and other sicknesses in humans and animals. It was said she got the gift from the fairies."
• Literature and Literary Bundle RC: Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion - Jack Zipes. Paperback, Routledge Classics. Woo-Hoo, I love this book (especially the section on Disney) and I love Jack Zipes! "As Jack Zipes convincingly shows in this classic work, fairy tales have always been a powerful discourse, capable of being used to shape or destabilize attitudes and behavior within culture. How and why did certain authors try to influence children or social images of children?"
• Food for the Dead: On the Trail of New Englands Vampires - Michael E. Bell. Paperback, Wesleyan. From PW's 2001 review: "Bell strives laudably for responsible scholarship, and the book is as much a critique of myth transmission as it is a tale of one man's vampire hunt."
• The Sea Their Graves: An Archaeology of Death and Rememberence in Maritime Culture - David J. Stewart. New Perspectives on Maritime History and Nautical Archaeology, University Press of Florida. "Based on a study of more than 2,100 gravestones and monuments in North America and the United Kingdom erected between the seventeenth and late twentieth centuries, David Stewart expands the use of nautical archaeology into terrestrial environments."
• The Native Tribes of South-East Australia - Alfred William Howitt. Paperbac, Cambridge Library Collection - Linguistics, Cambridge University Press. "A. W. Howitt's classic two-volume study, first published in 1904, investigates the organisation, practices and customs of the indigenous peoples he encounterd during his forty years exploring Australia."
• Codex Chimalpopoca: The Text in Nahuatl with a Glossary and Grammatical Notes - John Bierhorst. Paperback, University of Arizona Press. "In this companion volume to History and Mythology of the Aztecs, John Bierhorst provides specialists with a transcription f the Nahuatl text, keyed to the translation, and a linguistic apparatus to help elucidate it."

With this latest blogpost, I proof, yet again, that blogging ain't writing!