The interlibrary loan librarians.
Even more heartening is [the] observation that interlibrary lending is “the only professional service I can think of in which the provider pays the cost.” The faith our libraries show in the ability of that service to somehow, someday, contribute to a greater good is remarkable, and yet usually goes unremarked.
The greatest resource sharing our libraries practice is sharing their faith in us.
One episode of a BBC series called Tales from the Jungle on famous anthropologists examines the “shamanthropologist” Carlos Castaneda (d. 1998), appropriately described as the most controversial anthropologist ever.
For those of us who can’t watch the Beeb, it is available in segments from YouTube.
There are also episodes on Bronislaw Malinowski and Margaret Mead.
Without Castaneda, there would probably have been no “neo-shamanism.” Without Mead appealing to Western notions of the noble–and sexy–savage, the “sexual liberation” of the 1960s would have lost one of its ideological underpinnings. And Malinowski, of course, largely shaped 20th-century ideas of ethnography.
The videos are a little hoked-up–and I wish that the BBC would consistently identify the talking heads on the screen. They do include Castaneda’s son and ex-wife, who in the video defend much of his research (although not his actions), and Jay Fikes, an anthropologist known for his work with the Peyote Way in Mexico and the USA, who is more critical.
The video focuses on the cultish last years of Castaneda’s life in particular.
For more on Castaneda, read Richard DeMille’s two books on him, as well as Dan Noel’s The Soul of Shamanism. Also the Sustained Action website.
Via Savage Minds.
An Australian reporter dumps on tacky (to him) Pagans.
Pagans infested my university, were constantly pulling out ouija boards at parties and could often be found in the bush near my home, dripping candle wax on one another and swapping Tori Amos albums.
And the commenters dump on him, although signing yourself “Shining Wolf of Indiana” might just be playing right into his hand, you think?
Meanwhile, my university is not what you would call trendy. We are heavy on “non-traditional” (over 25) students, and even a surprising number of the “traditionals” are working full time and/or are married and/or have a kid.
So imagine my surprise at spotting my first (apparent) furry in an English composition class next door to my office, wearing some kind of loose top, a short skirt, and a long, racoonish fake fur tail hanging over the skirt.
We are already wild animals, as Gary Snyder points out. But some of us want to be cartoon animals.
UPDATE: Bad link fixed.
• When driving east from Colorado, I often make a short pilgrimage to Carhenge.
• BeliefNet has cut me off again. Restoring this blog to BlogHeaven is a “top priority,” my contact there said. That was three days ago. Again, I am baffled; I have not changed my RSS or Atom feed settings or anything like that. Eventually, I will just stop caring.
• “I guess we’re mainstream now–and thus ripe for parody,” said the person who emailed me this item from The Onion.
The Prince of Wales recently was quoted as saying McDonald’s restaurants “should be banned” (in the United Arab Emirates, if not the UK).
What do we call that, “nutritional mercantilism“?
Although I admire him for his environmental work and his line of organic foods, I laughed pretty hard at Steve Stirling’s fictionalized version of the prince in A Meeting at Corvallis, the final book of his post-Collapse trilogy. (Yes, I know, trilogies . . . )
I have mentioned Stirling’s fairly realistic Wiccan characters, but the third book offers an England where now-King Charles rules, and he has imposed his aesthetic taste on as much of the nation as he controls. Houses must have thatched roofs, while farmers and laborers must wear the old cotton smock when they work outdoors. “De national dress, mon,” says a Jamaican immigrant turned farmer.
Update: Alice Thomson calls the prince a true prophet.
I recently found a Wikipedia entry on Gleb Botkin. I still think that he is one of the most fascinating figures in American Paganism, with a life whose arc connected the lost world of the Russian royal family to the contemporary Pagan revival of the 1950s and 1960s.
He is worth a biography of his own, I think.
I had a lot of trouble sleeping this past week. Too much waking up with full bladder around 5 a.m. and then being unable to return to sleep, sliding instead into the pre-dawn jim-jams. “My Wasted Life” and other such perennial themes.
Pre-dawn wakefulness always reminds me of one of the first Church of Wicca Samhain seminars that M. and I attended in 1977 or so. We were among the “young folks” at those gatherings–there was a larger middle-aged contingent that was less into religious Pagan Witchcraft and more into dowsing, remote viewing, experiments with ESP, energy healing, and various kinds of “fringe science.”
Several of the men, including, of course, Gavin Frost and Loy Stone, had been trained as engineers and had an engineer’s pragmatic attitude towards magic, broadly defined.
One speaker gave a talk about the military’s experiments with extremely low frequency radiation (3–30 Hz), which is utilized by our navy and the Russians to communicate with submerged submarines. He suggested that these nefarious experiments were causing mental disturbance in humans—possibly because the frequency chosen was close to the Earth’s own natural radio frequency—after thirty years I do not remember exactly.
To prove his point, he asked the audience if they were frequently awakened around 4 a.m. Hands shot up around the room.
All I could think about was that with at least four time zones represented, “4 a.m.” was not just one moment.
But later, as I aged, I realized that four o’clock was a fine time to lie awake and think about all the failures and worries of your life, and that doing so just seemed to be part of middle age.
Shulawitsi, the Little Fire God, member of the Council of the Gods and Deputy to the Sun, had taped his track shoes to his feet. He had wound the tape as Coach taught him, tight over the arch of the foot.
Those sentences open Tony Hillerman’s Dance Hall of the Dead (1973). I read them probably in the early 1980s, back when the Santa Fe-based author of mystery novels was largely a cult favorite in the Southwest. Cruising down US 666 back then, you would watch your rear view mirror for Officer Jim Chee, who in my imagination does not look like Adam Beach.
After those two sentences, I was hooked.
I picked up a copy of Dancehall of the Dead today along with some other paperback thrillers (Elmore Leonard, Patricia Cornwell, Carl Hiassen) at Hardscrabble Books (appropriate name, eh?) down in Florence. Two old ladies were discussing Hitler, whom they seemed to think had been born a Jew. (Where do they get this stuff?)
When I finish the books, they will go into a box for Operation Paperback.
Operation Paperback collects books (and some magazines) for American military personnel in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. You register with them, and they give you a list of recipients who will turn share the books.
To pacify local members of the “Religion of Peace,” who might otherwise blow a gasket, there should be no pictures of scantily clad women, so be careful with the motorcycle and lowrider magazines if you are mailing to certain countries. (The Web site will explain.)
US Highway 666 is no more, of course. Certain wacko members of the “Religion of Love” lobbied the feds to change its number, lest they be forced to drive on the “Highway of the Beast.” Sheesh.
Cambridge University classics professor Mary Beard recently suggested that today’s Hellenic Pagans were inauthentic because they did not sacrifice animals.
Set aside the Pagans for a moment. What about Jews?
A small but controversial movement in Israel wants to revive Temple-based religion, including sacrifice.
The present-day Sanhedrin Court decided Tuesday to purchase a herd of sheep for ritual sacrifice at the site of the Temple on the eve of Passover, conditions on the Temple Mount permitting.
The comments on the article pretty well represent a spectrum of Jewish religious squabbling, from the ultra-orthodox who think that the state of Israel is an affront to their god, to those who think that sacrifice is “cruelty to animals” and those who think that it is not, to those who just want to kick the Muslims off the Temple Mount. Oy vey!
Via Mirabilis.
When it comes to reading the titles and cover blurbs of SF/fantasy books, I am with Timothy Burke:
Other things that are likely to drive me off:
1) “Book One in the Dark Swords of Black Terror Trilogy”.
2) Mostly, if the word “vampire” appears anywhere in the cover, title or blurb. It stops being “mostly” if “vampire” appears in the same blurb with “elf”.
3) Titles or blurbs that contain the name of a fantasy kingdom that sounds more like a prescription medicine for depression or impotence.
4) Anything that contains three of the following four elements in the blurb: plucky but innocent young heroine, farmboy with a destiny, dark lord of evil, wise ancient wizard. “Handsome voodoo priest” is a bonus demerit.
5) The word, “Drizzt”.