The Rogue Scholar

Codex Sinaiticus Now Viewable Online

The Codex Sinaiticus, one of the oldest known extant bibles and one of the most important handwritten manuscripts in the world, is now online for your viewing pleasure. (Mmmm, manuscripts...)

Traditional Fairytales Turn Off PC Parents

It's easy to make fun of the strange and continually evolving social experiment in national behavior known as Political Correctness (a.k.a. "cultural sensitivity").  It's a frightening yet inevitable truth of our world that a great many of the things that go horribly wrong in life are the unintended consequences of well meaning people striving to make the world a better place.  PC, I believe, belongs squarely in that category.  I realize that those who believe in it are trying to make the world a better place by ensuring that we refrain from giving each other offense.  It's an admirable ideal.  The theory merely does not bear up under the facts, two of which stand out most glaringly in this context: firstly, human beings routinely hate (and love) each other for very superficial reasons.  Secondly, we habitually rally around common points of reference. We band together based on race, language, religion, history, culture, hobbies, interests, hair color, height, weight, age, ideology, visions of the future, and past experience.  None of this is bad per se, it merely describes our social propensity to seek out those like ourselves in one way or another.  It's human. 

But another human tendency is to randomly beat the living crap out of those who are not like ourselves, frequently in large groups, often killing other humans in the process. This is generally considered a bad thing by sensible individuals the world over.  PC attempts to fix these tendencies by politicizing public communication.  I think that in adopting this technique, we actually make communication more difficult by creating an adversarial relationship between two or more parties where none need exist.  Clearly, there are some things nobody should say in public (inflammatory speech comes to mind) but I suspect that to view every word as if it might be inflammatory is not likely to improve the situation.

So, for those of us who do not subscribe to the theory or comply with its requirements, making fun of PC and those who use it is easy.  It's fun to make light of people who are different from ourselves, first because it makes us feel better about ourselves, and second, it helps us deal with the fear they might be reading the world correctly and we are not.  After all, these people are trying to make the world a better place.  Who can argue with that?  (Actually, I can, but that's a post for another time.)

But I wonder about these parents who refuse to read certain well-known bedtime stories to their children on the grounds that they are bad for the kids.  So that we're clear, let me just say that not all kids are ready for all stories at all ages.  Knowing what your kids can handle and at which age is part of being a parent. (When they were younger, for example, my autistic 11-year old nephew could routinely handle stories and films that gave his "normal" 13-year old sister nightmares for weeks.)  For that matter, if your stomach is strong enough, get yourself a copy of The Hard Facts of the Grimm's Fairy Tales by Maria Tatar and read it cover to cover. You have no clue (especially if you're an American) just how frightening these stories were a few generations ago.  And that's why I'm not going to make fun of these parents.  But I do question what they themselves are projecting into the stories they won't read to their kids.

The article contains two lists of books, the ten most read children's stories and the ten books least read.  Briefly, they are:

Top bedtime stories of 2008: 

1. The Very Hungry Caterpillar, Eric Carle (1969) 

2. Mr Men, Roger Hargreaves (1971) 

3. The Gruffalo, Julia Donaldson (1999) 

4. Winnie the Pooh, A.A. Milne (1926) 

5. Aliens Love Underpants, Claire Freedman & Ben Cort (2007) 

6. Thomas and Friends from The Railway Series, Rev.W.Awdry (1945) 

7. The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame (1908) 

8. What a Noisy Pinky Ponk!, Andrew Davenport (2008) 

9. Charlie and Lola, Lauren Child (2001) 

10. Goldilocks and the Three Bears, Robert Southey (1837) 

Top 10 fairy tales we no longer read: 

1. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs 

2. Hansel and Gretel 

3. Cinderella 

4. Little Red Riding Hood 

5. The Gingerbread Man 

6. Jack and the Beanstalk 

7. Sleeping Beauty 

8. Beauty and the Beast 

9. Goldilocks and the Three Bears 

10. The Emperor's New Clothes

You'll notice the Do Not Read column contains the more traditional works.  I'm the first to admit that most of the stories in the first list are unknown to me.  (When I saw the headline to the article I was worried that The Very Hungry Caterpillar had been banned on the basis of its encouraging obesity.)  I will say that I'm a bit surprised The Wind in the Willows got onto the Good to Read list seeing as how Toad is a total creep who puts his friends through hell as he destroys himself and everything around him. I understand reading Winnie the Pooh to kids, but I'm not a good judge of Milne's writing for one reason: I never liked Pooh.  Eeyore was and remains my boy, followed by Benjamin, the similarly morose donkey in Orwell's Animal Farm.  Although there's a clear difference between the two: Eeyore expected the worst and was often pleasantly surprised when it didn't appear.  Benjamin expected the worst and watched it unfold before his eyes, but he never looked away.  (I'm convinced Benjamin had a library of classic Russian literature stashed in the barn somewhere.)

It's also interesting to me that Goldilocks and the Three Bears made it to both lists.  I think I  see why in both cases. Those parents who liked it probably thought it was a whimsical story where the naughty little girl is "scared straight" as it were, and gets away unharmed and maybe a bit wiser.  But I can sympathize with parents who hated it, too.  Who wants to read a story about a girl who breaks into a strange house, vandalizes the family's furniture, befouls their food, then soils the bed before being discovered and escaping justice to their kids?  Not me.

I don't think Snow White deserves to be on the Do Not Read list.  It's not her fault the queen wants her dead, in fact, she lucked out with her escape (the hunter didn't have to let her go in the woods, you know). Beyond that she's just trying to make an insane situation livable.  Granted, I'm not sure I'd want my teen-aged daughter shacking up with seven dirty old men in the middle of nowhere, but even then they never actually demand anything obnoxious from her.  It seems they're happy just having a young woman around who likes to cook and clean but doesn't spit, curse, and stay out all night.  She could have done worse (and in some re-tellings, I'm sure she did.)

My parents did not read Hansel and Gretel to me and my brother when we were young.  I don't know if it was because the characters were Germans and we were Jews.  I did grow up thinking it was normal in the Fatherland for old women to trap and eat children, or occasionally for kids to push old ladies into ovens, but . . . well, maybe it was because we were Jews.  I don't remember.

Cinderella gets a bad rap because a lot of people think she's made to be a slave to the other women in the house. I don't deny she gets treated poorly, but if this story is truly offensive, it's more derogatory toward stepmothers and step-siblings.  I at least understand the pathology behind the stepmother, she's favoring her own kids over the adopted one. That happens plenty in real life (it happened to both my grandfathers at very young ages.) But the stepsisters are so one-dimensionally grasping, greedy and envious of anything Cinderella comes home with (or even wants to come home with) that in the original story (or one version of it) they cut off their heels and big toes to get that glass slipper to fit.  (Spoiler Alert: it doesn't.)  

Little Red Riding Hood should have followed instructions, stayed on the path and not wandered off.  Is that so hard?  (Neil Jordan apparently thought so.)  Meanwhile the Gingerbread Man was, by all accounts I remember hearing when I was six or seven, a complete jerk.  The lesson seemed clear to me even then: be a braggart, look for trouble absolutely everywhere and you will  get eaten by a fox.  Or else John Lithgow will torture you and rip your legs off.  Whatever.  The point is, don't be a jerk.

I never found Jack and the Beanstalk very interesting.  Jack was clearly a jock (what normal ten-year old can climb hand over hand for several hundred feet? None that I know) and to my mind suspect for that reason more than any other.  He's also obviously no math whiz or future business tycoon or he'd have understood that trading up from a healthy heifer does not mean getting a handful of so-called magic beans in return. (That the beans actually were magic was a mere lucky break.)  Then there's the matter of this young Mr. Universe breaking into the castle at the top of the giant plant to nowhere, killing the giant, stealing his golden egg-laying pet, then chopping down the beanstalk to cover his tracks.  I hasten to add, I don't entirely blame Jack.  He's a product of his genetics and environment.  I think the fact that the boy's mother ripped open the goose in a fit of greed to find nothing but blood and entrails is all the defense he'll need in court.  (I mean, come on, how much gold can a  goose pack in her ovaries at any one time? Gah!)

Sleeping Beauty might be a poor role model for young girls, or she might not be, it all depends on your interpretation.  Personally, I've always felt a little sorry for her.  All she wanted to do was learn a trade (i.e., spinning cloth), and a good skill it was--Gandhi himself calculated that if even a fraction of the women in India could spin for a two or three hours a day, they would produce so much raw cloth that they would provide for their national needs and completely bankrupt the British textile industry within a year.  It's also not her fault that her parents were rude to the wrong people; you'd think Old World royalty would know better. She certainly did not ask some strange man to come galloping from God knows where to behave as if he owned her just because he took advantage of her while she was indisposed.  And what Anne Rice put her through was just plain mean.

Beauty (no relation to Sleeping Beauty) and the Beast made a great Disney film, mostly because Belle is the only Disney princess to have an IQ greater than 87. Unfortunately, that's pretty much all the film had going for it (the voice acting of Jerry Orbach and David Ogden Stiers notwithstanding), so I won't say more about it.  Suffice to say that the French version is rather more complex.

I don't understand why The Emperor's New Clothes is on the Do Not Read list.  Public male nudity perhaps?  Wrecking the myth that Authority Knows Best?  Observing that a five year old boy on a crowded street knows a mature wee-wee when he sees one?  I never found this story anything but positive.  Then again, maybe that's the problem: many of these tales are steeped in allegory and metaphor to provide cryptic messages encouraging obedience in one form or another. This one stands out because it does exactly the opposite: it instructs children that when their elders are clearly not grasping the situation, they are to tell them what's happening.  Remind them that lies are still lies, no matter how scared of the liar and his minions they may be. Remind them that respect is earned and that to work it must be mutual.  

Most of all, children should remind their parents that trying to protect them by stealing other people's right to speak openly and honestly in public is just not going to work.

Pearl Harbor Reader's Advisory

This December 7, a lot of people will be asking you to remember the attack on Pearl Harbor by the Japanese in 1941. I won't say not to do that--memory  fades despite our best effort and remembering such events is important on that basis alone. But being a librarian, I will ask you to read a book as well.

At Dawn We Slept: The Untold History of Pearl Harbor, by Gordon W. Prange remains to my mind the best written account of the events of that day in history. During World War II Prange served as an officer in the Naval Reserve and during the occupation of Japan (from December 1945 to July 1951) he joined General Headquarters, far East  Command, Tokyo, as a civilian. From October 1946 to June 1951 he was chief of General Douglas MacArthur's G-2 Historical Section, and from June to July 1951 he was acting director of the Military History Section. He thus brought an unusual experience and background in the Army, Navy and academia to his research and writing about Pearl Harbor. Additionally, Mr. Prange spent 37 years of work preparing this book. By the time of its publication he knew more about the subject than anyone else. He interviewed virtually every surviving Japanese officer  who took part in the Pearl Harbor operation as well as every notable or important American source. The scope of this work is without equal.

Our Democracy That Was

It's an interesting exercise in evaluating the current state of politics in the U.S. to take a good, long look at Bill Moyers' new book, Moyers on Democracy (excerpted by Truthout.org, here) and compare it to Chalmers Johnson's review of Sheldon S. Wolin's new book, Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism, (discussed here on Alternet.org).

The two authors take parallel courses through their research and observations, but they both imagine subtle differences to the similar conclusion: the American ideal of "government of the people, by the people, for the people" is just about over.  Moyers believes that time is running out to save our souls and the ticks are getting closer together, while Wolin has (to Johnson's reading) chronicled the end of Our Way of Life.  If so, it would be a sad day indeed, since it's one thing to realize that the Greedheads have won but it's quite another to realize that you've been helping them win all along. 

Anyway, read the articles and if you're feeling especially flush, buy the books.  Enjoy!

ALA Announces Book Awards

First, the American Library Association Announces Literary Award Winners.  That's great.

Second, SirsiDynix's server access has been in and out all morning. A brief e-mail from the company says that the problem has to do with network issues on IBM's end, which literally filter down to us peons at the circulation desk who merely rely on these service to utilize our ILS on a daily basis.  That sucks.

Oh well, Monday, Monday.

In Case of Zombies, Break Glass

I'm actually on vacation this week but I also turned 40 a couple of days ago. Two birthday presents stood out, when my brother and sister-in-law presented me with copies of the Zombie Survival Guide and World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War, both by Max Brooks (aka, Max, son of Mel.) Both are excellently written and they're both quick reads (I finished WWZ in a couple of days, but as I said, I'm on vacation). Most importantly, they're fun to read.

Zombies are in right now. And they'll probably continue to be in for a while because zombies are genuinely creepy monsters. Granted, doomsday fiction is always fun because for most of us it's actually a relief to imagine a place that's recognizably here but without the crush of 6.7 billion neighbors and the attendant crime, pollution, and stress that living with them produces. Zombies are particularly democratic beasties for that matter because if you're breathing, you're a target. They don't discriminate except on the basis of  "living" or "dead." You're either with them or against them. (Hmm, that sounds familiar . . .)

I'm not going to say much on the history of the zombie as a movie monster, that's been done. Actually, if you want a zombie primer, you can go here. You can even go here but something tells me they're not talking about flesh-eating ghouls per se. I found this site last night while finishing up WWZ and I admit I wasn't sure I cared for what they had to say in their review section--they didn't approve of 28 Days Later which I really liked--but their FAQ changed my mind. (You'll see why about half way down the web page.)

If you're not a zombie fan yourself, you might be a little disturbed by the nature of some of the arguing that goes on among different fan groups. The director of the 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead, for example, couldn't seem to keep a certain amount of defensiveness out of his DVD commentary track. "We all know that in real life, zombies don't run that fast," he says near the beginning, "but it made for a creepier monster and, we thought, a better movie."  You hear that sentiment a few times throughout the film. It sounds strange but it's not unusual. One of the pet peeves that Zombiedefense.org guys had against the Zombie Survival Guide is the enormous amount of "misinformation" the book contains, including equipment lists with far too much stuff and the supposedly incorrect nature of zombies: a virus that Brooks identifies as "Solanum." They conclude that Brooks wants his readers to be loaded down so the zombies will eat them, thus improving his chances for survival. Well, okay.

One thing that I admit always confused me is how it is that every world that seems to have a zombie outbreak (whatever the cause) also seems to be populated exclusively by people who have never seen a zombie movie. I've seen one exception to that, a recent SciFi channel original movie called "dead and Deader." It was filled with with  jokes that would only make sense to hardened zombie geeks--and Star Wars geeks--and Superman geeks (the lead actor played Superman on Lois and Clark). There's even a scene that does nothing but pays homage to George Romero (aka, Father of Zombies Films.) At any rate, it's clear that zombie geeks wrote and directed that movie. Nowhere is this weird effect worse than in the Walking Dead series of graphic novels, which is strange because reading the foreword of the books makes it clear that these are also the works of zombie geeks.  At any rate, in the Walking Dead books the characters mean well (or not) but they don't seem to get it inasmuch as when the dead rise, pretty much all bets as to what constitutes normalcy are off and all rules of polite society go out the window. The basic rule is this--if your spouse or kids get bitten, they're going to eventually start gnawing on you and not in the cute endearing way that living spouses and children do. Zombie bites hurt like hell and are 100% fatal. If you get bitten, you'll start doing the same to those around you. The only solution is literally dying before the infection kills you. Which is why zombies make such good monsters--nobody really wants to take a club or shotgun and blow the head off of their family members--at least, nobody you'd want as a family member in the first place. The mental gymnastics that the characters need to go through to adapt to the abrupt change in world view, including an equally abrupt change in the world is what makes these works of fiction fun, or sometimes just frustrating. (Sometimes they're both.)

Anyway, regardless of how seriously you take your preparations for the upcoming zombie holocaust, Max Brooks knows his zombie subject matter and can tell a good story that's more than slightly disturbing.

The Loeb Classical Library

I don't subscribe to the Weekly Standard and it's literally been over a decade since I dealt with the classics (as they were called in more than one college English class) but I have nothing but respect and admiration for those who do (enjoy the classics, that is; I don't know anyone who subscribes to the WS, so I don't know what I think of their subscribers as a group.) At any rate, Tracy Lee Simmons wrote a great review of the Loeb Classical Library.  Here's the excerpt:

"A Loeb Classical Library Reader
Harvard, 240 pp., $9.95

THEY DO CATCH THE EYE, those handsome, pint-sized green and red books keeping their own elite company in the more recondite or otherwise up-market bookstores.

Their simple covers don't flash, though they fairly sing--sotto voce--their authority. They may look quaint, but these midget volumes have become the missals of the bookish classes. Generations have known them as "the Loebs," though they belong to what is properly called the Loeb Classical Library, and, within the English-speaking world, they are deemed an essential accouterment to the life of the mind. For within them we can find, in all their antiquated Greek and Latin glory, those exquisite feats of the ancient Greeks and Romans in poetry, drama, philosophy, and history--not to mention architecture, agriculture, geography, engineering, mathematics, botany, zoology, and even horsemanship and hunting.

Although they don't strike us as the stuff of bestsellers, their ubiquity surprises. One finds them equipping almost every public and institutional library in the land, as well as residing in not a few household libraries amassed by those with yearnings for intellectual nourishment of the genuine kind. They look far more erudite than a set of Penguins. They certify seriousness. Employing the royal "we" in a way only she could do, Virginia Woolf, a creditable amateur classicist herself, who once called Greek "the perfect language," said, "We shall never be independent of our Loeb." And she meant it.

The source of the Loeb Library's cachet may be shrouded from us in a trifling age, but that of their popularity isn't hard to discover: Along with the original Greek and Latin texts printed on the left-hand page as each book opens--texts, to say the least, of circumscribed value to most people--on the right-hand side we find crisp, unembellished English translations. The Loebs are the world's classiest crib, a trot for grownups. They are classics with a safety net. Here was an excellent innovation for those who have mentally mislaid the mastery of the classical languages they gained in schooldays. Here was also a perfect device for those who never learned them, and they make a somewhat larger crowd these days.

Despite the sense many of us have that the Loeb Classical Library has always been there, it has in fact existed for only just under a hundred years. The series was founded in 1911 by James Loeb, a gentleman of parts who was both a classicist and a successful businessman, and his goal was straightforwardly democratic in spirit: To make the finest, most consequential literature of the classical Greeks and Romans accessible, if not to the huddled masses exactly, then certainly to the hundreds of thousands of an emerging educated class whose schooling had not embraced the old classical curriculum when they opted for the applied sciences or an earlier form of Humanities Lite."

Read the whole thing here.

TechKNOW and Books to Buy

Firstly, here's the new issue of TechKNOW, out of Kent State U.  I stuck more stuff I stole from Alterman behind the cut.

BTW, speaking of Alterman: I think the guy's a snob, but I've never met him and my opinion really doesn't count, anyway. The fact is he's a great writer, and he wrote a terrific article for this book which has been on the shelves for a while now. (Buy the book.) The publishers are the same people who published this book, which you should also buy. (Buy this book, too.) Finally, I met this author at her book release party a couple of weeks ago and this author, who just got back from the Daily Kos road show in Vegas, a month or so ago at his book release event, and you should buy these books too.

(The fact that these books are published by my brother-in-law does not in any way mean that they're not worth shelling out money for.  Remember (I say as I flick the 'on' switch to my MIB neuralizer), the small press is good . . . the small press is good . . . buy these books . . .)

Pastafarianism.

Worship the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Worship It! Now!

All right, fine, don't worship it . . . but don't dismiss it out of hand, either. Faith is one of those wacky  things of which only humans are capable, and it's a delicate balance between making sense of the universe in which we live, and coming off as stark raving mad. That goes for all of us professing belief in God, Jesus Christ who was his son and died for our sins, except for Jews who don't, and Muslims who do but believe in His Prophet Mohammed, more,  Evolution (note the capital E there), Quantum physics, General and Specific relativity, Buddha, Zen, various Hindu deities, Orishas, Lwas, Science, Satan, or what have you. I didn't care for Hebrew school much (washed out after two and a half years) but I did come away with this notion: Faith is good, idolatry is bad. Questioning authority is good, blind obedience is bad.

Either we're all crazy or we're all sane.  If my observation is worth anything, then God's Children,  we surely all are, but some of us are consistently more childish than others.

My point here is that religion is inherently funny.  Laughter is inherently spiritual. Spirituality is inherently mind-expanding.

Just my two cents. </sermon>

Still More Vonnegut

I'm not interested in turning this into the "All Vonnegut All the Time" blog, but this week, it seems to be shaping up that way.  Not that I'm complaining: I've been reading the gentleman's work my whole life and am amazed and encouraged by the fact that so much of it is still in print.  It's a gift to be pessimistic and funny simultaneously. That's by no means easy to do, except when you read his writing, when it surely seems easy. Mark Twain could do it, too, but he's not mentioned in the papers much these days.

At any rate, this article is more biographical than excerpt, care of the Sunday Herald. Enjoy!