As the Sufis graced us, and Lincoln quoted:

هذا أيضا سوف يمر أو يعدي

And, with any luck, when it passes, it will pass into publication.  Properly lived, then properly rendered, it may be exquisite — and, it is to be hoped, meaningful to Niall in his adulthood.

But that is not for now.  For tonight, I console myself with Tibullus’ elegy: “Credula vitam spes fovet et melius cras fore semper dicit“.  The hope may be unwarranted, but it is good enough for a pillow.  Good night.  See you on the flip-side, friends.

YOU WILL TAKE IT WITH YOU

You can’t take away

From yourself

What you have truly given

Yourself

Even if you think

You lost it

It’s still there

Somewhere

And if you find it

You will take it with you

And if you don’t find it

You will take it with you

Wherever you go

Whatever you do

While you live

And when you die

You will take it with you

“Synchronicity” in the coincidental, non-paranormal sense.

1) everything that’s already in the world when you’re born is just normal;

2) anything that gets invented between then and before you turn thirty is incredibly exciting and creative and with any luck you can make a career out of it;

3) anything that gets invented after you’re thirty is against the natural order of things and the beginning of the end of civilisation as we know it until it’s been around for about ten years when it gradually turns out to be alright really.

…

We didn’t need a special word for interactivity in the same way that we don’t (yet) need a special word for people with only one head. … Interactivity.  Many-to-many communications.  Pervasive networking.  These are cumbersome new terms for elements in our lives so fundamental that, before we lost them, we didn’t even know to have names for them.

Worth a read.  Really.  Invest some time and read it, and remember one of the great minds and wits of the 20^th century.  And read it while holding your towel.  That brown stain?  It’s barbecue sauce.

A hellish blight destroys the land.  A dude from Maine recovering from drug addiction, his much younger psychic paramour, a retarded guy, and a preternaturally wise (but overly-sexualized) 11-year-old boy — all of whom smoke like chimneys — go on a road trip to combat it.

Along the way they discover a roving band of cannibals, identifiable because they have filed teeth.  The cannibals attack them with vicious homophobic slurs that are OK because obviously Stephen King does not agree with them.  The wise boy knows it’s no good, but the retarded guy battles valiantly, killing all but the biggest cannibal, dying in the process.

The ghost of some woman the dude from Maine read a lot about appears.  So does the ghost of his ex-wife.  They begin to battle.  In the process they wound the big cannibal.

The cannibal’s guts rupture, and out pour a bucketful of lobsters.  The lobsters fall upon the dude from Maine, severing some body parts.  His paramour screams.  Then the lobsters all burst open and broods of spiders pour out.

But the wise 11-year-old has been pondering, and his cherished book, which contains Edgar Allen Poe in-jokes, holds the secret to defeat the evil ghost.  The trick is for the good ghost and the boy to drown her.  She drowns graphically.

The world, in the meantime, has largely recovered, most of the evildoers having died.  The dude from Maine and his younger love get married and go to start a family.  The boy, who has formed a weird father relationship with the Maine dude, stays anyway to think about his fate, evoking one last goodbye from the good ghost, who fades with a whisper.

(So, what did I forget?  The rule is that every trope has to have occurred at least twice in the canon.)

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?

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]

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

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.]

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]

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.

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.

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

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!)

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

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 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.

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

• 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).

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).

ITunes model for books?  Will publishers go for it?

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.