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Posts tagged ‘Place’

  1. Book Review: Chernobyl: A Stalkers’ Guide

    I was 26 when the Chernobyl disaster occurred, and I well remember my feeling of horror and incredulity as the scraps of information filtered through and friends speculated what effects it might have on the magic mushroom season that year. I grew up in the shadow of the bomb – the three-minute warning, “Protect and Survive” and the War Game. Many of us had half-expected something like Chernobyl was only a matter of time. Over the years I’ve become fascinated with Chernobyl, its history and the mythologies it has spawned. I have spent hundreds of hours exploring the virtual simulacra of the Zone in the S.T.A.L.K.E.R trilogy of games and the two free mods, Lost Alpha and StalkerSoup. These games owe as much to Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s 1972 novel “Roadside Picnic” and Andrei Tarkovsky’s haunting film “Stalker” as they do to any real events, but if there is any place on earth where the borders of the real and the imaginary might collapse, it is Chernobyl. Continue reading »

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  2. Announcement: Old stones and ancient bones, poems from the hollow hills

    oldstonescoverGordon MacLellan, writer, storyteller, environmental artist and occasional contributor to enfolding.org has just published a new book of poems: “Old stones and ancient bones, poems from the hollow hills”. Inspired by visits to prehistoric sites, old quarries and other wanderings, these poems move from the Orkneys to Derbyshire, inviting the reader to enter a world of chambered tombs; kelpie-haunted streams and faerie rings.

    Old stones and ancient bones, poems from the hollow hills is available from Lulu or Amazon uk, priced £8.

    More about Gordon’s work and the book at Creeping Toad

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  3. Book review: Counter-Tourism: the Handbook

    Here is a treat for anyone who has wandered round a historic site, bored by the expected and provided routes and interpretations. Counter-Tourism by Crab Man (Triarchy Press 2012) is a challenge, an invitation and a license for the gentle naughtiness of doing the unexpected thing. Continue reading »

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  4. Book review: The Wanton Green

    The Wanton Green A key feature of contemporary Paganism is our relationship to place. Curiously though, there seems to be little in the way of in-depth exploration from within the Pagan community of how we make and sustain our relationships with places, nor of place-making as a social or political practice. There are some excellent scholarly books examining place-making – such as Corinne G. Dempsy’s Bringing the Sacred Down to Earth: Adventures in Comparative Religion (which I reviewed
    back in July) and Adrian Ivakhiv’s Claiming Sacred Ground: Pilgrims and Politics at Glastonbury and Sedona which argues that “sacred spaces” are heterotopic – where meaning is created, contested, and negotiated by different groups. Hopefully, The Wanton Green (Mandrake Books, Oxford, 2011, 222pp, p/bk) – an anthology of contemporary Pagan writing on our relationships with places – will inspire further explorations of Pagan approaches to place-making. Continue reading »

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