Detachment From The Physical

I won't bury the lede: I'm starting the transition away from physical books.

Starting.  And I'm not sure what the path will look like for a while.  I've been a life-long bookworm, with some of my fondest childhood memories being of trekking back and forth from the various local libraries that my family frequented.  One of the main failings that the city of Brea, where I spent my 6th grade through high school years, is it's sad branch of the OC Library system.  We have more square feet of bookstore in Brea than library.  We've built parks, community centers, and housing tracts without putting money into having a better library with better staffing, hours, and accessibility.  Ok, my library rant isn't the point here.  The point is, books are one of the main lenses through which I view the world.  "I read a book about..." is, I assume, one of the more annoying things I say in conversations.

Since I transitioned to buying books, they've become ... sacred objects.  They're not just something I consume, they've become something that I have emotional ties to.  A book invokes memories of the times I've read it, good times and bad.  A book reminds me of the times I've shared it with others.  My sister reading A Spell For Chameleon.  My brother telling me that he finally read it only after I left it on his pillow.



My sibs tearing through Ender's Game after I pushed it on them.



One of the first books my brother shared with me, The Botany of Desire.

I haven't lived with my mother for years, but I still have tons of books in her garage (sorry Moms, I'm working on it...).

But as I look back, books didn't start out as sacred objects.  I loved L. Frank Baum's Oz series as a kid, but I never owned a copy of any but the first book.  All the others were borrowed (quickly) from the the University Heights library when we lived in the suburbs of Cleveland.  My parents might have been the original music pirates when they (allegedly) borrowed LPs and ripped them to ... Reel to Reel.  In retrospect, I guess we were an audiobook family from way back as well.

These objects add clutter to my life.  That's the bottom line.  I love the content, but I don't need the objects to enjoy the content.  So what's the alternative?  I suppose I could buy eBooks versions of what I own.  But it kind of sucks to buy copies of things I already own in another format.

I guess I let go of my compact disks a few years ago.  My entire collection is mp3 now.  Can I go electronic for everything?  Well, maybe not for everything.  And I do like the experience of reading paper versions.  But FedEx Office will cut the binding off a book for $1.50.  And I own a duplex-scanner with document feeder for easy PDF creation.  And tablets are bound to come down in price.

I've already done this with a few books I own.  The ones I would buy copies of to give away.  Now I send a PDF and ask the person to buy a copy if they feel moved to keep the author employed.  I don't know if this will become a huge thing in my life, but we'll see.

But really, it's not about the technology.  It's about separating the emotions that the object evokes from the object.  Maybe I'll have a separate blog to document memories and emotions tied with books.  Or other object.  Or maybe I'll do that here. :-)

What are the things in your life that you have emotional attachements to?  Is there a way for you to preserve core of the bonds without having the object clutter your life?

100 Books Meme

Lazy, lazy blogging. But here it is.

Bold the ones you’ve read,
italicize the ones you want to read,
cross out the ones you won’t touch with a 10 foot pole,
put a cross (+) in front of the ones on your book shelf,
and asterisk (*) the ones you’ve never heard of.

1. +The Da Vinci Code (Dan Brown)
2. Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen)
3. To Kill A Mockingbird (Harper Lee)
4. Gone With The Wind(Margaret Mitchell)
5. The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King (J.R.R. Tolkien)
6. The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring (J.R.R. Tolkien)
7. The Lord of the Rings: Two Towers (J.R.R. Tolkien)
8. Anne of Green Gables (L.M. Montgomery)
9. *Outlander (Diana Gabaldon)
10. *A Fine Balance (Rohinton Mistry)
11. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (J.K. Rowling)
12. Angels and Demons (Dan Brown)
13. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (J.K. Rowling)
14. A Prayer for Owen Meany (John Irving)
15. Memoirs of a Geisha (Arthur Golden)
16. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (J.K. Rowling)
17. *Fall on Your Knees (Ann-Marie MacDonald)
18. The Stand (Stephen King)
19. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (J.K. Rowling)
20. Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte)
21. The Hobbit (J.R.R. Tolkien)
22. The Catcher in the Rye (J.D. Salinger)
23. Little Women (Louisa May Alcott)
24. +The Lovely Bones (Alice Sebold)
25. +Life of Pi (Yann Martel)
26. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams)
27. Wuthering Heights (Emily Bronte)
28. The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe (C. S. Lewis)
29. East of Eden (John Steinbeck)
30. +Tuesdays with Morrie (Mitch Albom)
31. Dune (Frank Herbert)
32. The Notebook (Nicholas Sparks)
33. Atlas Shrugged (Ayn Rand)
34. 1984 (George Orwell)
35. The Mists of Avalon (Marion Zimmer Bradley)
36. The Pillars of the Earth (Ken Follett)
37. The Power of One (Bryce Courtenay)
38. *I Know This Much is True (Wally Lamb)
39. *The Red Tent (Anita Diamant)
40. The Alchemist (Paulo Coelho)
41. The Clan of the Cave Bear (Jean M. Auel)
42. The Kite Runner (Khaled Hosseini)
43. *Confessions of a Shopaholic (Sophie Kinsella)
44. The Five People You Meet In Heaven (Mitch Albom)
45. Bible
46. Anna Karenina (Leo Tolstoy)
47. The Count of Monte Cristo (Alexandre Dumas)
48. Angela's Ashes (Frank McCourt)
49. The Grapes of Wrath (John Steinbeck)
50. *She's Come Undone (Wally Lamb)
51. The Poisonwood Bible (Barbara Kingsolver)
52. A Tale of Two Cities (Charles Dickens)
53. Ender's Game(Orson Scott Card)
54. Great Expectations (Charles Dickens)
55. The Great Gatsby (Scott Fitzgerald)
56. *The Stone Angel (Margaret Laurence)
57. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (J.K. Rowling)
58. The Thorn Birds (Colleen McCullough)
59. The Handmaid's Tale (Margaret Atwood)
60. The Time Traveller's Wife (Audrew Niffenegger)
61. Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
62. The Fountainhead (Ayn Rand)
63. War and Peace (Tolsoy)
64. Interview With The Vampire (Anne Rice)
65. *Fifth Business (Robertson Davies)
66. One Hundred Years Of Solitude (Gabriel Garcia Marquez)
67. The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants (Ann Brashares)
68. Catch-22 (Joseph Heller)
69. Les Miserables (Victor Hugo)
70. The Little Prince (Antoine de Saint-Exupery)
71. Bridget Jones' Diary (Helen Fielding)
72. Love in the Time of Cholera (Gabriel Garcia Marquez)
73. Shogun (James Clavell)
74. The English Patient (Michael Ondaatje)
75. The Secret Garden (Frances Hodgson Burnett)
76. *The Summer Tree (Guy Gavriel Kay)
77. *A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (Betty Smith)
78. The World According To Garp (John Irving)
79. *The Diviners (Margaret Laurence)
80. Charlotte's Web (E.B. White)
81. *Not Wanted On The Voyage (Timothy Findley)
82. Of Mice And Men (John Steinbeck)
83. *Rebecca (Daphne DuMaurier)
84. Wizard's First Rule (Terry Goodkind)
85. Emma (Jane Austen)
86. +Watership Down (Richard Adams)
87. Brave New World (Aldous Huxley)
88. *The Stone Diaries (Carol Shields)
89. *Blindness (Jose Saramago)
90. *Kane and Abel (Jeffrey Archer)
91. *In the Skin of a Lion (Michael Ondaatje)
92. Lord of the Flies (William Golding)
93. The Good Earth (Pearl S. Buck)
94. +The Secret Life of Bees (Sue Monk Kidd)
95. The Bourne Identity (Robert Ludlum)
96. The Outsiders (S.E. Hinton)
97. White Oleander (Janet Fitch)
98. A Woman of Substance (Barbara Taylor Bradford)
99. The Celestine Prophecy (James Redfield)
100. Ulysses (James Joyce)

Wow. Only one I want to read? Perhaps my readers could suggest their favorites for me to check out.

Michael Pollan

Michael Pollan is the author of The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World and The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals.


Here's his talk at TED, March 2007:

Loot

Books:

The Elements of Cooking
The Reach of a Chef
Generation Kill

Watch by Kenneth Cole (I think that's it, but with a stainless steel band)
All-Clad Stainless Steel saucepan
Apples To Apples game
Travel Boxer underwear by Exofficio

Breaking update:
Ninja bag from the Remy family!!!

Four Man Plan

I think Renee was the first one to tell me about this. Browsed through it in a bookstore last night (that's right, on a date in the relationship section. Classic John move). There's something I don't like about the generalizations, conclusions about human behavior, and vague manipulativeness. But it's too easy to accept the author's frame.

And she's freakin' hilarious.

The Blind Side: Michael Lewis

Previously:

The Blind Side: LT
The Blind Side: Bill Walsh

Promotional video for The Blind Side. Author Michael Lewis tells the story of how Michael Oher went from homeless to adopted into a rich, white family. Underlines the fact that this book isn't just about football, but about the emotional and intellectual development which many of us take for granted but is missing from the lives of a large portion of our citizens. And amazingly, 15 isn't too late for a person to start receiving love, attention, and intellectual stimulation.

The Blind Side: Bill Walsh

Previously:

The Blind Side: LT

Lawrence Taylor's importance as a defensive player was important because NFL quarterbacks were throwing more passes. And the reason they were doing that was coach Bill Walsh.

When [Walsh] arrived in Cincinnati in 1968... to run the passing game for Bengals head coach Paul Brown, he faced a new problem: comically inadequate football players.
...
His new quarterback, Virgil Carter, was a case in point. Carter wasn't able to get the ball more than about 20 yards downfield in any form other than a slow desperate wobble. Walsh's job, as he saw it, was to create a system that suited Virgil Carter's talents: guile, nimbleness, and an ability to throw accurately, as long as he didn't have to throw far.
...
Walsh's solution to Carter's weak arm was to teach him to use the field in a new way. He spread the field horizontally; that is, from sideline to sideline. He had the receivers run short routes timed precisely to the steps of the quarterback. If Carter took a three0step drop, they ran one sort of route; if Carter took a five-step drop, they ran another. Carter didn't wait for his receivers to come open but threw to where he expected them to be--usually just a few yards away. The process was further speeded up by reducing the number of decisions the quarterback was forced to make. His presumed precision means that he doesn't need to pay nearly so much attention to the defensive formation. His short, timed passes, if executed properly, can be completed against any defense.
...
Walsh had created the contraption to compensate for the deficiencies of his quarterback, but an offense based on a lot of short, well-timed parses turned out to offer surprising inherent advantages. First, it delivered the ball into a runner's hands on the other side of the line of scrimmage, thus removing the biggest defensive beasts from the space between him and the goal line.
...
Next, by shortening -- and timing -- the passing game, Walsh reduced its two biggest risks: interceptions and incompletion.
...
In 1971, Virgil Carter, who had never completed as many as half of his passes, somehow led the entire league in completion percentage... The next year Carter gave way to Ken Anderson, a little known passer out of even less well known Augustana College, who hadn't completed even half his passes in college. In Walsh's offense, Kenny Anderson did even better than Virgil Carter... In 1974, Anderson led the league in completion percentage and total yards and yards per attempt...
...
Walsh left Cincinnati... to run the offense for the San Diego Chargers. There he inherited a struggling quarterback named Dan Fouts. In Walsh's passing system, Fouts went on to lead the league in completion percentage.
...
In 1979, Walsh, now forty-nine years old, finally was named an NFL head coach, of the team with the league's lowest payroll and the league's worst record, the San Francisco 49ers.
The 49ers also had, by most statistical measures, one of the NFL's worst quarterback, Steve Deberg... the next year, in Bill Walsh's system of well timed passes, the seemingly inept Deberg threw more passes... than any quarterback in the history of the NFL.

Lewis argues that the next two quarterbacks for the 49ers, Hall of Famers Joe Montana and Steve Young, owed a huge amount of their success to the Walsh offensive system.

Eventually people must have noticed. As Walsh performed miracle after miracle with his quarterbacks, a more general trend emerged in NFL strategy: away from the run and toward the pass.
...
This single strand of the history of the game -- the strand that would become the rope tied around Michael Oher's waist and haul hum up in the world -- is clearer than most. Over time, the statistics of NFL quarterbacks, on average, came to resemble the statistics of Bill Walsh's quarterbacks -- because other coaches borrowed heavily from Walsh. The passing game was transformed from a risky business with returns not all that much greater than the running game to a clearly superior way to move the football down the field. As a result, the players most important to the passing game became, relatively, a great deal more valuable. The force that pulled on the rope around Michael Oher's waist was the mind of Bill Walsh.

With the passing game so important in NFL offenses, it becomes easier to understand the impact a genius pass rusher like Lawrence Taylor could have.

The Blind Side: LT

I don't watch football. I can't say I'm a fan. I've told people for ages that I assume there's an intricate dance going on in the offensive/defensive line that I don't understand or have an appreciation for. A set of skills that, since I've never played the game, I can't see. For months now, I've suspected that Michael Lewis, the author of Moneyball, had written a book just for me: The Blind Side.



Lewis's Moneyball gave an inside view on the economics of Major League Baseball by telling the story of Billy Bean's Oakland A's. The Blind Side explains the rise in importance of the Left Tackle through the story of Michael Oher.

And it begins over a year before Oher was born, but in the middle of the story.

From the snap of the ball to the snap of the first bone is closer to four seconds than to five. One Mississippi: The quarterback of the Washington Redskins, Joe Theismann, turns and hands the ball to running back John Riggins. He watches Riggins run two steps forward, turn, and flip the ball back to him...
... Two Mississippi: Thesmann searches for a receiver but instead sees Harry Carson coming straight at him....
... Three Mississippi: Carson now sees that Theismann has the ball. Theismann notices Carson coming straight at him, and so he has time to avoid him. He steps up and to the side and Carson flies right on by and out of th eplay. The play is now 3.5 seconds old.
[...]
You don't think of fear as a factor in professional football. You assume that the sort of people who make it to the NFL are immune to the emotion. [...] The head coach of the Giants, Bill Parcells, didn't think it preposterous, however. Parcells... believed that fear played a big role in the game. So did his players. They'd witnessed up close the response of opposing players to their own Lawrence Taylor.
[...]
The feelings of those assigned to prevent Taylor from hurting quarterbacks were trivial compared to those of the quarterbacks he wanted to hurt. In Taylor's first season in the NFL, no official records were kept of quarterback sacks. In 1982, after Taylor had transformed the quarterback sack into the turning point of a football game, a new official NFL statistic was born. The record books defined the sack as tackling the quarterback behind the line of scrimmage as he attempts to pass. Taylor offered his own definition: "A sack is when you run up behind somebody who's not watching, he doesn't see you, and you really put your helmet into him. The ball goes fluttering everywhere and the coach comes out and asks the quarterback, 'Are you all right?' That's a sack."
[...]
"I don't like to just wrap the quarterback, I really try to make him see seven fingers when they hold up three. I'll drive my helmet into him, or, if I can, I'll bring my arm up over my head and try to axe the sonuvabitch in two. So long as the guy is holding the ball, I intend to hurt him.... If I hit the guy right, I'll hit a nerve and he'll feel electrocuted, he'll forget for a few seconds that he's on the football field."
The game of football evolved and here was one cause of it's evolution, a new kind of athlete doing a new kind of thing. All by himself, Lawrence Taylor altered the environment and forced opposing coaches ans players to adapt.
[...]
Parcells became a connoisseur of the central nervous system of opposing quarterbacks. The symptoms induced by his sack-happy linebacker included, but were not restricted to: "intimidation, lack of confidence, quick throws, nervous feet, concentration lapses, wanting to know where Lawrence is all the time." The players on the Giants' defense picked up the same signals. As defensive back Beasley Reece told the New York Times, "I've seen quarterbacks look at Lawrence and forget the snap count." One opposing quarterback, finding himself under the center before the snap and unable to locate Taylor, called a time-out rather than run the play--only to find Taylor standing on the sidelines.
[...]
By his fourth pro season Taylor was not just feeding those fears, but feeding off them. "They come to the line of scrimmage and the first thing they do is start looking for me," he said. "I know and they know. When they'd find me they'd start screaming: 56 left! 56 left! [Taylor wore No. 56.] So there's this thing I did. After teh play was over, I'd come up behind them and whisper: don't worry where I am. I'll tell you when I get there."
[...]
Four Mississippi: Taylor is coming. From the snap of the ball Theismann has lost sight of him. He doesn't see Taylor carving a wide circle behind his back; he doesn't see Taylor outrun the blocker upfield and then turn back down; and he doesn't see the blocker diving, frantically, at Taylor's ankles. He doesn't see Taylor leap, both arms over his head, and fill the sky behind him. Theismann prides himself on his ability to stand in the pocket and disregard his fear. He thinks this quality is a prerequisite in a successful NFL quarterback. "When a quarterback looks at the rush," he says, "his career is over." Theismann has played in 163 straight games, a record for the Washington Redskins. He's led his team to two Super bowls, and won one. He's thirty-six years old. He's certain he still has a few good years left in him. He's wrong. He has less than half a second.

Next time, the beginning of the story: Bill Walsh and the quarterback

48 Laws of Browsing the Bookstore

Monday evening was spent browsing Barnes & Noble. Excited employee takes my interest in Robert Greene's 48 Laws of Power as an opening to recommend specific translations of The Prince (Machiavelli), Life's A Campaign (Chris Matthews), and The Game. He seems a bit overeager, and rushes to get another copy of Laws (for me to carry around, I guess). Maybe there's a contest to sell the most copies of this book? Is it one of the laws to get me to buy it?

When he walks away, an attractive woman who witnessed the exchange whispers to me:

That guy always talks to me about books whenever I come in.

Really? After reading Self-Made Man, I want to translate for her that this is probably that guys way of hitting on her. But that's presumptuous of me. I wouldn't personally use the book discussion method, but ... Wait, I'd totally do that. In fact, let's take a tour of a bookstore! And we do.

Wandering upstairs, I see some old favorites from my youth. A Spell for Chameleon, Cyteen, Ender's Game. She swoons at my description of Cyteen: "There aren't any cybernetic teenagers in it." Swoon as in she looks indifferent. I still think the "clone the genius and re-create his/her life stresses to re-create the genius" is a cool plot. And she's read Ender's Game. Wow.

Biographies: Team of Rivals
Only later do I remember that I haven't actually finished it.

Amusing to read more of The Rules. I'd carefully wandered into the relationship section hoping to randomly see it an re-use my "rule 23 is don't date a married man! there were 22 more important rules!" joke, but she totally steals my thunder with the exact same joke! Maybe it's just not that original. Who cares, it was still hilarious!

Where's the science section? I want to push all my cool science reading:
The Botany of Desire, Collapse, Freakonomics, Guns, Germs, and Steel, The Omnivore's Dilemma, Oranges, The Tipping Point

Hot drinks and pumpkin cheesecake in the cafe. They've changed the recipe to be more about pumpkin spice instead of pumpkin. Still good, but not as good as it used to be.

Continuing the chat, and she's willing to talk. Time flies, and the announcement sounds that they're closing up. Wow. I wonder later if I should have been more flirtatious or maybe even gone for the physical contact. It hardly ever occurs to me in the moment. Maybe I should read Greene's other book, Art of Seduction, again. I'm never comfortable being that calculated.

Do we say something about "doing the bookstore" again? Maybe not, but we should have. I should have formally set something up with her. Darn.

Later, at home, I look though the 48 Laws, I'm struck by Law 45:

Preach the need for change, but never reform too much
Everyone understands the need for change in the abstract, but on the day to day level people are creatures of habit. Too much innovation is traumatic, and will tend to lead to revolt. If you are new to a position of power, or an outsider trying to build a power base, make a show of respecting the old way of doing things. If change is necessary, make it feel like a gentle improvement on the past.

Nice. Sounds like every organization that everyone's ever belonged to. Quakers are definitely this way. :-)

The Reveal

I knew then that the time was right to tell Vergil the truth about me.
"Vergil," I said trepidatiously "I've got a confession to make."
"Okay," he said with complete composure. "What is it?"
"There's something about me that I haven't told you."
"Oh?"
"Yeah. Something important." [...] "Do you have any idea what it is?" I asked.
He thought for a minute, then ventured something he'd obviously been thinking for a while.
"You're not Catholic," he said.
[..]
"Guess again," I said.
"Hmm. Let's see. You're an escapee from a mental institution."
"Nope. Not technically, though being a New Yorker surely counts."
The monks had all been tickled by the fact that I made my home in a neighborhood called Hell's Kitchen. To them, the freak show of New York City was about as far from their home as you could get. To me it was and it wasn't.
At this point, I stopped Vergil on the path, stood facing him and said, "Look at me. It's right in front of you. Can't you see it?"
"What?" He looked into my face. "I see a guy with graying hair."
"No, that's not it," I said. "Look closer." I took off my glasses.
"I don't know," he siad, perusing me again. "What is it?"
He was blank. Puzzled.
We both turned and kept walking. I tried one last thing.
"I'm not what I appear to be."
This sank in as we rounded the corner of the footpath by the carpentry shop and began the last stretch back to the cloister. Suddenly he turned to me, the moment of revelation having come at last with full force.
"You're a woman."
"Yes," I said with relief.

Norah Vincent's Self-Made Man: One Woman's Year Disguised as a Man has been on my reading list for a while, and an expiring 30% coupon at Borders motivated me to pick it up. It's not a complex read by any means, but I still got great satisfaction from it. In fact, I'll have to re-read it a couple times.

A trap, I think, in each section, is that it tends to build towards the moment of revelation, which isn't always satisfying. Much better are the observations that Vincent makes about male character and interaction that I was unconscious of. Also interesting are the insights she makes about the contrast between male and female friendship dynamics, physical contact, showing of emotion, communication, and attitudes towards work.

As I said, it's worth reading more than once, and is going to be insightful for both men and women, though the chapter on sex is biased towards the specific experiences she has (I thought some of her conclusions were a little skewed).

Pompeii

My mother got me Robert Harris's Pompeii: A Novel for my recent birthday, and book junkie that I am, I read it in a single sitting. It's hard to nail down the genre; It's certainly a historical novel, taking place in the two days running up to the [spoiler alert!] eruption of Vesuvius, but it has elements of crime fiction, perhaps suspense fiction, geology fiction, and of course, civil engineering fiction. Wait are those last two even genres? There is quite a bit of commentary on aspects of life in the Roman empire, especially how those not in Rome viewed life in the Roman empire.

My main critique is that the compressed time frame makes it tough to ramp up suspense, flesh out the underlying crimes, or build truly deep characters with complex motivations. I could have done with some maps at the beginnings of chapters where there was travel. Diagrams of the aqueduct features in which key aspects of the action occurred would have been great.

I enjoyed reading it, but can't put it on my list of books I'd ever re-read. But I might borrow some other books by Robert Harris from the library.

I'm reminded of not reading the other volcanic eruption book I have, Simon Winchester's Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded.

I also find it troubling that books like this make me want to talk to a geologist friend about volcanoes. But that's a whole other issue.



Was there some subtle commentary on how modern society has become just thoughtlessly tied to our water projects? Hmmmm.... Fear of water scarcity in the Los Angeles Basin is one of my not-so-secret "hide under the bed" fears, so this might just be imagined. But seriously, what would we do if something (earthquake? terrorists? incompetence?) interfered with our water sources? We just don't have the water infrastructure for our inhabitants. I'm scared.



Another water-fear related book: When the Rivers Run Dry: Water--The Defining Crisis of the Twenty-first Century

Colbert Quotes

Late last night, I watched an episode of the Colbert Report from last week (5/23/2007). During the interview with Bob Deans, author of The River Where America Began: A Journey Along the James, Mr. Deans discussed the history of Jamestown, Virginia, founded 13 years before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock. Apparently the democratic process got used in order to facilitate quick decision making (rather than attempting to run the colony from London). But...

Bob Deans: But it wasn't democracy as we would recognize it. I mean, after all, only some people's votes got counted, there was martial law, there was torture, and the Royal Govornor ruled with fear...
Stephen Colbert: We wouldn't recognize that?
Bob Deans: Not in America.
Stephen Colbert: No, no!
Bob Deans: And the Royal Govornor ruled with fear, intimidation, and the political assassination of his critics. That's not democracy in America.
Stephen Colbert: No, no not any more. Not any more. Would that it were.

Interesting also that within 3 weeks of the first democratically elected assembly meeting in Jamestown, the first African slaves arrived (what Dean pointed to as an essential American contradiction in institutions: democracy and slavery). So yes, slaves arrived in America before Pilgrims arrived in America. I'll have to check this book out.

The Poor Have More Free Time?

I suppose my hackles are raised over definitions. Steven Landsburg is writing about an economic study that states that income gains of the educated rich have outpaced those of the poor, but that the poor have more free time than the rich and have gained more free time.

It's because a friend lent me Barbra Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America

Ehrenreich goes "undercover" working in the jobs she can get not with her real resume, but with the resume of a single woman with no college degree and no experience. Her descriptions of working for minimum wage (or slightly more) and needing more than one full-time job to support herself don't sound anything like someone who has tons of extra leisure time. Ehrenrich's description of the working poor sound more like reality than Landsburg's. Perhaps Landsburg is describing someone on the upper ends of the lower-class, but not the working poor. An Ehrenreich "vicious circle" theme is the struggle to find affordable housing within commuting distances of the multiple jobs needed to afford housing. Free time barely comes up, or comes up in the context of complete exhaustion.

An economic mystery: Why do the poor seem to have more free time than the rich? - By Steven E. Landsburg - Slate Magazine

Misquoting Jesus - Chapter 3

Part of a continuing series of reactions to the Mind on Fire reading group's reaction to Misquoting Jesus by Bart Ehrman. You can also read my entries on the Introduction, Chapter 1, and Chapter 2.

It isn't my goal to summarize the chapter, grade-school book report style, but to highlight the information which I found striking and worthwhile to remember, along with some of my reactions.

Texts of the New Testament

I believe the goals of this chapter were to

• show the practical consequences of previously discussed issues with early copyists of the New Testament
• highlight and give back-story to the historically and scholarly significant Bible editions
• give an overview on the types of changes to the Bible made by copyists

An interesting opening point was the idea of regional differences in copies of the Bible. Before the rise of the professional scribe, books were copied by individuals with less than perfect literacy skills (again, as highlighted in the previous chapter). Since copies of books were more difficult to produce in these pre-scribal times, one can imagine that an individual copying a book on his own would introduce unique mistakes to his copy. Then if that copy was taken to an area which didn't have copies of the book, then copyists in that area would base all the area's copies on the uniquely mistaken copy. Thus the idea of errors or variations in texts unique to an area. I wonder whether it's possible to create an early family tree of book copies based on the variations within the text. Or even identify the region a book came from based on the errors contained within it, like a fingerprint. Perhaps the transposition of two key words shows up in a certain city's copies. I hope that idea gets addressed later on.

After the rise of the professional scribal class, copies of manuscripts became more uniform. Because of their uniformity, they were presumptively superior, but of course the manuscripts were based upon flawed copies of flawed copies of flawed copies of manuscripts. So we need to question the source of these professionally copied manuscripts.

Byzantine manuscripts are the scholarly jargon for manuscripts in Greek made in the area formerly known as the Byzantine Empire.

The Latin Vulgate (4th century) was motivated by the multitude of varying Latin translations of Greek manuscripts. The Pope commissioned an official translation, which was based upon the best available translations as well as Greek sources. Vulgate is Latin for "common."

After the invention of the printing press, the Vulgate was the translation use for the Gutenberg Bible, the first book to be print-published (1450's). After being standardized upon over 1000 years before, it was thought of as the source manuscript, though of course it wasn't even the source language. The Complutensian Polyglot was a project to produce Latin, Greek, and (for the Old Testament) Hebrew translations side by side. Started over 50 years after the first print publishing of the Vulgate, it was the first time a Greek manuscript would be printed.

After the project started, Dutch scholar Erasmus raced to get his own Greek printed edition published, actually beating out the Complutensian Polyglot with his edition, Textus Receptus. Erasmus was less than thorough in getting multiple sources for the Textus Receptus, using a single 12th century source for Acts and Epistles and translating some of the Vulgate back to Greek for missing pages of Revelation. Ehrman makes a nicely snarky point that the Textus Receptus is based on a few Greek manuscripts at best to few or none (Revelation) at it's worst. The quality of the source manuscripts wasn't the best, and included the "woman taken in adultery" story and the last 12 verses of Mark, both mentioned in chapter 2 as problematic. It didn't originally include the Johanine Comma (only source reference for the idea of Trinity), as Erasmus couldn't find a Greek manuscript which included it. In a revised edition, he did include it after some contemporaries manufactured a Greek manuscript including the Johanine Comma! With all these problems, the Textus Receptus is the basis for 500 years of Greek manuscripts of the Bible, including the source for the King James translation. That's pretty mind-blowing to me, though I'm probably just a guilty of uncritical reading as the next guy. For example, I haven't read any of the source material referenced by Ehrman. I've just accepted his expertise... It's pretty disturbing that hundreds of years of Biblical tradition can be inspired by a rush-job, though.

Mill's Apparatus (1707) was a 30 year effort by John Mill which was based on a 1550 Greek edition by Stephanus (itself based on the Textus Receptus). It included "variant readings" from 100 Greek sources, and noted thirty-thousand places of variation, leaving out most word-order variations.

Today, there are 5,700 known Greek manuscripts from the 2nd to 16th centuries, ten-thousand Vulgate manuscripts, and all-in between 200-thousand and 400-thousand variants.

The chapter closes with a section on the types of changes which occurred during copying from accidental (misreading, misunderstanding abbreviations, and line skipping) to intentional (correcting factual errors, interpretive errors, circumventing misunderstanding, adding doctrinal emphasis, synchronizing texts with oral traditions).

For me, the chapter really shatters the idea of the literal, inerrant word of God being preserved in the Bible. Of course, that doesn't mean much, as that was my bias. However, I found it fascinating at the quantity and quality of the scholarly work which has gone into clarifying the details of the variants, yet how little is spoken of it in contemporary spiritual life.

Misquoting Jesus - Chapter 2

Part of a continuing series of reactions to the Mind on Fire reading group's reaction to Misquoting Jesus by Bart Ehrman. You can also read my entries on the Introduction and Chapter 1.

The Copyists of the Early Christian Writings


The general theme of the chapter is that Christian writings were painstakingly hand-copied and re-copied by non-professionals early in Christian history, then by more professional groups later on. And in all cases, errors occurred, sometimes mistaken ones and sometimes deliberate ones. In fact, the errors were so common that authors themselves referenced the potential, and scholars wrote about the frustration of having their studies thwarted by a text which was clearly rife with errors. Interesting to me to read this discussion and really sit to think about it. I mean, in modern West, we're fairly literate, but we probably haven't had to undertake the task of hand-copying a book. The task is quite daunting to think about. I just hand-copied my math homework earlier this week and kept making mistakes doing that. And it took a lot of time. And was generally not fun. I just can't imagine doing it.

Interesting point made about scriptuo continua, copyingatextwithoutspacingorpunctuationwhatapainintheassthatmustbetoreadandcopydefinitepainintheass. This was probably a result of the previous chapter's discussion of what "literate" really meant at the time. Some of the literate class could recognize letters, but not syllables. Could write symbols, but not spell.

Another interesting point is the type of error made by a person who was making a copy for personal use or for their community's use. These people might not have had the literacy issues previously mentioned, but might have had agendas in the changes they made, much less of an issue when the copying was being done by an impartial professional. Indeed, professional scribes might make a different kind of change to the text, namely fixing an error which they believed had crept into the source copy!

Ehrman muddies the water even more by pointing out that quite often the source material might have been written by a secretary taking dictation. And like modern day dictation, the secretary might have been given a broad outline of material to cover as opposed to a word for word dictation. In fact, in my mind, this is much more likely than the word for word dictation, because of the time-consuming nature of doing so. I wonder if it might even have been easier to rely on an assistant to do that due to the high level of training one would need to have to assist someone at that specific task. The secretary might have been one of the highest educated people around. Ehrman then points out that the secretary might have made multiple copies of the writing to send to multiple cities in a region, possibly making mistakes in doing so.
The meaning of the word autograph (original copy) in this case is very muddied: Which copy was the original? Did it necessarily even reflect the original intent of the person giving dictation?! I can imagine a situation where the person giving dictation says one thing, and the transcriber writes something different, unnoticed by the originator of the thought (or noticed but perhaps the 'author' like the change better than his own words). Actually I think that's a major plot point in Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses.

The last few sections describe the problems which scholars come across when trying to reconstruct original texts, namely sections which clearly don't seem to match the text they're included with. Sometimes that means that the vocabulary doesn't match. Sometimes they have older copies of text without the included passages. I'll mention the most famous passage, The Woman Taken in Adultery in John 7:53-8:12 ("Let the one who is without sin among you be the first to cast a stone at her") [by the way, I originally typed "one who is without son among you"]. Ehrman writes:

Despite the brilliance of the story, its captivating quality, and its inherent intrigue, there is on other enormous problem that it poses. As it turns out, it was not originally in the Gospel of John. In fact, it was not originally part of any of the Gospels. It was added by later scribes.
[..]
Here I can simply point out a few basic facts that have proved convincing to nearly all scholars of every persuasion: the story is not found in our oldest and best manuscripts of the Gospel of John; its writing style is very different from what we find in the rest of John (including the stories immediately before and after); and it includes a large number of words and phrases that are otherwise alien to the Gospel. the conclusion is unavoidable: this passage was not originally part of the Gospel.

Again, I have to be very careful in my state of mind when reading this information, for I've always assumed that this type of mistake exists in the Bible, but to have a scholar confirm it feels a little like someone telling me something I very much want to hear. I'm very interested in the future sections which promise more description of the evidence. Also worth pointing out that this information is traceable back to the sources which Ehrman is making his judgements on.

It was a nice, tight chapter which got down to business, made it's points, and finished. Would read again.

Misquoting Jesus - Chapter 1

This post is part of John Remy's Mind on Fire bookgroup, which is reading Bart Ehrman's Misquoting Jesus. Though I've volunteered to cover chapter 7 for the group, I'm blogging my reactions to every chapter.

I was originally going to hold back my chapter reactions until after the "assigned" book group member's reaction was posted, but we seem to not be doing that in order. Oh well.

My guilty confession is that I bogged down on chapter one for well over a year after I read the introduction. Only the reading group has really motivated me to continue, and I'm glad I did. As someone who has never formally studied the Bible, I've often felt lost about the structure and origin of the various pieces of the New Testament. This chapter helped me understand the back-story which helped me understand why they might be included in Canon at all. Looking back at the chapter, I can see why Ehrman thought to structure it the way he did, but I might have benefited from a better "executive summary" at the top of the chapter.

It starts with a discussion on the Judaic roots of Christianity, and the "bookish" character of Judaism as a unique characteristic in the history of the world to that point. It's important to understanding the roots and writing traditions of early literate Christians and why they would turn to the written word as a tool. Early Christian Letters, the first discussion of Christian writing, was eye-opening for me in seeing that the various founders of Churches (namely Paul) struggled with keeping separated populations of people synchronized in their belief systems. Letters were an attempt to solve that problem. Interestingly, we still do that today. The next few subsections, Early Gospels, Early Acts, Apocalypses, Orders, Apologies, Martyrologies, etc. helped me to a deeper understanding behind the motivation behind writings which eventually became Canon. Another constant theme is the number of lost texts which fall into one of these categories. Martyrologies struck a cord with me after having recently read about the "martyr complex" of early American Quakers in Daniel Boorstin's The Americans: The Colonial Experience.

The next section is on the formation of Canon. It really only whetted my appetite for information on this process, and pointed to another Ehrman book (among others) for the full story.

Next is a discussion of literacy rates in the early Christian populations (low) and what literacy even meant to the population of the time. This dovetails with a discussion of the tradition of public readings of scripture (so the illiterate know what's going on).

Ehrman closes with a series of questions all this raises. What was the infrastructure behind production of books in these pre- printing-press times? What was the infrastructure behind distributing them? Who was doing the copying and how do we know it was accurate?

I found the chapter to be slow going at first, but it got better and better. Part of my experience is reading in a way that I'll be able to discuss the chapters in these posts, which is a different kind of reading for me.

Onward! Ruth Reichel and Barbara Ehrenreich are whispering in my ear, and I don't want to fracture my attention (even more than it is).

Misquoting Jesus - Introduction

Though I've volunteered to blog about chapter 7 of Bart Ehrman's Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why (Plus), I thought I'd try to put down my reactions for each chapter. And I've been delaying my reading of Journeygal and pilgrimgirl's blog entries on the book in order to keep my reactions "pure." And I -really- want to read their entries, so ...

The introduction is a first-person narrative of Ehrman's religious journey and evolving relationship with the Bible. He foreshadows the twist which his path takes by explaining his desire to learn the Bible and memorize passages from it, but the true inflection point of his story comes when he's at Moody Bible Institute, learning the basics of textual criticism (attempting to reconstruct the original texts):

One of the most pressing of all tasks, therefore, was to ascertain what the originals of the Bible said, given the circumstances that (1) they were inspired and (2) we don't have them. - Misquoting Jesus p. 5

What seems to differentiate Ehrman from his peers at Moody is his intellectual curiosity about the original, inspired words of God.

Later at his next stop, Wheaton College, Ehrman continues this intellectual path, realizing that reading the earliest texts surviving today means learning the languages they are in. But that bring other complications into his faith:

... the experience of learning Greek became a bit troubling for me and my view of scripture. I came to see early on that the full meaning and nuance of the Greek text of the New Testament could be grasped only when it is read and studied in the original language...[T]his started maing me question my understanding of scripture as the verbally inspired word of God. If the full meaning of the words fo scripture can be grasped only by studying them in Greek...doesn't this mean that most Christians, who don't read ancient languages, will never have complete access ot what God wants them to know? And doesn't this make the doctrine of inspiration a doctrine only for the scholarly elite... What good deos it do to say that the words are inspired by God if most people have absolutely no access to these words, but only to more or less clumsy renderings of these words into a language, such as English, that has nothing to do with the original words? - Misquoting Jesus p. 6-7

Though I didn't know the technical details of translation, that's always been a source of friction to me. Anyone who knows two languages is aware of the situations where one language will have a word for a concept that takes a while to explain in the other language through context and example. But instead of doing that a lot of time, we'll give a rough approximation which misses subtleties, nuance, and context. Heck, it even happens in the same language across cultures. Try getting someone from the South to explain the word "bubba" and oftentimes they'll just give the one-word synonym "redneck." But I've heard explanations which took almost 5 minutes to give! I always wondered how, for example, the Psalms could possibly be translated yet rhyme. And all of this presupposes having inspired text as the basis, which we know we don't have. But Ehrman keeps searching for the truth as he understands it, no matter where that search might take him.

There's a bit of dissonance when he describes a major change in his thought a bit later on when he lists a series of inconsistencies or just plain mistakes in the text of the New Testament. Despite the previous sections on not having autographs (original writings) he still seemed to cling to the idea that the words were inerrant until studying at Princeton Theological Seminary.

So back to the issue of not having the autographs, he mentions a startling statistic about the differences in various texts we do have:

[T]here are more differences among our manuscripts than there are words in the New Testament. - Misquoting Jesus p. 10

Shocking, even for someone like me who hasn't every really held the Bible as a text of mystical importance.

Ehrman concludes on page 11 that a divinity which would have inspired the autographs could have preserved them and provided versions in later languages as well. I have a problem with this kind of analysis since if someone is going to believe in magic, why not also believe in inspired translation or inspired textual criticism?

This type of narrative is something I have to be careful of since it plays into my prejudices: passionate and intellectually rigorous examination of holy books leads us away from a literalist interpretation of them.

I'm very much looking forward to reading the posts others have done and the comments others have made.