Good Friday

Lord, why castest thou off my soul?             why hidest thou thy face from me? I am afflicted and ready to die from my youth up:             while I suffer thy terrors I am distracted. Thy fierce wrath goeth over me;             thy terrors have cut me off. They came round about me daily like water;             they compassed me about together. Lover and friend hast thou put far from me,             and mine acquaintance into darkness.

       —Psalm 88:14-18, KJV 

It's Good Friday, the day on which the Church remembers the crucifixion and death of Jesus.  Last night at church, we had a service which ended with a ritual I've always found to be particularly moving. While the above psalm is sung by a single voice, rising over the drone of low notes hummed by the choir, members of the congregation strip the sanctuary of all its ornamentation and implements. The communion cup and dish are covered and taken away; the altar and podium lose their colored cloth. At the end, there is only a crucifix in front of the congregation, covered by a black shroud.

The lights are turned off. The congregation sings a final, quiet song, unaccompanied by any instrument, and all leave in silence.

***

What are rituals for? I grew up thinking that to make something into a ritual meant, fundamentally, to take away its meaning. I thought that the only way to really mean something—a prayer, for example—that it needed to be spontaneous and made up on the spot, or at least created by the person who says it. How can you really mean something someone else created and handed to you and said "Here, say this and mean it"?

I recognize now that this was pretty short-sighted. I didn't think, for example, that songs written by other people were worthless if I sang them, or that marriages were invalid unless the person performing the ceremony made up the words as she went along. I just thought, really, that church rituals, doing and saying things about/for/to God "by rote" (as I would have put it) was wrong, and that was that. 

I've since changed my opinion about these things, but I haven't spent much time thinking about why. In a book I read recently called Religion for Atheists*, the author takes rituals, in particular religious rituals, to be a way of reinforcing what we already know, or what we already ought to know but would otherwise forget. They are a way of getting around our tendency to forget things very, very easily. He points out that at universities we are expected to absorb information heard once, often from someone not particularly interested in getting us to really know or understand what she is saying.  Religions, though, teach us the important lessons continually, through ritual reading of texts, saying of prayers, and the like. They are a way of making sure that we don't forget the most important lessons. 

The trouble with relying on ritual alone to teach us things is that we often end up not acting on what we know is good, e.g.: I know that it is good to love my neighbor, but I often fail to. This state is called akrasia, Greek for something like "acting against one's better judgement." We need something to startle us into paying attention to what we have heard and said a hundred times in church or elsewhere, something to break us out of our akrasia. One such thing, the author suggests, is beauty. 

***

I chose the King James translation in the psalm at the beginning of this entry, because I think it is beautiful. In fact, if you believe Robert Alter, the King James version is the last Bible translation both to set out with "beauty" as an end goal and to succeed. Bible translations tend to aim for accuracy and especially clarity and readability, but they tend to sacrifice style, rhythm, and other elements that make a written work truly enjoyable to read. 

Having read about the KJV and its goodness, I recently set about reading it myself. In my imagination, it's an intimidating book, full of old language and hard-to-parse phrases. But when you really sit down with it, and get yourself in the proper frame of mind, Robert Alter's argument comes true: it's a beautiful translation. And if Religion for Atheists is right, it may be the best way to startle myself into living rightly. I'm going to stick with it, I think.

***

Postscript: two things I think the ritual at the beginning of this post should remind us of. 

• Remember and respect that we are mortal. We all die, and that is no light thing.
• Sometimes we feel alone and abandoned. We should reflect on that feeling and remember it when encountering others: they may feel it without our knowing.

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*Why am I reading a book with a title like Religion for Atheists, you ask? I thought, in the day and age of the New Atheism, when atheists have embarked on a project of making religion out to be a downright monstrous thing, that it would be nice to read a book where an atheist talked about why religion was valuable and good. And I was right. It was very nice. Also, a character in one of my favorite books, Gilead, talks about the beauty of water baptism by quoting an atheist, Feuerbach, and I always thought that was neat and wanted to do it, and now I can, but without quoting Feuerbach, who is German and (in the German way) very hard to read.

Book Covers - Good Design, Bad Design

In your great book,
You got the good looks,
In your great book.
—"Your Great Book," Teitur

I love books. ("Are you sure, James? Or are you just looking around your half-packed apartment and saying you love whatever you see?" "I love books. I love books! I LOVE THEM.") Today, I'm packing my books so I can go move into my new house (it's a house house!), so I decided to take some pictures of my books before they go in their boxes, to be unpacked who-knows-exactly-when.

As a way of sorting which books to take pictures of, I've decided to turn my pictures into a quick illustration of how to design a book cover (and how not to design one).


Typography:

I'm not a huge typography nerd, but I am a little bit of a typography nerd. I like a good typeface; what can I say?*

The general principles of good typography are all you need for a good book cover: don't use too many fonts, don't use fonts that are ugly or generally despised (most importantly, Papyrus and Comic Sans), and when possible use the font to establish a clear window to the subject at hand.

• Bad: The Learning Bible, Contemporary English Version

This wonderful resource (a Bible my parents got me when I was a teenager and from which I indeed learned a lot) suffers from chronic typeface problems on its cover. There are at least three fonts, which is too many, and none of them are particularly enjoyable to look at. What's more, fonts don't really connect us to the subject of the book in a compelling way; nothing about these fonts in particular bespeaks learning, or biblicality. I think the blend of three separate photographs and the horrifying black, oval maw at the enter aren't good choices either.

• Good: Religion for Atheists, by Alain de Botton

This somewhat silly book, a volume that tries to find the good bits of religion and make them available to the non-religious, has some fantastic cover design. There are only two fonts here, and they are both pleasing to look at. The ornate, blackletter font used for "Holy Bible" establishes a thematic link to the ancient religious texts and tradition the author is mining, and the breaking through of the simpler, more modern font in the center visually establishes the idea of looking for something new in something old. The hole in the center also succinctly establishes the emptiness an atheist might feel is at the heart of religious traditions.

Imagery:

In general, visual art on a book cover should establish an implicit thematic connection with the ideas in the book, so that the reader gets a sense of what they're getting into just from picking the thing up. It needs to catch the eye, but not be too busy or distracting, and it needs to be pretty, or at least interesting. There are several kinds of visual art available to the designer of a book cover.


Reusing Older Artwork

There are any number of ways to illustrate a cover, but one common way is to pick a painting or other piece of art from the past, often used in order to create associations with that past in the mind of the reader.

If you want to reuse some old art in your cover, it needs to have a clear connection with the theme of the book, and it needs to be engaging and interesting to look at. "Less is more" comes into play here even more than elsewhere: since many paintings and other pieces of visual art are not meant to scale down to book cover size, it's important to pick something that's not too busy so it will really pop.

• Bad: Six Centuries of Verse, by Anthony Thwaite

This image is unfocused, and its connection to the subject—poetry—is unclear. There's a dude kind of looking like he's going to read to an audience (but maybe about to get arrested?) which is a thing poets do, but there's a heck of a lot of other things going on, too, so the poet, if that's what he is, is not the focus of attention. The image is also cropped kind of weird; it's clear there was some kind of visual framing going on with that latticework peeping over the upper corners, but the rest of it's been cut off for some reason. 

• Good: The Five Books of Moses, by Robert Alter

This translation of the Pentateuch, done by one of my favorite authors, Robert Alter, benefits from great cover design. The title is overlaid in a beautiful typeface over the image itself, drawing the eye into its drama. The image itself is gorgeous, colorful, and dynamic; it's cropped well, so we get a clear look at the figure of Moses, who looks like he's about to smash the commandment tablets, one of the most iconic moments in the Pentateuch. This establishes a double link with the focus of the book: the person named in the title is depicted on the cover, and a pivotal scene from the events inside is shown as well. 

Photographs

Same deal as above, but you know, with photographs. Less is more, establish a connection, don't confuse the viewer, etc. A major pitfall with photographs seems to be the temptation to use more than one, but in general this is a mistake; one great picture is always better than a few good ones jammed into one image. (Remember The Learning Bible's three blended photos above? Poor choice.)

• Bad: The Ayatollah Begs to Differ, by Hooman Majd

You can see what they were trying to do here (the Ayatollah's creepy eye is watching you with disapproval, O girl with balloon!) but it doesn't really work. The photo of the girl is too unfocused and busy, and the connection with the watching eye above is hard to notice right away. The subtitle placed above the title and to the right is also visually distracting and weird, since there's no really obvious reason it needs to be there.

• Good: Dictionary of Languages, Andrew Dalby

Here the subtitle is above the title, but it works because it's centered in a visually distinct area that looks like it's meant to house something, but is a little too small to hold the title, which needs to be big enough to dominate the cover and catch the eye. The many colored squares of the image, set into distinct sections of their own, call to mind both the diversity of the world's languages and the fact that they will be partitioned into different entries in this reference volume.

Original Visual Art

Commissioning some original visual art is a great, though probably more expensive, way to get something that will both relate directly to the theme or plot of the book, and be eye-catching and new. It's also a great way to get something ugly, so beware.

• Bad: The Affirmation, by Chrsitopher Priest

Cf. "ugly" above. This image represents the unraveling of the narrator's psyche and world fairly accurately, but not in a way that's visually pleasing or particularly interesting. 

• Good: The Big Rewind, by Nathan Rabin

This, on the other hand, is a visually arresting image that also captures the ethos of the book—a memoir told through the lens of whatever the author's favorite piece of pop culture was at the time he's narrating—through a slightly surreal, playful picture, one segment of which is boldly transposed onto the spine. 

The Winners:

What, you didn't know this was a contest? Me neither, but that didn't stop me from picking my favorite bad cover and favorite good one:

• Bad: Knowing the Heart of God, by George MacDonald

This violates all the rules, and then some. Too many fonts, a combination of two pictures (a painting and a picture, no less, and the picture is of sheep), and general busy-ness collaborate to form probably the worst book cover I've ever personally owned. 

• Good: The Separation, by Christopher Priest

I bought this book for the cover; that's how much I love it. It eschews type entirely, adhering rigorously to the "less is more" rule of cover design, almost to a fault. The plot of the book, in which two alternate timelines are created depending on the fate of a single aircraft in WWII, is elegantly alluded to in the repeated pattern of aircraft outlines, which could represent a group of planes or a single plane diverging into multiple universes and timelines. 

Now that that's done, I'm off to pack these books in some boxes! And other books, too.

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*If I were a real typography nerd, though, I would care about the distinction between typeface and font, which I honestly can't say I do. They will be used interchangeably in this post. True typography nerds: deal with it.

On the Whole Bible Project & Biblical Poetry

Part of a series on Reading the Whole Bible.

Oh God! well look at you now!  
Oh! you lost it, but you don’t know how!  
In the light of a golden calf,  
Oh God! I had to laugh!
—"Neon Bible," The Arcade Fire

Five months ago I wrote that I would be starting a project to read the whole Bible. I pursued this project with a great deal of excitement at first, which slowly diminished to diligence, and then to lethargy, over the first half of 2013. I set out intending to finish the project after a few months (I gave it three, tops) and move on to other pursuits. This was misguided, though not for the reasons you might think. It wasn't the fact that the material was boring or alienating because of its ancient character (I was raised with this stuff, after all, and have spent much of my adult life investigating it), nor that it was simply too long to read all in one go (at ~700,000 words, it's pretty long, but I've engaged in similarly long projects without tiring out—I'm looking at you, A Song of Ice and Fire). The problem, my friends, was poetry.

Don't laugh.

Reading Biblical prose is easy for me. In just about any prose text in the Bible, one idea follows the next in a logical sequence, usually keeping to chronological and/or cause-and-effect order. If you encounter something weird, you plow through it until you come across something more understandable and interesting. There is a plot or a narrative of some kind, so it's easy to stay engaged because you want to find out what's next. Plus, there's a feeling of excitement and discovery when things are new, and a feeling of returning to something beloved when they are not.

Biblical poetry, alas, is a different beast altogeter. Unlike much of the poetry of the ancient Near East, Biblical poems are virtually never used to tell an extended story, with the rare exceptions being retellings or references to a story that the poet assumes is known by the audience (see for example "historical" Psalms like Psalms 78, 105, and 106). Even when a poem tells a story in such a case, there is never any exposition to help the reader along. And in all events, most Biblical poems serve other purposes.

So it was with some dismay that I hit the middle portion of the Christian Bible, which is almost exclusively poetic in content, and realized that the pace I'd achieved during the previous sections was not going to be sustainable. (In my Bible, the distance between the beginning and end of the predominantly poetic books [i.e., Job to Malachi] is a little under 700 pages, roughly one third of the total.) Reading Biblical poetry is taxing; it forces you to either slow down and take it in (to try to analyze it for deeper meaning), or to rush through it and exhaust yourself with a task that starts to seem meaningless after a while (this is what I did).

Because I got exhausted reading poetry, and because the project was keeping me from doing more fun reading, I stopped for the month of May. To get prepped to start again, I'm rereading a favorite book, The Art of Biblical Poetry, by Robert Alter. In it, Alter lays out the features that make Biblical poetry unique and beautiful (specifically, a kind of dynamic parallelism, where things are stated and then restated in a way that makes them more interesting and moves the action of the poem forward). Alter makes a very compelling case for the poetry of the Bible as a interesting and important kind of art, in addition to its religious meaning for many, myself included. Thanks to his work, I'm looking forward to restarting this project in the days to come.

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Photo sources:
Photo 1: www.flickr.com/photos/skeggzatori/4278335002/
Photo 2: www.flickr.com/photos/vblibrary/4596177185
Photo 3: www.flickr.com/photos/joshme17/2143980427

1 & 2 Samuel: The Hebrew Bible's Best Novel

David's Grief over Absalom, Illustration from a Bible Card

And I should have known that my son so bold,
He'd bear my sword, he'd take my sword,
He'd take my sword to his grave.
—"Absalom," Families

Yesterday, my fiancée and I were asked to present our favorite scriptures to a Sunday school class we were participating in. After a little thought, she had come up with several lovely bits from the book of Matthew, things like "can any of you by worrying add a single hour to his life?" and "ask and it shall be given to you." I, meanwhile, was having much more trouble thinking of something to present. Not because I don't have favorite scriptures, but because I tend to think of them in terms of whole books, rather than individual verses from those books.

For the purposes of the Sunday school lesson, this was about as helpful as being asked my favorite movie quote and responding by acting out the entirety of Children of Men. I at least knew what my favorite book of the Bible was, though, so I had a decent starting place to start thinking on the question.

1 and 2 Samuel is my favorite book in the Bible. (In Bibles today, it's divided up into two books, 1 Samuel and 2 Samuel, but that's because when it was translated from Hebrew to Greek in ancient times, the Greek text was too long to fit on a single scroll, so it was split up into two scrolls. It's all one book, though!*) Broadly speaking, it's the story of how the ancient people of Israel went from being a hodgepodge of tribes with local rulers, often oppressed and attacked by neighboring tribes and peoples, to a unified nation under a single ruler, strong enough to defend itself adequately and play a role on the world stage of its era. But really, 1 and 2 Samuel is the story of one man: King David.

Samuel is interesting for a lot of reasons, but to me, it's the story of the ruthless rise to power and gradual aging and decline of King David that's the most fascinating. (There are other people's stories in it, including the story of the prophet Samuel, who the book is named for. These stories serve as a sort of lead-in to the main narrative about David.) Not just the story, though: while the plot of 1 and 2 Samuel is quite intriguing, it's the way the author** uses the literary tools at his disposal to portray that story that's truly compelling. Not only does the author present the history of David's life in a compelling way, he also uses the story to grapple with and explore big questions and problems in the human condition, on topics as diverse as aging, death, necessary evils, fame, political machinations, lust, avarice, treachery, murder, and, uh, hemorrhoids.

David and Goliath (Caravaggio) maybe the most famous image of David where he's not naked

Take this for an example: one of the basic tools the authors of the Hebrew Bible used to quickly define their characters was to make the first words a character says a key to understanding him or her. In 1 Samuel, David's first line of dialog takes place during the story of Goliath, a giant Philistine who has challenged the Israelite army to send a champion to fight him, and insulted them and their God when they do not immediately send someone. When David hears Goliath's challenge, he speaks for the first time:

"What shall be done for the man who kills this Philistine, and takes away the reproach from Israel? For who is this uncircumcised Philistine that he should defy the armies of the living God?" (1 Samuel 17:26, NRSV)

The first thing David ever says in 1 and 2 Samuel (1) looks very pointedly for (political) gain—the answer to "What shall be done for the man...?" turns out to be "You get to marry the king's daughter!"—and (2) either balances out or, more likely, covers up this grab for personal profit with some pious, patriotic rhetoric. This ends up being key to the author's portrayal of David, a character who uses whatever means necessary to gain and consolidate political power, and then either makes up for it or covers it up (depending on how charitable you want to be as a reader) with expressions of piety and political necessity.

Combat between Soldiers of Ish-Bosheth and David (Gustave Doré)

I'd like to take an aside to defend the use of the word "novel" to describe1 and 2 Samuel. The author of 1 and 2 Samuel has a clear interest in depicting historical events; unlike, say, Job or Jonah, 1 and 2 Samuel does not appear to have been made up out of whole cloth for purposes other than communicating historical events. (Whether David and the other characters of the book are real historical figures has been debated, but 1 and 2 Samuel lacks characteristics one would expect of a portrait of a legendary figure, and it is certainly no fable or morality play.) Even though 1 and 2 Samuel is interested in history, it is not just a book of history; the author feels free to incorporate folk tales and legends into the work, as well as other fictional elements. Literary critic and Bible translator Robert Alter describes it this way:

This narrative...has many signs of what we would call fictional shaping—interior monologues, dialogues between the historical personages in circumstances where there could have been no witnesses to what was said, pointed allusions in the turns of dialogue as well as in the narrative details to Genesis, Joshua, and Judges. What we have in this great story...is not merely a report of history but an imagining of history that is analogous to what Shakespeare did with historical figures and events in his history plays. That is, the known general contours of the historical events and of the principal players are not tampered with, but the writer brings to bear the resources of his literary art in order to imagine deeply, and critically, the concrete moral and emotional predicaments of living in history, in the political realm. To this end, the writer feels free to invent an inner language for the characters, to give their dialogues revelatory shape, to weave together episodes and characters with a fine mesh of recurrent motifs and phrases and analogies of incident, and to define the meaning of the events through metaphor, allusion, and symbol. The writer does all this not to fabricate history but in order to understand it. (The David Story, pgs. xvii-xviii, emphasis added)

Taking historical facts and weaving them together with imagined events, thoughts, and speech in order to wrestle with both the history itself and the themes it represents seems less like history to me than a historical novel. There are other other novels in the Hebrew Bible, stories that follow the arc of a few characters through a plot, not straying far into straight history or poetry or other genres; Jonah is one, and Esther and Ruth. For my money, though, 1 and 2 Samuel is the Hebrew Bible's finest novel, for no other Biblical book can match it for artistry, depth, and sheer enjoyability.

Study of King David (Julia Margaret Cameron)

When it came time on Sunday for me to share my favorite scriptures with the Sunday school class, I chose my favorite moment in 1 and 2 Samuel. It's a little dark, but bear with me:

The Lord struck the child that Uriah's wife bore to David, and it became very ill. David therefore pleaded with God for the child; David fasted, and went in and lay all night on the ground. The elders of his house stood beside him, urging him to rise from the ground; but he would not, nor did he eat food with them. On the seventh day the child died. And the servants of David were afraid to tell him that the child was dead; for they said, "While the child was still alive, we spoke to him, and he did not listen to us; how then can we tell him the child is dead? He may do himself some harm." But when David saw that his servants were whispering together, he perceived that the child was dead; and David said to his servants, "Is the child dead?" They said, "He is dead."

Then David rose from the ground, washed, anointed himself, and changed his clothes. He went into the house of the Lord, and worshiped; he then went to his own house; and when he asked, they set food before him and he ate. Then his servants said to him, "What is this thing that you have done? You fasted and wept for the child while it was alive; but when the child died, you rose and ate food." He said, "While the child was still alive, I fasted and wept; for I said, 'Who knows? The Lord may be gracious to me, and the child may live.' But now he is dead; why should I fast? Can I bring him back again? I shall go to him, but he will not return to me." (2 Samuel 12:15b-24, NRSV)

This story, particularly David's line at the end, is a turning point for his character. Before this incident, David is almost constantly gaining and consolidating political power, and nearly everything he says can be construed as having a secondary, political motive behind it. The heartfelt, wrenching line "Can I bring him back again? I shall go to him, but he will not return to me" is the first time David feels completely real to the reader; his heart is laid bare.

After this point, David begins to turn into the old man he will be at the end of the book, shivering in bed and scarcely aware of what is going on in his kingdom. Along the way, he starts losing track of what is going on in his own household; his children end up violating and murdering each other, and one of them, Absalom, starts a rebellion against David, only to eventually be killed when David takes back the throne, much to David's sorrow.

1 and 2 Samuel is many things, but it is not least a moving portrait of an individual human life, conveyed with profound artistry and richness. I recommend it to any reader looking for such a portrait. For the general reader, it's hard to go wrong with Robert Alter's translation, The David Story, which I quoted earlier. It includes enough helpful commentary to both understand the ancient context and appreciate the artistry of the book without overwhelming the reader, and I highly recommend it.

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*It's actually slightly more complicated than this: the end of the book, in which David is on his deathbed and giving his last instructions to Solomon, was later cut off and added to the book of 1 Kings, in order to serve as an introduction to 1 Kings' stories about Solomon. Thus, in modern Bibles, the story of 1 and 2 Samuel really goes all the way through 1 Kings chapter 2.
**The author is anonymous, like most of the authors of the Bible, especially outside the prophetic books, which tend to have been written by the people they're named for, with a number of exceptions. Given the time and place in which 1 and 2 Samuel was written, the author was almost certainly male.

Photo sources:
Photo 1: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:David_and_Goliath_by_Caravaggio.jpg
Photo 2: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:David%27s_Grief_Over_Absolom_%28Bible_Card%29.jpg
Photo 3: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:078.Combat_between_Soldiers_of_Ish-bosheth_and_David.jpg
Photo 4: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Study_of_King_David,_by_Julia_Margaret_Cameron.jpg

Reading the Bible—All of It

Part of a series on Reading the Whole Bible.

 
Books of Moses, bringing stone news,
Wet in the water, weeping in the sun,
Books of Moses, got some splinters, didn't you?
Books of Moses, brought me right here back to you.
—"Books of Moses," Tom Waits

On January 1st, 2013, I was dispiritingly unable to announce any New Year's resolutions to rival last year's set. While some might argue that my life just doesn't need any major improvements, I think the reality is that the kind of improving it needs is in places that New Year's resolutions cannot readily or easily address: be more productive, worry about the future less, get out and have adventures more often. Having a structure ("write an entry every Friday") was what made the resolution to start this blog successful, and having a well-defined goal ("don't eat meat, ever") was what made vegetarianism possible. With no structure or goal, resolutions fail fast: e.g., my resolution a couple years ago to get in shape, which ended after I discovered that jogging in public is painful (my knees/feet aren't built for it) and embarrassing (my running shorts are too large and have to be periodically pulled up, or just held in place with one hand), and a lack of a defined end goal or rigid schedule made it all the easier to quit, quickly.

It was not till several days after New Year's 2013 that I came up with my resolution. Instead of trying to improve the way I live my life, I've decided to set a single, straightforward goal: read the Bible. All of it.

I fielded the question "Have you read the whole Bible?" a number of times in 2012, and it was frustrating to be a person who takes his faith seriously and still has to answer "no." Especially as a Protestant, a member of the portion of the Church that views the Bible as the only resource necessary for salvation and holiness, I feel like something of a sham for never having even glanced at whole books (I'm looking at you, Obadiah) and never having read significant portions of certain key works (like Isaiah). It's also a been little embarrassing to have a running argument with a fundamentalist friend about our divergent views of Scripture without, you know, having actually looked at all of it.

More than this frustration and embarrassment, though, I'm motivated by the kind of curiosity that David Plotz describes at the beginning of his "Blogging the Bible" series; speaking of the (surprising, unsettling) story of Dinah and Shechem, Plotz writes: "If this story was strutting cheerfully through the back half of Genesis, what else had I forgotten or never learned?" (I'll admit I'm also compelled by his conclusion: absolutely everybody, religious or not, should read the Bible, for cultural and intellectual reasons.) I wish I could say I was reading for pure spiritual edification, but while I do care about that, it is not chief among my reasons (to be honest: I don't expect to be spiritually edified by large swathes of it).

The next step after choosing to read the whole Bible was choosing which one to read. There are lots of translations out there; the King James Version, while beautiful and influential, is also strange enough (and, academically/critically speaking, out-of-date enough) that I set it aside. There are any number of more modern translations, but I chose the NRSV as a reputable translation with a focus on word-for-word accuracy, rather than general sense translation.

Also, I knew I would need something extra to help me along in reading the Bible cover to cover. I find the Bible fascinating in short chunks, but without some more modern prose alongside to engage my interest and direct my understanding, I tend to get tired fast. (This is why I've had great success at reading, say, Robert Alter's Genesis translation and commentary, but I've never made it all the way through Hebrews.) So I wanted a study Bible, something like the Oxford Annotated Bible that was a required text for many students in college. But I'm also planning on carrying it around with me all over, so I wanted something more portable.

A truly portable study Bible turned out to be a mythical beast, but I found a close enough approximation in the Access Bible, which my father dug up (and, very helpfully, purchased for me—thanks, Dad!) after I asked him for help. It's a bit on the heavy side, but it's more compact than any other study Bible I've come across (about the size of a hymnal, but thicker), and a paperback to boot. The only flaw I've spotted so far is a exceedingly poor font choice for certain sub-headings, but at least it's not Papyrus.

A couple of things will make this particular resolution to read the Bible unusual. First, I'm planning on reading the Apocrypha, the books that Protestants do not think of as part of the Bible, but that other branches of the Church do. I'm expecting this to be the most fun part, actually, since I have next to no experience with these books. The other thing: I'm not following a schedule. There are lots of scheduled whole-Bible reading experiences out there; the most popular ones last a year. I have no intention of spending a whole year reading a book, not (mainly) because I think I'm too awesome a reader to take that long, but because I know at that rate that I will certainly get off schedule sometime and give up in despair. In fact, any schedule is going to make me more likely to give up, because I hate having to catch up on reading and tend to not do it (see: my core classes in college). So far, with no schedule, I'm 31 pages in—and still reading the introduction.

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Photo sources:
Photo 1: http://www.flickr.com/photos/wonderlane/27701688/
Photo 2: http://www.flickr.com/photos/renaud-camus/6242447085/

Everyone Should Read Moby-Dick

Part of a series on Stuff You Might Not Know About.

This book totally rules. Just look at it: this is the plot, right here, in this picture. Click to enlarge.

The harpoon and the line fly through,
Very deep into the whale;
She split the timbers of the ship,
With a flurry of her tail.
—"The Humpback Whale," Traditional, arr. Nic Jones

Every year at the University of Chicago Scav Hunt, the team captains are required by the rules of the Hunt to dress up in certain garb: samurai gear, say, or ball gowns; it varies from year to year. A few years ago, the required costume was famous fictional captains: one team's captains all dressed as Captain Han Solo, for example, and another's dressed as Captain Ahab. On Scav Judgement Day, I visited the team with the Captain Ahabs and hung out for a bit, examining their coolest items and chatting with acquaintances on the team. And I noticed something very wrong: all the Captain Ahabs had wooden legs.

In Moby-Dick, Captain Ahab is indeed missing a leg, but his prosthesis is made out of whale bone, not wood. It's kind of a key image in the book: a whale bites Ahab's leg off, so he fashions a replacement from the jawbone of a whale and swears revenge on the whale that dared to maim him. It's pretty badass. I asked around, and it turned out that not only did none of the Scav team captains knew this, none of the members of their team did either. In short, none of these kids had actually read Moby-Dick.

I was sad, not because I was surprised, but because it confirmed a suspicion I'd had for a while: no one reads Moby-Dick. "If this gaggle of bright, inquisitive, creative, and intelligent young people hasn't read it," I thought, "who has?"

This is less elitist than it sounds. This is not about "kids these days blah blah no one reads the classics blah blah I'm so smart I know all the things and you don't." What bothers me isn't that people don't read the classics, or anything like that; instead, it's that Moby-Dick has this horrible reputation for being a total downer, a needlessly challenging slog through heavy-handed metaphors and hard-to-absorb 19th-century prose. The way people talk about it just makes it sound profoundly un-fun and hard to read.

Here's the thing: that reputation is bogus. Moby-Dick is a beautiful, weird, wicked, funny, thoughtful, and emotionally engaging book.

Moby-Dick is the story of one man's quest to get revenge on a whale that bit off his leg, but it is way, way more than that also. In addition to the plot, which is scary, weird, and awesome, there are asides on philosophy, theology, and most importantly, cetology: sometimes Melville will just take a chapter off from the plot and explain what he thinks about, say, whales and whale science; it's magical because, if you dig it, it's really fun, and if you don't, you can skip it with no consequences for your understanding of the novel's plot. Throughout the book there are playful moments and disturbing moments and plenty of stuff that is just plain strange. Moby-Dick contains so much that, if you read it, you will almost certainly find something you really like in it.

My favorite thing about Moby-Dick is probably the narrator's (that is, Ishmael's) little moral asides, his moments of minor philosophizing. They tend to be funny and to ring true, and they're also often somewhat progressive for a man of his day. For example, after Ishmael freaks the heck out when he finds out his bedmate for the night at the inn he's staying at is a "savage cannibal" from parts unknown (and not, in fact, a white person) this happens:

 "'You gettee in,' [Queequeg] added, motioning to me with his tomahawk, and throwing the [bed] clothes to one side. He really did this in not only a civil but a really kind and charitable way. I stood looking at him a moment. For all his tattooings he was on the whole a clean, comely looking cannibal. What's all this fuss I have been making about, thought I to myself- the man's a human being just as I am: he has just as much reason to fear me, as I have to be afraid of him. Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian. (Chapter 3, emphasis mine)

Or check out this little bit, in which Ishmael defends his decision to go to sea as a sailor and get ordered around by some "old hunks" of a captain:

What of it, if some old hunks of a sea-captain orders me to get a broom and sweep down the decks? What does that indignity amount to, weighed, I mean, in the scales of the New Testament? Do you think the archangel Gabriel thinks anything the less of me, because I promptly and respectfully obey that old hunks in that particular instance? Who ain’t a slave? Tell me that. Well, then, however the old sea-captains may order me about- however they may thump and punch me about, I have the satisfaction of knowing that it is all right; that everybody else is one way or other served in much the same way- either in a physical or metaphysical point of view, that is; and so the universal thump is passed round, and all hands should rub each other’s shoulder-blades, and be content. (Chapter 1, emphasis mine)

There's lots more to be said in the book's favor, but I don't want this post to get too long; the last thing I'll says is that the book has some incredibly rich, beautiful language, which, if the reader slows down and really drinks it in, can provide moments of pure, readerly pleasure unlike almost any book I've ever known.* In this scene, for example, a boat caught in a storm is described with mesmerizing power:

The wind increased to a howl; the waves dashed their bucklers together; the whole squall roared, forked, and crackled around us like a white fire upon the prairie, in which unconsumed, we were burning; immortal in these jaws of death! In vain we hailed the other boats; as well roar to the live coals down the chimney of a flaming furnace as hail those boats in that storm. Meanwhile the driving scud, rack, and mist, grew darker with the shadows of night; no sign of the ship could be seen. The rising sea forbade all attempts to bale out the boat. The oars were useless as propellers, performing now the office of life-preservers. So, cutting the lashing of the waterproof match keg, after many failures Starbuck contrived to ignite the lamp in the lantern; then stretching it on a waif pole, handed it to Queequeg as the standard-bearer of this forlorn hope. There, then, he sat, holding up that imbecile candle in the heart of that almighty forlornness. There, then, he sat, the sign and symbol of a man without faith, hopelessly holding up hope in the midst of despair. (Chapter 48)

 I really think that everyone who can should read Moby-Dick. Folks might just love it as much as I did.

This post owes a large debt to Robert Alter's book The Pleasures of Reading in an Ideological Age and especially to Walker Percy's short essay Herman Melville (check it out if you're on the fence).

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*Note that reading Moby-Dick kind of ruined all other books for me for a few months after I finished it, because pretty much nothing on earth is as rich, beautiful, and strange. It can be hard to get back into paperback sci-fi after stewing your brain in Melville's language for a while. 

Photo Sources:
Photo 1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Moby_Dick_final_chase.jpg
Photo 2: http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/treasures/images/1831.jpg