Montague Whitsel
My blogs
| Gender | Male |
|---|---|
| Occupation | Writer |
| Location | Pennsylvania, United States |
| Introduction | A Lover of Life, I am existentially rooted and aesthetically sourced in the woods of western Pennsylvania.
I'm a Poetic Naturalist. My interests range from science and naturalism to music, literature, mythology, poetry and philosophy. I am attempting to live an earthen spirituality with roots in Celtic mysticism, western monasticism and Neo-Paganism. My 'art' is writing; poetry and prose. I create researched accounts on various topics, reflective poetry, essays and fictional works set in or participating in the fictional world of "Ross County, PA." |
| Interests | Writing. Music, Nature, Meditation, Poetry, Literature, Science, Mathematics. |
| Favorite Movies | Too many to mention, but here are a few from a range of genres that I can always re-watch: The Little Foxes (1941), The Uninvited (1944), Sorry, Wrong Number (1948), Sunset Boulevard (1950) A Streetcar named Desire (1951), The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), All That Heaven Allows (1955), Witness for the Prosecution (1957) The Apartment (1960), The City of the Dead (1960), The Birds (1963) and all of Hitchcock, "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" (1966), Wait Until Dark (1967) Night of the Living Dead (1968), Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992), Salem's Lot (1979 TV Mini-Series), Phantasm (1979), Alien (1979) and its sequels, The Fog (1980), Donnie Darko (1981), Mazes and Monsters (1982), The Goonies (1985), Silver Bullet (1985), Fright Night (1985) Predator (1987), The Dolls (1986) Lost Boys (1987), The Red Violin (1998), X-Men (2000), Below (2002), Spiderman (2002), Dog Soldiers (2002), Pan's Labyrinth (2006), Children of Men (2006), Moon (2009), Guardians of the Galaxy (2014), The Station Agent (2003), Spring Summer Fall Winter and ... Spring (2003), Shaun of the Dead (2004), Hot Fuzz (2007), Disturbia (2007), Sing Street (2016), Moonlight (2016), Arrival (2016), Deadpool (2016), Thor Ragnarok (2017), Call Me By Your name (2017), Black Panther (2018), The Hate U Give (2018), Shoplifters (2018), Black Klansman (2018), Peanut Butter Falcon (2019) |
| Favorite Music | A wide range of interests, from Renaissance sacred music to contemporary Celtic, Rock and Folk. A Short List: Anberlin, Apocalyptica, Beatles, Pat Benetar, Black Sabbath, Rosanne Cash, Clannad, DIO, Dave Matthews, Deep Forest, Enigma, Fleetwood Mac, Green Day, Emmylou Harris, Jethro Tull, Led Zeppelin, Linkin Park, Moby, Loreena McKennitt, Old Blind Dogs, Savage Garden, Solas, Shinedown, Skerryvore, Skippinish, The Waterboys, U2. Mediaeval, Renaissance and Baroque Sacred Musics: Perotin, Josquin des Prez, Jacob Obrecht, Cipriano de Rore, Palestrina, Thomas Tallis, William Bryd, Heinrich Schutz, Claudio Monteverdi, Tomas Luis de Victoria, Johann Sebastian Bach. |
| Favorite Books | Authors: J. R. R. Tolkien, Robert Holdstock (The Mythago Wood Series), Marion Zimmer Bradley's The Mists of Avalon, Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Dickens, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Mary Shelley, Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and James Joyce. My favorite poets include Robert Frost, William Butler Yeats, Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and the Wordsworths; William & Dorothy.. Poetics, Religion, Philosophy and Science: Robert Hazen's The Story of Earth (2012), Jerry Coyne's Why Evolution is True (2009) and Neil Shubin's Your Inner Fish: A Journey Into the 3.5 Billion Year History of the Human Body (2008). Richard Dawkins' The Greatest Show on Earth (2009); a really lucid, powerful, book; very much like his earlier books from The Blind Watchmaker to Unweaving the Rainbow. Helen Vendler, including: Coming of Age as a Poet (2003) and Poets Thinking: Pope, Whitman, Dickinson, Yeats (2004). I enjoy books by Bart D Ehrman, including Jesus Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions on the Bible (and Why We Don't Know About Them) (2009). In the 80's and 90's I read widely in Theology; focusing on feminist and liberation perspectives. I read and relished Brian Cox and Jeff Foreshaw's Why E = mc2 (2013) and The Quantum Universe (2013). I loved Sean Carroll's The Particle at the End of the Universe (2012) about the Higgs Boson. His more recent The Big Picture (2016) was a fascinating read from a scientist striving for the meaning of life in a naturalistic framework. Brian Greene's Until the End of Time (2020) dealt with the theme in a different and interesting way. |