Doubt is the magic killer

On By Malcolm R. CampbellIn magic2 Comments

“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”

― Frank Herbert, Dune

I agreed with a lot of the sentiments in Dune. I also extrapolated upon them.

I tend to think we create wherever it is we’re going. If fear is a mind-killer, then I step forward from that thought and think that doubt is also a mind-killer. I’m not against being prepared–as we were taught in the Boy Scouts. Yet, I can’t help but think time spent with negative negative concerns such as fear and doubt is not an example of being prepared. Instead, those repeated concerns not only demonstrate to the universe we have no confidence in what we’re doing (praying, casting a spell, intuiting a situation far away, transmitting healing energies), they also create the very conditions our fear and the doubt are focused upon.

Experts in the I Ching, the book of changes that many use for divination, point out that doing the same reading twice because you doubt the first answer you received will often bring a chiding response from the oracle. I’ve seen that happen. I’ve also seen it happen with Tarot cards.

If I send (serve as a channel for) healing energy multiple times to help a sick friend, what does the second time say about the first and what does the third time say about the first two times? I believe it suggests that we doubt our ability to allow a flow of energy or that we wonder if the first energy we sent knew what it was doing.

Prayer is like that, too, I think. If we ask God on Monday for a certain thing, what’s the result of asking God for the same thing on Tuesday? Does it mean we think She/He didn’t hear us on Monday? Perhaps we are suggesting She/He was too stupid on Monday to know what we were talking about, so we have to offer a wordy explanation on Tuesday? Or, maybe we think God screwed up so we need to give Him/Her another chance to get it right.  Out worst doubt is negating our best efforts.

In conjure, we say that when you cast a spell, don’t look back. Why would one look back anyway? There’s no reason to look back unless one thinks s/he crewed up the spell the first time. The double whammy here is that thinking one screwed up the spell only serves to screw up the spell. As in, say, foot track magic, the magic isn’t just the powder one places in the path of the intended target, it’s his/her intentions for that powder. Looking back weakens your intentions.

I’ve seen people fail when trying to use the law of attraction, first because they say they are trying to use it rather than using it, and second, because after their positive affirmations, they go through the rest of the day filled with doubts and other negative thoughts. If one works to attract money and then worries about getting evicted from his/her apartment for non-payment of the rent, the negative thought becomes a stronger affirmation than the positive thought.

The worst that can come of all this doubt is that one ends up believing prayers and magic and positive thinking don’t work. Oh, they always work. It’s just that one’s lack of belief has become the strongest spell they are using.

–Malcolm

Malcolm R. Campbell writes novels about magic.

 

 

 

 

 

Hoodoo Herbs: Cloves

On By Malcolm R. CampbellIn conjure
Most of us see them like this at the grocery,

If you’re a cook, you’ve probably used cloves with baked beans, fish, chicken, squash, and a variety of desserts including gingerbread and chocolate cake. Monica Bhide, in the Seattle Times, wrote that “As I began to bake, I would do combinations of cinnamon and cloves for more flavor. I also like to pickle olives, and a small bunch of cloves in the pickling juice adds a wonderful earthy dimension of flavor. When I began barbecuing, I found that cloves added to barbecue rubs or sauces added a very nice depth of flavor.”

They’re dried flower buds, bitter when raw, that can be used ground or whole in cooking, often paired with cinnamon and cardamom. They’re very pungent and aromatic.

Health

Medicinally, cloves have been used to treat stress, inflammations including arthritis, toothaches, and carminative. Healthline notes they contain fiber, manganese, calcium and vitamin E and are high in antioxidants.

Conjure

Curio companies like Lucky Mojo sell cloves in ready-to-use packets.

My primary source is Hoodoo Herb and Root magic by catherine yronwode. She says that you’ll find cloves (Caryophyllus aromaticus) in friendship, money, and prosperity spells. Plus, if you press hold cloves into a red candle and burn it, you can stop your enemies from slandering you or gossiping. Crapshooters carry red mojo bags with retired dice, five-finger grass, cinnamon, Irish moss, cloves, thyme, and Hoyt’s cologne.

You can make friendship bags, according to Herbmagic.com by placing seven cloves in small bags and wearing them around your neck. For protection/cleaning, add them to a floor wash or a cleansing bath.

 

 

Wikipedia graphic

This post makes no guarantees about the medical or conjure uses of cloves, but simply presents them as traditional information for those interested in hoodoo.

—Malcolm

Florida Folk Magic Stories, a Kindle e-book, contains three novels and represents a savings over buying them separately.

 

 

 

 

My memoir would only be full of lies

On By Malcolm R. CampbellIn writing

This is the era of the memoir. That’s okay. Everyone has a story to tell. If you’re already famous, so much the better, especially when the real story includes sex, scandals, and heroics that the biographers and fan magazines missed.

I used to tell people I was raised by alligators near the town of Immokalee, Florida and that my dad, Papa Gator, was the inspiration for the section of road through the Everglades called Alligator Alley.

Surprisingly, few people thought this was true even though they appreciated the wisdom of Papa Gator and his attempts to gain respect from the snowbird northern tourists without having to sacrifice his eating habits. There’s no need to talk about that here because most of you would probably file those truths under Too Much Information.

In “real life” I was a college professor’s son in a middle-class brick house in a middle-class neighborhood. I delivered the morning newspaper, had a ham radio receiver and transmitter in my bedroom along with fresh water and salt water aquariums, and was an Eagle Scout. Where I “went wrong” was discovering that I could lie in such a way that people believed me, including my parents, teachers, pastors, and ladies of the evening whom we snuck into the church basement.

See, already you have here the basis for a successful lie. Looking at the previous sentence, most people will assume we snuck in hookers, while others will wonder if–inspire of the Oxford comma–we also snuck in parents, teachers, and pastors. I learned early on that successful lies needed to include enough verifiable facts to make them seem true along with certain areas of vagueness that were misleading. Case in point, when I told my parents I was going to swing by the library, they thought–as I knew they would–that I was actually going to go inside and study. I never said that but I was content with their view of my plans for the evening.

I didn’t like staying inside the house. So, during an evening when I said I was swinging by the library–which was the gospel truth of the matter–my 1954 Chevy and I were likely to be a hundred of miles away from home, usually following sandy roads through national forest lands and visiting places with multiple meanings in their names like the River Styx, Tate’s Hell Swamp, and Florida Garden of Eden.

A family friend wrote a popular book called The Other Florida about the state’s panhandle and I was determined to explore all of it. I thought I was simply getting away from it all. Little did I know I was inadvertently gathering facts and impressions about a series of conjure woman books I would one day write some fifty years in the future.

Of course, fiction and fact blur together. Such is my imagination. Is it a lie or is it fiction? When I write fiction, I always blur the lines between truth and myth, impressions and reality, and night and day. That’s who I am, and it grew out of the need I felt as a child to be secretive and to keep people from knowing who I was or where I was, and so it evolved into a writing style in the genres of magical realism, contemporary fantasy, and paranormal. Yes, I know, the who business might be an early sign of dementia.

This is clip art and not a drawing of anybody I knew. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

All this comes to mind because I’m working on a short story about a man who’s put in a rest home because his kids convince a judge he’s too eccentric to be left alone in his home where he’ll probably spend all the money they want to inherit on frivolous stuff. Not that I think my family would do that. But if they did, I’m sure they’d tell the judge that I think I was raised by alligators or that I snuck a hooker into the church basement.

Writers not only have to worry that their search history on their computer might one day be snagged by the FBI in an attempt to prove they did some hideous thing when, in fact, they were doing research for a book, but they (the writers) also have to worry about being put in a home when people figure out that the stories and novels they publish sound oddly similar to the lies they told their parents when they were kids.

My imagination has always ruled my thinking. It has taken precedence over logic and so-called verifiable facts. I justify my lies by pointing out that quantum mechanics tells us that what can happen, does happen. With that in mind, it’s impossible to tell a lie. Plus, if I appeared to be telling a lie–in “real life” or a memoir–I was simply working on the rough draft for a short story, novel, or alibi.

I suspect that most of my life actually happened. But as I grow older, I’m not sure how or where it happened. Papa Gator seems so real

—Malcolm

 

 

 

Slanted news isn’t news, it’s propaganda

On By Malcolm R. CampbellIn News and Issues

Those of you who’ve read this blog for years know that I was a journalist and a college journalism teacher as was my father before me. We grew up in another era, one in which opinion in a newspaper was confined to the editorial page. Those who wrote news stories were–as we said back then–supposed to leave their opinions at the door.

These days, it’s hard to find the truth because the major news outlets are biased in favor of Trump or those who oppose Trump. My wife and I–she was a newspaper reporter–have caught news outlets (AKA propaganda sheets) focused on both sides the aisle slanting the news. We watch an event or a speech live, and then the outlet reports it incorrectly, sometimes making up quotes that weren’t in the speech.

We saw on Facebook yesterday and today how damaging skewed news can be. Many of us were debating what appeared to be the taunting of an Indian elder in Washington, D.C. by a group from a Catholic school that was in town to speak out against abortion. Our first impression–based on how the news was reported–was that the school group verbally attacked others and was rather smug about it.

Today we learn that everything about the incident we thought we knew yesterday was wrong. That is, the news report made it appear that the school group verbally attacked the Indian when this was not what happened. In fact, the school group, who was already chanting after the formal end of their march, saw the Indian chanting, and when he came over to them, they thought he was chanting with them. They didn’t realize until they saw the news that the media viewed them as white kids making fun of a well-known Indian elder.

My initial perspective was that the kids had run amok and shouldn’t have been making fun of the Indian. Others used the incident as a springboard to criticizing the Catholic Church, suspecting that taunting the Indian was something the church believed in. Others said that since their kids were supposed to be representing a church school, they should not have worn the MAGA hats because they were in town to protest abortion and not as Trump supporters.

Even though the Catholic diocese has apologized to the elder, the media who put their agenda up as more important than the actual news should be the ones apologizing, both to the kids who were under fire for being white and conservative and to the readers for skewing the story so that it matched their political agenda.

The political arena is volatile enough these days without news outlets published biased reports. They think they are helping the political parties they agree with when, in fact, they are hurting the country. Journalists are supposed to present the facts and allow their readers to decide how they feel about what happened. Today’s media appear not to trust the readers because they hedge their bets by using propaganda rather than truth.

They are discounting all of us.

–Malcolm

 

Don’t assume your readers know what you know

On By Malcolm R. CampbellIn writing

Fiction writers often assume readers know what they know. Why wouldn’t they? For one thing, you might be older than your readers, so terms from thirty or forty years ago that make sense to you might have no impact on a 25-year old. For example, if I write that a character in a novel set in the 1950s made a station-to-station long distance call, that term is so long gone, few people will understand it today.

Ghost light. Wikipedia photo.

For another thing, your readers might live in another country. In the southern U.S., most of us grew up eating deep-fried cornbread balls called hushpuppies. Then, several chain restaurants that specialize in fish added these to their menus and the rest of the country became familiar with them. Yet, as a question from a reader of this blog indicates, this food is unknown in the U.K. She asked if I was talking about the brand of shoes named Hush Puppies. She hoped so because eating shoes seemed better than eating actual puppies.

Or, you might know a subject like the back of your hand and have no idea that some of its common terms aren’t that common to those who aren’t fans of that subject. A proofreader who was going through my recent short story about ghosts in an old theater stumbled over the term “ghost light.” I mentioned it in the story but didn’t define it. Was it an eerie light caused by a ghost or something else?

It was easy to change my sentence from “Bob put the ghost light on the stage” to “Bob brought out the ghost light, a bare bulb on a stand and turned it on.” I knew what they were because I’d seen people doing that in old movies about theaters and knew that the light served as a night light (for safety reasons) so that when the house lights were turned off, the place wouldn’t be pitch black. (One might trip over a set or fall into the orchestra pit.

According to an old superstition, theaters always have ghosts. This light gives them a welcome-lit stage of which to perform at night when the theater is closed.

I don’t particularly like slowing down a story and/or ruining the flow of the prose by describing objects or customs that I think ought to be clear to everyone–or, at least, clear within the context where they’re used. Yet, when a reader stalls on a word or phrase that’s important to the story, a parenthetical description is better than confusing a reader.

I’ve read enough British fiction to know that spotted dick is a suet and fruit pudding, not a man with a venereal disease and that cock a leeky is not a slang phrase for relieving oneself in the restroom, but a soup that includes chicken and leeks. The first time I saw those phrases, I thought they were crude jokes of some kind. There’s no problem with such phrases when they appear in the U.K. editions of a book, but in the U.S. editions, a bit of translation would help.

Okay, I missed “ghost light” in my short story, but more often than not I try to scan my work for words and phrases that might confuse or mislead the readers. And no, I’m not going to start using footnotes for them.

—Malcolm

The “Florida Folk Magic Stores” e-book includes the novels “Conjure Woman’s Cat,” “Eulalie and Washerwoman,” and “Lena” in one handy Kindle edition that costs you less than buying the novels separately.

 

This and that–because I don’t have a wonderful post for today

On By Malcolm R. CampbellIn Life
Not our real yard. Stole some clipart

I planned to take a car full of stuff to the recycling center this morning but the fog is so thick I can’t see the car.

 

Yes, I’ve used this graphic before!

A lot of my friends are taking Facebook vacations. Primarily, they’re getting tired of all the people posting duelingpolitical memes. Some people must not have jobs because their blogs are filled with links to news stories and essays for one party or the other. This stuff probably isn’t changing anyone’s opinion.

None of the ghosts in my book live in the outhouse.

I finished a book of short stories yesterday and sent the manuscript off to my publisher. They’re all ghost stories, some old, some new. We already have the cover ready. It was done last fall before my wife and I decided to take off for a week at Thanksgiving and see my daughter and her family in Maryland. We took side trips to Alexandria and Mt. Vernon. So, the book had to wait.

Most of the original cast members have moved on.

According to the news, the medical drama “Grey’s Anatomy” has not been on longer than the medical program “E.R.” which had the record for longevity up to now. As we watch “Grey’s Anatomy,” my wife and I wonder if real doctors and nurses: (a) race into linen closets and empty exam rooms and urgently rip each other’s clothes off several times a day for sex, and (b) talk about daycare, shopping, and their dating problems while performing difficult surgical procedures.

 

Their Corpse Reviver cocktail was tasty.

We enjoyed finding fun places to eat including the Columbia Firehouse Restaurant in Alexandria. It used to be a real firehouse. I was a bit distracted by the blonde who sat at the next table, not because she was a blonde but because she ordered a salad and tore into it with a knife, chopping the while thing up into little pieces in a frenzy. We were taught that you’re not supposed cut a whole plate of food up like that unless you’re serving a child or an old person. I wish I had a video of it because she really looked angry while she was doing it. The video would have gone viral on Facebook.

—Malcolm

 

Why do old posts suddenly catch a lot of people’s attention?

On By Malcolm R. CampbellIn blog

When I log on to my WordPress dashboard, I see how things are going. Quite often, posts I think will have traction aren’t noticed while silly throw-away posts attract hundreds of readers.

Sometimes, I do a Google search to see if the subject of an old post that suddenly has hundreds of hits has been in the news. This time, it’s my 2011 post Many Glacier Hotel 1963, where the fantasy began. Why are people suddenly reading this old post?

  • I check the news to see if the hotel burnt down, had a string of murders in the basement, or got sued for not having an elevator in the annex.
  • As far as I can see from scanning Amazon, no new books have come out about the hotel that might cause people to put it into their search engines for more information.
  • President Trump isn’t staying there, nor has he unleashed a Tweet Storm about the place.
  • My publisher hasn’t made a surprise announcement to the press that I’m going to be there to talk about my two novels set in the historic structure.

So, I’ve got nothing. If any of you who went there see this post, I would like to know why you went there.

This is very a perplexing thing for a blogger. Why people read what they read. Lately, I saw that a lot of people arrived on my blog after a search for subject XYZ. So, I wrote a post about XYZ. Nobody read it even though my search terms index kept showing me that people were looking for more information about it.

Sometimes I think the Feds are doing this to make me go crazy to they can put me in a home, a One Flew Over the Cukoo’s Nest kind of home. Why would they do that, you wonder. My guess is that it’s because my alter ego Jock Stewart has contributed a lot of guest posts on this blog that made fun of the Feds. (Lately, the real news has become so crazy that Stewart couldn’t think of any way to satirize it.)

Okay, let’s pretend the Feds aren’t going it. Maybe some of you are doing it. You probably have a ringleader, some tough guy or badass chick from Chicago who calls the shots. Why would s/he do this? Kicks? Too much free time? A dislike of bloggers? Nurse Ratched withholds their meds unless they click on old blogs of mine to make me wonder why they’re clicking on old blogs of mine.

I’m sure there are other possibilities. The Russians hacked into my blog or maybe the Mafia did it. Or, possibly aliens from a place where no one has gone before.

Like those cop shows where a crime is committed in the middle of a crowded mall where nobody saw nothin’, I strongly suspect nobody knows why everyone’s headed out to that old Many Glacier Hotel post.

Okay, I can play that game, too, because my hacker software knows who you are and what you did. <g>

—Malcolm

Malcolm R. Campbell is the author of fantasy and magical realism novels which, after youve read this post, shouldn’t surprise you.

Hate doesn’t help us fix the racism cancer

On By Malcolm R. CampbellIn Life2 Comments

“The House overwhelmingly passed a resolution on Tuesday disapproving of racist remarks by Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, amid a wave of bipartisan denunciation.” – NBC News

Representative King reportedly told the New York Times that he doesn’t understand why terms like white nationalist and white supremacist are offensive.

He has a history of such statements.

Wikipedia photo

I grew up with people who felt that way in the 1950s in Florida, a state with a large number of lynchings, bombings, and other KKK activity. I learned to hate these people when I was in the first grade. I’ve spent a lifetime trying to come to terms with such hatred, an emotion that seems natural but that we are told is spiritually indefensible.

Hate, we are told, hurts us, keeps us from understanding those with whom we disagree, and while we are destroying ourselves with it, does nothing to harm those in our gunsights.

My natural instincts are not to understand Steve King and all the others like him who are getting to much media attention these days. My natural instincts are to hate him, despise everything he stands for, and to question his intelligence.

Some people are trying to curtail our freedom of speech these days. I resent that. Mr. King has just as much right to say he loves white supremacists as I have to say that I dislike them. If you look up white supremacy on the Internet, you’ll find articles in which those who believe in it have used pseudo-science and mythology to try to justify their beliefs. Frankly, I think most white supremacists are thugs and have zero tolerance for them.

The media is giving them a lot of attention. I guess we have a right to know, but the skewed attention is giving these thugs a voice that (in my view) they do not deserve while giving the public the impression there are more racists per square mile in this country than there are.

I want to hate Mr. King but the gurus out there say that if I hate him I am really not doing him any harm while it destroys me. Scary thought. People like Mr. King ruled my world when I was a child and now, a half century or so later, I’m hearing that I should deplore the sin while loving the sinner. I’m not there yet.

I may never be there. That’s why I write novels that speak out against racism. They are my atonement for the times I remained silent years ago.

—Malcolm

Malcolm R. Campbell is the author of “Conjure Woman’s Cat,” “Eulalie and Washerwoman,” and “Lena” all of which are set in the Florida Panhandle of the 1950s when Jim Crow was in charge.

 

 

 

 

 

A cat, a paperback, and a pillow

On By Malcolm R. CampbellIn writing

Let’s get this out of the way first: I’m older than most of you.

Bookwise, this means that I grew up reading hardbacks and paperbacks and still prefer them to Nooks, Kindles, and whatever else people use to read off the screen.

As 2018 ended, I tallied up the number of copies sold for Conjure Woman’s Cat, Eulalie and Washerwoman, and Lena. (Actually, my publisher did this.) Anyhow, what continues to surprise me is that for all of these books, the paperback editions represent a very small percentage of total sales.

I have Kindle for PC, so I do read books off the screen. However, I spend the entire day looking at a screen, so the last thing I want to do when I relax with an interesting book at the end of the day is read it off the screen. I buy paperbacks when I can and hardbacks when I can’t wait for the paperback edition to come out. Every night before I go to sleep, I prop up in bed with a calico cat named Katy, a paperback book (currently, Tom Clancy’s Dark Zone) and a comfy pillow. The ambiance would be totally spoilt with a Kindle or a Nook.

Yet, even though I’m older than most of you, I don’t feel that out of touch. I have this blog, a Facebook account, and can be found on Twitter. So, I’m not a 1950s person trying to navigate the new millennium. That means, I thought more people would be reading paperback and hardbacks because those are real books. Yes, I know, they cost more, but you really never own the books, do you? They’re saved on Amazon and you’re just accessing them.

If Amazon were to crash and burn, which might not be a bad thing, all of my physical books would still be on the shelves in my office the next day. I have no clue where all my Kindle copies would be. I suspect the answer is “nowhere.”

Plus, if you have a cat next to you in bed, that cat doesn’t want to compete with a Kindle, a tablet, or any other kind of electronics because those cat ears pick up the sounds from the unit, including the demons hard-coded in the software, and they’re (those sounds) not soporific in spite of my white noise machine that covers up the outside world.

So, my advice–not that you’ve listened in the past–is keep the cat, keep the pillow, and ditch the e-book. Yes, I know, there will be a period of withdrawal as you wean yourself from movies and books watched/read off of cell phones. But once you succeed, you’ll feel better about yourself and your reading habits. Seriously, you don’t want to be hooked into the Internet like just another computer, do you?

The other day, I saw an article bemoaning the fact that nobody fixes stuff anymore when it breaks. They just replace it.  So, what happens to your Nook or Kindle when it breaks? You throw it in the trash since recycling centers seldom take electronics. Bad for the Earth, right? When a physical book “breaks,” we can either throw it in the fireplace (which somehow seems wrong) or we can throw it out with the sure and certain knowledge it’s biodegradable.

The bottom line is this: Kindles and Nooks have zero reading ambiance when you’re propped up in bed with your calico cat, but worse yet, they’re not Earth-friendly. Personally, I hope the Earth stays around for a while, so I read paperbacks and hardbacks and see that as part of my bit for humanity. No, it’s not the same as discovering a cure for cancer or a cost-effective way of getting all the plastic out of the oceans, but it’s a step in the right direction.

—Malcolm

Malcolm R. Campbell is the author of three folk magic novels set in the Florida Panhandle during the Jim Crow Era in which a conjure woman named Eulalie and a cat named Lena fight the evils of the day

 

 

 

 

Professors, you’re killing your students with books

On By Malcolm R. CampbellIn books

I taught in a small college and among my duties was serving as the advisor to a group of students. I wanted to say, “Get out while you’re still alive.”

Why?

Class, you have to read all this shit by the end of the week. Yeah, right.

Because each professor assigned books, in addition to the course textbook, for each student to read during the quarter or semester. First, nobody could read that many books. Second, each professor acted as though s/he was the only professor in the college assigning books to be read during the term.

There was no communication between departments. This meant that each professor assigned books without thinking about the number of books his or her students’ other professors were assigning. Between the time I went to college and the time I taught in college, this problem had gotten worse. Nobody can read 3-4 novels a week when they have other classes to attend.

Putting up with the nonsense of (a) studying the assigned chapters in the textbooks for 3-4 courses per semester and (b) fitting in a hundred pages worth of additional reading from a stack of fiction and nonfiction for each course killed my respect for the educational system. I felt the same way when I was caught up in it as a teacher. I taught journalism. All we had was the textbook. But my colleagues were assigning stacks of books to be read each week and nothing I said about it mattered.

They wanted me to get with the program and, for example, force my students to read a thick book containing all of Hemingway’s war reporting one week and all of some other journalist’s dispatches another week. I wouldn’t do it.

So, we argued about it, the other departmental teachers and I, and the students were lost in the shuffle. No wonder everyone survived on Cliff’s Notes and Monarch Notes and whatever the modern versions of those are today. Frankly, I think that–based on the credit hours of a course–there should be a maximum number of pages/books that can be assigned (including the textbook). We need to increase the credit hours awarded by the course if we add more reading material.

I’m a writer and I disliked high school and college English departments. That’s kind of sad, I think. Those departments did their best to kill my love of reading and writing and, I have a feeling, they’re still doing it today. When will they ever learn?

—Malcolm