a belated message to my reader

It’s farewell to this blog, for no good reason. I’ve been working on a new blog for some time, so please visit daily, illustrated.

bringing God to book: the evidence mounts

I’m diverting myself again with ye old testament, using Testament as my starting point but ranging through many different versions – I’ve come across a concordance thingy which allows you to compare chapter and verse in 26 different versions. For example, were the ‘tumours’ that God visited upon the peoples of Ashdod (1Samuel 5:6) really hemorrhoids? Not surprisingly the skeptic’s annotated bible (truly a godsend) has great fun with this, especially with the five golden images of hemorrhoids God then demands to be made, as a ‘trespass offering’, whatever that is. The King James Bible uses the word ‘emerods’ where Testament and most modern versions has ‘tumours’. Interestingly, a later version of the King James, called The New King James Version, also uses ‘tumours’ and has a footnote about it referring to the bubonic plague. I was tempted to accept that maybe ‘tumours’ was more historically accurate (apart from the bit about God bringing them about), but then came upon another even more recent version of the King James, called the Twenty-first century King James Version (that should be it for the next century then), which boldly uses ‘hemorrhoids’. Bible study’s a fraught business, but it can be fun.

A rather more serious discrepancy occurs at 1 Samuel 6:19, where the skeptics understandably make much of the terrible slaughter and the pathetic pretext. Here’s the KJV:

And he smote the men of Bethshemesh, because they had looked into the ark of the LORD, even he smote of the people fifty thousand and threescore and ten men: and the people lamented, because the LORD had smitten many of the people with a great slaughter

My Testament reduces this number (50,070) to 70, without comment of course, and you can see here that, of eight versions, only two claim that seventy men were killed, while another goes for ‘seventy men – fifty chief men’, trying to argue presumably for fifty ‘thousand-men’ being chief men – probably on very shaky ground. The other five versions go with the vastly bigger number, sometimes with some ambiguity, separating the fifty thousand and the seventy as though that were somehow significant. But really, it looks bad for God. Not that murdering 70 is less heinous than murdering 50,070, and in any case the charge list is horrendously long quite apart from this crime. We’ve definitely got him on the big ones, ethnic cleansing, genocide, crimes against humanity. What astonishes me is that he has chosen to write his memoirs, detailing in chapter and verse the whole gamut of his crimes. A testament to the complete arrogance of the fellow. Personally though, I believe he has grossly exaggerated his involvement, in order to big-note himself and to scare his enemies. Like most alpha types he suffers from delusions of grandeur.
He’s been lying low for a while but he can’t evade capture forever. I hope they don’t make it a show trial, he really doesn’t deserve the publicity. The last thing you’d want to do is make a martyr of him.

Surprise surprise, someone's arrived here way before me.

lost in Albany

And of course it’s not just in books or in illness that you find heart-stopping pain. This is the sort of pain I most dread. As I get older, I suffer it less, and I don’t know if that’s good or bad.

don't forget the rack

I’m not aware that Ellis wrote anything other than this 1958 novel, which naturally reminded me of that other book dealing with a tubercular young man seeking treatment in the Alps, Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. Since reading that book more than twenty years ago, I’ve probably become less idealistic, less hungry for knowledge, and certainly more bronchitic, though Ellis’ depiction makes my phlegmy gobbets feel quite benign.  
Unlike Mann’s largely relaxed depiction of dilettantism, The Rack is much more about speculums than speculation (sorry, I had to get that line in), and is harrowing in its unrelenting realism about, not only this particular illness, but the often fatal conjunctions of character, constitution and treatment, not to mention the psychological foibles of examining physicians.
Interestingly, the writer I was most reminded of was Dostoyevski. The intensity of much of Dostoyevski’s writings, and of his on-the-brink characters, has often been attributed to illness – specifically epilepsy. In The Rack we find a similar feverish energy, the energy of youthful fervour trapped in an exhausted and debilitated body. Add to this the brain stimulus of morphine and other drugs of treatment, and you have the formula for the sort of impotent anarchy that marks the novel. We meet an array of irrational characters – nursing staff and doctors as well as fellow-convalescents – and we observe the central character – Paul Davenant, an English student - being subjected to a most bewildering array of contradictory diagnoses and treatments, yet Ellis manages to handle the twists and turns in Davenant’s health and hopes with wry humour. Not surprisingly, the question of suicide, dealt with so heavily and intellectually by Camus a generation earlier, is often foregrounded here, in a very different way. In the end, though, Davenant keeps on keeping on, in spite of the apparent loss of the love of his life  - the unkindest cut of all, though treated with Stendhalian understatement.  
The lines at the end of the book will stay with me, and are worth quoting in full:

Why did he feel such an intensification of grief? ‘Nothing is altered’, he repeated, half aloud. He covered his eyes with his hand. ‘Stretch me no more on this rough world.’ The phrase came irresistibly to his mind. Where had he read it? He picked up Haydon’s Journal and turned to the entry which the latter had made just before killing himself:

‘22nd. God forgive me. Amen.
Finis of
B. R. Haydon
“Stretch me no more on this rough world” – Lear

Something was grotesquely wrong. He opened his Shakespeare.

     “…O, let him pass! He hates him
       That would upon the rack of this tough world
       Stretch him out longer.’

‘The rack’, he murmured. ‘Haydon forgot the rack.’ And his mind still exercised by the strangeness of the omission, he stared across at the half-open window.

funny thing about passion

A couple of nights ago we watched Ken Russell’s film, Crimes of Passion on DVD. It came out in 1984. Like all Russell’s films, it’s high-energy, anarchic at times, silly, shallow, funny and sometimes startling. It’s all about sex, with Kathleen Turner playing China Blue, a bewigged smart-mouthed prostitute who by day is a workaholic sportswear designer. Considering the content, the film’s rating – M, for low-level violence – is way off-beam. It contains quite a lot of nudity, and one scene, in which China Blue has a wild ride with a truncheon-wielding policeman client, would definitely push it up to an R in my generally libertarian judgement. Of course, with Russell, nothing is ever taken too seriously, which is presumably why he’s gotten away with it.
Insofar as there’s a plot, it’s about a private-detective-security guy caught in a loveless marriage who’s asked to tail Joanna Crane, that’s Kathleen Turner’s workaholic sportswear designer, because her boss suspects she’s secretly selling out his designs. Naturally he uncovers her undercover job and they get under the covers. The sex is fantastic and whammo, it’s Romeo and Juliet, or maybe Antony and Cleo.
Meanwhile China’s being stalked by a sex-obsessed godbotherer, played either by Norman bates or Anthony Perkins, who resorts to mayhem here and there and is finally run through by a silver vibrator. All in all, a lot of frenzy and sordidité, some funny if creaky lines, a few distracting videoclip-type visuals, and a musical score that got under my skin, because I was sure I recognised a classical refrain, though Rick Wakeman was the only name in the credits. We never find out why Joanna becomes China, nor for that matter why she becomes Joanna. There’s a touch of pathos in the failed husband-wife relationship, though it’s hard to feel too much sympathy with frigidity so blankly presented. There’s probably an affirmation-of-life attitude to sex operating here, but to channel it into the old all-or-nothing, virgin-whore dichotomy looks to me like a failure of imagination. It’s not a film that’ll stay with me, character-wise, I suspect.

remember Scott Parkin?

Media attention to the pathological posturings of Mark Latham has inevitably pushed a few more serious issues aside, and what could be more serious to our national identity than the deportation of peace activist Scott Parkin? Barista has some pungent commentary here, and well done Natasha for pursuing the issue vigorously in the senate, but of course the wall of national security is easy to put up and excellent for hiding behind. The claim is that the opposition, on being briefed, went along with the decision. So just who was the opposition in this instance. Was it Mister Big, or the shadow cabinet, or every card-carrying ALP member? Hey, I’m in the opposition, and I’ve never voted labor in my life.

Did this opposition also accept that Parkin be billed $20,000? More importantly, what allegations could they have sensibly made against him? That a person who has built his reputation on non-violent methods of protest was suddenly planning something violent? Rubbish. That he was planning to reveal some secrets of Haliburton that would compromise national security (i.e. national commercial interests)? Now there’s a political minefield. Hard not to head in that direction though. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if ASIO was pressured by ‘outside forces’, and considering Beazley’s consistent pro-American positioning, I’m afraid I wouldn’t trust his judgment any more than I’d trust ASIO’s.

Meanwhile, the lie that the public needn’t be informed about the details of this case must be exposed. The onus should be on the government to prove rather than assure that this extraordinary deportation isn’t political.

bye bye feudalism? - some Tibetan enlightenment

Thanks to Sarah for sending me this info on the history of Tibet, apropos of nothing at all. I was never a big fan of the Dalai Lama; not that I had anything against him, he seemed harmless enough, and his message sounded positive, if a little vague and ineffectual. I suppose what has most irritated me is the sort of people he often attracts, the ‘enlightenment-chasers’, though he has, as this article indicates, stressed the material needs of his people over and above the spiritual – even advocating Marxism, much to the chagrin of his CIA backers no doubt.

priorities

I think my blog will have to take a back seat for some time. I intend to write copiously about this harrowing case, and I realize I can’t do that in a public place for the time being. My lawyer has also advised me not to speak about it, so I’ll go along for the time being.

guess who bears the brunt of America's tsunami?

Randomly clicking through Blogger’s blogs, I note they’re mostly American, and a fair percentage of them proclaim praise of the lord as their primary purpose. Still, I came across some fine original material, with naturally much about Katrina. Lots of anger about the local and federal authorities’ lack of response and support for those (the vast majority of them black) trapped in New Orleans and elsewhere. Lots of directives were issued, but those who couldn’t afford to follow these directives got short shrift – and the federal authorities, according to this finely enraged site, have been stinting on providing money for levees to protect New Orleans for years. It’s occasions like these, sadly, that really expose that country’s great divide.