The Touch  of a Mother’s Skin:  Some Notes on the Gendered Taxonomy of Mormon Blessings.

Anthony Easton

anthony.easton@gmail.com

Concordia University.

Intended  for the “Skin” call module

There has been recent discussion in LDS church  circles about which rituals women can perform, and which they are forbidden to. The Church’s historic compromise between congregational and magisterial models of power, means that not allowing women to be priests, does not forbid them from speaking in church, for example, but does forbid them from blessing the sacrament.

The concept of laying on of hands for healing, is one of the rites of the LDS church, where this tension between the lay and the priesthood is made the most explicit. For feminist scholars of religion, like Mary Toscano, the historical Mormon act of a Mother’s blessing, is as sacramental as any of the blessings that were traditionally performed by men. For (mostly) male critics of this position, there are blessings that can be only performed by men. These blessings are not only discreet work in the temples, or blessings for setting apart before people go on missions, or blessings to dedicate new children, or even to baptize, but also blessings to heal .

The question emerges--because male rites to lay on hands for the express purpose of healing, are wrapped up in a gender essentialized method, is there a masculine touch that heals differently than the feminine touch of a mother’s blessing?

Researching the history of the mother’s blessing, the shifting roles of motherhood in Latter Day Saint Context, and LDS connections between healing and vernacular religious practice, will provide a historiographical narrative, where the skin on skin contact for the purposes of healing tells of stories of how families are both integrated and exiled. This will be done by investigating both official church statements, from Brigham Young to the 1994 Proclamation of the Family; personal recollections from families, and also radical theological interventions, that seek to collapse the category of blessing.

i don't think i liked snowpeircer, and i don't know why. i love chris evans--and his melancholy here was strong, the aesthetics were powerful, tilda was brilliant, as was john hurt, the work seemed both new and peiced together from various parts. i can handle allegory, it might have been the nihilism, i think it was one of the more hopeless movies i have seen, (any solution posited will result in more catastrophe, any dissent has been constructed to further the status qua, the revolutionary and the reactionary depend on each other (one seeding the other), stability and hierarchy win over chaos, and eventually, the polar bear will eat the last survivors) but dystopian works are not expected to be pleasant, or to end well--recent dystopias have failed to note how their work is co-opted into an agenda of self-perpetuating crisis/crony/corporatism capitalism (cf Divergent, I am No, 4, Hunger Games). It's hopelessness seemed well earned. There were things I could nitpick (the writing, the writing was terrible) but I felt dissatisfied and uneasy at the end of it, and I didn't know why.

Pop Matters Best of the 2000s List: 

1. Britney Spears Blackout 
2. kd lang Hymns of the 49th Parallel
3.  Tanya Tagaq,  ᐊᐅᒃ
4. PJ Harvey “Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea”
5. Dolly Pardon Little Sparrow. 
6. Miranda Lambert Kerosene
7. Bjork Vesperine 
8. MIA Arular 
9. Americas Sweetheart Courtney Love 
10. Cesaria Evora Nha Sentimento

what's the word for bittersweet erotic frisson of accidentally stumbling upon an image you jerked off at 14--especially when at 14 you had to glean thru scarcity and now you live in the promised world of excess

Reference/Begging Notes for Invocaiton of my Demon Brother peice:

PAwnbroker

Blake

Chein Andulou

Trauma to the Eye Motif

Isaac

Mason

Phallic

Sailor

Steward

Barely Legal

Semenial Magic Crowley

Lefthand path

hanged man

tarot

Vietnam

Helicopter

Spero

Skull Pipe

siamese batting

the sweep of musicians

weird home movie aesthetic

Truman Capote Thru the Flowers

Garden

Back to the Garden

light show

acid test

pessimistiv

flames

capes

ritual garments

moonchild

solit of personhood

tattoo

conjoined

mirroed bodies

skryers glass

glitter

cockettes

radical fairies

hermes

stone cock

false eyes

eyes as mouths

ring of similar faces

cornia

sundog

tarot

death

hanged man

devil as camp hollywood

lined in red satin

godwin

nazi

burning

more flames

into spikes

tom of finland

hells angels

thomson

horus

abstracting, splitting, repeating

kadeliscope

hippie jesus

satyr

manic

more nazis

heartfield

broken cross

out of the copter

not alot of cock

owl

tattoos ad eyes

kaballa

orgy as masturbation

third eye sequin

lace

warhol exploding plastic

velvets

tophat

more simaese

cat

ironic procession

jagger

kapelscope

fade out

live performance

lattice work

jagger in white holding snake

hippie

pentagram

zap yr pregrant thats witchcraft

Clerical and Episcoplal Vestments, Diary of Bishop Fields, June 22 1844

2 Satin Gowns
1 Silk Gown
1 cassock
2 Scarves
2 Sashes
6 cochets (?)
6 pairs of sleeves
2 pr silk wristbands
3 silk aprons
1 Oxford Cap
4 par bands
1 case for bands
1 purple bag
3 sermon cases.

(oxford cap vould be 16 or 1 6x?)

60 pages, GRP outline:


Intro:

• Bio of Wood 
• Anglo-Catholicism
• uni 
• and romanism 
• Family History
• rc cousins 
• money 
• reverseals 
• Englishness
• pyschogeography 
• floating bubble 
• NB/Montreal
• Schoolmaster 
• Sister Sarah 
• eccesial 
• Death
• funeral  
• Methodology: 
• If not X then Y but not X nor Y Then What 
• a) Pedestry 
• school teaching 
• anglocatholicism history and connecitons to the uranians 
• the urianis connection b/w peadstry and schooling 
• the uranians connection b/w pedestry and misogyny 
• no evidence that he was even sexual 
• swimming anecdote 
• Sister Sarah 
• Romanism 
• Aesthetics 
• Eucharistic Theology 
• Tractarian alelgience 
• I am not a Romanist 
• willingness to compromise (incense anecdote)
• what does Anglican Ritualism look like? 
• Canadian 
• New Brunswick then Montreal 
• emergence of an Anglophone discourse 
• Colonial suggests they thot of themselves as English 
• English in Exile 
• what is English then (McClintock) 
• Masculinities 
• hyomosocial 
• school 
• Father French
• but presence of Sarah and the three communicats at his funeral 
•  homosexual 
• French 
• material culture reads as queer. (bosivert) 
• gossip post-Wood 
• homosexual as a category failed to exist  Aesthetics 
• funeral discussion 
• Robinsons work 
• Supplice
• Supplice wars 
• the 1904 photo 
• Wood willingness to just be present
• Aesthetics 
• Funeral Gear 
• Body Positioned in Church 
• Supplice Case Study (robinson) 
• Educaiton 
• St John School Material 
• Choir School and its future absence 
• Death after a year 
• Case study of photo of the corridor 
• Fosdick anecdote
• Aesthetics as a kind of Material Culture 
• Eucharist 
• horse trading at the end of the life of these spaces.
• Money, Realestate adn the Golden Sqaure Mile 
• Celibacy 
• as a kind of queerness 
• as a kind of romanism 
• as a kind of ritual practice 
• Sarah and Marriage
• Fiefdom 
• as a setting part 
• as a kind of ritual act
• Cocnlusion 
• Wood as symoblic figure, as a cipher mroe than as biography 
• absence/presence./negation 
• boredom as a strategy. 

saw little girls dressed in perfect miyake pleats and orgami headresses

doing crane like motions

and i was at peace with quebec

two glasses of a v. dense italian red, a v. dry sav blanc, a planters punch, a french version of port, a fennet branco, lapin croquette, a v. light veal stew with fiddle heads, peas,and asparagus, and a black  forrest cake more like a mille fille. liverpool house w/ wendy

The weight of the world, it seemed, rested on the bachelor's shoulders. And the4 conflicts and stresses registered in certain bachelor texts rerive from the peculari situiion of bachelor identiy in the antebellum phase of its emergence. The bachelor occupies an ambigious position within the mid-Victorian system of sex, gender and body ideologies. Not yet the subject of etiquette books such as the complete bachelor (1896, no longer an adresse of younge men's guides of the thirties and forties (in which the owrd "bachelor" can barely be mnetioned, nowhere to be found in the treatises on domestic life and martial sexuality, the bachelor's sociosexual identity is undefined and unrelgulated. Located in a kind of negative conceptual space, on the threshokld between domestication and transgression, the bachelor is a liminal concept in atebellum culture, and a strantional s tate within proper masculine devolpment...

Fireside Chasity, The Erotics of Sentimental Bahelorhood in the 1850s, Vincent J Bertolini, from Sentimental Men 29.

Pater envisions his critical activity under a public gaze, and thereby structures his aesthet- icism through the social forms and psychology that it ostensibly re- pudiates, those of Victorian gentility.

"The world," Newman writes, mistrusts innocence as "craft" because "sobriety, self-restraint, control of word and feeling have about them an air of being artificial, because they are not natural; and of being artful, because artificial." Thus self- restraint, he continues, "is the first thing which makes holy persons seem wanting in openness and manliness.

Georg Simmel points out in "The Sociology of Secrecy and Secret Societies," That which we can see through plainly to its last ground, shows us therewith the limit of its attraction. . If the utmost attractiveness of another person is to be preserved for us, it must be presented to us in part in the form of vagueness or impenetrability. This is the only substitute which the great majority of people can offer for that attractive value which the small minority possess through the inexhaustibility of their inner life and growth

The trope of arcane wisdom thus invites thefin-de- siecle celebration of art as a dangerous influence, as in the trope of "the fatal book." And Pater's rhetoric clearly suggests a calculated affiliation of his aestheticism with homoerotic subcultures that still remain shadowy in recent social and literary histories of Victorian England.3"

But it is important to note that the rhetoric of secrecy is not inevitably the expressive veil of a specifically homoerotic desire. Indeed, to draw this inference would seem to reproduce the very practice that Newman analyzes in his sermon on "Innocence and Wisdom": "the world," disturbed by the secrecy of those who withdraw from its scrutiny, interprets the transgression as a mode of gender deviance. One facet of the burden of Victorian manliness is a deep mistrust of (which is of course inseparable from a fascination with) secrecy:

ritualized devotion as a means of giving shape and solemnity to a life of aesthetic experience -of realizing aestheticism as what Foucault has called a technology of the self.?5

Gentleman, Dandy, Priest: Manliness and Social Authority in Pater's Aestheticism
Author(s): James Eli AdamsSource: ELH, Vol. 59, No. 2 (Summer, 1992), pp. 441-466Published

Polaris List:

Tanya Tagaq Aminism
Wet Secrets Free Candy
Jess Mossaluke Light Up the Night
Fresh Snow I
Rae Spoon My Beautiful Prarie Home

Schlock, at its finest, is where bad taste becomes great art. Schlock is music that subjugates all other values to brute emotional impact; it aims to overwhelm, to body-slam the senses, to deliver catharsis like a linebacker delivers a clothesline tackle. The qualities traditionally prized by music critics and other listeners of discerning taste — sophistication, subtlety, wit, irony, originality, “experimentation” — have no place in schlock. Schlock is extravagant, grandiose, sentimental, with an unshakable faith in the crudest melodrama, the biggest statements, the most timeworn tropes and most overwrought gestures

Jody Rosen

neighbours

it had profound homnophobia

but in ways that were almost closeted

and an anger against women

sort of like women are furniture, or ruin yr adoloscent fun

so the only way to fix that is to spend time with men

which flirts with queerness in a way

that allows for one to pretend for pleasure

and then be punished when the pleasure goes too far

angry, ugly, vicisous movie

profoundly distrubed queer writers are praising it

John Rolfe's book of vintage drawings of logos and signs is kind of a graveyard of pre-tatcher nationalism and is a beautiful example of the haunting of capital in ordinary material culture.

cold war  satelites tell us about ancient mid east historical sites

vintage photos of the 70s  computer labs

The Chronicle of Higher Educaiton tells of how oral history nd other archival work into the troubles in ireland have provided legal consquences, including murder charges against former Sein Fein members who are now part of parliment.

NFB streams the entire Introducing Leonard Cohen, from 1965.


i have watched this man work thru his mug collection on camera for 8 minutes like 10 times, its incredibly southing.

15 unproduced hitchcock flims

more informaiton about jpii and his covering up of the sex abuse crisis

cops still think they have everyones best interest in mind, shocked when agit prop campaigns backfire.

on the problems perserving residental and vernacular modernism, a dallas case study.

Chris Molophany on the charts  is one of the most delightful, tight work on what it music means now, this is his emp talk. and him in conversation with s/fj about how to fix the r and b charts


Elvis Costello in Nashville, a mid 80s bbc doc.

Didion interview  thanks to the believer

as opposed to most abandoned  site porn, Warren Kirks photos of suburban Melbourne, are small intimate, and profoundly respectufl.

Fantastic Obit  for Billy Frank Jr, one of the first legal agitators for native fishing rights, here in Salmon in sattle.

long interview with Thelma Schoonmaker.

From Lynne Cohen's Late work in Venice as an RIP 

five points

a) ongoing western magical tradition and occult socities working in favour of that instinct (Rosy Cross' document Chemical Wedding...from 1616, and the idea of a chemical merriage as an active symbol of this)
b) traditions from the 16th century onward (eg Enochian magic was easily synthesised with other magical elements of the order because it was originally derrived from these same elements...icluding cabala, heremticism, astrology, alchemy and natural magic) being synthetic, so movements like Order of the Golden Dawn became kind of metasyntethtic. (for example, Westcott, one of the founders of the ORder of the Golden DAwn, talked about Securalism, Cabalsitic, Hermetic, Alechemial and Roschian practice) (or the order of the golden dawn a combo of heremticism, neoplat, cabala, demonic/natural)  (see also the translations of the Agrippa ) also perhaps the intersections of pagan and cabalistic texts, not nessc. as christian, but including something else The canon OGD talught to initaites, for example: "before the admission to the Zectau grade, the neophye must learn the names and achlemical symbols and the four elemnets, the names of astrological symbols, and elements atruibuited to them, of the twelve zodiac signs, the names charactersand (ritual purpose) of the 22nd letters of the herbrew alphaet, the ten serphaie, etc) (33) Also the cabalistic replaces of words n xian prayers, use of hindu language in words like aum, also (and this might be a bit more Blavastsqkesque, nthough mentioned in less chapter, the inclusion of yoga) Also all the egyption borrowing--Freeamsonry esp. (see Assman) The possiblity of Masonry as Polythesitc or Pagan.
c) occasionaly more open (see Blavastky or Kingsfold's rship to women, or how common it was in lower and upper classes) See McacEnzie's Royal MAsonic Cycopledia of 1877, which while perhaps a bit debunked as a masonic text, was considered more than useful in how it discussed other groups) Dysons critique of Bretts MAgus
d) spats (about ritual, women, leadership, who they are absorbing) (see the differences in how theophists practiced ritual much less than the hermetists) (westcott less of a ritualist) free vs speculative masons RoX refusal of spiritualism
e) loose boundries (inventon of tradition, inclusion of fiction (see Buwler-Lytton), the cabala/pagan shit) also possiblity of collective


questions
urania
sufferage
h rider haggard
masonry and catholiism
working class
FRazer
crowley and purposeful obsfucation




random thots
caballa makes magic approite (24)


four rituals of the golden danwn
a) official rituals
b) the equavelent of cathchesis ot progress thru levels
c) Mcgregopr, et al's creative work (founder)
d) "extranous exampels of the members activeities (27)

nullifcation of the nesscessity of a second text

Donnie Darko, Bully, Gummo, Mysterious Skin, Blair Witch, Election, Jaw Breaker, Y Tu Mama Tambien, Apt Pupil, Hedwig, Spring Breakers, Funny Games, Happiness, The Rules of Attraction, American Psycho, Boys Don’t Cry, Velvet Goldmine, Fight Club, Bad Santa, Scream, The Ice Storm, Boogie Nights, Igby Goes Down, Rushmore, Die Mommy Die, Last Days of Disco, AI, Lost Highway, 28 Days Later, Pan’s Labyrinth, District 9, Capturing the Friedmans

In his letter to Alig, just now after prision, James St James writes a list of movies he has to say. This is the new cult canon kids. i want to write more about this, but i cannot think of a movie i would subtract to tis list, and only a few i would add. 

twelve things i am thinking about post emp:

a) ccm, mumford, larry norman, xian hipness (thanks Jewly Hight and Josh Langhoff) (thinking maybe a 33.3 on Amy Grant---ever since Rae Spoon I have thot an enourmous amount of Amy Grant as a pop music gateway drug)
b) the mutability of class (thanks well everyone)
c) reutning western to country and western, and who exactly is working class anymore (Thanks Ann Powers, Alfred Soto Tom Smucker)
d) the intersections of rezhop and noretona country (thanks Josh Langhoff and the entire regional panel)
e) Faure's Requiem (Thank Carl Wilson) and whether religious xtc is a useful critical category in pop)
f) What50s style sophistication means as an aesthetic and paedological category (Thanks Barry Shank)
g) The radical potential(s) of pleasure (well everyone)
h) How digital media functions versus analog media vis a vis preservation (ThanksAndy Zax)
h) bro country Jody Rosen, Thomas Inskeep Alfred, Ann, Carl, Josh, and well anyone)
i) How I don't understand straight negotions of adultery (the song Me and Mrs Jones)
j) intersectionality as an aesthetic of overlapping filigrees (Me'Shell at the keynote)
k) boarding schools and failures to form masculinity Dub Dob Dee

also seattle is a paradise of ciders, i had cider like three times a day--a smoked cider, a chery cider, a pear cider, dry ciders, sweet ciders, oh thank you jesus

op ten things i saw at the Seattle art museum

1) Al Held's Last Series from 1964-1966, maybe two dozen, small and medium size paintings, with bright house painted colours, over paintings, awkard shapes, attempting to soften hard edge, and harden lyricism, with its size, and its slight attiude of instiability or formal offness, prefigures heliman and silliman.
2) Remington Bronzes (they swerve and swagger)
3) dozens of objects of messian, and of chinese white ware, the chinese white ware made to look like messian, the messian made to look like work from china, 18th century global trade routes, and the role of the exotic in counissuership, placed together in an incredibly cloer gesture
4) This medium sized persian painting, of interlocking rooms, with a figure in each room, the spaces are at oblique angles, and a dual line of black and gold between them, negotiates the schematics of how to map place in a rigious composition.
5) Noland's Relic from 1969. a painting maybe a meter by two meters, tiny by noland's standars, the top 30 cm and the bottom 30 cms stripes, in jewel tones--gold, cobalt, hot pink, orange, citron, and the middle a dusty apricot. the control of pictoral space seems new. also, in the top 30 cm a line of dunnish brown that i thought was natural canvas, but was actually painted, in an inside baseball guesture of intimate trompe d'oilel.
6) Frankenthaler Hold, 1974. most of this canvas is empty, a large scrabbled line near the middle, and a floatinng rectangle, shading an interior sqaure. underneath all of this, is a unsteady curve. The colours are weird and sort of ugly, but the true genius of Frankenthaler is how to layer paint thru a set of negotions between the oblique and the transparent..this is a paticualrlly good example of this.
7) a coast salish cedar blanket which was just a grid, within a larger grid.
8) two haida skull masks.
9) The white scarf of Leon Delafosse in their only Sergent on view.
10) that much of their (large) african masks were displayed in ritual garments.

three things i liked at the seattle sculpture park
a) tony smith's stinger--large, but lying low on the ground, nestled in a grove, it has this weird, monolithic energy, in a kitsch sf sense, managing to be unnerving and v. much of its time and place.
b) sol lewitts large wall drawings
c) a nevelson that was of welded steal, not the usual assembelege

hooray, hooray, the first of may
outdoor fucking begins today