So, I’ve been giving a lot of thought to this question, and I think if I were to spend a year studying one book of the Bible, it would be Hebrews.

Atheist Josh, huh?  Year with one book?  I’ll get back to the general question at the end, but specifically, this book is fascinating.  What an incongruous (nicer term than “fucked up”) Christology.  I haven’t spent a year on it, but as far as I can tell, it was directed to early Jewish Christians.  It tries to syncretize the OT and NT, and it … kind of fails at that.  Granted, it’s pretty much impossible to do that, but with some (fairly deep) reflection on hypostasis, it tries to have Christ be both “son of God” and “high priest”.  Except the latter doesn’t really work with the Gospels.  If this were modern genre fiction, we’d call the attempt “ret-conning”.  Bonus points for the attempt.

I am left wondering how this was accepted into the canon in the first place.  Surely there were people who would have said — “Um … the NT works better without this in it.  Or with just this in it.  Thoughts?”  And I’m repeatedly amazed that the fiercely eschatological stuff wasn’t redacted.  I mean, by the fourth century C.E. it was pretty clear that any generation alive in Jesus’ day wasn’t around any more, right?

Here are some of the (my) highlights:

• This is where English gets both “a little lower than the angels” and “a shadow of good things to come”, which are simply awesome poetic lines.
• I’m pretty sure that 8:6-7 is the origin of the Narnia “deep/deeper magic” bit.
• 12:8: If God doesn’t hurt you, then he clearly isn’t your father.  Editorializing here, but: that’s messed up.
• 12:29: “our God is a consuming fire”.  13:20: “[our God is a] God of peace”.  There’s not even an attempt to separate them in the text.
• By writing this post, I am guaranteeing that (10:28-29) God is going to kill me without mercy.  Just FYI.

I know my Dad’s going to be reading this, but I think this is appropriate to do publicly.  I used to attend my Dad’s weekly early morning Bible study.  But I’m kind of … not welcome any longer.  I mean, I’m totally welcome in lots of senses, but … I guess it’s analysis that’s not really welcome.  That’s not a diss: my Dad is totally down with analysis, and he knows his shit.  But the old dudes (they’re all old dudes) in the class: not so much.  I’ve been ribbed by a venerable member, outside of class, that I’m missed, but that the classes tend to stay more on track without me.  Mentioned in a sincere haha-only-serious way.  And I think: “On track?  What’s more on track than discussing what we’re reading?”  But — again, not so much.

I broached this with my Dad, and the answer occurred to me in mid-sentence: “Wait; is it a devotional group to them, and not at all a study?”  In the broad strokes, he confirmed that.  Again, no diss to my Dad.

As to the general question: why the hell is atheist Josh contemplating spending a year studying one book of the Christian Bible?  Well — I’m kinda damned if I do, damned if I don’t, am I not?  There’s a lot of our culture and nation that’s still pretty die-hard.  When I debate Christians, they frequently fall back to telling me I need to “study more”, and frequently to “find a Bible study”.  And my response in general is “Dude: done that.”  I spent 18 years immersed as a believer, and I’ve done (reasonably) advanced studies of the Bible.  In fact — and this is bizarre — often more than the Christian has.  And almost certainly more extrabiblical reading about the Bible than he has.

So, y’all, both atheists and theists: your choice for a book to study for a year?

1985:  Stephen King publishes the short story “Ballad of the Flexible Bullet”.  It describes a writer’s descent into paranoid madness.  When he moves into a new home, he doesn’t have a phone installed; he has discovered that phones run not on electricity but on radium.  There is a bit of radium in every handset, and the radiation is responsible for the increased cancer rate, not smoking or car exhaust.

2006: In the midst of brain cancer scares, Stephen King publishes the novel “Cell”.  It describes a pulse sent over all cell phones, turning all those talking on the phones at that moment into homicidal zombies who bite out the throats of everyone they meet.  In the introduction, he explains that he refuses to have a cell phone.

Um.  Yeah.

[title]

From a discussion group called [arts-poetry-humanities]:

For starters, Tim, it’s clear that you’ve been immersed in a paradigm in which the English language has been subverted into a mode that requires more intensive decoding;  I recognize it from when I worked at Harbinger, where they elevated language to buzzwords that hid the actual meaning from the audience that might attempt to read it.

Emphasis added.  Of course.

Alternate Title: “Of all things po-mo // Let us have no mo’” — Geoff Nunberg

Has anyone read Dom Segolla’s 140 Characters: A Style Guide for the Short Form? 

From the back cover, apparently:

What Strunk and White’s Elements of Style did for traditional media, 140 Characters does for the social media revolution happening today.

This is a bold claim indeed. 

Alternate post title: “Je n’ai fait celle-ci plus longue parceque je n’ai pas eu le loisir de ce tweet faire plus courte.”  But, with the hashtags, that would make the Twitter crosspost too long to RT [insert. irony. here.]

Page 11 of a novel:

I’m back in produce, though, honestly, I don’t remember what caused me to drift back there.

Does … someone else?  The author maybe?  Also, have you just established that you are sometimes going to lie to me?  You’re a $7.99 drugstore mass market paperback thriller, for gods’ sakes, but if you want to rock the Unreliable Narrator, I’ll put you on probation to try it.

Page 12:

Though recently, for reasons I can’t explain, it has begun to fade.

Could you … try to explain them?  Seriously, you’re all I’ve got connecting me to the story here.  You can’t take a nap onstage and then leave it to the reader to figure out the deep haunting majesty of your hazy pretensions.  Especially given the prose of the first ten pages.

She gets five more pages, and then I’m out.

[title]

Hey, you remember some years ago when we all headed over to WWDN to, essentially, make fun of someone, and he turned out to be an admirable, decent, articulate, multi-faceted, stand-up example of a guy?  Well, Brent Spiner’s now on Twitter.  And the man is a genius, in an amping-snarkitude-and-wit-to-eleven kind of way.

Just remember, when he’s parrying people, he’s actually saying “fuck you”, and remember that when he says “fuck you” to them, he’s actually saying “fuck you” to you, and remember that even though he just told you to go fuck yourself, the man’s got a rapier.  Or, in better words than mine, from his abduction fantasy:

I drifted higher and higher. I was convinced I was a part of the light. But I wasn’t. It was a portal of some sort and I was being sucked in.  It felt strange.  Unlike any sucking experience I’ve ever had.

Offered to me:

Wow.  That was fast, even by today’s standards.  Was it a work in progress that he took a few nights to add on a chapter and call it “finished”?  Maybe that explains the 2/5 stars it is receiving.  It’s at the top of the NYT Bestsellers List as I write.  Note that this is the “Who Killed Kurt Cobain?” scoundrel.

Given a choice between a free subscription to Popular Science that I’ll never get around to reading and a free subscription to Smithsonian that I’ll never get around to reading, which should I choose?  I haven’t read either in more than a decade.

Do there exist words for the following?

1. An emotion that can only be accurately described by nonverbal expressions
2. Beauty of a type or degree that makes the viewer uncomfortable
3. Two people close enough in age that they could not be siblings (and far enough separated in age that they could not be twins)
4. The position of honor in film actor billings in which they state, at the end of the list of stars, “with foo and bar“

Real words only, please.  I’m not looking to play e-Sniglets

Highly recommended:  The Have a Word For It by Howard Rheingold (not in print?) and:

Unread (if someone wants to buy me the Kindle edition, LMK; I’ve sent the sample to Cabin Small):

OK, fine, since people are going to post smartass answers anyway, I might as well pretend I courted them

… is small enough that one may safely round it to zero  –Bob Mike

I’ll just come out and say it: I really like Spider Robinson.  Misogynist, yes, but wonderful.  As in what?  Well, dedicating a book about a brothel to Heinlein and wishing that all prostitutes — “artists” — had a place as wonderful to practice their art as his fictional parlor.

But as embarrassed as I am to mention the book, and mortified that it will seem I’m recommending it, I have to quote a couple of lines:

[I]f there is any way that you can arrange your affairs so as to avoid dropping into whorehouse garbage from a great height, naked in February, then that is almost certainly the course your life should take.

and

A command is really just a request you don’t bother to phrase politely.

I’ve been meaning to change my Recently Read Books list (now, again, woefully out-of-date) to a series of blog posts that share a tag and that actually review the books in question.  This would ideally be accomplished by starting at the beginning of the trail of books as far back as I can recall their sequence.

But I’ve just got to shatter those plans by recommending a book: a fantasy novel by Rick Cook in which a computer programmer is whisked out our world into a magical realm in which, to save his love, he has to systematize and hack magic.  This is great fun for nerdy FRP folks and fantastically interesting in that I didn’t write it.

I found this entirely by accident.  I was looking for something at the Baen Free Library to send to my Kindle.  I liked the title.  I didn’t know the author, didn’t even know it was the first in a five-book series.  How fortuitous.  Great fun.

Amazon: Wizard’s Bane

Or free etext: Wizard’s Bane

UmYeahWow.  WorldCat is awesome: “Search for books, music, videos, articles and more in libraries near you.”

I can highly recommend, to US buyers, the oddly-named Vera Trinder, self-described as “London’s Oldest Stamp Accessory Store”, for philatelic literature.  They have relatively low prices, good coverage, and exceptional service.

Watch your checkbook, though: the merchant is completely honest, to be sure, but the current exchange rate (plus “international fees” on your credit card) leaves much to be desired (when importing — it has been a boon while selling on eBay!)

My brother has a new essay entitled Deus Ex Leo, about C.S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, in his continuing series of hacking to death, as an adult, fond memories of his childhood.  The series is very good.  Have I mentioned my brother is a better writer than I?

Also, I has a comment there, or might eventually, if it gets approved by a mod.

This is not the next post in the Chain Link saga, but I had to comment.

The (living) author J.K. Rowling hand-wrote and illustrated seven copies of the book The Tales of Beedle the Bard, which is referenced as a fictional book in one of her Harry Potter stories.  Each copy is magnificently bound, with deckle edges, Moroccan leather, and sterling silver.

All proceeds go to charity.  Good for her.

Amazon bought one for £1 950 000 at Sotheby’s, which presumably does not include a buyer’s premium.

Um, yeah.  A couple years ago, at least (when I was still following prices), you could buy a Gutenberg Bible and a Birds of North America for less money.  Save up a few more pennies, and you could walk away with a First Folio Shakespeare.  If you like children’s literature, you could probably buy every hand-written and -illustrated Beatrix Potter and Lewis Carroll volume and letter in existence for less.

What do you think will have more enduring value?

I’ve placed an order for an e-book reader: the first-generation Amazon Kindle.  I’ve been interested in a good e-book reader for about 8 years, but what I previously thought was going to be the best, the Everybook, failed to bloom.  It was many times as expensive and heavy, and used LCD screens.

I sat down some years ago and put together a checklist of what I wanted in an e-book reader.  They were:

1. Lightweight
2. Electronic paper
3. Long battery live
4. Expandable storage
5. Ability to be annotated
6. Multiple format support
7. Price under $500
8. Fold-open design to see two facing pages
9. Viewable area at least as large as a paperback
10. Hackable!

Only the first seven are guaranteed.  This is only a one-page reader, however, rather than a two-page reader.  The viewing area is only 6 inches diagonally.  And I’m not sure whether it’s going to be hackable, but I’ll try my best.  But Amazon added a whole bunch of extra functionality: MP3 player, free wireless access to buy books or download content while seeing Amazon reviews, free browsing of Wikipedia, an email address for the device.  I think this all adds up to “good enough for now”.

Notice how everything is converging?  My ideal reader today would support full-motion video, color, advanced music playlist management, email, telephony, touch-sensitivity; it would be a replacement for a separate book reader, phone, mp3 player, PDA, calculator, and laptop.

C.S. Lewis, 1947 (?), final stanza:

Hence, if belated drops yet fall
From heaven, on these her plastic power
Still works as once it worked on all
The glad rush of the golden shower

Wow.  The truth.  Email subscribers, go to the site for the scan.

Do check out PaperBackSwap.com.  Trade books — for free! — with other book lovers around the country.  There is a sister site for CDs, but that costs money.

This is going to fall off Google’s archives quickly, as eBay has suspended his account.  Virginia Tech gunman Cho Seung-Hui was offering for sale on Half.com, under the alias blazers5505, the following books:

• Micro Fiction
• Oates’s The Female Of The Species
• Horror novel Hell House
• Jean-Paul Sartre: Basic Writings
• John Donne’s Poetry
• Best of HP Lovecraft
• Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film
• Ten Little Indians, and
• Sabbath Night In The Church Of The Piranha

No judgment of his tastes is implied by posting the list, it’s just going to be forever-lost data in a few hours.  (Archive of search).

Hmmm.  Amazon: 92% reassuring, 8% not at all reassuring.

I’m hoping this post will help web surfers.  If you’re looking for a caustic solution to dissolve paper, cardboard, and ink of all tested varieties, mix cat urine and diet cola in roughly equal quantities, and immerse.

This research was underwritten by the Amazon.com VISA card, which provided Thank You For Arguing and Color for Philosophers to my nightstand, and I was ably aided by assistants Mika (our poorly-housebroken cat) and Sebastian (our clumsy cat).

Google Book Search: Buy your books by the chapter.

ITunes model for books?  Will publishers go for it?

I just finished reading Nicholas A. Basbanes’ Among the Gently Mad, a book about book collectors and book collecting that has many insights to offer about the phenomenon of collecting in general, how a germ of an idea will snowball into a major quest, and the value-adding properties of assembling a choice lot, wherein the whole becomes far more valuable than the separate parts.  Speaking as a collector of various things, I read with interest his insights into the mind of the collector — I frequently wonder the value and purpose of my collecting pursuits, and Basbanes’ analysis of the art and science of collecting do much to mollify.

The book cites two intriguing books: Double Fold, about the betrayal of the public by librarians who destroy books to save them, and Understanding Book Collecting, which is less intriguing to me now that I read that it is targeted for the British collector.

Wow, I’m glad I kept reading The Blank Slate.  The last two chapters, “The Arts” and “The Voice of the Species” were really, really, really good.  Maybe borrow the book and just read those?

I have been reading the intricate shell game that is Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate. Thought-provoking shell game, but shell game nonetheless, prone to rapid escalations from fish-in-barrel-shooting to global generalization in seven-league leaps of Randian proportion.  I’ve kept reading it for one reason: its occasional aha-generating moments are really fun (and normally in the form of citations from other thinkers.) In that sense the book is a footnote to its bibliography.

Allow me to cite, however, the first citation that has made me put the book down to write a blog post. He cites a writer called J.C. Wakefield as follows:

A good definition of a disease or disorder is that it consists of suffering experienced by an individual because of a malfunction of a mechanism in the individual’s body.

Now, hold on.  That is an immeasurably lousy definition of disease and disorder, on the scale of David Gelernter’s definition of vivid imagination.  By this definition, brain death is not a disorder.  Early-stage HIV infection is not a disease.  They’re not causing suffering, right?  At least not unless you expand suffering to something like “eventual diminution of lifespan”, or “elimination of the potential for experience of happiness”. But maybe his argument doesn’t rely on the suffering bit, or maybe it permits this sort of wide definition. He proceeds to explain why violence is not a disorder:

But as a writer for Science recently pointed out, “Unlike most diseases, it’s usually not the perpetrator who defines aggression as a problem; it’s the environment. Violent people may feel they are functioning normally, and some may even enjoy their occasional outbursts and resist treatment.  (Emphasis added)

I’m not making a claim about the pathology of violence. That’s not the point. The point is that if you are willing to start with assumptions this flawed, where do your arguments lead? Apparently, if this book is testament, the effect is arguments such as Neural models with distributed intelligence function better than top-down models. Leftism is top-down and utopian. Conservatism, with its free economic agents pursuing their own ends, is distributed. Therefore, the validity of Conservatism is supported by artificial intelligence research.  The only difference is that he takes ten pages to state this thesis.

Google begins to digitize paper books.  Amazing potential.

For the mathematically inclined reader, we note that a Calabi-Yau manifold is a complex Kähler manifold with vanishing first Chern class.

Egads.  I thought I was a mathematically inclined reader.

The age demanded an image

Of its accelerated grimace,

Something for the modern stage,

Not, at any rate, an Attic grace;

In what dialect or dialects of English do the pairs image and stage, grimace and grace rhyme?  Can anyone help?