• The devil makes them do that homosexual stuff. Oops, the bishops are showing me the door. Maybe they know something.
• From the “Let’s Return to the Pure Days of the Early Church” files, when even the shit of saints was sacred.
• Scheduling sex and saying “just” a lot. But not in the sense of “just do it.”
Jack o' Lantern depicting the Gunpowder Plot. Stacked barrels on the left, arches over head, Guy Fawkes with a torch at right—carved by the neighbors' daughter, an architecture student.
There is an Anglo-American couple (her from the UK, him from right here) down the road who always have a Bonfire Night party.
M. and I bumped into the American half recently, and he said that this year’s “Guy” would be a certain wealthy local hobby-rancher.
Having earned his money elsewhere, this guy is busy buying up every piece of vacant land he can find, erecting pretentious ranch gates, quarreling with the Forest Service, and possibly interfering with water rights (still unproved, but if so, it’s a hanging offense).
Unlike the actual largest landowner in this end of the county — who might be found on a mechanic’s creeper underneath one of the engines at the volunteer fire department, fixing something — he holds himself aloof from all community activities.
He has a bad case of “Texas Vertigo”—he thinks the world revolves around him. And, says the woman who waited tables down at the little steakhouse while working on her nursing degree, “He’s a two-dollar tipper.”
“All right,” I thought, on hearing my neighbor’s announcement, “it’s a real Aradia moment. Di legare il spirito del oppresore and all that.
Not the neighboring landowner but a cable TV talker.
But when M. and I walked up the neighbors’ driveway, dish in hand, to where everyone gathered around the fire pit, beer kegs, and tables of food, the “Guy” was someone else—a certain cable television political pundit.
Not nearly as interesting from a folk-magic perspective, if you ask me.
Burn! Burn!
It is still an emotionally satisfying conclusion.
In this week’s New Yorker, Daniel Mendelsohn reviews a new, compressed translation of the Iliad by Stephen Mitchell. (The whole article is behind the paywall—the link is to an abstract.)
Discussing other recent translations, he describes Stanley Lombardo’s as having “a tight-lipped soldierly toughness.” I own that one — I saw its cover while walking through the book exhibits at the 2005 American Academy of Religion annual meeting and almost wept — it was such an emotionally powerful design.
Mendelsohn, meanwhile, strikes gold at the end of his review:
The Iliad doesn’t need to be modernized, because the question it raises is a modern — indeed, existentialist — one: how do we fill our short lives with meaning? The August 22nd issue of Time featured, on its “Briefing” page, a quote from a grieving mother about her dead son. The mother’s name is Jan Brown, and her son, Kevin Houston, a Navy SEAL, was one of thirty-seven soldiers killed in a rocket attack in Afghanistan this past summer. What she said about him might shock some people, but will sound oddly familiar to anyone who has read the Iliad:
He was born to do this job. If he could do it all over again and have a chance to have it happen the way it did or work at McDonald’s and live to be 104? He’d do it all over again.
Whoever Homer was and however he made his poem, the song that he sings still goes on.
That is the polytheistic view of life. The world is a mess. The world is beautiful. The gods are eternal (or as good as). The gods work at cross-purposes, and sometimes humans are caught between them.
If you try to change the world in the name of some grand, sweeping, utopian vision, you will just make it worse. The most you can do is to give Achilles and Kevin Houston a good cause.
Last June, as our creek began to dry up, I blogged about building a little shrine to Tlaloc, “god of the hydrological cycle” as Craig Childs described him, in a big culvert under our county road.
It snowed, nearly a foot on October 26. The combination of trees pulling up less ground water after freezing weather came, plus the melting snow, started the creek running again. On Halloween night, M. and I were walking the dogs before bed, and we heard a gurgle in the creek bed. Slowly, rock by rock, tiny pool by tiny pool, it was coming back.
By yesterday, the flow had increased. While everything in the shrine was natural (rocks) or biodegradable (turkey feathers, etc.), I thought that I should retrieve the glass jar for the votive candles, before it washed away, broke, and became litter. So I pulled on a pair of rubber boots-of-many-names and waded into the flow.
There was the little shrine, still dry. But what’s this? Here was a bundle of herbs, tied with a string. And here was a bunch of dried-out marigolds. Marigolds, hmmmm. Very traditional, but we had not grown any this year.
I took the jar and left the rest. At night, as we set out on dog walk, I remembered to ask M. if she had left those offerings.
Blank look. No, she had not.
So who did? Not the bears and raccoons. One of the neighbors—and there are not very many of them—has joined in on the cultic activity. But which?
We keel you! (Part 241).
• French magazine fights back after firebombing. Cartooni-jihadis also swarmed its Facebook page, leading the group Reporters Without Borders to call on Facebook to “renounce censorship” and let the editors access their own page.
I give them credit for guts: They plan to republish the “guest-edited by Muhammend” edition.
• Arab spring? Let the killing begin! Coptic Christian high school student murdered by his own teacher (with help). Does teacher-education in Egypt include a course on strangling and bludgeoning, or is that learned in continuing-education classes? This sheikh perhaps inspired him.
I expect that we are going to see a whole lot of Coptic Christians in North America very soon, the ones who survive.
• Toy guns made in China are part of an anti-Islamic plot.
Refresher: Aisha was the prophet’s 9-year-old wife. And he consummated the marriage right away. But, hey, it’s a different culture, and who are we to judge?
• An Islamist group whose name means “Western education is forbidden” kills 63 people in Nigeria.
If you are in the Northern Hemisphere and following a solar calendar with quarter days and cross-quarter days, it falls at 1827 hours Universal Time on Monday the 7th.
You don’t need a henge, just a website for all your solar-calendrical needs.
At Adventures in Animism, Heather Awen builds a shrine.
Day of the Dead Altar to Marilyn Monroe
As planned, I stopped by the Student Center on Wednesday to check out the Day of the Dead altars.
No Vlad the Impaler altar this year! No altars to firefighters or Victorian writers either. Apparently Chicano Studies conformity was enforced, with Catholic Campus Ministries stepping in as a co-sponsor as well. Lots of crosses, “correct” altar decorations, Jesus candles, and Guadalupe candles—even if She is, as we say in religious studies, a multivalent symbol.
The altar to Marilyn Monroe shown above was the only one that broke the mold a little, sharing the “anyone can participate” feeling from previous years.
I drank some cups of colada morada with my Ecuadorian professor friend and nibbled some guaguas de pan. Eating babies—that’s a little edgy, but remember, it’s cultural. (Some pisco would have helped the colada.)
Russian guy seems a little confused over this whole Day of the Dead concept. You don’t dress up real skeletons.
Here is a wonderful rant : “A**holes and Autumn People.” Bonus Ray Bradbury reference.