Phrases from Homer to Incorporate into Daily Conversation

nothing loath (=quickly)
Now tell me, and tell me true . . .
. . . and his armor rang rattling around him as he fell (This one will have to go into the file with "I threw down my enemy and smote his ruin on the mountainside"--someday I will bust this out. Someday. And it will be awesome.)
vouchsafe X to Y
Tell me, O Muse . . .
and while he was thus in two minds . . .
and they put their hands on the good things before them
the blessed boon of sleep
the child of Morning, rosy-fingered Dawn

Reviewing the Iliad

I’ve been listening to the Librivox recording of the Iliad during my household chores. I’m really enjoying it, despite the unevenness of the readers (Pete Darby, yay! Hugh Mac, your talents lie elsewhere).

I can’t help but compare it with that other great work of the ancient world, the one with which I am much more familiar. You know, the Hebrew Bible. There’s really very little in common between the two, except for one episode: 2 Samuel 2:12-32 feels reminiscent of the Iliad, what with the fighting, the spoiling, the speeches in the midst of battle.

But anyone who thinks of “the Old Testament God,” or of the Old Testament itself, as bloodthirsty . . . well, one wonders if they’ve examined the competition.

The Iliad, like the Bible, also uses a lot of stock phrases: So-and-so kills such-and-such, “and his armor rang rattling around him as he fell heavily to the ground.” There are maybe a half dozen of these phrases that Homer cycles through to describe somebody biting the dust (actually, “he bit the dust” is used now and then in the text—yes, there was a time when this wasn’t a cliché). I enjoy this stable of phrases, but some people apparently find them irritating. (Scroll down to the review entitled “One of the most important works of literature ever - and a damned good read too” for some unintentional humor.)

Last night the idea for a game based on the Iliad came to me in a dream. I still haven't perfected my game based on the wars of Alexander the Great's successors, but the Iliad one is simpler . . . I know what I'll be working on over Thanksgiving.

For some reason, this kind of argument (X has an ungodly/pagan origin and is thus unacceptable for Christians) drives me insane. See also, Al Mohler on yoga, Frank Viola on "the institutional church." (As an aside, Viola claims that he doesn't reject ideas just because they're pagan. Well, that's the impression I got from reading Pagan Christianity. In fact, I'd call that list of "straw men" an accurate summary of the book's theses.)

Now that I've asserted but not argued anything, I'll drift on to other points, if you don't mind.

My parents and their home church rejected Halloween because of its pagan origins. I heard some great, lurid stories about the origins of jack-o-lanterns and trick or treat.

I call the stories "great" with only partial irony. Now they sound to me like folk etymologies, but I was interested in them at the time. I was in a phase when I wanted to find out the etymon, the true origin, of everything—words, names, symbols, customs.

There is a perennial attraction to the quest for the etymon, a feeling that once you find it, you’ve grasped true meaning. I’m still very interested in etymons, but more because they often make for a good story than because they’re the key to ultimate meaning. The kind of meaning I find more relevant is how the word (name, custom) fits into the larger system. In anthropological terms, I’ve moved from James George Frazer to Claude Levi-Strauss. In linguistic terms, from Jakob Grimm to Ferdinand de Saussure.

Take yoga. The Christian anti-yogaists are dismayed that Christians would put their body in a pose dedicated to a Hindu god. The woman at the health club teaching a yoga class might not be a Hindu. She might not even know anything about the pose's link to a deity. But if you go back far enough, the argument goes, the etymon lies in pagan worship. So the yoga pose *means* devotion to another god. Taking on the pose is like speaking praise of that god, which a Christian should not do.
If the etymon of the yoga pose truly lies in pagan worship, that would be an interesting story. I have my doubts whether the story is true. If I were in a real argument on the topic, I'd like to see some non-polemical scholarship on the question. But would such an etymology imply that the pose *means* pagan worship?
I was thinking that it could mean such a thing in a sacramental view of the world. Sacramentalism does emphasize that we're not disembodied minds, that what we do with our bodies has spiritual impact. But to call this position sacramental would be an insult to sacramentalism. Even in sacramentalism, the body cannot mean what the person as a whole does not mean. You could bless the public swimming pool on a hot day in July, but that doesn't mean all the swimmers become baptized.

Hence, I submit to you that to believe that yoga constitutes pagan worship isn't even sacramental. It's purely magical. It's a pagan idea if there ever was one. (Look, the argument just folded in on itself!)

At some point I stopped despising earlier Christians for the pagan customs they retained/redeemed—and started admiring them for their audacity. (This is one of the things that made Chesterton my homeboy, finding that he had this attitude.) Maybe it had something to do with learning about all the good things in my life that had “bad” backgrounds—Christmas trees, Easter eggs, eeny meeny miny moe, the European settlement of America, most of the names of God . . .

If you want to reject everything with a tainted origin, what will you be left with? Utopia, I suppose. Nowhere to stand.

Medieval Mentality

From a review of Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin:

Perhaps we need a new word, one that is broader than the current definition of genocide and means, simply, “mass murder carried out for political reasons.”

My first thought on reading this sentence was, "Isn't all war 'mass murder carried out for political reasons'?" If the international community is to allow war but criminalize some mass murders, what makes the criminal ones criminal?

My second thought (and now you're going to laugh) is that the difference between war and criminal war is . . . chivalry.

Jesus and Violence

Heh:

In an interview several years ago for Relevant Magazine, Mark Driscoll (well known pastor of Mars Hill in Seattle) said,

“In Revelation, Jesus is a prize-fighter with a tattoo down His leg, a sword in His hand and the commitment to make someone bleed. That is the guy I can worship. I cannot worship the hippie, diaper, halo Christ because I cannot worship a guy I can beat up.” (You can find the original interview here).

I frankly have trouble understanding how a follower of Jesus could find himself unable to worship a guy he could “beat up” when he already crucified him.

Now I'm going to have "The Hammer" in my head all day. HT: Matt Tebbe

"What a blessing it will be to attend a banquet in the Kingdom of God!"

Is it sacrilegious to say that the wine at last Sunday's Eucharist was particularly excellent?

I don't think so. The Eucharist is many things simultaneously. Among those things, it is a foretaste of the Messiah's banquet. And we know that the Messiah serves the good stuff.

George Clooney's Secret

He's really Peter Sagal.

Wasting Time and Money

Mrs. Chaka and I have made the dangerous discovery of two hours of Star Trek (TOS and TNG) being broadcast each night. Last night's episodes (The Changeling and Emergence) were somehow archetypal; each embraced all the joys and absurdities of its respective series.

It's always amusing to see how dated the future is. The Changeling made frequent reference to data being stored on "tapes". Then again, in Emergence, Dr. Crusher had a pretty cool blue iPad.

Oh, and I had a Double Down a week ago. Definitely not worth the price of admission.

Spite Food

I read (on the Wait Wait Don't Tell Me blog) that KFC introduced the Double Down because of complaints that there wasn't enough chicken in their chicken sandwich. If true, it places the Double Down in that delightful genre, Spite Food.

Potato chips are the best-known example of Spite Food. To quote the Wikipedia article:

"The original potato chip recipe was created by George Crum, the son of an African American father and Native American mother, in Saratoga Springs, New York on August 24, 1853.^{[citation needed]} Fed up with a customer who continued to send his fried potatoes back complaining that they were too thick and soggy, Crum decided to slice the potatoes so thin that they could not be eaten with a fork. As they could not be fried normally in a pan, he decided to stir-fry the potato slices. Against Crum's expectation, the guest was ecstatic about the new chips."

I'm still hoping to eat one of those Double Downs; haven't got to it yet.

Endless Rain

Blogging has suffered, what with the moving house, the many calls to AT&T trying to convince them to take my money, the computer dying, etc. But I just discovered this and had to blog it:

YouTube Repeat!

Insert the word "repeat" into a YouTube URL before the ".com" and the video will loop endlessly. I'm using it to listen to this over and over. Helps me focus on the giant pile of work.

Wading through Stacks

Adam Graber directed me to this New York Times article about the consequences of digital (and hence, mashable) texts. The whole thing is interesting in its entirety, but what drew my attention was this quote:

“Online research enables scholars to power-search for nuggets of information that might support their theses, saving them the time of wading through stacks of material that might prove marginal but that might have also prompted them to reconsider or refine their original thinking.”

This strikes me as a very real problem. It’s really easy to be a bad scholar. The task of refining your thinking and mastering your subject requires time, focus, and discipline—three things we have in short supply. For all their benefits, digital texts make it easier to veil poor thinking and inadequate mastery of the subject. The power of machine searching delivers a trade-off: a vastly greater pool of data with a vastly more superficial grasp of it. The efficiency of search obsoletes that horribly inefficient part of research, “wading through stacks of material.”

(Perhaps I should qualify my pronouncements: I obviously speak for myself, not for all of academia. My academic credentials amount to a master’s degree and a single journal article*. The temptations and follies I describe are my own.)

A few weeks later, Adam noted that Oxford University Press is trying to address these concerns. In brief, they’re producing “a straightforward, hyperlinked collection of professionally-produced, peer-reviewed bibliographies in different subject areas—sort of a giant, interactive syllabus put together by OUP and teams of scholars in different disciplines.”

The Oxford Bibliographies will no doubt have efficient search capabilities, quick retrieval of the desired documents, and a large pool of data in one place. But by foregrounding the texts that scholars have judged most important, they encourage you to wade through material that should be known, even (especially?) if it’s irrelevant or destructive to your thesis.

As you can tell, I like this image of “wading through stacks.” It sounds like a mixed metaphor, but it makes me think of walking the key shelves in the library stacks. The mass of (potentially) relevant titles thicken the air in that spot, slowing your pace to a shuffle. You look up and down the shelf, pulling out a volume, browsing, letting your mind quicken as your feet slow.

Interestingly, the library in which I picture myself wading like this is the University of Edinburgh library, where I spent a mere six months (as opposed to the four years at the University of Minnesota and three years at Trinity University). I suppose it’s related to the fact that British syllabi encourage more wading. Instead of telling you about the five required books and when you’re supposed to read each chapter, British syllabi give you a list of forty books and tell you to have fun. Read around, master the subject, and at the end of term, write a big old essay about the subject (which will be 100% of your grade for the course).

In my experience, this system results in lower grades but better habits.

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*Forthcoming :-)

"It made me feel significant and connected to ancient traditions"

A little satire on Philippe the Postmodern Evangelist:

"Read it again, more slowly this time. I want to hear the poetic forms and imagine myself in the context of the ancient tradition."

That cuts close, that does.

HT: Lingamish

KFC's Double Down

This makes me feel so conflicted about being an American. Disgusted? To a point. Proud of my country? Absolutely.