Hoodoo and the Lost City

M. and I watched The Skeleton Key, a middling thriller starring Kate Hudson. It’s the usual “Don’t go up those stairs! Don’t open that door!” sort of plot, but what gives it its twist–more than the conjured Hoodoo atmosphere that the movie tries to evoke and the echoes of Mia Farrow in Rosemary’s Baby–is the thought that it must have been the last movie partly filmed in New Orleans before Hurricane Katrina.

It’s like looking at pre-war Berlin or something. We will not see those street scenes again.

Cat Yronwode, owner of Lucky Mojo, was the hoodoo consultant.

Association of Polytheist Traditions

The APT is a group of mainly reconstructionist Pagan religionists, planning a conference on 13 May 2006, at the University of Central Lancashire. You can find more information on the conference page.

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The plumbing task

If I remember correctly, 60 Minutes did a segment a few years ago on the inadequacies of low-flow toilets, the ones that are mandated to use only 1.6 gallons per flush.

Ours, one of the earlier models and never a great performer–perhaps you’ve noticed how everyone owns a toilet plunger these days–seemed to be getting more and more feeble.

Recently I visited the Lowe’s store in Pueblo to buy a new one. It was like going to a car dealer: there were choices not just in size and color, but in power, internal dimensions, and style of flushing. Thoughtfully, they provided a sort of spreadsheeet for comparing models.

I walked up and down the aisle, comparing, until settling on a mid-price plain white model with the largest “throat” I could find. That extra quarter inch might make a difference.

I installed it yesterday. A job that would take a master plumber maybe 45 minutes takes me three hours, what with coffee breaks, double-checking-the-plumbing-manual breaks, e-mail breaks, and a trip to town to buy a new stool supply line, since the old one was too short.

“Put it in so it doesn’t leak, come back, and we’ll give you a plumber’s license,” cracked the white-haired clerk at the hardware store. You don’t often find his kind at the big-box stores. Unfortunately, our small-town hardware store does not sell complete toilets, just repair parts.

Now the old toilet sits in pieces on the front porch, giving our home that special House of Mountain William charm. Previously, when I replaced a toilet, I smashed the old one into little chunks, put them in a sturdy carton well-wrapped with duct tape, and set it out for the garbage pickup. Problem solved.

But even toilets can be recycled, I have learned. Now I”ll take the tank, for instance, out to one of the muddy low points in our gravel driveway, raise my sledge hammer, and cue the prison work song:

Riley crossed the water [thunk]
On dem long hot summer days [thunk]

Cover with some other gravel to blend the colors, and it’s done–a composted toilet.

Where is the Wiccan connection in all this? I learned how to remove and install a toilet from the high priest of my first coven, when one of the other coveners had a leak in hers, and he took me along as his assistant to replace it. It was the Colorado coven described in the first chapter of Margot Adler’s Drawing Down the Moon, although take her enthusiastic description of the back-to-the-land lifestyle with several grains of salt.

UPDATE! Why didn’t I think to contact the World Toilet Organization with my toilet-disposal issues? Maye they use unneeded vitreous china fixtures to build roads in the Third World or something. Was I truly “thinking globally, acting locally” when I repaired my own driveway pothole? And I was a week late for World Toilet Day–or has it not been celebrated since 2003?

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Professional reading

I am reading this but only because it’s my job to keep up with Wiccan autobiography, you see.

He leaned into me, spreading my legs as he stood between them. Heat radiated from his body; I rested my hands on his chest, feeling its hardness, his strength. His hands cradled my face, and this time the kiss was soft and slow, ruthless and persuasive.

Whew! And that’s only page 4.

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More AAR blogging

I have plumbing tasks ahead of me, so I will just link to another Pagan Studies colleague’s take on her AAR experience this year.

Then I will be back to explain the connection between Wicca and plumbing.

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The White Goddess

Lee Gilmore writes of synchronistic experiences involving Robert Graves’ “historical grammar of poetic myth,” The White Goddess.

First published in 1948, it was for many people a “gateway book” to Goddess religion–it certainly was that for me. (Maybe we should devote a Pagan Studies session to it.)

Lee also reports on her own experiences at this year’s AAR-SBL.

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More on Book Design: The Best Iliad Cover Ever

Walking through the enormous book exhibition at the AAR-SBL, I stopped at the booth of Parmenides Publishing, publisher of Classical philosophy and literature.

In conjunction with Stanley Lombardo’s audio recordings of his translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey, they had the print edition

which I had not seen before.

The famous D-Day photograph and the word “Iliad.” It stopped me cold. What a brilliant juxtaposition of image and text. It was a Nietzschean moment of “tragic pessimism.” I suppose that I will have to buy that translation.

Give the designer an award.

UPDATE (23 Dec. 05): With the book now in hand, I see that the cover design is credited to Brian Rak and John Pershing. The photo, “Into the Jaws of Death,” is simply credited to the U.S. Coast Guard, as I already knew.

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Post-AAR book chat

ABC-Clio is publishing anthology on contemporary Paganism. I did a book with them in the early 1990s, and my experience was mostly good, especially with unexpected largesse from foreign-rights sales. Given the transnational nature of his book, maybe we should speak of “foreign rites” sales.

OK, weak joke. I just got off the train. Note the cover: are we ever going to get beyond “Pagans standing in a circle”? It’s hard to find one visual center of attention in pictures like that. But congratulations to the editor and contributors anyway.

From Equinox, look for Patriarchs, Prophets, and Other Villains, which is not about what anyone might have learned in “seminary school,” to quote the Doors’ song.

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Pagan Studies at the American Academy of Religion

Ten years ago here in Philadelphia, a group of 20 or so people sat in a circle of chairs at the Philadelphia Convention Center. The meeting was convened by Dennis Carpenter and Selena Fox of Circle Sanctuary to bring together people interested in the academic study of Pagan religion. We did not do much except introduce ourselves.

The following year, Dennis and Selena did not attend (and have not attended since), so I got the job of organizing a follow-up meeting, where we agreed that having a listserv would be a good thing.

Meeting in 1997 in San Francisco, we decided to apply to be an official program unit. We were turned down for two reasons: we had not demonstrated sufficiently that our needs were not met it pre-existing units (e.g., New Religious Movements) and also the AAR was simply not as open to new program units, since they and their older parent, the Society of Biblical Literature, were having some trouble finding meeting venues with sufficient small rooms for the dozens of concurrent sessions. Those were the official reasons for the denial, at least.

So beginning in 1998, we started holding our own pre-meeting session and giving papers. The original 2.5-hour session grew to the full-day Conference on Contemporary Pagan Studies, which will continue in the future.

In 2004 we applied again. This time, the AAR and SBL had agreed to meet separately after 2007, which decision helped with the meeting-space issue. Suddenly new unit proposals were welcomed, and ours, supported by evidence of scholarly activity (papers presented, books and articles published, the existence of The Pomegranate) sailed right through.

Leaving for home today, I’m buoyed by thoughts of this meeting’s packed rooms (more than 60 people at both the CCPS and official Pagan Studies session) and the quality of the presentations. We’re off and running.

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Blog splat

I am taking a break from blogging for the next eight to ten days because I leave on Wednesday for the intellectual carnival that is the American Academy of Religion–Society of Biblical Literature combined annual meeting.

It’s in Philadelphia this year. Our last meeting there was in 1995, and I spent much of the time walking the steets looking for sites and building associated with the career of Charles Leland, author of Aradia: Or the Gospel of the Witches and Etruscan Roman Remains, among other things.

This year should be different: We have the first official Pagan Studies sessions, plus I will be meeting with my publisher to determine such weighty matters as what comes after the colon in the book title now tentatively known as Her Hidden Children: Paganism and Nature Religion in America. They are telling me that the publication date is March 2006 and that the paperback will be $19.95. As I know more, I will post it.

I am not bothering to take a laptop computer this year, so I will be summarizing our sessions when I get home.

Meanwhile, there is this: one of today’s Google searches that sent a visitor to this blog: “Known Hookers With Cops Pueblo.” Just another reason why smart searchers always go to the Advanced Search Page.