The Same River

If blog entries are especially sparse over the next week or two, it's because I'm in the process of moving. Moving gets less traumatic every time I do it, but it's still significantly worse than, say, getting my wisdom teeth out (largely because I was unconscious for the latter process).

The thing with moving -- well, one of the things with moving -- is that it allows all too many opportunities for falling into a pseudo-Proustian reverie in which one looks back over one's life and finds it vaguely wanting. From there, one could move on to analyzing Augustine's ruminations on time and memory in Book X of the Confessions (with due attention to Ricoeur's treatment of this passage in Time and Narrative) and pondering the Heraclitean doctrine that no one can enter the same river twice.* Alternatively, one could opt to consume chocolate and watch Buffy tapes. Sadly, neither activity gets the kitchen packed.

After extensive and prolonged thought, however, I have concluded that it's time I bought new flatware.

* -- I think it says volumes for the existence of pre-Platonic antipathy between mythos and logos that nobody seems to have tried to take the perspective of a river-nymph in this debate.

Heat, Etc.

It's hot today. The A/C in this building, even if I wanted to use it, is broken. Fortunately, I'm a Summer Person. I love ice-cream, fireflies, sleeveless tops, hollyhocks, thunderstorms, and fans -- by which I mean not potential textual poachers, but the electric appliances with revolving blades and multiple settings. I'm hoping for a thunderstorm later this evening, but right now I have a fan directed onto me, a bottle of water next to me (I'd prefer iced tea, but it's too hot to get up and make some), and my laptop in front of me. There's chocolate frozen yogurt available in case of emergency. This is how sane people spend hot summer afternoons... although I wouldn't mind some new fiction.

Has anyone read Nino Ricci's Testament? I haven't, but this piece makes me mildly curious. It's more of an article than a book review, offering a quickie history of retelling Jesus's life while interviewing Ricci about his book and refusing to draw any critical conclusions about it. (I think that the article's representations of early Christian attitudes toward telling the life of Jesus leave something to be desired, too, but it's too hot for me to cite sources.) Now, it seems to me that the world only needs so many Fictional Lives of Jesus -- quite apart from the Gospels (canonical and otherwise) and the rather embarrassing but fascinating Toledot Yeshu, the Meditaciones Vitae Christi tradition (oh, cripes, it's never too hot to cite sources) -- well, anyway, Saramago and Graves are plenty for the modern era, with Reynolds Price classed more as interpretative translation than anything else. On the other hand, Fictional Lives of Jesus are a vast improvement over Fictional Lives of Whiny Adulterous Upper-Class Urbanites much of contemporary fiction. The issues I have with Ricci's novel in particular are that (a) I can't decide whether or not Hebraicizing (and shouldn't it really be Aramaicizing?) names from the Gospels pleases me or annoys me, but I'm leaning toward the latter; and (b) any author who can dismiss Graves, Saramago, et al. as "over the top"* and then announce that he enjoys Jesus Christ Superstar without seeing any apparent contradiction is probably not someone I need to bother with.

It might be just hot enough that I'm feeling less diplomatic than usual. So I'll save the post about why I think the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals is absolutely right for another day.

It's not that I don't have reading to do; our interdisciplinary seminar is in its final week, and we're doing little presentations involving several commonly read articles. Some of my colleagues know how to structure a presentation so as to make it interesting; others... do not. However, these presentations do give me the opportunity to ponder important epistemological questions, such as how art historians manage to keep from giggling at the term "groin vault." The following is an actual sentence from an actual article: "Whereas the groin vault was conceived of as two interpenetrating barrel vaults, producing groin lines of difficult-to-manage parabolic curvatures and folds, the rib vault instead began conceptually and in construction as an integral framework of discrete arches, each with an independently generated curvature defined not by a mere edge but by strong plastic form." Yes, it makes perfectly good architectural sense, but once you start thinking in terms of double entendres....

Oh, right. It's hot.

* -- Although, in fairness, D.H. Lawrence is always over the top, and not in a good way.

De Arte Blogendi

So Kass is wondering about different sorts of blog entries, and whether different interfaces encourage different sorts of posts. Victoria is writing about the concept of TMI in one's personal journal. Alex Golub, whom I had tentatively classed as an Academic Blogger, is writing what I could swear an earlier version of the relevant entry termed "fanfic." Everyone is still wondering about identity. And I... well, I'm wondering what I should call this thing I'm writing in, and how many different categories of entries I routinely perpetrate. Self-obsessed, much?

Truthfully, I've never been entirely clear on the difference between "blog" and "journal." Calling Baraita a "diary" is flat out, since it seems at once too personal and too dull, given my quotidian activities. But "journal" seems a little too faux-literary on the one hand (besides, when I'm "writing for a journal" it's usually something academic), and too diary-like on the other. "Blog" seems to imply something updated a bit more regularly than Baraita is likely to be, and a little more link- or news-heavy, but it's by far the most entertaining word of the three. Of course, I consulted the Weblog FAQK at Brunching Shuttlecocks, and received a definitive answer:

What is a weblog?
A weblog is a chronological collection of hypertext entries, including but not limited to links to other locations on the Web with editorial or personal commentary thereon.
How is that different from an online journal?
Weblogs do not contain little graphics at the end of each entry telling you that the author is "feeling bummed."

Since I'm not "feeling bummed," I guess this is a blog. Mind you, I'm usually cautious about neologisms -- not necessarily against them, unless they turn out to be godawful uses of nouns as verbs for people too illiterate to think of something different (e.g., "to message") -- but the word "blog" is apparently being considered for inclusion in the next OED edition. So that's something.

As for categories... Movable Type, my chosen weblogging tool, has a "category" function which allows the blog author to place each entry into one (or more, I think) author-defined categories. I've never used it, but if I did, the categories would fall into overlapping groups not unlike the ones in the one-line description of this blog -- "academic," "religious," and "pop-cultural." (The problem here is that posts about the role of religion in the Buffyverse technically qualify for all three of these categories.) There are also posts which are essentially "links thinly disguised as content," and posts which would probably be "personal." This last category tends to flourish when I'm visiting family, but it's never been especially regular, and those posts seldom garner much in the way of comment. I'm afraid I do pay attention to how many comments I get on assorted topics, because I feel a certain obligation to be interesting. While I'll grant that my definition of "interesting" is somewhat skewed, I'm fairly sure that my readers can do without a detailed account of how many disclaimers my course syllabi contain or how tasty tonight's seafood alfredo was.

On the other hand, I find the concept of ars deeply interesting, especially as it relates to blogging. No, ars does not mean "art" -- not exactly. The Lewis and Short Latin Dictionary, brought online through the marvelous Perseus Project, defines the term as follows:

ars , artis, f. [v. arma] , skill in joining something, combining, working it, etc., with the advancement of Roman culture, carried entirely beyond the sphere of the common pursuits of life, into that of artistic and scientific action, just as, on the other hand, in mental cultivation, skill is applied to morals, designating character, manner of thinking, so far as it is made known by external actions (syn.: doctrina, sollertia, calliditas, prudentia, virtus, industria, ratio, via, dolus).

It's not a terribly clear entry ("just as, on the other hand"?!), but it can yield a pretty fair definition of what I want to do with whatever the heck it is I write about. The ars blogendi* -- in my view -- involves relating content to other things, pursuing the advancement of culture (I'm not sure which culture, but let's save that for another day), applying skill to morals, and carrying the whole "entirely beyond the sphere of the common pursuits of life, into that of artistic and scientific action." Sounds good, doesn't it? Now if I could just sort out how best to accomplish all that....

Of course, funny links are good too. Look! Social theorists in Lego!

* -- In the absence of a decision from some authoritative body (I think the Vatican is the only power announcing new Latin words these days), I've decided that the back-formed Latin for "to blog" should really be "blogere" with a long e. I base this choice on the highly technical grounds that "blogeo ergo sum" sounds niftier than "blogo ergo sum."

On Names, Divine and Otherwise

I didn't give a huge amount of thought to the question of what to call myself when I started this blog. I'd dabbled in writing fanfic, and although I've yet to write anything that couldn't be read out loud in front of both my grandparents and my university's committee on tenure and promotion, I've always been conscious of what's attached to my professional name online and what's not. I'm not inexperienced at picking online handles, but most of the ones I liked back in college were too precious (although none of them involved the prefix "Lady"). I wound up going with my Hebrew name, Naomi Chana, for purposes of fic-writing and from thence to this blog.

Now, my Hebrew name isn't technically a pseudonym; it's how I'd get called up to the Torah at a synagogue, and there's nothing much more "real" than that. Since somewhere around about the Middle Ages, European Jews have been accustomed to give their children two names: one in the vernacular of wherever they were living at the time, and one in Hebrew to be used in religious services, on Jewish legal documents (e.g., a marriage contract), and whenever else you feel like it. Some people, of course, have the same name for both, but this only works if you have a Biblical name to begin with; many people give their children cognate or similar-sounding names in Hebrew and English. "Naomi" has some very distant relation to one of the possible meanings of my extremely English-language first name; "Chana" is after my maternal great-grandmother.* The funny thing is that nobody except me (and possibly the rabbi who got stuck giving me Bat Mitzvah lessons) could ever remember my Hebrew name. So it made perfect sense to use it for this part of my online identity; it's certainly me, but nobody associates it with the everyday me. Strictly speaking, I suppose, it's the sacred me -- and, now the blogging me.

With all due respect to AKMA's position on the matter, I don't understand why on earth using a blog pseudonym should pose a moral quandary, raise a technical problem, or even be seen as a deviation from the norm. After all, people in the know realize that "Schneur Zalman of Liady," "the Alter Rebbe," and "the Baal ha-Tanya" are all the same person.** "Name" is not equivalent to "identity," however much our conception of the latter has changed over time. But people change names, and have multiple names, in religious traditions other than Judaism. Catholics have baptismal and confirmation names (nowadays the baptismal name is usually the same as the secular first name); for many years, people going into Christian religious life have also adopted new names. But this isn't a product of ethical monotheism; since the dawn of civilization (one of those phrases I caution students against beginning an essay with), human beings have routinely adopted varying degrees of nicknames, patronymics, royal names, and literary pseudonyms. Plato was, well, "Plato." The Romans had cognomens. Second Temple Judaism and early Christianity positively wallowed in pseudepigrapha. Medieval European literature is laden with figures whom we identify by their major works in default of a name (the Pearl-poet, the Cloud-author) or who went by meaningful pseudonyms (Rutebeuf, meaning "rude ox" and writing in favor of self-proclaimed "workers" against the mendicant orders) or place-names (Julian of Norwich, after the church where she became an anchoress). As for the modern period... go on, read a Russian novel. Any Russian novel. Then throw in African slaves given "Christian" names, various noblepeople who went by their titles, essayists and pamphleteers who still went by flimsy pseudonyms... oh, right, and movie stars given screen names, which brings us up to hippie names and BBS handles.

One of the more important names in the history of Christian thought is Pseudo-Dionysius. (Concepts we owe largely to him include the names for our nine choirs of angels, the routine use of the terms "mystical" and "theology" in relation to Christianity, and the notion of apophatic or negative theology (i.e., that it is more accurate to refer to God in terms of what cannot be said about Him).) As you might guess, the "pseudo" is a modern addition. Late antique and medieval readers had no idea that the author of several key mystical and theological texts was not Dionysius the Areopagite of Acts 17, as he claimed to be. Dionysius even went to the trouble of referring to "Timothy" (he of the Pauline epistles), "Carpos," and "Hierotheus" (pseudonyms chosen to fit in with the overall conceit); we can only presume that there were real people behind each of these names. However, Dionysius's apostolicity was debated during the Reformation, and twentieth-century scholars found that he referenced the pagan philosopher Proclus (d. 485) as well as earlier Christian figures. We are reasonably sure that "Dionysius the Areopagite" was actually an early sixth-century Greek-speaking monk of questionable orthodoxy.

I'm going on about Dionysius because among his four extant works -- all extremely influential -- is one called On The Divine Names. (Here is an old -- and questionable, but public-domain -- translation. Ignore the introduction, which is mostly twaddle, and skip straight to page 50.) A key point of this work, which draws heavily on the Platonic traditions, is the multiplicity of names under which it is at least somewhat proper to refer to God. In Scripture alone, God is One, Good, Being, Life, Wisdom, Reason, Truth, Power... Omnipotent, Ancient of Days, King of Kings, Lord of Lords... well, you get the idea. Dionysius didn't seem to think that there was a problem with all of these names, since each one somehow (albeit inadequately) expressed an attribute of the divine, and since they all ultimately referred to the same God. Of course, this idea wasn't at all unique to Dionysius or to Christianity -- apart from Dionysius's treatment of that whole "trinity" problem -- but I think there's a nice symmetry in having a pseudepigraphic treatise on names for God. That aside, all the monotheistic religions will agree that the word "God" (or "Allah," or any equivalent you will ever find in Hebrew) is only a name for something a lot more real than we can describe.

I hope that those of my readers who are not theists -- or who object to religion on principle -- will recognize that this implicit argument could equally well be put in secular terms, and we could discuss the birth of the individual (which has been placed in every single century by the people who study that century). More appealingly, we could chat about Wittgenstein and ostensive definition and "what lies behind the idea that names really signify simples?" Wittgenstein answers, in part, that "it is impossible to give an account of any primary element; for it, nothing is possible but the bare name; its name is all it has. But just as what consists of these primary elements is itself complex, so the names of the elements become descriptive language by being compounded together. For the essence of speech is the composition of names."*** I think Pseudo-Dionysius would agree, and so would I.

Meanwhile, I remain Naomi Chana -- but you may call me Naomi.

* -- The odd thing about my Hebrew name is that it wasn't given to me; apparently, my entire family went along quite happily for twelve years without realizing that I was missing a Hebrew name, and I wound up picking it out when I started studying for my Bat Mitzvah. And, yes, my Hebrew name also should include a patronymic, only it's a matronymic in my case (I drew the line at inventing a Hebrew name for my father, whose English name is straight-out Anglo-Saxon). The whole thing makes a nice complicated symbolic statement that's only somewhat in-your-face. I didn't do a half bad job for a twelve-year-old.
** -- Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liady (1745-1812) was the founder of the Lubavitch or Chabad movement of Hasidic Judaism. Other legitimate naming options used by his contemporaries would potentially include an acronym from initials or a vernacular (Russian) name.
*** Philosophical Investigations, Aphorism 46.
[Edited to eliminate a sort of mental typo; I do realize that "cataphatic" and "apophatic" are opposites, but should probably resist the urge to try and proofread posts at 2 in the morning.]

I've Got A Theory

"I've got a theory that it's a demon, a dancing demon -- no, something isn't right there...."

Actually, I've got a theory that the Buffy musical soundtrack is the auditory equivalent of crack, because I've had it stuck in my head for the last three days nonstop. This may be how Mutant Enemy intends to win viewers back to the show; right now I'd kill for a DVD of S6, and I didn't even like a good half of S6. Of course, I've also got a theory that the Lutherans took over much of Europe in the sixteenth century because "A Mighty Fortress Is Our God" is so darn catchy. If I could just explain Calvinism, I'd be much happier.

Speaking of DVDs, I'm very happy for all of you in the U.S. who've just gotten Buffy S2. Now please hush. I don't even want to hear from those of you in the U.K., but come November -- or possibly September -- or maybe just as soon as I've been reimbursed for next month's move -- I'm buying me a shiny new multi-region DVD player and a full deck of Buffy and Angel. For my, uh, career.* I only bought a VCR a year ago, and I've never acquired a proper video library, just a lot of tapes with TV shows recorded on them. They're about as well organized as my home files, which is to say that there's a large stack of "deal with later." But I can already tell that I'm equating DVDs with books. As any marginally observant reader of this blog will realize, this means that I plan to start buying lots of DVDs.

(And speaking of my slide into gadget idolatry, I've been reunited with my Palm Pilot -- I'd accidentally left it at my parents' house last week -- and just ran across this English-Quenya dictionary for Palm OS. I think I can hold out another twenty-four hours or so before I give in to curiosity and download that sucker.**)

But returning to Buffy, there's been some interesting blog discussion about the show's legacy as regards female characters: is Buffy a show with a uniquely stand-alone female hero,*** or a show where ordinary women only get killed? Obviously, these options aren't mutually exclusive, and I vote for "both," although I think this season's unfortunate portrayal of the Buffy/Spike relationship tips the overall balance in favor of a more negative assessment. The season finale was also sort of disturbing from a gendered perspective -- not so much for the obvious connotations of Xander's saving Willow (with help from Giles) but for Buffy's reaffirmation of her desire to be a Perfect Mommy to Dawn. I think I'll wait for S7 to make a decision on how all this plays out.

Meanwhile, there's some non-Buffy work I should be doing... uh, somewhere. Or I could finish Morris's Wood Beyond The World, in which the heroine cannot sleep with the hero because her magical powers are connected to her virginity... no, definitely going with work.

* -- And since I'm currently editing an overlong Buffy article for mysterious professional purposes, it should be obvious that the DVD player will be a business expense and will therefore count off on my 2002 taxes. Of course, I can incorporate Buffy into a class if I try hard enough, but the particular class I have in mind isn't likely to come up until 2003 or so....
** -- I can't seem to find a good free- or shareware Latin-English dictionary for the Palm, though, and I'm reluctant to pay in advance for any dictionary I haven't tested out. Any suggestions?
*** -- It's not that I don't take any of those online quizzes; I just don't share the results unless they're amusing or genuinely relevant. Here, I have two examples of the latter; check out the range of female heroes rather strikingly defined or guided by male figures:

The MaggieFic Mary Sue Generator (results tinkered with to produce maximum humor):

Name: Felicitie dell'Ortollio
Eye Color: Gold-Flecked Mahogany
Signature Scent: Antique Citrus
Paranormal Power: Power of Love
Specialized Skill: Astrophysicist
Distinguishing Mark: Full, Pouting Lips
Newly Revealed Relationship To A Major Character: Yoda's college roommate

Which Cartoon Hero Are You? (results unchanged, because there really aren't many female cartoon heroes who can kick ass and excel in school):

Commander and leader of the Power Puff Girls

Take the Cartoon Hero Quiz!

Safe At Ingle-Nook

It's finally sunny again today, and a wonderful day to do nothing. Yesterday I went to the Cloisters,* numerous shops in Manhattan, a friend's apartment on Roosevelt Island, and a snooty French brasserie-type restaurant with no ambience but very good food and a Celebrity Chef. My general opinion of Manhattan is summed up in the classic "nice place to visit," but it's also a nice place to stay away from when I need rest. So, for today, "nothing" has included the usual meals, reading, phone calls to family, arguing loudly over the appropriateness of the shoot-out in World Cup soccer, listening repeatedly to the Buffy soundtrack someone gave me, and looking up Haftorah commentaries for my little cousin's Bar Mitzvah speech (don't ask). I'm still trying to make time to paint my toenails before attending a script reading this evening.

I may be getting better at this vacation thing.

Today, by my calendar, is both Father's Day and Bloomsday. I approve of both holidays, but as far as I'm concerned, they're mostly incompatible -- Leopold Bloom's father's appearance in "Circe" is one of those moments in Ulysses which makes me wince and skip ahead. ("I told you not go with drunken goy ever"?!? Oy freakin' vey.)

My father, on the other hand, is very much alive and mostly wonderful. I am all the daughters of my father's house and all the brothers too, so that while I love my mother very much, I'm basically Daddy's girl. We have the same coloring, the same sensitive skin, most of the same tastes in music and books, and the same fondness for peanut-butter-banana-mayonnaise sandwiches (lettuce optional). When I was little, he told me a never-ending set of bedtime stories about a girl on a ranch in Wyoming, undeterred by the fact that neither of us has ever been to Wyoming. Between the ages of five and ten, I spent most afternoons up in my father's study, reading through his books (I always ran out of my own) while he wrote a dissertation. Even though we are both teachers, and therefore not terribly good students, I learned from him about history and college basketball and literature and unions and housekeeping and higher education and power tools and driving. This past year, it's been invaluable to have one person whom I could call at any time of the day or night and interrogate about which parts of a job application should be stapled and which should be paper-clipped.

My father is in Thailand right now -- oh, yes, that's also where I learned about the professorial vacation-cum-research-seminar -- and I miss him. I called him yesterday morning, right before he left from Hawaii, because I have no way of reaching him today. (I did call my surviving grandfather, but that's another entry.) Instead of calling, then, I'm fiddling with this entry, and I think I'll end it with my very favorite bit of James Joyce, because it fits my father as well as me:

For every true-born mysticist
A Dante is, unprejudiced,
Who safe at ingle-nook, by proxy,
Hazards extremes of heterodoxy,
Like him who finds joy at a table
Pondering the uncomfortable.
Ruling one's life by common sense
How can one fail to be intense?

These lines -- and, of course, this entry's title -- come from "The Holy Office", which is presumably the other thing one could celebrate this Sunday (if one didn't happen to be Jewish). For once, I will stick with purely secular holidays. Happy Father's Day to any of you who qualify!

* -- Which, along with the Met proper and the Strand, are apparently the places I'm most likely to visit anytime I'm in Gotham. (The NY Public and Pierpont Morgan libraries come in a close second. But that's next weekend.)

Adventure Stories

In case you -- any of you, dear readers -- wonder what makes up a Perfect Afternoon for yours truly, the answer is simple: books, chocolate, and people (but only with the chocolate, not the books). More precisely, an hour or so at the Strand and another at a hideously overpriced yet cute little café in Greenwich Village* chatting with acquaintances and efficiently devouring rum-soaked ladyfingers topped with chocolate-hazelnut gelati and whipped cream. (It was a bit like deconstructed tiramisu, only without the mascarpone -- or like an ice-cream sundae, only in Italian and much more expensive.)

Among the astonishingly nifty books I purchased -- several of which would go too far toward giving away my academic interests to discuss here -- is a cheap Dover facsimile of the 1894 Kelmscott Press edition of William Morris's The Wood Beyond The World. I like some of Morris's poetry, and most of his wallpaper, so I'm looking forward to reading what is, according to the back cover, "one of the finest of Morris's celebrated prose-romances, a wonderful fantasy set in a medieval never-never land, brimming with high adventure and fancy flights." Mind you, reading this book will be more difficult than it sounds; the volume is set in a black-letter Gothic font (with rubricated headings in the margins** and modern punctuation) and includes sentences such as the following, which I chose at random (really!):

For the Mistress will have thee for her only, and hath lured thee hither for nought else; and she is wise in wizardry (even as some deal am I), & wert thou to touch me with hand or mouth on my naked flesh, yea, or were it even my raiment, then would she scent the savour of thy love upon me, and then, though it may be she would spare thee, she would not spare me.

I believe the only appropriate response to this is "Zounds!" The language doesn't really faze me; I spent disturbingly large parts of my childhood reading things written in equally fake-archaic diction, leading to fond memories such as the time my father was forced to enlist Barbie dolls in order to define the term "buxom" for me. On the other hand, those childhood tomes were basically G-rated; "buxom" was simply an adjective before "barmaid." I can't quite decide whether Morris is ripping off Marie de France or writing a bodice-ripper, but it should be somedeal entertaining either way.

Right now, however, I'm most of the way through a slim volume by Jorge Luis Borges called This Craft of Verse. It's a transcription from tapes of Borges's Norton Lectures at Harvard in 1967-68, only published in 2000, and while I've caught one major editorial error so far,*** it's mostly just a delight to read. Borges and I share many literary tastes, and I enjoy his style and manner of expression. The topics he chooses deal mostly with poetry, and how poetic language functions. The lectures form interlocking and altogether fascinating essays. What I wanted to mention here, however, is an instance of that marvelous phenomenon in which one realizes that an author has perfectly expressed one's innermost thoughts. My innermost thoughts, as it happens, include the question of why I adore epics but am relatively indifferent toward novels. (I have serious misgivings about genre theory, too, but that's another post.) Borges, of course, makes it all clear:

One is almost tempted to think of the novel as a degeneration of the epic.... For the novel goes back to the dignity of the epic.

If we think of the novel and the epic, we are tempted to fall into thinking that the chief difference lies in the difference between verse and prose, in the difference between singing something and stating something. But I think there is a greater difference. The difference lies in the fact that the important thing about the epic is a hero--a man who is a pattern for all men. While, as Mencken pointed out, the essence of most novels lies in the breaking down of a man, in the degeneration of character.

This brings us to another question: What do we think of happiness? What do we think of defeat, and of victory? Nowadays when people talk of a happy ending, they think of it as a mere pandering to the public, or they think it is a commercial device; they think of it as artificial. Yet for centuries men could very sincerely believe in happiness and in victory, though they felt the essential dignity of defeat....

Well, nowadays if an adventure is attempted, we know that it will end in failure. ... When we read Franz Kafka's The Castle, we know that the man will never get inside the castle. That is to say, we cannot really believe in happiness and in success. And this may be one of the poverties of our time.

The fanfic-writing segment of my readership may want to consider Borges's suggestions in terms of the eternal Darkfic Versus 'Fluff' debate; the fantasy-reading segment may take a second to wonder how, after that tour de force, Borges could assert that the World Wars did not produce any epic literature (think about it -- it'll come to you... on DVD in November, actually). The purely bibliophilic among you may simply pause to reflect on why I -- and many of my acquaintances, on- and offline -- wind up reading more genre novels (mystery, romance, fantasy) than Serious Contemporary Novels. If there are any booksellers among you, by the way, this would be a good time to point me to a decent Spanish-language bookstore in NYC where I can get copies of Borges's other works. I know my copies of Obra Poética and Ficciones are in a box somewhere in the Midwest, but that leaves several worlds yet to be conquered.

Books, chocolate, and people make a perfect afternoon, but books and people last longer than chocolate.

* -- Which I refuse to call "the Village" for the same reason I refuse to call The New York Times "the Times" -- I don't live here, and I think it's silly to foster the impression that I do.
** -- Which is all wrong for the period to which the black-letter Gothic presumably belongs. Rubrication is used for emphasis; thus, it winds up on initial letters and especially key phrases or sentences -- the modern descendant of this practice is the Holy Bible With Words Of Jesus In Red. Marginal glosses are supposed to be in ordinary black ink.
*** -- Note to editor: if your author has repeatedly avowed his fondness for Old English poetry, it would be to your advantage to familiarize yourself with the limited corpus of said poetry, so that you realize when references to "the seafarer" do not refer solely to Odysseus. There is, of course, an important OE poem called "The Seafarer." And even if you had somehow missed it, the following line's reference to "the giving of rings" should really have clued you in, as this is hardly a prominent feature of the Odyssey.

Emet v'Emunah

I think I've read one too many excellent blogs about online identity, because I've somehow gotten over worrying about that (for the time being) and switched to worrying about the nature of religious truth-claims. They are, as you will see, not unrelated. Yes, as a matter of fact, I do make my own fun.

The first thing I should explain is that I'm not a particularly honest person. I much prefer being compassionate to being truthful, and under most circumstances I even prefer being polite. This is not to say that I'm a habitual liar, or even -- I think -- especially mendacious; in the vast majority of everyday interactions, it's easiest and most advisable to tell the truth. There are certainly some situations and relationships in which it is essential to be true to oneself and truthful to one's companions, if not necessarily "honest" in some abstract sense. A great deal of my teaching career, and not a little of my religious tradition, is predicated on certain events having verifiably taken place at certain times in the past. But honesty, in the abstract, has always struck me as a questionable virtue and a potentially dangerous ideal. The precise content of "truth" has been questioned since considerably before Pontius Pilate, and will continue to be questioned considerably after Richard Rorty. I happen to be a theist, and so for me, "truth" is at best a divine attribute; I suspect that it is no more possible for humans to be altogether truthful than it is for them to be altogether just or altogether wise. I also happen to be doing my thinking in the twenty-first century, and so for me, "truth" is at worst something the people in power construct to keep themselves in power, often without recognizing their own duplicity. (No matter what your political views, you can probably think of a contemporary example to suit them.) But I'm no relativist, and I will call people on inaccurate or incorrect assertions unless there's some compelling reason not to do so.

The assertions that really bother me, through, are the ones which claim to be telling the truth -- and often, at one level, are telling the truth -- but only as a cover-up for some less pleasant truth. Deceptive truths, you might say. The "intelligent design" argument, for example, has been causing some controversy in blog circles recently. I should have no quarrel with intelligent design theory; I do indeed believe that God created heaven and earth, along with things that flower and fly and swim and creep and blog. I also believe that there's a great deal of wiggle room about precisely what She created them out of, and I don't see any of this as particularly incompatible with evolutionary theory. But I definitely don't think that the public schools in our pleasantly disestablished nation should be required to teach ideas which I hold as a matter of personal belief. (If I had to pick one of my central beliefs to inculcate in America's youth, creation would be fairly low on the list in any case, somewhere below the tenet that reality shows are Evil and should be Roundly Ignored.) So I'm against proponents of requiring intelligent design theory as part of public-school curricula because they're clearly working toward something without any wiggle room at all.

There are other true statements that don't necessarily lead to the truth. Messianic Judaism, as a movement, makes me uneasy not because of its doctrinal content per se -- my own respect for the teachings of Jesus is tremendous, although I don't take him to be the Son of God -- but because the "Jews for Jesus" are largely funded by conservative Protestant groups who want Jews to convert as part of their eschatological scenario. It's not that we Jews don't also have a history of co-opting other religious groups as symbolic placeholders in our own theology, but we're much more tactful about it -- we have code-names, we avoid translating especially mean-spirited passages into modern languages, stuff like that. (Another count against Messianic Jewish sites is that they have a lock on all sorts of Google searches for basic Jewish concepts, and the only way you can tell half of them are Messianic is when they start mentioning "Yeshua.") Ultramontanist Catholics who insist that the papal howlers of late antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the early modern period don't really count because they weren't proclaimed ex cathedra -- when that way of assessing papal infallibility was only made Catholic doctrine in 1870, at Vatican I -- are likewise telling the truth but dodging something equally important.

Islam's claim to truth in the Qu'ran and the words of Mohammad is another belief with which I can sympathize, if not agree. There are more literalist understandings of this "truth," often paralleling literalist Jewish readings of the Tanakh and Christian readings of the Bible -- in fact, the site it-is-truth.org is all about reconciling the Qu'ran and various forms of Western science. There are also less literalist readings of the Qu'ran, and I suppose I'm more sympathetic to those, just as I'm more sympathetic to less literalist readings in Judaism and Christianity. (At least I'm in good historical company.) Unfortunately, however, some fundamentalist Muslim groups are doing their darnedest to turn this into another deceptive truth. There is a hadith in which the Prophet is quoted as saying that the Al Aqsa Mosque was built forty days before the Kaaba. The Kaaba itself was built either by Allah before creation, by Adam, or -- in its present form -- by Abraham. As a non-Muslim, I can cheerfully agree that the Masjid Al Aqsa and the Kaaba are both terrifically holy Muslim sites, to which all Muslims should be granted access whenever possible. However, there's an article (scroll to the bottom) by Jamil Hamami at the usually wonderful bitterlemons.org which insists that this hadith must be read literally, as establishing without any doubt (since the word of the Prophet is truth) the presence of the Al Aqsa Mosque in its present form and its present place and thus its precedence with regard to Judaism and Christianity. For anyone who hasn't been paying close attention, the Al Aqsa Mosque, along with the Dome of the Rock, is located on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. Hamami doesn't want to give the Hebrew scriptures any weight at all, though:

...[N]othing in the truthful word of Islam mentions that Solomon built the Aqsa Mosque or any construct on the site of the Aqsa Mosque. The Samaritans, who are one sect of Judaism, believe that the Temple was built on the ruins of Mount Jerazim in Nablus.

In addition, the only knowledge of the Temple is in the scriptures of the sons of Israel. These scriptures rely on images and recollections that do not stand up in the face of documented historical scientific evidence.

Now, I know that one can find non-Jewish writers -- to say nothing of non-Scriptural Jewish writers -- who attest to the presence of the Temple on its mount in Jerusalem. (Pliny the Elder, Josephus... er, large portions of the Mishnah... no doubt I'm missing some obvious figures, but this isn't my area of expertise.) Archaeological evidence from less than a century ago is impossible to obtain, since there is, after all, a functioning mosque on the site, but explorers in the nineteenth century found a warren of passages from both the First and Second Temples running under the mosque. So the "historical scientific evidence" pretty much confirms that the latest version of the Temple (i.e., the Second, built from 537-514 B.C.E.) predated the latest version of the Mosque (i.e., the one built in 715 C.E.) atop the Temple Mount. From a secular perspective, this shouldn't even be an issue. But I'm bothered by the theological claims involved. They're right on some levels -- which is why I'm considering them -- but wrong on others.

After all, according to their respective theological traditions, some version of both the Temple and the Mosque predated creation. The Mosque God created predated the First Temple, not to mention the second one; the Temple God created predated anything Omar built. All of this makes arguments about precedence slightly silly -- one can't very well argue priority before the existence of time! But even this is missing the point. With the exception of a few wackos who want to personally build the Third Temple so they can start sacrificing pigeons again, everyone is fine with the Mosque staying exactly where it is for the foreseeable future. However... Hamami's arguments are marshaled not simply in support of Muslim control over the Al Aqsa Mosque, but a total rejection of any Jewish claim, theological or political, to the Temple Mount and presumably to the rest of Jerusalem. Very few Jews, Christians, or innocent bystanders, no matter how sympathetic they might be to the Palestinian desire for a homeland, are likely to agree to that. It's a pity, actually, because this sort of argument detracts from the greater truth of Islam. Still, I get a kick out of imagining God, hunched in front of a CAD program (but in a non-anthropomorphic kind of way) before the dawn of time, designing and redesigning everything that has ever sat or will ever sit on the Temple Mount.

"Emet v'emunah" is the beginning of a prayer in the Jewish evening liturgy; the phrase itself means something like "truth and faith." I don't think it's coincidental that they seem to go together; I also don't think people who have problems with one should accept the other too easily.

Love Sandwich

Yesterday, before flying to Gotham, I attended a wedding in the next town over from My Hometown. My cousin -- we'll call her Ruby -- was marrying her longtime boyfriend. I have nothing much in common with Ruby beyond our mutual carbon-based chemistry and a handful of polite conversations, but we see each other at family gatherings three or four times a year, and I really like her parents. I wasn't originally invited to the wedding -- there was limited space at the reception venue, and there are large families on both sides. A few weeks ago, however, they decided to issue me an invitation (I suspect that I was on some sort of waiting list). I wanted to see my aunts and uncles, and my father wanted me to attend, so I tinkered with my flight plans, bought the couple a fancy lamp (it was on the registry), put on my nice embroidered Thai silk suit, and rode with my parents to the wedding. The bride was beautiful, the food at the reception was delicious, and although I myself would go for something several degrees less formal in almost every respect, I thought it was a lovely wedding.

However... there was this homily. I should explain that Ruby, her parents, and most of my father's side of the family grew up Methodist. This part of the country is overwhelmingly Protestant, but Ruby's fiancé is Catholic, something I hadn't realized until we received wedding invitations to "Immaculate Heart of Mary Catholic Church." ("Isn't 'Catholic' kind of redundant there?" I asked my father. "I guess they don't want to get mixed up with the Immaculate Heart of Mary Primitive Baptist Church," he said, keeping a remarkably straight face.) I'm not sure whether or not Ruby is converting, and I don't know her well enough to ask how they're raising the kids, but I think many of my relatives have gotten the Wrong Idea about Catholicism after this wedding. You see, the priest who married them had known Ruby's fiancé since childhood, and at the beginning of the service, he let us know that he'd gone by the spot where the happy couple met and said a blessing that morning. Well, fine. The happy couple met while they were both working at a Chik-Fil-A chain restaurant in the local mall. Still fine.

Then it turned out that the priest had brought a sandwich over, and while I briefly entertained fantasies of his using it to administer Communion (perhaps accompanied by a nice extra-large fountain drink to represent the blood of Christ), what transpired was beyond my wildest imagination. We were treated to an allegorical interpretation of the Chik-Fil-A Chicken Sandwich. The two halves of the bun represented the happy couple (wisely, the priest did not specify who got to be on top). The chicken in the middle represented the sacramental bond of their marriage and the presence of God in their lives. The two (always two) round pickles atop the chicken symbolized their wedding rings. The assorted dipping sauces had something to do with the different conditions they would encounter in married life, and the paper wrapper was -- and I quote -- "the envelope of the Holy Spirit." The phrase "sandwich of love" was used on several occasions. Hardly anyone laughed. It seems that my side of the family believes that there should be a little more dignity in a wedding service.

Me, I was just disappointed that nobody brought up the fries as the cloud of witnesses, or perhaps the breading on the chicken as an adoptionist take on Christ's divinity. (I'll leave possible applications of the Chargrilled Chicken Sandwich and the Chick-n Strips to my readers.) But I very sensibly did not mention this disappointment to my family; there are some emotions best left unshared. Ecumenical relations around My Hometown may have been set back several generations. I hope Ruby will be very happy, though, and in case of emergency, she could probably stun an ox with the lamp I got them.

Lettered Olives

As I've explained before, one goes to the beach at least once every summer in my home and native land -- that is, the northern part of the southeastern U.S. There are places where people go to lakes or mountains or outlet malls instead, but My Home State is blessed with especially nice beaches, and My Hometown is located among foothills with mountains only an hour away, so they don't impress us much. (Only Yankees go on skiing vacations.) The beach, on the other hand, is about four hours' drive away, and farther if you want to head for the barrier islands. Precisely which beach one visits is a complex signifier of race, class, party size and average age, etc., but the procedure is much the same regardless. At the beach, one stays at a motel or cottage, spends days at the beach either basking in the sun or swimming, and eats out frequently. Beach reading, while typical, is not strictly necessary. Visits to cultural or ecological shrines are entirely optional. Hush puppies are mandatory.

(The culturally deprived among my readers should know that hush puppies are small deep-fried fritters -- cornmeal-based, sometimes with a hint of sweetness, sometimes leaning more towards the onion or jalapeño side of things -- which accompany fried or broiled seafood and pulled-pork barbecue in certain bastions of traditional mid-Atlantic cooking. Legend has it that the leftover cornmeal batter into which fish had been dipped at an outdoor fish-fry was itself fried in the leftover oil and these bits tossed to the dogs to keep them quiet. Hence "hush puppy."*)

Western intellectuals, who don't fit terribly well into the class system no matter what Marx says, have had a rocky relationship with the concept of "vacation" since Socrates. No, really. In the dialogue called Phaedrus, Phaedrus decides to go for a walk outside the city and persuades Socrates to accompany him; Socrates responds to the sight of trees and brooks with hyperbolic praise, and Phaedrus asks Socrates whether the latter has ever been outside Athens. Socrates responds at length, explaining:

... I am a lover of knowledge, and the men who dwell in the city are my teachers, and not the trees or the country. Though I do indeed believe that you have found a spell with which to draw me out of the city into the country, like a hungry cow before whom a bough or a bunch of fruit is waved. For only hold up before me in like manner a book, and you may lead me all round Attica, and over the wide world. And now having arrived, I intend to lie down, and do you choose any posture in which you can read best.

Phaedrus apparently accepts this explanation, since he goes off about something else entirely in his response. The occasional Transcendentalist notwithstanding, relatively few professional "lovers of knowledge" have tried to tackle the wide world of Off Campus without a book firmly in hand. But I find it amusing that Socrates equates books with food, because I find that the best way to manage my vacations is to plan lots of both.

Just for the record, I had a lovely time and am currently sporting a "rosy glow" (or, for the less optimistic, a "not quite sunburn") on various parts of my body. I managed to consume plenty of Eastern-style (i.e, vinegar-based sauce) pulled-pork barbecue, steamed and spiced shrimp, fried oysters, broiled shrimp and scallops, and lots of hush puppies.

My final beach reading list, heavily conditioned by what was available at the Hometown main library and the used bookstore we patronize at the beach:

• The Wrong Rite, Charlotte MacLeod as Alisa Craig: fun, as all MacLeod's mysteries are, with characters I'd enjoy meeting again.


• 1688: A Global History, John Wills: interesting and enjoyable piece of lay history, and believe me when I say that "lay history" is not a genre I usually care for. There were certainly omissions in the parts I knew best, but no major misstatements, and that's truly impressive in a world of global scope.


• The Copenhagen Connection, Elizabeth Peters: I somehow thought I'd read all her earlier thrillers; this is OK but not one of her stronger outings. I prefer it when my heroines do less getting rescued and more rescuing.


• Double Trouble, Claire Cross: occasionally funny contemporary romance, but too much cuteness about the Internet aspects.


• An Essay on Man, Ernst Cassirer: fairly engrossing as neo-Kantianism goes, with intriguing take on history of ideas and on "man" as homo symbolicus; also, and not unimportantly, loads easier to read than The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (possibly because it was originally written in English rather than German). Responsible for recalling the Phaedrus passage to mind.


• A Finer End, Deborah Crombie: excellent mystery with nods toward the procedural, intellectual, and romantic ends of the spectrum. I've found some of Crombie's offerings less engaging than others, but here that's not a problem; in fact, the supporting characters and setting overshadow the relatively straightforward murder plot which emerges from them. Definitely an enjoyable read, though.

(I also read most of a monograph in my field, which led me to the decidedly un-beach-like need to go look up a reference in Foucault's Archaeology of Knowledge, at which point I sensibly put the book down. One of the unintentional side benefits of our family's chosen beach is its utter lack of proximity to anything approaching a university library.)

Astonishingly, I did find time to do something other than eat, read, and sleep. It was apparent from the first day that this was going to be a good year for shells -- I think there must have been a storm a few days earlier -- so I decided to look for specimens of a very pretty and very appropriate species, Oliva sayana, better known as the lettered olive. Why "lettered"? Apparently, someone somewhere thought that the shell's markings resembled Egyptian hieroglyphics. Why "olive"? I think it has something to do with the shape of the shell, but that makes even less sense than the "lettered" part. Still, the lettered olive is a perfect emblem for my beach vacation: a shell named after a combination of mild intellectual pretension and foodstuffs. Of course, the lettered olive also happens to be a carnivorous snail. I acknowledge the similarities.

Tomorrow -- more or less -- I will stop talking about food and philosophy long enough to talk about pop-culture and academia. Or possibly something else. At the moment, however... well, really, Socrates said it already: "Now having arrived, I intend to lie down, and do you choose any posture in which you can read best."

* -- There is also a brand of shoes called Hush Puppies, based on both the previously existing food item and the idea that "dogs" were a slang term for feet. Comfortable shoes would therefore hush one's puppies. No, I am not making this up.