Bang, Bang, You’re Legal

>Instead of writing or working on spring-semester syllabi, I spent Saturday immersed in gun culture, taking the required pistol-handling course so that I can apply for my concealed-carry permit. (Colorado is a “shall issue” state, meaning that the county sheriff must give you the permit if you pass the course, pay the fee, and are not a convicted felon, mental patient, or otherwise fail the pro forma background check.)

At 10 a.m. I reported to the Cactus Flats shooting club with two small-caliber pistols (I was indecisive up until the last moment about which to bring), protective ear muffs, shooting glasses (rose-tinted lenses that turn the sky Martian indigo and the arid landscape almost Martian orange), and ammunition.

My four fellow students were all in their fifties or sixties–one man probably over 70–and all of us lifelong shooters. (One man had had a concealed-carry permit in Seattle already.) Consequently, the morning instruction session was, shall we say, leisurely, conversational, and fairly cursory, although I picked up a minor point or two. After lunch we demonstrated that we could all hit the silhouette targets at short range, and we learned some useful things about practicing for “the gravest extreme,” to use Massad Ayoob’s phrase. When the class certificate arrives, I can do the paperwork for the permit.

But why? Other than when hunting, I do not normally go around armed. Once in twelve years in this house–just last month–did I strap on a revolver for the night-time dog walk up through the woods and down a dark road, because I had seen a mountain lion here the night before and a prison escapee was possibly in the area (he was captured elsewhere in the county). Rationally, therefore, I could say that I want the permit primarily for when I have a pistol in the truck when traveling, especially in other states that honor Colorado’s permits. (New Mexico just passed its own >concealed-carry law, so maybe they will sign a reciprocity agreement soon with us.) The permit adds a layer of legal protection.

And it is also because an armed citizenry bothers the bejesus out of authoritarians of all political stripes. (Do I think that George W. Bush really endorses the Second Amendment in his heart anymore than Senator Joe Lieberman does? No, I don’t.)

Ecotheology recognizes Paganism

Graham Harvey of the Open University in Britain has guest-edited the latest issue of Ecotheology: The Journal of Religion, Nature and the Environment, which has a new subtitle and a new publisher, Equinox Publishing Ltd., London.

Ecotheology, which formerly had a largely Christian focus, is now broadening its reach, and the latest issue “aims to consider the ways in which places have influenced or perhaps actively engaged with the evolution of particular religions, and the ways in which religious people have engaged with particular places,” to quote Harvey’s introduction.

Contents include these articles:

“Orchestrating Sacred Space: Beyond the ‘Social Construction’ of Nature” by Adrian Ivakhiv

“Imagining Gaia: Perspectives and Prospects on Gaia, Science and Religion” by Grant H. Potts

“Smokey and Sacred: Nature Religion, Civil Religion, and American Paganism” by Chas S. Clifton

“‘Gaia told me to do it’: Resistance and the Idea of Nature within Contemporary British Eco-paganism” by Andy Letcher

“Reclaiming the Ecoerotic: Celebrating the Body and the Earth” by Sylvie Shaw

“Covenanting Nature: aquacide and the Transformation of Knowledge” by Laura Donaldson.

The invention of ‘Goth’ style?

From David Clay Large’s Where Ghosts Walked: Munich’s Road to the Third Reich, a cultural and political history of the city from the late 1800s through the rise of the Nazi party, comes this description of an avant-garde cabaret, The Eleven Executioners:

“After the opening song came an appearance by the resident femme fatale, Marya Delvard, an extremely thin woman with flaming red hair, black-rimmed eyes, and luminescent skin. Dressed in a long black gown and bathed in violet light, she looked as though she had just crawled out of a coffin. Hardly moving or changing her pitch, she moaned songs about dawning sexuality, suicide, and murder. ‘She was frightfully pale,’ recalled the writer Hans Carossa. ‘One thought involuntarily of sin, vampirically parasitical cruelty, and death . . . She sang everything with languid monotony which she only occasionally interrupted with a wild outcry of greedy passion.'”

The year was 1901.

Drat that Mary Magdalene

More attempted damage control from the Christian right to the fuss raised by The Da Vinci Code, about which I blogged earlier on Dec. 9, 2003.

Here, AP writer Richard N. Ostling writes a fairly snide review of Karen L. King’s The Gospel of Mary Magdala: Jesus and the First Woman Apostle.

(Credit to Religion News Blog, which has the dirt on all kinds of religious groups, so long as they are not “Christian apologists [or] countercult professionals.”)

Now It’s Candles

As one of those people who always liked candles, I hate to admit this, but it seems to be true. Burning parafin-based candles indoors might be bad for you. But how many candles are too many?

From the linked risk-analysis paper: “These results support the conclusion that the public health risks posed by benzene in candle emissions (soot) do not exceed the threshold (1 excess cancer in 100,000 individuals) for California Proposition 65 listing and labeling. “

Interest in Vodou Surges

As long as I am on the topic of Vodou/Voodoo/Voudoun, this New York Times story ties a “surging revival of interest” in the religion to 9/11, oddly enough. (Free registration required to read the article.) “The appeal of voodoo now cuts across racial and national lines. Some specialists say that in the United States, and particularly in New Orleans, many of those who now gravitate toward it are white.”

“Something very real is happening,” said Martha Ward, a professor of anthropology at the University of New Orleans who wrote one of the forthcoming books about [famed early 19th-century Voodoo priestess Marie] Laveau. “Americans today are hungry for spiritual fulfillment, and voodoo offers a direct experience with the sacred that appeals to more and more people.”

Practical Polytheism

Practical Polytheism

I am currently reading Devoted to You: Honoring Deity in Wiccan Practice. The title is a bit of a misnomer, as one contributor, Maureen Reddington-Wilde, could be more properly described as a Greek Reconstructionist. Since I was recently blogging about Aphrodite, I’m starting with Reddington-Wilde’s chapter on Her.

Editor Judy Harrow contributes a section on Gaia; other constributors are Alexei Kondratiev (Brigit) and Geoffrey W. Miller (Anubis).

Harrow writes, “We are four Pagan henotheists, each of whom has a long-standing devotion to the Deity he or she has written about here. We are devoted. We respect and admire one another’s devotion. . . . Since modern Paganism is a high-choice relgion, we have a wide range of choices in our basic approach to religion itself. So another thing that I would hope is that this book will show you something of the range of options available to you and help you find your own comfortable place within that range.”

Vodou souls

“The Quick and the Dead: The Souls of Man in Vodou Thought” is an essay by the Berkeley, California, musicologist Richard Hodges, who writes, “In nineteenth century France, the Nancy school of hypnotism discovered a way of producing states of abandonment of the body by the personality as profound as in traditional ritual possession. This only became a minor chapter in the history of Western medical psychology. There is a deep-seated prejudice in the West against loss of control. There is such a high evaluation of the individual and his personality that it is very difficult to conceive of the possibility for the ego to relax its grip and to accept to be displaced by something higher and finer. Such relaxation is one of the fundamental states of the human psyche. The absence in the West of cultural institutions for the socialization and development of this state is one of the signs of the loss of genuine psycho-spiritual knowledge in modern times. “

Nightmare Alley

Last November, Jim Lewis, the editor of Syzygy, the journal of new religious movements, tipped me off about William Lindsay Gresham’s 1946 crime novel Nightmare Alley. He suggested that this book about “carny” life–with its attitude that most people are marks, rubes, sheep and that all religions are tricks and con jobs, held the blueprint for Anton LaVey’s creation of the Church of Satan twenty years later.

The relationship might be analogous to the way that the Church of All Worlds was based on Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land — terminology, polyamory, and all (except for Martians).

Gresham’s books are apparently “collectible,” and the cheapest way that I found to buy the book, after cruising Advanced Book Exchange, was to order a discounted copy of Crime Novels, an anthology of noir-ish ficition, from Powell’s Books online. Nightmare Alley is included, along with The Postman Always Rings Twice and other classics.

Now for the truly strange part: he and his second wife, the poet Joy Davidman, became strongly interested in the writing of C.S. Lewis in the 1940s. They broke up in 1954; she went to England and later married C.S. Lewis herself.

L. Ron Hubbard comes into the picture too, but I think that’s enough weirdness for now.

(That makes two posts in a row using the word “noir.” What’s going on? I don’t plan these things.)

And not a minute too soon

I am referring to 2003, of course. Let it be over with. I have just checked two thirty-ish couples, plus dog and toddler, into our rental cabin, and I hope they have a good New Year’s Eve celebration. Mary and I will be catching up on The Sopranos on video, since we live beyond the range of cable television.

We have just returned from a 3,800-mile train trip: Chicago, Philadelphia, Washington (and for me, Newark and New York–right through Tony Soprano’s fictional homeland). Two-and-a-half cheers for Amtrak; I think that it is time we join its “frequent traveler” club and see if we can get any discounts or upgrades. That makes two transcontinental rail trips in six months, and it sure beats flying commercial airlines, an experience that is more and more like going to jail–without the jail cuisine.

And now we have yet another of those perpetual, unwinnable marital argument topics: Is the Superliner (double-decker) sleeping car preferable to the Viewliner (single-decker) sleeping car, or vice-versa? I vote for the Superliner: true, the upper berth has no window, but it just has much more of that 1940s, film noir feel to it, even though the cars are newer than that.

Hear That Lonesome Whistle Blow

Blogging will slow down until the week after Christmas while Mary and I get on the train for Philadelphia and New York.

According to Leslie Miller, who covers transportation for the Washington Post, on Wednessday the 17th, the Federal Railroad Administration “is trying to give communities that want to silence train whistles some peace,” permitting more gates and flashing lights at crossings. The FRA news release link is here, but may have some problems.

Most of my life has been lived within sound of a train whistle. When I was a poor college student in Portland, Oregon, the Southern Pacific ran through the kitchen of my house, or so it seemed to roommate Yiorgos Chouliaras and me.