The Painful Nowning Process

JMNR reminds us that the sciences need the humanities:

Knowing what a thing is made of, after all, does not tell us what it is.

. . .

Literature, the fine arts, theater, and music teach humans what it is to be good, true, and beautiful. They point to meaning. What does it profit a man to learn all mysteries of matter and energy if he does not have love? Science can only simulate or stimulate the feelings of love, but . . . cannot create one real passion.

That first sentence, as Reynolds very well knows, is a paraphrase from a conversation in C.S. Lewis’s The Voyage of the Dawn Treader:

“In our world,” said Eustace, “A star is a huge ball of flaming gas.”

“Even in your world, my son, that is not what a star is but only what it is made of….”

How I hope that the makers of the movie don’t lose or obscure that particular bit of wisdom!

“Translation is interpretation.” I’m pretty sure someone else said that first, but I can’t recall who. In any case, I say it to my students in almost every class, especially “world literature” and medieval lit, in which they often read (or want to read) translations from Old or Middle English.

A few months ago I posted about the controversy over the translation of the so-called “Gospel of Judas.” This week the Chronicle of Higher Education reviews and updates the whole story, and the four scholars most involved with translating and publicizing the ancient text: Bart Ehrman, Marvin Meyer, Elaine Pagels, who contracted with the owner of the manuscript fragments, National Geographic, to translate it and participate in a highly publicized documentary about the text, and April D. DeConick, who questioned the results:

These discoveries filled her with dread. “I was like, this is bad, and these are my friends,” she says. It’s worth noting that it didn’t take DeConick months of painstaking research to reach her conclusions. Within minutes, she thought something was wrong. Within a day, she was convinced that significant mistakes had been made. Why, if it was so obvious to her, had these other scholars missed it? Why had they seen a good Judas where, according to DeConick, none exists?

Maybe because they were looking for him. The first reference to the Gospel of Judas was made by St. Irenaeus, the bishop of Lyons, in Against Heresies, written around 180. Irenaeus was not a fan of the Gospel of Judas, which he deemed a heretical text (though it’s not known whether he actually read the gospel or had only heard rumors about it). Until the Coptic manuscript surfaced in the 1970s, Irenaeus’ mention of the gospel was the only known reference. Irenaeus wrote that the gospel portrayed Judas as “knowing the truth as no others did.” It was an intriguing statement and suggestive of a more positive Judas.

DeConick thinks the translators were overly influenced by Irenaeus and read the gospel with his interpretation in mind. If you come to the gospel free of preconceptions, she argues, then it’s clear that Judas is evil and cursed, not holy and chosen.

Last week, the Chronicle reviewed a new translation of Virgil’s Aeneid, the first by a woman (a second will be published later this year), and also discussed the interpretive slants of other popular translations:

Our own recent, bloody history makes it easy to hear echoes in Virgil’s tragedy. That has made the Aeneid even more appealing to a post-Vietnam generation of translators.

“Particularly when you get meaningless wars like World War I, Vietnam, and Iraq, the legitimacy of death gets questioned,” says Richard F. Thomas, a professor of Greek and Latin and director of graduate studies in the classics department at Harvard University. “This is a poem that activates that question pretty well: Is Rome worth it?”

He points to a 1971 translation by Allen Mandelbaum as one that has been particularly popular with instructors “who wanted to get Virgil as a post-Vietnam poet.” That resonance has not faded. The cover photo on [Stanley] Lombardo’s 2005 version is a close-up of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall, with the names of the fallen inscribed on black stone.

. . .

Richard Thomas . . . points to a phrase in Lombardo’s edition . . . “Without very much justification on the level of Virgil’s Latin but a great deal of justification from what’s going on in the poem,” he says, “Lombardo writes ’shock and awe,’ which immediately takes one to more-recent events and sets one asking the question, Are we Rome?”

Seamus Heaney’s popular translation of Beowulf is now embedded in the Norton Anthology of English Literature, and although I and many other critics have praised its readability and poetic style, they’ve also noted that it’s not always very accurate. Heaney’s introduction to the translation discusses the many parallels he found to ancient Irish culture, which some think lead to a somewhat odd result. Tom Shippey critiques the pros and cons very even-handedly.

One of the courses I’ve been teaching this semester is an upper-level seminar on Postcolonial Literature, mainly books and films from British/Commonwealth and former British colonies.

Nita’s Wide Angle View of India posted this interesting summary of a comparative study of “cultural variables”:

Hofstede laid out certain ‘dimensions’ of culture which he used to compare different nations. These “dimensions” are not individual traits…but simply “averages” or “tendencies” of whole groups. The Hofstede dimensions are as follows:

• Power Distance (PD) The attitude of people towards differences in power and wealth …countries with a great power distance will have strict hierarchies and this will be accepted by those in the lower levels of the hierarchy.
• Individualism Collectivism (IC) This measures the ability to live in groups or choose ones own path, regardless of what the group/community is thinking or doing. Individual achievement is highly valued.
• Masculinity (MF) This measures a culture’s “masculine” traits like competitiveness, aggression and giving importance to material things and “feminine” traits like sensitiveness, empathy, importance given to quality of life. This masculine/feminine terminology has also been dubbed as Quantity of Life vs. Quality of Life. [...]

Uncertainty Avoidance (UA) This dimension (added later by Hofstede) shows how people react to uncertainty in their environment. This dimension also shows the level of tolerance in a society for differences

Where does your culture or the culture where you grew up fall on the these scales? But note the possible exceptions and criticisms of these hypotheses, footnoted at the end of the post.

In case anyone’s interested the Postcolonial Lit seminar, three intrepid explorers*, has read:

• Possession, by A.S. Byatt (England)
• Anthills of the Savannah, by Chinua Achebe (Nigeria)
• The Secret River, by Kate Grenville (Australia)
• The God of Small Things, by Arundhati Roy (India)
• Running in the Family and Anil’s Ghost, by Michael Ondaatje (Sri Lanka and Canada)
• Foreign Bodies, by Hwee Hwee Tan (Singapore/Netherlands/USA)
• Tsotsi (film–South Africa)
• Lagaan (film–India)
• My Brilliant Career (film–Australia)
• The Dish (film–Australia)

In retrospect, I think (and students agreed) I would have chosen Rabbit-Proof Fence or Whale Rider as one of the films representing Australia/New Zealand. Nevertheless, overall it has been a horizon-expanding semester. Also, I chose Achebe’s Anthills of the Savannah, because I figured most of us had already read Things Fall Apart. Anthills is so oblique, however, and depends much more on the reader’s being fairly familiar with modern African culture. We all agreed that re-reading Things might have worked better.

*The small size makes the class, officially, three independent studies meeting simultaneously. Still worthwhile, though.

Author Mark Chadbourn explains the enduring appeal of fantasy fiction:

I don’t write fantasy fiction simply to provide a trap-door from reality. For me, the genre is as much about the world around us as EastEnders [or CSI, Desperate Housewives, or The West Wing, for those who don't watch UK TV].

But instead of coming slap-bang up against it, fantasy charts the unconscious hopes and aspirations of our modern society through symbolism and allegory in story-forms as old as humanity.

It’s about turning off the mobile phone and the computer and remembering who we are in the deepest, darkest parts of ourselves.

Of course, he’s not the first to talk about this. Tolkein said some of the same things in “On Fairy-Stories,” and C.S. Lewis’s explored the territory in “Sometimes Fairy Stories May Say Best What’s To Be Said.” The two essays, and the two writers’ fantasy writings, are compared and contrasted effectively by David C. Downing in “Sub-Creation or Smuggled Theology: Tolkien contra Lewis on Christian Fantasy.”

Time to re-read The Lord of the Rings or Till We Have Faces?

Today is the official launch for my friend K. Dale Koontz’s book, Faith and Choice in the Works of Joss Whedon. I was honored to be given a preview of the book and to offer a mini-review (aka “blurb”) that appears on the back cover:

Koontz writes with insight, verve, and humor, informed by a panoramic knowledge of world religions. All the big questions are here, and answers both expected and unexpected.

accompanied by another by the brilliant and busy Rhonda Wilcox. Why write or read a book like this one? Dale says:

Far from disposable entertainment, Whedon’s work goes much deeper, dealing with issues of morality, family and redemption. …
Studying popular culture is important because it is the examination of both what’s going on now and what we as a society focus on. Using examples from popular culture is also a great way to get people interested in big concepts (such as faith) that otherwise might be intimidating or confusing to them.

More about Dale Koontz and her work at her blog.

As for me, I’m off to the first day of the last two weeks of classes!

Noted science fiction author Sir Arthur C. Clarke has died. When I started reading sci-fi in fifth and sixth grade, it was all Clarke, Asimov, Bradbury, and Heinlein.

Clarke lived a good portion of his adult life in Sri Lanka, and continued writing and encouraging other science-fiction writers until his death. He seems to have hoped at least somewhat seriously for the possibilities of extra-terrestrial life such as those described in his stories and books:

Clarke did not rule out the prospect of resurrection – cloning by highly advanced aliens being, predictably enough, his favoured method.

In the late 1990s he donated a few of his remaining strands of hair to be launched into space as part of the AERO Astro Corporation’s “Encounter Project” which, after a boost from Jupiter, was intended to travel deep into the Solar System.

Clarke hoped that, “maybe a million years from now, some super-civilisation will capture this primitive artefact from the past. Recreating its biological contents might be an amusing exercise for their equivalent of an infants’ class.”

To which we respond with the words of Don Henley:

To this garden we were given
And always took for granted
It’s like my daddy told me, “You just bloom where you’re planted.”
Now you long to be delivered
From this world of pain and strife
That’s a sorry substitution for a spiritual life

They’re not here, they’re not coming…

But the stories were entertaining and intriguing, all the same. C.S. Lewis explained the appeal long before Clarke began writing them (thanks to Jeffrey Overstreet for the link.)

Santiago Ramos comments further on Clarke’s “faith.”

I’m looking forward to some adventures and improvements in 2008, but I’m not going to talk about them now, because—as Bruce Cockburn sings—”Anything can happen…” Although I am fairly sure that I’ll be teaching Comp 2 (Intro. to Lit), British lit. survey 1 (Anglo-Saxon to 18th c.), and another course, which I hope will be the scheduled “Postcolonial Literature.”

Instead, some other interesting developments that don’t depend on me:

I’ve been following with intermittent interest the plans to change all US broadcast television from analog to digital in 2009. According to this story, the government will issue coupons to defray the cost of converter boxes for TVs that receive programs via antenna. It seems like the least they can do, although the article reports that only 13% of the US population are believed to rely solely on antenna reception these days. But what really caught my eye was

The Association for Public Television Stations reported in September that 51 percent of participants surveyed were unaware that the transition was taking place.

That statistic would seem to include many of my first-year students, who generally expressed shock and disbelief when I suggested the change to DTV as a research topic last semester. I don’t know if this indicates that (a) most of them don’t watch TV, (b) most of them have cable or satellite reception, or (c) most of them don’t watch or read news.

So, never mind TV, what about books? Everybody’s Libraries has an interesting discussion of copyright and works entering the public domain around the world. Apparently Dorothy L. Sayers’s work (among others) is now in the public domain in some countries (December 17, 2007, marked the 50th anniversary of her death)…let us hope they treat her right.

I’ve come to the end of the book-a-day calendar (thanks again to my brother, for a 2006 Christmas gift that kept on giving). From the last few pages, here are my recommendations:

1. The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, by Alexander McCall Smith—and its sequels, and pretty much any other book by Mr. Smith, whose quirky sense of humor and flexible style make each of his protagonists uniquely enjoyable.

2. Shooter: The Autobiography of the Top-Ranked Marine Sniper, by Jack Coughlin & Casey Kuhlman, with Donald A. Davis—For my brother-in-law, and my husband, and maybe my nephew, and anyone else who enjoys this kind of truelife adventure which “invites you into the mind and world of one of the U.S. military’s most successful snipers….His journey…to Iraq (with stops along the way in other fiercely dangerous places like Somalia) is a gripping, enlightening, and one-of-a-kind account.” Then re-read Tim O’Brien’s “How to Tell a True War Story” from The Things They Carried.

3. The Gatekeepers: Inside the Admissions Process of a Premier College, by Jacques Steinberg—this book about how admissions works at Wesleyan University (or did in 2003) may or may not be helpful to students and parents of students who are applying to similar or less prestigious colleges, but it sounds interesting anyway. Someone should write a book about the Campbell U admissions process—but not me!

4.    Patience and Fortitude, by Nicholas A. Basbanes—It seems perfect to end the year with a pilgrimage through the world’s great libraries, past and present, “from Alexandria to Oxford, from New York to the Vatican,” chronicling their unusual denizens as well as their volumes. Several years ago I attended a literary conference that included a tour of Biltmore House. As the guide led each group of professors into the gorgeous library, lined with beautifully bound books from floor to ceiling, a collective sigh of delight and longing arose from the group and we just stood there, gazing. The tour-guide reached the end of her spiel and was ready to move on, but we would have happily spent the rest of the evening in that library—if the shelves hadn’t been cordoned off with velvet ropes! As fantastic as it is to be able to find so much—nearly anything—in the way of scholarly articles online now, or through inter-library loan, nothing can replace the awesomeness of an enormous and beautifully designed library.

Exams are over (obligatory sighs of relief), grades are posted—mostly. Now for a little R&R, with random book recommendations from the “book-a-day” calendar, now reaching its final pages.

1.    The Progress Paradox, by Gregg Easterbrook—according to Easterbrook, life really is better than in the so-called good-old-days, so why is everyone so gloomy?  Read this and cheer up! Probably a brilliant example of how to lie with statistics, but bound to be thought-provoking.

2.   Crimes Against Logic, by Jamie Whyte—since my colleagues and I spent a significant portion of the semester attempting to instill “critical thinking” skills in our students, and since the 2008 election year seems to be already half over, one could hardly do better than do arm oneself with this book that “exposes all the faulty reasoning and double-talk [of] politicians, talk-show hosts, newspaper columnists,” etc.

3.    The Arabian Nights: Tales from A Thousand and One Nights, tr. Sir Richard Francis Burton—the hidden intricacies of this ancient collection were a revelation to those in my World Literature course who investigated beyond the familiar movie or Disney versions. Burton popularized these tales in the West.

4. The Kite Runner, by Khaled Hosseini—this coming-of-age tale set in Afghanistan and  American is soon to be a major motion picture, so read the book first. And then read A Thousand Splendid Suns, by the same author, to gain a deeper perspective on life in Afghanistan under the Taliban.

5.     The Shop on Blossom Street, by Debbie Macomber—something for everyone, and this book particularly made me think of  my cousin’s wife, who knits. I wish I had some skills like that, but despite my mother and my aunt trying to teach me, nothing seems to have stuck with me. Sad, really. But that’s one thing books are for.

Off to take the cat to the vet!

Not Campbell’s Carrie Rich Memorial Library. Northern Kenya’s mobile library service arrives via camel, bringing books in English, Somali, and Swahili to rural schools that are literally off the beaten track. In a Voice of America story from March 2007, camel herder Omar Dabar Ali explains why camels are better than motorized “bookmobiles” for this terrain:

“The camel plays an important role in this process. The camel is very important in the Somali culture. Also, the camel can pass through small roads that a vehicle cannot pass through.”

I can identify a bit with this story. When I was a kid (ages 6-10), my family lived in a tiny mountain town that had no library. The monthly arrival of the county “bookmobile” was a joyful occasion. Nevertheless, we always had books at school and my family were dedicated readers. Literacy and advancing education in countries like Kenya is essential to their future, but lack of books is a major obstacle. The camel library reaches an under-served people group in a uniquely effective way.

Here’s how to help the Camel Library, if you wish.