Liveblogging the Bible:John

I was tempted to give up the Liveblog for this book. It takes soooo long to complete even one account doing it this way. I really should complete The New Testament this year to keep on schedule with Ward's Lifetime of Reading (http://www.interleaves.org/~rteeter/grtward.html), not to mention the facts that it is enjoyable, important to my development as a person, and something that, had I done it ten years ago, would have saved me a world of hurt.

But there is also the fact that I am becoming a bit obligatory in my reading. There is already the danger for an English major/teacher to read to finish books, rather than to enjoy them. I feel no little pride at being able to say, "I've finished Plutarch", whether or not I got much out of it. If a book is irritating or pointless, where is the virtue in finishing it?

These musings aside, I conclude that the brain damage of liveblogging the Bible is outweighed by the benefit, and so here goes:

1:1 What a way to start out. I had forgotten that the book starts with this tidbit. As a Jehovah's Witness, I was well-armed for people to use this verse as a support of the Trinity doctrine. I knew, through no scholarship of my own, that the original Greek here for "The word was with God" and "The word was God" use two different forms of the word translated as "God". In the first case τὸν θεόν is used to indicate capitalized God, and in the second, θεὸς lower-case god, a state of deity, godlike, but not the big J himself. This distinction is a bit academic, and stems from the fact the there is no indefinite article in Greek. Therefore, the former could read "The God" and the latter simply "god". Yeesh. All of this was drilled into the heads of young Witnesses in the event that the object of conversion raised John 1:1 as an objection. But . . .

It obscures the verse. The Word is a fascinating appellation for Christ, and many believe that this gives him identity as far back as Genesis, as the word that God spoke in the act of creation. John touches upon depths here that the other Gospeleers never thought of. Was Christ a perfect reflection of God, though man? Or was he something superhuman, even God himself (this latter proposition I will always find ludicrous). I prefer to, in my baked-from-scratch theology, that he was, almost literally, a word. Christ was an expression of God, an idea made so by the speaking. Wanna know a secret? So are we all. Do you see how much effort can go into liveblogging one verse? Moving on . . .

1:5 a very serviceable metaphor indeed. The nature of light is that the teeniest bit can overcome all darkness. I was moved by the expression of Byron Katie this weekend, when she said, "Love is deadly. It will annihilate (perhaps not the exact word) everything that is unlike itself." That was a good workshop, BTW.

1:6 So what is the difference between being "sent from God" and being the Word of God? How is John less of an expression than Christ? Once removed, I guess. And was John literally ordered by the person of God, or simply inspired by the Divine?

1:7 another name for Christ: the light--not capitalized, interestingly

1:13 beautiful! By this process, we are all the Word of God. I had forgotten how metaphysical John is.

1:14 Even as all words do. The word that I speak creates my reality, and thereby becomes flesh.

1:17,18 How does John invoke Moses in one breath, and say that no man has seen God with the next?

1:25 Where did the idea of baptism even enter into the Jewish consciousness? It is not anywhere in the Old Testament.

1:30 It is this that John refers to in 1:15, indicating that the latter was written later. This indicates that an editing process went into the writing of this gospel, and helps to explain its wonderful fluidity so far.

1:32 I can think of no reason to take this metaphor more literally than the light or The Word. One always sees images of the Holy Spirit as a literal dove, which I think is silly. Anybody with a scrap of poetry in his or her soul can recognize a metaphor upon seeing it.

1:33 This seems to answer the question posed for 1:6.

1:35 I must have missed something. John never is said to have baptized Jesus in this account. Jesus just sort of walks by.

1:40 Who was the other? Possibly John himself who, as I recall, avoids referring to himself.

1:42 I never realized in my early Biblical education that the word "Peter" means "rock". This would have been highly inconvenient to Witness Theology, and it was somehow never mentioned.

1:47 I love this characterization. I think of myself as Nathanael sometimes. Never ask me if a dress makes you look fat. A pity we never learn much more about him.

1:50 How is this not Jesus' first miracle? It happens long before the water into wine stunt.

2:1 I wonder why he doesn't give her name?

2:4 Yeesh! What a jerk. Was she pressuring him somehow? Did she know something that we don't at this point in the narrative?

2:5 Evidently she did know something, and evidently John was either present or has a reputable source, for this is a rather specific detail.

2:9 There is a hole in the narrative here: we missed the part where the water turns into wine. I wonder if it's a quirk of translation or Jewish storytelling conventions for this information to be treated so offhandedly. In a modern story, this would be a noticeable flaw.

2:10 This seems to be a peroration, rather than a compliment, as if to say, "Idiot! Where have you been hiding this? This is gooood shit!"

2:15 Wow! It's only chapter 2. Luke took forever to reveal Jesus' dark side.

2:19 And cutting to the chase with regard to his death as well.

In general, the Jesus of this account does not seem as interested in preserving the mystery as he did in the other three.

3:2 Who is "we"? The Pharisees as a group? How intriguing--as in, the subject of an intrigue.

3:3-6 Although the metaphysical interpretation of this idea is pretty clear, it is unsatisfying somehow--as though it doesn't quite get to the meat of the matter.

3:7 This is more like it. The one who acts with Spirit is as the wind: his actions do not belong to him. He does not live; he is being lived.

3:10 This feels disingenuous, and a cheap shot.

3:12 A very Confucian sentiment. First, know this moment. If you can do that--and none can--worry about the future.

3:13 Which gives this verse a new meaning.

3:16 One cannot help but wonder if Jesus said these things, or if they were added to give verisimilitude.

3:17 Judge not, lest you suffer, for judgement is the source of all suffering.

3:18 Condemned in the sense of already in hell--for not to believe is to be in hell.

3:19 I thought you didn't come to condemn the world. This section is not as Zen as the preceding ones.

3:27 This is more to my liking, and in line with my Theology. What is, is. To argue with it is silly. I can just hear Byron Katie saying of John's disciples, "They are simply believing their thoughts. Is it true?"

3:29 In this metaphor, I suppose that the Spirit is the bride.

John's effort to frame Jesus as The Son of God seems to get in the way of Jesus' teachings, which are rather enlightening.

4:2 An interesting detail. Jesus did not baptize anybody. Why not?

4:6Also revealing that Jesus gets tired. Why include this detail, if the whole point of your book is to paint Jesus as divine?

4:7 It's hard to reconcile this with his later calling a Samaritan woman a dog. IS it because he's too thirsty to worry about that?

4:26 John's testimony is in direct conflict with the other three here. Matthew Luke and especially Mark all show that Jesus avoided identifying himself as the Messiah. In John's version, he does it right off the bat.

4:32 Based on this verse, an argument could be made that the water at the well incident was not incidental at all. If he had no need of refreshment, then he contrived the whole thing to make a point.

4:35 And this is the point: he wants people to know about him. He wants the harvest of followers, or to spread the truth, depending on your perspective.

4:45 This seems to contradict the statement that "A prophet has no honor in the prophet's own town".

5:14 This is an interesting admonition. Does Jesus mean to indicate that the man's suffering was a result of some misdeed of his own?

5:17 This is a perfect answer to the Sabbath argument. God doesn't take the Sabbath off. Why should we?

5:22-23 Okay, so if i were the Jews, this is the point in this speech where I would be calling "heresy!" Claiming to be God's son is one thing, and a perfectly innocuous thing at that. But claiming the ability to give life--before having actually done it--reeks of sacrilege, and post facto editing on the author's part.

5:24 I'm not clear in exactly what sense does the believer "not come under judgement"? This is a rather strong statement. I could choose to interpret it as "To the believer, one thing is as good as another, for the believer, desiring nothing, judges nothing", but that seems to go against John's intent . . .

5:30 Although such an interpretation is not altogether incompatible with this verse.

5:31 I wish that people had the sense to apply this verse to the Bible. If the Bible testifies about itself, the testimony must not be true either.

Wow. This book has a bunch of mysteries wrapped up in it. One one hand, John is less enjoyable, because it paints Jesus in what I consider an unapproachable light, and eliminates much of what is endearing about him. On the other hand, it is far richer in theology--perhaps incomprehensibly so--and so merits attention of a different kind.

6:4 John's audience is clearly not Jewish. they would need no explanation fo what the Passover is.

6:13 it strikes me that this miracle is rather singular among the world's religions. What a gentle and striking demonstration of power.

6:18-20 The same could be said of this example. All of Jesus miracles seem to be remarkable for their gentleness and their focus on creative, rather than destructive ability--unlike Moses, Elisha, etc.

6:26 And he was correspondingly more popular--though perhaps not in the way he wished to be

6:30 Perhaps it is just my current mood, but I feel a little irritated in Jesus' behalf here. First they come to him just for the food, then they demand a further sign. And this is just how people would act today as well. Basically selfish and stupid.

6:41 Oh, and fickle.

6:54,55 Well, he was not allowed to turn them away, but he could certainly give them more than they bargained for.

6:64 This seems to assume that Judas did not believe. What if his story is all the more tragic because he believed the most?

6:70 possibly a bit of editorializing on John's part. After all, it is said that John was the closest to Jesus' heart.

7:5 The matter of belief again becomes troublesome here. What if his brothers said this, not because they did not believe, but because their belief was so strong. I think the resentment that comes through in these last few chapters is John's, not Jesus'.

7:13 Waitaminnit. Isn't it the Jews who are being spoken of here? Are they then afraid of themselves? Or is "The Jews" code for the Jewish political system?

7:15 In which case it would be the system that was astonished here, not the people.

7:21 is the "one work" the miracle of the loaves and fishes? He has performed more than one miracle by this point in the narrative.

7:22 is the parenthetical correction here from Jesus, or from John? It does not seem like the sort of thing Jesus would add in the middle of a sermon.

7:23 This must be the "one work" then: the healing of the man at Beth-Zatha.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle: The Hound of the Baskervilles

I can certainly see why this is the most read/adapted of Doyle's four novels.  The twists and revelations are exactly of the sort that make for good theater/television, and the spectre of the demon hound is custom made to capture the imagination.  It's a pity that it wasn't better written.

In other, less famous of the Holmes novels, Doyle errs in the other direction.  The narrative is sound, the characterization solid and the plot tidy.  It is only the relative lack of imagination in A Study in Scarlet , for example, that makes them less memorable.  To draw attention to one parallel in particular, Doyle's lengthy interluding narrative regarding the history of the Mormon enclave fits nicely into place, and is even a refreshing break from the narration of Watson.  Doyle attempts the same thing in The Hound, but the interludes feel forced, even convoluted.  The chapters that consist of diary entries are utterly unbelievable as such--they do not have the feel of diary entries, but retain the style of the rest of the novel--and the same is true for the chapters made up of letters to Holmes.  Another dissatisfactory element is the ending chapter.  Holmes' recounting feels forced, didactic even.  

But even barring these flaws, I continue to discount Doyle's work.  Imaginative, yes, but literate?  Hardly.  I have read nearly 3,000 annotated pages of his in the past two years, and am entertained, but not impressed.

BTD:25.  Right on schedule.

Greguerias--continued

For an explanation of what the hell this is, please see earlier post. It was getting too long, and I'm not even ten percent done . . .

The summer is full of anonymous hissing.

The sleepwalker seems to be taking the measure of something with the perenthesis of his extended hands . . . perhaps of his own shroud.

The "A" is the camp store of the alphabet.

"Bread" is such a short word so that we can ask for it urgently.

He was so courteous that he sometimes saluted the trees.

Two in a car: a love affair. Three: adultery. Four: kidnapping. Five: crime. Six: a shootout with the police.

In the end, a bottle of champagne is an anti-aircraft gun.

Only about 2,200 to go . . .

The architecture of snow is always in the Gothic style.

Every comma of their royal decrees is hung with their ermine pelts.

The Nile is a most reckless and beautiful horse.

One doesn't have to give himself a baby carriage for the first child.

How stiff the beard of the hedgehog sticks out!

If the miniatures were edible, they would be delicious.

The cricket keeps the pulse of the night.

Plantains get old in one day only.

The hypochondriac seems to me like a disparate mixture of a crocodile and a hippopotamus (a play on the spelling of the three words in Spanish).

The moon sits on the night like a lapel pin (some liberties).

On the old palms, the mane of age comes out.

With bad tobacco, fleas of fire jump out of your pipe.

Thunder is a drum without noise.

The only purpose of the train's whistle is to scatter melancholy over the countryside.

The bicyclist is a vampire of velocity.

The bad thing about a helicopter is that it always seems like a toy.

Lakes are puddles left by the Flood.

Artistic definition: the cockroach is a metaphorical beauty mark on the night.

The hail throws its rice, celebrating the marriage of Summer.

The waves sculpt skulls of giants out of the rocks.

The marble Venuses in museums show bruises from pinching.

If the mirror were to pull aside her mercury curtain, we would see our X-ray.

The sofa faints to hear the news.

The ice melts because it cries cold.

The watch is a time bomb--a bomb of more or less time.

A kiss is a nothing in parenthesis.

Like psychoanalysts, we discover that he has made this suit with so many buttons because he wants to be a piano (WTF?).

On the beach, our shoes turn into hourglasses.

Water is happiest in the paddles of a water wheel.

We want to be stone, but we are jello.

The biggest grievance of marble statues is that they always have cold feet.

Don Juan asked for love like somebody else would ask for a job.

There are fences that children think are made of giant pencils.

Dreams are repositories of stray objects.

Combs are the musical staves of dead ideas.

There is a snowstorm of feathers in the henhouse.

Arabic architecture is a magnification of the keyhole.

The bat flies away out of the Devil's magic box.

Flamenco was born from the reeds.

The Moon is the night's laundress.

Chrysanthemums are flowers from the bottom of the ocean that prefer to live on land.

The sun is the universal medicine: It gives us life, and the microbes.

The moon is the crystal eye of the heavens.

Roulette is the child's game that gives tragedy to men.

The elephant that announce the circus is made of all the members of the company.

The cicada is the alarm bell of the nap.

The soul flees the body like an undershirt on wash day.

The horns of the bull seek the bullfighter to the beginning of the world.

When the telephone sleeps, it gives the ears the message, "Nobody home".

That which speaks of the universe does so as if it were speaking of a grand marketplace.

The mare with a young pony is the temptation of the photographers.

He who uses his moustache like a toothbrush is a prophylactic.

The poet looked at the sky so much that a cloud came out of his eye (I'm not confident of this one. This is the second time I've had trouble with the reflexive verb salirse).

Logic is the pulverizer of reason.

The good writer knows nothing if he knows writing.

An inheritance is a gift for him who tips well (suspect).

There is no such thing as a virgin forest. Those forests we call "virgin" are filled with satyrs . . .

The worst atavism we have is death.

Civilization needs to invent messenger seagulls.

There are melons that seem to be cheeses, but are melons nonetheless.

There are those that sleep in such a way that we expect, when we remove the handkersheif from their face, to see a rhinoceros horn.

He who is in Venice is mistaken into thinking he is in Venice. He who dreams he is in Venice is the one who is in Venice.

It was so crazy, what he was asking the tailor : to make him a waistcoat, when he knew he was making it with long sleeves.

The day the moon buys a car, the night will be much shorter.

When a star falls, it seems like a point had run down the middle of the sky.

He ate so much rice that he learned Chinese.

The woman who poses suggestively while smoking cheats the man with the cigarette, and cheats the cigarette with the man.

Gloria: name for a woman with a temper.

When a flower loses its first petal, it is already lost entirely!

The iris doesn't amount to an orchid, simply because it doesn't know how to comb itself.

The squid is the dry cleaner for the fish's mourning garments.

The band one puts on a pigeon's leg has to be a watch, so that it can deliver its messages punctually.

The smoke rose to the sky when it was supposed to descend to hell.

The castaway comes out converted into a beggar to whom they gave a gift that came big (I'm sure I butchered this one).

Some heads look like a column fell on them.

Luke IV

19:1-10 This lacks the ring of something that really happened. It feels embellished, or allegorical.

19:12 If Jesus is the Nobleman in this parable, has he really gone to get kingly power?

19:21, 22 Again, the parallel does not quite fit. How is Jesus a harsh master taking what he did not deposit etc.?

19:26 What an odd metaphysical bent What do the minas represent here? Knowledge? Power? Spirit? In any case, how is it that those who have nothing have theirs taken away? a riddle?

19:44 It sounds like they are recognizing it. and is he claiming to be God here?

20:4 Whence comes this hesitation, even at the end of the tale? From a necessity that the deed be done on a certain day? some incomplete aspect fo the ministry? Genuine fear?

20:8 Or is he just toying with the buggers?

20:9-16 This parable fits the narrativemuch more nicely than the one in Ch. 19.

I like Jesus best as he is in this chapter: a teacher, not a prophet. He teaches, not by answering questions, but by exposing principles at the root of the questions. He reminds me of Socrates or Confucius, who, when asked what happens after death, answered (roughly), "Idiot. You can't even get this life right. Why worry about the next one?" Likewise, Jesus answers the question that isn't asked, which is usually more important than the one that is.

21:6 Is it possible that he was speaking generally, and not prophesying? More, "This will not last forever" than "This will be destroyed!"?

21:14 A nice verse that had never caught my attention before. "Do not prepare what you will say in advance" is good general advice.

I have a bit of a problem with this chapter. On one hand, it appears to be a pretty accurate prophesy. Things did occur mostly as said here. On the other hand, people (coughthewitnessescough) take it too far and apply it on a greater scale than the JEwish system of things. I'm not sure how I feel about the idea of prophesy anyway. A pretty compelling case can be made that this is the real thing. What does that mean metaphysically? Does it argue for a Boethian, simulatneous model of time?

22:3 As concerned with facts as Luke is usually, he seems to let a bit of supposition slip in here.

22:17 This is an interesting detail: There are two cups in Luke's account of this meal. One before the bread and one after. Does each have a significance?

22:21 I can just see everybody jerking their hands off the table at this point . . .

22:24 A natural extension of the "Who is the villain" topic

22:38 The point at which Judas wasuncovered and left is missing. Was it before or after the kingdom was conferred in verse 29?

22:62 From whom did Luke learn this account? Peter himself seems the most likely source, in which case we have to wonder about the objectivity of the account.

The Jesus of this, and indeed of the last three chapters, more closely resembles the peaceable, gentle Jesus of the first ten chapters than the angry, fiery Jesus of 11ish-19ish. I like this one better.

23:2 a lie, to be sure.

23:9 As it should be. Herod has no part to play in the unfolding of this drama, and Jesus rightly denies the murderer of his cousin the dignity of a response.

23:24 Pilate is often painted as a villain in this scenario, but so far it seems that he acted rather more nobly than he is given credit for. The common claim of Jewish apologists is that the Romans were Jesus' murderers. It certainly does not seem so from this account.

23:36 and these soldiers could easily be officers of the Sanhedrin, not of the Roman government.

23:47 never mind.

24:1 This verse is one with which My Dad has had some issue, and I credit it with the beginning of his mistrust in The Witnesses. According to his math, Jesus was not dead for 3 1/2 days if what Luke says is true. That certainly blows apart a whole mess of prophecy!

24:7 "On the third day", not after. So, less than three days in the tomb!

24:18 Interesting that we never hear ore about this Cleopas. I wonder what his connection to the early church was, that Luke felt it necessary to name him?

24:34 Rather an unsupportable conclusion . . . Peopple see what they want to see, after all.

24:36 This account is a little more credible.

In brief, I liked the beginning and end of this account. The Jesus described in those sections is a marvelous example as a teacher and as a human. The Jesus of the middle part, though, what a character! I'm not sure I like him . . .

Henry Miller: Tropic of Cancer

Of the five people who showed up to book club this month, I was the only one who liked this book--let alone raved about it. I went through about four interpretations of it before settling on one, and even though my fellow clubbers didn't enjoy the selection, their perspectives--especially Belinda's--helped set my opinion that this is one of the two best books I have read this year.

This presents me with a problem. Nothing is simpler than to rail against a book I don't care for, or to make a connection between a tepid book and something interesting from my own mind. What is difficult is to read a book that has so many interesting aspects that it is difficult to piece them all together in something cogent. Even more difficult, Miller's book is fragmented to begin with. Let my try and touch on a few of the more interesting aspects, but I know I will be unsatisfied with the result.

Miller would have wanted me to be unsatisfied anyway. The book is designed to unsettle, not only with topic (drinking and sex) and language (cunt after cunt after fucked-out cunt of a whore), but also with marvelously disturbing imagery (the remains of a ham sandwich floating in a bidet is my favorite). The book inveighs against the tendency to put things in flowerpots, to compartmentalize, to write stories--books and internal narratives--that limit the wonder of experience. The point of existence, as I see it through Miller's eyes, is to experience those grand moments of epiphany that make the rest of the agonizing tedium worth it. "I had moments of ecstasy and I sang with burning sparks," the narrator explains (251). The book itself is Miller's attempt--and he never has illusions about it being more than an attempt--to capture that experience, to write "pages that explode, pages that wound and sear, that wring groans and tears and curses" (248). Whatever else can be said, this he did do. And I choose to believe that he revealed, at points, the single unwavering band of light that Vonnegut assures us is at the center of each one of us.

Sylvia Plath: The Bell Jar

One mark of great literature is the ability to portray an experience so convincingly that it does more than recreate the moment in the reader's mind; it forces the reader to live what is written in his or her own life. Such was my experience with this book.

Understand, though, that I have an affinity for Plath already. So closely does The Bell Jar follow my own path that I can mark the exact page at which it diverges: 170. The words at certain points might have come out of my own mouth--only probably not as beautifully. Some examples:

"The thought that I might kill myself formed as clearly in my mind as a tree or a flower" (97).

"I knew that if anybody spoke to me or looked too closely the tears would fly out of my eyes and the sobs would fly out of my throat and I'd cry for a week. I could feel the tears brimming and sloshing in me like a water glass that is too unsteady and too full" (101).

And there is more, not single lines but entire chapters. The fig tree filled with dreams between which she cannot choose--and which wither on the branch--and the calm with which she overdoses on sleeping pills. Most people think of suicide springing from despair, but Plath describes it as only one who has been there knows: springing not from despair, but from numbness.

So closely did The Bell Jar serve as a mirror, it was in fact dangerous to read. After putting it down, I found myself back there. My own mind and body has assimilated Plath's writing and made it reality. I felt the same invisible hand that worked Esther/Sylvia like a marionette grab hold of my strings again, and it was rather scary to feel him grasping for me. I wonder what would have happened if my path continued along Esther's after page 170, if somebody had checked me in somewhere. Would I have ended up like her? Or like her creator?

BTD: 22ish

George Bernard Shaw: Androcles and the Lion and Saint Joan

A long time ago, in another life, Shaw was my favorite author. I felt an affinity with his wit and especially his evident scorn for everything and everyone around him. I read as many of his texts as I could find--provided they were in the matching Penguin edition with which I started. My anal retentive library tastes were evident even then. When I was young.

But now I am old--shut up--and hadn't read anything by Shaw for five years at least. Blessed with much backstage time during the run of Princess Ida (a smashing success, if you're interested), I decided to revisit my old friend and exercise some of my age-ripened reading skills. Like many things from that period of my life--marriage, for one--I found that I no longer have a taste for it. At least, not in the same way.

There is still plenty to recommend Shaw. Certain of his characters are just as indelible as Shakespeare's, if slightly more interchangeable. I'm thinking of The Captain in Androcles and Robert in Saint Joan, who might well be the same character, though I didn't mind because that character is so cool. The Captain's line "Are your Christian fairy stories any truer than our stories about Jupiter and Diana, in which, I may tell you, I believe no more than the Emperor does, or any educated man in Rome," and her response "A man cannot die for a story and a dream . . . If it were anything small enough to know, it would be too small to die for." express perfectly and touchingly Shaw's view of religious experience, and that scene is the one truly cosmic moment in either play. "There lives more faith in honest doubt," as Tennyson said, "believe me, than in half the creeds."

Sadly, Shaw does not touch this height as often as I had thought. The plays are too often didactic and as such lack layers of meaning, a criterion by which I judge all literature. I don't grieve my old regard for him, but I have been semi-consciously searching for Shaw's replacement ever since.

Sir Cecil Maurice Bowra: Primitive Song

I had such high hopes for this book. I casually researched Bowra on teh internets [sic], and found him to be quite a wit--the Oscar Wilde of anthropology. "Buggers can't be choosers", he once quipped, and "I expect to pass through this world but once and therefore if there is anybody I want to kick in the crotch I had better kick them in the crotch now, for I do not expect to pass this way again." Surely such a wit would bring a fresh and axiomatic flair to his seemingly dry thesis: that the very earliest, paleolithic forms of human song could be extrapolated from those of certain primitive peoples. The age of a society, he rightly posits, has nothing to do with its similarity to paleolithic society, and modern Selk'nam and Yamana tribes likely bear a closer resemblance to our primitive forbears than ancient Greece or Rome.

I regretfully report that Bowra does not live up to my expectations, however, and I consider this the first time that Philip Ward's recommendation has led me wrong. Even such tedious texts as Tacitus' or Saint Teresa's at least had some literary value, and inspired some worthwhile thought. Not only is Primitive Song empty of Bowra's celebrated wit, it is without scholarly merit, and even approaches certain analytical fallacies for which scholars are infamous.

Borges famously satirized the propensity of scholars to project onto a text and overattribute to it in his short story "Pierre Menard: Author of Don Quixote". There Borges describes a modern writer who reproduces Don Quixote word for word, and picks his text apart. Menard does not translate Cervantes' work; he writes it anew without ever having read it--a Borgesian situation to be sure. In the fashion of a smirking academic, Borges proceeds to show how the two identical texts are completely different, hilariously overreading between the lines and close reading the work to death.

I don't necessarily find anything wrong with this sort of textual scrutiny; scholars do it all the time. We isolate a single anapest in Shakespeare and write at length on how brilliantly the choice of scansion illustrates the overrarching themes of the oeuvre. I remember being guilty of it myself in an essay about Dickinson's poem "Much Madness is Divinest Sense". "By capitalizing the word 'Eye', Dickinson invokes the word 'I'." I wrote. "Suddenly, the 'discerning Eye' does not belong to some unidentified person, but to the author herself, and even to the reader." Barf.

But even this is not as nauseating as the conclusions drawn by Bowra from the most primitive of texts. Here is just one example: from the single-line poem "The Old One--to me--weather from the West", he
extrapolates

"It is a bald statement of fact, but it is nonetheless infused with emotion, with anxiety and implied complaint. Each word does its utmost by hinting beyond what it actually says, and nothing could be more compressed. But it is certainly a work of art, an exhibition of words set to action through passion by restraint. It catches what matters most in the blah blah blah etc."

Double barf. I am a big fan of close reading, but this goes too far, and throughout the entire book. Not only are such conclusions meaningless, they are disreputable. Bowra goes so far that his authority is undermined and the reader discounts the entire book. The only thing that makes reading it less than a complete waste of time is that I invariably find more to write about texts that I don't like than those I do. Et voila!