March Madness: The Tournament of Books

I just saw this in Salon, for all of you voracious readers, or anyone looking to expand their reading horizons:

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The grandaddy of them all, however, is the Tournament of Books, mounted by the Morning News Web site and now in its sixth year. Unlike DABWAHA, ToB doesn't offer prizes to readers who make the most accurate predictions, and unlike all the other contests, it doesn't rely on polling readers to determine the winning books. Instead, a single guest judge selects the victor in each bracket, while the tournament's overseers, Kevin Guilfoile and John Warner, serve up commentary garnished with the occasional dab of sportscaster lingo ("quintuple toe loop"?). There's even an official statistician who crunches such questionably significant numbers as (I think I have this right) the ratio of an entry's length to its likeliness to ascend to the next round.

The ToB has a healthy sense of its own absurdity, evidenced by the fact that the first round put Hilary Mantel's doorstop historical novel set in the court of Henry VIII, "Wolf Hall," up against "Logicomix," a graphic "novel" by Apostolos Doxiadis and Christos Papadimitriou about Bertrand Russell's effort to establish the logical foundations of mathematics. Both could be called historical fiction, but beyond that, the notion of weighing them against each other is so silly that it effectively pegs the entire contest as a goof. ("Wolf Hall" won that round, by the way.)

Because the competition itself is essentially meaningless, ToB is a Trojan horse. Under the guise of a sports conceit, it encourages people to read outside their comfort zones and reflect on the often knee-jerk judgments they make about books they've never even cracked open. In what other circumstances (besides having a job as a book reviewer) might someone wind up reading both John Wray's "Lowboy," a novel about a schizophrenic 16-year-old, aptly likened by judge Andrew Womack to a "cool indie flick," and Kathryn Stockett's best-selling book club favorite, "The Help"?

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My Five Books Meme

I have been tagged by Daniel and Tonya at Hebrew and Greek Reader. In this meme, I will give the five books or authors who have shaped my thought the most, whether I like them or not, whether through agreement or opposition, etc. And they can be enduringly or immediately influential. This meme started not too long ago with Ken Brown at COrthodoxy. So, here are my five. For those who read my blog regularly, there probably will not be too many surprises.

1. M.M. Bakhtin. Most immediately, this Russian has profoundly influenced not only the way I approach my work--although he does that--but how I view day-to-day interactions. I was introduced to his thought through his essay on the "Chronotope" in the collected volume, The Dialogic Imagination. I use the Chronotope extensively in my dissertation. Since then, I have branched out to his other works and others' use of him. But even his concepts of the "utterance" from simple day-to-day speech-units to complex utterances of literary genres that interact dialogically is brilliant, see especially Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Or check out his reading of heteroglossia in Dostoevsky's works in The Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics. I think that is enough for now from Bakhtin, but I cannot get enough of his work! I think Dialogic Imagination is a good start if you aren't familiar with his work.

2. Erich Auerbach's Mimesis. This is one of the first books assigned to me in graduate school. I took a class on the history of interpretation of Genesis 22 with Alan Segal and David Carr, and Auerbach's opening chapter is the famous reading of "Odysseus' Scar." I don't think I realized it at the time and while I do not always agree with his interpretations, Auerbach's close attention to detail and astute reading not only in terms of content, but in terms of style has influenced my own reading habits. For you Dante fans out there, check out his Dante: Poet of the Secular World.

3. Michel de Montaigne's Essays. I have only come to Montaigne this past year, but I find him very refreshing. Again, I don't always agree with what he says, but more how he says it. He is a brilliant stylist. It is as if you are catching him in the moment of thinking, even though he revised and polished his essays over and over again. I like his concept of the imagination, and the role of the imagination in the fashioning of the self, in a self that lives insistently and creatively in the present. Reading him is a whole experience in itself. I also get this same group of feelings--reading as an entire experience, catching one in the moment of thinking, etc.--when I read Walter Benjamin.

4. Although it may sound cheesy or prosaic, Shakespeare's Hamlet. Although it is not my favorite work today (Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov is), I was never really interested in literature until I read it in high school. None of the other plays I had read until then--Macbeth, Julius Caesar, Romeo and Juliet, etc.--had every caught my interest. After reading (I think the Dover thrift edition of it), I developed a much keener interest in literature. It was at that point when I realized what amazing things could be done in the English language. I am so glad I get to teach King Lear for my literature class these days. In fact, this weekend I plan to see a free production of The Tempest.

5. I am having difficult coming up with a fifth book or author. As I look over the books that line the walls in my itty bitty apartment, I find many that I find wonderful, insightful, impressive, inspiring, and even of shaping importance for my research, but nothing really on the level of the four mentioned. And I fear I would just add something to fill out the meme and it would not be something or someone truly influential for me. And so until the time comes when I find something of the caliber of importance of the other four, I will leave the fifth slot vacant for Elijah.


Ok. Those are my five (or nearly so). You probably will notice not a single author or book within my own field of study. I always find the greatest influences for my thought and how I approach ancient Jewish and Christian literature derive from those in completely different fields. There is a certain cross-fertilization of knowledge that I find the most helpful or insightful in approaching these ancient texts anew.

I hereby tag: James McGrath, Ken Schenk, April DeConick, Justin Dombrowsky (It will give him an excuse to blog on something), and Liam (for a medievalist's perspective).

Book Meme Deferred

I just realized I had been tagged for a book meme by Daniel and Tonya at Hebrew and Greek Reader. I am supposed to think up the five most enduring or immediately influential books or authors (not necessarily the ones I like the best, but the ones who have shaped my thought through engagement, even through opposition--perhaps often the most important ingredient). I have a few who come to mind immediately, but this is going to be difficult. For a full list or review, I believe I will have to ruminate at least another day or so. If I fail to remember, please, Dan or Tonya, feel free to remind me.

The Fifth Gospel, the Fire Gospel, or the Gospel of Malchus

From the NYTimes (I apologize ahead of time for the long block quote, but this just seemed like it would make great spring break reading for many of you bibliobloggers out there):

January 8, 2009
Books of The Times
A 5th Gospel Can Be Like a 5th Wheel
By JANET MASLIN
Skip to next paragraph
THE FIRE GOSPEL

By Michel Faber. 213 pages. Canongate. $20.

As part of Canongate’s series of short novels based on myths, “The Fire Gospel” is nominally linked to the story of Prometheus. Like Prometheus, Michel Faber’s main character steals something incendiary and is terribly punished for his transgression. But Mr. Faber’s hapless Canadian linguistic scholar, Theo Griepenkerl, does not suffer the Promethean fate of being chained to a rock and having his liver repeatedly devoured by a bird of prey. His is a different kind of pain. In keeping with Mr. Faber’s more modern idea of torment, Theo has to contend with Amazon.com’s idiotic customer reviews of his book.

That book is an earth-shaking religious tract. It is created by a strange twist of fate. Theo is in Iraq, trying to wheedle relics away from a museum curator in Mosul, when an explosion wreaks havoc in the place. The curator is killed, the bas-relief likeness of a goddess splits open, and out of the sculpture’s belly come nine previously hidden papyrus scrolls. When Theo translates them, a job for which he is well equipped because “Aramaic was his baby,” he stumbles onto something momentous. He appears to have found a fifth Gospel, a new account of the Crucifixion.

Theo seizes on the publishing potential of this discovery. But it’s not an easy sell. “I only approached two agents,” he claims, “or five, if you count the three that didn’t answer my calls.” Finally an academic publisher called Elysium takes the bait. Elysium has had only one best seller, a book that could not be less like the turgid ravings of Theo’s scroll writer, Malchus.

Until now Malchus was best known for the severing of his ear in the Gospel of John. On the evidence of the scrolls’ prose style (“that is to say, the man called Malchus is unworthy, the man called Malchus deserves no more attention than a dead dog in the street,” Malchus was an unctuous biblical bore.

“The contract gives you a quarter of a million dollars and it gives me half a million headaches,” Theo is told by the head of Elysium, a man who grasps the problems posed by such a manuscript. The scrolls may be stolen goods. The Fifth Gospel is short. (“It’s 30 pages of text, max, if it were printed in quite a roomy font with generous margins.” )

How can Elysium package what is essentially just a pamphlet? “The obvious solution is that we pad it out with your account of how you found the scrolls, how you got them back from Iraq, some fascinating facts about the history and structure of the Aramaic language, what you had for breakfast on the morning you arrived back in Toronto, and so on and so on and so on,” the publisher explains.

There are also copyright problems. Theo’s description of his experience, as his publisher puts it, “how many Band-Aids you had to apply to your face,” will be protected by copyright. Malchus’s gospel will not, so paraphrases of Theo’s translation will be all over the Internet in no time. Since the workings of search engines matter more than accuracy, Theo is advised to change his name to something easily spelled. An easy-to-reference Theo Grippen is loosed upon the world.

Out he goes onto the talk show circuit to explain some of Malchus’s more awkward revelations: because the gist of the Fifth Gospel is that Jesus had very human frailties. And the scrupulousness of Theo’s translation creates trouble. Even his use of the word groin (“I could’ve translated it as ‘loin,’ but I felt that would be unnecessarily archaic”) raises eyebrows, since Malchus made regrettably graphic observations. And Malchus gave those observations an unflattering slant in what purports to date from about A.D. 40 and offers an eyewitness’s account of the Crucifixion. “Who among us would not flinch?” he blasphemously wonders about Jesus’ reflexes.

These provocations turn “The Fifth Gospel” into “The Fire Gospel” once it creates a furor. Angry readers even begin buying and burning sacrificial copies of it. “A sale is a sale, right?” Theo decides.

Mr. Faber, still best known for his long, ravishing “Crimson Petal and the White,” this time manages to be most insightful when describing fatuous superficiality. Yes, Amazon.com review parodies are cheap shots, but he makes them priceless. Theo is horrified to learn that his book is being bought by readers of “The Da Vinci Code.” He marvels at Amazon’s own flat-footed product description. (Malchus’s account is “as honest and vivid as when it was written — in the 1st century AD, at the dawn of the Western world’s greatest faith.”) He encounters spectacular displays of semiliteracy (“once he gets his ear cut off and sees the crucifixtion, thats basicly it.”)

And he is treated by pedants the way Prometheus was treated by carrion-eating birds, even when those birds themselves are a point of contention. “Carrion-eating birds (whose precise species is unclear in the Aramaic, a detail on which Grippin expends a 17-line speculative footnote!) peck out his eyes and portions of his entrails,” one particularly irreverent reader complains. “A curse on these money-grubbing exercises in imaginary scholarship, cack-handed hokum and Mickey Mouse theology!” he complains.

“The Fire Gospel” coasts cleverly and blithely through most of Theo’s American book tour. Eventually it hits a pothole and can’t get back on track. Once Mr. Faber trains his focus on crazy, trigger-happy American readers and then on the Muslim terrorists who decide that Theo is Satan’s helpmate (“He wasn’t used to being called ‘minion of Satan,’ except in Amazon reviews”), this novella turns from satire to slapstick and never regains its rigor. Not even Mr. Faber’s final twist about a book that really makes a difference (hint: it’s not Theo’s) can match this book’s early glee about the discovery of a dubious biblical sensation.

“My flesh is yellow, my eyes are yellow, the hairs fall from my head,” Malchus has written, in words meant and marketed to thrill a credulous world, “and my innards make noises when all else is quiet.”

I haven't read this book (and probably won't, at least for a while--I did not even read the Da Vinci Code), but if you want to find out about Jesus' graphic groin and, too, are annoyed by Amazon.com reviewers (although the NYTimes reviewer seems to think it has a disappointing ending), here is the book for you.

Quote of the Day: Borges, "Library of Babel"

It seems like I am thinking about Babel/Babble lately with my last post and just (re)reading "Library of Babel" by Borges. I had read this short story in college, and it has persisted in my memory ever since. This library is eternal and infinite. Each room is a hexagon with the same number of shelves and books on each wall (except two). Two walls lead to adjacent hexagons, while a spiral staircase infinitely moves up and down to different floors with ever new hexagons. There are no two books alike in the library, but the books contain all possible combinations of twenty-five symbols, with all possible syntaxes, languages, books, writing, and, well, babble. As such, this same blog posting will be already found somewhere in the library (as well as any past and future postings I may write and miswrite). The inhabitants of this library are called librarians. The main character is a librarian who has been searching for the book of books, the catalogue of catalogues, all of his life...and has failed. This character reflectively writes:

In adventures such as these, I have squandered and wasted my years. It does not seem unlikely to me that there is a total book on some shelf of the universe; I pray to the unknown gods that a man--just one, even though it were thousands of years ago!--may have examined and read it. If honor and wisdom and happiness are not for me, let them be for others. Let heaven exist, though my place be in hell. Let me be outraged and annihilated, but for one instant, in one being, let Your enormous Library be justified. (trans. James E. Irby)

Quotes of the Day: Walter Benjamin, "Unpacking My Library"

I think I will just quote from the master of quotes without commentary (or little commentary outside of this sentence), itself Walter Benjamin's ultimate goal, from his own "Unpacking My Library: A Talk about Book Collecting":

Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector's passion borders on the chaos of memories.

For what else is this collection but a disorder to which habit has accommodated itself to such an extent that it can appear as order?

...the acquisition of an old book is its rebirth.

To a book collector, you see, the true freedom of all books is somewhere on his shelves.

Make your own order of my chaos of quotation, my poaching of words.

My Amazon Wishlist Widget

How often have you said to yourself, "Gee, I wish I could just buy Jared, that poor bibliophiliac graduate student, a book, but I just don't know what he would like or if he has it already!" Well...this post is for you. I have just added a widget to my site that shows my most recently added items to my Amazon wishlist. I noticed I had about 150 books saved for later in my cart. And was beginning to think this was ludicrous, so I am slowly transferring these books that I cannot possibly buy myself to my wishlist just in case someone out there looks, and thinks, "He hasn't read that! By God, we must get that guy up to date!" Although, I know that most people who read this are themselves poor graduate students or poor professors...but it is still worth a shot! :)