Happy Friday! There's going to be some changes for Incidental Mythology over the next few months. I'm slowly migrating the blog posts and video essay transcripts over to my personal author website. Maintaining two separate websites is becoming a little financially burdensome, and I'm seeing no true reason to continue to keep them seperate. That being said, Incidental Mythology as an entity will continue to exist. I like keeping the analytical stuff seperate from the bigger more long-form research projects I undertake as an author. That being said, what's at their core is not really much different, and therefore I think it makes sense to combine the two. And it comes with the added benefit of also no longer having to deal with ads when you read a blog plost.

This is mostly to explain that the links to blog posts and the like will start being on this new platform, though the website will continue to live until the end of June.

Speaking of blog posts, we have one for this month. This time, I do a little bit of talking about the relationship mythology has with time passing. It was inspired by a comment I got on a recent video essay about the necessity of time passing in the consideration of the definition of mythology. So I kinda thought about that as a concept, and discuss its veracity - or lack thereof - in adding this to the definition.

As happens every Thursday, we have vlogs! The first, I went over to Reading to record some podcast episodes with Holly for I'm a Fan of That. We've started recording season two, and that day recorded two episodes. Which leads us wonderfully into the second vlog, where you can watch me do some editing of those very same podcasts! I also did a few other content creation stuff like writing video essay scripts.

And with that, we're on to the fun stuff!

What I'm Writing

There's still a lot of waiting for the writing projects. It takes time to hear back from agents and publishers, so new projects are going to be slow to start.

That being said, I still have work to do on my book Cosplay and the Dressing of Identity. I just received proofs from Reaktion, my publishers. We're at the stage of publishing where the proofs are now PDF versions of what the book will actually look like. It's really cool seeing how the book is actually going to look when it's finally in y'all's lovely little hands.

What I'm Enjoying

For those of you not massively involved in farming video games, Stardew Valley just released their 1.6 update. It's a huge update with loads of new content. So whenever I've been getting a spare moment, I've been back in Stardew Valley, adding to my several hundred hours playtime.

Book Recommendation

This week, it's a return of one of my anthropology heroes. Mary Douglas's Purity and Danger is perhaps one of her most famous works. Purity and Danger is a classic in anthropology, and its hard to go through a course without at least some mention of this book. In this book, Mary Douglas explores aspects of pure and impure, taboo and pollution.

What is arguably Mary Douglas's most famous quote is "Dirt is matter out of place". Essentially, this is a statement about how taboo and pollution and dirtiness is based on category. If we had a picnic out in a park and you saw dirt on the ground, you woudln't really comment about the park being dirty. However, if I invited you over to my house and there was dirt on the kitchen floor, you would comment about the dirtiness. This is because in our cultural categories, dirt belongs outside, not inside at the kitchen. This is some of the basics of Douglas's argument.

If you read nothing else of this book, I would highly suggest her chapter on the Leviticus food rules. In fact, this is probably the chapter you will read in any anthropology class. This chapter I think is the best thesis statement for the book, and explores how it all works in the example of the food rules as laid out in Leviticus.

This all being said, Mary Douglas is not the easiest anthropologist to read. While she's not the worst, it does take a little extra care if you're not used to reading academic writing. But I think it's highly worth it.

And that's it for today. As always, be good to one another!

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