For a not-so-regular moviegoer, I hear about a lot of movies -- many of my friends and acquaintances do in fact go to movies, and the people on LJ summarize them, and I wind up wondering whether I can cite Van Helsing to my classes as an example of contemporary ecumenical movements without actually seeing it. But I also get myself irritated without even the benefit of getting to eat unhealthy-yet-delicious movie-theater popcorn. You see, I had already decided that the prospect of Sean Bean in a leather miniskirt Bronze Age armor was not really enough to distract me from the well-publicized disadvantages of the movie Troy, such as the decision to write the Greek gods out of an ostensible retelling of the Iliad (plus or minus a few scenes from The Fall of Troy, The Aeneid, etc.). As we all know, the gods don't really play any major role in the Iliad. Nor am I the tiniest bit interested in religion. *cough* Still, I could sort of rationalize that decision -- cramming the dramatized Iliad into one movie-length sitting is a tough job, so something had to go.

That said, I have received the first reports from my LJ friendslist, and I am more shocked and horrified than I had expected to be. So they got rid of the gods -- except for Thetis, who is presumably a woman with a seashell fetish -- and they ditched subplots including Cassandra and Sarpedon, which make no sense without the gods and are somewhat tangential to the main action anyway. Fine. I was kind of looking forward to hearing creatively atheistic explanations for why Achilles returned Chryseis to her father ("My father is a priest of -- er, an accountant! He has brought the wrath of the Peloponnesian Revenue Service down upon your encampments!"), how Helen escaped with Paris, why Achilles was invulnerable, that sort of thing; alas, I was bitterly disappointed. It turns out that I was giving the filmmakers too much credit for wanting to adapt the actual Iliad: Chryseis does not appear (Agamemnon just grabs Briseis), and as far as I can make out, Helen decides to run off with Paris because he's dishy and does so by the clever expedient of stowing away on their ship under a cloak. Yippee.*

It also turns out that many elements of the original texts are neither avoided nor simplified but simply... changed, for no apparent reason. Reasonable change: when Menelaus and Paris fight, Paris is not carried away by a goddess but shielded by Hector. Fine. Then -- unreasonable change: Hector and Menelaus fight and Menelaus is killed. (So much for including the bitter-irony-of-war scene in the inevitable Odyssey movie. Is this supposed to be resonant or something?) Later on, in the final scenes of destruction, Paris finally shoots Achilles, Agamemnon kills Priam, and Briseis -- who, by the way, has borrowed Trojan royalty and (former) virgin priestesshood from Cassandra -- anyway, Briseis kills Agamemnon. If this is supposed to represent female characters with agency, I am So Not Impressed. (And I was so looking forward to Mycenae with Sharon Stone as Clytemnestra and Haley Joel Osment as Orestes!) Then Paris and Briseis take off together to go join Helen and Aeneas, all of whom skedaddle out of the city safely as far as I can tell. (One can only pray that the Aeneid movie -- which is pretty well inevitable at this point -- will have entirely different continuity.)

Now, I like referential and derivative fictions as much as (perhaps more than) the next woman, and the Trojan-War-plus-aftermath is easily in the top two all-time Most Fictionally Elaborated Stories of So-Called Western Civilization: there's not a lot that hasn't already been done with the story. I also appreciate the need to adapt a lengthy, originally oral, epic poem into something that can be told through a Major Motion Picture Event. But at a certain stage (it's a very fuzzy line) one stops "adapting" or "dramatizing" a story and starts retelling it as what media fandom calls an AU -- an alternate-universe version of the original. There's nothing necessarily wrong with that, either: an AU can make for a reasonably good fictional narrative when the alternative is one logical and thought-provoking step removed from the source narrative. Dio Chrysostom's Eleventh (or "Trojan") Discourse actually offers an Iliad AU of sorts, starting from the premise that the Trojans actually won the war but Homer had to rewrite it for purposes of Aegean propaganda. It is fascinating precisely because it assumes knowledge of the Iliad and plays on the many points of confusion in that narrative to offer a tongue-in-cheek revisionist history. Some source narratives even include their own AUs: for instance, the Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode "The Wish" is an AU working from the premise that Buffy never arrived in Sunnydale at the beginning of the series.

But when a piece of derivative fiction starts with a premise along the lines of "all the characters on Buffy are human EMTs in New York and vampires don't exist" -- or, less creatively, "in this story Angel dies in Season One and Buffy gets together with Xander because I always liked him better anyway" -- it is usually a lousy narrative on its own merits and always awful as fanfic, because it is almost never telling a story which can sustain any kind of relationship, nevermind fruitful tension, with the source narrative. This kind of fiction is basically a standalone narrative with the same character names and a couple of plot segments that might be from the original. Or from Shakespeare. Or from the Bible. Or even (mirabile dictu) from Greco-Roman mythology. There's no telling, really: "boy steals girl, gods and/or mischance kill off everyone except the narrator/moral voice, people die more or less heroically" is the plot of Romeo and Juliet, the five or so sequential stories/poems from which Shakespeare borrowed all but a few supporting characters in R&J, nearly half of Ovid's Metamorphoses, and at least two episodes in the Book of Judges. Short of telling it as an allegory about subatomic particles, the producers of Troy aren't likely to come up with any completely new twist on Homer, but the pattern of seemingly pointless divergences from a widely-known and well-respected source narrative puzzle me. I mean, if you're going to change the story around to that extent, so that entirely different people survive and die with no obvious dramatic payoff in either direction, why not just call the hero "Bob" and the other guy "Joe" and have them engage in a climactic jello-wrestling match while wearing the aforementioned leather miniskirts?**

I would be better able to cope if I felt that this was a special form of insanity visited upon the producers of Troy (presumably by the Greek gods, who were looking forward to casting calls). It's not. I remain completely puzzled by many of the decisions made in the Lord of the Rings movies, as I have already explained at some length, but it was a miracle of textual fidelity compared to most adaptations. For instance, I am hearing squeals of delight from LJ Land over the upcoming Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban movie, but as a fan of that particular volume, I am unimpressed by some of the inexplicable line-swapping hinted at in the trailers. Then there was a Disney TV movie of Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time the other night, which I very sensibly did not watch because I loved that book as a child and I am not a masochist -- but I understand that IT was represented as a guy rather than a giant brain, which strikes me as completely failing to convey the book's rather central point about evil as depersonalized intelligence. I'm really starting to think that either I am crazy or the rest of the world is, because I am actually a specialist in the history, theory, and practice of doing wacky interpretative things to texts and yet I can find no room for most of these book-to-movie "adaptations." They are pointless at best and abominable at worst. And so now I am wondering why we apparently have media scandals about Janet Jackson's breast but not about Homer's literary castration, whether Homer's legendary blindness wouldn't be a perfectly reasonable reaction to the average movie adaptation, and why anyone goes to see movies.

Well, there are always the leather miniskirts.

* -- Hey, does anyone know how they explained Achilles' invulnerability? Or if it even made it into the story? I gather Paris shoots him in the heel, then shoots him a lot more times elsewhere. But most of my Troy plot-summary information is checked against Troy in Fifteen Minutes and not much else.
** -- That's probably a movie plot somewhere. Please don't tell me about it.

This weekend, I had intended to write about story adaptations, about Levitical society, and about my ongoing addiction to Homeowner Porn (e.g. HGTV). I may actually blog one or more of these topics once I regain my will to live, but today has been One Of Those Days. Never mind the lawn-mowing problems, the really big roach (the first person to tell me that roaches do not usually live solitary lifestyles will get smacked), the minor physical aches, the thirteenth-hour student grading issues, the fact that I operate at about three-quarters impulse power on Sundays anyway, and the fact that I was awoken by the phone at 8:15 am on the first day in three weeks when I could've slept seriously late (and it was my mother calling, so hanging up on her wasn't a viable option). What really has me down is the aftereffects of Shabbat.

Yesterday I did my semi-usual synagogal commute: read Torah for the Marvelous Monthly Minyan, made lots of food for their kiddush, switched over to Temple Boondoggle, taught a very good class (if I do say so myself) on the Baraita de-Rabbi Meir*, ran a very disappointing committee meeting there, popped home to refrigerate leftovers, then drove out to Congregation Beth Boondoggle (the local Conservative shul) for afternoon/evening services bookending Mishnah study. This isn't an especially wacky schedule for me, but this was an especially educational Shabbat, and here's what I learned:

(1) It is just possible that you should stick to one major responsibility on any given Shabbos, especially when you are not actually getting paid for this.

(2) On the other hand, if you encourage someone else to do the d'var Torah, you can't very successfully cut them off when the discussion starts going to the Bad Place. (I did point out -- very tactfully -- that perhaps we shouldn't debate the merits of socialist government before we got around to eating lunch.)

(3) In related news, eating breakfast is a Good Thing. Fasting before Shacharit was obviously a concept introduced by someone who had not gotten up at 5 am to cook, plan lessons, and rehearse a Torah portion.

(4a) When you are running a committee meeting, but all your regular attendees have to duck out early and the resultant assembly leaves you fumbling for adequate metaphors for flakiness ("bowlful of Wheaties" or "five pounds of puff pastry"?), it is time to re-evaluate hara-kiri as an option, or at least give up any hope of, you know, deciding things that week. (Note to self: never, ever take up congregational ministry job. Fantasies of suppressing congregants à la Alice in Wonderland not good for psyche.)

(4b) Of course, if the committee has control over very little and is essentially being told go to play in its sandbox, it doesn't exactly matter, now does it?

(5) There are apparently a lot of people at Temple Boondoggle who see nothing at all problematic about using Yom Kippur to advance wishy-washy social action agendas with no apparent fucking relationship to, you know, the actual holiday. (Yes, I'm upset. I feel that if you plan to fob off advance a social action agenda in place of a significant chunk of the liturgy for Yom Kippur, the least you can do is tie it into one of the Haftarot for the day. Believe it or not, they have selected a "theme" which is specific and modern enough that it relates to neither Isaiah's nor Jonah's broader messages. Not, of course, that we read Jonah.)

(6a) Contrariwise, there are a lot of people at Congregation Beth Boondoggle who feel that the increasing problematization of Jewish marriage by Israeli and American Orthodoxy is all the Reform movement's fault for recognizing Jewishness patrilineally as well as matrilineally. These same people seem remarkably uninterested in discussing the long and complicated history of Jewish lineage disputes going back to Ezra and Nehemiah, engaging with the horribly messy exegesis of the ten-caste system in Mishnah Ketubot, speculating about the standards for Karaite-Rabbanite intermarriage** during the Gaonic period, or even contrasting this contemporary issue with the testimony in Yevamot 14a about intermarriage between the houses of Hillel and Shammai (which is where the whole debate started).

(6b) It is difficult -- but not impossible -- to casually introduce all these examples into conversation. (By the way, I am not entirely sure that I approve of constituting Judaism by patrilineal descent either; I am simply certain that a lack of historical context with a side of self-righteousness won't get anyone anywhere.)

(7) So, in conclusion, either I am not studying Torah for its own sake, or Rabbi Meir was on the second-century equivalent of crack, because even though I kept my temper all day yesterday, it is depressingly clear that I am not "modest and patient and forgiving of insults." (Of course, I came very close to teaching that perek entirely on the basis of old SNL skits. "Torah: it's a floor wax and a dessert topping.") And I don't quite fit in anywhere. Possibly I never will. Why do I have to re-learn this about once every two months?

Oh well. Y'all know that there's a reason I called this blog "Baraita," right?

* -- AKA Perek Kinyan Torah, or Pirke Avot chapter six. (Yes, we're a week ahead of the traditional cycle -- comes of starting during Pesach. But it gives us an extra weekend to do Best Of, which ought to be fun.)
** -- Which should probably be the logical precedent for the Reform lineage question: most of the Karaites, being Biblical fundamentalists of a sort, very sensibly pointed out that the Torah favors patrilineal descent, if anything. Some of the post-Gaonic authorities who upheld the so-called "Rabbanite" position and favored matrilineal descent permitted intermarriage with Karaites, while others forbade it with varying degrees of shrillness (the Karaites did not get around to returning the favor until the early modern period). Judging from the ketubot in the Cairo Geniza, however, most of the prohibitions were roundly ignored and a variety of intelligent compromises were worked out instead.

As a general rule, I resent the attention given to "math and science" education. I am, after all, a humanities geek, and we don't get no respect. I learned this lesson early: my Home State has a special high school for science and math, and a special one for the arts, and bupkis for All That Other Stuff I've Always Been Really Interested In. Sadly, I grew up to discover that the same state of affairs is reflected in grant funding. So I have nothing against math and science -- I had fun learning about both -- but I tend to roll my eyes at the gazillionth news story about the wonders of (insufficiently peer-reviewed) scientific research or how Our Children Are Falling Behind In Math.

However. Somewhere around this time of the semester, I begin thinking that my students could clearly use a bit more in the way of math education, because they apparently lack the capacity to calculate their own damn grades with a modicum of accuracy -- and every semester I wade through two weeks of "what's my grade not counting the final?" emails followed by another two weeks of "why didn't I get an A, and can you explain in detail?" emails. There is, of course, a simpler way to solve this steady drain on my time (not to mention my goodwill towards humanity): gradebook software designed to allow each student to view his/her grade calculations online. It does in fact exist -- although the market seems entirely slanted towards elementary and secondary education -- but Boondoggle U. "doesn't support" anything of the sort. After I get tenure, I must remember to mention this to the next administratively approved person who touts "using technology in the classroom."

Unfortunately, my inner pedagogue is still sitting in the corner pouting after attending a workshop featuring the question "What are we bridging students to?" (Apparently, a brave new world where "bridge" is a transitive verb -- as is "transition.") Yes, it is Commencement Week, that wonderful time of the year when we academic types have meetings, workshops, meetings, workshops, and -- oh yes -- meetings. I rather like well-run committee meetings, and some (not, alas, enough) of this week's events have been describable as such. Teaching workshops aren't half bad if they give you enough toys, and can sometimes even offer useful tips. But I resent being forced to waste all my shiny new post-conference energy on listening to (and not, by and large, being able to affect) institutional minutiae.

So this morning, after (wait for it) a meeting, I hopped in my car and headed to Penultima Thule (or, as they say around here, "the suburbs") to meet with my new eye doctor. This is another post-semester ritual of sorts, since I haven't had time to schedule an appointment and haven't really been in a rush to doff my intimidatingly professorial glasses during the semester. But contacts are a lot more convenient for swimming, leaning over into the garden, and moving from over-air-conditioned to steamily-humid environments as I dodge in and out of libraries. And my new eye doctor seems very nice -- although I feel that I deserve some sort of community service award for answering his questions about the historicity of The Da Vinci Code politely while unable to focus my eyes or confront light courtesy of the extremely bad pun you all no doubt saw coming in this post's title.

By the way, why has nobody written the Hebrew Bible equivalent of The Da Vinci Code? You can't tell me that the Biblical stories of Josiah's rise to power and the quote-discovery-endquote of the Book of Deuteronomy don't make for some damn good conspiracy theories. I mean, c'mon -- depravity! Pillars in high places! Kings of Judah named after Egyptian deities! Palace assassins! Human sacrifice! Prophetesses! Grave defilement! Iconoclasm! You merely have to posit a forbidden romance between Huldah and Josiah, explain the real location of the Ark of the Covenant, link the Deuteronomists up with your favorite wacky medieval movement (Passagians, obviously) and your favorite semi-secretive modern group (I suggest Skull and Bones) and you're set to continue the proud literary tradition of plagiarizing Abbé Barruél! (No, I don't want to write the book; anyone is welcome to it. But remember that all material on this blog is published under a Creative Commons license and save yourself some trouble from an irate professor by putting in an author's note explaining exactly which parts are fiction.)

I just have to get through this week without killing anyone, and everything will be blissful. Oh, look, another student email!

Major Professional Conference #3 is undoubtedly my favorite academic event of the year, although I am trying to tone down my participation in its scheduled activities -- this year I was only on the program twice and didn't organize anything, and I only attended two additional business meetings, which counts as a teeny-weeny victory in my personal sanity sweepstakes. I am pleased to state that all the events I participated in went beautifully -- the session in which I delivered a paper even achieved that rare and unplannable synchronicity in which three total strangers find themselves having an engrossing academic conversation. Still, it occurs to me that next year I could actually attend this conference without giving a paper, a heretofore unprecedented event in my academic career. After all, I have a job, and giving papers does not count towards tenure. Plus, they always schedule the sessions I really wanted to attend opposite my own. And not giving a paper would allow me more time for what I really want to do at MPC#3: listen to other people's papers, talk to fellow scholars I only see once or twice a year, meet new fellow scholars, catch up with old friends from grad school, plot sessions for next year, get excited about everyone's research projects (including mine), and of course browse the book exhibits.

When I say "browse," by the way, any halfway attentive Baraita reader will immediately realize that I really mean "buy, in quantities sufficiently large to impress fellow academics." Doing this successfully and gracefully with minimal budget overrun requires only a few simple techniques, which I happen to have worked out over the past seven or so years but which I should probably share with my readers. You see, the great thing about MPC #3's hideous college dormitory accomodations -- why, in fact, I do not move to the hotel where the Senior Academic types stay -- is that they are very, very convenient to the book exhibits. It is possible, even easy, to buy books an armful at a time, take them back to your room, and return to the exhibit hall. (Especially if you put in a polite request on your registration form to be in the same building as the exhibits. Flies, honey, vinegar, etc.) One could fly in and stay at the hotel, of course, and I do this at other conferences, but there's a great deal to be said for the sheer geeky fun of driving across the Midwest toting your own snack food, stopping at the occasional gas station for refills, and holding a lengthy disquisition on why it's godawfully annoying when undereducated philosophers call Aquinas "Thomas."* By about hour three of the drive, the graduate students have usually forgotten that I am a professor, which comes as a great relief to all of us under the circumstances.

Now, where was I? Oh, yes, books. Of course any smart conference attendee will pack a sturdy extra bag, or two, because books (as well as miscellaneous papers, business cards, etc.) have a way of piling up on that last day of the conference. If you are not driving alone, and your vehicle is full on the way up, it helps to know who else is driving back and forth from your university -- or your overall metropolitan area, if there is friendship involved -- so that you can send excess books back with other people. If you are flying, make sure that at least one of your extra bag(s) can be checked through in a pinch, and pack the books inside your checked suitcase in another removable bag in case you exceed the airline weight limits (which clearly do not take books into account). In case of emergency, i.e. when it is absolutely impossible to get all your books onto the plane and you figure this out before you are due at the airport, mail your dirty laundry, not your books: it will be cheaper and you will still have something to read on the trip back.** (Nobody ever pulls their dirty laundry back out, do they?)

Timing is also crucial for the book-buying conference experience. Arriving on time to sessions is not absolutely essential, unless you are giving a paper or moderating, but it behooves you to slip in quietly with a faintly guilty expression. Arriving on time to receptions is considered odd, unless there is free alcohol, in which case everyone will understand (or unless you are organizing the reception, in which case you want to move away from the free alcohol quickly, before someone gets hurt). But arriving on time to the exhibit hall will not cut it, at least not on the first and last days of the conference, which are respectively noted for the presence of reservable display copies and widespread leftover-book discounts. Camping out in front of the entryway is probably excessive; the organizers of MPC #3 have thoughtfully put free coffee and tea dispensers near the exhibit entrances, so it's simple to wander downstairs from your nearby room with a granola bar (books are more important than breakfast any day) about fifteen to twenty minutes early. At most conferences, and certainly at MPC#3, that timeframe will land you among the first ten or so in the door, which should be plenty of head start -- provided that you've already planned your route using the handy exhibition map included in your program book and cross-referencing by desirability of new releases and publishers' discounting policies on display copies, but that's obvious, right?

The great advantage of having this conference at the end of the school year is that I have plenty of time this summer to reorganize my bookshelves. Oh, and to write stuff, which is really the major event this summer. But the books are very important indeed for the writing part, not only because I need to keep up with new literature in my subfield (no, seriously, I do), but because it annoys me that other people's books are not citing my dissertation, and apparently the only way to ensure that they do this is to finish turning the dratted thing into a book of my own. Someday -- two or three MPC #3s from now -- I might even pause on my headlong flight into the exhibits, distracted by the gorgeous cover of my award-winning monograph... or I might ignore it and go on buying other people's books. Er, enjoying the conference. Well, it's all more or less the same thing, isn't it?

It's been ages since I said this: I love my job.

* -- We are thinking here of the sort of philosopher who reads "Thomas" (by which they mean selected parts of the Summa theologiae) together with Aristotle and Kant, all in English, and who wouldn't know a Dominican from Pseudo-Dionysius or a studium generale from a hole in the wall. If you are not that sort of philosopher, relax.
** -- Incidentally, is it a sign of irremediable geekdom when you realize that you have purchased "fun" books for the trip back, but one of them is in parallel Greek/English and the other has the word "hermeneutics" in the title?

So -- in case y'all were wondering whether I do anything but kvetch about Jewish community -- I wish to note for the record that I had a spiritually fulfilling, intellectually challenging, communally reassuring, socially stimulating Shabbat day last week. I attended all three (well, three and a half counting Musaf) possible Saturday services, listened to morning Torah plus Haftarah and afternoon Torah, discussed parts from two different Mishnah tractates, and filled in the handful of gaps between events chatting with friends about Jewish community organization and educational initiatives.

Of course, I went to three synagogues (of three different denominations) and drove about thirty miles total in order to accomplish this. Also, the back seat of my car would make a decent synagogue library. The sooner I get a pickup truck, the sooner I can just put a bookshelf behind the front seats and have done with it. But -- more Mishnah! New people to argue discuss with! Whee! (My friends tell me I should stop referring to Pirke Avot study as a "gateway drug to Talmud." It sounds about right to me, though.)

Anyway, since I'll be at Major Professional Conference #3 this weekend instead of making my local synagogue rounds, I thought this would be a good time to solicit input from Baraita readers on one of those educational initiatives. If you were compiling a list of the Top Ten (or so) Historical Jewish Figures You Should Know Something About But Probably Don't, who would you list? (Note that the target audience for this completely hypothetical program is an American Reform congregation shading towards Renewal. Note, also, that "you" does not mean me, or most of you for that matter. "You" means the average congregant interested in learning a little something.)

There needs to be some sort of chronological distribution, but there's no way anything like this will be comprehensive. And I think we should try to mostly pick people the congregants have heard of but don't know much about, plus a few world-expanding ringers. I figured I'd assemble a list of no more than 30 and let the adult ed committee vote on it. So I tried, and... um, I have prejudices. And, apparently, a complete lack of interest in the Amoraim, although it may just be a lack of stand-out personalities in my mind. Any suggestions, either "I've always wondered about" additions or "what on earth were you thinking?" deletions, would be welcome.

Then, of course, we revise the list again based on the fact that I need people who are not me to want to teach stuff. ;)

Salome Alexandra (Shelamzion)
Philo Judaeus
Hillel and Shammai
Yochanan ben Zakkai
R. Akiba (and Bar Kochba by extension)
Beruriah
R. Saadia Gaon
Rashi
Dulcie of Worms (or perhaps I should talk about the First Crusade another time?)
Rambam (Maimonides)
Ramban (Nachmanides)
Dona Gracia Mendes
R. Isaac Luria (the Ari)
R. Joseph Karo
Shabbatai Zvi
R. Israel Baal Shem Tov
R. Elijah b. Solomon (the Vilna Gaon)
R. Shneur Zalman of Liadi (the original Lubavitcher Rebbe)
Moses Mendelssohn
Hannah Rachel Werbemacher (the Maid of Ludomir)
Theodor Herzl
R. Isaac Mayer Wise
R. Mordecai Kaplan

Obvious questions: where do I end, chronologically speaking? (My suspicion is that if people want to learn about major twentieth-century figures, they have plenty of resources available.) And am I paying too much attention to the European traditions?