Theologian C.H. Dodd with his best analogy for what reading The Bible should do for you:

It’s place as a whole is rather with the masterpieces of poetry, drama and philosophy, that is, the literature which does not so much impart information but stirs the deeper levels of personality. “Tragedy”, said Aristotle, “effects through pity and fear the purgation of such passions.” The dramatist has experienced life in terms of the suffering that besets it and the spirit that triumphs over the suffering. The compassion and awe that the experience arouses in him he succeeds in conveying to his audience or his readers. Through identifying themselves with his personages in their pitiful and terrible experiences, they undergo an emotional awakening and cleansing. Thus King Lear or Tess of the D’Urbervilles does not instruct us in a theory of life, but makes us sharers in an experience of life more intense and profound than our normal level. We are greater men, potentially, for reading such works.

Have Spacesuit Will Travel by Robert Heinlein

This is one of the first chapter books I read as a kid, when I was in grade one or two. I read a lot of books about dogs back then. You know, where the dog is the hero None of the classics in that genre, if you’re wondering, at least none that I can recall. Anyway, Have Spacesuit Will Travel is about a young boy, Kip, who wins a real, albeit really run down and useless, space suit in a contest. He rebuilds it and gets into an exciting alien adventure where he has to use his intelligence to prevail. The title is a take-off of the cowboy show Have Gun – Will Travel. Kip is your typical 1950s science hero but being your atypical 1980s kid I loved it. This is the book that got me into reading science-fiction. I never really read any more Heinlein, though. I was more of an Asimov fan.

The Tactics of Mistake by Gordon R. Dickson

I think this is my Dad’s favorite science-fiction novel. He told me to read it at least once a year for years and I never did. Until I read The Art of War and I wondered if it had any connection. I confess I don’t remember too much about it and I’m not even sure if it is related to The Art of War. I seem to remember being disappointed that it wasn’t related. I do remember it having some cool bio-feedback ideas in it and an interesting idea about military strategy. Mostly I remember it for it’s cover. I wish I could find a better quality image of it. It has one bad dude on the cover.

The Proteus Operation by James P. Hogan

This book is a total guilty pleasure. It even looks terrible. Look at that cover. It has Einstein on the cover so you know it’s about time travel, right? Bad people from the future built a time machine to make sure Hitler won the war. They succeeded. Luckily American rebels (it’s always American rebels) learn of the project and go back in time to set things right. It’s pretty fun. The best character in the book is Winston Churchill. You can’t say that about many Sci-Fi books. Like many genre books it proudly bears terrible quotes and inscriptions, from “The times they are a changin’” on the back cover, to this doozy:

Only when [the mythological Proteus] was captured and constrained to a particular manifestation could the future be determined with certainty … strangely reminiscent of the collapse of the quantum-mechanical wave function.

Sometimes, late at night, I’m afraid I sound like that.

Have you ever bitten down too soon on a mint? I’m sure you have. You may recall the sound of the mint breaking like crunching glass in your head, giving way, if the mint was perhaps filled with chocolate, to a surprising softness as the shards of candy sink in to the centre under pressure.

Yes, on Friday I had my two top wisdom teeth pulled out of my head, relatively quickly, to the sound of cracking mints. The bottom two have yet to surface. I suspect they are waiting for a future moment of weakness when they can emerge to deliver the final killing blow.

After the anesthesia wore off, in an effort to transfer the pain from my jaw to my brain, I decided to read some early twentieth century theology. C.H. Dodd’s The Authority Of The Bible, in particular.

I was actually pleasantly surprised with Dodd. I was expecting, I don’t know why, dry, mathematical, voiceless, theology – which Dodd isn’t. He’s the sort of classic Oxford Brit scholar (well, he’s Welsh) who can write to the popular level but thinks nothing of quoting untranslated German poetry. At least I can guess at some of the Latin. Erudite, amusing, clever, thoughtful, bold and exhaustive. I’ll have to read more Dodd, I think. The chapter where he sketches the life of the average first century Palestinian peasant, through a careful reading of the parables of Jesus, is amazing.

Here’s a bit, appropriate for my particular situation, from the chapters dealing with the historical Jesus: While pointing out that the saying enjoining the followers of Christ to take up their cross and follow Him is a saying for times of emergency, best translated, in the spirit of Dodd, as drag the electric chair behind you if you want to follow Christ, he criticizes those who want to transform this saying into “habitual forms of self-sacrifice or denial”:

A similar emergency may arise for some Christians in any age. In such a situation it is immediately applicable, in it’s original form and meaning. For most of us, in normal situations, it is not so applicable. But it is surely good for us to go back and understand that this is what Christ stood for in His day. We shall then at least not suppose that we are meeting His demands in our day by bearing a toothache bravely or fasting during Lent.

The above quote illustrates, according to Dodd, “how the historical study of the Gospels, with the criticism that necessarily belongs to it, is of religious value.” Which is sort of Dodd’s whole thing, using historical study, and entailing criticism, of The Bible to determine what truth it has for us today – or, namely, what authority it has for us.

The above quote may also illustrate, ironically, given that Dodd is, I understand, a fairly liberal protestant, how to sound like a fundamentalist hard-ass. Or maybe that’s just me being unnecessarily defensive.

Through reading (and through the study of literature), we rehearse the great dilemmas of life, both personal and social. We find ourselves asking the big philosophical questions: How should I live? What is the good life? What is love? What is justice? And what does it all add up to? Literature is not philosophy, it’s not psychology and it’s certainly not religion or theology. But it is a form of knowledge that tells us about who we are, about ourselves, our society and our culture. Milan Kundera calls it a “parallel history”. Through the novel, he argues, we encounter all the dimensions of existence, from “the nature of adventure” to “the secret life of the feelings” to “the role of myths from the remote past”, and on. Reading enables us to reflect on elements of existence we don’t encounter anywhere else, and to do it in a unique way. It enables us, in the words of Virginia Woolf, “to learn through feeling”.

That’s Ann-Marie Priest, an academic at Central Queensland University, wondering, in The Australian, what practical value literature has. One can obviously read for pleasure, but base pleasure isn’t ultimately pleasurable now is it? Aristotle saw this. He suggested a balance should be met between what’s good for you and what’s good for others. But I don’t have to casually misrepresent Aristotle to convince you of the value of literature and reading, do I? Literature, what do you have there, between the lines?

At the height of World War I, Woolf speculated that “the reason why it is easy to kill another person must be that one’s imagination is too sluggish to conceive what his life means to him – the infinite possibilities of a succession of days which are furled in him, & have already been spent”. Reading is one way of stimulating a sluggish imagination to discover what other people’s lives are to them. That revelation in itself must make it harder to do harm.

I know a social worker who is convinced that reading fiction helps violent young men control their violence simply by making them aware that others feel pain too. The same principle – the development of empathy – underlies the argument that literature should be taught to professionals of all stripes. An Australian professor of psychiatry … argued that medical students should study literature and art to give them an understanding of illness from the point of view of the sufferer, and to teach them compassion. And young law students take literature courses in droves not only as an antidote to the tedium of studying tax or corporation law but also because it broadens their perspective and exposes them to the insides of other people’s heads.

As for solace and counsel, what passionate reader has not turned to books again and again for both? Unlike Adelaide, I think it perfectly appropriate to prescribe Tennyson’s In Memoriam for the bereaved. I once read parts of In Memoriam with someone who was in the dull, advanced stage of grieving, and he found it immensely cathartic. The poem’s extravagance was the perfect expression of the uncontainable quality of his own feeling, and he was even able to find some ironic distance, as well as emotional release, in its sentimentality.

More here. I left out Literature’s cure for the sexually repressed. You at least have to read that. Or maybe you don’t, you freaky book-lovers.

Today is Robbie Burns day. Tomorrow I get my wisdom teeth pulled. Robbie, what do you think about that?

Where’er that place be priests ca’ hell,
Where a’ the tones o’ misery yell,
An’ ranked plagues their numbers tell,
In dreadfu’ raw,
Thou, Toothache, surely bear’st the bell,
Amang them a’!

Yeah, thanks, Robbie. You can read the rest of Address To The Toothache here.

It’s been noted, by myself and others, that I have the curious ability to remember just enough of almost everything I have ever read so as to appear that I remember everything ever written by everyone. This ability fails me now and again but I usually seem pretty smart. “Seem” is the key word.

Anyway, The Claw of the Conciliator has held a mirror up to my somewhat phony life with the post How to pretend to be high-brow, on the cheap. The Claw suggests using the culture of free on the internet to help pass yourself off as one of the élite:

The trick is to read a little bit about many different topics, so that you have a lot of breadth but little depth. A great way to do this is reading journals, which will provide you with a nice sampling of interesting essays and articles. And these days you can read a lot of these journals for free because their archives are available on the Internet.

I would also suggest changing the home page on your browser (or if you’re like me, one of the multiple tabs on your home page) to the Wikipedia Random Page. Just copy the url http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random and paste it into the home page location in the preferences section of your browser. It’s usually the first pane of the preferences window under the file menu. I think I first read this suggestion on Lifehacker. Why not try it? Who knows what you might seem to learn!

Myron Magnet, editor of City Journal, doesn’t want you to wonder, “What use is Literature?“

… [It] teaches us more about psychology than the psychologists can. The inner life—and its relation to the outer appearance, from which it is often (and proverbially) very different—is literature’s special subject. It is a particularly complex subject, with its interweaving of motives and impulses, as appetites grapple with ideals, as consciousness both registers and distorts external reality, as natural promptings intersect with social ambitions, and the universal in our nature takes on the fashion and the garb of a particular age.

Here literature’s weakness—that, unlike philosophy, it is unsystematic—becomes its great strength. It mobilizes all our faculties of knowledge at once: not just our ability to analyze the outer world but our introspection and intuition as well. We can understand what is going on in the hearts of others because we know what stirs our own hearts, and what could stir them. When a writer imagines his characters’ inner drama, his description rings true to us because we have felt similar impulses or imagined analogous situations, and, further, can identify sympathetically with something beyond our ken. We grasp intuitively the complex internal mix: the simultaneous interplay of feelings, thoughts, beliefs, and hopes, of conscious and subliminal impulses—as pity combines with social anxiety, say, or with eros or vanity or sudden insight to impel a character to behave as he behaves. Literature is the great school of motivation: it teaches us how, out of the complex welter of impulses churning within us, we make the choices that define us and seal our fate.

Via The Editor is Near, who offered up this article to explain why he doesn’t own a TV.

My first blog meme, via Classical Bookworm. I guess I’m an official blogger now…

Hardback or trade paperback or mass market paperback?
Whatever I can get. I prefer the trade paperback, though. It’s easier to handle.

Amazon or brick and mortar?
Definitely brick and mortar – with a sign that says used or bargain out front.

Barnes & Noble or Borders?
Not where I’m from, eh.

Bookmark or dogear?
Dogear the good stuff for future civilizations, use a bookmark for my general use.

Alphabetize by author or alphabetize by title or random?
By author in theory, random in practice.

Keep, throw away, or sell?
Keep, God help me, keep.

Keep dustjacket or toss it?
What? Keep.

Read with dustjacket or remove it?
Read with. It makes sense to remove it and I do with my son’s books, but not with my own. Weird. I think I do it for looks. As if someone’s going to come in and say,”My! look at that handsomely designed volume Ian’s reading. What taste he has!”

Short story or novel?
Novel. Short story. Novella. Screenplay. Stageplay. Magazine article. Whatever. Does it have words? I’m reading it.

Collection (short stories by same author) or anthology (short stories by different authors)?
Anthologies usually win at Upper Fort Stewart. Preferably old ones.

Harry Potter or Lemony Snicket?
Who?

Stop reading when tired or at chapter breaks?
I always try for the chapter break but rarely make it.

“It was a dark and stormy night” or “Once upon a time”?
Once upon a time.

Buy or Borrow?
Buy.

New or used?
Used.

Buying choice: book reviews, recommendation or browse?
Insanely embarrassing research.

Tidy ending or cliffhanger?
Tidy ending with a bit of a bump.

Morning reading, afternoon reading or nighttime reading?
I only read on days ending in “Y”.

Standalone or series?
Good grief. Standalone. Who has the time? [looks anxiously at The Stack] Um, both.

Favorite series?
Fantastic Four. What? It’s kind of a book.

Favorite book of which nobody else has heard?
Joseph and His Brothers by Thomas Mann

Favorite books read last year?
See above.

Favorite books of all time?
What should I say today? For some reason I always end up rereading a terrible collection of essays by Vonnegut called Fates Worse than Death. The sheer number of times I’ve read it must mean it’s my favorite, right? What else? Heinlein’s Have Spacesuit Will Travel, Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, Moses’ Genesis, Sun Tzu’s Art of War, Homer’s Odyssey, Wallace’s Infinite Jest, etc.

Huh, I did alright with this Either-Or thing. Surprising. Now what?

Pantheism, the multiverse, and the problem of evil – all in one paragraph:

On the principle that you can never have too much of a good thing, reality could very well consist not just of a single infinite mind, but of infinitely many. Even so, this situation wouldn’t be “perfect” in such a way that the ethical need for one thing never overruled the ethical need for another. Pantheism, the belief that nothing exists except divine thinking, doesn’t deny the facts recognized by science and by common sense, such as that our efforts can affect the world well or badly. If our universe is an ingredient in divine thoughts that are infinitely worth having, then why does it contain toothaches? Answer: because divine knowledge is better through not having gaping holes in it, holes corresponding to such things as knowing just how it feels to be a human with a toothache. Yet this doesn’t deny that there are good reasons for visiting dentists. Even inside an infinitely good reality, local benefits would be worthwhile.

That’s philosopher John Leslie, Professor Emeritus at the University of Guelph in Canada, writing on his book Infinite Minds. John Leslie says all sorts of crazy things.

Average weight of a blue whale: 200,000 to 300,000 lbs.

Average weight of an American automobile: 6,000 lbs.

Estimated weight of Samuel Johnson: 360 lbs.

Weight of blog author Ian Stewart: 155 lbs.

Combined weight of the three published volumes (of a projected five volumes) of N.T. Wright’s Christian Origins and the Question of God: 7 lbs (of a projected 15lbs.).

Weight of The Oxford Annotated New Revised Standard Version of The Bible with all the Apocrypha, lengthy introductions, essays and maps and whatnot: 4lbs.

Weight of The Life of Johnson by James Boswell: 2 lbs.

Estimated weight of Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck: 1/2 a lb.

Average weight of a Californian field mouse: 1/16 of a lb.

Useful equation: Bathroom Scale + Internet = Blog Post