On a Roll

Numbers

This was, as expected, tedious in parts, but there were also some interesting insights. I find it interesting that the key conflicts of the book center on the idea of "holiness". Korah, Dathan and Abiram claim that , "the whole congregation are every one of them holy," and are promptly swallowed up by the Earth. Moses and Aaron are banished from the promised land because of failing to 'show [God's] holiness before the people." So what is this holiness? If so important, why is it not explained in detail? As a teacher, I want to see a rubric for holiness; what are the criteria?

I have always equated holiness in my mind to the idea of being set apart for a special purpose. But this must not be what JEHOVAH had in mind when he punished, since the Israelities could not have been more set apart than they were. What was their sin? Why were they repeatedly decimated with plague, war and poisonous serpents? Is it because they were whiny? If so, holiness as meant in Numbers must mean humble, passive and yielding. this does not fit with any definition I can think of.

But the real question is, "Why were Moses and Aaron punished?" As far as I can tell, JEHOVAH told them to strike water from the rock, they did, and he got mad. There must be some hole in the narrative. Last item of interest: The father of Moses, Aaron and Miriam appears, in the geneologies, to be their great uncle as well. Their mother married her uncle. Why is this never mentioned, or is it a trick of translation?

Richard Byrd: Alone

This memoir, while engaging and erudite, smells of pretense. Richard Byrd seals a place for himself as a typical Bourgeois hero: a man of advantage and education who goes through a dark night of the soul, and waxes philosophically about it. Occasionally he drops a nice turn of phrase, such as, "The stars were so bright, I wanted to reach out and scoop up a handful of the sparkling pebbles," which, for some reason, I found quite poetic. But for the most part, he simply tries too hard. His goal is to maintain civility, not to let emotion overwhelm him, and to prove his manhood, none of which are particularly inspiring goals.

Steven D. Levitt,Stephen J. Dubner : Freakonomics

This is the first book in a while that I have been unable to put down at night, and have foregone sleep to finish. Yet, in retrospect, I cannot put my finger on what it is that was so engrossing. The book was poorly constructed, not illiterate, but illiterary. The subjects were of interest, but not enough to quell my ADD as it did. Maybe there is an economical explanation for it. But I'm bored now. BTD: 10 Goodbye.

Ted Kooser: Delights and Shadows

I made a mistake when I started to read this book. I mistook Kooser for another Billy Collins, another engaging, idiomatic poet whose chief virtue is his accesibility. Collins has a way with imagery, but I take his work to be brothy, meatless. At first, I thought Kooser was the same.

The first thing that tipped me off to something more in this volume was the consistency of topic. Poem after poem in this collection is a profound metaphorical analysis of a simple household object or a mundane image: a jar of buttons, a girl holding a gyroscope, creamed corn, a telescope. Kooser wows repeatedly with his take on these silly little items, but the fact that he focuses time and again on the same sort of seemingly innocuous image tips the reader off to something more. Many poets write an ode to something stupid like a Grecian urn, but a whole volume of such things simply must be about something more.

That something more came into focus when I read the poem "Father". Kooser says that the father's voice was "delighted with stories", nicely skewed turn of phrase in its own right. But the word "delight" is also in the title, which makes an alert reader take notice. From that point, I was watchful for the words "delight" and "shadow" in the poems, eagerly looking for a connection. Of course "Delights and Shadows" is a perfectly subtle and suitable title without anything deper--and it took thick ole me a while to realize the play on "lights and shadows". But when one realizes that by delights Kooser means "Stories", as in "Father", and that by shadows he means "Ghosts", as in "Pearl", the whole volume takes shape.

Each object, each image that Kooser dissects into its poetic components has a story, a delight, and a ghostly shadow as well. The "Flow Blue China" overflows with stories of heapingly generous meals, and the ghost of a seventy-year-old woman reaches out from the sentences. No object is dead or inanimate. Each is an amphora, possessed with the spirits of the dead who used it. And it is not merely his personal memories , his own dead, Kooser seals into these poems like mausoleums. "Four Civil War Paintings by Winslow Homer" contains the delights and shadows of an entire country.

What is amazing is that Kooser does all of this while never obscuring his meaning or alienating his reader. One never really is asked to decipher these poems, simply to meet them. At last a good poet that I can send to my brother without recieving a text message to the effect, "WTF? I dont get it."

The Odd Couple

I am so far behind in my blooking that I shall probably never catch up, but hackneyed hyperbole aside, I shall crank out a few easy ones while I have a moment.

Leviticus

I expected this to be a boring read, having only pretended to read the Bible in the past, but I actually got a little out of it. It may one day be interesting to study the different types of sacrifice the Israelites were commanded to offer--elevation offerings, burnt offerings, atonement offerings, sin offerings, far to many to remember at present. One particular thing I noticed is that the Bible--at least the Hebrew Scriptures portion--does not seem to mean what we think it might when it speaks of "sacrifice". I have always assumed that the Israelites took their sacrifical animal up to the altar, threw it to its fate, and returned home. Having read Leviticus now, I think otherwise. They seem to have led their animal up to the altar, slaughtered it, and returned home with most of the meat. Sacficial offereing seems not to have been sacrifice as we think of it so much as ritual butchering. They kill the animal, throw a few pieces on the fire, and eat the rest. I'm not sure what significance this clarification has, except to say that sacrifice is indeed not so much about giving something up, but about living a certain way--ritually even. Also, The Witnesses insist that the prohibition against eating blood in Leviticus is grounds for refusing blood transfucions today, but they neglect to notice that the Israelites were also prohibited from eating fat. Put that in your fondue, why dontcha?

Mencius

I like to think of this as "Confucianism for Dummies". This is nothing against Confucius, but Mencius followers seem to have kept a bit better track of what he actually said than Confucius' followers did. "The Analects" reads like a random assortment of quotes, many of them completely inscrutable. Mencius' works, on the other hand, have at least some narrative line and seem to form a more cohesive ideology. The gist of this ideology is that "Human Nature is good just as water seeks low ground" (VI.a). Although a man can be made bad just as water can be held in an artificial container, it is not man's natural state, just as it is not natural for water to be still. This is why, as Mencius observes, no matter how terrible and debased a man is, when he sees a child about to fall into a well his first instinct is of concern. He may or may not act on that instant of alarm, but he experiences it instinctively.

None of which I find particularly revolutionary, but Mencius is at times delightfully idiomatic. Allow me to share some of my favorites:

"One accepts willingly only what is one's proper destiny . . . it is never anyone's proper destiny to die in fetters" (VII.a).

"You can never succeed in winning the allegiance of men by trying to dominate them through goodness" ( IV.b).

"Only when a man will not do some things is he capable of great things" (IV.b).