Christmas Passed

Got NO books for Christmas this year, but fair enough - I didn't ask for any!

My Christmas reading matter tends to be on the light side (to give myself a break, and to be capable of being absorbed after a heavy night) and this year I am progressing nicely through The Matchmaker of Perigord by Julia Stuart. It is a very pleasant, undemanding frothy confection in the style of Chocolat, passed onto me by Daughter #1 who likes to de-stress on her train journey home from the Inns of Court.

I still haven't had a chance to look at my new Greek-English New Testament, but I am saving that...I have bought a lovely suade book-jacket for it, which smells just wonderful!

Now that the York Borders store has finally closed, there won't be any spending of my Christmas money there (obviously): Waterstones may get a grudging look-in, but I'll probably get most of my stuff online from now on (except novels - I'll try to source them from charity shops or borrow them from the library).

Christmas Joy!

Oh joy! The post-woman has just delivered two eagerly awaited volumes from the Book Depository which I am just about to unwrap as you read this: No1, in a jiffy bag (no sniggering now, you North Americans!) is Thought and Language, a revised and enlarged edition of Lev Vygotsky's seminal work that I have decided is utterly necessary to my doctoral studies and , along with Wallace Chafe's Discourse, Time and Consciousness will be the touchstones of my thesis. The second (pause to fetch scissors for the altogether more serious cardboard wrapping and shrink-wrap) is a beautiful burgundy Nestle-Aland Greek-English New Testament with full apparatus criticus! I am running my hands over it appreciatively and feel the urge to kiss it.

Not that I am actually short of Greek New Testaments, you understand, as you might expect for someone in my field. The count up to present include my workhorse NA27 (complete with apparatus criticus, blue, underlined and well-thumbed) that I've had since my undergrad days with Keith Elliott, a UBS 3rd edition with app.crit. and dictionary, a UBS 4th edition Reader's New Testament with gloss, both burgundy too, a small, black Englishman's New Testament (1877, interlinear literal, plus KJV translation around the margins, the font almost too small for my poor old eyes to read), a British and Foreign Bible Society 1931 NT, a 1907 diglot Novum Testamentum Graece et Latine and and interlinear with parallel KJV and NIV texts. So I guess you could say that I collect them,but the thrill of opening up a brand new, pristine text is unsurpassable. It's my Christmas present to myself.

The Desert Fathers.....redux

OK, as promised, a couple of passages from the Desert Fathers (and Mothers) [Penguin Classics] demonstrating that they definitely took asceticism, self-denial and punishment far too seriously, warping every natural human instinct, behaviour and desire into monstrous and entirely selfish aberrations:

'A brother was leaving the world, and though he gave his goods to the poor he kept some for his own use. He went to Antony, and when Antony knew what he had done, he said, 'If you want to be a monk, go to the village over there, buy some meat, hang it on your naked body and come back here.' The brother went, and dogs and birds tore at his body. He came back to Antony, who asked him if he had done what he was told. He showed him his torn body. Then Antony said, 'Those who renounce the world but want to keep their money are attacked in that same way by demons and torn in pieces.'

'Once one of the hermits lay gravely ill, and was loosing a lot of blood from his bowels. A brother brought him some dried fruit and stewed it, and offered it to him saying, 'Eat; perhaps it will do you good.' The hermit looked at him for a long time, and said, 'I want you to know that I wish God would leave me my sickness for thirty years more.' In his weakness he absolutely refused to take even a little food; so the brother took away what he had brought, and returned to his cell.'

'Once a brother went to visit his sister who was ill in a nunnery. She was someone of great faith. She herself had never agreed to see a man nor did she want to give her brother occasion for coming into the company of women. She commanded him, 'Go away, brother, and pray for me, for by God's grace I shall see you in the kingdom of heaven.''

Insights from the Talmud....and Aristotle.

I am thoroughly enjoying dipping into the Penguin Classics The Talmud: A Selection, being constantly amazed and enthralled with the wide-ranging debates and scholarship that can be found this record of Rabbinic discussion on Jewish law, ethics and their interpretation of scripture as a guide to daily life. One particularly wonderful passage from chapter three of the seventh tractate (Nidda) is this:

'Rabbi Simlai expounded: What is a baby like in its mother's womb? He is like a folded notebook, his hands on his two cheeks, his two elbows on his two knees, his two heels on his two buttocks, his head between his knees, his mouth closed and his navel open; he eats what his mother eats and drinks what his mother drinks, but he does not excrete in case it kills his mother. As soon as he emerges into the fresh air, what was closed opens, and what was open, closes, for otherwise he could not survive. While still in the womb a light shines over his head, and he sees from one end of the world to the other, as it is said When his lamp shone over my head, when I walked in the dark by its light (Job 29:3) - do not be surprised at this, for a man sleeps here and in his dreams sees Spain - and these are the best days of a man's life, as it is said O that I were as in months gone by, in the days when God watched over me (Job 29:2) when there were months not years.'

Apparently during this time the child is taught the whole Torah, but on emerging from the womb into the fresh air 'an angel slaps his mouth and causes him to forget the whole Torah' so for the observant Jew the whole of life is spent trying to regain that former state of blessed knowledge.

There follows an excursus on what it takes to form a whole human being:

'Three partners form a person: the Holy One, blessed be He, his father and his mother. His father produces the white seed out of which are formed bones, sinews, nails, the soft matter of the brain in his head and the white of the eye: his mother produces the red seed out of which are formed skin, flesh and hair, and the dark part of the eye: the Holy One, blessed be He, puts in him spirit and soul and facial appearance and the seeing of the eye and the hearing of the ear, the speech of the mouth, the movement of the legs and discernment and understanding. When his time comes to depart from the world the Holy One, blessed be He, takes his portion and leaves before his mother and father their portion.'

I was particularly struck by recognition of the idea that the foetus is not just the sum of his bodily constituents, but requires additional divine input to make him 'alive'. Aristotle, who also spent a lot of time trying to work out how the foetus was formed, considered that the male contributed the vital heat required to give the soul form (the 'colder' female merely supplied the matter). Indeed, he thought that females were colder, damper, inferior versions of males - but this is the guy who considered that plants were upside-down animals because they had their nutrition-seeking parts down in the earth (unlike animals mouths which tend to be on the upper end of the body) and their generative (seed-bearing) parts waving about in the air (unlike animals who have their generative parts safely tucked away)!

Both the Talmud and Aristotle agree however that the male embryo becomes 'ensouled' at 40 days gestation.....the female embryo somewhat later.

Because they're a bit colder (thought Aristotle) they take somewhat longer to get going, see?

The End of the Line

The death-throes of the York branch of the doomed 'Borders' continue. Just as a corpse is stripped by scavengers, the dwindling book-stock is getting shunted ever-closer to the front of the shop, leaving denuded shelves at the now-cavernous/cadaverous rear. Lurid posters and cards proclaim the escalating percentage of discount that can be expected and, sadly and ironically, the shop has never been busier. A game of 'spot-the-book' (see previous post), undertaken from the gallery of the in-store Starbucks is now no longer possible: the bookshelves below are now quite empty. Talking to the staff of that cafe (some of whom have been working there for ages) it would appear that they too are living on borrowed time. When Borders closes its doors for the final time (imminently, it would appear), they will all probably be without jobs, as the neighbouring branches of 'Bucks each have a full complement of staff, particularly as they have been doing some seasonal recruiting. I know a lot of people dislike the globalising and monopolising aspects of Starbucks, but to be quite honest, I much prefer going in one of their branches than a poky little independent cafe that sells indifferently brewed coffee and often less-than-fresh muffins. I know that wherever I find a Starbucks, I can get a decent cup of coffee.
Yes - I get all that about large chains squeezing out the independent trader, but in reality people like to go where the food and coffee is of a consistent quality (and if it isn't, make a fuss and you will get a free replacement and a voucher) and you can sit for hours chatting with friends or working on your laptop without feeling like you've outstayed your welcome. Although nearly all the people of the York Borders In-Store Starbucks are unknown to me by name, their faces and foibles have become familiar over the years. They feel like a community - one that is soon going to disperse. And that feels rather sad.
Where will we all go now for our rest and respite?
And yes, I have taken advantage of the liquidation discount - an Oxford World Classics copy of Boswell's 'Life of Johnson', a droll and mighty tome (as befits its subject) that I probably would not have otherwise purchased, and am currently enjoying as my bedtime reading matter.

Metamorphosis I am Hoping for, not Dereliction.

I am rather sad at the demise of Borders bookshops as I have spent a lot of time (and money) browsing their shelves and drinking coffee in the in-store Starbucks of the York branch. It's rather unusual in that the back half of the building was originally a chapel, and the cafe area occupies the gallery that runs around the four walls in a squared-off oval.

Ever since he was very young, the Bright-Eyed Boy and I have spent many a happy hour peering over the handrail and playing our favourite game of 'Book Spotting' with a coffee/bun to hand. This consists of one party naming a book that they can see on the shelves on the floor below, which the other party has to locate and describe. Good for both observation and verbal skills, although we just enjoy it. We went to have a possibly final cup of coffee there today, but sadly found that the coffee-shop was shut for a staff meeting. I hope we manage to fit one more in before the doors shut forever. As a venue, it really does hold many fond memories for me and I hope that the building isn't going to be turned into yet another crappy cheap clothes shop. In truth, I guess I am partly to blame for the chain's demise. Although I have bought a lot of books from them in my time, in many instances the limits of stock, the esoteric nature of my wants, or simply cost, have driven me into the arms of online retailers. Which is where a lot of Borders' clientele have ended up, I suspect.
Mea culpa, Borders.
When I was browsing in town on Saturday, whilst waiting for daughter #3 to do her rowing training (in the boathouse gym, as the river has well and truly burst its banks) I went to a favourite antiquarian book shop, Ken Spelmans on Micklegate. This is absolutely lovely, smells just right (ever so slightly musty), is suitably poky and has an open coal-fire glowing in the back room. Up the rickety stairs there is a modest theology and classics section (always a few Loebs to be had) where I chanced upon a wonderful leather-bound copy of Donnegan's Greek/English Dictionary dating from 1837. I was severely tempted, but as it was a tome of considerable avoir du pois and I had only just started my two-hours' browsing, I regretfully put it back. However, when I thought about it over the rest of the weekend, I developed a terrible hankering for it (small Greek font has a strange effect on me). Monday (a teacher-training day) saw the boy and I legging back up the hill to snatch it gleefully of the shelf. I had previously told myself that it would probably have been bought (to guard against disappointment) but when I saw that it hadn't - well, it was like a real chemical 'hit'. The nice thing about Spelmans is that they wrap your purchases up in green parcel paper, so you feel like Mr Brownlow or some other Dickensian character as you walk out of the shop.
I have to admit to taking advantage of the 20% off sign in Borders and bought Alexander McCall-Smith's The Comfort of Saturdays, a Penguin Classics copy of Selections from the Talmud and an Oxford Classics version of Kafka's short stories. I whipped through the first in no time at all (and for a while found myself thinking in a similar fashion to Isabel Dalhousie: wistfully philosophic) and am dipping in and out of the second. I will read the third in dribs and drabs, as Kafka is far too weird to read a lot of in one go. We've been reading some portions of untranslated Kafka in the German Reading Skills classes and he is a most unsettling author. Nothing is comfortable or predictable. All is alienation and rejection. I remember borrowing Metamorphosis and other stories from the library in response to another (similar) author's work. Damned if I can remember who it was now!

Metaphorically Speaking

I have finally finished Janet Soskice Sisters of Sinai and, despite my earlier misgivings about its initial slow pace, I have really enjoyed reading it. The author has managed to blend together an amazing story of perseverence (a solid Presbyterian virtue) with good, scholarly research that reflects the protagonists' own story of learning, delving and discovery. I only wish that I could pass it on to one of my family or friends, but I fear that the fairly esoteric subject, plus its 'slow-burn' start might put most of them off.

I am also making my way through (practically finished!)David J. Williams very excellent Paul's Metaphors: Their Context and Character. This comprehensive thematic survey of Paul's language is appealing at every level, to both the reader of the Bible in English translation (here the NIV, a good workmanlike, if occasionally nervous version) and to those who (like myself) like to wrestle with Paul's Greek mano a mano. In actual fact, it has been a very good way of revising those hapax legomenon - those one-off terms with which Paul peppers his epistles and which I tend not to always recognise immediately. I've also learned a fair bit about subjects otherwise not high on my agenda. Did you know, for example, that a Roman soldier had as much to fear from his fellow legionaries as from his commanding officers or the enemy? If he failed to keep his place in the battle line, or lost his weapons to the enemy he could be condemned to the fustuarium, to be assailed by his comrades wielding rocks and clubs! Indeed, whole units could be subjected to this treatment: after being paraded in disgrace before the whole legion (10 cohorts of between 480 to 600 men = up to 6000 soldiers) every tenth man was chosen to undergo the ordeal (the origin of the word 'decimation'), the brave alongside the downright cowardly could equally be chosen by lot. A similar punishment was meted out for a sentry losing the wax tablet that had the current 'watchword' inscribed on it, or for being away from his post during a spot-inspection (what if nature called?). Harsh. No wonder the discipline of the Roman army was legendary.

The layout of the book is pleasing, although I think I would have probably preferred the specialist language information to have been contained in footnotes rather than endnotes, but that is just because I (personally) find all the flicking back and forth between the pages mildly irritating. I can understand the decision to keep them all en bloc, so that the non-specialist is not overwhelmed with torrents of Greek.

The book is divided into sections that deal with concepts in the same semantic field, which will no doubt please the linguistics afficionados, but some of the metaphors 'bleed' into one another so information in the endnotes occasionally tends to be, if not repeated, referred on to other endnotes. But this is a problem with which I am all too familiar: how to successfully and comprehensively cross-reference without becoming bogged down. The book has a couple of nice and useful appendices- a chronology of the Roman Empire (in outline, rather than exhaustive) and short biographies of the ancient writers that make an appearance in the book, plus the usual bibliography (extensive) and scripture index. There is also an index of the cited ancient authors. Two very minor observations follow.

i) It would have been interesting to see a 'metaphor map' of each epistle to get an idea (at a glance) of the coherence (or indeed scattershot nature) of Paul's thought.

ii) The author skirts around the problem of Pauline 'authenticity' with the old 'what constitutes an author?' chestnut. He says that he has 'accepted the traditional ascriptions of authorship to Paul', and thus includes not only Ephesians, Colossians ansd 2Thessalonians (..well..OK...I can live with that...at a push), but also the Pastoral Epistles. In addition he ransacks the Pauline speeches of Acts for material which he believes contain a kernel of Pauline authority. Mmmm. Why not add Hebrews too, then? I think the trouble with including the whole kit and Pauline caboodle is that we end up examining language that is actually quite far removed from its 'source', and the valid fields of investigation can flow ever outward, until the whole NT is plundered (and then, why not the apocrypha - someone thought that they had authority). Why not maybe 'NT Metaphors: Their Context and Character'? That would indeed be a μεγα βιβλιον! (και ἰσως μεγα κακον!) But if source limitation really is the name of the game, then play on the side of conservatism (not theological conservatism though!) and limit your sources to those upon which the majority of scholars can agree: Romans, 1&2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1Thessalonians and Philemon. The book would indeed be slimmer, but no worse for that.

That having been said, I am enjoying reading this handsome and appealing volume immensely - so much so that I have put my other current reads on hold for the meantime to concentrate on it. I shall no doubt refer to it in my own research, and shall heartily commend it to my fellow scholars.

Texting Away

Sisters of Sinai is still being read, allbeit at rather a slow pace. It improved once the narration fo their expedition got underway, but the most notable event for me was their individual bad-luck at losing their late-found and ideally-suited husbands after only a few years of marriage. That, and how the sisters managed to acquire enough language skills in Syriac to pass muster as serious scholars. But they did, so all credit to them. It must have helped to have no small amount of money to smooth the way though! Some birthday money allowed me to get hold of William Mounce's Complete Expository Dictionary, Walter Wilson's Pauline Parallels and a Penguin Classics copy of the poems of Goethe, with German and English text on opposing pages. Lovely - should keep me busy a while. I don't seem to have a 'non-serious' book on the go at the moment: I did get a copy of Marina Lewycka's A Short History of Tractors in Ukranian from a charity shop for £1, but it's just laid on my desk at the moment, unopened. I've also worked my way through Textual Scholarship: an Introduction by David Greetham, and John Harvey's Listening to the Text which examines the rhetoric of Paul's epistles.
The Penguin Classics Desert Fathers book can only be read in very short doses: their utter refusal to engage with life in any sort of normal way is so alien that the mind boggles almost immediately. I shall post the most bizarre example of this when I've finished all the chapters.

The Horror of Reading

I can hardly believe it, but the Bright-Eyed Boy is actually starting to show an interest in fiction! And all thanks to Anthony Horowitz. The B-E-B showed a great enthusiasm for reading from an early age, having mastered the alphabet in the Noddy book at the age of three. Not having a great deal of faith in the 'see-and-speak' method of learning to read that was being championed by the nursery class that he was (very reluctantly) attending at that point, I taught him to break words down into sounds to work out what the word said. 'Cuh - A - Tuh' = CAT. I have been vindicated in this as a couple of years ago the school returned to this tried and tested method. Seems obvious to me - how can you read if you can't work out what the words say? Anyway he never had any problem reading as he had the tools to work stuff out himself, but he never showed any interest in reading stories. He is a great consumer of facts: the Guinness Book of Records, dinosaur dictionaries, the Top Gear magazine, Horrid Histories and any number of books like Why is Snot Green or How to Avoid a Wombat's Bottom.

When we undertake a long car journey I like to take an audio-book with us to lessen the tedium: last year it was a collection of Anthony Horowitz horror stories and this year it was The Devil and His Boy, a historically based novel by the same author. We all enjoyed it so much that we had to put the remaining chapter on even after we'd returned home, just to see what happened.

Anyway, I found a paperback copy of Anthony Horowitz Horror 2 in the library and, after I'd read one of the short stories out loud to him (The Man with the Yellow Face - very creepy and set in York!), the B-E-B took it upon himself to read the remaining ones to himself. Having finished it very rapidly we went along to the library and asked the very helpful assistant who wrote in a similar style to Mr Horowitz. She returned a couple of suggestions and a few minutes later we triumphantly emerged carrying a copy of one of Darren Shan's 'Demonata' series. He gobbled it up and as a result, I have just found myself buying no.2 in the series - The Demon Thief. I've promised him that when he's finished that, I'll get no.3...and so on. They seem very grisly and macabre, but I am assured by daughter #3 (all of two years his senior) that 'all boys like that sort of thing'. I admit that I was slightly worried that he'd start having nightmares, being a gentle sort of fellow, but thus far, he seems able to separate fact from fiction. Long may his enthusiasm continue.

In the Desert, Up the Nile, In the Graveyard

The Testament of Gideon Mack has been duly passed onto the husband, who whipped through Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book in double-quick time while we were away. I have eventually managed to hold of a copy of The Sisters of Sinai (blogged about some time in early spring) and, to be quite honest, am finding it pretty dull at the moment. The first part of the book is taken up with a lengthy description of the sisters first venture up the Nile and details their tribulations with their hired 'dragoman'. I have found myself caring less and less, and if it doesn't get interesting and onto the nitty-gritty of manuscript discovery p r e t t y soon, I shall stamp my tiny foot in annoyance. The 'stipend' has seen me buy a copy of Charles Puskas Jr's The Letters of Paul: An Introduction, a pretty useful vade mecum for the basic facts on the epistles - always useful - as well as a somewhat less useful (but nontheless appealing) Penguin Classics copy of The Desert Fathers : Sayings of the Early Christian Monks compiled and translated by Benedicta Ward, who is a reader at Oxford, as well as a religious. I must admit that I was attracted as much by the cover as by the subject matter itself - a medieval illustration from the Bedford Book of Hours, depicting a 'hippocentaur' (half man, half horse, but with huge ibex-style horns on its head), a monster that does not seem to make an appearance in the book of medieval grotesques and monsters that I purchased the other week.

The desert fathers were renowned for their simple, solitary and austere lifestyles, their simple faith, lack of scholastic learning and joyful acceptance of life. One of the entries tells the story of the hermit-monk Macarius, who, on discovering a thief loading his few possessions onto a donkey, assisted the burglar to load up the rest saying to himself all the while that he brought nothing into the world, the Lord provided, and now its time to relinquish it all. Hmmm. Not sure I'd be so helpful. Still, the book is going to provide some short but interesting bedtime insights. A few lines is all I can seem to manage at the moment before my eyes shut!

And On the Third Day....

We spent a wonderful couple of days in Barcelona and had the chance to 'test-drive' a couple of guidebooks that we took with us. The winner was, without a doubt, the Dorling Kindersley 'Eyewitness Travel' guide to Barcelona and Catalonia. For a city that is rich in visual treats, it is absolutely essential that any guidebook gives a foretaste of them, and this is where the Time Out guides fail to engage, despite their comprehensive information. OK if you're wanting info about Wolverhampton or Karlsruhr: just not up to the job for Rome, Venice or Barca! The simple area-by-area format allowed us to plan our routes using simplified maps and gave us an idea of the treasures on route. A concise guide to the travel arrangements, culture, food and nightlife - plus recommendations on where to eat and where to avoid - enhanced the whole trip, as did the more comprehensive street plans and index in the back. We actually didn't buy this, but borrowed it from our local library as we have found that constantly updated information means buying a new guidebook for each year/visit.

My reading book was, as mentioned in a previous post, James Robertson's The Testament of Gideon Mack. Superbly written, the prose just flowed off the page and into my head. Poor Gideon, the lonely son of distant and inscrutable parents, destined to follow in their unhappy footsteps until a devastating accident leads to an encounter that irredeemably alters his life. Or does it? The reader is never quite sure whether the book charts a real event or merely Gideon's descent into madness, and this is its utter brilliance: we feel the madness from the inside, what it must be like to think things have happened, only to have other people look at you with disbelieving horror. For what it's worth, I believe that Gideon Mack did spend three days underground with the devil: the evidence of his healed broken leg is incontravertible. Actually, I've just had a thought that the book could be some sort of biblical allegory....I mean, three days underground? Meeting the devil? Come on...! I'm going to have to go and re-read it immediately!

Travel.....and More Books...

Half term looms (again) and the prospect of a few days in Barcelona is prompting me to find a suitable travel book for the journey. And the broken nights/early mornings - I'm suffering from ruptured sleep patterns again and whilst this can be a blessing sometimes (two extra hours of academic reading before the household stirs) it can be a bit of a pain away from home, when you're already pretty stressed-out and exhausted by travelling and unfamiliar surroundings. So, as usual, I'm looking for something not-too difficult, absorbing and well-written. Amidst all the 'serious' stuff that I'm reading at the moment, I picked up a discounted copy of The Testament of Gideon Mack by James Robertson (£1.99), not a writer I've ever come across before. Reviews seem rather encouraging, mainly highlighting the pleasing style and unusual nature of the first-person narrative (not that first-person is unusual, the narrative is...) so that might be the one for the journey. Something for the Husband needs to be bought, and having exhausted the Neil Gaiman corpus, I'm going to have to trawl around Borders or the like, as he most certainly will not have the time to source one himself. The usual online book suppliers are certainly benefitting from my AHRC funding money: only this week I have ordered The Handbook of Discourse Analysis, Textual Scholarship: An Introduction and A.P.Hartley's What a Word!. This last is a 1930 first edition and I was surprised at the ridiculously cheap price (only a couple of pounds). I am deeply grateful that I can indulge - yes, that's the word - my passion for books, academic or otherwise, and am all too aware that many students are nowhere near as lucky as I have been in securing funding. But neither was I - for many years, and I think I was deeply scarred by husband #1's cold remark (when I asked if I could buy a paperback) that I 'already some had books'. Call this my therapy.

Stops and Starts

Fanning's book Verbal Aspect in New Testament Greek arrived and, as usual, I am less than impressed by what the academic press gives you for circa £60. It has one of those glued spines that don't open flat properly and tend to shed their pages after a few goes. I had enough of those during my undergrad days: the overpriced Bristol Classical Texts, with the nasty photocopy quality print.....Still, they have a captive audience, I guess!

The good old Oxfam bookshop turned up a diamond this afternoon: Driver's 1907 Introduction to the Literature of the Old Testament (7th edition), a mere £3.49 and a handsome volume at that. In fact, strangely enough, there were two practically identical copies of it, the other had a shelf-mark in something like Tippex on the spine but less pencil underlining of the text (I don't mind pencil so I picked the un-Tippexed one). It looks right at home next to Farrar's Life and Works of St Paul (2 vols) and is a testament to the sort of scholarship that we just don't see anymore, a scholarship that lives within its subject and understands it completely. Truly awesome!

I've given up on Everett's Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes: it was just such a strange mish-mash. I've been reading Magnus Zetterholm's Approaches to Paul, an excellent overview of Pauline scholarship and interesting enough to make a couple of longish train journeys go quite quickly. It touches on subjects that I have a vague understanding of, but fills in the details of how Kasemann differs from Bultmann, and how Bornkamm differs from both etc. etc. And I have read about half of it in one day, so that's a recommendation in itself.

Snake-Eyes Watchin' You

Following my book-buying surge over the last few weeks things are on a bit more of an even keel. I still waiting for Fanning's book to arrive, but my breath is definitely not bated! I'm ploughing through Daniel Everett's Don't Sleep, There are Snakes and am finding it by turns interesting and annoying. I think that one of the reviews that I read of it mentioned that it could have done with a damn good editor, and I have to concur. There is a distinct lack of evenness of tone, veering from really quite gripping accounts of life in the jungle to odd and stilted sections of linguistic observation, like he'd just copied out his notebooks. It's neither one thing nor another genre-wise. There is also a breath-taking arrogance at work here: Everett installed himself and his family in the malaria-ridden Amazon without any emergency back-up and when things go wrong he assumes that the native population should just rally to his aid. They do, and the account of the journey with his desperately ill family to the distant missionary hospital is hair-raising and unbelievable. How could he put his family, particularly his children, through this suffering? And how dare he, on his eventual return to life amongst the Piraha people presume to tell them what was right for them? No wonder they wanted him dead on occasion! I may or may not finish the book. Depends if something less irritating comes along.

footnote: the blurb celebrating this book is by Edward Gibson, Professor of Cognitive Sciences, MIT 'Everett is the most interesting man I have ever met... a fascinating read' : har har...didn't Everett study at MIT?

Monsters, Grotesques, Crystal, Porter and Fanning

Two recent purchases courtesy of my 'stipend' have been David Crystal's Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics and Buist Fanning's Verbal Aspect in New Testament Greek, books that I need rather than want. The former is the sort of book that is regularly useful to all sorts of linguistics students and thus is regularly recalled by the library, or lives in the short loans shelves, neither of which is great when you live over a hundred miles from campus. The latter, a seminal book for my PhD, is conspicuous by its absence - which is strange as they have Stanley Porter's contemporaneous tome on Verbal Aspect. Even though I put in a purchase request at the beginning of my studies (endorsed by my supervisor) they still haven't bought it (or if they have, they haven't got round to registering it and putting it on their shelves yet, which it useless). It's mighty expensive but I can't do without it, I'm afraid, so the bullet had to be bit. I'm just waiting for the uni library to recall Porter's book to make my joy complete. Sometimes - nay, often! - it's a bit of a pain being so far away. The very lovely bookshop on Minstergates (at least 5 storeys of winding stairs, low windows, uneven floors and interesting little rooms crammed full of books) always has a shelf of books outside to tempt the temptible (like me) and it was from there that i picked up very appealing British Library booklet on Grotesques and Monsters in Medieval Manuscripts by Alixe Bovey. Now I know all about blemmyae and sciopods - which is more than you do!

Libraries, Books, Philosophy and Paul

Now that the new academic term has started, I'm going to avail myself not only of my current uni library, but also the ones belonging to my old alma mater. I think I'm correct in thinking that £50 will get me a post-grad library card with borrowing rights. The main library is a circular Art Deco beauty that just breathes learning and knowledge. I used to really enjoy squirrelling around in its subterranean depths, enjoying the smell of the waxed parquet and old books. I intend to get myself over there soon and sign up. It'd be good to open up old channels of communication again with my old department too.
Books have been coming through the letter box at a very satisfying rate, save for yesterday when I was down on campus and one was returned to the post depot from whence I had to retrieve it today. I though I'd better do as there is a postal strike threatening....oh no!
I finished Alexander McCall Smith's The Sunday Philosopy Club, and felt curiously vindicated concerning my original judgement of it. Unsatisfying, and definitely not as good as its sequels. Still, it was only £1 from the Autism Charity Shop. I've been reading Michael Gorman's Reading Paul and find it a clear and insightful introduction to the Pauline corpus, although a bit too devotional for my liking. I have read so much about Paul that I have the curious feeling that I actually know him, like he is some sort of tetchy uncle that I haven't seen for a while and who I wouldn't necessarily go out of my way too visit. I think he would be far too much like hard work, picking arguments, generally being pedantic, grumpy, nosy, self-pitying, but the kind of chap that would wordlessly press a twenty-pound note into your hand as you left, noting with surprise that his eyes look moist. I've never quite got over the extraordinary feeling that I got when I was translating 1Corinthians in the autumn dusk a few years ago: I'd got to the last verse, verse 16 and was whizzing through the last section when I became convinced that he was personally addressing me, actually speaking to me through the epistle. Amazing, and not a little spooky. One book that I picked up recently and am keen to crack on with is Daniel Everett's Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes, a missionary - and linguist's tale of life amongst the Amazonian Pirahas tribe. His original intention to 'convert' (what a horrible notion!) them is quickly sidelined as he discovers them to be the happiest of people, with absolutely no need to be 'saved' (I wonder what his superiors made of that!). It was the linguistic side of the book that appealed to me most (naturally) as his discoveries concerning the Piraha's language 'run counter to prevailing linguistic orthodoxy'. John Searle rates it highly, so I'm guessing that it is anti-Chomksyian in its thinking. Don't get me started....transformational grammar v behaviourism.....hmmmm.

A New Term, A New Pile of Books......

I'm in a bit of a book frenzy at the moment - courtesy of a small unexpected pension lump-sum bonus. It started off respectably enough: a second-hand copy of Alexander McCall Smith's The Sunday Philosophy Club (which, on first reading a couple of years ago, I had hated enough to leave it behind in the holiday apartment - I had failed to 'get' its subtle observation). It is pure comfort reading, gentle, wryly amusing and deep enough to provide some food for thought. I also bought the husband another Neil Gaiman (Smoke and Mirrors), as he'd finished Neverwhere which he enjoyed immensely. Then my fiscal prudence specs slipped somewhat: my response to needing to study is generally to buy more books, as if the mere act of buying them was equivalent to absorbing the knowledge therein (I actually realise that this is not true....). I kind of justified the expense by reasoning that the expenditure was in fact a very small proportion of my forthcoming 'stipend' (what a lovely old-fashioned word!) and that they might contain some insightful nugget that would illuminate my whole PhD. The lists comprises of Coles & Dodd's Reading German (for my upcoming German language-reading course in October), Reading Paul by Michael Gorman, The Deliverance of God: An Apocalyptic Re-Reading of Justification in Paul by Douglas Campbell and The Philosopher's Toolkit: A Compendium of Philosophical Concepts and Methods by Julian Baggini and Peter Fosl. Quite a list to get through. Quite a heap on the bedroom floor! Oh, and a second-hand copy of Your PhD Companion by Dr Stephen Marshall and Dr Nick Green from the Oxfam bookshop, which I read practically all the way through in Starbucks this afternoon.

A Taste of Things to Come?

Here's a rather worrying thing: Daughter #3 has an accumulation of unwanted books, accrued over the past couple of years of voracious book-reading. They've been to the friends that want to borrow them and, duly returned, are cluttering her bookshelves and bedroom floor. She's largely outgrown that particular genre (magic, mystery, alternative worlds, para-history) and thus is unlikely to read them again. What to do with them? The first thought was to give them to charity, but then I had the idea that the library could probably use them. In the past I've had books that have come up on renewal as 'donations' and I noticed the other day that the library shelves - especially in the childrens' section was a bit sparse. And what better way to recirculate old books? Lots of people could benefit if they were in the system. So I bagged them up and took them to the local branch where I was told that they 'no longer accept donations' as the process of registering them was too difficult. What? Ease of process takes precedence over the acquisition of books? In a library of all things? They'd rather turn down 20 free books (all fairly hefty tomes, in good condition, costing on average £6.99 each new = around £140) than put up with a little inconvenience??!! The world's gone mad! The cart is being put before the horse, surely. I am alarmed for the future and not a little despondent.
The Heart Foundation, however, seemed a little more grateful: they accepted the books with alacrity and a smile. I hope they make a few quid from them.

Oratio Obliqua

Am scratching about for something interesting to take my fancy. I finished Robin Wasserman's Skinned, and although it was tolerably good, it didn't really live up to the promise of the initial few chapters. The characters' behaviour became increasingly stereotypical, and the excesses of angst betrayed its teen-fiction standing. My twelve-year old daughter liked it, though whether well enough to purchase the upcoming sequel remains to be seen.

Daughter #2, ransacking the Sunday car-boot-sale stalls, happened upon a 2-volume edition of F.W.Farrar's The Life and Work of St Paul (1879), which she bought for a mere £3. I was delighted, as I am a fan of his quasi-whimsical, late-Victorian (but very scholarly and insightful), immensely readable ponderings. It was in fairly good condition, but sadly someone had seen fit to plunder it for its coloured maps. Shame, but the prose is as enthralling as ever, if somewhat fanciful.

'It is clear, from the education provided for Paul by his parents, that they could little indeed have conjectured how absolutely their son would be reduced to depend on a toil so miserable and so unremunerative. But though we see how much he felt the burden of the wretched labour....while he plaited the black, strong-scented goat's hair, he might be soaring in thought to the inmost heaven, or holding high converse with Apollos or Aquila, with Luke or Timothy, on the loftiest themes which can engage the mind of man.'

This week she arrived home with two rather attractive 1895 volumes of Demosthenes Orations - the orators are not really currently my cup of tea, but there's no denying the shabby handsomeness of the books (although, sadly, Volume 1 is missing). The Husband is still engrossed in Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere: it's lasted him for quite some time, having started it on the outward plane journey of our holiday some 3 weeks ago. For someone who spent many a year NOT reading, he's certainly getting some good stuff under his belt now, although he does tend to get what I borrow/buy for him (I'm his personal book-shopper) so it's not really a balanced reading programme at all. I noted not long ago that the books I choose for him tend to be a bit predictable - all in the same vein: NG's Anansi Boys, American Purgatorio by John Haskell, Dogwalking by Arthur Bradford, You Shall know Our Velocity by Dave Eggars, Steven Sherrill's The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break, Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club.....all a bit weird and with a hint of sadness/madness. We were both, however, reduced to wonder by the amazing tales in David Eagleman's Sum: 40 Tales from the Afterlife.

Perhaps it's time to diversify more....

Holidays and Beyond

Thoroughly enjoyed my two holiday books (The Unbearable Lightness of Scones and PopCo), managing to polish off the former in just under two days, the latter lasting until half-way through the four-hour flight delay on the return journey. Alexander McCall Smith's latest volume in the 44 Scotland Street series was the familiar comfort-reading that I'd both hoped for and expected. Nothing nasty, with enough amusing insights to raise the odd internal chuckle. Having fairly recently read Scarlett Thomas's The End of Mr Y I had an idea what was in store for me and was not disappointed. PopCo's heroine Alice Butler is far more sympathetic than her angst-ridden self-hating Ariel Manto. The plot is not what you'd call tight, but combined with the various digressions on specialist subjects (maths, cryptography. marketing techniques), it is absorbing enough to keep the pages turning. Characterisation is slight, with many of the supporting roles appearing as mere ciphers (haha! in a book on cryptanalysis! Geddit?) - but that's fine: I wasn't expecting Flaubert. It was fine holiday fare, in the same league as The Gargoyle. Better than The Raw Shark Texts, not as good as Fight Club.

Having finished PopCo before our flight took off I was desperate for something else to read and picked up Robin Wasserman's Skinned, which daughter #3 (12 years old) had completed a few days ago. It was immediately gripping, a tale set in a dystopian future featuring a girl hideously injured in a car accident (shades of The Gargoyle again!). The medical expertise is available (largely courtesy of her parents' vast wealth) to have her essential self 'downloaded' from her broken body into a replica mechanoid, perfect in every way except that it is not 100% lifelike. It will keep her 'alive' indefinitely as long as she follows the care protocols. And this is the interesting bit: is she 'alive'? What does 'alive' mean? What does a person consist of? Are they the sum of their bodies and their minds, or is it the mind alone that counts? We are asked to consider various ethical and moral dilemmas through Lia's angry confrontation with her old life, her friends, her boyfriend and society's reactions. It is very thought provoking stuff, deeply philosophical and gripping. I'm rather impressed.

Actually, I'm procrastinating.......various scholarly tomes are jostling for attention but, hey, I'm still in holiday mood!

Another Useless Doorstop

Can't do it: read Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon, I mean. I started it two nights ago and made a final effort at it this morning but it's.....well, I don't like to label....too blokey for my liking. The research seems admirably detailed (although he could be writing absolute mathematical bollocks for all I know) and I can cope with sketchily drawn (tautology?) characters and fast moving plot switching. But do you know what? It's like reading something written by someone with attention-deficit/Asperger's...or for them...syndrome: I'm not sure which. So with no little annoyance, I shall consign it to the 'help-yourself-anyone' shelf along with various other ill-advised purchases. I know what I'm going to get in replacement: Scarlett Thomas's Popco and AlexanderMcCall Smith's The Unbearable Lightness of Scones - pure undemanding beach pabulum, but with pretty coherent narrative strings. As far as I can tell. Thus far.

Finished...in more ways than one

Woke up early and finished off Force of Circumstance - more because I wanted to put it out of its misery than through any desire for completion. The ending is so bleak and downbeat that I really must read something light and fluffy to counteract the sour and gloomy atmosphere that is lingering around me this morning (Alexander McCall Smith is good for that...The Unbearable Lightness of Scones maybe?). Reading between the lines, I'm guessing that she had some sort of mid-life crisis (hackneyed concept though it is) that caused her to lose her enthusiasm for life, her insatiable desire for travel and experience, even for her writing, which latterly became a chore done with grim determination. She sensed the life draining out of her, hated the withering of her body, dreaded the separations inevitably wrought by death.
Well, we all do, love! But her reaction was to 'batten down the hatches', withdraw from society (save for a few intimates) and things that previously gave pleasure, and settle into a grimly monastic existence guaranteed to make her old age seem even longer and less enjoyable than it might otherwise have been. She lived a very selfish life, did exactly what she pleased when she pleased, and in the end this self-sufficiency allowed her to pull her lonely cloak around herself with very little opposition. At the end of this book she laments that all her experiences, reading and knowledge 'made no honey....provide no-one with any nourishment' and bitterly regrets that her annihilation will terminate her repository of memories:


'If it had at least enriched the earth; if it had given birth to....what? A hill? A rocket? But no. Nothing will have taken place, I can still see the hedge of hazel trees flurried by the wind and the promises with which I fed my beating heart while I stood gazing at the gold-mine at my feet: a whole life to live. The promises have all been kept. And yet, turning an incredulous gaze towards that young and credulous girl, I realize with stupor how much I was gypped.' (Force of Circumstance 'Epilogue')


Perhaps this is one of the best arguments against voluntary childlessness that I have ever read (although she never once even mentioned that she might have considered children, having had a horror of restriction and duty. Imagine a little Sartre/de Beauvoir!). The legacy of such emotional independence can turn out to be a terrible loneliness at an age when we are least capable of sustaining it.
I've still got All Said and Done (the fourth volume of her autobiography) to re-read. As I remember, this consists of a series of essays on important themes in her life - far more measured and reflective than Force of Circumstance's anguished threnody. I think, however, that I have had enough of Mme de Beauvoir for the time being. Maybe in the autumn I will turn to her again.

Thar She blows!!!!

Simone de Beauvoir is officially depressing me now. Whatever happened to the intellectually curious and sociable young woman of her younger books? The attitude that prevails in the last quarter of Force of Circumstance is that of a jaded appetite for life and a constant bewailing of the descent into the tomb. And she's only in her fifties.....not significantly older than myself. I guess she must have burned herself out. I am forcing myself to complete it, but am finding her gloomy introspection having a negative effect on me and can't wait to get it over and done with. I might have to go and reread some of her earlier stuff, when she was at the Sorbonne and started to knock around with J-PS in the Flore cafe to jolly myself up! Having said all that, her reflections on life often hit the mark: perhaps that's why I'm finding it such hard going - she's relating the unpalatable truth about ageing and loss of vitality. I sha'n't lend it to my mother, who dwells quite a lot on the implications of loss, old age and death.
It occurred to me that I am woefully under-read when it comes to classic novels, so in a futile and belated attempt to remedy this shortcoming I've bought Herman Melville's Moby Dick. Shallowly enough, I was prompted to do this by the recent rescreening of an episode of my favourite cartoon series Futurama, The Day the Earth Stood Stupid, where the earth is invaded by giant disembodied brains which attempt to wipe out all thought processes in the universe. It's too complicated to relate in detail, but a battle ensues where the plots of classic novels are employed to trap, in turn, the Chief Giant Brain and the unfortunate Fry and Leela. The Chief Giant Brain utilises the plot of Moby Dick, crowing triumphantly 'You shall remain trapped forever in this dense symbolist tome!' They don't, because Captain Ahab (who identifies the chief GB as 'the great grey thinky whale') and Queeqeg and (don't ask) Tom Sawyer help them to escape into the plot of Pride and Prejudice (again, don't ask!). Soon after, in desperation Fry writes his own appallingly spelt novel whose lack of logic causes the Chief GB to have a mental breakdown and 'leave earth for no good raisin'. Hilarious stuff.
Anyway, I invested in a 'Wordsworth Classic' version whose merits I have sung before (cheap, and with an excellent introduction and notes). Complementary to this, I also picked up Leviathan, or The Whale by Philip Hoare which is shortlisted for the 2009 BBC Samuel Johnson Prize for non-fiction. This should add vital background.

I was a young but ardent whale conservationist in the seventies, for many years sporting the ubiquitous 'Save the Whale' badge on a succession of shoulder bags (it didn't get any less theoretical than that, I'm afraid), and I was quite transfixed by a recent visit to the whale exhibition at the Natural History Museum in London. So I shall enjoy a voyage of the imagination onto the high seas: and doesn't it have one of the most thrilling opening lines of any novel? I don't know quite why, but 'Call me Ishmael...' sends a thrill of anticipation and excitement down my spine.....

Cryptono...no...no!

Still extremely dubious about Cryptonomicon. I read the prologue this morning and felt even more sceptical. I probably need a back up.

A Writer's Life

I am plodding on with Force of Circumstance and find that it is improving. Actually, to tell the truth, I am skipping the overtly political bits and concentrating on the author's reflection on her motivations, relationships, writing and travels. For a forceful and intellectual woman, she seems unduly troubled by the ageing process. Her relationship with the writer Nelson Algren having petered out (both too pig-headed to compromise), she mournfully resigned herself to a celibate decline. She had not even reached fifty, for crying out loud! An unexpected affair with the journo Claude Lanzmann restored her confidence and joie-de-vivre, particularly as he was 17 years her junior. She writes much more engagingly when living life to the full and it is not difficult to detect the grey cloud of depression that shrouds her when she feels lonely and disconnected. Misery chokes articulacy.

She describes the writing process extremely accurately, and it is heartening to know that even such a towering intellect as hers struggled to put pen to paper:

'When I feel ready [after much reading and reflection], I write three or four hundred pages straight off. This is arduous work: it requires intense concentration, and the rubbish that accumulates appalls me. At the end of a month or two, I am so sickened that I can't continue. I begin again from scratch. despite all the material I have at my disposal the paper is blank once more, and I hesitate before taking the plunge. Usually I begin badly, out of impatience; I want to say everything at once; my narrative is lumpy, chaotic and lifeless. Gradually I become resigned to taking my time. then comes the moment when I find the distance, the tone and the rhythm I feel are right; then I really get underway. With the help of my rough draft, I sketch the broad outlines of a chapter. I begin again at page one, read it through and rewrite it sentence by sentence; then I correct each sentence so that it will fit into the page as a whole, then each page so that it has aplace in the whole chapter; later on, each chapter, each page, each sentence is revised in relation to the work as a whole. Painters, Baudelaire says, progress from first sketch to finished work by painting the complete picture at each stage; that is what I try to do.'

Force of Circumstance: Part I, ch.5 'Interlude'

Inspiring stuff indeed.

Like Father(s)? Like Sun!

Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson: that's my holiday book, but I have to admit I'm feeling a bit dubious about it......seems to tick the right boxes, but I am uncomfortably aware that so did the Illuminatus! trilogy.....I did try to read some of Stephenson's Baroque trilogy once upon a time but faltered quite quickly. I'll give this one a go.

Two biblioblogger recommendations are winging their (used) way to me:

1) New Testament Studies by C H Dodd, as recommended by Mark Goodacre as essential reading for anyone who is 'seriously interested' in Pauline eschatology (me! I am!) and

2) John J. O'Keefe & R.R. Reno's 'Sanctified Vision: An Introduction to Early Christian Interpretation of the Bible' [recommended in 'Son of the Fathers' blog, by - if I'm not mistaken - Josh Mc Manaway (sp?)] dealing with patristic hermeneutics, very pertinent to my area of study.

I don't think I'll be taking them away on holiday with me: I'm far too shallow and flakey. No pics of me boning up on my PhD stuff on the beach....or maybe.....?

HT Mark Goodacre's NT Blog , Son of the Fathers

Force of Habit

I've been reading Simone de Beauvoir's Force of Circumstance and, to tell the truth, I'm finding this volume of her autobiography slightly dull. Starting at the end of the war, it concentrates on the period of her literary heyday, her strange relationship with Sartre and her many political and social connections. And I think this last is the main problem: I've never heard of most of them, but she takes it as given that these faceless names mean something to the reader. There's also a lack of personal reflection (at least as far as I've read) that made the previous two volumes interesting. I don't care who she knew - I want to know what she thought. As it is, it reads a bit like a meeting schedule. It may improve, but it had better do so pretty damn soon!

I've also been trying to bone up on the basics of linguistics, and to that end purchased a Hodder 'Teach Yourself' linguistics book. It is utterly fascinating -no, it's better than that. If I was going to do another degree, this is the subject that I'd study. The book is by Jean Aitchison, although I didn't realise this until just now, when I looked for the author's name (not very prominent). This is the linguist recommended to me by my doctoral supervisor as being clear and accessible - and I have to agree. It's rivetting stuff.

Before long I'm going to have to sort out a 'holiday book' again. As I'm anticipating doing a lot of wine-soaked lazing about in the sun, I want something not too heavy, amusing but well written with enough pages to keep me going throughout the whole week. If I get the selection wrong, I stamp my tiny foot, pout and sulk, so I had better start looking soon! I must also get over the temptation to take anything scholarly with me: I'm pretty good at pretending to read the heavy stuff, i.e. moving my eyes over the page at a convincing rate, but actually thinking about something entirely different (and usually banale). Usually food.

Being and Time and....Nothing(ness)!

I've just finished - and thoroughly enjoyed - The Prime of Life and hope to start on Force of Circumstance later this evening. De Beauvoir writes vividly of occupied Paris and the efforts that she and her comrades made to make their lives tolerable, if not enjoyable during the most oppressive times and her enjoyment of cafe life is something with which I can identify most enthusiastically! I could have kicked myself for my procrastination the other day: whilst browsing in the Oxfam bookshop I found a copy of Heidegger's Being and Time for £4.99 and a commentary on it for a further £3.99. I hummed and ha'd about buying it (he's a bit earlier than my usual existential interests, although seminal) and eventually put it back on the shelf. Sometime during the ensuing hours, I conceived a real desire to buy it, so having delivered daughter no.3 to her rowing practice the following day, I scuttled back to the shop to purchase it. Only someone else had bought it in the interim. Dammit! I am so annoyed! I wonder if it was the same freak that bought the Gothic grammar a few months back? Do I have a doppelganger? I think, dear reader, that I do!

Force Majeure

A 'pre-owned' copy of Force of Circumstance - the third volume of Simone de Beauvoir's autobiography - arrived today (a genuine 70's Penguin, but sadly without a Matisse blue-figure cover illustration). I was severely tempted to start reading it at once, but as I am approximately one third of the way through a long-intended re-read of her Prime of Life (volume 2), I restrained myself. I am throroughly enjoying the latter, especially as the last book I read on de Beauvoir was Deirdre Bair's less than flattering biography of her. There is no doubt that de Beauvoir glossed over much of her past, particularly her manipulative relationships with her pupils and her over-dependency on the good opinion of the toad-like Sartre. Still, I find her apparent ability to both enjoy and analyse her experiences (the ones she lets us in on) most captivating.
It came to mind that I had bought my first copy of her Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter whilst staying with my aunt and uncle in Devon. I'd been sent down there to give my long-suffering parents a break from my teenage stubborness and rebellion. I clearly remember the sense of freedom I felt as my (very tolerant) relatives let me do more-or-less as I wanted or gently steered me to places like Buckfast Abbey and Exeter. I think I'd taken to wearing some bizarre floor-length outfits and affected a world weary air of langour. O how bohemian I felt! Suffice to say I was not improved by my sojourn and returned just as insufferable - if not distinctly worse - having found a similarly headstrong role-model and a taste for Disque Bleu!

Philosophy and Theology

Am thoroughly enjoying a re-read of Simone de Beauvoir's The Prime of Life in preparation for the arrival of her Force of Circumstance (due to plop through the letterbox any day soon). Takes me back a bit and fills me with regret that I didn't actually manage to have a coffee in 'Les Deux Magots' when last in Paris (the troops were on the verge of mutiny). An impulse buy recently was a Norton Critical Edition of The Writings of St Paul (eds. Wayne Meeks & John Fitzgerald), sourced from the internet at an amazing £8.98 (inc. p&p)! There's nearly 700 hundred pages of scholarship and reception ranging from Irenaeus to Luther to Nietzsche to Barth. Plus a comprehensive bibliography. Fantastic value......that's my 'serious' book for the summer. I did see it recommended on someone's blog, but can't for the life of me think where. Apologies - will post an acknowledgement if I re-find it*.

It was in Theophrastus' blog What I Learned from Aristotle
link:http://whatilearnedfromaristotle.blogspot.com/search?q=the+writings+of+st+paul

Force of Circumstance

One of the things that I regret on a regular basis is getting rid of books. Sometimes this has been forced upon me by the break up of circumstances (it's usually better to run for your life than ponder what books to take with you) or by the occasional misplaced desire to declutter, streamline, minimise, whatever. I think I'm a bit wiser now.....I never get rid of books entirely, the extended personal loan is a favourite strategy of mine. Some long-gone books continue to haunt me by their absence: a well-thumbed childhood copy of The Wind in the Willows, a lavishly illustrated volume of Tutankhamun's treasure, a Penguin set of Simone de Beauvoir's autobiography with matching Matisse blue figure covers. I managed to replace three of the latter (two sadly with different cover photos). Why did I ever get rid of them in the first place? A university friend of mine did much the same thing, dumping all her medieval literature after the end of her course, only to bitterly regret it later. I guess some books need time and distance to truly appreciate them. Anyway, I intend eventually to replace the non-Matisse ones, thus recreating my teenage reading experience. I have however, just ordered the third volume 'Force of Circumstance' from an Amazon subsidiary - for 44p! Funnily enough, I'm not entirely sure that I ever possessed this one in the first place, which seems a bit of an omission...but I can't recall anything about her in the mid-forties to mid-fifties. Oh well....we'll see....

Life, and What Comes After It.

David Eagleman's Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlife duly arrived and I have been reading the odd one or two at bedtime every night. They are exquisite gems of writing, Borgesian - yes - but also remind me of Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, although Eagleman's prose is leaner, more haiku-like. They are ingenious too, with breath-taking ideas wrapped in both wit and poignancy. Actually , I have had to hold myself back....it would be very easy to indiscriminately bolt through them in one go and fail to savour their subtle individual flavours, which would do the tales a grave disservice.

I've also just read the latest in Diana Athill's biography Somewhere Near the End. It is a slim volume and I managed to read it piecemeal in about a day. Her writing is, as one would expect from a literary grande dame, elegant and precise. Cool, even cold on occasion. I'm not sure whether she has deliberately taken the decision not to reveal her emotions concerning what would be counted by most as life-changing /traumatic events, or if she is very much of the 'stiff-upper-lip-mustn't-grumble brigade' (very possible, given her age), or if she is just completely lacking in empathy and compassion except in the most perfunctory way. I don't get the impression that she particularly cared about her family, friends or companions except in wishing to be seen to do approximately the right thing. As for the families of the married men that she had affairs with....there seems to have been an absolute absence of comprehension or interest in anything other than her own gratification and amusement. It's a pity, because I hoped that this would be a warmer book, filled with wisdom and insight garnered over 9 decades, rather than an apparently chilly dismissal of people and opinions other than her own. In a strange way, I found it reminiscent of Simone de Beauvoir's autobiographical writings, which I have enjoyed immensely since I first read her at the tender and impressionable age of seventeen. She was certainly a cold and calculating fish, but possessed of an intellectual vigour (and rigour) that is missing in Athill. I must start reading de Beauvoir again soon.

Mmmmmm.....New Greek Lexicon....

Blimey! Returned the university library copy of the Patristic Greek Lexicon to them by post today......as it weighs nearly 3kg it was NOT cheap, not even sending it by Parcelforce 48hr. Still, it's cheaper than the train fare to the midlands. By an elegant coincidence, just as I was about to leave for the post office, the DHL van arrived to deliver MY OWN COPY OF IT!!!!! Yes - I bit the very expensive bullet, courtesy of my anticipated funding, and now have a Lampe of my own to illuminate my reading. Mmmm...brand new book with crisp clean pages......mmmm.......small Greek text......mmmm!

Egypt Calls

The library's recall of Lampe's Patristic Lexicon has left me in a bit of an expensive quandary: to buy my own copy or not? It's vastly expensive, but I could spend pounds and pounds if I indulge in constantly recalling it myself for redelivery. Would that there was an online version! If I don't eat for a month or two......

I've been reading, in a very desultory fashion, C.J.Sansom's Revelation......and to be honest I'm not really getting into it. Maybe it's the 'historical mystery' genre ('Morse in hose', as the hero has been dubbed) - not really my thing although I really enjoyed The Dante Club by Matthew Pearl - but I think that I'm not really enjoying the way that it's written....it seems almost too straightforward and clear, almost as if it were written for teenagers. Writing by numbers, if you like. I probably won't persist as I picked up a copy of Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet and, having read the first few pages the quality of the prose just hit me between the eyes. Fantastic! The languourousness of humid Alexandria reminds me (unsurprisingly) of Naguib Mahfouz' Cairo Trilogy which are among my absolute favourite books. It makes me want to read the poems of Constantine Cavafy again.I hope I'll be eventually able to source a charity shop copy of my own. Still waiting for Sum to arrive, but when it does, I can slot the separate tales between the Durrell chapters.

An Old Man: by Constantine Cavafy.

At the noisy end of the cafe,

head bent over the table, an old man sits alone,

a newspaper in front of him.

And in the miserable banality of old age

he thinks how little he enjoyed the years

when he had strength, eloquence, and looks.

He knows he's aged a lot: he sees it, feels it.

Yet it seems he was young just yesterday.

So brief an interval, so brief.

And he thinks of Prudence, how it fooled him,

how he always believed - what madness -

that cheat who said: "Tomorrow. You have plenty of time."

He remembers impulses bridled, the joy he sacrificed.

Every chance he lost

now mocks his senseless caution.

But so much thinking, so much remembering

makes the old man dizzy. He falls asleep,

his head resting on the cafe table.

Night Train to the Afterlife

My bed-time reading recently has been Pascal Mercier's Night Train to Lisbon. I bought it on the strength that it was very cheap when bought with the Times newspaper (£1.99 or £2.99....I can't remember) and had a glowing recommendation from Isabel Allende on the cover (' A treat for the mind' or somesuch, I can't be bothered to go upstairs and look). I've been reading it for ages and ages, a small morsel at a time. It's one of those slow burners that, even after finishing it, I'm not quite sure whether I enjoyed it or not, although when I'd finally closed the cover, I knew I'd miss it. Looking at the reader reviews on Amazon it seems that opinions on it vary widely: some people hated it, thought it was dull, stodgy, had a boring hero, that nothing happens etc., but some people gave it five stars and loved it for its glacial pace and introspection. Many commented on the poor translation from the original, but it was not something that troubled me too much. I think the whole message of the novel is that life is all about the journey, not the end destination. Poor little, boring, troubled 'Mundus' was like a worm wriggling miserably on the hook of its existence: the brief intrusion on his life by the (suicidal?) Portuguese woman coupled with the discovery of the luminous and mysterious Prado's book at the bookseller's had the effect of opening up a world of possibilities and other lives that, having had a glimpse of it, he could not bear to step away from. But he is subject to the 'Bell Jar' effect (see Sylvia Plath's book of the same name): We humans cannot escape ourselves by changing location: we carry our stale lives' atmosphere around with us, our fears, hang-ups, paranoias, shyness, whatever. They taint the freshness of wherever we go, so that it is no longer the place we originally and fondly perceived it to be.
Nicholas Lezard's paperback choice of the week, David Eagleman's Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlife, reviewed in the Guardian newspaper last Saturday certainly struck a few chords with me and slotted right into my current interest in, and studies of, the hereafter. Eagleman seems an intriguing prospect as an author- a neuroscientist who writes in a style reminiscent of Jorge Luis Borges (whose work I just loved and devoured last year). The premise is '40 different versions of our post-life existence.....skits on the conundrums of creation itself...God, variously imagined as male, female, non-existent or concerned only with microbes...is, as often as not, in despair at how imperfect everything is, how the best intentions can go wrong...These are stories that tell us how to live our life now, to appreciate, indeed treasure, our sublunar existence...'

(never mind skipping off on pointless and unneccessary quests, touting our pack of misery with us). Needless to say, I have ordered it.
Given that there are forty separate morsels, I intend to read it over the space of forty days...a biblical concept if ever there was one

The Comfort of Job

Can't resist an ICC commentary! Picked up a 1921 copy of 'A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Book of Job' by Samuel Rolles Driver and George Buchanan Grey from the Barbican Bookshop. It's in pretty good condition, a bit faded and musty, but most of the pages are still uncut along the top edge, so I'm guessing that it hasn't had much use unless the previous owners were content to peer into the pages! I'm particularly keen on examining the language of Job's hope for post-death vindication, but that'll have to wait a wee while until I've incorporated some of Albert Schweizer's ideas (from The Mysticism of Paul the Apostle) into my study of Pauline eschatology. It's an amazing book: I can't quite understand why the university have relegated to the storeroom. However, I'm going to have to read Kasemann on Schweizer. No doubt I'll find all my current ideas turned upside-down!

Daniel and Decisions

Studying the Book of Enoch has lead me onto the Book of Daniel. The ever-brilliant Barbican Bookshop has a large selection of International Critical Commentaries at the moment (some in considerably better condition than others!) including a pristine commentary by James Montgomery on Daniel. Not the most modern commentary on the market, but very useful as it contains a great deal of textual detail. The wonderful news that I am to receive funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council for my doctoral studies means that a whole new world of book-buying will open up for me come October. I scarcely know where to start: One biggie that I surely want is the IVP Dictionary of New Testament Backgrounds edited by Stanley Porter, another possibly my own copy of Lampe's Patristic Greek Lexicon. Decisions, decisions.....

Too Hot to Blog

This is why the continentals are so laid back.......the glorious sunshine and high (for us)temperatures disincline computer use. And the lap-top screen can't be seen very well outside, so blogging will be kept to a minimum for the duration. Suffice to say that I have sourced a 1917 translation of The Book of Enoch (Ethiopic), which I have been reading in the shade of the vine-covered pergola. It's lovely and mesmeric stuff, full of arresting imagery, that meanders through the heavens and the underworld as Enoch reveals his visions:

'And I proceeded and saw a place which burns day and night, where there are seven mountains of magnificent stones, three towards the east, and three towards the south. And as for those towards the east, one was of coloured stone, and one of pearl, and one of jacinth, and those towards the south of red stone.
But the middle one reached to heaven like the throne of God, of alabaster, and the summit of the throne was of sapphire. And I saw a flaming fire. And beyond these mountains Is a region the end of the great earth: there the heavens were completed. And I saw a deep abyss, with columns of heavenly fire, and among them I saw columns of fire fall, which were beyond measure alike towards the height and towards the depth. And beyond that abyss I saw a place which had no firmament of the heaven above, and no firmly founded earth beneath it: there was no water upon it, and no birds, but it was a waste and horrible place. I saw there seven stars like great burning mountains, and to me, when I inquired regarding them, The angel said: 'This place is the end of heaven and earth: this has become a prison for the stars and the host of heaven. And the stars which roll over the fire are they which have transgressed the commandment of the Lord in the beginning of their rising, because they did not come forth at their appointed times. And He was wroth with them, and bound them till the time when their guilt should be consummated (even) for ten thousand years.'

The Book of Enoch is seminal in that it is from here that the designation 'Son of Man' (as seen in the Matthaean Gospel) comes.

'And this Son of Man whom thou hast seen shall raise up the kings and the mighty from their seats,[and the strong from their thrones] and shall loosen the reins of the strong, and break the teeth of the sinners. [And he shall put down the kings from their thrones and kingdoms] b ecause they do not extol and praise Him, nor humbly acknowledge whence the kingdom was bestowed upon them. And he shall put down the countenance of the strong, and shall fill them with shame. And darkness shall be their dwelling, and worms shall be their bed, and they shall have no hope of rising from their beds, because they do not extol the name of the Lord of Spirits.'

As I am tracing the concept of the underworld and resurrection at the moment, this is all fantastic stuff and this text is referred to constantly in the Schweizer book (The Mysticism of Paul the Apostle) that constitutes my current reading first thing in the morning. But my favourite verses are the ones that refer to the dwelling-place of Wisdom ( as usual, a female personification):

'Wisdom found no place where she might dwell; Then a dwelling-place was assigned her in the heavens.
Wisdom went forth to make her dwelling among the children of men, and found no dwelling-place:
Wisdom returned to her place, and took her seat among the angels.
And unrighteousness went forth from her chambers: Whom she sought not she found, and dwelt with them,
As rain in a desert and dew on a thirsty land.'

Fantastic!

A Lampe to Read By

The courier has just brought me G W H Lampe's Patristic Greek Lexicon from the uni. library. How exciting! It's actually not as old as I'd imagined it to be: I thought Lampe was some bewhiskered Victorian clergyman-scholar, but in fact the publication date is 1961. Being an OUP publication, it's very much like my large Liddell-Scott-Jones in format (not quite so bulky though), but of course specialises in theological and ecclesiastical vocabulary, so I don't have to wade through all the classical forms and definitions first. I can't wait to get started!

The Mysticism of Paul the Apostle

Albert Schweizer's The Mysticism of Paul the Apostle. Uncanny. I was looking for this in the uni library catalogue a couple of weeks ago and found that it had been relegated to the card indices and stores. And there it was today, up the winding stairs of the Minster Gates Bookshop (the bookshop that I'd most like to own because of its location adjacent the Minster). At £10, it has actually broken the bank, but I couldn't not buy it, could I? Call it serendipity, karma, whatever...

The Valley of Dry Bones

Currently occupied in tracing the development of the afterlife in Judaism, I find myself engaged with Ezekiel's 'Valley of Dry Bones'. Whereas She'ol is had generally been understood as beyond the dominion of YHWH, in chapter 37 of the Book of Ezekiel describes God's power through prophesy to clothe the dead bones and restore breath to the bodies. I need to look thoroughly at the language used in the Septuagint. I knew that the good old Barbican Bookshop had a rather elderly copy of an ICC Ezekiel, so I called in to see whether it was still on their shelves. It was, so I bought it. It's vintage stuff: first published in 1936 (although I have the 1960 reprint), Cooke's commentary 'keeps the Hebraist in view' and each section is most usefully followed with a page or two of detailed textual notes, including readings from the LXX. Marvellous stuff. Whilst there I happened to see another ICC volume: Abbott's 1897 (although mine must be a reprint) commentary on Ephesians and Colossians. I've generally avoided anything on the deutero-Pauline epistles thus far, and really only purchased it because of the library plate on the fly-leaf:

'This book is the property of

The Hoult Library

Free Methodist Church

New Mills. Derbyshire

and is on loan to

Rev. Keith Beckingham

as long as required.'

Wouldn't like to be paying his fine.....!

Am also currently waiting delivery of Lampe's Patristic Greek Lexicon from the university library. I imagine that it's quite a hefty tome - although probably not quite as large as my LSJ 9th edition. I couldn't find it when I was down there the other week, but even if I had, I probably could not have managed to hump it all the way back home on the train. My neck was cricked enough after filling my back-pack to capacity with impulse borrowings. Seven pound fifty is a bargain for door-to-door delivery.

The illustration at the top is one of my favourite pre-Raphaelite paintings by one of their lesser-known brethren Henry Alexander Bowler. Painted in 1855, it is titled The Doubt: Can These Dry Bones Live? (on display in theTate Collection). This is a quotation from Ezekiel which describes God showing Ezekiel the valley of dry bones. The butterfly, resting on the skull of John Faithful, is a traditional symbol of the Resurrection. The word ‘Resurgam’ is inscribed on the headstone, and translates as ‘I shall rise again’. It is typical of the Victorian tendency towards maudlin sentiment, but I just love the delicately backlit horse-chestnut leaves.

Gothic Urges

I was suddenly seized last week with the desire to have a look at the Gothic language (not the language of Goths, those black-clad pasty-faced miserablists....er, I mean alternative moodsters that blight bus-shelters and bung-up Subway). Having Googled to see what the preferred grammar on it was --- Joseph Wright's 1910 'Grammar of the Gothic Language' since you ask --- I happily remembered that I'd actually seen a second-hand copy in the local St Paul's book shop. Absolutely certain that nobody else in the whole wide world would ever dream of buying such a book, I confidently sauntered there to purchase the aforesaid. And would you believe it.....it had been SOLD!!!! WHAT!!! I thought there was only me who was interested in that sort of stuff. Obviously not....so that's a bit creepy. There's someone else like me about.

Saturday saw a rather satisfying padded envelope plop through the letterbox. Actually, it didn't plop.....it sort of squirmed its way through: undue wear and tear on the draught strip (caused by posties shoving packages through rather than spending a few extra seconds ringing the bell and handing it over face-to-face) means that anything fatter than your standard letter struggles to make its way through the slot. It was a copy of N.T.Wright's 'Paul in Fresh Perspective' the published and slightly tweaked collection of his Hulsean Lectures. Wright is a scholar who seems to sharply divide opinion and I look forward to reading his thoughts. When leafing through, I was amused to note that he accepts Ephesians and Colossians as part of the authentic Pauline corpus, and although he admits occasionally drawing upon them (and Acts) to illustrate a point, he generally confines himself to the 'undisputed' epistles. His reason for tentatively including the 'deutero-Paulines' is that - when push comes to shove - he feels he should 'conform to the episcopal stereotype'!!!

My early morning reading of late has been 'What Happens When We Die' by Dr Sam Parnia, a critical care doctor who has carried out extensive studies into Near Death and Out-of-Body experiences. Contrary to what you might imagine this was a very uplifting book: nearly all those who had undergone NDEs (bright light, tunnel, assembled relatives, angelic guides etc) remembered their experiences as positive, comforting and life changing - regardless of their religion, spirituality or lack of it. Parnia examines the theoretical possibilities of such common ground - the 'dying brain' scenario being the one most favoured at this point: the brain, starved of oxygen releases chemicals that trigger feelings of euphoric contentment. But it is his examination of consciousness that was most interesting, in that there is nothing in the brain that can, in itself, be 'fingered' as the generator of the consciousness. Just because the brain manifests consciousness does not mean that it initiates it, very much as a TV set manifests images that do not actually originate from its working parts. And seeing which parts of the brain light up in a scan when it is subjected to certain stimuli does not mean that they are actually the source of the emotions felt. Parnia seems to think that mankind does not have the wherewithal to explain consciousness as yet, just as the 18th century scientists knew that there was a form of energy that we now understand as electromagnetism, but that they were then unable to assimilate. Fascinating stuff.

Less strenuous bedtime reading has recently consisted of Marina Lewycka's 'Two Caravans', an engaging tale of immigrant agricultural workers who risk every kind of economic exploitation in their pursuit of a 'better life'. The lasting legacy of this book is a desire to avoid processed chicken of any sort (read it and you'll see why....).

I've also really enjoyed Moshin Hamid's 'The Reluctant Fundamentalist'. The unusual literary device of addressing the non-responsive reader in the second person, plus his cool, precise prose makes this book one of my favourite reads of this year so far, even if I anticipated the ending motif somewhat in advance.

I also have to admit to buying the Saint Jerome Daily Missal that I caught sight of a few months back. As it is now post-Easter and the volume runs from Low Sunday until July 31st, I felt sort-of justified. What swayed my decision to purchase was its illustrations - beautifully stark wood-cuts (of a type much-favoured in the sixties) by the Dutch artist Jan Sleper. It is a piece of artwork that is a joy to own.

A trip down to uni. meant some time spent in the smaller of its libraries and a heavy backpack full of books to lug around for the rest of the day. I'd only noted a couple of titles to pick up (Kasemann's and Cranfield's commentaries on Romans), but like a child in a sweet shop I kept seeing books that I just knew would 'come in handy' and, as the account limit is twenty books at any one time, I went for it big time. This means that I have an enormous pile of stuff to wade through for material. Hey ho! Time to crank up the reading hours again!