There's the question of the historical Jesus, enthusiastically discussed by more and ever more laymen, and left undiscussed by Biblical scholars and Christian theologians scholars who still almost unanimously insist that the matter has been thoroughly investigated (When? Where?) and that it's certain Jesus existed, and Shut up!
Then there's the entire excitement surrounding Constantine the Great, the inaccuracies about him which are so popular: It's still so often said that he made Christianity Rome's official religion -- he did not. It's said that he (often: he and the Pope) wrote or re-wrote or edited the New Testament at the Council of Nicea. Nope: the Pope wasn't there; the Pope and Constantine had many more reasons to be enemies than to be allies; nobody altered the Bible or discussed what should or shouldn't be in it at Nicea; and there's no evidence that Constantine gave a rat's ass one way or the other about what was in it.
Here's a question which might deserve much more study than it has generally received so far: would Constantine have involved himself with Christianity at all if his mother, the empress Helena, had not been a Christian? I put it to you: which seems more plausible: that a Roman Emperor who, all who have studied his life agree, was a particularly savvy politician, that this Emperor gave some support to Christianity because, at a crucial battle in his struggle to solidify his control of the Empire, he saw a cross in the sky along with words telling him that with this sign he would conquer -- or that he gave some support to Christianity because his mother was a Christian and had a lot of influence on him?
The story of the cross and the words in the sky, and a lot of other nonsense, comes from Eusebius, who unfortunately is our most important single surviving source of the history of Christianity up until Constantine in general, and of biographical information about Constantine in particular. I say unfortunately because Eusebius' pants were on fire. I say unfortunately because the truth was not in him.
Some apologists and conservative historians will attack me for doubting the veracity of Eusebius, but that's okay. I'm in very, very good company: Edward Gibbon's multi-volume History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
has been praised as a groundbreaking work of genius, still unsurpassed in many ways two and a half centuries after its first publication -- because that's exactly what it is. It has also been vehemently condemned from the time it first appeared uo until the present day -- because Gibbon was clearly (although not quite explicitly) an atheist, and because he dared to question the accuracy of the historical accounts given by people like Eusebius.
A century after Gibbon, Jacob Burckhardt, another historian of great genius, enjoying the greater freedom of expression given to us all by courageous pioneers of freethinking like Hobbes and Spinoza and Hume and Gibbon and Voltaire, found no reason to hide his great annoyance with Eusebius, who had so thoroughly hidden and blurred the history which he, Burckhardt, was working so hard to find. Burckhardt came right out and called Eusebius a liar. and of course, the same people who disliked Gibbon also attacked Burckhardt, for the same reasons.
But lo and behold great wonders, O ye nations: as time passes, Gibbon and Burckhardt look more and more reasonable, as Eusebius, whose veracity was even attacked by other Christian historians as early as the 5th century, looks more and more like a teller of tall tales and less and less like the historian he called himself, and for which he was mostly taken from his time to Gibbon's.
And this man, Eusebius, is pretty much the founder of Christian historicism, the foundation upon which much of the history written over the course of the next millenium in Christendom, was based. Gibbon and Burckhardt and anyone else who cared about investigating history properly were quite right to be annoyed. Such a shaky foundation has produced a lot of spectacularly shaky results, and continues to do so today, although, as I said, Eusebius' falsehoods are finally beginning to be exposed and undone.
So I would say, to those who dislike Christianity and its continued omnipresence and power: don't blame Constantine above all others. If it hadn't been for his mother, he might never have given any support to Christianity. He might have continued Diocletian's persecution of it, and you and I might never have heard of Christianity. But far more, blame Eusebius, who took Constantine's support of Christianity and said that it was a conversion to Christianity, although Constantine never withdrew his support for the pagan religions. Blame Eusebius for intensifying the Christian disregard for reality and reason. Blame Eusebius for spreading the idea that Christianity had conquered Rome, decades before it actually did. Reality and reason and historical accuracy were defeated first, and then the Empire followed.
Wednesday, April 8, 2015
Tuesday, April 7, 2015
Most Documentary TV Shows On Ancient Topics (Biblical Studies And Early Christianty, Mostly) Really, Really Suck
A recent program about the fragments of the True Cross did a fairly good job of presenting the viewer with a story about the activities of the Empress Helena, mother of Constantine the Great and a devout Christian, who according to that story pretty much invented what we now know as Christian veneration of relics. The program tells us that Helena went to Jerusalem, found a piece of wood and declared that it was the Cross on which Jesus was put to death, cut it up into little pieces and distributed these pieces to churches all across the Roman Empire. This is the traditional story about how Helena began the belief that all of those pieces of wood in churches are pieces of True Cross. There are very good reasons to doubt whether Helena ever interested herself in relics at all. If these reasons were presented during this program, I must have blinked or zoned out at the time.
The same program did a particularly bad job of presenting the information it had on some recent scientific evaluation on the authenticity of the True Cross: a piece of wood considered since the 11th century to be piece of the True Cross was carbon-14 dated, and found to have come from a tree which lived in the 11th century. Not even close to the supposed time of Jesus, not even close to Helena's discovery in the 4th century of what she called the True Cross.
The carbon-14 dating was presented to the viewer in the very last several minutes of the 1-hour show. Why not at the very beginning of the show? Why not inform the viewer right at the start that any preoccupation with the Cross or any other relics on Helena's part is not solidly demonstrated by any historical evidence?
Perhaps the show's producers were afraid that if they did that sort of thing -- made sense -- it would be hard to keep viewers' attention for the rest of the hour. Perhaps they were exactly right about that. In any case, their handling of the material was pretty typical of such shows purporting to present the latest scholarly knowledge about ancient religious things: present a mix of comments by serious scholars with obfuscating narration, as if what the producers actually want is mainly to keep the viewer confused. The scholars will discuss "the tradition," that is, what the most conservative of believers regard as history, although almost no-one else who's studied the subject matter still does. The shows do not make plain what is meant by "tradition," they don't make plain that the experts are not relating what they consider to be fact. To make things worse, often crackpots who DO regard the traditional fables as factual are interviewed along with the experts.
Is there any rational reason at all to believe that Helena would have had any means at all of determining that what she had discovered was the True Cross? (IF, for the sake of argument, she actually looked for the Cross at all?) I doubt it very much, but my point is that the question was not discussed on air. The people most well-qualified in the world to discuss such matters, and quite willing to share their expertise, were interviewed, and we got a recitation of a bunch of fairy tales and precious little evaluation of what history, if any, is contained in them.
I have to wonder just exactly how much edifying information is routinely edited out of such interviews. I wonder whether one can hold out some hope that the raw footage of the entire interviews tends to be preserved, and will someday be edited into something much better than most of what goes on the air these days.
Thank goodness, these scholars write books, books with which the producers for half-assed "Secrets Revealed" shows on the so-called "History Channels" and NatGeo and the Smithsonian Channel, etc, have nothing to do. If you watch some of these shows and are intrigued by what is said by people like Professors Ehrman, Pagels and Chilton, you might find it quite interesting to read their books and see how badly the TV shows present what they have to say.
And then you'll walk around angrily muttering to yourself all the time about how TV jerks us around, just like I do. Just like me, you'll shout, "Why don't the experts insist on better shows being made? Is it just money, simple as that? Are the experts afraid that if they rock the boat they'll kill the golden goose? Et tu, Bart?!" Yes, you'll be angry, but I'll be a little bit less alone.
The same program did a particularly bad job of presenting the information it had on some recent scientific evaluation on the authenticity of the True Cross: a piece of wood considered since the 11th century to be piece of the True Cross was carbon-14 dated, and found to have come from a tree which lived in the 11th century. Not even close to the supposed time of Jesus, not even close to Helena's discovery in the 4th century of what she called the True Cross.
The carbon-14 dating was presented to the viewer in the very last several minutes of the 1-hour show. Why not at the very beginning of the show? Why not inform the viewer right at the start that any preoccupation with the Cross or any other relics on Helena's part is not solidly demonstrated by any historical evidence?
Perhaps the show's producers were afraid that if they did that sort of thing -- made sense -- it would be hard to keep viewers' attention for the rest of the hour. Perhaps they were exactly right about that. In any case, their handling of the material was pretty typical of such shows purporting to present the latest scholarly knowledge about ancient religious things: present a mix of comments by serious scholars with obfuscating narration, as if what the producers actually want is mainly to keep the viewer confused. The scholars will discuss "the tradition," that is, what the most conservative of believers regard as history, although almost no-one else who's studied the subject matter still does. The shows do not make plain what is meant by "tradition," they don't make plain that the experts are not relating what they consider to be fact. To make things worse, often crackpots who DO regard the traditional fables as factual are interviewed along with the experts.
Is there any rational reason at all to believe that Helena would have had any means at all of determining that what she had discovered was the True Cross? (IF, for the sake of argument, she actually looked for the Cross at all?) I doubt it very much, but my point is that the question was not discussed on air. The people most well-qualified in the world to discuss such matters, and quite willing to share their expertise, were interviewed, and we got a recitation of a bunch of fairy tales and precious little evaluation of what history, if any, is contained in them.
I have to wonder just exactly how much edifying information is routinely edited out of such interviews. I wonder whether one can hold out some hope that the raw footage of the entire interviews tends to be preserved, and will someday be edited into something much better than most of what goes on the air these days.
Thank goodness, these scholars write books, books with which the producers for half-assed "Secrets Revealed" shows on the so-called "History Channels" and NatGeo and the Smithsonian Channel, etc, have nothing to do. If you watch some of these shows and are intrigued by what is said by people like Professors Ehrman, Pagels and Chilton, you might find it quite interesting to read their books and see how badly the TV shows present what they have to say.
And then you'll walk around angrily muttering to yourself all the time about how TV jerks us around, just like I do. Just like me, you'll shout, "Why don't the experts insist on better shows being made? Is it just money, simple as that? Are the experts afraid that if they rock the boat they'll kill the golden goose? Et tu, Bart?!" Yes, you'll be angry, but I'll be a little bit less alone.
Monday, April 6, 2015
"How Many Languages Do You Speak?"
This question, which is naturally frequent in the sort of international groups I like, gave me the topic for this post. The answer to the question, of course, always depends upon how well one must know a language before one is justified in listing it among the languages one "knows," and one always wonders, of course, listening to the group's responses, whether this fellow claiming fluency in 30 languages might not be padding his resumee just a bit, and whether this lady saying she knows only 2 is being entirely too modest by listing 2 languages, her native language and one more, whose native speakers assume she's a native speaker, which is extremely unusual for a non-native speaker. Think of all the people you know who've lived in your native country for decades after having grown up somewhere else, who speak your language wonderfully, with ease and grace and a huge vocabulary -- how many of them entirely lack a charming accent? A foreign actor passing for a native in a movie or TV show doesn't count, even though it's still a remarkable achievement with a script and dialogue coaches and multiple takes.
I'll claim 6: I'll stand here and tell you (I won't look you in the eye and tell you, but that's because I'm autistic, not because I'm a shifty schemer or anything like that.) that I can speak English, German, Latin, French, Spanish and Italian, in that descending order of proficiency. I read and write each of them better than I speak them. I have some rudimentary knowledge of Greek, Arabic and Hebrew. I've just started on Hungarian and Armenian.
But of course languages come in families, so my familiarity with Latin, French, Spanish and Italian means that Portugese, Romanian/Moldavian, Catalan, Provencal, Rhaeoto-Romanic and Maltese will not be total mysteries to me. Likewise, my native proficiency in English and a long and intensive study of German mean that I can understand some Yiddish, Dutch/Flemish, Afrikaans, Frisian and Luxumbourgian, all of which can not entirely unreasonably be considered German dialects; and to a lesser extent the Scandanavian Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Icelandic and Faroese. And that is not an abstract theoretical postulate; it's based on some experience with each of those languages, and having discovered that I could understand some of each of them. So should I have said that I speak 24 languages (or 29?) instead of 6? No, I shouldn't have; because, for example, that might've given someone somewhere the impression that I would be of some practical use if someone were needed to act as an interpreter between someone who speaks Provencal but no Faroese and someone else who speaks Faroese but no Provencal. Okay, I wouldn't be completely useless in such a situation, but, depending on the locale, my skills might be much better employed looking for an interpreter than in taking on the steep-uphill challenge of trying to act as one. I would understand enough to figure out, after some effort, that what we would want, ideally, would be someone fluent in both Provencal and Faroese. I would be able, with some effort, to figure out that those were the native languages of the 2 people who needed to communicate with each other.
(Naturally there's a very good chance that both of them would speak English well enough to make me fully superfluous.)
Rather than saying that I'm competent in 6 languages, I could say that I have some familiarity with the Germanic and Romance languages families, and that I have made some investigations into the history and development of those languages and their relationships to one another. This proficiency has not been acquired more or less accidentally in the course of a life of constant globe-trotting, but intentionally through a love for books. Many a la-dee-da carefree globetrotter who never had any particular ambitions as a scholar would be much more useful than I in many situations calling for a polyglot, especially if he or she had any proficiency whatsoever in Chinese or Russian or Japanese or Hungarian or Turkish or Swahili or Nahuatl, etc, etc, etc; whereas I would have much more urgent need than the average globetrotter to suppress the urge to be a pain-in-the-ass know-it-all and criticize as ahistorical the combinations of spoken and written languages and other cultural phenomena in "Game of Thrones." (The dragons could be considered ahistorical, too, Steven. Ya big goof.)
Ideally, the question "How many languages to you speak?" will not simply be answered with a number, but will be the opening to a long and fascinating conversation.
Sunday, April 5, 2015
Compassion
Is it a good thing?
Before you stop reading and start shouting that I'm an evil bastard and/or a Republican for even asking such a question, let's acknowledge that "compassion," like "love," is one of those terms which we need to examine more closely, because it can mean more than one thing. If we leave such terms unexamined, we leave some confusion unaddressed.
Tracing the term back to its Latin roots, "to have compassion with" someone means "to suffer with" them. The Latin "passio" means suffering, and "com" or "cum" is a Latin word with various meanings, often used as a prefix, often mean "with" or "along with."
All decent people want to alleviate the suffering of their fellow humans whenever they can. Nietzsche was a thoroughly decent person and he wanted this as much as any decent person.
He was often misunderstood on this point -- and Machiavelli too -- both by rotten uncaring people who thought he was one of them, and by decent caring people who thought he was one of those rotten people, because he dared to examine what compassion really is. Actually, in German the situation is a bit clearer, because instead of using a form of a Latin or Greek term, Germans use a modern German compound word to refer to compassion: "Mitleiden," which means "Withsuffering," "suffering-with." In English, "compassion" can also refer to the readiness to actually do something about the suffering of others, without necessarily feeling bad because someone else feels bad.
A person has been injured and lies bleeding in the street. Bystander A comes by and weeps and wails for the suffering of the injured person, and does nothing else. Bystander B, who is in a particularly cheerful mood, comes by, immediately calls an ambulance, and until the ambulance comes does what he can to keep the wound clean and slow the bleeding. And B stays particularly cheerful the whole time.
Who's been comapssionate, A or B? Like I say, it depends how you define "compassion." If you define it to mean suffering along with those who are suffering, then A has been compassionate. If you define it to mean doing something to help others, then B is the compassionate one.
I'm afraid that we often define compassion in the sense of Bystander A: suffering with others, participating in their suffering. I find that to be actually worse than useless: it increases the amount of suffering in the world. Bystander B reduces the amount of suffering in 2 ways: by helping, and by not suffering himself.
The Christian martyrs -- the real ones, that is, and not the ones whose suffering existed only in myth --
-- were compassionate with the real or mythical sufferings of the real or mythical Christ, and eager to share in that suffering. Galileo preferred to lie his way out of torture to give himself the opportunity to continue his work in science during the house arrest in which he spent the final years of his life. The martyrs were like Bystander A: eager to suffer. Galileo was like Bystander B: full of the desire to be useful.
Good and evil are relative terms. Nietzsche wrote about that a lot and even put it in the title of one of his books. I do not have have the same opinions as everyone else about what is good. I think that Bystander B and Galileo were good, because they were good for something.
As a young monk, before he proceeded into open rebellion and started the Lutheran Reformation, Martin Luther went to Rome and was outraged by -- Michelangelo. He was outraged by churches adorning themselves in gorgeous art. Back in Germany he was outraged by the sale of indulgences. Germans were paying lots of money to have official documents from the Catholic Church certifying that their souls had been saved. Back in Rome the money paid for all that gorgeous art. Apparently not a lot of Italians or French people could be induced to pay money for such things. Did Luther denounce his fellow Germans for being such schmucks? No, he denounced the Catholic Church and ushered in centuries worth of incredibly gory religious wars. Not because people in Germany were too superstitious, as many a Lutheran apologist might have you believe, but because in Rome people were feeling too good and living too well.
Even today a lot of Protestants are bitterly angry about the very same Renaissance art in the Vatican. And a lot of atheists are bitterly angry about it too. They -- both the angry Protestants and the angry atheists -- talk about selling off all that art for the good of the poor. As if poor people can't appreciate art.
No, I don't think that art is the enemy of the poor. I think those angry Protestants and atheists -- and let's not leave out the few angry Catholics who're with them. Among 1 billion Catholic there've got to be a few who are that crazy -- are Bystander A, more interesting in increasing suffering than lessening it.
Don't go after art if you really want to help the poor (I'm not talking to the angry people I've described in the preceeding 2 paragraphs, they're not listening to me anyway, they're much too busy hating each other and me and quite possibly you too, I'm talking to those of you who are relatively sane). Go after tax breaks for billionaires. Support raising minimum wages. Help publicize sweatshops and slave labor and shut down those who grow richer off of human misery. You can do all that and love art at the same time, in fact you can do all that and make great art at the same time -- in fact, if you're not yet very familiar with art and the lives of artists, you might be amazed at how many great artists do exactly all of that sort of thing all at the same time.
You don't have to be miserable in order to be good.
Before you stop reading and start shouting that I'm an evil bastard and/or a Republican for even asking such a question, let's acknowledge that "compassion," like "love," is one of those terms which we need to examine more closely, because it can mean more than one thing. If we leave such terms unexamined, we leave some confusion unaddressed.
Tracing the term back to its Latin roots, "to have compassion with" someone means "to suffer with" them. The Latin "passio" means suffering, and "com" or "cum" is a Latin word with various meanings, often used as a prefix, often mean "with" or "along with."
All decent people want to alleviate the suffering of their fellow humans whenever they can. Nietzsche was a thoroughly decent person and he wanted this as much as any decent person.
He was often misunderstood on this point -- and Machiavelli too -- both by rotten uncaring people who thought he was one of them, and by decent caring people who thought he was one of those rotten people, because he dared to examine what compassion really is. Actually, in German the situation is a bit clearer, because instead of using a form of a Latin or Greek term, Germans use a modern German compound word to refer to compassion: "Mitleiden," which means "Withsuffering," "suffering-with." In English, "compassion" can also refer to the readiness to actually do something about the suffering of others, without necessarily feeling bad because someone else feels bad.
A person has been injured and lies bleeding in the street. Bystander A comes by and weeps and wails for the suffering of the injured person, and does nothing else. Bystander B, who is in a particularly cheerful mood, comes by, immediately calls an ambulance, and until the ambulance comes does what he can to keep the wound clean and slow the bleeding. And B stays particularly cheerful the whole time.
Who's been comapssionate, A or B? Like I say, it depends how you define "compassion." If you define it to mean suffering along with those who are suffering, then A has been compassionate. If you define it to mean doing something to help others, then B is the compassionate one.
I'm afraid that we often define compassion in the sense of Bystander A: suffering with others, participating in their suffering. I find that to be actually worse than useless: it increases the amount of suffering in the world. Bystander B reduces the amount of suffering in 2 ways: by helping, and by not suffering himself.
The Christian martyrs -- the real ones, that is, and not the ones whose suffering existed only in myth --
-- were compassionate with the real or mythical sufferings of the real or mythical Christ, and eager to share in that suffering. Galileo preferred to lie his way out of torture to give himself the opportunity to continue his work in science during the house arrest in which he spent the final years of his life. The martyrs were like Bystander A: eager to suffer. Galileo was like Bystander B: full of the desire to be useful.
Good and evil are relative terms. Nietzsche wrote about that a lot and even put it in the title of one of his books. I do not have have the same opinions as everyone else about what is good. I think that Bystander B and Galileo were good, because they were good for something.
As a young monk, before he proceeded into open rebellion and started the Lutheran Reformation, Martin Luther went to Rome and was outraged by -- Michelangelo. He was outraged by churches adorning themselves in gorgeous art. Back in Germany he was outraged by the sale of indulgences. Germans were paying lots of money to have official documents from the Catholic Church certifying that their souls had been saved. Back in Rome the money paid for all that gorgeous art. Apparently not a lot of Italians or French people could be induced to pay money for such things. Did Luther denounce his fellow Germans for being such schmucks? No, he denounced the Catholic Church and ushered in centuries worth of incredibly gory religious wars. Not because people in Germany were too superstitious, as many a Lutheran apologist might have you believe, but because in Rome people were feeling too good and living too well.
Even today a lot of Protestants are bitterly angry about the very same Renaissance art in the Vatican. And a lot of atheists are bitterly angry about it too. They -- both the angry Protestants and the angry atheists -- talk about selling off all that art for the good of the poor. As if poor people can't appreciate art.
No, I don't think that art is the enemy of the poor. I think those angry Protestants and atheists -- and let's not leave out the few angry Catholics who're with them. Among 1 billion Catholic there've got to be a few who are that crazy -- are Bystander A, more interesting in increasing suffering than lessening it.
Don't go after art if you really want to help the poor (I'm not talking to the angry people I've described in the preceeding 2 paragraphs, they're not listening to me anyway, they're much too busy hating each other and me and quite possibly you too, I'm talking to those of you who are relatively sane). Go after tax breaks for billionaires. Support raising minimum wages. Help publicize sweatshops and slave labor and shut down those who grow richer off of human misery. You can do all that and love art at the same time, in fact you can do all that and make great art at the same time -- in fact, if you're not yet very familiar with art and the lives of artists, you might be amazed at how many great artists do exactly all of that sort of thing all at the same time.
You don't have to be miserable in order to be good.
Friday, April 3, 2015
Don't Be Afraid Of Foreign Languages
I know that fear of the unknown is one of the most basic and primal human fears. And I also know that horrible things can be said in any language. But I also know that paranoia usually doesn't make sense, because most people have other things on their minds most of the time, than you. And whether they speak a language you don't understand or not, if you're nice, you greatly reduce the chances that they'll say nasty things about you. Does it really make much difference if they say something to your face in a language they assume you don't understand, or in your native language when you're out of earshot?
There are many, many perfectly good reasons to study languages, plural. One is that the beauty of the finest language, that of the most skilled writers, is untranslatable. Ovid's verse is so beautiful, line after line, that it gives me goosebumps, the same way that beautiful music does. I wonder, do you really have to understand Latin at all in order to hear and feel a great deal of the sheer beauty in lines like these?
Quae gemitus truncaeque deo Neptunius heros
causa rogat frontis; cui sic Calydonius amnis
coepit inornatos redimitus harundine crines:
"Triste petis munus. quis enim sua proelia victus
commemorare velit? referam tamen ordine, nec tam
turpe fuit vinci, quam contendisse decorum est,
magnaque dat nobis tantus solacia victor."
Those are the first 7 lines of book 9 of Ovid's Metamorphoses.
I realize that I'm undercutting my own point here by choosing the Metamorphoses to illustrate it. I chose Ovid because I've been reading him lately and I really love his work. In fact, right at the moment, Ovid is my very favorite poet in any language. He's just the best. however, the beautifully-written Metamorphoses is chock full of the most hair-raising content. Ovid's masterful verses describe many weird and shocking things. I had to search for a while to come across a handful of verses in a row with such relatively tame and unexotic content as those I quoted. This book does not spend a lot of time on the "then they came into a beautiful town, and the fields were lush, and they were welcomed with great hospitality and dined and drank in comfort as the sun sank peacefully into evening" -- sort of deal. It has much more to do with loving and fighting and deception and revenge and plots and wars and so forth, and, as the title indicates, with magic and transformations. Action-adventure Hollywood doesn't have a lot on Ovid. His beautiful lines deliver a lot of "adult-oriented" material, as it's sometimes called. Don't worry, though, the 6 lines I quoted above could be rated G. Very, very soft PG at most:
The hero who called himself the son of Neptune asked the Calydonian river-god why he sighed and how his forehead had been wounded. The god replied as he bound his unruly hair with reeds: "You ask something painful of me -- who wants to talk about his own defeats? But I'll tell you all about it, because the shame of defeat is mitigated by having fought such a mighty opponent at all."
But my translation of those 6 lines, and, frankly, every single other translation of those lines I've seen, squeeze all of the beauty of the original right out. The original 6 lines, like Ovid's work in general, are exquisitely constructed and balanced and polished like JS Bach's music. Translating Ovid is sort of like describing Bach's music in words instead of playing it or listening to someone play it: it sort of misses the whole point.
There are many, many perfectly good reasons to study languages, plural. One is that the beauty of the finest language, that of the most skilled writers, is untranslatable. Ovid's verse is so beautiful, line after line, that it gives me goosebumps, the same way that beautiful music does. I wonder, do you really have to understand Latin at all in order to hear and feel a great deal of the sheer beauty in lines like these?
Quae gemitus truncaeque deo Neptunius heros
causa rogat frontis; cui sic Calydonius amnis
coepit inornatos redimitus harundine crines:
"Triste petis munus. quis enim sua proelia victus
commemorare velit? referam tamen ordine, nec tam
turpe fuit vinci, quam contendisse decorum est,
magnaque dat nobis tantus solacia victor."
Those are the first 7 lines of book 9 of Ovid's Metamorphoses.
I realize that I'm undercutting my own point here by choosing the Metamorphoses to illustrate it. I chose Ovid because I've been reading him lately and I really love his work. In fact, right at the moment, Ovid is my very favorite poet in any language. He's just the best. however, the beautifully-written Metamorphoses is chock full of the most hair-raising content. Ovid's masterful verses describe many weird and shocking things. I had to search for a while to come across a handful of verses in a row with such relatively tame and unexotic content as those I quoted. This book does not spend a lot of time on the "then they came into a beautiful town, and the fields were lush, and they were welcomed with great hospitality and dined and drank in comfort as the sun sank peacefully into evening" -- sort of deal. It has much more to do with loving and fighting and deception and revenge and plots and wars and so forth, and, as the title indicates, with magic and transformations. Action-adventure Hollywood doesn't have a lot on Ovid. His beautiful lines deliver a lot of "adult-oriented" material, as it's sometimes called. Don't worry, though, the 6 lines I quoted above could be rated G. Very, very soft PG at most:
The hero who called himself the son of Neptune asked the Calydonian river-god why he sighed and how his forehead had been wounded. The god replied as he bound his unruly hair with reeds: "You ask something painful of me -- who wants to talk about his own defeats? But I'll tell you all about it, because the shame of defeat is mitigated by having fought such a mighty opponent at all."
But my translation of those 6 lines, and, frankly, every single other translation of those lines I've seen, squeeze all of the beauty of the original right out. The original 6 lines, like Ovid's work in general, are exquisitely constructed and balanced and polished like JS Bach's music. Translating Ovid is sort of like describing Bach's music in words instead of playing it or listening to someone play it: it sort of misses the whole point.
Thursday, April 2, 2015
I Haven't Watched Charlie Rose In Over 30 Years
One of the best jobs I've ever had was also one of the worst in that the wages were exploitatively low: $80 a week in 1995-96. I was an usher in a theatre showing Steve Martin's play Picasso at the Lapin Agile. (Movie stars' salaries make headlines, but there are a lot of low-paying and even non-paying jobs in show business, and the producers and studio execs who make more than movie stars and manage to keep their finances out of the news make money off of the movie stars, and the people being paid very little in non-union jobs, and the people not being paid at all. Unionize.)
I could've gone home when the play started, but night after night I stayed and watch the play. It was incredible. It's set in 1904, in the Lapine Agile, a bar in Paris where Picasso hung out at the time. Albert Einstein was never there, but this play is not strictly realistic, and in this play he pops in. 1904 was shortly before he published the papers on relativity and photoelectronics which made him famous. In the play the proprietors of the bar have a ridiculously, hopelessly, unnecessarily complicated system of bookkeeping, which it seems they will never untangle, but young Albert quickly does some amazingly complicated math in his head to help them out. Then people ask him to tell them about himself. Instead of saying he's working on academic papers, the way he puts it is that he's writing a 70-page book about "everything." Someone asks him how many people would have to read his book for him to consider it a success, and he gets the same abstracted expression of his face that he had just a little while ago when he was doing the complicated math in his head to his the bar's owners with their messed-up accounting; and after a while he answers, "One. But it has to be Max Planck."
That doesn't make Einstein as different from other writers as some might think. Sure, all other things being equal, the more people who read my blog, the better. But one person reading my blog, or something else I've written, and then commenting favorably on it, could make me a successful writer all at once -- if that person is Oprah Winfrey.
Or possibly if it were Charlie Rose. I'm not entirely sure about that. Like I say, I stopped watching his shows 30 years ago, because the way that he constantly interrupted his guests, not only verbally, which was bad enough, but also by waving his great big stupid hand in their faces for them to shut up, was driving me mad. So why did I watch his show to begin with? Because he had very interesting guests. And I gather he still does. I gather this partly by channel-surfing past his show and seeing the face of some extremely-interesting person -- as interesting as Cate Blanchett and Salman Rushdie and 4 different Presidents and Harold Bloom -- and partly by hearing extremely-interesting people talk about having been on his show in venues other than his show. Does the amazing list of guests make me want to repent and give Rose another try after 30+ years, see if he's become somewhat less unbearable? No. On the contrary, it make me angry that all of those amazing people continue to prop this jerk up by appearing on his show.
I hope I've made the intensity and unreasonableness of my dislike for Charlie Rose vividly clear.
Still, I suppose that Rose could make me famous. Not Oprah's Book Club-famous, probably, but he could give me a huge boost. I think sometimes about whether I would refuse to appear on his show. I know, I just finished denouncing a teeming host of wonderful people for appearing on his show. I also suspect that I've made it impossible that Rose will ever want to interview me, with this post, if it wasn't already impossible because of other things I've said and written. But maybe Rose is a very magnanimous guy. Maybe he doesn't interrupt nearly as much. Maybe he's stopped with the waving of that big hand in his guests' faces.
(The fact that the guests were so great, even 30 years ago, was what made the interruptions so unbearable. You can understand that, right? I tuned in to watch -- say, Steve Martin, or Ted Kennedy, not to watch Rose talk about Martin or Kennedy while they struggled to get a word in edgewise. Hot tip, Charlie: if you're fortunate enough to have a great speaker appear on your show, LET HIM OR HER SPEAK YOU BIG GOON!!!)
Whether or not to grit my teeth and betray my principles -- and maybe take a strong prescription pill or 3 -- and go on "Charlie Rose" -- that's the sort of dilemma I want to have. And just like the Tom Petty Ab-So-Lute-Ly Bassackwards Law of Microeconomics, the more likely it is that I will ever have a chance to appear on the show, the less likely it will be that I will have any incentive to do so, because, although Charlie Rose could single-massive-handedly make me rich and famous, it's unlikely that he would want me as a guest unless I were already rich and famous, or at the very least, already speeding toward rich and famous.
Anyhow. Whether Oprah or Charlie are ever involved at all in my career rise, or even if they both actively oppose my rise because I've criticized them, if they're petty that way -- the more people who read my blog, the better. I'm doing everything I can think of to get the attention of the publishers and agents and other people who could help my career, including asking my readers, repeatedly, begging them, to mention my blog whenever and wherever they can. My ambition is naked. Yr darn tootin it is. I'm not trying in the least to hide that fact that I want to be a huge, huge, huge success. I know that some people advise those who are ambitious to hide their ambition, to pretend to be humble, and even pretend not to want honours and promotions. (But take the honours and promotions anyway of course, just pretend to do it unwillingly and with protestations of unworthiness.)
Whatever. I'm going a different way. It's one less thing people can accuse me of being insincere about.
I could've gone home when the play started, but night after night I stayed and watch the play. It was incredible. It's set in 1904, in the Lapine Agile, a bar in Paris where Picasso hung out at the time. Albert Einstein was never there, but this play is not strictly realistic, and in this play he pops in. 1904 was shortly before he published the papers on relativity and photoelectronics which made him famous. In the play the proprietors of the bar have a ridiculously, hopelessly, unnecessarily complicated system of bookkeeping, which it seems they will never untangle, but young Albert quickly does some amazingly complicated math in his head to help them out. Then people ask him to tell them about himself. Instead of saying he's working on academic papers, the way he puts it is that he's writing a 70-page book about "everything." Someone asks him how many people would have to read his book for him to consider it a success, and he gets the same abstracted expression of his face that he had just a little while ago when he was doing the complicated math in his head to his the bar's owners with their messed-up accounting; and after a while he answers, "One. But it has to be Max Planck."
That doesn't make Einstein as different from other writers as some might think. Sure, all other things being equal, the more people who read my blog, the better. But one person reading my blog, or something else I've written, and then commenting favorably on it, could make me a successful writer all at once -- if that person is Oprah Winfrey.
Or possibly if it were Charlie Rose. I'm not entirely sure about that. Like I say, I stopped watching his shows 30 years ago, because the way that he constantly interrupted his guests, not only verbally, which was bad enough, but also by waving his great big stupid hand in their faces for them to shut up, was driving me mad. So why did I watch his show to begin with? Because he had very interesting guests. And I gather he still does. I gather this partly by channel-surfing past his show and seeing the face of some extremely-interesting person -- as interesting as Cate Blanchett and Salman Rushdie and 4 different Presidents and Harold Bloom -- and partly by hearing extremely-interesting people talk about having been on his show in venues other than his show. Does the amazing list of guests make me want to repent and give Rose another try after 30+ years, see if he's become somewhat less unbearable? No. On the contrary, it make me angry that all of those amazing people continue to prop this jerk up by appearing on his show.
I hope I've made the intensity and unreasonableness of my dislike for Charlie Rose vividly clear.
Still, I suppose that Rose could make me famous. Not Oprah's Book Club-famous, probably, but he could give me a huge boost. I think sometimes about whether I would refuse to appear on his show. I know, I just finished denouncing a teeming host of wonderful people for appearing on his show. I also suspect that I've made it impossible that Rose will ever want to interview me, with this post, if it wasn't already impossible because of other things I've said and written. But maybe Rose is a very magnanimous guy. Maybe he doesn't interrupt nearly as much. Maybe he's stopped with the waving of that big hand in his guests' faces.
(The fact that the guests were so great, even 30 years ago, was what made the interruptions so unbearable. You can understand that, right? I tuned in to watch -- say, Steve Martin, or Ted Kennedy, not to watch Rose talk about Martin or Kennedy while they struggled to get a word in edgewise. Hot tip, Charlie: if you're fortunate enough to have a great speaker appear on your show, LET HIM OR HER SPEAK YOU BIG GOON!!!)
Whether or not to grit my teeth and betray my principles -- and maybe take a strong prescription pill or 3 -- and go on "Charlie Rose" -- that's the sort of dilemma I want to have. And just like the Tom Petty Ab-So-Lute-Ly Bassackwards Law of Microeconomics, the more likely it is that I will ever have a chance to appear on the show, the less likely it will be that I will have any incentive to do so, because, although Charlie Rose could single-massive-handedly make me rich and famous, it's unlikely that he would want me as a guest unless I were already rich and famous, or at the very least, already speeding toward rich and famous.
Anyhow. Whether Oprah or Charlie are ever involved at all in my career rise, or even if they both actively oppose my rise because I've criticized them, if they're petty that way -- the more people who read my blog, the better. I'm doing everything I can think of to get the attention of the publishers and agents and other people who could help my career, including asking my readers, repeatedly, begging them, to mention my blog whenever and wherever they can. My ambition is naked. Yr darn tootin it is. I'm not trying in the least to hide that fact that I want to be a huge, huge, huge success. I know that some people advise those who are ambitious to hide their ambition, to pretend to be humble, and even pretend not to want honours and promotions. (But take the honours and promotions anyway of course, just pretend to do it unwillingly and with protestations of unworthiness.)
Whatever. I'm going a different way. It's one less thing people can accuse me of being insincere about.
Wednesday, April 1, 2015
You Are Feeling Very Sleepy...
...very pleasantly relaxed. When I've counted down to 1 you'll be completely hypnotized, 5, 4, 3... 2... 1. You want me to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. I'm your favorite writer, you find my work to be deep and important and witty and charming all at the same time. "Sparkling prose" is a very overused phrase, but my prose truly sparkles. I am wise, I am always full of sound advice for the world. The thought of me winning the Nobel makes you very happy. You think that it is strange and wrong that my work has not been published in books and in magazines like the New Yorker and the Atlantic and Vanity Fair and Redbook and Harper's for many years already and that it is not on the bestseller lists. What would be proper and just would be if I were often referred to as being like Dan Brown or Stephen King (in terms of the sales of my books), except that I'm a good writer. If you're a publisher of books or periodicals you want to publish my work, if you're a literary agent you want to represent me, if you're Oprah you want me to be in your Book Club, if you're Conan or Jimmy Kimmel you want me to be a frequent guest on your show. Whoever you are, you want to talk about how good my writing is and how everyone should read as much of it as they can. You want to talk and write about it as much as you can, wherever and whenever you can, to whomever you can. Reading this blog makes you happy. Thinking about my writing makes you happy. Talking and writing about it, spreading the word about it, makes you even more happy. The thought of me winning that Nobel Prize in Literature, this year if possible but if not this year then just as soon as possible, makes you blissfully happy. When I've counted back up to 5 you'll be wide awake again, you'll feel great, rested and cheerful, and you'll start spreading the word about me with a verve and conviction you've seldom felt in relation to any cause before this. 1, 2... 3... 4... 5.
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