자유부인

이러한 신파극에 의미가 숨어있을까요? 한형모 감독이 그런 목표로 촬영했는지 아니면 그냥 이익을 위해서 했는지 잘 모르겠지만 뒤늦게 보면 사회적인 영향을 받았다는 게 확실이다.  감독이 사회적인 영향을  일부로 강화하든 함부로 하든 결국은 마찬가지다.

자유부인에 무슨 영향이 미치냐면 작품명과 동일 한 자유가 아니다.  오히려 자유는 한국 부인을 부패하게 만드는 것으로 다루고 있다.  파방판에는 그 부패된 부인을 가부장제만 살려줄 수 있다.  그래서 이 작품에 "자유가 위험하다"는 의미가 숨어있다고 할 수 있다.

아직도 자유부인의 자손된 현재 한국 드라마에 같은 가부장제를 강화하는 내용을 찾기 어렵지 않다.  자유러운 여자가 남자 없이 잘 사는 장면을 언제 까지 기다려야 할 건가?

연세대학교 출판부: 주제가 있는 한국어 읽기 (5급)

다음달의 한국어 능력시험에 신청했다.  더 이상 미루면 그냥 쓸모없는 흔해빠진 중년 백인 아저씨가 됬다고 할 수 있을까 걱정이 돼서 마침내 마음을 먹었다.  생각 보다 무서운 일이네.  시험을 본 후 4급으로 나오면 그 지난 8년 낭비한 셈이다. 사실 온 지 8년이 됐어도 아직 실력이 낮은 것에 부끄럽다. 

그래서 이 책을읽은것이다. 읽어보니 더 무서워졌다.  시간 제안 없어도 이해하기 어렵다면 현실 시험은 어떻게? 특히 마지막 장인 "서편제"에 내용 이해 질문을 맞기는 커녕 등장인물 몇 명이 있는지를 말 할 수 없겠다. 

제 언어 습득에 어려운 당계를 당도한 것 같다.  앞에 지름길이 없겠으니 열심히 공부 하기 밖에 방법이 없다.

Amy B.M. Tsui: Understanding Expertise in Teaching

The problem with this sort of academic writing is summed up in something one of my favorite professors, 조현용 once said (roughly translated): "Academic writing requires you to write 30 pages for the right to propose a single line."  And that's basically what Tsui has dutifully done here.  I will save you all the trouble of reading the "30 pages" of theoretical underpinnings, research methodologies, and background information, and skip directly to the "single line", the kernel of insight that she had to work so hard to justify proposing:

"The findings of the case studies suggest that the critical difference between experts and nonexperts is not that the former solve more and more problems, because problems often do not present themselves as such.  It is their capability to 'see' what appears to be unproblematic as problems that distinguishes them from nonexperts" (271).

This insightful distinction, not between experts and novices, but between experts and experienced nonexperts, is at the heart of this research.  The ability to problematize, analyze, and improve things that experienced nonexperts would view as "ain't broke" is what makes a true expert, in teaching and presumably across fields.  While I find myself woefully short of expert in many ways, this salient perspective identifies a way forward and offers a way around the trap of becoming just another mediocre white guy teaching English in East Asia.

Friedrich Nietzsche: Thus Spoke Zarathustra

There seem to be two things that people get wildly, carelessly wrong about Nietzsche--the sort of ignorance that comes from having read a few decontextualized quotes or believed one's undergraduate intro to philosophy class a little too willingly.  The first is that Nietzsche is a philosopher at all.  There are no reasoned propositions here, no analyses, proofs, or theses to be found.  This is poetry first, and philosophy only insofar as all poetry has a secondary claim to that label.  This book, and what little else of his I've read, is neither rational nor objective, but the pure and beautiful wailing of an anguished spirit, put into words where such should have been impossible.

Which leads rather naturally to the second thing people--by which I chiefly mean tepid, unremarkable straight white men with a desire to appear profound but nothing interesting of their own to say--get wrong about Nietzsche.  If one approaches a book like this with a meatheaded belief that it will be philosophy, the natural next question is, "What school of philosophy is it?  What label can I put on it, and then on myself to spare me the realization that I have nothing interesting to say?"  The answer that some come up with to that question is "Nihilism", a term which then gets further warped into "belief in nothing", and ultimately results in conveniently unassailable laziness.

But to assert that Nietzsche believed in nothing is manifestly ludicrous.  The passion with which this book seethes is in stark contrast to the numb, mushy life that so many who say they embrace Nietzsche live.  Nietzsche believes, not in nothing, but in nothingness: in the wild and creative power of the void.  When he wrote in "Beyond Good and Evil" that if you "gaze long into the abyss, the abyss also gazes into you", he was referring to its power, not its danger.

That abyss, void, longing, desire, against which so many rail and resist is for Nietzsche not an enemy.  The gaping maw that yawns at our core is terrifying, and so many make the mistake of fleeing from it, covering it up, or trying to fill its insatiable mouth.  Its hunger begs to be satisfied, but is there a more Sisyphean task?  The desire of the abyss cannot be silenced, and neither is it meant to be.  That desire is the reason for its existence, and it is out of that desire, if we stop and gaze, that truth comes.  The abyss does not devour; it delivers.  It does not consume; it creates.

How ludicrous to suppose that Zarathustra in this book--and Nietzsche, to the extent the two overlap--have any truck with Buddhism.  The latter's dismissal of desire is completely incompatible with the former's embrace of it.  The sky calls to Zarathustra, to be sure: the soaring, liberating abandonment of this world's petty concerns.  But so does the earth call to him: desire, rage, and struggle.  There is an upward motion to our journey, an ascent to the peak of a mountain, at which point we have no choice but to sprout wings.  But there is also a going-under, a return to the darkness of discontent and agony, that is equally necessary.  It is this darkness, in fact, from which we get some of our truest light, if we can bear its gaze.  Wonderful things can come from the void, and Nietzsche here helps us to look at it without going mad, resting a comforting, but rough, hand on our shoulder as it opens up in us and produces, for example, verses like this of mine, a tribute to his vision:

Becoming a tree means grasping the earth, as surely as clutching the sun,
Seizing the soil for all that its worth, in the forest of two unfolding as one.

허영만: 식객

세상에 많은 재미없는 얘기 중 하나는 "지금 하는 걸 말고 우리옛날에 했던 걸 해라"는 얘기다.  시간이 흐르는 것과 마찬가지로 틀림 없이 모든 세대가 이런 말을 먼저 들어야 하고 마침네 해야한다. 그래서 "지금 먹는 음식 말고 우리 옛날에 먹었던 음식을 먹어라"는 책을 쓰려면, 이 뻔함을 어떻게 피할 수 있을까? 따분하고 재미없는 말을 재밌게 하는 방법은?

허영만 작가가 매체를 잘 산택한 것으로 이 도전에 성공했다.  만화의 특장은 독자의 방어를 낮추는 것이다.  아무리 교문적이라도, 글을 만화에 싸주면 광객이 잘 받을 것이다.  그러므로 이책에 담겨있는 역사, 요리법, 논평을 웃기고 담동적인 식사로 맛있게 먹었다.

하상욱: 서울 시 2

간결은 기지의 본질이라는 속담이있으므로 이책은 짧아도 기지로 가득해있다.  한국어의 많은 동음이의어, 동철이의어들의 도움을 받아 한 문장 속에 한 문단의 내용을 숨었다.  그러한 놀라운 정직성이 방패 세울 수 있기 전에 당도하여 골수에 사무치게 한다.  60% 웃기고 50% 현명하고 30% 통찰하고 30% 감정적이고 30% 그냥 설렁하며 단권에 두권의 보람이 있다.

김주영: 홍어

이 책을 불완전히 이해를 하는 것은 나의 즐거음에 장벽이 아니었다.  서양의 책을 읽는 것에 단어단어로 이해 해야 의미를 풀어 감상할 수 있다.  동양의 문학은 그렇게 읽으면 낭비다.  나무만 보고 숲을 보지 못하는 것이다.  나는 이책을 읽으면서 어떤 문장을 이해했고 어떤 다른 문장을 추측해서 해석했고, 또 다른 문장을 단어단어를 사전에 찾아보고 사투리 때문에 찾지 못 해서 포기 했다.  전체적인 소감은 쓰러져서 눈 더미에 빠진 것과 비슷하다.  눈송이들 모두다 유일무이하며 아름답지만 잠깐 추위를 느끼는 것도 알음답다.

Nashville

To the extent that the goal of art, in cinema or otherwise, is the clear and inexplicable crystallization of even the smallest moment of humanity, to exactly that extent this movie is a crowning glory.  To be sure, there are other goals of art: to tell a story, to inspire reaction, to simply exist in its beauty, and Nashville meets each of these goals almost as well.  But I can think of no other movie that captures and seals in amber exactly what it means to be a human the way this one does.  It tells no story completely, and doesn't need to.  It is unsatisfying and even ugly at times.  It means at once nothing and everything.  I am not any of the characters in this movie; I cannot relate to them at all.  I am instead the movie itself: a dizzying medley of experiences and stories that mean nothing individually, but everything in their whole.

Luigi Pirandello: The Late Mattia Pascal

What a joy and what a mercy it is to be free.  To be free from the limits of interpretation, to not ask "What does it mean?", and to experience a book as an event, rather than as a coded message of some sort, how lovely and kind.

And yet, as the title character found in his adventures here, every freedom is a tyranny of its own.  Yes, he loosed himself from the bonds of family, duty, and obligation; he escaped from the prison of his life.  But this freedom closed off to him that which he really wanted: stability, connection, and especially love.  He set about painting a new picture of himself, and, "determined to begin  new life from this point, [he] was filled and uplifted by a fresh infantile happiness" (83). Nonetheless, he found himself staring at the unfinished, unfinishable portrait of himself and growling at it, much as Pepita did later in the book (201).

Reading this book on its own terms, in perhaps something approaching an Asian style, I found myself immersed in its world, and as often happens, let the book escape from itself and read me back, even reading the other books I was working through with me.  But what did it mean?  Why did I read it?  Am I missing something, perhaps hidden in Paleari's theories of light and darkness (114-16)? Is the life that I have reconstructed to escape my former life as hopelessly untethered to reality as that of Adriano Meis?

Igor Stravinsky: An Autobiography

This is exactly what a memoir should be.  Stravinsky's approach to the recounting of his life is directly in line with his approach to music.  Of the latter, he says: "The interpreter, of necessity can think of nothing but interpretation, and thus takes on the garb of a translator . . . this is an absurdity in music" (34).  He later explains, "All these misunderstandings arise from the fact that people will always insist upon looking in music for something that is not there.  The main thing for them is to know what the piece expresses . . . They never seem to understand that music has an entity of its own apart form anything that it may suggest to them" (162). 

And it is the same objectivity that Stravinsky demands in music that he brings to narrative.  The reader of his autobiography "will not have found any lyrical outpourings or intimate confessions" (174).  Said reader will merely find a very straightforward account of his life, complete with colorful anecdotes.  What does that, or any, life mean?  One can no more answer life than one can answer music.  Both simply are, and must be appreciated and experienced on their own terms.

Slavoj Žižek: Trouble in Paradise

At first I gave this lecture the benefit of the doubt.  Perhaps it was merely my expectation of a Western/English discourse pattern that made it feel jumbled, pointless, obscure.  Slavic/Russian discourse patterns often appear inconsistent to us imperialist Yankees.  Perhaps what I perceived as self-indulgent and pompous was only so seen through my conditioning.  Was I being a bad global citizen, imposing my American expatations [sic] on  world literature?  Were the blinders that kept me from enjoying this book also limiting my access to other literature?

Perhaps the above accusations are well-founded.  But the moment Žižek stooped to defend himself against his detractors, he revealed my reaction to be at least partially warranted.  If he had not quoted one of of his critics as saying "Žižek is once again making a muddled word salad in an attempt to dress up commonplaces as profundity" (207), I might not have found the confidence to believe my own assessment, or the words to express it. 

But while Žižek's "word salad" is indeed without purpose, other than seemingly to convince himself that he is worth listening to, the individual ingredients in that salad were quite tasty.  As with so many other silly, autoerotic contemporary scholars, they often strike a point that is relevant, and occasionally even original.  If only these few moments were developed, distilled, and extrapolated; if only they were the main dish, instead of garnishes meant to lend an otherwise bald and aimless diatribe an air of legitimacy, then I would be swayed, rather than swyven.

Giorgio Vasari: The Lives of the Artists

I wonder if Vasari was satisfied with his life.  Here we have a seminal work, indispensable to historians, art and otherwise, filled with delightful and quirky anecdotes that are seemingly found nowhere else.  And neither does he seem to have been the sort of creator who was unappreciated in his own time, apparently on friendly terms with the some of the greatest minds and artists of all human history.

Was it enough for him?  Was he content to have documented the lives of these demigods, knowing full well he would never be one of them?  If something of him still remains among us, is he upset or content that his name is known only as a writer, not as an artist, and that by only a small fraction of a fraction of people?

If it is any consolation, Vasari, I am glad to have met you.  You seem to have been a pretty unremarkable fellow, and both your writing and your art leave something to be desired.  But fate dropped you in your proper slot, and you did what was required of you.  One could wish for nothing more.

Benjamin Law: Gaysia

Reading this delightful, if harmless, item left me filled with emotions.  There were those the book intended to inspire--sympathy, hope, pity, and awe--but I also experienced plenty that were likely less intended: jealousy, judgement, and bitterness.  Law's breezy, aphoristic style only occasionally betrays the effort of coming up with original ways to describe his experiences (one of my favorite examples: "I spent the evening rushing to the toilet every hour, close to tears, leaking what felt like hot soup.  It was if my guts had become a faucet of horror, passionately rejecting something evil inside me [274]). His way with words, his access to the resources necessary for such a journey, his constant reference to his skinny, youthful body and "criminally handsome boyfriend", all overlaid the reading with a hunger on the part of this reader that was uncomfortable and cowing.  It was a good book.  He seems like a good guy.  I'm happy for him.  I am.

Al-Baqarah

1: I'm only on the first verse of this book, it is only three letters long: الم, and I have spent nearly thirty minutes pondering it.  Suffice it to say that the Al-Muqattaat have captured my attention and imagination, and I am eager to see what they reveal.  They beckon me in the same way that the void does, with the promise to reveal.

2: I refuse to get my hopes up that that this book will actually offer a sunnatullah, an explanation of the actual mechanics of things.  But I am not above imagining if it did.

3: The insistence on unrequited spending of one's essence already sets this book at odds with the majority of The Bible, which makes worship far more transactional.  Who is the We, here, however, and why are they capitalized?

4: I believe in nothing else than what has been revealed to me from my essence.

5: To make an attempt at applying this verse seems premature in this reading, but it could not be more in line with my own current thoughts about the definition of success.  To perceive and love the individual expression of a universal truth that one has come to name "I" (Rabb), and to extrapolate that perception and love into all reality (HUDA).

7: Here is a familiar thought, however.  This might as well have come directly from 1 Corinthians 3.  And I take the same exception with it as I do with that verse: if it is Allah who has veiled their insight, in what way is their suffering of their own desert?

8: A second mention of the divinity of the letter B, one that causes me to doubt the objectivity--though not the usefulness--of the Sufi translation I have received.  This addition seems to be a liberty, and one with no perceptible corrolary in other translations or in the original Arabic.

10: Another verse with a strong corollary in Thessalonians 2:10.  It is out of line with what seems to be the Sufi interpretation of the Divine to say that it punishes one by amplifying imperfection.  Especially insofar as the sin in question is one of inability, not error.

11: This is a rather loaded verse.  I shudder to think how many harmful and mutually contradictory stances it could be used to justify.

12-15 This is an interesting way to begin a sacred text.  The Bible reserves these admonitions for Paul to deliver after corruption has reared its head, not as an introduction before the religion has even begun to exist.

16: I love this verse.  There are those who we rather be right than happy, and those who would rather have comfort than truth.  I hope that I am on the right, or at least the profitable, side of each of these equations.

17: Another beautiful and edifying observation.  There are those who can only see what is outside them, which is the same as seeing nothing at all.

20: I am becoming simultaneously more and less skeptical of this translation.  The substitution of "His Names Sami and Basir" for "hearing and sight" seems at once to be a liberty of interpretation, and a faithful nod to the layers of the language.

22: Whereas the liberties taken here are rather more without linguistic justification.  To add that setting up rivals to Allah is to fall into shirq is not at all present in the original text.  It is becoming necessary to reference two other versions of this book while reading Hulusi's "translation" because he is so unreliable in marking his additions.

23: But this extra effort is more than made up for by the attention he gives to perils of translation, such as his lengthy treatment here of دُون

25: Again, one of Hulusi's seeming liberties relates to the addition of Shirq.  There is no justification for the addition here, and it is a bald insertion of the assumption that purification is freedom from duality (a supportable liberty) and the corresponding transfer of that modifier from its original referent (أَزواجٌ) to another (وَهُم), which is entirely unsupportable.  And again, this seeming linguistic carelessness is balanced by a stimulating explication of the shades of meaning arising from the former.  If I were blessed with أَزواجٌ, it wouldn't matter to me in what sense of the word it came to me.

26: Certainly a parallel with 1 Cor 2:14, and compatible also with various Buddhist approaches.  The most fascinating implication, though, is Husuli's non-translation of رَبِّهِم, which in the other texts I'm referencing is "lord"but here appears simply as "Rabb".  According to his glossary, it is not simply the object of one's worship, but one's divinity in a precise sense: the unique way in which the divine is expressed in oneself. It's maddening to be at once furious with Hulusi for his seeming arrogance, and fascinated by what he reveals.  I would be unable to forgive this linguistic heresy if it were not so fascinating.

27: Here, Hulusi's interpretation requires no linguistic acrobatics to be justified, and one begins to see where he got it, though I still look at him askance for inserting it elsewhere.  The central conceit is that Allah is not a "He" or even an "It", but rather the state of perfect indivisibility. The "shirq" (I wish I knew how to write this in Arabic) that he keeps inserting elsewhere into the text is the corruption of duality, an idea which finds a very natural home in this verse.

28: This verse is ripe with layers of meaning, coming from the possible meanings of تَكفُرونَ. One translation renders it "disbelieve", another "be unfaithful".  Hulusi, in what is becoming a familiar fashion, goes further and injects "deny that that names of Allah comprise your essence".  Insofar as for him, the self is an expression of Allah, this makes perfect sense.  For this reader, admittedly susceptible to such an approach, it still doesn't justify the alterations made to the text.  I'm still fascinated by the puzzle of Hulusi's parenthetical (why are some of his additions parenthetical, and others treated as though there are in the original text?) fixation on the letter B.

29: And the subtleties of هُوَwould most definitely be overlooked if I had been relying on one of these other translations, without Hulusi's announcement that this is one of the Names of which he speaks.  Indeed, without his commentary, inexcusably invasive though it is, the Quran would indeed sound much like a generic religious text to me.  No wonder that all Muslims insist it can't be read in English.  Perhaps I can begin to ease up on him a bit.

30: Here's another place where other translations ("viceroy" and "successive authority") would have been meaningless without Hulusi's linguistically unjustifiable insertion of "conscious beings who will live with the awareness of the names".

31: There's a shift here that seems to mark a transition from invective to narrative.  If the preceding can be called an introduction, it's a very different one than is found in many other religious texts, and feels more well thought out.  A potentially revealing detail is that the Names which Adam is taught (and of which he is composed, according to Hulusi) get a feminine pronoun, while the referents of those names get a masculine pronoun.

32: It will be interesting to see if this is the final word in the opposition between men and angels, or if it's setting up a lengthier conflict.  At any rate, the angels in the Quran are much more flavorful than those in the Bible or Torah.  I like Hulusi's choice to leave  العَليمُ الحَكيمُ untranslated. The other translations I'm referencing render them "knowing" and "wise", which feels flat by comparison.

33: And Adam being invested with both the knowledge of the Names and entrusted with their transmission is another huge departure from the Biblical Adam, who is rather a schlub.

34: Here's the beginning of the conflict.  So much to unpack in this verse.  Iblis' sin is similar to that of Satan in that it comes from his arrogance, but there are two telling distinctions. Satan is framed as rebelling against God; Iblis is (so far at least) rebelling more against man.  Further, framing of egoism as the source of the conflict carries more meaning here, insofar that the first 30 verses have taken care to set up Allah as a manifestation of unity, and to caution against belief in separateness, division, and individuality.  Against this background, Iblis' problem is not that he wanted to be greater than others, as Satan did; Iblis problem is that he believes that such a thing--hierarchy, comparison, and separateness from the all--is even possible.

35: So much here as well.  The We is an important pronoun choice, as opposed to the I of the Bible, and more in keeping with the theme of multiplicity, infinity, and unity.  The sudden appearance of Adam's spouse, who seems to be given neither an origin, a name, nor a gender, lends itself to Hulusi's interpretation that it is not some "other" that he is to dwell with in peace; it is his life and condition.

36: The "all of you" here is frustrating in its seeming lack of referent.  Does it refer to Adam and his "other"? or is Satan included in the going down?  One tempting interpretation is that the one with whom Adam shares his condition and life in 35 is an aspect of himself, and the going down here is separation from that self.  By a similar token, what is the relationship between Satan and the Iblis of 34?  Is Allah not the only one with multiple names here?

37: Quite a turnaround from the Genesis account.  Adam is forgiven for his transgression, but not freed from its consequence: a separation from the paradisaical condition of unity.

38: I'm getting used to Hulusi's habit of leaving words with subtlety that would be damaged in translation untranslated.  This treatment of  هُدًى here prompts a little digging.  The word in question is translated as "guidance" in the other two translations I'm referencing, but it seems to also carry the sense of "gift" according to the dictionary.  Hulusi, of course, takes it to mean the comprehension of one's own reality, which would cover both meanings.

39: This is a verse where the three translations (Hulusi's and two other more conventional ones) diverge on a key point: the meaning of أَصحابُ.  Hulusi renders it "abide", and the other, unattributed translations choose "inmate" and "companion", a wide semantic gap.  From a strictly dictionary definition, a better translation might be "owners", which widens the gap even further.  I begin to forgive Hulusi for his liberties, insofar as its clear that all translation of the Quran must necessarily be an interpretation.  At least Hulusi is more or less transparent about it.

40: Wait, what?  Children of Israel? This is highly unexpected.  I had heard that Abraham et al were revered by Islam, but the writing of this book clearly took place in, and was intended for, nobody living in what we today call Israel.  I wonder if Muslim people consider themselves Children of Israel even today?  This is a point on which I expect far more to be revealed as I progress.

41: Another verse in which Hulusi's explanations are helpful but not to be taken too seriously.  His treatment of "what I have revealed" as the Quran, and "that which is with you" as the Torah makes perfect sense, but by no means the only possible interpretation.  And his translation  of وَإِيّايَ فَاتَّقونِ  as "protect yourself from me" is far more ominous than the "fear me" and "be wary of me" in other translations.

42: This verse is one of which the translations are far more consistent, and a very nice general rebuke of cognitive dissonance.

43: I am again appreciative of the choice here to leave الصَّلاةَ untranslated, for it seems to carry more meaning than just "prayer".  It's tempting to view this as the Islamic equivalent of Acts 15:28,29--namely, a simplification of what is required for believers.  By a similar token, "To bow with those who bow" asks to be taken as a parallel to Hebrews 10:25, although naturally Hulusi's explanation is far more metaphysical.

44: Perhaps I'm in a certain frame of mind as I read these verses, because I am again beset by the parallel to Acts 17:11.  It's interesting that the voice here keeps summoning Paul, rather than any Hebrew prophet.  At any rate, here is another marvelous and highly applicable verse.

45: I'm pleased with my decision to read this translation alongside two others, insofar as the interposition of "this is difficult for the ego" is entirely Hulusi's invention, but not clearly indicated as such.

46: Although the Sufi idea that Allah is a manifestation of one's Rabb is certainly a welcome one here, and no doubt casts the entire book in a light that I can appreciate, it's becoming exceendingly clear that it is not a mainstream Muslim idea.  I wonder if the Bible could benefit from a similar reading.  I certainly cannot overstate how appealing the idea of knowing my Rabb is.

47: Again, the Children of Israel are addressed, although their blessing is knowledge in the Sufi approach, not prosperity.

48: The idea that the day of judgement is the day of death, rather than the advent of a divine war, is certainly appealing in its obviousness and simplicity.

49: Whereas both of the other translations I'm referencing render رَبِّكُم as "Lord", here it is left as "Rabb", which in the Sufi perspective is not an external force, but the unique way in which the Names are manifested in you as an individual.  This approach opens up and degausses a whole range of interpretations, both of the Quran and of the Bible.

50: And it is in this verse that Hulusi's Sufi approach gains a little credence.  The most straightforward translation renders بِكُمُ as "for you", which is in line with the Pentateuch's narrative.  But Hulusi gives the much more wordy and metaphysical "by manifesting the forces of Allah's names in your essence" for the same word.  The answer to this dichotomy is revealed in the third translation (I wish the translators of the other two were not anonymous so I could refer to them more properly).  It is there rendered "with you", and given the footnote "through your entering it".  The word itself is far beyond my ability to parse in this context, given its widely various meanings (a quantifier meaning "how much", a noun meaning "muteness", and a seemingly all purpose preposition), but the average of the three translations seems to imply something like "through you, by means of you", which is certainly in line with Hulusi's ideas.

51: Another example of how the Quran is claiming the origin stories of the Pentateuch for itself.  Insofar as Abraham's descendants never returned to anywhere near Ur, this seems pretty anacrhonistic.

52: But of course the people were not grateful for very long.

53: Another chance for me to appreciate Hulusi leaving وَالفُرقانَ untranslated as "Furqan".  Its rendering as "criterion" in the other translations is rather opaque.

54: A rare example of the other translations taking a liberty that Hulusi does not.  أَنفُسَكُم is quite clearly "yourselves", so to kill the ego within ones self is a very reasonable interpretation.

55: Well this is a departure from the Pentateuch's version.  The Israelites did not say any such thing according to Exodus, and the rays from Moses' face were an unavoidable side effect of his divine encounter, rather than a conscious punishment.

56: "Give thanks" is clearly a better translation of تَشكُرونَ than Hulusi's "evaluate", both here and in 52.

57: Interesting that the blessings (shade, quail, manna) were provided to "you", but the errors were committed by "they".  This is consistent across translations, though it is not clear what it might mean.  What is clear is that nothing is exempt from Hulusi's metaphoric lens, and even the most straightforward and seemingly literal of narratives become metaphysical in his hands.

58: One of the potentially most interesting elements of this project will be the extent to which the narrative of the Quran supplements or elaborates on the narrative of the Pentateuch, as here.  There is no mention in the latter of the children of Israel stopping for succor at Jericho, and the detail adds weight to their later, bloodier return.

59: But one leaves this moment dissatisfied with the knowledge that there was an incident at (what may have been) Jericho, but that the Pentateuch doesn't mention it, and the Quran is maddeningly vague.  Hulusi, of course, is not interested in the narrative at all, and even goes so far as to suppose that the sky itself here is merely a metaphor for the amygdala.  Rather a stretch, if you ask me.

60: A fascinating intersection of Exodus, Al-Baqara, and Josephus here.  The former two are rather in agreement on what happened, though I don't recall Exodus including the detail that each of the tribes had its own stream of fresh water.  Tacitus, however, relies on the more mundane Hebrew oral tradition that Moses simply followed a herd of wild asses to where there was water just under the ground.

61: More interesting pronoun shenanigans here, enough to make one wonder how person designation works in Arabic:  the ingrates referring to "your" Lord, rather than "our"s, and another sudden shift from second person to third as in 57, this time without any correlation between time or judgement.

62: Whooooa this verse could be seen as a game changer, and certainly a welcome divergence from Christian dogma.  Even non-Muslims who call upon the Names of Allah (and there are many) are considered saved here.  This needs deeper scrutiny.

63: Two interesting things here:  firstly, that the Torah is charactarized not as God's promise, but as the Israelites' promise, accepted by God.   And secondly that the mountain itself was raised up (in all three translations to which I am referring here).  In what sense?  In the sense that the mountain itself is a testimony?  Or more literally?  When faced with such a dichotomy, it is a fair bet that Hulusi would choose the former.

64: خاسِرينَ is a very telling choice of epithet for nonbelievers.  Reliably (by which I mean all three translations agree) translated as "losers", it speaks to the way that the errant have been treated so far here:  not as wicked enemies, but as pitiable misguided.

65: A tempting question in light of this verse is why Muslims do not keep the Sabbath in the same way as the Jews did.  There is no distinction drawn so far between Jews and Muslims as an audience for this book.

66: Was the punishment here simply the spurning mentioned in 65?  It certainly seems to be referring to a specific event, lost to time and history, rather than a general practice.

67: A semantically difficult verse.  What is the relationship between the Jews' question and Moses' answer? At any rate, it is clear that up until this point the idea of sacrifice was rather alien to the Hebrew exiles.  And it is no doubt from this verse that the entire book takes its name, so one is tempted to view "sacrifice" as a continuing theme.

68: Another moment where I'm quite fond of Hulusi's leaving Rabb untranslated.  No doubt the vast majority of Jews and Muslims would take issue with his interpretation of it as one's own personal relationship with the divine, but the determiner "your" instead of "our" here and below certainly supports Hulusi's interpretation, albeit circumstantially.

69: The fact that Moses came back with a specific answer indicates that the questions were not, at Hulusi would have it, unnecessary.

70: The almost obsessive narrowing of the field says something about the Jews' desire to be as precise as possible, and also about Allah's willingness to indulge them.

71: It is almost as if they were not satisfied until the task was sufficiently difficult, and there was a real risk of failure.  It is very human to not see the value in something unless it is difficult.

 72: Another incident seemingly not recorded in the Pentateuch.  Unless the Egyptian killed by Moses is the murder in question here, but that seems a rather tenuous connection.  What murder could be referred to here, for which the entire tribe bore accountability?  Or is Allah indeed talking directly to Moses here?

73: Certainly I need to readjust my perception of this book.  I've been reading it as a declaration from Allah to the ancient Jews, misled by references to Israel et al.  But I need to recalibrate my pronoun references.  "You" here seems to be Arabs of Jewish descent, and the book is not a retelling of history, a la the Pentateuch, but a contemporary admonition given long afterward., in the seventh century.  This opens up the possibility that these verses are in fact referring to the death of Jesus--which still begs the question who the "We" refers to, since Muhammad himself is not a candidate during that time period. More pronoun trouble, though.  What is the "it" with which they were to strike the "dead" man?  Hulusi's assumption that "it" refers to a part of the sacrificed cow is echoed in other interpretations, but is not helpful.  I suspect that if the meaning of this cow is revealed, the name of the book itself would become clear.

74: What a wonderfully evocative verse.  The stones that gave forth their water to Moses, the stones that rolled away to reveal Jesus' empty tomb, even the stony hearts of the target audience here give way before the piercing insight of Allah.

75: Certainly not the last time this accusation could be leveled against the audience of this book.

76: A very specific indictment of those who learn and understand, but do not disseminate their understanding.

77: The concealment itself here is thesin.

78: Hulusi chooses to add the transliterated "ummiyyiina" (أُمِّيّونَ) here, which leads me to try and explicate the meaning.  One other translation renders it simply "them", as hulusi does here, while another choose the more specific "unlettered ones".  Various dictionaries render it "illiterate" or "uneducated", which gives credence to the latter translation, and explains why Hulusi felt it necessary to elaborate.

79: The condemnation here, then, is not of those who don't know.  Indeed, ignorance is forgiven earlier in verse 62.  But ignorance with a protestation of knowledge--that is what brings "woe".

80: So many of these people around, even today.

81: And the fire that they wish to avoid, whatever it is, is exactly the fire in which they will end up dwelling.

82: Whereas those who dwell in the righteousness of their Rabb will not be rewarded at some future point, but have already been rewarded by living in the paradise of truth.  But this is entirely my extrapolation.

83: Prayer and charity remain among the pillars of Islamic practice, but the key here is not the practices themselves, but the keeping of one's word to Allah.

84: Another reference to an unrecorded covenant, but one that makes it more clear that "you" are the Jews who settled at Medinah.  The specific promises made, however, are irrelevant.  It is the adherence to one's word, both individually and institutionally, that has been the focus of this entire section.

85: The Day of Resurrection is treated as a known dogma here, without further explication.  Such a promise enters into religious thought sometime after Jesus' death, and is so clearly established by this time that it's seen as self-evident.

86:  The idea of an afterlife, on the surface, seems incompatible with a Day of Resurrection.

87: It is my personal belief that the line of Rasuls (again helpfully untranslated by Hulusi) has never stopped.  Who are they today, though?  Each translation and dictionary has a different rendering of رَسولٌ--apostle, prophet, messenger--so Hulusi wisely leaves it here in the original.

The Third Man

I love opera.  As with most things that are either thought of as highbrow, not commonly listed as "favorite"s, or both, answering the painfully common and unimaginative "What kind of music do you like?" this way understandably opens me up to accusations of elitism, hipsterdom, and other doucheries.  And accurate as the elitist label may be, my love of opera is as free and innocent of it as a sanitary napkin.  I love opera, not because it's deep, profound, or meaningful; it's often not.  I love it because it happens to combine several of the things I love in one form.  I love vocal music, I love acting, I love set design, dance, costume, spectacle, and drama.  A mere musical would successfully capture all of these things in one package, and I have quite a soft spot for those as well.  But there is one additional element that opera (often) includes, and it happens to be my very favorite thing in the world: language.  And so I love this casserole of some of my favorite things, not as an elitist, but rather in the more mundane way that I love seven layer nachos.

Which is a roundabout way of getting to the reason I love movies.  Movies combine things that I love in the same way opera does.  I love books, and I love visual art.  A good movie has all the elements of a book--plot, character, setting, and maybe some meaning?--and those of a painting or photograph--mood, composition, metaphor--in one package.  So naturally I like them. 

Realizing this fact about why I like movies, as I did while viewing the undeniably brilliant The Third Man, also made me realize why I disagree so wholeheartedly with certain others who also love them:  we do so for very different reasons.  They seem to be able to look at the individual parts of a film and appreciate them, saying things like "It was beautifully shot" or "It created a very specific mood", things that one might easily say of a painting or photograph.  But I don't watch a movie for just those things.  I expect a film to do more than be beautiful.  I expect to be able to gaze at and be lost in it as I would a painting, and also to read it as I would a book.  That's why movies exist in my, and perhaps only in my, mind.  To do what another form could not on its own. 

So while The Third Man was Art, filled with careful and ingenious use of imagery, metaphor, composition, and mood, it was not literature.  All the tools I use to view a painting, and none of those I use to read a book, were applicable here.  Specifically, I was not able to take the individual elements of the work and tie them to each other.  In a good book, things that seem to be out of place, such as a lengthy fourth act sequence following a minor character through the sewers, would actually be keys to understanding the whole thing.  Here, however, they were merely the result of Orson Welles' agent doing her or his job well.

안철수의 생각 (제정임 엮음)

재목을 잘 탯했네요.  이 책을 읽어보니 "안철수는 생각만 하는 것 같다"는 생각이 든다.  안철수의 행동이란 책을 쓰기 어렵겠다. 제정임 기자의 칠문 마다 "하겠다", "하면 좋겠다", "고려해야 한다" 밖에 답 안 하는 것 같다.  "했다"는 답이 어디 있을까요?  책에서 그렇기 뿐 만 아니라, 정치 운동에서도 안철수가 그런 비판을 받는다. 제정임 기자의 "지금까지 말씀하신 복지, 정의, 평화 다 좋은 얘긴데 당장 먹고살기 힘든 서민층, 저소득층 국민들에게는 살림살이에 과연 어떤 도움이 될까?"는 칠문에 통찰력이 있다 (163).

아쉽게도 책의 재목과 동일한 "생각"은 특별하지 않다.  사실 안철수의 생각 아니고 안철수가 무슨 잡지 기사나 자습서를 통해서 생각하게 된 거라고 할 수 있다.  생각이 나쁘지 않지만 약간 뻔하거나 진부한 생각이다. Bumper sticker를 봐서 자세를 취한 셈이다.

근데 그 일반화에 있는 제외 하나 있다.  다른 정치인, CEO들 언급하지 않는 내용이니까 현실로 안철수의 마음 속에서 나온 생각 아닐까요?  칠문의 냉용과 관련 없시, 안철수가 "창업기업이 실패한 후 재기가 힘든", "장여업을 하다가 망한", "한 번 실패로 그 사람을 완전 버려진" 사업가에 대한 얘기를 주먹을 끌 정도로 언급한다 (89, 95, 136).  눈에 뛴다.  툭하면 얘기하는 걸 보니 이 책에 있는 진실로 안철수의 생각 뿐인 것 같다.

안철수는 살기 힘든 저소득층, 효과가 없는 교육 과정, 부패의 소굴인 정부 등에 대한 다른 사람의 말을 반복 잘 하지만 그를 위해서 무슨 행동을 했을까요? 안철수의 독창적인 생각 하나 뿐 인 "한 번 망한 사업가들에게 다시 기회를 주자"는 제안은 진실로 누구에 괸심이 있는 지 드러내 보이는 것이다.

Edward Gibbon: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

A little perspective goes a long way, and the nearly 2000 years of perspective contained in this masterwork have had a profound effect on me.

Without such perspective, it would be a forgivable mistake to think that the modern world is in its death throes.  Trump, Duterte, 박근혜, 김종은, Marie Le Pen, Theresa May, Narendra Modi, Putin, et al ad seemingly infinitum, the allies of reason and humanity seem to be hopelessly outgunned and outnumbered.  And yet I remain strangely unmoved.  My American friends are rallying in great numbers and working themselves into a froth in resistance of the current president.  "We must do something!" say they, but must we?  Well meaning humans have been resisting dictators; working for the benefit of society; and building progressive, productive communities for 2000 years.  And here we are.  We have learned precisely nothing.  Humans have evolved, as far as one can tell from Gibbon, exactly zero in 2000 years, and the forces that conspire to degrade and destroy anything virtuous and noble are the same as they have always been.

But Gibbon's service to the reader is greater than just granting perspective, which gift alone might lead to despair.  His ambitious and painstaking portrait of the period in question seldom takes the liberty of drawing conclusions for the reader, and taken individually there would no doubt be myriad ways to interpret any single account.  But seen as a whole, the patterns in the tapestry are clear even without Gibbon feeling compelled to trace them out for us.  The impulses that corrupt and collapse human societies are repeated over and over again, and they number merely two.

The first is that which Gibbon emphasizes when he says, "In comparing the days of foreign with the ages of domestic hostility, we must pronounce that the latter have been far more ruinous to the city" (1250).  This domestic hostility, which one might characterize as "division" is never far from Gibbon's pages.  From the Arians and Athanasians, to the Greens and Blues, to even the Sunnis and Shias, Gibbon faithfully documents the human impulse to divide itself into arbitrary and petty factions.  What Gibbon does not speculate upon is the source of this instinct, leaving it to the reader:  an offer up on which, I have gleefully taken him.

I cannot speak for others, though the reader may see her or himself in what I observe.  I can merely ask what is at the root of my own desire to define another human as an other human. On the surface, there is no necessity to group people according to us and them, my people and not.  But it is a nearly irresistible urge.  The (often) unconscious instinct is to assess any new person according to familiarity and similarity.  To what extent does she or he resemble me, in terms of experience, appearance, or perspective?  That level of me-ness then either reaches the threshold of comfort, or it does not.  In the former case, they become a member of our set, and in the latter, a member of the set marked "other".  The urge is so instinctive and irresistible, that one assumes a biological/evolutionary root for it, for which idea I'm sure scholarly support could be found.  Insofar as this tirade has already taken a dry turn, I will refrain.

The question is not whether humans do this, or even why.  The question is, in light of its well-documented--in Gibbon and in experience--destructive and outdated nature, whether we are capable of moving past it: learning to recognize the instinct when it is activated, and question it.  For humanity as a whole, I suspect the answer is "Not in the next 500 years."  But Gibbon's narrative suggests that another answer may be possible on the individual level.

Which brings me to the second destructive human instinct he reveals.  He rightly observes that what destroys societies is what we might term "lateral division", the instinct to otherize and divide.  Even those exterior forces which visit destruction on their neighbors--war, crusade, siege--are merely macro versions of the same phenomenon.  But this depressing run through the taffy-puller of history, endlessly pulling apart and recombining gooey pink swaths of humanity, is not the only story Gibbon tells.   He also preserves for our consideration the shining examples of a few who stood above and resisted this pull, those whom we might call virtuous:  Marcus Aurelius, Belisarius, Diocletian, and many others to various degrees.  And it is by contrast of these with their opposites, Theodora, Elagabalus, Phocas, and others just as numerous as their virtuous counterparts, that a force which corrupts the individual, just as lateral division corrupts the group, is revealed.

One factor contributing to Gibbon's enduring reputation is no doubt his objectivity.  He does not spare religious figures from his contempt, and he does not scruple to give those thought of as barbarians in his time--Atilla, Timour, Zingis et al--their due.  And it is in the description of this latter and his successors that Gibbon puts a nice point on what set them apart: "Firmly united for their own and the public interest, the three brothers and their families were content with dependent scepters; and Octai, by general consent, was proclaimed great khan, or emperor of the Mongols and Tartars" (1140). This golden standard of virtue stands out more brightly set against the dark fabric of "the returning selfishness of human nature", observed in these pages and our own lives far too frequently for me to recount (265).  This instinct is related, but not identical to that which corrupts society at large; it is not a lateral division, but a vertical one, a raising up of oneself above another.

And this instinct is just as observable in our personal narratives as in Gibbon's historical one.  Not only do we sort the rest of humanity into mine and theirs, but also into better and worse.  Naturally the tendency is to conflate "mine" with "good" and the obverse, but it is not a perfect correspondence.  Even within "mine", the instinct is to stratify the members with respect to our selves, above or below; better or worse.

Like the lateral instinct, this vertical division is ingrained in us so deeply it may as well be biological.  It cannot be eliminated, so far as I can tell, but it can be resisted, questioned, and rejected.  And as glorious as Gibbon's narrative is, he has embroidered a gem into the center of this tapestry that is worth as much or more than the rest put together;  the perspective one gets from reading his book is a mere reflection of the perspective he gained in writing it.  "Whatever is fortified will be attacked;" he observes, "and whatever is attacked may be destroyed" (1250).  Insecurity leads to fear, and the instinct to fortify.  Civically, this means building castles and walls.  But social position has no such visible bulwarks.  We acquire possessions, of course, but these only fortify our social persona to the extent that they mark us as richer, more tasteful, more creative, more stylish, or otherwise better than others.  Hierarchy has no physical manifestation; it is a purely mental construct, and can only be seen in terms of comparison and judgement.  If we resist this urge, if we refuse to believe our instinctive judgements and comparisons, we are actually refusing to fortify.  And to extrapolate from Gibbon's observation, that which is not fortified cannot be attacked.  It endures.  It resists corruption.  And it eventually dies.  But perhaps it gets written down somewhere and remembered.

Julia Kristeva: Intimate Revolt

Fool me once, shame on you.  Fool me twice, shame on me.  As wrong as my friend Chris was about how much I'd enjoy the first book he recommended by Kristeva, I should have known better than to accept another recommendation from him.  Nonetheless, I did, and my compulsion to complete things started drove me to finish this volume, even after it was clear that it had nothing to say.  I suppose there is a bit of insight to be gained from her distinctions between American (consumerist) and European (humanist) liberalism, and I did enjoy her pleas for a return to the latter, but these enjoyable sections came from seemingly nowhere, with no logical underpinning or connection to the rest of the book.  I remain hard pressed to say whether this is the eponymous "revolt" of which she is so fond, or some tangential filigree. I feel like my time was wasted reading this, and would have been better spent enjoying the books that she feels like she had to have read for me, especially Being and Nothingness.

Frank A. Thomas: The Choice

When my friend, the right reverend professor doctor Baker, loaned me this book, it was with the caveat, "He needed an editor like you when he wrote this, but I think you'll find some good stuff in here."  She was right on both counts.

Perhaps it's my unfamiliarity with the dialectic of the African-American preaching style, but this collection of sermons seemed better suited to being preached than to being read.  On an objective level, the typos, misspellings, and malapropisms at least are of the sort that I would have abolished quickly and mercilessly.

But she was also right that I found "some good stuff", a succinct and elegant framework for describing the sort of thoughts and struggles that have been forefront in my mind this year.  It is no surprise that I found an affinity with Thomas' paradigm.  Not only does he speak from a Protestant perspective that 30 years made very familiar to me.  He also speaks from a familiarity with transformational training, and his approach to agency, power, and victimization all align nicely with my own. 

Whether the central framework, that of inside-out vs. outside-in living, is his own innovation, cribbed from somewhere else, or (most likely) somewhere in between the two, it is exactly the sort of thing that has been occupying me lately.  Starting with Murakami's exploration of selfness in Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki, and continuing through Kristeva's distinction of the subject self and the object self, I have been forming a crystal of understanding in which Thomas' inside/outside living is the latest, but not the final, ingredient.

Al-Fatiha

All things come to those who wait.  I received this copy of the Quran three years ago, on a visit to Turkey.  In the Istanbul hotel where we stayed, the shelves in the lobby were lined exclusively with it, rather tellingly all in English.  I felt as if I had discovered the Islamic equivalent of the Gideon headquarters, or the Christian Science Reading Room.  Hundreds of identical bindings, arrayed with the quiet aggression of a battalion standing at attention.  The title Decoding the Quran did its job on me, however, and I submitted.  The desk clerk was surprised, but assented gleefully when I asked if I could take a copy with me.

And it turns out to be exactly what I wanted: a faithful translation of the text, but with commentary and interpretation.  Ahmed Hulusi, the commentator, turns out to be a Sufi mystic with a perspective that lines up almost too perfectly with my own at this moment in my quest.  Everything he says in the introduction resonated with me, and my spirit vibrated enthusiastically in agreement as I read it.  We shall see if the text itself is as agreeable as the commentator, for in a confluence of exactly the sort that I have come to expect from this life, I also happen to be at the point in Gibbon's Decline and Fall that deals with the origins of Islam.  The character of Mohammed (saw) leaves much to be desired from Gibbon's account, and that author's opinion of Islam is rather at odds with what Hulusi describes.  Nonetheless the line between Sufi and Sharia is clearly drawn, and I feel no conflict accepting one and discarding the other, as I have done with Christianity, Buddhism, Bahai, Confusianism, and Daoism already.  So without any more adoing,

Epigraph:  I am acting under the assumption that these words, which seem to introduce each book, are the author's own, or at least unique to the Sufi interpretation to which I am about to yield.

1. Hulusi gives an incredible weight to the first letter of the first verse: ب , but he has not yet explained its significance.  This is one of many pieces of information that I am eagerly awaiting as part of this reading. The choice of Rahman and Rahim to introduce the nature of Allah here draw attention to the nature of existence as first a reflection of the nature of Allah and all His names, and secondly as an observable manifestation of the nature of those names.

2. And it is telling that the first admonishment of the book is to suspend judgement, seemingly in the sense of ascribing qualities such as good or bad, of these wordsm and to simply take them as they are: a neutral description of reality as it is.

3. And as the Rahman and the Rahim are again invoked, Hulusi in his commentary sets up a distinction between the two as representing the potential and the actualized reality of the various names.

4-5. The idea of submission is the one that turned me off when I was looking into Bahai. Without Hulusi's observation that it refers to the necessity of surrender to to the unity of reality, and the abandonment of our attachments to duality, no matter how momentarily pleasing and seductive, I might have been turned away from the path here as well.

6. Yes, this.  This is all I want from this life at this moment.  All my other quests are distractions from the realization of my innermost reality.

7. I see that I am going to have to overlook the gentle fiction of the divine personhood, for it is not Islam alone that finds it necessary for the benefit of the followers.  I wonder if Mohammed (saw) was aware of the fiction as he was presenting it.

Nora Ephron: I Feel Bad about my Neck (and other thoughts on beng a woman)

As revealed in the title, I am not the particular target audience for a book of this sort.  There was a lot to which I can't relate and have no particular affinity.  But it so happens that the overlap between aging as a female and aging as a gay male is wider (or perhaps as wide as) one would expect.  In particular, the essays "On Maintenance" and "I My Purse" poignantly capture all that is involved in feeling like a human at a certain age.  Although still a few decades away from Ephron's perspective, it is clear that simply letting nature take its course is a recipe for solitude  One can rail against the reality that demands I lose weight, moisturize, and dye, or one can take the necessary steps to satisfy the desire that has become its own agent and its own fuel.

As Ephron embraces the gloomy, lonely reality of aging, she inadvertently gives with one hand the hope that she snatches away with the other.  Yes, aging is a dreary process, not golden in the ways that some would have you believe.  And this is especially true when one faces them alone.  But somehow, the possibility that although some things are now forever visible only in the rear view mirror, other things are to be discovered at one's elbow: truth, insight, wisdom, and--it is to be hoped--one's own self.

MASH

Loved it.  4/5 stars.  Would recommend, and would watch again.  And yet . . . what on earth is this harmless, meandering TV sitcom pilot doing on the AFI's list of 100 movies?  In what universe is it significant, artistic, or anything other than serviceable?

even though it seems that the TV show was not  yet a gleam in its producer's eye at the time this film was released, it works much better as a pilot than as a stand alone theatrical release.  I feel as though I just binge watched a season of a clever, occasionally poignant Netflix series--not a movie. Sadly, I hear that season two has much less of the lewd, gruesome, anarchic humor that made this such a delight: as though Apocalypse Now and Animal House had a child born without the ability to feel shame.

The Revelation of John IV

This is the end, both of this project and of all creation, if memory serves.

17:1 I wonder if the word "whore" represents the same tonal shift in the original language as it seems to in English.

17:3 These "blasphemous names", are they so in the sense that we would expect?  Namely, appropriating the divine for themselves? Or are they merely profane?

17:6 I too am "greatly amazed", and I'm merely reading it.  Is there any more vivid image in the Bible?

17:8 If only we had some time markers here, this would be a lot easier to identify.  Without them, it's entirely possible that this apparition is not a symbol or a metaphor at all, but an actual spirit that holds influence over the rulers of the world.  Perhaps it's best to read it as though the angel is speaking with reference to his own time, not to the time in which the vision is to be fulfilled.

17:11 This verse is pretty challenging to parse.  The sentence is structured such that the beast itself is the eighth king in a line of seven, of which each is both a precursor and a part of the whole.

17:13 Which makes an interpretation of the ten kings who didn't exist at the time of John's writing as the security council of the United Nations pretty tempting.  Kings that had their own time, but are now all part of a larger body to which they yield their power.

17:16 Which makes a religious interpretation of the whore rather tidy.  Unless . . . she is repeatedly referred to as a city.  Only two cities could possibly fit the bill: the Vatican and Jerusalem.  Wouldn't it be a twist if the beast (the UN) turned on secular Israel, and dissolved it?  The recent censure of the general assembly would be a first step.

18:1 Since this is a vision, I wonder what sort of visual cues led John to believe that this angel had "great authority".

18:2 And I continue to be obsessed with the question of why certain verses are set as poetry.  Is it some artifact of the original text?  In other cases, I have assumed it is because they are quotes from a passage that was also set in verse, but this book is entirely original, so that seems unlikely.

18:2,3 More arguments for seeing the whore as having an actual temporal city.

18:6 I find this passage very poetic.  Something about the rhythm of it is more poetic than John usually displays.

18:9 These very kings seem to be the ones who in chapter 17 gave her up to the beast, that which is made up of they themselves.

18:24 Certainly sounds like a religion to me.  But the Vatican, or Jerusalem?  Or perhaps Mecca?

19:4 This tableau is evidently still visible from wherever John is watching.

19:5 Is God referring to himself in the third person here?  Or is the figure seated upon the throne some other individual?

19:6 Is this the same great multitude mentioned in chapter 7, those who passed through the great ordeal, or just a generic crowd?  If the former, then we begin to see something resembling an actual timeline.  And the description here gives nothing to contradict such a reading.

19:11 Difficult not to see this figure as the same who led the four horsemen earlier.

19:17 This is certainly a unique wedding feast.

20:2 Been a while since we heard from this fellow.  Not much information on the relationship between him, the beast, and the whore though.

20:4 This gives the lie to the old "only God can judge me" chestnut.

20:5 But if the rest of the dead are not resurrected, those who worshiped the beast were slaughtered, and those who did not were reigning, then over whom did they reign, and whom did they judge?

20:7 The religion in which I was raised interpreted these events as happening well after the great tribulation and the battle of Harmageddon. And John certainly seems to be following a linear timeline in these final chapters, so if we are to take the beast as the UN, and the whore as some religious entity, then such a timeline doesn't have any inherent inconsistencies.  But suppose that the beast and the whore and the day of judgement were actually symbols of something else, something that has already passed.  The fall of Rome?  The fall of Jerusalem?  I suppose the symbology could be made to fit either event.  Is it possible then, that this 1000 year period of imprisonment has also come and gone?  This would be a more tempting line of inquiry if there were anything that would have resembled the end of the world 1000 years thereafter.  

20:8 And are we to suppose that Gog and Magog, whatever they might be, are still around after the day of judgement?  Human nature being what it is, such a thing would not be at all surprising.

20:14 Pretty impossible to take this lake of fire as anything other than allegorical, when Death and Hades are themselves cast into it.

21:3,4 And here's the coda.  The happy ending that let John wake up from his vision without gouging his eyes out.  I find myself supposing that without these verses, religion as we know it today would look very different. 

21:24 Pretty absurd to suppose that there would still be nations after all of this. No doubt used metaphorically to represent all mankind.

21:26 This seems redundant.  Weren't all those who aren't written in the book of life cast into the lake of fire last chapter?

22:5 Wait, no more night?  This would require some serious rewiring of the universe.

22:10 "Near" is always relative.

22:12 As is "soon".

22:15 No, the sorcerors and fornicators et al were destroyed.  They cannot be outside to gnash their teeth.

22:16 PLOT TWIST The angel showing these things to John was Jesus all along!  And furthermore, he says not to worship him, that he is just a fellow servant.  Either John forgot some of the theology from his epistle, or there is some change in speaker that he forgot to record.

Well, there you have it folks.  The end of many years of pondering, overanalysis, suspension of disbelief, and skeptical query.  I find that this book, obscure and inconsistent as it was, was a rather good microcosm of the rest of the Bible.  Taken too seriously, it becomes dangerous, confusing, and maddening.  But taken on its own merits, a profoundly deep and poetic book with reams of insight about humans, as seen across a slice of thousand of years.