Gallimaufry & What Didn’t Happen

• When M. and I left our hotel room on Tuesday, the lobby was full of the crackle of police radios. Everywhere you looked in downtown Chicago, there were cops standing around.

These are some kind of federales outside a federal office building on Jackson Street.

I was happy, therefore, to get home and learn that the huge crowds at Barack Obama’s rally were mostly good-natured and that there was no celebratory rioting.

• I will be watching for progress on rebuilding the Temple of Artemis.

• When Obama made his ill-considered remark about those of us in flyover country “clinging to guns and religion,” my first thought was to wonder which religion(s) he had in mind. Oleg Volk, a Russian-born photographer now living in Tennessee, created an image that mirrors my thoughts.

• And this post on “alternative” gun culture is all about others who don’t want to be victims, such as the Pink Pistols.

Books at AAR That I Could Not Resist

Checking some of the post-AAR blogging, I see people listing book purchases from the publishers’ exhibit. Here are mine:

• The Western Esoteric Traditions: A Historical Introduction. (I should also get Kocku’s Western Esotericism: A Brief History of Secret Knowledge, and I need something by the discipline’s éminence grise, Antoine Faivre, such as Access to Western Esotericism.)

• Doug Cowan’s Sacred Terror: Religion and Horror on the Silver Screen. That’s research material too. Doug is one of those scholars who manages to teach effectively, write a lot, and still have a life.

• Ordered for later delivery, Ronald Hutton’s Blood and Mistletoe: The History of the Druids in Britain.

Midway through AAR

If I come away from this year’s AAR annual meeting with any one Big Idea, it is that I am glad to see Pagan Studies moving away from “Wiccans and Odinists,” as Jone Salomonsen put it, and towards a broader sense of a “a way to think about religion” (or religious behavior). Our joint session with the Religion and Popular Culture Group started the weekend off well, and presenting a co-written work-in-progress paper and slide show there got me thinking about how I want to return to the whole nexus of nature religion, civil religion, and small-p paganism as well as thinking about capital-P Paganism.

Meanwhile, the election that has lasted forever is almost over!

Last night, from the 23rd floor of the Chicago Hilton Towers, I looked down a floodlit, fenced-off portion of Grant Park, where Sen. Obama’s victory rally will be held. The mayor has “suggested” that businesses in this part of town close at 3 p.m. on Election Day. No doubt they expect a riot if Obama loses — and probably if he wins as well, by the same mob-logic that caused violence and destruction in Philadelphia when the Phillies won the World Series.

Food of the Gods

One of the benefits of eating in Chicago’s Greektown is that it almost feels like a religious act when the restaurants are named Zeus and Venus. (“Venus” is Aphrodite — in Greek — on the screen-savers at the waiters’ computer terminals.)

Going out to eat becomes embodied religion. “Corpospirituality,” as Michael York would have it.

My friends are in awe of the Cyprian’s Mousakas Tsoukas.

Trapped in Chicago Bookstore

Hotel room view, across Grant Park towards the Field Museum, Aquarium, etc.

When I booked this hotel, across the street from the Chicago Hilton Hotel, the AAR‘s main annual meeting venue, I had no idea that it was only a block from one of Chicago’s Powell’s bookstores. M. and I are in deep trouble.

I restricted myself to just two purchases today: Anna Reid’s The Shaman’s Coat: A Native History of Siberia and Giorgia Geddes’ Nichivo: Tales from the Russian Front 1941-43. Both count as “research.” (Those are Amazon links, but you can search Powells’ inventory through Advanced Book Exchange.)

And given the heavy emphasis on book-buying at AAR, I still do not understand why someone does not set up a “pack-and-ship” booth in the exhibit hall!

The coffee shops are filling up too: “My dissertation advisor thinks I should go for publication, so he’s being real hard on me.”

Good luck with that.

Here is a spooky story, worthy of Fate magazine. Political writer (and Orthodox Christian) Rod Dreher has his own ghost-story post.

Off to AAR

I post this from the Wireworks cafe in Pueblo, partway through our journey to the train station.

I hope that I have everything I need for a successful conference session:

  • two printouts of my paper, plus copies of the photos that go with it, on both CD and flash drive
  • registration materials
  • photos of dead people

Doing a paper on the Day of the Dead at two Southwestern universities, plus attending a Samhain ritual. Too much?

I’ll try to post more as the meeting continues.

Spinning Flaming Pentacles

Writer Dianne Sylvan blogs on her early Pagan days — books, groups, Marion Zimmer Bradley …

But my favorite paragraph was this one:

Good god, Pagan websites used to suck. Remember MIDI files of Enya and spinning flaming pentacles? Black star-flecked background with violent purple lettering in 20 point font? Remember when cut-and-pasting Scott Cunningham was all you had to do to make your Geocities site popular?

Oh yeah. But I think I still have a folder of flaming-torch and spinning-pentacle GIF files somewhere on my hard drive. Do you think they might ever become retro-cool?

Gallimaufry with Pumpkins

Since there won’t be any on-time Hallows blogging from me this year, here is an early sampler:

¶ Rod Dreher finally sees autumn arrive in northern Texas.

¶ A Halloween column: “Hitchhiking in the Land of the Dead.”

¶ A pastor’s rant against Halloween, via The Gods Are Bored.

¶ Since I won’t be able to take any photos this year, here are some of last year’s Day of the Dead altars built by students at Colorado State University-Pueblo. For some reason, the Vlad the Impaler altar has been drawing a lot of Google hits for the past two weeks …

Joe Biden Freaked by Naked Goddess

This happened just down the road from me, but I had to read The Wild Hunt to learn about it.

Vice-presidential candidate Joe Biden was apparently unable to give his standard speech in the presence of a statue of the goddess Diana in downtown Pueblo, so the goddess was covered by black cloth and hidden by a flag.

“Is he just as bad as Palin?” M. asked.

Pathetic.

UPDATE: Joe Biden as channeled by Iowahawk.

“I’m not going to lie to you – it doesn’t take a weatherman to know that hey, Mr. Tambourine Man, a hard rain is gonna fall, all along the watchtower,” said the Delaware Senator, strumming on a pantomime guitar. “There will be a point — maybe one week, maybe two weeks after the inauguration — when the opinion polls will look bad. Really horribly bad. Despite our best efforts, a couple of mid-size cities will inevitably be vaporized. People will be complaining. ‘Why are you nationalizing the Safeway?’ ‘When is Omaha going to stop glowing?’ ‘Why do the Chinese soldiers keep asking for my papers?’ When this happens, we will need you to keep supporting us because, trust me, you really won’t want to be observed not supporting us.”

Why I Am Not Blogging Much

I have a number of substantive posts that I want to write, but I seem to not be getting to them.

Reasons: I am trying to finish a paper to be presented at the AAR. The easy narrative part is done, and so I am struggling with the theoretical part. Only to complicate things, it’s a co-written paper (with slides to be projected in sync with the text), and I have to see what my co-author will add, and how it all be integrated.

Are co-written papers a bad idea? Probably, if you both have busy lives and live 1,200 miles apart!

And then I have to finish reading and making notes on a new religious-studies textbook that I am supposed to copy edit and put into InDesign, knowing that the publisher and the general editor will be at AAR and will expect me to have intelligent things to say.

There are some posts (more to come) about M.’s and my Yellowstone trip on the other blog.

Expect more here, one of these days.