Did Reza Aslan, a Muslim writing about Jesus in "Zealot," intend to say anything about the politics of today's Middle East?

Asks Jonathan Kirsch of Jewish Journal. Aslan said:

I really didn’t. I was very careful in not trying to make any overt political point with this book. It’s a historical biography about a man who lived 2,000 years ago, and nothing else. But a lot of people have brought it up, because nothing much has changed. The politico-religious context of our world is something that Jesus would have understood. The arguments that Jesus made against authority are being made today on the streets of Cairo and Jerusalem. And the role of religion in providing a sense of dignity to marginalized and oppressed people, regardless of their religious background, is a universal that exists in all places and all religions.

Here's the book "Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth." And for those who'd like to see him write about Islam, here's his book "No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam."

By the way, I was surprised to see that Reza Aslan is the 6th most popular author on Amazon.

Read More

12 years without sex, or as Sophie Fontanel calls it, 12 years of insubordination.

Fontanel did not forgo sex for any moral or religious reason or out of a lack of desire. She was only 27 at the outset. She wasn't prudish, but she rejected the way she'd had sex without being "present" and because it was the thing to do.

I wanted to recover my body. My real desire was to re-want having sex....

She decided: "I will return to sexual activities when it is worth it — and it took more than ten years."

When her book — "The Art of Sleeping Alone" —  came out, "a lot of people — a huge amount of people — began to say that they had the same experience."  That was in France. It will be out here next week. Expect a lot of confessions from people who've gone without sex for a long time. If you've voluntarily gone for years, will you admit how long? It's nice of Fontanel to open the floodgates on this topic, which I think many people are embarrassed to talk about, afraid of looking pathetic or undesirable.

Here's her advice:

I recommend being true to yourself. If you are making love and you’re disappointed, then stop. Recover your freedom. Don’t be afraid of being single, and don’t be afraid of being single for a long time.... It’s very important to learn that it’s not a sin to be alone.

Funny to get to the end of the article and see the word "sin." I think she's being humorous, not revealing secret religiosity. Obviously, I haven't read the book yet, but I suspect that she is saying that people have sex out of habit or to seem normal to themselves and others, and the sex is often worse than nothing.

You know my old aphorism: Better than nothing is a high standard.

Read More

"Bezos believes that a big reset button is being hit on the media ecosystem."

"And the old models don’t work. So there’s plenty of room and opportunity for new models to be created," says Businessweek senior writer Brad Stone, whose book "The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon," coming out in October, needs updating.

We’re so dominated in our world by our media organizations getting smaller and losing money, and yet to him it’s always been clear that this is an opportunity for more experimentation. So this does fit within that framework.

But Stone thinks the acquisition might be less about the monetizing old media on the web and more about "buying a lot of political influence."

And we can’t discard the fact that Amazon hasn’t been an enormous player, at least up until the dispute over sales taxes, and in buying The Washington Post, he has a seat at the table. And I think particularly legislators and anti-trust regulators are gonna be weighing the dominance of Amazon a lot in the years ahead.

Here's Stone's book, which you can pre-order, obviously at Amazon, which happens to be the best way to monetize a blog, through its Associates program, which you know I participate in. (Feel free to enter Amazon through my portal if you're inclined to buy something and simultaneously express appreciation for my writing.)

Read More

Bolus.

Some readers enjoyed my use of the word "bolus" 2 posts down. (A "feminist blog is committed to chewing things into a bolus of feminism....  When the evidence is flimsy, lubricate the bolus with the notion of the subtlety of the oppression. It might be swallowable.") That's not a word that would have come naturally to me if I hadn't read Mary Roach's cool book "Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal," so let me provide you with a reading:

The study of oral processing is... about the entire “oral device”: teeth, tongue, lips, cheeks, saliva, all working together toward a singular unpicturesque goal: bolus formation. The word bolus has many applications, but we are speaking of this one: a mass of chewed, saliva-moistened food particles. Food that is in— as one researcher put it, sounding like a license plate— "the swallowable state."

I don’t think the scientists are uninterested. I think they may be disgusted. This is a job where on any given day, you may find yourself documenting “intraoral bolus rolling” or shooting magnified close-ups of “retained custard” with the Wageningen University tongue-camera...

Humans, even physiologists, don’t like to think about food once they’ve begun to process it. The same chanterelle and Gorgonzola galette that had the guests swooning is, after two seconds in the mouth, an object of universal revulsion....

ADDED: From last April: Holus-bolus.

Read More

"With no notice, the man stepped forward, grabbed the headband off of Dexter's head and threw it to the bottom of our shopping cart."

"He then cuffed Dexter around the side of his head (not hard, but that is not the point) and said with a big laugh, 'You'll thank me later, little man!'"

At the same time as I stepped forward, Dexter grabbed his head where the man had smacked him and threw his other hand forward, stomping his foot and shouting, "NO!" I got between my son and this man and said very firmly, "If you touch my son again, I will cut your damn hands off."

The guy snarled at me, looked at Dexter with disgust and said, "Your son is a f*cking fa***t." He then started sauntering out, but not before he threw over his shoulder, "He'll get shot for it one day."

That spiraled out of control quickly!

The things that happen to HuffPo mombloggers when they happen to go to WalMart with their 2-year-old sons wearing mommy's pink lace flower headband.

Here's the blogger Katie Vyktoriah's description of the horrible homophobe who was, I take it, monitoring WalMart shoppers for insufficiently instilling gender norms in toddlers:

The man was overly large with a bushy beard and a camouflage shirt with the arms cut off. He had tattered shorts and lace-up work boots with no laces. I could smell the fug of cigarette smoke surrounding him, and there was a definite pong of beer on him.

Smoking and shorts. And overly large. When are men overly large? Don't they know when they are taking up too much space? A camouflage shirt with the arms cut off... talk about the right to "bare" arms. And the "pong of beer"... Pong?



Pong, meaning "A strong smell, usually unpleasant; a stink" is a Britishism. OED examples:

1925 E. Fraser & J. Gibbons Soldier & Sailor Words 226 Pong, a stink.
1936 F. Clune Roaming round Darling xxiv. 257 Avoid the smell of camel. They were complete with permanent, pyramid, and perfume, commonly called pong....
1991 D. Coupland Generation X i. i. 4 Smelling the cinnamon nighttime pong of snapdragons and efficient whiffs of swimming pool chlorine.

There's a blast from the past. Not the old Atari game (whoever forgot that?) but "Generation X." Remember when everyone was reading "Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture"? I'd buy that right now and blog it for its poignant, pungent, pong-ent, obsolescences, but it's not available in Kindle? Not in Kindle! Oh! How the times pass! How the cutting edge dulls!

But, what say you? There's a lumbering, overly large man in shorts, a jack-booted thug with no shoelaces, and he's come to snatch the pink headband off your little boy. Threaten him with hand amputation, that might bridge the culture gap. Or, since he's a stinking smoker, a beer drinker, it might incite him to splutter out some warning about future bullying that will be so badly worded that in print it's good enough to make the HuffPo crowd gasp: Oh, noooooo! Homophobia rages... at WalMart. That's why I NEVER go there. That guy is always there, in his over-largeness, blocking the aisles, shuffling around, graceless... and laceless.

Read More

"I can food."

Did that look like something a LOLcat would say? If so, I guess you haven't arrived at "The New Domesticity."

I knit. I can food. I garden. I cook, and when I’m not actively cooking, I’m thinking about what I’m going to cook next... I didn’t grow up doing these things.... So you can see why Emily Matchar’s new book, “Homeward Bound,” sounded as if it could be a mirror into my soul.

This is the pithiest part of the review (at WaPo, by Becky Krystal):

Some of the new domestics think feminism isn’t just about being in the workplace; it’s also being able to choose to not be in it. 

Feminists have been saying that all along, but kind of only because they have to, and there always seems to be this qualification that if you choose the home life option, you've got to do it the right way, which is not because of tradition and not in subordination to a husband. By contrast, if you choose the moneymaker option, the conventional and/or servile aspects of what you're doing are more likely to go unnoticed (or so it may seem to the go-along-to-get-along subordinates to feminism in its most banal form).

Back to Krystal:

Or, Matchar says, it’s about reclaiming for the hipster set what used to be symbols of drudgery, such as the apron. 

Circa 1970, hippies did this. I remember seeing the women's movement of that time as a dreary and very square challenge to the hippie philosophy, which aimed at transcending commerce. But the women's movement soundly trounced hippies. Can hipsters succeed where hippies failed?

Others rebuff [feminism] entirely, blaming feminism for eating away at family life and demeaning the home arts and those who stay home to practice them....

It's appealing to stay home, but women do feel guilty and in need of justifications when they do it. (And how about men? It's even more challenging, even as one might imagine feminists smiling upon the male homemaker.)

Matchar’s dissection of new domesticity raises other, larger issues of race, class and gender. White women who stay home are praised more often than their black counterparts, who risk being called “welfare queens.”

Doesn't that more depend on whether you're collecting welfare? Who can expect praise for that? And I see no trend in America to praise white women but not black women who are doing the same thing. (The racial problem I see in the Disparate Praise category is patronizing black people with praise when they do things that are otherwise viewed as ordinary.)

Impoverished women with less disposable income and time can’t cook every meal from scratch or stay home with their children....

I'll resist saying things I've said before about the economics of the single-earner family, but obviously if you have a single-parent household, you'll need some kind of income stream to opt to say at home.

Also jarring is the notion, articulated by some of Matchar’s subjects, that it’s only “natural” for women to be in the home, that they are biologically suited for nurturing. That belief is unsettlingly close to the perverse use of “nature” that justifies discrimination, and not just against women.

I love the way the "nature" theme comes and goes in the discourse of discrimination. Nature makes a great argument — e.g., homosexuality is inborn — until it doesn't. But Krystal doesn't really try to figure out what's happening with the nature "notion." She merely calls it "jarring" and "unsettling."

Hell, yeah, nature is jarring. It will jar you one way or the other in the end.

Read More

When Mitch Daniels took aim at Howard Zinn.

From The Chronicle of Higher Education:

In a message sent on February 9, 2010, [Mitchell E. Daniels Jr., the governor of Indiana at the time, now president of Purdue University], asked top state education officials for assurance that the works of Howard Zinn, the longtime Boston University historian and political activist, were not "in use anywhere in Indiana."

Zinn had died less than 2 weeks earlier.

"This terrible anti-American academic has finally passed away," Mr. Daniels wrote, referring to Mr. Zinn. "The obits and commentaries mentioned his book 'A People's History of the United States' is the 'textbook of choice in high schools and colleges around the country.' It is a truly execrable, anti-factual piece of disinformation that misstates American history on every page. Can someone assure me that is not in use anywhere in Indiana? If it is, how do we get rid of it before more young people are force-fed a totally false version of our history?"

It seems low to kick the man just when he dies, but Daniels admits to picking up the information about the "execrable" book from the obituaries, which makes the timing less mean and just ignorant.
Who didn't know about "A People's History of the United States"? And it sounds so lame to demand that "someone" "assure" him that it's not being used "anywhere in Indiana." Why didn't he already know how history is taught in Indiana schools? Instead of going hysterical about banishing a book he just heard about, why wasn't he already taking care to ensure that the children of Indiana were receiving sound, valuable reading materials in their history classes?

If there's one thing that disgusts me, it's compelling children to spend their days trapped in school buildings and then not serving their best interests. Zinn tried to do what — in his view — he deemed worthy, which was to supply the counter-story to conventional high-school-level American history. It was up to the education professionals and the politicians who supplied them with their endless flow of vulnerable little clients to perform what was and is a moral duty to give them an excellent education, in history and everything else. Belatedly railing about Zinn is a pathetic revelation of how miserably these people abused children.

I really don't give a damn about how this idiotic material is used against Daniels in his role as president of Purdue. The old politico can fend for himself. What's important is that those with a duty to the children failed — as they fail in all the other states and have failed for a long, long time.

Read More

What is the sight of one hand hidden? The zen koan of a NYT headline.

I'm getting a late start this morning. Only yesterday — ah, yesterday! — I had my first post up at 6:21. It contained the memorable Drudge headline "Big Sis Wants to See Under Your Clothes." Today, the blog didn't get going until 8:45 (and that's Central Time). If I wanted a cover story — a story that you can't see under even with your National Surveillance X-Ray Robot Eyes — I'd say I needed to meditate for hours upon encountering — on the front page of the NYT — the equivalent of the old what is the sound of one hand clapping? zen koan.

Having achieved oneness, what is its sound? In other words, how does it reverberate? How does it go out into the world and function? If we're just being "one" with our own hand, what have we accomplished? If it's all about our own private experience, it's nothing but a hand job!

Are you ready now for the headline? It's: "In Second Term, Obama Is Seen as Using 'Hidden Hand’ Approach."

If it's a hidden hand, how is it seen? Some unnamed entity/entities are seeing, but they are hidden by the hidden hand of the headline writer using the passive voice. The passive voice is evidence of the unseen hand of another hand job for President Obama.

Who has seen the wind?
Neither I nor you:
But when the leaves hang trembling,
The wind is passing through.

The leaves of the newspaper are trembling with the wind that passes through, and thus do we "see" the unseen. But what is this wind? The underlying article, written by Peter Baker begins like this:

In the nearly two weeks since Egypt’s military seized power, President Obama has promoted a better federal bureaucracy, given a medal to George Lucas of “Star Wars” fame and had former President George Bush to the White House for lunch. What he has not done is publicly address the violent upheaval in Cairo.

Try not. Do or do not. There is no try.

That is not to say Mr. Obama is uninvolved. In the privacy of the West Wing, away from the cameras, he has made calls to leading figures in the Arab world and has met with advisers trying to influence the crisis. But his low public profile on issues like immigration, Syria and health care underscores a calculated presidential approach that admirers consider nuanced...



... and detractors call passive.

When we see nothing, how can we know that the person who would be expected to act is choosing to act by not appearing to act, in some deliberate "hidden hand" approach? Quite aside from whether that is a wise and workable approach, is it even something he's doing? Peter Baker cites no inside sources for the proposition that Obama claims to be using a "hidden hand" approach. The old inside phrase was "leading from behind," and it would be interesting to analyze a shift from "leading from behind" to "hidden hand." (Is the hidden hand goosing the behind?)

Peter Baker's quoted sources are — I kid you not — Jim Newton, author of "Eisenhower: The White House Years," and Dwight Eisenhower's granddaughter Susan. These are the seers seeing.

Some compare Mr. Obama’s approach to the “hidden hand” style of President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who often steered events behind the scenes without being public about his role....

Some... If you use the notoriously shifty sentence subject "some" you'd better have at least 2.

“In those senses, Obama does appear to me to be taking a page from Eisenhower’s playbook,” Mr. Newton said. “What I don’t know, however, is how aggressively Obama is working out of view on these matters. The essence of Eisenhower’s hidden hand, of course, is that there was real work going on that people didn’t know at the time. If that’s true now, then Obama really is emulating Ike. If, on the other hand, he’s simply doing nothing or very little, that would be passivity, not hidden-hand leadership.”

Susan Eisenhower, a granddaughter of the late president, said it might be too soon to tell. “Eisenhower’s hidden-hand means of meeting his objectives was not really evident until his papers were opened, many decades after he left office,” Ms. Eisenhower said.

So Susan Eisenhower is not even seeing the hidden-hand. She's just talking about how hard it can be to see what is hidden. And Newton — who must be thrilled at the invitation from the NYT to push his book — is (as I see the unseen) responding to Baker's effort to get him to endorse the hidden-hand theory that has no theorists. And he doesn't. The Newton quote is studded with weasel words: appear... if... if... 

What unseen things were seen by the some who saw none?

Read More

"It's very appealing, the idea of writing under a pseudonym."

"Realistically... I have to pay [journalists] the tribute of saying that my chances of getting away with that are incredibly remote... now."

The book she got away with writing under a pseudonym — long enough, at least, to get excellent reviews — is "The Cuckoo's Calling."

MORE: Here:

There is a long history of authors changing their names. In 1984, Doris Lessing said she wanted to escape "from the cage of my literary reputation" when she began writing under the pen name Jane Somers. She did not reveal Somers's true identity to her British publisher, who rejected the manuscript. The book did find a publisher, but sold only 2,000 hardback copies.

Read More

"Hog Dressing, Log Cabin Building, Mountain Crafts and Foods, Planting by the Signs, Snake Lore, Hunting Tales, Faith Healing, Moonshining, and Other Affairs of Plain Living."

Subtitle of "The Foxfire Book," which was published in 1972, collecting the best of Foxfire magazine (which was famous enough to make me forever incapable of remembering the name of one of my internet browsers, Firefox).

I'm noticing the book this morning because it's one of the things that readers of this blog bought using my portal to Amazon (which is always at the top of the blog, in the banner). Thanks to everyone who used the portal to buy whatever it is they'd have bought anyway and thereby making a contribution to this blog. Much as I write for the intrinsic rewards of writing — my old motto: "to live freely in writing" — I am a professional writer, the Amazon portal is the main way this blog is monetized, and seeing it work is an encouragement.

I know there are some people who would love to discourage me, but that's irrelevant. Those who buy nothing through the Amazon portal make no impression — whether they hate me or have never heard of me. Those who do buy are saying: I care about this blog, and I want it to continue to be there every day, as it has been for nearly 10 years (without a single missed day). I hear you.

Read More

"A kind of madness is pushing us to the future, in a good way."

"This is a book of the future, now. I didn’t know that until it was done. People say that this new generation is so used to the Internet that their heads are already different. They can’t read a book from beginning to end. That is not a tragedy. The book changes form.... It is short enough that you don’t have to think about reading a whole page, because there is no whole page."

Said Yoko Ono, promoting her new book "Acorn," which is like "Grapefruit," a book I think is quite wonderful.

Read More

"What do you think the difference is between a tourist and a traveler?"

"I think a tourist is usually someone who is on a time budget. A tourist is out to see sights, usually which have been enumerated for him in a guidebook. I think there’s a deeper degree of curiosity in a traveler."

So it's a continuum, and if you want to move to the extreme good side of that continuum, perhaps you ought never to leave your home town. The quote is from Philip Caputo, author of "The Longest Road: Overland in Search of America, From Key West to the Arctic Ocean," and he's dialoguing with William Least Heat-Moon, author "Blue Highways: A Journey into America."

Heat-Moon reframes the tourist/traveler distinction in terms of destinations: "let’s pick Arizona — those tourists are likely to head for the Grand Canyon, whereas a traveler in Arizona might light out for Willcox. Why somebody would want to visit Willcox, I don’t know, other than to see what’s there. Ask questions: Who was Willcox? What kind of place is it? A tidy little place, by the way."

You go to all that effort to drive way the hell out somewhere, and then you just check out some little towns? Why didn't you just go to all the little places within a close radius of your hometown? That's what doesn't make sense. Heat-Moon comes right out and admits he sees no sense in his own idea.

Here are these 2 big travel writers, and they trash the tourism and hew to the old cliché that one ought to be a traveler, not a tourist. But they can't really explain the worth of this travel that isn't tourism. Unspoken is the reality that for each of them, travel is their work, if they are travel writers. Those who get paid for a particular type of work may find it hard to explain the value of the activity to someone who isn't getting paid but must in fact pay.

They do recommend writing as a way to "deepen the travel" — but writing is a way to deepen whatever it is you do, wherever you are. How do you decide what it is you will do? Let's say you buy into the importance of depth. Is traveling around, going slowly, going to small places, journaling, really worthwhile? Most of our depth comes from the life we live at home, and if we were really observant we would never run out of things to perceive and contemplate at  home.

2 of my favorite quotes are on this topic. First, from my favorite movie "My Dinner with Andre":

I mean, you know, there was a time when you could have just, for instance, written, I don't know, Sense and Sensibility, by Jane Austen! 

Talk about close observation, sharp writing, and sticking within a short radius at home.

And I'm sure the people who read it had a pretty strong experience. I'm sure they did. I mean, all right, now you're saying that people today wouldn't get it, and maybe that's true, but, I mean, isn't there any kind of writing, or any kind of a play that--I mean: isn't it still legitimate for writers to try to portray reality so that people can see it? I mean, really! Tell me: why do we require a trip to Mount Everest in order to be able to perceive one moment of reality? I mean...I mean: is Mount Everest more "real" than New York? I mean, isn't New York "real"? I mean, you see, I think if you could become fully aware of what existed in the cigar store next door to this restaurant, I think it would just blow your brains out! I mean... I mean, isn't there just as much "reality" to be perceived in the cigar store as there is on Mount Everest? I mean, what do you think? You see, I think that not only is there nothing more real about Mount Everest, I think there's nothing that different, in a certain way. I mean, because reality is uniform, in a way. So that if you're--if your perceptions--I mean, if your own mechanism is operating correctly, it would become irrelevant to go to Mount Everest, and sort of absurd! Because, I mean, it's just--I mean, of course, on some level, I mean, obviously it's very different from a cigar store on Seventh Avenue, but I mean...

The other quote is from one of my favorite books, "Walden," by Henry David Thoreau: "I have travelled a good deal in Concord..." Concord! Not even Massachusetts. Concord. Of course, he didn't have a car.

But then again, he didn't have the internet.

Unspoken: Does Althouse ever leave Madison?

ADDED: A reader quotes my "Those who get paid for a particular type of work may find it hard to explain the value of the activity to someone who isn't getting paid but must in fact pay" and says that "made me think of this sublimely wonderful passage from Moby Dick":

Again, I always go to sea as a sailor, because they make a point of paying me for my trouble, whereas they never pay passengers a single penny that I ever heard of. On the contrary, passengers themselves must pay. And there is all the difference in the world between paying and being paid. The act of paying is perhaps the most uncomfortable infliction that the two orchard thieves entailed upon us. But being paid, -- what will compare with it? The urbane activity with which a man receives money is really marvellous, considering that we so earnestly believe money to be the root of all earthly ills, and that on no account can a monied man enter heaven. Ah! how cheerfully we consign ourselves to perdition!

Read More

"Hey, you two... I'm looking to buy a Kindle version of the OED."

"I'm not sure which one to order. If you want to send me a portal link to a recommended version, I would both appreciate and use it."

A reader writes. There's no Kindle version, but if you buy the full-scale 20-volume print set, you get a CD ROM, which would give you the ability to do searches.

ADDED: Here's the CD-ROM version alone... and much cheaper. And there's this "upgrade" to it. (Thanks to the reader who pointed that out.)

AND: A reader writes: "And, the OED online people are very comfortable to deal with — I pay the thirty bucks a month for two or three months and then cancel because I need the money elsewhere and then start up again when I can afford to. Always a simple process, cancelling and then beginning again."

Read More

"A federal judge on Wednesday found that Apple violated antitrust law in helping raise the retail price of e-books..."

"... saying the company 'played a central role in facilitating and executing' a conspiracy with five big publishers."

Apple’s lawyers noted at the trial that the publishers had long complained that Amazon.com’s uniform pricing of $9.99 for new e-book titles was too low.... But the Justice Department said Apple’s deal with the publishers left Amazon with no choice but to raise prices....


The Justice Department said that the publishers used their relationship with Apple, combined with the most-favored nation clause, to threaten Amazon to switch to the agency model so they could raise prices. If Amazon did not agree to those terms, the government said, the publishers intended to withhold their e-books from the retailer until the more expensive hardcover books had been on the market for awhile....

One e-mail, written by Steven P. Jobs when he was chief executive of Apple, was frequently brought up at the trial. In an e-mail conversation with [Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of Internet software and services] about the contracts negotiated with the publishers, Mr. Jobs wrote: “I can live with this, as long as they move Amazon to the agent model too for new releases for the first year. If they don’t, I’m not sure we can be competitive.”

Good. Celebrate by buying a little something for yourself at Amazon. If you use that link, you'll be supporting this blog (without paying any extra for anything).

Read More

"The last time I had dinner with David, about six weeks before he died, he was so weak..."

"... that it was impossible to imagine him mustering the strength to work. But he was so close, he said. 'I need to finish it, and then I’ll be ready.'"

Read More