Wednesday, June 19, 2013

A splendid idea …

… Robert Alter's Masterful Translations of the Bible as Literature – Tablet Magazine (hat tip, Rus Bowden.)

Only if we approach the Bible as a work of literature, Alter believes, can we understand the full subtlety and intelligence of its stories. As he writes in his pioneering book The Art of Biblical Narrative: “As one discovers how to adjust the fine focus of those literary binoculars, the biblical tales, forceful enough to begin with, show a surprising subtlety and inventiveness of detail, and in many instances a beautifully interwoven wholeness. … The paradoxical truth may well be that by learning to enjoy the biblical stories more fully as stories, we shall also come to see more clearly what they mean to tell us about God, man, and the perilously momentous realm of history.”

Telling one from the other …

The Signal and the Noise. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

A thought for today …

Human beings must be known to be loved; but Divine beings must be loved to be known.

— Blaise Pascal, born on this date in 1623 l

Congratulations...

...Michelle de Kretser wins Miles Franklin literary award

Perspicuity first...

...Clear Minds Come Out with Clear Words

Tuesday, June 18, 2013

But Decadence can be a good thing too....

Warrior Princess

A former Navy SEAL has written a book about the 20 years that they spent in the elite squad before living life as a woman...

As Chris, Beck served for 20 years in SEAL team 6 and retired just months before the May 2011 raid on bin Laden's compound...

She has created a garden in the backyard of her home in St. Petersburg, Florida and is opening it up to returning veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan in an effort to help calm them as they return to civilian life.

'Sitting in my back yard or at my fishpond I no longer feel anger, resentment or depression; I feel peace. I want to give this option of a "peace garden" to my veteran brothers and sisters,' she writes on the group's website under her old name of Chris. 'We fought on the battlegrounds for freedom and the American way of life, now it’s time to be welcomed home to a "Healing Ground."'

Kristin watching Kristin get interviewed last week on Anderson Cooper/CNN. She was in town on Friday and so we met up and had a drink or two and she watched her and I watched her watch her...when does this get infinitely recursive??

How weird …

… 'Real men don't do poetry': Israeli army refuses to let IDF soldier read verses on the radio - Middle East - World - The Independent. (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)

So Wilfred Owen and Edward Thomas were not real men.

FYI …

… The Millions : Tom Wolfe on “The Human Beast” and its Kingdom of Speech. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

The bell tolls …

… From An Unwritten Theory of Dreams by Zbigniew Herbert | The New York Review of Books. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Who would have thought?

...Grammar: The plucky punctuators fighting against apostrophe catastrophes

Important: Find out for yourself …

… Edward Snowden: NSA whistleblower answers reader questions | World news | guardian.co.uk. (Hat tip, Lee Lowe.)

Our explanatory culture …

… The American Scholar: Too Much Information - Paula Marantz Cohen.

The other day, a colleague came into my office disgusted. He had asked his students to write a paragraph about the symbolism of the flower pot in Raymond Carver’s story “Popular Mechanics.” The answers that came back were similar, he said, not because students had copied from each other, but because they had all Googled “Popular Mechnics,” “Carver,” “flower pot,” and “symbolism,” scanned what came up, and found the “answer.” They had no idea that this wasn’t the way to proceed. They figured that the question had a singular answer, much in the way a math problem has an answer.

I detest those audio tapes they give out at museum exhibitions. Why the hell do they think it's called visual art?

A man of many parts …

… Job advice from Casanova … with a few diet tips, too. | The Book Haven.

A Male View of Marriage "from the inside"

..Jay Ponteri thinks there's another way to make sense of things. Not to get divorced, but to talk about exactly what's going on inside a marriage, from inside of it.

Jay is a real married person living in Portland, Oregon. He and his wife share the usual things married people do: a house, two dogs, bank accounts, a son. A life "ballooning with inventory," as he puts it, a life filled with to-dos. He resembles a tired kid being dragged around on constant errands -- this house repair, that dinner date with friends -- a situation he avoids by retreating to his workshop off the house. There, he explores his fantasies about other women in a manuscript.

He uses the manuscript the way some people use drugs or drink, to dream up alternate worlds in which his life is not his life (or his wife is not his wife, his house is not his house). "My dreams pulled me out of bed," he writes. "Padded the lonely walls up against which life threw me." The barista who serves him lattes at the coffee shop becomes his lover, and together they share a lascivious existence of cigarettes and gravy fries, confessing everything and comforting one another in their romantic, adolescent-seeming sadness. Discovery of this manuscript understandably strains his marriage. Particularly because when his wife reads it, he hasn't yet changed the characters' actual names.

What Ponteri means to do here is less about enumerating the negatives of married life -- so many have done that before -- but more to flesh out the individual, emotional experience of binding yourself to one other individual person for the rest of your life, and the fatalism made worse by that relationship, especially if you already tend on the navel-gazing side.

I'm sorry: is there a point? At all? Anything to be learned? By anyone? Wow...the stuff that gets published and the credence given to the published material...from Dawn to Decadence indeed...

The dangers of projection …

… Maverick Philosopher: Does Anyone Really Believe in the Muslim Paradise? (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

If we are to be as charitable to Atran as possible, we would have to say that he holds his strange view because he himself does not believe in the Muslim paradise and he cannot imagine anyone else really believing in it either. So Muslims who profess to believe in Paradise with its black-eyed virgins, etc. are merely mouthing phrases. What makes this preposterous is that Atran ignores the best evidence one could have as to what a person believes, namely, the person's overt behavior taken in the context of his verbal avowals. Belief is linked to action. If I believe I have a flat tire, I will pull over and investigate. If I say 'We have a flat tire" but keep on driving, then you know that I don't really believe that we have a flat tire.

Same with the Muslim terrorist. If he invokes the greatness of his god while decapitating someone, then that is the best possible evidence that he believes in the existence of his god and what that god guarantees to the faithful, namely, an endless supply of post-mortem carnal delights. This is particularly clear in the case of jihadis such as suicide bombers. The verbal avowals indicate the content of the belief while the action indicates that the content is believed.

But do the papers get it?

… Americans' Confidence in Newspapers Continues to Erode.

Catching life's tempo …

… Poetry: Floyd Skloot discovers the necessity of music for insight | OregonLive.com. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

No mere linguistic slip …

… Continuous and Discrete | Guest Blog, Scientific American Blog Network. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

… without going into a detailed construction of real numbers, an ordinary person understands that some things, such as children, books, or cars can only be counted, whereas certain other things, such as water, milk, or the weight of a person have to be measured. Discrete objects are counted, while continuous ones are measured.

A thought for today …

It is a trick among the dishonest to offer sacrifices that are not needed, or not possible, to avoid making those that are required.

— Ivan Goncharov, born on this date in 1812

Monday, June 17, 2013

Gallows humour...

...Riotous writers

Not malign, just deluded …

… Bryan Appleyard — A Boomer Bites Back. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

I really have no dog in this fight, since I'm even older than the boomers. I was 21 at the time of the Cuban missile crisis, but I don't remember especially alarmed over it. As I learned not to later when I went to work in the field of arms control, both sides were at pains to make sure no bombs went off. The problem — still unsolved — was nuclear proliferation. Unfortunately, the people in charge these day — a good many of whom, i suppose, re boomers — are far less serious than those in charge back then.

Whitey being Whitey …

… Paul Davis On Crime: Crime Beat Column: A Q and A With Dick Lehr, Co-Author of 'Whitey: The Life Of America's Most Notorious Mob Boss.

Together at last …

… Edward Snowden and Catholic Social Teaching | Catholic Moral Theology Edward Snowden and Catholic Social Teaching |.

While there may be legitimate disagreement about where we should draw the line that determines when the basic conditions required for private property and civil society have been violated, surely there is no doubt that such a line should be drawn. And if one should respond that thus far the massive and systematic collection of personal data does not yet cross that line, one should at least ask the question that so disquieted Edward Snowden: is the infrastructure in place for the government to cross that line at a moment’s notice? When we are dealing with huge and powerful social structures like the US security apparatus, is there a meaningful moral difference between thecapacity to dissolve the sphere of privacy that makes civil society possible and the actual dissolution of that sphere?

Splendid...

...

Google launches Internet-beaming balloon

In case you wondered...

...Was Uri Geller a secret CIA spy?

This is all very nice …

… but what exactly are we supposed to do about the people who go around decapitating other people, claiming they do so for religious reasons: This View of Life: Here He Goes Again: Sam Harris’s Falsehoods. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Aureole of wonder …

… Anecdotal Evidence: `Like a Frock Coat on a Mermaid'.

Literary food fight …

… Controversy erupts as "undiscovered" Joyce manuscript is published just in time for Bloomsday | MobyLives. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

The necessary contemplative …

Defending the Commune: 3 | The American Conservative. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Thus the warning of Sir Thomas Browne in the seventeenth century: “Every man is not a proper champion for truth, nor fit to take up the gauntlet in the cause of verity. Many from the ignorance of these maxims, and an inconsiderate zeal unto truth, have too rashly charged the troops of error, and remain as trophies unto the enemies of truth. A man may be in as just possession of truth as of a city, and yet be forced to surrender: ’tis therefore far better to enjoy her with peace, then to hazard her on a battle.”

Water on the horizon …

… First Known When Lost: By The Sea, Part Two: "So Of The Soul".

Traditional murder and modern times …

… THUS WAS ADONIS MURDERED by Sarah Caudwell | Petrona Remembered. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Melodious and free …

… Luminary by RS Thomas: Poem of the week | Books | guardian.co.uk. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

A thought for today …

Learning starts with failure; the first failure is the beginning of education.

— John Hersey, born on this date in 1914

And that's perfectly fine...

...Curtis Sittenfeld: 'I know my characters are unlikable sometimes'

I think we can have this tendency to feel like famous people just exist for us to be amazed by or to comment on their clothes. They are real people. They brush their teeth, they have families. I do think George Bush and Laura Bush are real people [but] I have really negative feelings about George Bush's presidency. The way I feel about it is: if he hadn't been president and if he'd been the uncle of a friend of mine and I'd sat next to him at a wedding, I would have thought: "Oh, this guy's really friendly and funny."

Wordsworth, The Child Psychologist

It's often said that the Romantics invented childhood, as if children had merely been small adults before.

Hmmm...What about "unless ye be as a child..."

Sunday, June 16, 2013

Hmm …

… Sam Tanenhaus on Conservatism and Culture | FiveBooks | Five Books. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Well, I'm older than Tanenhaus, I spent some time with Bill Buckley, and I worked for ISI. I think I know the American conservative movement pretty well (though I have been libertarian). I think Tanenhaus gets some things right, but a lot of things wrong. At its best, American conservatism is the nearest thing we have to 19th-century liberalism.

Bloomsday in Philly …

… Bloomsday and the Gloves of Love.

Filling us in …

… Issa's Untidy Hut: Huff Dedication Redux: John Paul Moore.

Rallying cry …

… Language Log Çapuling. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

From pedestrian to freeway …

… Moore College of Art and Design - Blog - Retired Shoe Designer Bonnie Smith Finds New Career in Cars.

Bonnie and Debbie knew each other in high school and remain best friends.

Plus ça change …

… Paul Davis On Crime: Evelyn Waugh's 'Scoop': Journalism Is A Duplicitious Business.

What's going on in Turkey …

… THE VIEW FROM THE STANDS . (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

To all …

… Happy Fatha’s Day. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Concluding unscientific fragment …

… Anecdotal Evidence: `Tableau Vivant if You Will'.

Inquirer reviews …

… I review a couple of books by Gerald Stern: Thinking, feeling in poems and prose.

… Twisted tale of murder and power.

… He just loved teaching golf.

… How baseball and the nation emerged from WWII.

A thought for today …

A modern person has no energy to love any other time than his own.

— Torgny Lindgren, born on this date in 1938

Worried sick...

...Isaiah Berlin's letters reveal his despair at the 'growth of barbarism'

Saturday, June 15, 2013

An evening with...

...E

Also born today …

… Harry Nilsson, in 1941.

Big brother alert

… Secret to Prism program: Even bigger data seizure.

Years after decrying Bush for it, Obama said Americans did have to make tough choices in the name of safety.

"You can't have 100 percent security and also then have 100 percent privacy and zero inconvenience," the president said.

You can't have 100 percent security, period. Life is full of risks. We are smart enough to gauge them, and should be brave enough to take them, not imprison ourselves to avoid them.

Three in one …

… Dante…Rodin…Philadelphia | Dreaming in Iambic Pentameter.

In these parts, it's deer …

… zmkc: No Laughing Matter.

We were warned …

… Lincoln Hunter Web Log: On Freedom.

More academic lunacy …

… Important: Researcher Says that Berenstein Bears, Franklin the Friendly Turtle Perpetuate "Racist," "Socially Dominant Norms" to Children.

When are people like this going to be subjected to the relentless ridicule they so richly deserve?

Escaping the prison of self …

… A Bloomsday Appreciation of Ulysses by James Joyce, Greatest Mind-Scientist Ever | Cross-Check, Scientific American Blog Network. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Joyce achieved a kind of hyper-realism, rendering the experience of ordinary awareness so faithfully that other depictions seem quaintly artificial, like medieval paintings before artists mastered perspective.

In Saving the Appeances, Owen Barfield notes that the laws of perspective were known to artists long before they were employed by them. His conclusion is that a change in human consciousness took place around the time of the Renaissance, that people began to see the world in greater perspective and that artists began to portray it accordingly. Also, while Leopold Bloom's background was Jewish, he was in fact baptized twice, first as a Protestant, then as a Catholic when he married Molly.

Non-aligned critic …

… Anecdotal Evidence: `What Culture Survives the Century'.

“The great historical fact of the immediate past is therefore not that Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon or that the century of total war has continued into its seventieth year or that the liberal philosophies of the nineteenth century have become the mandates for terrorism and totalitarianism, but that man has ruined his one design for a community.”

This sounds pretty prophetic to me.

Shadows …

… Zealotry of Guerin: The Sense of Speed (Dali).

Reason for concern …

… Instapundit — ONE RING TO RULE THEM ALL: A reader who requests anonymity emails.

Literary cuisine …

… Allen Ginsberg’s Personal Recipe for Cold Summer Borscht | Open Culture. (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)

Back to the usual …

… Press Freedom Index 2013 - Reporters Without Borders. (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)

Long, whiz-bang sentences …

Bookslut | The Riotous, Wounded Wit of Stanley Elkin: On Illness as Muse. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Hidden stakes …

… Ivebeenreadinglately: Penelope Fitzgerald on Barbara Pym. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

A thought for today …

What a strange thing!
to be alive
beneath cherry blossoms.

― Kobayashi Issa, born on this date in 1763

The price of service...

...Flying drama

Nazi soul?

...Long-lost diary of top Hitler aide offers window into Nazi soul

Friday, June 14, 2013

Cognitive dissonance …

…Leon Wieseltier: “Perhaps culture is now the counterculture.” | The Book Haven.

The problem is what the academy has done to the humanities.

Graphic brevity …

… Issa's Untidy Hut: Ed Markowski's treeee: Small Press Friday.

Reminiscence …

… Bloomsday Memories - NYTimes.com. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Today is Bloomsday, when readers worldwide celebrate Leopold Bloom’s Dublin wanderings on June 16, 1904, in James Joyce’s “Ulysses.”

The Times's copy editors must have been asleep when this piece moved. Today is June 14.

Tyranny at work …

… Footage from the RC drone that was shot down by police [HD] on Vimeo. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Dumb and dumber …

Gary Jansen: 9 Reasons Why Dan Brown is One of the Most Important (Living) Authors. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

"Critics too, while probably conceding that Brown knows how to spin a good yarn …" This reviewer would concede nothing of the kind. As for Brown's historical inaccuracies, the problem is that they falsify his narrative. The Council of Nicaea was not convened to determine if Jesus was divine and the vote that decided how the Son was related to the Father and the Holy Spirit was not remotely close. English is not the European language with the fewest words of Latin origin. Opus Dei's headquarters are in Rome, not New York City. Dan Brown is a dreadful winter of godawful tripe.

Just a glimpse …

The Only Surviving Film Footage of Anne Frank - Rebecca J. Rosen - The Atlantic. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

A discipline for laziness …

… W. H. Auden’s Juicy Missing Diary Appears! And Then Promptly Disappears, For $74,426.56 | The Awl. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Cause for concern …

… Instapundit — 21ST CENTURY WATERGATE? CBS News confirms multiple breaches of Sharyl Attkisson’s computer.

One out of six …

… Collateral damage by William Logan - The New Criterion. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Amen, sister …

… The Sickening Snowden Backlash - The Daily Beast.

When one major institution (the Washington media establishment) so seamlessly partners with another (the U.S. government) in trashing a whistleblower, it’s not hard to understand why Americans might be jaded. The New Yorker’s Jeffrey Toobin wrotethat Snowden is "a grandiose narcissist who deserves to be in prison." MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell complained about Snowden’s naiveté and “maturity level,” as if only a child would believe the government should be transparent about its activity.Politico’s Roger Simon called Snowden “the slacker who came in from the cold,” with “all the qualifications to become a grocery bagger.” That people feel comfortable sneering about grocery workers—a respectable job—and writing off Snowden’s years working as a security guard as sloth tells you a bit about the culture of the nation’s capital, doesn’t it?

Read the whole thing.

Engagé …

… Gezi Park in the words of five writers | MobyLives. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Unheralded talent...

..."An imp with brains": The forgotten genius of Charlotte Mew

It is no mistake that she wrote so many dramatic monologues: the form is the perfect vehicle for such a lonely cast of souls, in that the addressee never replies to the speaker (dramatic monologues are always addressed to a silent other). In Mew’s poems, that addressee is often absent in any case: a vanished sweetheart, a buried loved one, a distant, unreachable God.

Turtling again …

… Anecdotal Evidence: `The Sport of Truly Chastened Things'.

Reviving the revenge tragedy …

… A Commonplace Blog: The audacity of revenge. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Precision and audacity …

… Bedford Park, by Bryan Appleyard - review — The Spectator. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

A thought for today …

I couldn't claim that I have never felt the urge to explore evil, but when you descend into hell you have to be very careful.

— Kathleen Raine, born on this date in 1908

His last book...

...The Quarry by Iain Banks

Thursday, June 13, 2013

Take a look …

… REBEKAH HIGGINS CONTEMPORARY SACRED ARTIST.

Saving a snapper …

… Ivebeenreadinglately: You can never have too many turtles, but maybe you can have too many Turtle Diaries? Or, a contest! (Hatip, Dave Lull.)

Debbie and I were at Tinicum Marsh a while back, and a man walked by with his little daughter, who had just seen a turtle. In the course of talking to her dad about it she coined the term "turtling." We both thought it was a great word. In fact, these past few days, burdened with a cold, turtling is what I've mostly been doing.

Prelude to a masterpiece …

… Agee, Before He Was Famous. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

And the winners are …

… Winning Poems for 2013 June : IBPC.

… The Judge's Page.

(Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)

And the winners are …

… Winning Poems for 2013 June : IBPC.

… The Judge's Page.

(Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)

The world beyond his skull …

… Anecdotal Evidence: `I Try and Stay Away from Being Kooky'.

Hair-raising …

Three Beards : The New Yorker. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Except for brief period when I settled for a mustache, I have been bearded since the early '60s. I grew up wanting to have a beard.

Literary crime

… The Visionary Detective by Joyce Carol Oates | The New York Review of Books. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

These may be great reads, great fictions, but they don't sound to me as if they really connect with actual police life. But what do I know? I'm just the son of a cop. "Raymond’s milieu is the chill of Thatcher-era London …" That would be the bad old days before they started slashing soldiers to death in broad daylight.