Looking at a biography of St. Francis of Assisi just now, I’m reminded how cool it is that the saints all get halos around their heads in paintings.
When I’m sainted for my really innovative uses of Perl’s grep() and map() operators, I want to be depicted in devotional paintings wearing something really awesome — like a cool hat.
The New York Times gives prominent placement today to a study claiming that circumcision halves the risk of AIDS. (Included below the fold.) I am skeptical of those results. Men who are willing to get circumcised for their health are obviously different from those who are not; the circumcised group was probably at lower risk for AIDS to begin with.
I have to assume they’re kidding, but can anyone explain to me the deal with The Onion’s editorial cartoons (e.g.)? Has the newspaper been taken over by crazy right-wingers, or are they just making fun of the editorial-cartoon genre?
And incidentally, “How Did I End Up On The Cover Of This Romance Novel?” is basically perfect. It feels like it was written by the same guy who did “Why Do All These Homosexuals Keep Sucking My Cock?”.
Some of us still hope that the Net will live up to its promise, and will be a force for absolutely fundamental social and economic revolution, rather than a new way to distribute television. If such a revolution does happen, it will probably not be the way anyone imagined it, with a single massive assault on a single well-defined enemy. It will be a revolution by a million cuts, starting with an economy that devolves to the people in lots of little ways; the slow abandonment, via shifting copynorms, of copyrighted works; the creation of an entire software industry around a product that no one pays for; news researched by people rather than companies; political activism in the form of lots of little donations from lots of little people; etc., etc. We’ve all been trained to look for revolutions that happen at once and feature lots of guns. I’m starting to suspect that revolution is an altogether different beast. (Yochai Benkler is the theorist of note on this subject.)
All of which is a lead-in to what I was originally going to note: Craigslist doesn’t want to make money, and financiers can’t seem to get their heads around it. It’s just another part of the revolution.
(Article included below the fold.)
In Pulp Fiction, Badassist-in-Chief Samuel L. Jackson famously intones:
The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the iniquities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men. Blessed is he, who in the name of charity and good will, shepherds the weak through the valley of darkness, for he is truly his brother’s keeper and the finder of lost children. And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who would attempt to poison and destroy my brothers. And you will know my name is the Lord when I lay my vengeance upon thee.
He attributes this to Ezekiel 25:17, but little tidbits I’ve seen on the net over the years have suggested that it’s mostly a dramatic remix of many different passages in the Bible.
So for the sake of . . . something or other, here’s what my New Revised Standard Version says about Ezekiel 25:17 and the lines immediately preceding (with verses attached):
15: Thus says the Lord GOD: Because with unending hostilities the Philistines acted in vengeance, and with malice of heart took revenge in destruction;
16: therefore thus says the Lord GOD, I will stretch out my hand against the Philistines, cut off the Cherethites, and destroy the rest of the seacoast.
17: I will execute great vengeance on them with wrathful punishments. Then they shall know that I am the lord, when I lay my vengeance on them.
My King James (aka “Authorized Version”) quotes it thusly:
15: Thus saith the Lord GOD: Because the Philistines have dealt by revenge, and have taken vengeance with a despiteful heart, to destroy it for the old hatred;
16: Therefore thus saith the Lord GOD: Behold, I will stretch out mine hand upon the Philistines, and I will cut off the Cherethims, and destroy the remnant of the sea coast.
17: And I will execute great vengeance upon them with furious rebukes; and they shall know that I am the lord, when I shall lay my vengeance upon them.
I don’t exactly blame Tarantino for taking liberties with Ezekiel. Cherethites aren’t the best dramatic tools to use when you’ve got a gun pointed in a dude’s face. Believe me, I know.
Adam Rosi-Kessel does this thing, where he suggests to me that I read or listen to or program something, and I do so six months later. Somehow he got me to read the New Yorker with only a small bit of prompting, and now I’m addicted.
Part of it is that the writing is just So. Good. It’s not a small feat; their articles can be quite long, but something keeps you going through them. Part of the trick just occurred to me whilst reading Elizabeth Kolbert’s review of children’s books. It’s spiked with occasional sentences like this one:
Buying a picture book is a bit like buying Parisian lingerie, or pet food: you can’t (or at least shouldn’t) use the product all on your own.
or this one:
The question of propriety — whether children’s books should be as disgusting and violent as children — is a genuinely vexing one.
that keep you moving along, sure that you’re in the presence of someone who smirks a lot. A leitmotiv of the article is that children’s books are there to put kids to sleep, rather than any deeper motive to enrich them creatively or get them to enjoy reading. The author describes something her own son wrote at school, which seems to have internalized the formula of children’s-book writing without realizing it:
“Gosh Juans dead all ready its only been an hour,” a character named Kan declares. Another crew member is soon lost to a huge fish. “Uh oh thats not good.” Finally, when there’s not enough food for dinner, one of the remaining friends gets eaten. “Now lets go to bed,” says someone, maybe the laconic Kan, or maybe one of the other fine young cannibals.
The effect of so much funny in a single article is to make the reader laugh uncontrollably by the end. You feel kind of ridiculous, because you’re not even sure what’s so funny. And then you hit this concluding note:
The arrangement in “Goodnight Moon” is completely uneven. Time moves forward, and the little bunny doesn’t stand a chance. Parent and child are, in this way, brought together, on tragic terms. You don’t want to go to sleep. I don’t want to die. But we both have to.
I lost it. Kolbert simply could not have been serious. It’s one of the masterstrokes of New Yorker humor writing that you just don’t know whether she is, and the sudden gravity of the switch — after a discussion a few paragraphs earlier of poo-based storytelling — is just too much to handle.
And yet in the same issue you have an examination of why Arlen Specter let habeas corpus die. That’s what initially drew me to this issue of the magazine. Every issue has something whose cover uncontrollably lures me in. I never regret the purchase.
The loveliest part of the New Yorker’s serious articles is that they are, as Adam puts it, the opposite of a blog. On the spectrum of perspective, blogs are on the shallow end; they rarely see more than a few days at once. Then come newspapers, which maybe stand back enough to see the week at a glance. The New Yorker’s policy articles deftly summarize a year or more of a story (say, Iraq) without ever skimping on the issues at its heart; its coverage is brilliant and succinct.
Finally, you have stories that stand outside of the news, and give you an angle that you never would have thought interesting. The absolute pinnacle of this must be John McPhee’s article that eventually became his book Oranges, which is exactly what it sounds like: a book containing everything you could ever want to know about oranges — a monograph which is possibly the most interesting book of less than 200 pages that you will ever read.
McPhee writes in the preface to Oranges of his experience pitching it to William Shawn (father, I just learned in that article, of the actor Wallace “Inconceivable!” Shawn):
I, meanwhile, had resigned from Time magazine to become a freelance, writing wholly for The New Yorker, and I was in search of topics, making lists. I thought of the machine in Penn Station, and the four oranges in the ad. While mentioning a number of story possibilities to Mr. Shawn, I uttered the single word “oranges?”
He answered right back. He always answered quickly. It seemed impossible to propose any subject to him that he had not thought about before you had. He kept his writers at the far ends of something like bicycle spokes — all separate, all somehow spinning together and apart, with him at the center — and when he turned down an idea he was usually protecting the interests of some writer whose name would never be mentioned. “No. I’m very sorry. No,” he would say typically, his voice so light it fell like mist. “That subject is reserved in a general way for another writer.” To my question about oranges, though, he said, “Yes. Oh, my, yes.”
That seems just the New Yorker’s style. U.S. News would not publish an article about oranges. In its more trimmed-down current life, probably the New Yorker wouldn’t, either. But it would do something just slightly offbeat, like a study of Barbie’s new competitor, Bratz, which has 40% of the market in which Barbie claims the other 60%; the article turns into a study of the low-level creepiness in the entire industry. (Unfortunately that article is not online.)
I think I’ll need to be subscribing to it ASAP. Hats off to the New Yorker and to Adam for suggesting it.
This is mostly a reminder to myself. Periodically I try to remember the name of the guy who was burned at the stake for translating the Bible into English. Looks like I’m thinking of William Tyndale. The Wikipedia entry is rather sparse on details, but it seems as though the quality and scathing nature of the translation may have had something to do with It. Not sure, though. There’s a biography by David Daniell and a 1937 bio by James Mozley, if I want to dig in more.
P.S.: If John Wycliffe translated the Bible into English a century earlier at least, why was Tyndale murdered rather than Wycliffe? I assume it has to do with the timing of the Counter-Reformation. As I recall, Kuhn’s Copernican Revolution likewise blames the Counter-Reformation for the severity of the response to Galileo.
Ever since the upgrade to Firefox 2.0, there’s a little irritant in the search bar (i.e., the thing in the top right). Under Firefox 1.5 and before, the search bar would start suggesting search terms to you (based on your earlier searches) as soon as you started typing. Under 2.0, you have to stop typing before it will suggest anything. I’ve looked all through about:config, and in the Mozillazine knowledge base, but have found no way to turn this off. Any ideas?
Via Talking Points Memo, look below the fold for a truly depressing article about the incoming Democratic House Intelligence Committee Chairman’s knowledge of Iraq.
. . . Thus spake now-former Senator Conrad Burns. (Via TPM.)
I’m just asking here, but which of the following deserves to be #1 on a list of “Bad Things That Have Happened To The United States Throughout Its History”?
One little usability thing about Google that I’ve always appreciated is that when you visit google.com, the search field has the cursor (i.e., has the focus). They do this with a little piece of JavaScript: give the form some name (they call it ‘f’), and give the field within it some name (they call it ‘q’), then put
<script> function set_focus() { document.f.q.focus(); } </script> in the <head>...</head> block, and put onload="sf()" in the <body> tag. Voilà: now the form field gets the focus.
I wonder why more sites don’t do this.
Two other little notes about Google:
onload=sf() rather than the XMLified onload="sf()". `One thing I really deeply resent is that I know about celebrities without doing anything to gain this knowledge. A while back I complained that I know who Jessica Simpson is, even if I couldn’t tell you what made her famous. I somehow learned that she was/is married to a man named “Nick.” But again, this was all through frustrating cultural osmosis: I don’t watch television, yet every time I stepped into a non-Whole Foods grocery store, I saw Simpson’s face or legs on some publication that is no better than printed television. I resent that.
Simpson seems to have disappeared, at least from an osmotic perspective. Now it’s Lindsay Lohan. She’s an actress or something, and I know she was in A Prairie Home Companion, but she seems to be famous for being a coked-up socialite or something. I don’t really care. Again, all I want is for her to disappear off my radar. I have better things to know.
I think I’ll make this post the home for other People Who Should Stop Crowding My Valuable Brain Space.
Sincerely,
A curmudgeon
There’s an ad for Listerine that I walk past every day on the way to work. The premise is that there is some mysterious reason why Listerine is not just good for your mouth, but good for your whole body; the ad says that science doesn’t yet understand the cause, but that somehow oral health is tied in with bodily health, and that people whose mouths are healthy tend to be healthy overall.
This is where a degree in statistics shouldn’t be useful, but is. It is common sense: if you eat a lot of bad, sugary food, your teeth will be unhealthy and so will your whole body. There’s no mystery to this at all, and the Listerine ad seems like deliberate mystification in order to imbue their product with some life-sustaining force. The saddest part is that they clearly expect their audience not to call them on it, because they expect that their audience doesn’t have the critical-thinking skills to spot what’s actually going on.
One caveat about Peter Brown’s exceptional Augustine of Hippo, and it’s more a caveat about expectations than about the book itself: it’s a history, not a theological work. It may help you understand where Augustine was coming from when he followed the particular routes he did, and it certainly provides a historical context that reading Augustine on his own would probably not give you. But it’s not going to delve very deep into Catholic thought, or probably help very much in understanding how others extended Augustine’s ideas.
Brown says as much in the epilogue:
As a result my biography of Augustine has been described as a ‘biography without the theology’. I accept this as a fair judgment from Henry Chadwick, and I do so all the more willingly as he has remedied the defect of my book by a succinct study of Augustine that manages to present the thought of the Master in one hundred and nineteen pages only, through a gripping and seemingly effortless unravelling of its principal tensions and consequences. Other guides to Augustine’s thought are now available, to remedy the lacunae of my book.
(Internal citations omitted, though it’s at least worth noting that the Chadwick book he cites is Augustine, in the “Past Masters” series. Elsewhere in the epilogue, Brown writes that “English-speaking students of Augustine will be particularly grateful for . . . a fresh rendering of the Confessions by Henry Chadwick, a master of Early Christian thought. Better than any other, Chadwick’s translation has caught the precise flavour of Augustine as a philosophical writer steeped in an austerely Platonic world-view that is notoriously hard to catch in modern words.” The Chadwick translation he’s referring to here is the Oxford World Classics edition of the Confessions.)
The epilogue — divided into a chapter on “New Evidence” and one on “New Directions” — is a delightful piece of work on its own. The erudition in the main body of Brown’s work was overwhelming to begin with; now add thirty years of reflection, and you get the epilogue. It’s kind, generous to Brown’s colleagues, and if possible even more excited by its subject. Thirty years has only deepened Brown’s appreciation for Augustine. In particular, evidence discovered in the 1960’s has softened Brown’s earlier belief that Augustine was an authoritarian, the spiritual father of the Inquisition. A few sermons show clearly that Augustine’s parishoners really did need discipline, and that if Augustine was authoritarian it was with good reason.
Much more importantly, time has made Brown reflect on the way that we judge historical figures, and he’s come to realize that we too often judge them by our own standards. His thoughts on Catholic sexuality are a breath of fresh air:
On the issue of sexuality, we should be very careful not to ‘demonize’ Augustine. To speak of him as the ‘evil genius of Europe’, and to lay at his door alone the ills associated with the handling of sex in Christian circles up to our own time, is to take an easy way out — as if by abandoning Augustine we have freed ourselves, by magic, from a malaise whose tangled roots lie deep in our own history. We have made our own bed over long centuries. Augustine did not make it for us. Denunciations of Augustine usually misrepresent him and, in any case, they get us no further in the serious, slow task of remaking that bed. It is, indeed, an act of egregious cultural narcissism to believe that all our present discontents can be glimped in the distant mirror of one man’s thought.
(Internal footnotes again omitted.)
To extend the probably already overzealous quoting just a bit more, there’s this casual sidebar about the sadness that accompanies a great man’s intellectual revolutions:
A touch of sadness at Augustine’s failure to respond to the quiet vision of the cosmos still shared by many of his contemporaries is an entirely appropriate emotion in an historian of ideas. For sadness does justice to the irreducible particularity of any truly creative intellectual system. The effect of a major breakthrough in the history of ideas is to block all alternative visions of the world. Thoughts that had been thought with dignity and profit for many centuries become unthinkable. The loss of an entire world-view cannot but be accompanied by the ‘leaching out’ of many necessary nutrients. They are lost to future ages. And thus each epoch passes on to the next the intellectual and religious vitamin deficiencies created by its own, most distinctive achievements.
I find that statement really quite profound, and it’s just a part of the bittersweet — mostly sweet — reflections that Brown lovingly adds to his masterwork. It’s a perfect conclusion to a lovely, thought-provoking book.
Today’s New York Times article on the expensive deep-tissue massages that some women have to go through because they carry big bags is almost a parody of the kind of jokes conservatives would make about overpampered liberals. Next up: Park Avenue high-rise residents send their kids to $200-an-hour psychotherapy to overcome the crushing desolation of “texting thumb.”
(Article included below the fold.)
One of the points that comes up repeatedly throughout Brown’s bio of Augustine is that people didn’t used to baptize their children at birth. Augustine himself was baptized only after his conversion experience. The idea seems to be that you’ve made a conscious choice to start this new life, and you have entered into the ceremony willingly. All your fellow church patrons are there to watch your baptism, and you’re garbed in a white robe afterward to signal the purity of your new life.
It makes sense to me to do this as an adult — or rather, the more I think about it, the less sense it makes to baptize infants. They are certainly not conscious of their new lives, so it seems odd to say that a baby “is a Christian.” If the convert isn’t entering into the new compact with God willingly, why should God look differently upon him or her than upon his or her unbaptized brethren? If people can be involuntarily baptized, why not baptize adults against their will? I imagine that at various times, adults have been forced into baptism for just this reason. But does God smile on forced baptism? If He doesn’t, then why would He smile on baptized infants?
Again, this question appears to have been resolved — at least in North Africa — by the time of Augustine in the mid-400’s, so I doubt I’m raising an interesting (in the sense of “unsolved”) question here.
I really wanna go read him now. (Included below the fold.) Though I’m under no illusion that I’ll get the jokes.
I have just discovered that I feel deep, painful envy for Peter Brown. According to the Wikipedia, “Brown . . . reads at least fifteen languages”, and his authoritative biography of St. Augustine came out when Brown was only 32.
You never would guess that Brown was that young when he wrote this biography. It has such a command of its subject, and such a deep understanding for the culture surrounding Augustine, that I was convinced it must have come at the end of a life’s work studying the man. As for Brown’s command of languages, a glance at many individual footnotes will make the case clearly: within one note, Brown will cite German, French, and Latin sources. The erudition hurts me. It has reawakened my desire to take a class in Latin or Ancient Greek at a university.
Augustine himself is a fascinating subject — prolific, intense, obsessive, by turns ruthless and kind, and frightening as hell. Only as I approach the end of Brown’s biography do I understand the uses of what Jason Smith and James Grimmelmann have said: that at bottom, faith is a coming to terms with the absurd. By the end of his life, Augustine was entirely comfortable with the notion that babies — not yet born, laying peacefully within their mothers’ wombs — must pay for the sin of Adam. It must be, reasoned Augustine, that Adam’s sin was so grave, so incomprehensible, that God would visit punishment for it on all of mankind until the Day of Judgment. God told us in the book of Exodus that he would visit the sins of the father on the son, and on the son’s son; we might expect that He would continue to do so forever.
Absurd this may sound, but it comes from a respectable place: Augustine wants to explain why humanity suffers. He also believes that God is infinitely wise and infinitely just. Perhaps the only way to square these ideas is to believe that there is a logic to God’s actions that is far beyond our comprehension. Perhaps Augustine is right: to come to terms with the reality of the world while understanding God, we must confront the absurd — only because God Himself is so far beyond our comprehension that what’s reasonable to Him looks insane to us.
Fundamentally, this is one of the principles I’ll need to understand before I can really appreciate where my Christian fellow-men are coming from. Jason has been telling me for years that the Christianity that he subscribes to is apophatic — a basic premise of which is that God is not knowable, and must be defined by negation rather than by construction. Anything which we can comprehend or put into words is not God. I’ll need to read a lot more about it, but I wonder whether this sort of belief system invites passivity in the face of horror: what does an apophatic Christian do during the Holocaust? In general, what are the practical consequences for life here on earth, if the basis of our knowledge is that God is unknowable?
These sorts of questions, I’m coming to understand, have probably long since been answered. I’m starting to ask what are probably toy questions, of the “Can God create a stone He cannot lift” variety. For instance, if God is omniscient, then he knew from the beginning of time who would be damned and who would be saved — so what does it matter what I do here on earth? I was condemned or not, from birth. I’m sensing from the end of Brown’s biography that Augustine himself knew — if he didn’t outright create — this question. Which is to say that intelligent Christians have been answering questions for 1,500 years. They may well have solved many of these questions, at least within a system that revolves around the Scriptures.
So whenever I discover a theological question that seems interesting, I should realize first off that it’s probably not as interesting as I thought, and that it’s probably been elevated to a much higher, more interesting level by people who know much more than I do. And this probably all happened at least 700 years ago.
If nothing else, then, all my Christian reading is giving me a new respect for the religion’s intellectual foundations. I’ve not read enough to answer anything yet, but respect is quite enough for now.
In the continuing hunt for respectable espresso in Boston, I’ve found a place that is thus far the frontrunner: Simon’s Coffee Shop (included below the fold), near Porter Square. They’re actually running neck and neck with Murky Coffee, which may not be a coincidence: Nick Cho of Murky recommended that I check Simon’s out, and Cho’s list of 50 Things to improve your espresso production is posted near the espresso machine. There aren’t that many places that clearly care about their espresso, but Simon’s appears to be one of them.
(Note that this is respectable espresso near Porter Square, so it won’t actually help Adam find good espresso near downtown Boston.)