I don't have a terribly well-thought-out theory of intellectual property rights, especially by comparison to many of the bloggers whose work I enjoy reading. In part, this is sheer laziness, and in part, the sense of entitlement that comes from being an educator. Barring massive violations of copyright, and provided that I attribute things properly, I can use pretty much any text/image/sound for free as long as I'm using it to teach with. (I realize that this isn't an accurate representation of the relevant laws, which vary by country in any case, but it's a fair enough summary of how they work in practice, and it seems tolerably just to me. Anyone who objects to having their material used in education should avoid publishing it. Yes, I might be a trifle biased here.)

On the other hand, being an educator does raise some interesting issues. Are my online course materials mine, or the school's? (Answer: since nobody has ever succeeded in getting me to sign a contract to the contrary, they're mine. As long as nobody tries to make money off them or block me from using them, though, my colleagues are welcome to borrow ideas -- I sometimes start planning courses by searching for related syllabi online.) Where does plagiarism begin and end? (This comes up with disturbing frequency in academia.) Being an educator who's also active as a researcher means that I'm interested in how electronic publishing works (more institutionally and legally than technically), and I spend enough time in university libraries to be fascinated by their partial transformation into collections of proprietary databases.

On balance, though, I've never questioned the idea that a given creative product does, in fact, belong to someone (individual or corporate) who has control over at least the first stage of its distribution. I am not unconcerned about software and media piracy; I am also not unconcerned about the arrogance of various manufacturing organizations which believe that they can control the uses to which people put products which they have already purchased.* But... I don't do a whole heck of a lot about it. The other day, however, I ran across something which really makes me wonder exactly what I think about the rights of intellectual property versus those of education.

I was searching Google because I was (a) too lazy to go to the office and look at the relevant books, but (b) trying to remember whether there is a midrash collection for I and II Samuel or whether I had imagined it. (I am fully capable of imagining stranger things than that, but, yes, it exists.) Through the usual circuitous path, I wound up at the Midrash. If you follow that link right now, you will find nothing especially controversial.** But that's because I, well, edited it a bit. (Wikipedia is an open encyclopedia, which should imply something about its reliability as a source of accurate information. It's a lovely idea, though.) When I first read the article, the final paragraph ran as follows:

At first sight, one might think that such farrago as the Midrashic literature could be of interest and value only to a Jew as Jew, inasmuch as the Midrashim are thoroughly steeped in the spirit of Judaism, bear distinct witness to the laws, customs, doctrines, aspirations of the Jewish race, and record the noblest ideas, sayings, and teachings of the Jewish sages in early times. The more, however, he examines the contents of these ancient expository works, the more he discovers that they are an invaluable source of information to the Christian apologist, the Biblical student, and the general scholar as well. In this body of ancient literature there is much in the line of ideas, expressions, reasonings, and descriptions, which can be used to illustrate and confirm the inspired records of Christianity and the traditional teachings of the Church, notably concerning the passages of the Old Testament to be regarded as Messianic. The Biblical student will at times notice in the oldest parts of the Midrashim, Scriptural readings anterior to those embodied in the Massoretic text. .... Lastly the Philologist, the historian, the philosopher, the jurist, and the statesman, will easily find in the Midrashim remarks and discussions which have a direct bearing on their respective branches of study.

My eyebrows went up at "farrago" and started breaking high-jump records at the references to "confirm[ing] the inspired records of Christianity and the traditional teachings of the Church." I had a theory -- no, I will not break into Buffy-musical-inspired song -- about where that language came from, and a quick run through Google with the first sentence revealed that I was right. The original is in the online Catholic Encyclopedia, which happens to be a painstakingly transcribed version of the 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia. Yep, 1913. I intend no disrespect to the Catholic Church when I gently suggest that 1913 was not an era during which it exhibited great openness to other denominations or religions, much less great interest in investigating its own history in a fashion consonant with modern scholarly norms. (Okay, go ahead. Skim the article on Protestantism. Or Mohammed and Mohammedism -- especially the bit on "ethics," which concludes with the assertion that "what is really good in Mohammedan ethics is either commonplace or borrowed from some other religions, whereas what is characteristic is nearly always imperfect or wicked." Try not to reflect on parallel contemporary discourses.) The 1913 Encyclopedia is a fascinating and thought-provoking look into a bygone mentality -- even the most conservative Catholics of my acquaintance no longer think this way -- and a valuable primary source for the state of Catholic scholarship just before the First World War.

Unfortunately, it's presented online as "The Catholic Encyclopedia," not "The 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia." An article on the CE website discusses the reasons behind taking the 1913 version into cyberspace instead of a more recent edition:

Knight chose the 1913 15-volume set because the later editions are still under copyright protection. Not only is the 1913 version in the public domain, but it is also thought by many to be the superior version. It covers topics both religious and secular, from a uniquely Catholic perspective. Although 84 years old, readers will find the information solid, surprisingly relevant, and eternally valuable.

As far as I can tell, the first sentence is the only relevant one; I may be unqualified to pronounce on the "eternal value" of these articles -- I do find them very useful when I need quick information on some obscure third-century bishop or eighteenth-century pope about whom nothing too controversial can be said -- but their information is anything but "solid." Even if there were no "uniquely Catholic perspective" involved, scholarship in fields ranging from biology to history to religious studies has changed considerably since 1913.*** Not only have new discoveries been made (everything from DNA to the Dead Sea Scrolls), but the list of authors and topics considered important has expanded dramatically, and the ways in which those authors and topics are treated has also changed. The most important attribute of a scholar (even a scholar of religion) is no longer necessarily his or her religious affiliation or lack thereof. And... I am, without doubt, preaching to the choir. It's terribly, terribly obvious that the online Catholic Encyclopedia material is seriously out of date and sometimes simply wrong.

As I said before, though, I use the online Catholic Encyclopedia, albeit with a small shakerful of salt. I tell my students about it, because my classes will frequently result in their doing web searches on topics for which a Catholic Encyclopedia entry will pop up as the first or second result. I let them know that it's a valuable resource, but one which should be treated with caution. All well and good. After all, anyone who wanted to know the provenance of the CE entries could simply follow the same links on the main site that I did; its sponsors aren't trying to hide its age, much as I wish they'd publicize it a little more. But now someone has, apparently, chosen to import this Catholic Encyclopedia entry into Wikipedia. (I didn't check for others, because I have quite enough to do this week, but I'm sure there are others.) I am less than thrilled.

I realize that this isn't entirely the fault of intellectual property laws. In fact, the copyright note on the online Catholic Encyclopedia is no doubt designed to prevent someone hijacking its content in this fashion. But even though I have very little patience for the perpetuation of low-grade bigotry thanks to a combination of laziness and ignorance, I can't help feeling that Wikipedia -- and the non-proprietary sections of the Web as a whole -- would be a much more reliable source of information if people could access more recent scholarship. When I'm not being lazy and doing Google searches, I can access such scholarship online, but that's only because my university subscribes to assorted services which make the content available to me. Your average Web-surfer with a burning question about midrashim (oh, c'mon, there are people like that) is out of luck.

At first, one might think that such farrago as this post could be of interest and value only to a humanities geek as humanities geek... but there's something more to this than midrashim. Apparently, when it comes to letting people learn, I have no qualms about abandoning intellectual property rights. I wonder if I shouldn't think about this a little more often.

* -- The RIAA is more than bad enough, but the book-manufacturing people who object to online used-book sales simply baffle me. That's not a question of intellectual property; it's a question of profit, and I feel neither an ethical nor a legal obligation to help them maximize it.
** -- Unless you're a scholar of rabbinic midrash (I'm not, but I know a few), in which case you may have issues with some of the dating and with the rather simplistic distinction between halakhic and haggadic midrashim. In the interest of full disclosure, I will also admit to editing the bit about what is and isn't "modern midrash" -- you may compare the Wikipedia entry with its original if you're curious -- but that was more about tact than fact.
*** -- It's possible to argue that "the field of religious studies," as understood in contemporary American academia, didn't really exist in 1913. But it's more convenient to just keep going.

I had intended to write a thoughtful entry about the fifteenth of Av, which is a Jewish holiday so partial, so obscure, and so in-the-middle-of-summer-when-Religious-School-is-out that I'd never heard of it until distressingly late in life. In a passage of Talmud (tractate Taanit) which always gets quoted in connection with Tu b'Av, however, it and Yom Kippur -- yes, in that order -- are said to be Israel's most joyous festivals. They're also the only two festivals during which men and women were allowed to mingle. Nudge, nudge, wink, wink.

Of course, like any self-respecting Jewish holiday, Tu b'Av served a number of simultaneous purposes back in the day. The most entertaining one had to do with matchmaking: all the single women in Jerusalem went out dressed uniformly in white and danced in the vineyards while flirting with available men. In other words, strictures on the encounters of unrelated men and women were relaxed so that all the singles could chat each other up. The white clothes were all borrowed, the Talmud tells us, each woman borrowing from the rank below her and the common people all borrowing from each other, so as to avoid embarrassing anyone who didn't have a white dress of her own. It is all too obvious that the Talmud was written by men, since any chain of serial borrowing is going to break down eventually if someone doesn't have a dress to be borrowed, and it's not as if people don't keep track of where their dresses are going. It is also all too obvious that the proper method of celebrating Tu b'Av for a nice liberal Jewish girl such as myself is to go borrow something white to wear, hang out at a singles bar and try to pick up guys.

Unfortunately, my commitment to informed religious observance notwithstanding, I view this prospect with all the enthusiasm I normally devote to cake mixes, Cliffs Notes, and reality TV -- in other words, less than none. I look okay in white, but I loathe anything resembling a singles bar. Unfortunately, the other reasons for commemorating Tu b'Av are even less appealing; they include the realization that God had stopped killing Israelites as a result of that nasty rejecting-the-Holy-Land incident, the reversal of a couple of decrees limiting the ability of Jewish women to choose a mate from outside their tribe, the burial of the dead from Beitar (the last stronghhold of the Bar Kokhba rebellion, which was overrun on Tisha b'Av, of course), and the end of the season during which wood could be cut for burning sacrifices. After Tu b'Av, it seems, there was a danger of insects infesting the wood and rendering it unfit for religious purposes; thus, the axes used for chopping the wood were broken on this day. (I think it would've been easier to put them away in a cabinet until next year, but I suppose that would have lacked the necessary drama.)

Now, there's definitely something odd about this holiday, not least the connection between courtship and burial (both of which, I should point out, entail wearing indistinguishable white garments). There is also the potential for comparison to "Prophecy Girl," the first-season-ending episode of Buffy in which she puts on a white dress and a lot of other things happen. But I shall leave these conclusions to my readers and confine myself to the simple regurgitation -- no, let's go with a less medically suggestive word -- the simple recital of entertaining facts, because I am currently suffering from a persistent headache which will not respond to modern painkillers. I feel as if the sacrificial-wood-cutting axes were being broken somewhere right about the middle of my forehead.

I also feel that all of this is probably still a preferable state to being in a singles bar. Granted, it's kind of a pity to lose the opportunity to try out some of the pick-up lines the Talmud reports the daughters of Jerusalem as using, especially the ones quoting Proverbs to the effect that charm is false and beauty is fleeting. I'm sure that would bring them running. On the other hand... nah. Perhaps another year. In a parallel universe. If the Advil ever kicks in.

Did I tell you that I spent much of the week before my move packing while rerunning the same videotape of Random Recently Taped Buffy Episodes over and over again, with the result that I've memorized the dialogue of "Once More With Feeling," "Tabula Rasa," and "Something Blue"? Did I tell you that I actually started to see a Buffy/Giles relationship subtext in S6 after, like, the tenth viewing? Did I tell you that I'm more convinced than ever that Spike's S6 characterization was decided from show to show by some sort of roulette wheel (and possibly some fine recreational substances), but that he just might be my favorite character in S4? Did I tell you that I've narrowed down the point at which Willow starts annoying me to late S2 sometime? Did I tell you that one of the things I most dread about S7 is my suspicion that Xander and Anya will get back together? Well, no, I didn't.

Somehow, the filling-people-in-on-my-latest-Buffyverse-and-fandom-at-large-related-opinions function of this blog has been swallowed up by the writing-little-essays-on-assorted-somewhat-highbrow-topics function. I could just segregate them -- keep a LiveJournal for one and an MT blog for the other -- but one of my few definite thoughts about "fandom" (which is usually to say media fandom) involves the need for it not to be shoved into an intellectual ghetto. There is, in fact, something intrinsically more important about Tisha b'Av than about Buffy -- the former has lasted a lot longer than the latter, has influenced more people, and is more complex, hence a larger topic -- but they can exist in the same world and be approached by some of the same interpretative schemes.* (Note that the first person who dares me to compare the multiple catastrophes of Tisha b'Av to Buffy's string of calamitous birthday episodes will be in deep doo-doo.)

I know people who avoid TV and non-art-house movies like the plague (which they might actually associate with "bubonic" rather than "Camus"). I also know people who believe that all the worthwhile things about Western culture can basically be learned by watching the entirety of old-series Star Trek, and that books which are neither novelizations nor graphic novels are torture devices applied in high-school English classes. Each camp has its canonical authors, its preferred forms of discourse, its rules and hierarchies. Neither is nearly as nonconformist as it believes itself to be. But both approaches strike me as being... how to put this tactfully?... intellectually impoverished, and rather sad. I think I'm sensitive to this sort of thing because I more or less used to belong to the first camp, but I have no intention of converting fully to the second, and I'm still pretty pop-culturally challenged. I just want to be able to think analytically about both TV shows and -- say -- commentaries on Scripture, and to have these pasttimes be reasonably well-respected. I don't ask for much, do I? But this isn't entirely about me (thankfully); there's a whacking great loss of aesthetic perspective and historical awareness in either camp, and that's, well, wrong. A serious error. A bad idea. An extremely bad idea. I realize that I'm vastly underqualified to organize some sort of rapprochement between the two camps, but the least I can do is to make a teensy-weensy stand in this weblog. So I deliberately craft my blogroll to contain a mix of types, and I do my best to oscillate between posts addressing -- as the blog description indicates -- academic, religious, and pop-cultural topics.

Almost a year ago, Kate wrote an entry on the slash revolution. I disagree with her on many of the details,** but I think her vision is right in most respects and could very easily be expanded. That is, I agree with her idea that there should be some "connection between your real life and your fan life," and I'd like to suggest that, with any luck, certain elements of fandom could "explode" not only "all over pop culture... all over media" but also all over classrooms and libraries and museums and legislative chambers and houses of worship. If that does happen, it won't be entirely unprecedented; Western culture (please ignore the huge problems involved in using that as a category for the time being) has incorporated seemingly opposed forces before. The most obvious example may be the one referenced in the title of this entry, after the famous question Tertullian (c. 160-220 CE) posed in his De praescriptione haereticorum (chp. 7): "What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?" In time, and despite Tertullian's best efforts (he himself had an excellent philosophical/rhetorical education), philosophy and Christianity got rather used to one another. But Tertullian poses a question a few lines earlier that may sound less archaic: "Whence spring those 'fables and endless genealogies,' and 'unprofitable questions,' and 'words which spread like a cancer'?" No, he wasn't talking about fanfic***... but it's good to realize, sometimes, that we've already survived a number of revolutions.

Meanwhile, this weekend's Angel rerun was "Provider," so I think we can all agree that re-reading Tertullian was a much better use of my time.

* -- It's probably best that I resisted the temptation to use the word "hermeneutic" there, but it continues to rattle around in the back of my mind. Those of you interested in the topic can fill in your own discussion of Ricoeur, Gadamer, and the role of historicity and memory in Buffy.
** -- I've addressed identity issues before, I think, and no doubt will again. As for the issue of RPF (real-person fic)? Well, it's probably less illegal than traditional fan-fiction, which eliminates one possible issue. In my view, whether it's immoral or unethical depends on both the use you make of the real persons in question and the extent to which those real persons have established public personae (the concept of lashon hara in Judaism probably applies on the one hand, and boyband members are the boundary case on the other). However, I am quite certain that any sort of sexually explicit public RPF is tacky, which is sufficient for me to avoid reading or writing it. Fortunately for all concerned, the weight of my opinion is not going to crush anyone's soul, and I count among my friends people who do much, much tackier things than write RPF. And, perhaps more to the point, I think Kate may be right in suggesting that RPF (not necessarily just the sex-related stuff) will contribute significantly to establishing media fandom as a wider cultural phenomenon.
*** -- Although there is an interesting passage in chp. 39 -- I'm using the translation available online, but you'll want to check the Latin here if you can read it, because the metaphor in Latin is a lot more interesting than the one the translator subs in: "You see in our own day, composed out of Virgil, a story of a wholly different character, the subject-matter being arranged according to the verse, and the verse according to the subject-matter. In short, Hosidius Geta has most completely pilfered his tragedy of Medea from Virgil. A near relative of my own, among some leisure productions of his pen, has composed out of the same poet The Table of Cebes. On the same principle, those poetasters are commonly called Homerocentones, 'collectors of Homeric odds and ends,' who stitch into one piece, patchwork fashion, works of their own from the lines of Homer, out of many scraps put together from this passage and from that (in miscellaneous confusion)."

Tomorrow -- well, today at sundown -- is the ninth of Av in the Jewish calendar ("Tisha b'Av," in Hebrew). This, for any of my readers not extremely Jewish-literate, is the Ultimate Downer Holiday. You see, both Temples were destroyed on the ninth of Av, and a great many other unfortunate historical occurrences took place on the same date, plus or minus a bit of calendrical manipulation. The resultant holiday -- if I may indulge in a tiny bit of religious chauvinism -- has both Good/Holy Friday and Ashura (for Shi'ites, not Sunnis) beat in terms of sheer weight of Bad Mojo. (It's not purely Jewish Bad Mojo, either; for example, the outbreak of WWI supposedly took place on 9 Av.) Traditional observance includes a three-week preliminary period of ritual unhappiness culminating in a single day of fasts, deep mourning, and the public reading of the Book of Lamentations. There's even a ban on studying parts of Torah or Talmud which don't relate to mourning or destruction.* The flip side of all this mourning is the tradition that the Messiah's supposed to be born on Tisha b'Av and to eventually rebuild the Temple, but I'm firmly in the tree-planting school when it comes to Messiahs, so that's not much of a consolation.**

Tisha b'Av wasn't exactly emphasized in my liberal Jewish upbringing, and with fairly good theological reason -- we wouldn't know what to do with a Third Temple if we got one (and it's just as well we don't have one). On more theoretical grounds, I like my holidays overdetermined in several different directions, while Tisha b'Av is probably the most thematically consistent holiday in the entire Jewish calendar. So I knew Tisha b'Av existed, and what it was for, but I never paid much attention to it. I've never been to proper all-day Tisha b'Av services, either. The closest I came was two years ago, because my grandmother died on the third of Av, and we were still midway through sitting shiva on the ninth. The funny thing about that (there's not much funny about it) is that Tisha b'Av is redundant if you're already in deep mourning. I was even studying the appropriate laws at the time. We did read from Lamentations, which I appreciated; I hadn't really paid much attention to it before, and it's one of only a handful of books of the Hebrew Bible with its own rabbinic midrash collection, and it pops up in the traditional Jewish liturgy in some very interesting places.

Still, there's something about this holiday that resists intellectualization. (And there, ladies and gentlemen, is a phrase you'll never hear me utter again.) I occasionally get annoyed by the way traditional Jews writing about Torah and Talmud in English in cyberspace persist in throwing Hebrew terms and transliterations about -- it wouldn't kill them to write "Jeremiah" instead of "Yirmiyahu," it wouldn't change an iota of meaning, and it might avoid alienating some otherwise interested readers, since they're writing in English not Hebrew for crying out loud -- but "Lamentations" isn't a very good title for the book in question. It's descriptive enough, I suppose, but not exactly stirring or even entirely correct. The name of the book in Hebrew, taken from its first word, is "E[i]cha," and it's usually translated as "how," or more precisely, "how?" It's a question without a particularly good answer. How could this happen? How could God allow it? How could any of this ever make sense? How?

My favorite part of Lamentations is the part that goes from lamenting to not lamenting, just before the ever-popular discussion of how the Lord Stompeth All Mine Enemies In His Own Good Time. In the sonorous (if not always precise) King James Version, Lam. 3:18-21: "And I said, my strength and my hope is perished from the Lord: remembering mine affliction and my misery, the wormwood and the gall. My soul hath them still in remembrance, and is humbled in me. This I recall to my mind, therefore have I hope."

How? Beats me. But I think it has something to do with remembrance. I plan to buy the most tree-like thing I can fit onto my back porch and repot it tomorrow. I'm not great with mourning, but I can do remembrance, I can do hope -- and I'm very good at planting trees.

* -- Prohibitions on Torah study are extremely uncommon; they only apply to Tisha b'Av and to the week of intense mourning after losing a close family member. Acceptable texts for Tisha b'Av, in case you're curious, include not only Lamentations but also Job, the laws of mourning, and the narrative parts of the Talmud which deal with the destruction of the Second Temple and then of Jerusalem under the Romans. One is also encouraged to read about other catastrophic moments in Jewish history, which leads me to the slightly blasphemous but well-nigh irresistible impulse to dig up some old newspaper articles in which Madonna announces that she plans to study Kabbalah.
** -- The remark I'm thinking of here is attributed to everyone from Yohanan ben Zakkai to Martin Luther (somewhat ludicrously, in the latter instance), and asserts that if you're planting a tree and someone runs up to tell you that the Messiah has arrived, you finish planting the tree before you go check out the potential Messiah.

There's a story I heard somewhere -- I am not convinced of its accuracy -- that sometime back in the '50s, deep into the Cold War, the United States used to test suspected Soviet spies by asking them to sing the second verse of "The Star-Spangled Banner." If they knew it, they were obviously foreigners bent on espionage, because no real American would possibly have bothered to learn anything but the first verse.

Of course, the '50s weren't exactly a shining era for civil or personal rights in the U.S., although they did produce some damn fine music. But this story is a trifle unfair to them; someone must've known all the verses to our national anthem in the '50s, because the words "under God" were added to the Pledge of Allegiance in 1954, and -- even more telling -- the motto "In God We Trust" was added to all U.S. currency in 1955 (both changes signed into law by President Eisenhower). The fourth and final verse of "The Star-Spangled Banner" -- anyone who tries to tell you it's the third is leaving out the nasty we-kicked-British-ass verse -- runs as follows:

O thus be it ever when free-men shall stand
Between their lov'd home and the war's desolation;
Blest with vict'ry and peace, may the heav'n-rescued land
Praise the Pow'r that hath made and preserv'd us a nation!
Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just,
And this be our motto: “In God is our trust!”
And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave!

Sort of disturbing, isn't it? (The full lyrics are here.) I'm perfectly happy to believe that God preserves people and even occasionally peoples, but I've never considered Her especially devoted to the welfare of specific modern nation-states. And... "conquer we must"? Does anyone else have a sneaking suspicion that someone at the Bush White House knows this verse?

I have a deep and fundamental objection to editing works for content, especially without letting on that this is what's happening. (Hence my difficulties with the Reform (Jewish) liturgy; quite apart from leaving things out, the English translations often bowdlerize the Hebrew.) I have an equally fundamental objection to ignoring historical context. Therefore, I think it's important to know exactly what Francis Scott Key -- a good Episcopalian by all accounts -- wrote about the U.S.A. in 1814, and what the U.S. government adopted as a national anthem in 1931 (it was already in use by various of our armed forces). It's also handy to note that our "Founding Fathers" preceded Key by several decades and refer to You-Know-Who as "Nature's God," "Creator," and "Supreme Judge" in that little Declaration thing, but are much more concerned with "a decent respect to the opinions of mankind" in said document.

People have written books -- very good ones -- on the extent to which America was or was not religious in the late eighteenth century.* I don't plan to enter that debate just now. But I think it's amusing the way U.S. politicians are now switching over from "The Star-Spangled Banner" to "God Bless America" as an unofficial anthem, even as they defend the motto of "In God We Trust" and the words "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance.** "The Star-Spangled Banner" would suit them far better. "God Bless America" suggests "Let us swear allegiance to a land that's free." Its only mention of God is, in fact, the rather vague notion of blessing. It's pretty well impossible to find a song about America that doesn't talk about God, but I personally prefer "America the Beautiful": "America, America! God mend thine every flaw / Confirm thy soul in self-control / Thy liberty in law."

I'm sure my readers will be entirely unsurprised to learn that I was kicked out of my ninth-grade Civics class due to an unfortunate habit of, er, giving my own impromptu lectures. (I was bored, okay?) They sent me to the library and told me to read de Tocqueville's Democracy in America. De Tocqueville, of course, was a man of his time when he "doubt[ed] whether man can ever support at the same time complete religious independence and entire political freedom." But I like to think we can aim a little higher these days, especially if our country is as "religious" (a term sorely in need of definition) as All That. After all, de Tocqueville also pointed out that "the greatest advantage of religion is to inspire diametrically contrary principles."

Happy Fourth of July, everyone!

* -- I'd recommend Jon Butler's Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People and Patricia Bonomi's Under the Cope of Heaven: Religion, Society, and Politics in Colonial America.
** -- With which there are many, many religious issues to be raised in any case. I might consider pledging allegiance to a republic, but never to a flag.

Most frightening thing I've read in ages: this list of especially unfortunate story summaries from UCSL, a giant archive of unconventional-relationship-centered Buffyverse fanfic. (Not for the faint of heart, as many Disturbing Mental Pictures are evoked -- but extremely funny if you're familiar with the characters of Buffy and Angel. Somewhat more witty commentary here.)

Second most frightening thing I've read in ages: the July issue of Better Homes and Gardens, in a feature article on "romance," suggests foofy bubblebaths accompanied by romantic reading. Its examples of appropriate reading are as follows: Wuthering Heights (not my personal taste, but I see the connection), National Geographic Traveler (does everyone else dream of vacations in tandem? I certainly don't), and -- wait for it -- Love, Ronnie, the collected love letters of the fortieth president of the United States to his second wife. I don't usually make judgments on the literary quality of books I haven't read, but I'd be willing to waive that policy were I not so horrified by the extreme tackiness of publishing anyone's love letters before all parties involved have passed on.* Feh.

Most frightening thing I've read in the last five minutes: this site. I was trying to sort out which of Nietzsche's works the above-referenced quote about monsters and abysses appears in, but was foiled by roughly twenty different spellings of "Nietzsche" (they all got the "N" right) and then reduced to helpless giggles by the above-mentioned quote's co-optation as an "inspirational quotation about persistence."

Sometime this week, I may have a consequential thought, but I wouldn't count on it.

And while I'm thinking about gazing, could anyone explain to me why Netscape persists in rendering styles clearly marked as 12-point in some teeny-weeny font?

* -- If you need to read third-party love letters in the bath -- and I can't imagine why you should -- I suggest the Penguin paperback translation and abridgement of The Letters of Abelard and Heloise.