A couple of juicy Davies quotes since I can't resist.

"Celtic civilization was tribal, but by no means savage or uncultivated. People who regarded the theft of a harp from a bard as a crime second only to an attack on the tribal chieftain cannot be regarded as wanting in cultivated feeling."

"I was reading Dorothy Dix this afternoon; she says that it is permissible for a young man to tell a girl he knows fairly well that she has pretty ankles; from this I assume that the better he knows her the higher he may praise her."

"I don't really care how time is reckoned so long as there is some agreement about it, but I object to being told that I am saving daylight when my reason tells me that I am doing nothing of the kind. I even object to the implication that I am wasting something valuable if I stay in bed after the sun has risen. As an admirer of moonlight I resent the bossy insistence of those who want to reduce my time for enjoying it. At the back of the Daylight Saving scheme I detect the bony, blue-fingered hand of Puritanism, eager to push people into bed earlier, and get them up earlier, to make them healthy, wealthy and wise in spite of themselves."

Still alive, just not blogging much, as you well know. Gotten a little bit of reading done lately, though not much else. I want to give full praise to Mark Horne who several years ago recommended to me Kenneth Bailey's fine book, Jacob and the Prodigal. Bailey's breadth and intensity of knowledge regarding his subject (Luke 15) are not to be matched anywhere. He spent most of his adult life living and studying in the middle east and brings to his subject some quite extrordinary resources, such as medeival Egyptian and Arabic christian scholarship. Bailey's thesis is that in the story of the prdigal son, Jesus was self-consciously adapting the saga of Jacob. He points to quite a number of elements which are in common in the two stories (the two sons, one of whom goes away to a foreign country and is later welcomed back, etc.) as well as a few phrases which occur ONLY in those two stories within the biblical corpus, such as the use of kid meat as a meal and the combination of the terms run, fall on the neck and kiss. Caertainly a must read for those seeking a better understanding of this sentral parable.

On the book contest front, another one is completed, namely Kirk's entry of William Pitt the Younger, by William Hague. Hague, as some of you may recall, was the leader of the conservative party in English parliament not too long ago. He apparently felt some kinship with the younger Pitt, both of whom showed a genius for politics at an early age. Hague (according to the fount of all wisdom these days: wikipedia) made a memorable speech at the conservative party national conference in 1977 at the age of 16. Pitt, on the other hand, was at his third year at Cambridge at that age, though he did have the advantage of a well educated, connected and famous father.

Anyhow, the book is probably about as good as political biographies get. Hague neither talks down to his readers nor does he assume detailed knowledge of English government institutions and history, explaining all the necessary details as he goes. Unfortunately for me I don't like political history nearly as much as Kirk does, much to my shame, so I found it hard to keep up my own interest all the way through. This is certainly not Mr Hague's fault, but there you have it. The last hundred pages were a struggle for me as I realized that even though the writing was good, I just wasn't interested enough for 400 pages.

Also, making my way through the posthumous keavings of Robertson Davies, I just finished For Your Eye Only, a collection of Davies letters edited by his biograper, Judith Skelton Grant. I already had a fairly full idea od Davies personality and this idea was only confirmed by the letters. Lots of good comments and humor scattered throughout. He had a few comments about translations of Russian novels which confirmed ny own experience in many ways, namely that if you pick up a translation by Constance Garnett you should immediately put it down again since it will be unreadable.

Nice cartoon.

Three things:

One, I'm still alive, but just haven't felt like blogging much lately.

Two, I have a short report on another contest book. Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner pretty much fits the mold of an Oprah club book. Main character overcomes experience of brutalization in youth (observed rather than experienced in this case), yet continues to deal with the effects of the ordeal throughout life. Toss in an exotic locale (Afganistan) and off you go. It wasn't bad at all, but it wasn't especially good either. We'll call it a (generous) 5 out of 10. THE book to read about the impact of a single incidence of violence is Robertson Davies' Salterton Trilogy. I can get away with calling it A book since it is published in one volume these days.

Currently working on the next contest book, but won't say anything til I'm done with it. It's quite good so far though.

Three, I'm not sure what to make of this. Perhaps there's some kind of translation problem???

May as well balance things with some thoughts on womanliness.

Thoughts on manliness.

Three of the four of us are sick and a bit down this weekend (Isaac the exception so far) and I don't feel like writing a long post today, but I'll try to cover a couple of things.

First off, Thomas' book contest entry was superb. Po Bronson has a terrific way of collecting interesting stories from people and them writing them up in such a way as to make them come alive and give plenty of food for thought. This was true in What Should I Do With My Life, and remains the case in his latest, Why Do I Love These People. The latter volume examines stories about family dynamics. Some of the stories are told in such a way that I would challenge anyone to read them without crying. My only criticism of the book was that the last couple of stories weren't as good as the rest, so there was a a bit of a sense of let-down. Still, a fine book all around.

Other item for today was a thought from Sunday School. We talked about the story of Mary breaking the bottle of perfume to annount Jesus. During the discussion I kept asking myself what purpose the story had within the gospel accounts. In both Mark and John it takes place just before Jesus's betrayal framed by comments about peope wanting to put Jesus to death. The only conclusion I could draw was the that bottle was meant by the gospel writers to serve as a symbol of Jesus life and body. The story is followed by the Last Supper where Jesus draws attention to the sacrificial nature of his body himself, but the story of the bottle of perfume seems to draw attention to the wastefulness of the sacrifice. Judas (and other disciples in the one account) mention how the bottle could have benefitted the poor. Earlier in his ministry, this is what Jesus used his power for--to benefit the poor, the hungry and the sick. But now is the time when the full sacrifice is to be made.

Thinking about this made me think immediately about how unpragmatic christian doctrine often can be. While we are often called to minister to the poor when we can, that is only done in service to the gospel. We do not completely devote ourselves to the good of other people, but to the service of God, following in Jesus example. Often this will mean sqandering resources which could have been used better. I can think of no more poignant example than that of Endo's priest in Silence who must choose between saving the lives of Japanese converts and honoring Jesus through refusing to spit and trample on an image. The temptation to think that we have the power to do great good in the world is a very strong one.

Just finished taking the jeopardy online test. That was pretty stressful. Only 15 seconds on each questions, which goes by really fast when you are trying really hard to remember something you know that you know.

I've really been enjoying my latest book contest book, but I'll hold off making comments til I've finished it. I've also been enjoying very much this week a book my brother recommended to me long ago: Herman Hesse's The Glass Bead Game (also published as Magister Ludi. I'd throw out some quotations, but I left it out in the car and don't feel like bringing it in right this second. I've been really tempted to just post the quotations without any attribution to see if anyone had any idea where they came from. Just a lot of remarkable stuff in there. Plus, I think it really should qualify as sci-fi, since it purports to take place roughly 500 years in the future. The basic structure of the book is as a fictional biography of Joseph Knecht, the master of the glass bead game. To explain any of that would take way too much time though. Apparntly when it was written, the idea of an intentionally fictional biography was something of a sensation. The book begins with a quotation in Latin which I immediately assumed was phony. It turned out Hesse wrote it in German and had some of his old school buddies translate it into Latin for him, but it seems that quite a few people assumed that it must have been lifted from a classical source. I guess today were just more accustomed to fictional pretenses.

More on all of this later.

Book Contest Update

This is just to let everyone know how the book contest is shaping up right now and to give my first report. My friend David Carson submitted an entry in person which brings the total up to ten. Here are the entries (in the order submitted):

Albion's Seed, David Hackett Fischer, submitted by Lenise
Saving the Appearances, Owen Barfield, submitted by Alastair
William Pitt the Younger, William Hague, submitted by Kirk
Why Do I Love These People, Po Bronson, submitted by Thomas
Kristen Lavransdatter, Sigrid Undset, submitted by Matt
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Mark Haddon, submitted by Jamie
Mongo: Adventures in Trash, Ted Botha, submitted by Scott
The Future Does Not Compute, Steve Talbott, submitted by Nathan
Proof, Bill Bright and Jack Cavanaugh, submitted by Heather
The Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini, submitted by David

When my family was visiting here, my mother brought a copy of Mongo, so I was able to get to that one soonest. Ted Botha's book is devoted to the culture of people who collect things which are discarded in NYC (and other places). Various chapters are devoted to things like food scavenging (by vegetarian food snobs), building materials, and even people who excavate old outhouses. While the whole thing was certainly interesting, it wasn't exactly Great Literature. It did, however pass the test of being a book I've now brought up in conversation more than once. If it sounds like something you'd like to read, you probably would enjoy it :)

Two more contest entries have been checked out of the library, so stay tuned for further updates.

I love Grieg, and the first of these pieces is one of the most deceptively difficult piano pieces I've ever tried (and fail miserably at). Perhaps it easier on guitar? It sure sounds nice. Sorry if it takes forever to load. Just do something else while its loading.

I'm not sure I want to pick sides in this particular war.

Wrote my very own joke today, but it's pretty bad.

What do you call someone who specializes in the skin diseases of dead animals?

A Taxidermatologist.

In Diane Ravitch's book, Left Back: A Century of Failed School Reforms, she discusses the idea which developed in late 19th century educational philosophy that the mind needed to be trained, in a general sense, and specifically that things like memory and reasoning were susceptible to this sort of training through schooling. Then follows this:

The first attempt to test the validity of mental discipline was recorded by the eminent Harvard psychologist William James, who conducted a trial of his own memory. He wanted to see "whether a certain amount of daily training in learning poetry by heart will shorten the time it takes to learn an entirely different kind of poetry." During an eight-day period he memorized 158 lines of Victor Hugo's poem "Satyr" at the rate of one line every fifty seconds; ten, over a thirt-eight-day period, he memorized the first book of Paradise Lost. When hereturned to the Hugo poem, it took him fifty seven second to memorize each line, which indicated that he had gained nothing in speed or efficience from his earlier memory feats. While James thought that one's memrory might be improved by various methods, he doubted that the faculty of memory could be strengthened merely by training. He referred to his self-test in a footnote in his monumental work, The Principles of Psychology.

James allocated only a footnote to his whimsical experiment because he did not take seriously the idea that education could become a science [my emphasis]. In his celebrated lectures to teachers in 1898, he had warned, "You make a great, a very great mistake if you think that psychology, being the science of the mind's laws, is something from which you can deduce definate programmes and schemes and methods of instruction for immediate schoolroom use."

You may want to read the bold sentence at the top a few times and let it sink in.

Isaac Carlisle Baxter was born on March 1 at 12:12 pm. Lenise's water broke at about 2 am, so she woke me up. We called the Nelsons who finally woke up enough to answer the phone and were gracious enough to take John for us until we are available to get him again. Lenise wanted to eat some Honey Nut Cheerios on the way out the door, so they were unwilling to do the operation until those got digested.

Isaac is fine. He likes to sleep a lot. Doesn't cry much yet.

Lenise is doing pretty well. Not nearly as much pain and nausea as the first birth. We don't know when mom and son will make it home yet. Perhaps Saturday.

Chris O'Donnell called this the feel good story of the year, and who am I to disagree.

As promised, a few comment on Richard Rhodes book. Why They Kill is an exploration of the career and ideas of a criminologist named Lonnie Athens. Athens grew up in a very violent home and found himself drawn to the field of criminology when he discovered there was such a thing during his college years. Athens' immediate reaction to the prevailing theories about violent criminal behavior was that they did not at all match up with his own experiences and observations. Violent criminals, in his experience, did not "snap", go crazy or otherwise act irrationally when involved in violence. They were simply acting on the basis of their personality and evaluation of the situation they were in.

While countless studies had been conducted in sociology collecting data sets on the "factors" associated with criminal acts, Athens thought this was entirely the wrong approach to the question. In his mind he felt that the best approach was to do intensive interviews with violent criminals and find out if there were common patterns in their backgrounds and in the way they perceived their reasons for acting violently. He carried out this research in various prisons and made the startling conclusion that there was a specific pattern to the background of every single one of the violent criminals. Each person went through specific stages of development, so to speak, on the way to developing a violent personality. Athens called this process "violentiztion". I'll not spell all these out, since I think you should read it for yourself.

Athens academic career was not successful though. His rough background and his non-conformity to prevalent sociological methodology put him at odds with many of the people in his field. His books were not accepted by any american publisher, though they were eventually accepted by the british publisher Routledge.

After spelling out Athens' research, Rhodes goes on to examine whether Athens' scheme could be seen as applying more broadly. He looks at several notorious cases of violence which had already been examined heavily by other journalists such as Mike Tyson and Cheryl Crane (Lana Turner's daughter). Additionally he looks at the history of child rasing in Europe and its possible connection with the violence which had been so common before the 18th century. Murder rates in rural medieval Europe, for example, were quite comparable to those in the worst 20th century cities. THe process of violentization always has as its first step brutalization. This could include either being personally beaten or witness horrible violence done to another person. In examining historical work on child raising norms in european history, Rhodes quotes one scholar as saying he could not find a single documented example of a child who was NOT beaten before the 18th century.

Rhodes also goes on to look at violence in warfare and its relationship to the training methods used by the military. Again, there was a lot a fascinating material here which I will encourage you to read for yourself.

Towards the end of the book RHodes turns his eye to a subject which Lonnie Athens had not discussed in his writings: conservative christianity. Rhodes mentions several popular christian books on child raising and scorns their model of seeing children as creatures of evil whose wills need to be "broken". I found this section disquieting. The discussion of the relation of christian child raising and violence could certainly have been nuanced quite a bit more than it was, but on the other hand, I think it is not at all far fetched to suggest that many violent parents see justification for brutalizing children through certain fundamentalistic beliefs and teachings.

Anyhow, this was easliy one of the most interesting books I've read in my lifetime. Can't recommend it highly enough.

I'm wondering if conversations like this one are in my future somewhere.

I've been rerading this week Richard Rhodes's book Why They Kill: The Discoveries of a Maverick Criminologist. For what amounts to a biography of an academic career, it is an overwhelmingly compelling read. More on it later, but I wanted to thank whoever recommended it to me. I just don't remember who that was. Someone in a comment quite a while back.

Something unexpected to cheer up your weekend.