On “For Something to Do” by Elmore Leonard (4943 words) ***

Here's a short story that seems somewhat typical of Leonard's work: the violence, the tough guy focus, the criminal element. Even the fact that this is set in rural Michigan might be seen as emblematic of Leonard's work—bringing together a common setting (Michigan) and the western elements of his early work. Evan has married his sweetheart. The two are expecting guests, but they hope, strangely, that the guests won't show: in fact, they'd be okay with the guests getting in an accident or something else dreadful. The reason soon becomes clear why. Cal (a relative) and Ray (a former boyfriend) are tough guys here to spend time with Evan's wife and not too keen on seeing her poor horse farmer husband. Leonard's work probably works better over a larger page count, where the plots can unfurl in unpredictable complexity. Here, as seems inevitable in so much Leonard fiction, a fight ensues, and we see the parties come to a head, the situation “resolved,” though the degree to which that resolution is permanent, I have to wonder, would be questionable outside the tidy resolution of the story. You can read it here at Harper's Magazine.

On "City Primeval" by Elmore Leonard ****

The subtitle of this work is "High Noon in Detroit," which essentially sums up this cop versus robber (or really, killer) novel. Raymond Cruz works in the homocide division of the Detroit Police Department. Clement robs the occasional person and shoots the occasional person for fun.

Clement currently is setting up a scam with an Albanian, but he's interrupted by a lousy driver. His reaction: Shoot the dumb driver--and his passenger. The driver turns out to be a judge. Only, the judge was crooked and not well liked. So you figure maybe folks wouldn't care too much, maybe? But the police go after the killer like any other.

In a whodunit, we'd be wondering, well, who done it? In this work, we know who's done it from the first chapter. In many another book, we might know who done it, but we'd be walking with the police as they figure that out. Neither is true here. The police know pretty quickly the killer. The issue is that the killer is good at snaking out of any charge that is given to him, so the book is mostly about gathering evidence and also about setting Clement up so that he can't slink away.

And that's where Raymond comes in. In a central scene in the novel, the two protagonists square off, and they talk about how if this were the Old West, they'd have a duel. And that's really what this becomes: the wits of one man against another until only one is left. (Without giving much away, I'll say that in a way, the book ends twice. I prefer the first ending, but I think Leonard felt a need to bring it back to that faceoff, so we get a tag that seems unnecessary and less fitting to the circumstances.)

On “52 Pickup” by Elmore Leonard ****

This is the first crime thriller I've read by Leonard, though of course I've seen several movies based on his work, movies, which I've read, often just lift his dialogue whole. Indeed, this work is quite cinematic: built in scenes, around people and events, not a lot of summary or exposition. As with the two westerns I've read by Leonard, this was a page turner, thrilling pretty much from about five pages in until the very end.

So Mitchell is the owner of a car parts manufacturer, a man who for a brief period uncharacteristically ends up having an affair with a woman one year older than his daughter. Three neerdowells decide that Mitchell is the perfect object of an extortion scheme. You see, the gal he's been carrying on with, she was into adult modeling and, as such, has links to a shady underworld. The three guys hatch a plan, based on photographs they've gotten of the couple together, to insist that Mitchell pay them $100k or the info gets leaked to the press, the family, the company, whatever works to make his life dreadful.

Mitchell, though, is a tough nut, and he's not sure he's ready simply to pay up. He doesn't want to go to the police, either, because things could get messy. He doesn't want to put his family through all that. When he doesn't comply, on time, the three crooks murder the girl and arrange things so that the crime can be easily pinned on Mitchell. Now they want $100k every year. Mitchell says he'll think about it and continues along his usual way, delaying and generally being cool to their attempts to intimidate him. This involves, for example, coming clean with his wife, and it evenually involves him turning the three crooks against one another through various nefarious means so that in essence they do the work of solving the problem for him.

The plot thrills, and the characters are well drawn, and the dialogue is fresh. What's not to like? I was ready to hand this five stars, but the ending was a letdown. The story, I suppose, is over, but there are all kinds of ramifications to what Mitchell has done. He does so much, supposedly, to save his family, but in the process, his wife suffers terrible consequences; he doesn't go to the police, but at some point not going to the police seems more a plot point than mere logic, and in the end, the police will be involved, and how exactly is Mitchell going to come clean? He has a lot of great plans, but it's obvious the crooks know where he lives and have access to his wife and family. They're capable of killing—or at least Mitchell actually believes they are—so why would he not safeguard them, send them away, or whatever? It's these sort of issues that pulled me away from genre fiction when younger, and while I can enjoy thrills, the lack of emotional link to the characters and their feelings makes for a less compelling work.

On "Hombre" by Elmore Leonard *****

Another fine western by Mr. Leonard. This one, apparently, is the only novel that Leonard wrote in the first person, but he uses the voice effectively if unironically. It's a taut thriller from start to finish. The story involves a man who is actually called Tres Hombres at one point, because he manages to shoot as many as it would take three men to shoot. In typical western fashion, that is our book's superhero—a man raised by Indians who sympathizes with them and lives half on the edge of civilization.

Our narrator is a young man who has just lost his job with a wagon company, the railroads having taken most of the business. But there is a need for a wagon on his last day on the job, and one of those passengers needing a ride is a young gal who has been held captive by Indians for a month and is now free and wanting to get home. Other passengers include Russell, the aforementioned hero, and a rich man and his wife. It's the rich man who agrees to pay for the journey, so the young man's boss agrees to allow use of a wagon to carry them, to the young man's chagrin, as he wanted to drive (something he hadn't done before). But the good thing is that this gives opportunity for the young man to sit in the carriage with the young gal. Also along for the ride is a military man readying for marriage and a new job, but though he's bought a ticket, he's bucked out of his seat by a bully named Braden, who shows up at the last minute.

The rich man insists that they take a seldom-used shortcut since he's paying for the journey. But this off-road experience proves to be as harrowing as one might expect. And then, that's where things get really interesting. Spoilers follow.

The reason the main road was not a good option, it turns out, is that the rich man is transporting stolen goods, money he's stolen as a federal Indian agent, allowing the Indians for whom the money was designated to starve. The main road is more likely to be dangerous in terms of thieves (or, one might also assume, law enforcement). As such, it takes the thieves, who actually were aware of the rich man's bounty, extra time to catch up, word being sent to them by Braden, who it turns out is part of the party. Once they circle the wagon, they take the bag of money and the rich guy's wife (for insurance) and leave the party to die.

Except that things don't work out that way. Russell, as would be expected, comes to the rescue, recovering the money and leading the party out of the area. The wife, though, is still a hostage, and the thieves are keen on getting their loot. Alas, a man who steals from Indians is not to be trusted and certainly has no honor when it comes to either his wife or the others in his party. Is he worth saving, after he himself steals the money (again) and leaves the party for dead and then finds himself in trouble? Some people seem to think so; others not so much. When it's at the cost of lives, who gets grace and who does not? Tragedy unfolds.

On “Being Cool” by Charles J. Rzepka ***

This is a critical study of the work of Elmore Leonard, and a pretty good one at that. Though a devoted reader to Leonard's work, Rzepka doesn't idolize Leonard the way the biographer of Get Dutch does. Readers get close readings of several works and a bit of biography as well. The biographical sections come in mostly near the start of the book, but Rzepka's main focus is in the title: What makes Leonard's characters “cool.” By “cool,” we're not talking what makes them great characters so much as “cool,” as in collected. Leonard, as such, has characters who are cool and others who are not. The “cool” characters are those who maintain grace under fire, who handle stress well, who don't get unnerved. Leonard's work is often violent, but the violence is usually a result of characters losing their cool, characters who don't maintain ease in the face of stress.

One of the most interesting readings Rzepka engages in is regarding Leonard's form of narration, which is almost always omniscient, or rather, third-person limited but wherein he travels to the different limited vision of various characters. As such, Leonard, as author, disappears. This is something that didn't happen as much in his early fiction. There, you'd find the author sometimes intruding with an adverb or a description that was clearly that of a narrator or author, not something coming from within some character's head, but in time, Leonard moved himself further and further into the shadows so that what we have in his fiction is simply characters perceptions. Several close readings over time demonstrate this.

On “The Holy Land” by George W. Knight ***

I've had this pictorial guide on my shelf for probably close to a decade now, a gift from someone at church. It's made to be picked up, read a bit, and put down. But I finally decided to do more than that, to actually read it from start to finish. When I say that it's made to be picked up and put down, what I mean is that it's structured around various sites, prolific with photographs, and somewhat interesting in the short term. But that was precisely the reason I never read it in full. There is not a through-line, so anything but short reading into the book doesn't tend to hold one's focus. The book is, in essence, set up like an Insight Guide, one of those marvelously illustrated travel guides to a region, full of info and pictures, but really intended for you to read about sites of interest rather than to read it from start to finish. There wasn't much to be gained from the book in terms of new information; it was interesting, I suppose, on the level of thinking about events spatially and regionally: this is the area where X and Y and Z happened. Sometimes, it was enlightening that way, making one realize that certain events shared a place. For what it is, however, within its genre, it's a great book, wonderful to look at and drop into occasionally—which is why I've kept it on the shelf.

On “Get Dutch” by Paul Challen ***

I feel like I chose the wrong introduction to Elmore Leonard, a writer whose books have been turned into several movies I've liked and who I've until now read just one book by, a very good western. I was looking for one biography and one critical study. I chose this biography because it is the most recent (the other was written a decade earlier); I chose a particular critical study also because it is the most recent, but it is limited in scope. I stayed away from the Twayne series book on Leonard, because the series seems so formulaic and basic, even as I'm now thinking the one in the series may actually have been more in line with what I wanted—a true critical introduction.

Challen's book is the work of a fan. Not being an aficianado of Leonard's, other than the impression he's worn on me via film and the one book, I actually found myself a bit turned off by the work. You can sell a subject too hard, and that's how I felt here. I'm not particularly keen on violence, but there's supposed to be lots in Leonard (so this book makes clear, with gusto). So why am I reading more by him? Because I was impressed by the one book.

As a fan, Challen doesn't engage much in actual critical analysis. More often, the work talks about the various books and how Leonard writes. Challen did a lot of interviews with people who knew Leonard, many of whom are also fans. So there's lots of gushing about how great Leonard is as a person and as a writer. And I guess that was what Challen aimed for—nothing negative or even anything that might be seen as such. This is not a warts and all biography.

So what did I learn about the writer? He comes from a middle-class background; his father worked in corporate America, and Leonard sort of followed in that vein, becoming a copywriter for an ad agency. That was his day job. Most of his life was spent in Detroit. His off-time job was writing, at which he worked hard. He started at a time when the short story era was just coming to an end. What I mean by that—people obviously still write short stories—is that it was the end of the era where magazines were devoted to stories and had substantial subscribers and paid substantial amounts. So Leonard sold his first story for a thousand bucks, and this at a time when that was several months pay at his regular job (today, you might get a few thousand in a glossy magazine, but it would likely take only story an issue; most publications pay nothing or a few hundred if lucky). It was a western. An agent noticed the work and got in touch with him, offering to help. Leonard took her up on it.

For many years, Leonard churned out western short stories, selling them for a hundred or so dollars apiece. It wasn't enough to quit working, which the agent made clear. Indeed, the agent worked with writers like Leonard in the hope of one day scoring big, once such authors started writing novels. And so Leonard did. Again, he was paid a modest sum, something like three thousand dollars, which if you think about how much he was paid for that first story, tells you how little/much such work paid: not quite a year's salary with no guarantee of more money to come. But Leonard plowed on, and his books sold for movie production, at which he made a little more money.

His agent, meanwhile, started to push Leonard to write something other than westerns (indeed, other than stories involving Indians). She knew the market for such stuff was drying up. She encouraged him to write adventure tales. And so he started.

And that's, of course, when he started to really hit the big time—or at least, do well enough that he felt he really could quit his day job writing ad copy. From there, he'd churn out mystery books with regularity, selling quite a few to film companies, and also getting work as a screenwriter here and there (his first screenplays were for a series of documentaries). As decades passed, his reputation grew until two decades in or so he started hitting the best seller list.

As a writer, Leonard treated his profession like a job, writing each day from about 9:00 to 5:30. He worked longhand, on the first draft, and then with a typewriter thereafter. Very old school. He didn't plot out his novels. Rather, he let the characters take him where the books were to go. Dialogue was his huge focus, enough that you'd think, based on what he said in interviews and what Challen writes about him, that his books were just collections of dialogue, which they are not—there are plenty of descriptions, even if they aren't florid. But I do think it interesting that he didn't know where a book was going or how it was to end until about forty pages to the end; given how intricate some of his plots are, one would think he planned a bit more. What he did do, though, he says, is as he was nearing that end, he'd realize certain things were important and then go back and add in the scenes that were needed to make that ending work. He was clearly a talented guy. I find that plotting something out in advance tends to give a work a kind of shallowness and fakeness, because one is forcing characters to do things rather than letting the characters guide themselves, so I understand his point; on the other hand, when one is writing longer works, it's also easy to lose track of characters and history and so forth, which is a big challenge of book-length fiction. It's also easy for a character to become completely predictable in terms of the plot that comes into being. So in those senses, Leonard seems to have been gifted with a good memory and kind of natural ease of finding ways to keep characters from simply falling into standard tropes, or at least that's my impression of him. I guess I'm going to find out over the coming months, as I read a selection of his work.

On “We” by Yevgeny Zamyatin **

This has been on my too-read list for years; unfortunately, it was quite a big disappointment. In part, this book suffered from The Godfather complex. By that I mean that so many other works that came after this book use similar tropes that the “original” hardly seems all that innovative or exciting, so while it might be the classic or the first, as a reader coming to it late, it reads as derivative. Not only that, but it doesn't read well.

The book is about a man working for the United State. Everyone works for the state. There is a kind of group think. Outside the state are revolutionaries, aiming for individuality. The man, like all other citizens, is simply a number. No one bears names. They all work for the good of the state. Until . . . The man falls in love with another person. Now, they work to break the system. Numbers: think Lucas's THX 1138; omnipotent, omniscient state with clandestine love affair: think 1984. Unlike those works, however, I never found myself caring about the characters. The writing was emotionally over the top; at the same time, it was hard to follow, and the fact that I fairly early on gave up caring meant I didn't try hard. A synopsis on Wikipedia explained most of what I'd gathered and little of what I hadn't (go there for the real synopsis).

Spoiler: It doesn't end well. Just as you think the revolutionaries might pull it off, the man himself reverts to be interested in supporting the state, soaking up its drug. It betrays his lover. The state wins. One can, I suppose, take the comments from the man's lover as holding hope out—namely, that revolutions never stop. A state might have total control, but eventually someone overthrows it. There is no end to that. We just don't see that overthrow in this story.

On “The Reluctant Parting” by Julie Galambush ***

Like Metzger's book, this work is essentially an introduction to the New Testament, providing summaries of each work and a short account of how it came to be. What differentiates this work is that it purports to provide a Jewish view of the New Testament. Galambush's thesis is that before the New Testament became Christian it was a Jewish work, one in which Jews debated Jews about the meaning of Judaism. It's a provocative thesis, one that I would have thought would have led to many more unique readings of the New Testament works than it did.

There are some valuable observations here but on the whole the work seems more an introduction to the New Testament to Jewish readers who would otherwise be unfamiliar or less familiar with the works, so it didn't offer as much new info to one familiar with the New Testament as I would have expected. Complicating this further if Galambush's standard Protestant reading of so much of Christian doctrine. With the author having been a Christian that converted to Judaism, I felt as if I were getting two rather distorted views of the scripture rather than a fresh read of it. Galambush takes the standard secular line on the late creation of most of the works of the New Testament, merges that with standard readings of Christian doctrine (e.g., harrowing of hell) that likely were not part of the NT authors' original intent, and then places all of that within Jewish arguments over what would have made for proper Jewish teaching at that time.

On “The New Testament” by Bruce M. Metzger ****

This introduction to the background, growth, and content of the New Testament was much more interesting and potentially useful than I expected. I'd been under the impression that this leading biblical scholar, as the teacher of Bart Ehrman, was something of a liberal one, but his readings fit, rather, more often with the conservative school. In addition, the work being an introduction would seem to offer little more than basics, but it actually provides some strong readings of the various biblical works.

The first part of the work discusses culture of the time in which the New Testament was written, providing in roughly one hundred pages a summary of Jewish sects and Greek philosophical, as well as the Roman governmental structure. A second section discusses life of Jesus and the literary structures of his various sayings and stories. Metzger than discusses the church's early history and the travels of Paul. A large section summarizes each book of the New Testament and presents theories regarding each work's creation; the summaries sometimes provides a few close readings that are eye-opening. The book closes with a suprisingly conservative view of how the canon essentially self -authenticated long before its actual setting aside and with a discussion of the various translations and their limitations and advantages.

On “Misquoting Truth” by Timothy Paul Jones *****

I figured I'd give this Christian response to the work of Bart Erhman a go after reading Ehrman's similarly titled work. Even Jones has to admit that Ehrman is an amazing scholar, but of course, both Jones and Ehrman have particular points of view and different axes to grind, as do we all. So what was useful about reading Jones's book was seeing so many of the fact that Ehrman doesn't quite give the full truth about. The first part of this book largely adresses Ehrman's Misquoting Jesus, and the second largely addresses Ehrman's Lost Christianities.

Interesting tidbits that Ehrman doesnt include in his text: While many early documents are missing author names on their works, it's possibly because the title page is missing; in the cases where we have author names attached, in every single case, from a wide variety of areas, the names (Matthew, Mark, John, etc.) match what these works would come to be called. It's not like someone assigned these names to the works later. (What neither Jones nor Ehrman discuss are the specific documents and the specific dates of the documents and the actual numbers, which is likely getting a bit too far into the weeds for most people. If we have Gospels of John before 300 and none of them bare his name, and we have sixteen from the 400s with twelve bearing his name, that would arguably mean something quite different from having two Johns from the 200s, one bearing his name, eight from the 300s with one bearing his name, and then twelve from the 400s with three bearing his name.)

Ehrman's argument about 1 Corinthians 11:34-35 being added by a duplicitous scribe with an agenda mentions that those two verses are sometimes placed after verse 40 in some manuscript; what he doesn't mention is that those two verses, nevertheless, still always appear. We don't have versions of the letter without them. That suggests something quite different to me.

Other things that Jones brought up were things I'd thought about even while reading Ehrman's work. Most of the discrepanciess Ehrman sees in early manuscripts as destroying the value of the written works seem, on reflection, not to make that much of a difference when it comes down to the actual pont of the work. The same message still applies. I suppose that one could argue that God should have put his writings on some kind of industructable stone so that we would absolutely what they said, which seems to be the only thing that would satisfy Ehrman's scepticism, but the part of the point of scripture is that God works through fallible humans; the stone would kind of dissuit the point. That we have as accurate copies as we do seems no less than a miracle, as Jones notes, because if you think about people copying stuff down in a language without punctuation or spaces between words, such would seem to lend to all kinds of errors and eventual changes. You can take from that what you will. One man sees the whole enterprise as a human one attempting to speak for a god created by humans, and one man sees God speaking through humans.

But as Jones notes near the end, and I think the point is a good one, we can't get too tied up in the idea that everything in the Bible must match or that we have all the answers. Such prognostications can lead us to lose faith when scholars point out the problems. We need to be honest about what's there and about what we don't yet understand, while seeing the bigger picture.

On “Leaving Las Vegas” by John O'Brien ****

 

This is another reread for me from a book read about three decades ago. When I last read it, the movie was a more recent title, and O'Brien's other two books were things more heavily on folks' minds. I did not like Stripper Lessons, which seemed mostly some male fantasy, and I never got to Assault on Tony's, which someone in grad school had recommended and which sounded sort of intriguing, mostly for its ties to the 1992 Los Angeles riots, but which I suspected would not be unlike the other two books in focusing mostly on dreariness and drinking and maybe some hot angelic woman. I was uncertain I would find this book of much interest this time around, and I was surprised by how well it held up.

Having come off reading Tapping the Source, this was a different sort of read. There isn't a strong plot on this title, but it deals with similarly salacious material. I can't say I'm likely to read this one again. In some ways, the plot is laughable and the characters seemingly nonsensicle and the whole thing unceasingly depressing. And yet, on some level, the work still manages to pull a bit at the reader, since it explores such dark and depressing lives and doesn't flinch at looking at them.

This is essentially a love story between an alcoholic and a prostitutee. The prostitute gets beat up. She has men (i.e., the former pimp) from her past show up and expect her to provide them whatever cash she's earning. This is not a glamourous life. It's hard and awful. The alcoholic has lost his wife and his job, though both losses seem mostly due to his drinking. He's chosen to drink above all else, and he has resigned himself to drinking himself to death, and he won't let anything or anyone stop him. He knows he's messed up. He gets the shakes anytime he hasn't had a drink recently enough. He too gets beat up or just stumbles for little reason and as such beats up his own body. (I'm prone to think such a life ridiculous, but having had a friend essentially do just that—drink himself to death—I know now this sort of thing happens, in late-stage alcoholism.)

The prostitute is desperate for companionship. The alcoholic, on some level, seems open to that for a while, but in the end, what he really wants is to be left alone with his drinking, and there's no stopping that. For a short while they meet and share share some moments. The plot never shirks from the inevitable bleak end.

On “Tapping the Source” by Kem Nunn *****

I was uncertain whether I read this while living in California or while living in Texas, but my reading log, reveals it was the latter, which makes sense, because a fresher read would better suggest why I kept the volume. It was recommended to me in California, while I was working at a bookstore. I picked it up cheap on remainder but like so many books at the time, I didn't read it. It sat in my library. In Texas, I was without access to a public library, which meant that array of books I'd collected over the years finally got read, every single one of them. This was one of those. And when I read it, finally, I was impressed. That's how it ends up here with five stars.

On rereading it here nearly thirty years later, I remembered almost nothing about it except for the fact that it involved a mystery and surfing. Likely, these sort of things are what impressed me. I love Nunn's description of a California desert town, which fits well with what I remember of the state. His attention to the California beach towns is also interesting, though Huntington Beach, where this book is set, always seemed a good deal more built up than how he describes it here. The attention also to surfing culture, about which I know little, and to bike culture, is also of interest. This is also a book about “tough” guys, a kind of overmasculinized culture, which is fun in its own right.

The novel is gripping. But it is also selacious and, in the end, rather ridiculous, at least to me as I read it now. (I'd be more inclined to give it four stars were I rating it now instead of then.) The story involves a young man who is in love (incest forges part of the text) with his sister. Years ago, his mother took off; he never knew his dad. Though their physical needs (a place to live) were supplied by an uncle and grandmother, he and his sister were left to fend largely for themselves. Ellen, the sister, eventually, though, ran away, taking up with various men. One day, Ike, her brother, receives a note with three names on it and word that Ellen is in trouble, has gone off with these three men to Mexico and never returned. Thus begins Ike's quest. He leaves the desert for the beach and takes up surfing to try to get close to the men who might know what happened to Ellen. (Spoilers from here.)

Instead, he ends up largely becoming friends with a man named Preston, a biker, impressed with Ike's mechanical skills, which he picked up working at a shop in the desert. Preston warns him to stay away from Hound Adams and the other two men on the list. They are trouble. But Ike never is told the truth about what happened to Ellen. As such, as one can imagine, he ends up not taking Preston's advice, and when opportunity presents itself, he takes up with Hound. Preston and Hound, as it turns out, are old rivals and old friends. Ike, meanwhile, takes up with a gal. Bad things go down between Preston and Hound. Ike ends up being pulled into a nefarious underworld of drugs and pornography and eventually Satanic rituals in the quest to find out what happened to his sister. While engaging, the book gets more and more ridiculous and perverted, until of course we finally find out where Ellen is.

On “Misquoting Jesus” by Bart D. Ehrman ****

I'd been a little leery of this book, knowing Ehrman's penchant for calling into question basic tenets of Christianity, and that is, on the whole with this book, his point and purpose. His general thesis, as denoted in the introduction and conclusion is that because the text of the New Testament can't be perfectly known, it must not be inspired. But his general point, alas, does not necessarily follow from the evidence he provides. In between is a really good layman's introduction to textual criticism and to some of the issues that arise when trying to edit the Bible (the same issues, actually, that arise with editing virtually any book whose author no longer is alive). It was because I couldn't get ahold of Ehrman's Orthodox Corruption of Scripture that I ended up reading this layman's version. I actually wanted to know more about the various alternative versions of the text. And while not as thorough as that book, this one certainly provides some great case studies.

The start of the book and, indeed, some passages later on are very basic. Such made me reflect on the difficulty writers have who are aiming at a general audience. How much is too general? How soon can one delve into specifics. But soon enough, Ehrman drops into literacy rates in the ancient world (they were low, but Ehrman takes the lowest end of estimates as a given) and the nature of how early texts were copied. The earliest texts, as he notes, were copied not by professionals but by what few literate members there were among the Christian community. Most of the time this would have been those who also were rich enough to have large enough homes to host Christian gatherings. As there were a number of Christian beliefs, some “scribes” would have had a willingness to change texts to fit an agenda. (The fact that our texts are as close as they are to one another would itself seem to be something of a miracle, but Ehrman focuses on differences not on similarities.) A few centuries in, the role of copying was taken over by professionals, but the damage of these early years was already done. There were no really reliable manuscripts. But I'm not so sure this reading of the history is correct. Professionals, as Ehrman brings out in his examples, were inclined to make similar errors or even deliberate changes as well.

This is the situation we find ourselves in when we come to the translations into English. The King James Version, which has so affected every English translation since, was itself based on a faulty manuscript, according to Ehrman, one of the most faulty of them all. Other reading of mine, however, shows this claim to be debatable, counterarguments that Ehrman largely ignores. The issue, of course, as Ehrman brings out, is that with varying manuscripts, editors are left trying to figure out what the original actually was. We have, in many cases, older manuscripts than those that were used to translate the KJV. Differences there would seem to indicate that some of the later manuscripts reflect changes made to the text that weren't in the original. But our early manuscripts, alas, are also often from particular regions and reflect, arguably, changes that were made in that region. They might be older, but there is possibly a reason that the variations in those texts didn't show up in later versions: They weren't the accepted or best text. It's impossible, often, to know. Ehrman describes some of the ways in which scholars attempt to figure out which really is more accurate. One way is by looking at what is the more difficult reading. It's more likely that a scribe would have changed something to be easier to read or understand than to be more difficult. This makes sense to a point, but it's no given. Another, Ehrman does not, is also regional variation. Copyists in one part of the world might have a manuscript with an error that is copied from frequently, an error or variation that doesn't exist in manuscripts in other parts of the world.

Ehrman himself admits that the vast majority of the changes to the text are mere typographic errors that are easily enough discerned. It's in the places where such changes make a difference to meaning that issues arise. But even here, some of these variations don't seem quite as profound as Ehrman makes them out to be. Whether Jesus looks on a disabled man with grace or anger when healing in one passage in Mark makes a little difference in the context and even to an extent in how we read Mark generally, but when we look at the overall point of the Gospels, I don't think it signficantly changes Christian teaching. One can read such a passage both ways and find value in each.

And I can totally understand the difficulties scribes and editors are up against. Sometimes a passage is unclear. If there's no author to ask, one is left sometimes with a difficult decision. Is this weird thing an inadvertant error or was that what the author really wrote and intended? It happens even when editing contemporary texts. The more interesting observations are those where Ehrman claims the text was changed deliberately. Some of these are more obvious than others; others are certainly open for debate, though how one reads other parts of the New Testament will often affect whether one believes these were later changes.

In the end, I found this book really engaging and informative. And while I don't think that Ehrman's overall point is ultimately convincing, denying that some parts of the Biblical text are difficult to discern is not the best means toward valuing faith. It's better to acknowledge that we don't know everything, even as we look to the overall themes of the New Testament text.

On “Underground” by Haruki Murakami *****

I first read this book at the airport in Madrid, Spain. I believe it was 2001, but it could have been 2005. Either way, at the time, I found the book engaging and heart wrenching, especially the account of the woman who became mostly a vegetable after the 1995 Aum Shinriko sarin gas attack in the Japanese subway, which is the focus of this book. On this second read a quarter century later, I didn't find myself tearing up (in fact, maybe because I remember the account of the woman, I was more affected this time by the account of a pregnant woman who lost her husband), but I was nevertheless pulled in by the interlocking accounts.

Essentially, the book is a set of interviews Murakami conducted with some of the attack's victims. In the account of the pregnant woman, it was incredible the coincidence that on thar particular day, her husband and she go up early to eat a heavier breakfast together before work. It was like a good-bye, but how would they have even known? Murakami organizes the accounts around stations, so one reads several different people's observations from each station, and often the one observed in one account is one telling the account in another. Also fascinating was the way that the people generally speaking didn't know what was going on, which I suppose is almost always the case in real time in these sort of events. I remember 9/11, which would have happened, actually not long before I read this title, the kind of chaos and confusion of the moment, and I also remember a friend of mine who lived in New York at the time explaining how that day was even more chaotic for her. After all, the Twin Towers were where most broadcasting towers were, which meant no TV or communication was available. Were we are war? What's happening?

But the accounts of the victims are just the first part of this book. The second part, tacked on apparently after its initial Japanese publication, concerns those who actually are or were part of the Aum Shinriko cult. This was interesting insofar as the accounts expose the way in which one's reaction to being in a cult really is complex. Most people got quite a bit out of the association, in terms of mental stability, but at the same time, it's clear that a good chunk of the teaching and behavior was abusive. Some were locked up for days or had to make a furtive escape from one of the group's communes. Further, of course, was the degree of loyalty the group inspired such that members would go through with such a plot as to release poison gas on a subway.

One other thing that surprised me was that these events occurred in 1995, so around the time of the Oklahome City federal building bombing. I'd thought these event occurred in the late 1980s, around 1987-89. Strange how our memory can transplant events like so. When I heard of this on TV (which I do remember), that means I was in grad school, not high school or my first year of college, as I'd thought.

On “Early Christianity in Alexandria” by David Litwa ****

We don't know much about Christianity in Alexandria before about 180, when folks like Dionysius, Pantaenus, and most especially Clement and Origen show up on the scene. Or at least, that's the usual story. Litwa claims that we actually know quite a bit about Christianity before these folks arise, if only we stop overlooking the obvious. Christianity in Alexandria was not what we have come to think of as orthodox. It predates all that and nourished quite different views of Jesus than those that have come to be adopted by the church centuries later.

A major point in this claim comes in the form of the Jewish community itself, which was highly Hellinized, at least among some of the intellectual class. Our source for that sort of info is, of course, Philo, the Jewish philosopher who resided in the city around the time of Jesus who adopted Platonic thinking to Jewish scripture. Jewish Christians simply fell in line with such Jewish thinking. Case in point for Litwa is Apollos. I'm not convinced that Apollos was a thinker in line with Philo and with Christian thinkers who would later be termed gnostics, but Litwa tries to make a case for it from Paul's writings about Apollos and about false teachers in his letters to the Corinthians. (For me, the two simply don't fit well together. Paul doesn't seem one for subtlety when it comes to people he disliked, so I don't see him writing positive things about Apollos in one place (although Litwa reads Paul, even in such passages, as actually placing himself above Apollos, thus snubbing him) and then writing such sarcastic and denigrating things about “ministers” more generally, while actually meaning Apollos among them.

But after those early chapters, as Litwa notes, Jewish people were essentially for a few decades removed from Alexandria, around 117. This left primarily non-Jewish Christians, who did their best to use the Jewish scriptures but read them in allegorical ways, like Philo, finding in them valuable lessons even while giving up the Jewish rites connected with them. Mix those ideas with others from Greek philosophy and from Greek and Egyptian mythology, and you end up with a unique form of Christianity, one that most would come to see as not Christian at all: These would be the followers of people like Basilides and Valentinus. Such teachers, however, at the time were no less Christian than those who would eventually win the doctrinal debate going on among early Christians. Transmigration, the idea that Jesus was never really human or that the god of the Jews was some other, lower god who was not the real one—many of these things found space in the theologies of the Alexandrian Christians, until, of course, they didn't, because other Christians won out. But truly, as Litwa notes, even Origen and Clement dabbled in such ideas, even if those men eventually got adopted into what become the Catholic Church.

Litwa's book is a good corrective to the manner in which we often think about early Christianity. Although I'd argue that such thinking was not that which reflected the early apostles, at least as preserved in our New Testament, it's clear that other Christianities existed from early on. Those, however, were not the ones that eventually came to be the Christianity we know. (Even so, such ideas subtly changed much of what Christians have come to believe in the millennia since the New Testament was put together.)

On “The Giving Way of Life” by Manfred Arthur Fraund

I was given this privately published/printed book nearly a decade ago but only now got around to reading it. It was by the father of various kids I grew up with, a friend of our family's and of my parents. Alas, at this point, the author is no longer alive, nor my father, so I can't write him to thank him for the collection and his thoughts. In the closing years of his life, the author took to writing books of essays, poetry, and memoir. This is one of his books of essays. Truly, this is a man who thought a lot about his faith and about God. Once in a while, I'd get a more personal insight about his life or family, something that would have been wonderful to read more about. As it is, the five extended works in this book are made up each of twenty very short essays on a given spiritual subject. They read, in a way, like devotionals, though usually with the focus on a spiritual idea rather than one particular scripture. Written as it was, I suspect that there would be more to glean from reading this in small bits, picking up the book and reading one essay and then maybe returning some other time, meditating on the small passage, much as the author likely wrote the pieces. And that is how I'd largely read it until the last couple of months—though returning to it far too infrequently—when I decided I'd read it through, so that I could say I'd actually read it all.

What is there to say of our lives? We pass from one place to another. When I met Mr. Fraund at a church picnic where he handed me the book, he seemed excited to see me and to share his work with me, this kid who had grown up with his. Occasionally, he'd had contact with my dad, who still lived in the same town but who had taken a slightly different path when it come to his spiritual journey and ended up in a different fellowship, though they believed largely the same thing. The rest of Mr. Fraund's family, it appeared, had taken yet other paths. As family, of course, he was still involved in their lives, but outside of a Facebook contact list (that I rarely ever touch), I would no longer be likely to come across any of his children in real life, given our own diverging paths and places of abode and worship. It is wonderful that technology can put us in touch or keep us in touch with such people, in ways that were not possible twenty-five years ago, but at the same time, one is reminded constantly of how our lives converge for a time and then diverge, the blessing of a friendship for a few years and of the memories that go with it. I could write of such memories here (so many of them, indeed), but I will save those perhaps for some other venue, not focused as much on my reading, and some other time.

On "On Pascha" by Melito of Sardis, edited by Alistair Stewart-Sykes ***

I didn't come to this book for Melito's work on Passover, as I have read it before. I came to it to read what Stewart-Sykes had to say about it. I wanted something short, but if I wanted a fuller explanation, I probably would have been better off with his book The Lamb's High Feast. And then again, I wasn't sure I wanted to read that long a discussion of the work.

As an intro text, this one works fine. One learns who Melito was and what the basic context was and receives a short analysis of the text. Melito, Stewart-Sykes claims, was Jew with a strong background in Greek rhetorical tradition. The text itself has annotations that further explore the allusions. Following it is a collection of fragments having to do with Melito or with the Quartodeciman movement.

I think the main thing I learned is that there were, according to Stewart-Sykes, more than one type of Quartodeciman. While all kept the Pascha on the fourteenth, some kept it at the same time as certain Jewish people, while others kept it at midnight. There wasn't much discussion about whether that meant the fourteenth or the fifteenth, since there was also a controversy, among Jews, on whether to keep Passover at the start of the fourteenth or the end.

On "The Rise of the Creative Class Revisited" by Richard Florida ***

I had read Florida’s theories in various Citylab articles and so thought he would be a good writer to end my Econ list with. As a whole, the book I chose had much to offer, but it was also quite familiar to me, full of standard educated thinking of the past twenty years: diversity good, city good, etc. And much of the book seemed to be Florida pushing his theory on everything. It reminded me of how some scholars will create a theory and then write book after book using said theory. It becomes a personal industry. Despite my interest in the subject and Florida’s easy style, I found myself not as enthralled as I would have thought. What follows are my loose notes as I proceeded chapter by chapter.

Businesses move to where the talent, tech, and tolerance are. They don’t move to where there are ample office parks and infrastructure. Where the kind of people you want to employ live or want to live is where your company wants to be. Creative jobs make up a large portion of economy and tend to be best paying. We moved from manufacturing to service but it’s creative where the real growth is happening.

What goes into creativity? There is a contradiction between creativity and organization. The latter stifles the former, but without the latter creativity can’t progress far. It takes more than one person usually to make an idea successful, but often just the one person provides the spark. Creativity flourishes in open and diverse societies. It is often the product of a person’s focus—or ability to do so. Groups can take away from that focus. When organization is too strong, creativity ceases. But the stability of organization also provides the opportunity for creativity to thrive.

The creative class has grown as a percentage of the workforce over the past century. Its wages are higher than the working class or the service class. Its openness, however, is set back by the way it is dominated by Asian and white ethnicities. During economic crisis it experienced fewer job losses than the working class or service class. But what is the creative class? Florida’s definition is a bit hard to figure out. Anyone who has to think or make decisions, it seems, is creative class. Obviously someone who packs boxes all day based on a form denoting where each item should go is service sector; however, if someone has to figure out how best to pack those boxes, is that creative?

Motivating factors in work are less money and more the challenge, stability, and flexibility. So is the claim, based on surveys. That’s why professions like machine operator lacked skilled employees but we have a surplus of hairdressers, which is considered more rewarding. But some of Florida’s statistics seem not to match his claims as much as he makes them out to be. He makes the point that money is less a motivation for type of work than a motivation for dissatisfaction. Highest paid employees tend to enjoy work more. As such, I’m not sure I completely buy his point.

Next is a chapter on flexibility and security and the way creative jobs offer the former but sometimes at the cost of the latter. Companies and employees both seem less inclined to partner for as long as in the past. People move around a lot. Often these are lateral moves rather than hierarchical ones. Bosses no longer know the jobs of their employees. Businesses are flat, with various experts who move from company to company.

Company cultures have changed to allow more flexibility and casualness in aiding creative types. Gone are dress codes. Offices are open, to encourage collaboration. But sometimes such changes are merely for show. Adding ping pong might be a way to make things casual, but if the office isn’t truly flexible and expects long hours, it’s not really conducive to long term creatives.

Time has become the most difficult resource to maintain. Creatives work more hours. And they merge work and home more. In that sense, the old factory worker often ends up with more leisure time than the so-called leisure class. Beyond that people in creative professions often multitask, making time seem even more scarce.

The creative class prefers active leisure to passive. They run, hike, rock climb. They stay in shape. They aren’t big on spectator sports. Passive activity is more the domain of the working class. The creative values experiences. They’re more likely to go to small clubs than huge concerts, which demand too much time and money and don’t mix experiences. (I couldn’t quite figure out Florida’s reasoning for why this is so. Personally I’d venture that many of the creative class jobs are sit-down jobs, whereas working class is more physical labor. Different kind of rest in one’s leisure time.)

The creative class is a strange mix of Protestant work ethic and bohemianism. In the past these two were antithetical. But the two categories have merged in the modern world, such that neither category really exists. The creative antisocial tech person is also the hard worker. Geekiness has gone hip.

Florida turns next to place, noting that while technologically the world has become flatter, places are actually becoming more specialized and less egalitarian. Cities keep growing even though tech allows for rural resourcing. Why? because people of the same creative sort like to be together to bounce ideas off in person. A diverse city offers more ways to get ideas and to work with others in similar fields. (This seems to contradict itself. If all musicians slowly gravitate to Nashville, then in some ways Nashville becomes less diverse—it’s all musicians, whereas writers go to nyc.)

Creative class regions often have higher wages than working or service class, which lends to inequality.

Creative class cities have high levels of technology, talent, and tolerance. But Florida talks mostly about the latter. Where foreigners, homosexuals, and bohemians are tolerated, creativity excels. His comments on foreign born were particularly interesting in our current state. Twenty-five percent of patents are made by foreign born, even though they make up just twelve percent of the population. In other words, hard immigration policies contribute to the brain drain and less economic development. communities that are open to people of all types make for more openness to new ideas as well—to creativity. Want to know where houses will go up in value? Follow where the artists go. They are the first step to gentrification. The one exception to tolerance and diversity? Integration. It seems that that works opposite to these other factors, which is strange, but shows the persistence of racism. My bet would be that a truly tolerant and integrated place would do even better economically through willingness to embrace new ideas, but the continued presence of racism means deep integration doesn’t lend to prosperity.

Florida spends half a chapter defending his theory versus others, most especially the human capital theory, which dovetails closely. But while that one measures raw wealth, creative class theory takes into account where that wealth comes from and thus better measures productivity. If all wealth is inherited it is not really producing anything versus if wealth is coming from wages. The latter is what creative class theory values.

Next, Florida looks at creative class around the world and which countries score high. He also addresses social inequality and notes that the United States is more an outlier than standard because many creative class economies are actually quite egalitarian, much more so than the United States.

Where do people want to live and what sort of relations do they want to have? Florida claims that modern society isn’t about independence and accompanying loneliness. Most people don’t want close communities. They want loose communities—only a few close friends but lots of acquaintances. Loose social ties actually provide more opportunities for work.

He then looks at what makes places attractive and lists these features: a thick job market (many jobs in a profession available, since few expect to stay with the same company), third places to hang out, dating opportunities, diversity, authenticity, and “scenes.” Basic services are important, but people want more than that. They want cultural opportunities and nice scenery.

If a city sets out to attract creative types and to thus grow, what should it do? Attracting a business isn’t enough. It needs to make itself attractive to a diverse set of people, including the less stable young and single. They may not stay, but they are not likely to return with families if there was nothing for them before.

There’s talk of the move back to the city that is common now—or was until COVID. And there’s discussion of the need for density and the advantage of big population. Where density kills is when it starts to kill off variety at the street level. Question: if dense city cores are best for creativity and bold economy, how did suburbs take over for a time and why? I’ve got to think there was an economic advantage for such a system that it would become common for a while.

My question was almost immediately what Florida turned to next—namely by looking at why so many people actually like suburbs and what those suburbs bring to the creative class. His point seems to be that suburbs are an integral part of large metros, and the best suburbs actually find ways to mimic the advantages of that dense core within the suburb.

Next, Florida turns to inequality, which he notes tends to be greater in creative class areas, but then he makes the argument that even so, lower class people are still overall better off in such areas generally. This seems to be variation on the rising tide argument of conservative economics. But the anecdotes at the start of the chapter seem to weigh against it. When a city becomes too expensive for its artists, that creative core becomes the plaything of only the most successful. I mean I guess there are still creative scenes in those places, but I’ve never understood how those scenes hang on. Do they? 

I would think they don’t, or they somehow transform. I think of Deep Ellum in Dallas. It was a hip area when I lived in Fort Worth twenty-five years ago, but I’m told it’s all gone now, full of high cost businesses. It seemed headed that way even when I lived close by, wherein the funkiness was getting priced out and the hipness fading.

Florida seems to believe creative, working, and service class is more important than high, middle, and low class. Yes, those with money are generally happier, but once a base level is reached, creative class are happier than working class. Areas with more creative class are healthier, have lower gun violence, better dental care, and are less likely to drive to work (versus walk, bike, or use public transport).

In his conclusion, Florida makes the case for the creative class to become politically active and notes that we are in a process of revolution not unlike that of the Industrial Revolution. He provides various suggestions, including helping working and service class jobs pay more by making them more creative, making education emphasize creativity more, making cities denser,  encouraging diversity, providing better means to make workers more mobile with health care and retirement not tied to jobs, and recalibrating how we measure growth.

On “From the Lost Teaching of Polycarp” by Charles E. Hill ***

Like other works about Polycarp, this one suffers from the same lack of information we have about the man. Hill is, in fact, attempting to rectify that in this work, by claiming a couple of other texts for him. That said, even if we accept those texts as written by Polycarp, there just isn't as much as one might wish to have about this important ancient figure. But then, that is true of pretty much all ancient people.

The two works that Hill attempts to link to Polycarp are various comments that Irenaeus makes about Marcionism and Valentinianism and the work Ad Diognetum. Hill himself admits that the former is easier to do than the latter, and the end result fits squarely with that expectation. I came away convinced of the former and skeptical of the latter.

Irenaeus, in his writing, refers to a presbyter as the source of much of his information about and many of his argument against Marcionism. Who was the presbyter? By linking up said passages with a couple of other passages where Irenaeus refers to Polycarp by name and to a letter to Florinus that Irenaeus also wrote, Hill is able to make a strong argument that this unnamed source was Polycarp. In so doing, Hill also establishes that Ireneaus's memories of Polycarp probably extend to his teens or maybe even early twenties, not just his childhood. As such Ireneaus is a good source for information about the sort of things Polycarp believed and said. Given that the only writing we have of Polycarp is a letter the Philippi that is very much a basic doctrine, the idea that he preached heavily against Marcion fleshes out his teaching just a little.

The arguments that he was also the source for Ad Diognetum seem much weaker, based on some ideas that correspond to what we do know about Polycarp and the like. I felt like I learned more about the work, in this regard, then about Polycarp. Hill makes a good case that the work is a transcript of a speech rather than a letter or a formal piece of writing. It does, however, have an apologetic purpose, in trying to teach Diogenetus about Christianity. As such, if it is by Polycarp, we then have a letter, anti-heresy teachings (as recorded in Ireneaus), and an apology, which would be a well-rounded sample.

 

On "St. Paul in Britain" by R. W. Morgan ***

This older book is one I saw referenced in a few texts, so I figured I'd give it a go. I don't know many other books devoted specifically to this subject. Morgan's arguments, even in his time, were a bit criticized, and I can see why the entire idea of Paul traveling to Britain would get dismissed so easily. But the legends are out there, so it was good to read about where they come from and how the argument is made.

Morgan's book is written in overwrought nineteenth-century prose, making its short text seem much longer, more substantive, and more difficult probably than it really is or should be. He discusses a good amount about the Roman relationship/war with Britain during the first century BCE and CE, about which I knew little and realize I need to find out more about. So the material on Paul and Christianity really only makes up maybe half the slim volume.

The gist of the argument about Christianity in Britain preceding even the establishment of that in Rome (a bit dubious) is based on the idea that Joseph of Arimethea first made the trip only a few years after Jesus's death, along with perhaps some other Jerusalem Christians. Sometime later, Paul's companion Aristobolus made the trip. And then, finally, came Paul.

By then, Paul was already in contact with many converts who had come from Britain. Those converts were of the royal household, which had been taken captive and forcibly removed to Rome. We find many of their names in the New Testament--Rufus and Pudens and Claudia. Indeed, when in Rome, Paul was either imprisoned with these captives or lived in their house. The arguments for these come from, of course, names in the New Testament shared with those in some epigraphs by Martial and some British records. The argument is intriguing, but one can also easily start finding all kinds of interesting historical finds if one simply goes by names. When we're talking millions of people, it's also entirely possible that there were more than one Rufus or Claudia. It's easy to start conflating people and events.

While I found that portion of Morgan's writing intriguing, it's clear that he has an ax to grind. One of his main goals is to prove that British Christianity predates Roman and is actually truer to it, never mind that British Protestantism doesn't derive from the ancient British church but from Rome (even if there was a British church that preceded the Roman church's takeover of the faith during Augustine's time). He ties British Christianity to Druidism, which he says had many Christian elements, including a belief in the eternal soul (which, well, isn't actually a Christian idea but one from Greek philosophy--but never mind, this is Morgan's view of what early Christianity was, which was Protestant). Thus, Brits were naturally inclined to take up the Christian faith, more than Romans. A real problem enters when he writes of how Constantine spent time in Britain and became emperor while there (both true--and facts I didn't know) and how it was there that he became familiar with Christianity. As such, his conversion was mitigated by his contact with British Christians. But if this was the case, I had to wonder, why all this fuss about Roman versus British Christianity, since it was obviously British Christians who thus forged the front under which Rome itself was converted; this would mean British Christianity was Roman Christianity. In other words, the argument seemed, well, a bit nonsensical.

Still as a work to become familiar with the possible links of Paul and Christianity to Britain, it's a nice summary, one that traces backward the various historical records insofar as they exist. While I don't think the case for Paul in Britain is definitive, I think it can certainly be made to seem plausible. Such would also explain the lack of other records regarding his supposed trip to Spain make a bit more sense, insofar as he likely would have just touched the southwest sector of Spain on his way toward Britain, where we actually do have at least these legends.

On “Freakonomics” by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner ****

I saw the film probably fifteen years ago. I was expecting, as such, the book to have a lot more than the film did, but I'm not sure that it did. My memory isn't that fresh, obviously, but many of the same stories show up in this book and don't seem told in particularly deeper ways. As such, this book was a little bit of a disappointment. In fact, as becomes obvious after reading the appendixes, the book is built upon a series of scholarly articles written by Levitt that were dumbed down for a popular audience by Dubner. One could say that each chapter is like one of those articles, rewritten for a popular audience (and gladly so, as is obvious from one blog post included in the appendix that is laden with tables and econ speak).

Still, Levitt has an interesting way at looking at the world and applying econ to it, and Dubner has a way with making that all accessible to noneconomists. As such, this book is really interesting, even if the movie seems to have actually been about as thorough as the book. Among the findings: Some teachers cheat for their students on standardized tests. We can tell because the same questions are often answered right and wrong by large swaths of a class that deviate from the general population. Some sumo wrestlers likewise “throw” contests toward the end of the season, since as with British soccer, a sumo wrestler on the edge could, with a loss, drop to a lower level. Suddenly, toward seasons end, some matches that should be givens end up being the other way around in terms of wins. Real estate agents are likely not to work as hard to make their customers an extra ten thousand dollars as we ourselves might be, because in the end, that ten thousand is only one-fifty to the agent. We can tell because agents tend to take a week longer to sell their own houses and make the extra money. Drug dealers, unless they are at the top of the pecking order, make less than minimum wage. Why bother? Because, as with aspiring actors and other hopefuls, the lower drug dealers hope/think they'll make it big one day. Why did crime go down in the 1990s and thereafter? Abortion was leglized in the 1970s, resulting in fewer unwanted children. Unwanted children, apparently, means crime. Such would suggest that parenting makes a great difference in a child's life, but the next chapter discounts that: apparently, parents don't really affect what children become much at all. What's more important is genetics. Educated, well-off, socially involved, older parents end up with more successful kids than those who spank or who live in a better neighborhood or are interested in the arts. Finally, names can help with people getting interviews (we're less likely to call back someone with a supposed “Black” name than a “white” name), but in the long term may not affect one's overall success. Name popularity moves from the high class to the low.

The edition I read ended with three appendixes: one with the article that inspired the book, one with various newspaper articles in response to the book; and one with various blog entries. Some of these were enlightening to the topics covered in the book, while others seemed like tangential material being used as an excuse to produce a new edition. In that sense, the book is not unlike the podcast, which for me seems hit and miss. Sometimes there are some real though-provoking gems, and other times, it just seems like someone is trying to fill radio time.

On “The Johannine Corpus in the Early Church” by Charles E. Hill *****

I thought I'd read one of the best books one could possibly read with Culpepper's bio and exploration of all the different tales about John through history, but Hill's book managed to provide something new and thoughtful. (I was drawn to the book having been impressed by many of his scholarly articles and realized his book-length work might be intriguing, and it is.) The book is a long one, longer than Culpepper's, and the point much more narrow, but I get the sense that Hill had to be so thorough because his views do not seem to be very popular among contemporary scholars. Essentially, the whole book is devoted to slapping down one argument—namely that the works of John, and most especially his Gospel, were not accepted by the early church because they started out as works more popular among Gnostic sects. As such, it was not until Irenaeus adopted John for the mainstream church that John's materials were acceptable for the canon. Hill quotes early text after early text, looking at just about every allusion to John that likely exists.

Hill shows how the "Johannophobia" of the early church, as he terms it, is simply not true. He shows that John's work was written mostly to counter Gnostic-type ideas and that most Gnostic sects understood his work in that way. Although one can find references to John's work in Gnostic literature, it is not complementary. It usually argues against John; if it uses John, it does so in a way that such groups would have used any such scriptures: that is, by finding analogies to their various aeon systems and so forth that would not have spoken to anyone who was not already initiated into and in agreement with such a system.

Furthermore, Hill goes on to show, most early church officials did accept John's work, most especially the Gospel, but also Revelation and 1 John, as apostolic and used it in their writings. (2 and 3 John are rarely used., but their brevity would preclude much usage—and the mere fact that they were preserved suggests that others thought them the work of the same author and bound them together.) Hill's claim with regard to usage of John's writing in general is a bit tricky but also well founded—that is, often early church writers didn't directly quote John, but to be fair, they rarely directly quote any of the New Testament. That just wasn't how authors wrote at the time, as many had to quote things from memory, not having a book before them. (Indeed, the work I recently finished reading about Eusebius noted that as one of his great innovations: the degree to which he quoted authors directly.) As such, the “quotes” of John are usually paraphrases of a sort, but the ideas seem very much contingent on his work. The implication is, further, that John was the author of all of the works generally attributed to him—that was certainly how writers in the first two centuries treated the works and attributed them (irrespective of whether John actually wrote them, which Hill doesn't take a hard stand on). It was only really in Eusebius's time that John's writings began to be called into question—and most especially, his apocalypse, because millennialism had fallen out of favor and Revelation is heavy on it. That critique has since found its way into modern scholarship, but it is nothing new, even if it didn't arise in the earliest centuries.

On "Christianity and the Transformation of the Book" by Anthony Grafton and Megan Williams ***

Neither Andrew Carriker's amazing undertaking about Eusebius's library nor this book quite get at what I hoped to learn about early archives of the Christian church, a work I suspect isn't even really possible, but both works have proven very useful. While Carriker's is more technical in nature and likely to appeal to few outside of scholars, Grafton and Williams have managed to tell a story that is a bit more broadly interesting. As the title denotes, this is really a history of early book making. As with Carriker's book, the library at Caesarea plays a large role.

Grafton and Williams look specifically at two works, one by Origen and one by Eusebius. But they also delve a bit into the history of the Caesarean library, of Caesarea, and of the book more generally. The library at Caesarea seems to have been in many ways the product of Origen, who brought many of his books with him and then wrote extensively. His work, in turn, was preserved by Pamphilus, who then passed that material on to Eusebius. Each of these men were the beneficiaries of patrons who supported them, since such work and undertakings were not things a common man could afford. Eusebius had the advantage, later in life, of having not just a private patron but a public one, since the Emperor Constantine's adoption of the Christian faith meant that he had an interest in seeing the library profit.

Such libraries weren't just archives, however. They were book-making institutes, with a whole staff of scribes, some with specialist knowledge of languages. Both Origen and Eusebius moved away from scrolls toward codexes, the basis of our modern book. The codex allowed them to do things that previously would have been difficult to accomplish. With his Hexepla, Origen set out to create a Bible with six different versions set side by side for easy comparison, including Hebrew and various Greek translations. This was a new type of work. That work, in turn, became, at least in format, a model for Eusebius, who would set out to present a timeline of world history in his Chronology, by setting out events from different peoples in columns. Such work would have been near impossible on a scroll, but a codex was more suited to such a task. In turn, of course, these works became the basis for how many of our works even to our day do similar things in terms of presenting information in tables or columns. In other words, they revolutionized book making for millennia to come.

On “Debt” by David Graeber ***

 

The book is a history of debt that questions a lot of assumptions about fiscal systems generally. It starts off really interestingly and is full of interesting anecdotes throughout, but the deeper I got into the book, the more technical it felt and the less interesting it became. In the end, this really seemed more like a scholarly work than one for general audiences. Because I ended up having a harder and harder time following it as I made my way through it, my notes are likely to seem somewhat slipshod, but they attempt both to summarize some of the main points and some of he most interesting ones.

On a national level debt is both a way of keeping the third world poor and of rich nations gaining tribute from the rest of the world. (In that sense American debt is actually just a sign of its power.) Whether debtors are bad because they have failed to meet obligations or creditors are bad for taking advantage of others varies by the cultural moment and needs of those in power. Impersonalizing debt allows us to justify dreadful actions to others that would be impossible without. We would never demand someone let us prostitute their family, but if we make it such that not paying a debt, the person will face consequences such that they then turn to prostitution to avoid those consequences, we aren’t directly implicated in that turn to prostitution.

The first chapter explains how debt really is the foundation for money. Tendency is to see barter as preceding money, but Graeber denotes that money actually is just an IOU and as such predates any kind of barter. After all, among people who know each other, why would a person take a chicken he didn’t need in exchange for a stereo? We would just give the person the stereo as a gift and then one day when we needed a chicken, the other person would hand us a chicken. We would have credit in other words. Barter only enters in when you have communities who don’t know each other or when monetary systems collapse. If my dollar used to buy stereos but now I need a million dollars that tomorrow I will need 2 million such that dollars are essentially useless, I’m going to be inclined to take the chicken but again only if I need it or if I feel I can do something with that chicken and quick. It’s really not practical for me to wheel chickens around.

Debts can be bought and sold, transferred. But the issue would be that down the line, some folks won’t know the loaner or debt holder. This is where government enters. If the debt holder is the king, everyone knows the king. Now the king becomes the person issuing debt—i.e., money. As such government must have debt to enable money. Thus taxes—we owe government money/debt it then loans out.

Religion is often structured around ideas of debt: we owe our creator or the gods.

But debt is not always a medium of equal exchange. Society is actually centered around different formats and debt can be a way of maintaining social relations such that it is never expected to be paid back. Parents for example will never recoup what they put in to their children; if they demanded such, the relationship would essentially be at an end. Why should such a child continue to respect the parent? In a sense then all communities are communist in a way: we tend to share when we have and take when we need. If we are digging a hole together and one of us needs a tool and the other person has it, we ask and the person gives. The person doesn’t say, what’s in it for me? At a different level, though, communities also organize around exchange. Such communities do so only when people are at near status. If a rich man takes a poor to dinner, the poor man likely isn’t expected to return the favor. Two friends, however, would expect that. A poor man taking a rich man out would generally be seen as receiving a favor from the rich man for his time. So what to do when parties are at different levels? Exchange becomes formalized in some other way where debt is never fully paid, such that relationships continue. The mob boss offers “protection” and takes from me a share of my earnings.

In fact perhaps money is not rooted in debt as a system of exchange at all. Perhaps money is rooted in the concept of debt that can never be repaid: the bride price or, in the religious context, one’s own existence.

Here’s a fact I didn’t know: most Africans went into slavery not as war captives but as debtors. Graeber is interested in how we can come to accept such violence for debt. One can’t truly, for example, pay back someone for a murder. One life does not equal another. Each person is unique. But if we can depersonalize things, rip people from their contexts, then yes, actually we can make a person equal another—or a bag of gold. A slave is like a dead person; and as such, the dead have no rights (indeed, if one is enslaved via war, one would have been dead—and therefore can be owned by the savior).

Graber then turns to questions of honor as they relate to concepts of debt. And then next to women— and how they became possessions (such was not so in the earliest societies). Honor plays a curious role here. The bride price makes sense in a poor or rural society, where a woman is another worker for the family. In rich and urban societies you get the opposite: dowries. Now the family pays the groom to take the woman, the extra mouth to feed, off their hands. Veiling plays a role here as well. Men protect this assett they have acquired with the veil, as a matter of honor. Some early laws required veils for respectable women but also required that prostitutes not wear veils.

Slavery is a basis for society throughout much of history, but it has ceased to be the rule at some periods, like now. But in its place is wage slavery. Why? Perhaps religion but also perhaps having to do somehow with money. Graber doesn’t make clear the connection.

What he does note is that periods of credit are exchanged for periods of coinage: real metal used for money. The latter tends to be periods of warfare, where credit won’t do: you can’t pay transient soldiers with credit and you won’t sell to such soldiers who may never return if only on a promise that they’ll pay you back someday. We’ve entered a credit period with Nixon who took us off the gold standard.

So coinage arrives during a period of great war, when soldiering becomes professionalized rather than something done by regular folk when necessary. It replaces plunder. This period when armies roved and coinage first came to wide use, around 500 bc, is also when great philosophy came on the scene: Buddha, Confucius, and Pythagoras all came in this century and all from civilizations that started using coinage. What’s the connection? Debt enslavement in turn also falls away with soldiering as the spoils of war allow riches to be gained that way rather than from plebians. Now the plebians are soldiers. What emerges with the coin is markets. Markets mean a more materialist way of thinking, which in turn sparks new philosophies and thoughts on ethical practices.

Interesting fact: much of Adam Smith’s theory is drawn from medieval Muslim economics writing, which saw the open market as good and even created by god—however, to help people share rather than to be selfish. Because Muslims banned usury, the market was the only way to make money: take part ownership in someone’s business and reap profits. Christianity condemned usury also, but it saw markets as bad, the tool of nefarious profiteers.

In the Middle Ages coinage was taken in mostly by the church. There was a return to a credit system.

In the early days of capitalism, debt was viewed negatively, but almost everything ran on informal credit. Debt was personal. Rarely did people seek formal law about it; the law in turn was super severe—like the death penalty for not paying a bill was possible and certainly prison. Best not to do that to your neighbor. But as interest was added to debt and credit became depersonalized, buying on credit fell into disrepute, even as penalties became less severe. What’s more government itself took on debt by borrowing from its people to pay for things like wars, instead of people in debt to government because of taxes. That created something of a double standard, where debtors are bad but the government can take on debt at will and at great levels and no one cares.

Graeber then gets into questions about what capitalism even is and how long it’s been around. He gives special attention to slavery and how debt has been used to enslave people such that we aren’t really out of a slave economy: we have wage slaves.

The modern debt age begins with the floating of the dollar, the death of the gold standard. That made poor countries poorer (since they held dollars in lieu of gold) and created inflation. The floating of the dollar was used to pay for the Vietnam War, much as government debt is usually about funding armies. American debt has gone up at roughly the same rate as military spending. Meanwhile the dollar has become the world’s default currency. The dollar is essentially an IOU that goes down in value, or in other words tribute, since that dollar is used to pay for the military that props up its use.

In the end Graeber says that debt plays into the hands of the haves against the have nots, even when the haves owe money. (Think of how banks are bailed out, but people who default are made to pay or reap the consequences of bad credit scores.) His one proposal is to start over; forgive all debt, lest the world’s economy fail, as it surely at some point will.

On “Moneyball” by Michael Lewis *****

 

Economics applied to baseball—that was my thinking in choosing to add this to my economics reading list. It wasn't that heavily into the theory, though, as in the the stories surrounding those who applied new ideas about statistics to sports, and specifically baseball and the early 2000s Oakland A's. In a way, the book adhered much more closely to the movie based on it than I would have imagined. That is, it was much more centered on Billy Beane's life and how his experiences shaped his work as general manager of the team. For a baseball fan, especially for one who grew up in the 1980s, with Bill James's abstracts and Status Pro Baseball, this book is a really fun read; given its heavily narrative nature, I'm not sure how much one gets from it from an economic theory perspective.

For me, much of the book was about how little I know about baseball of the era that Lewis writes about. I followed baseball deeply as a preteen and early teen, from about age twelve to sixteen, and continued to know it fairly well through the miraculous 1988 Dodgers season, when I turned eighteen. But once I started work and especially after I graduated from high school, I found myself with much less time to devote to the sport. Sure, I might check in on how a team is doing from time to time and who are the stat leaders, but I don't listen to virtually every game of my team, scour stats on summer days, or spend those days playing simulation games. As such, players come and go and I know nothing of them. This means, that outside of Jason Giambi, Tim Hudson, Barry Zito, and Nick Swisher, I knew virtually none of the players discussed in this book. And even of the four mentioned, I knew almost nothing of them, other than that they were for a while very good players. I found myself, as such, looking up some of the other players Lewis writes about.

The essence of the book is an attempt to answer how it is that the A's of the early 2000s, one of the cheapest teams in the sport, managed to put up teams that were constant winners. The answer is, of course, to any familiar with what has become standard now in the stport, by paying attention to statistics that others aren't. Things like batting average, for example, really aren't as important as on base percentage. ERA isn't as important as walk-to-strike ratio or homers pet batters. It's these sort of stats that the A's started recruiting with and building a team around. Such was essential, because a poor team like the A's can't afford to keep players like Jason Giambi, who can hit for power and average, so instead one gathers nonnames who actually do significant things.

Beane was apparently an incredible athlete and a potentially great player, but his major league career never panned out. The issue for him was psychological. He couldn't deal with getting out. The game is as much mental as physical. As a result, he floundered, until one day he quit—or sort of did. He walked from the clubhouse into the back office and asked instead to work there, which is odd coming from a relatively young player.

Thereafter, we learn about Bill James and his baseball writing. We learn about why the A's don't run. We learn about various players the A's recruited, such as the catcher Jeremy Brown (an on-base machine who is otherwise not that impressive and thus of no interest to other teams) or the pitcher Chad Bradford (whose low velocity and weird delivery disinterested other teams, despite statistical major- and mostly minor-league success, but whose extremely high groundball rate was of particular interest to the A's). We see how Beane goes about trading with other teams and drafting players, and how his success has meant that he's had to find ways to do so deviously such that teams don't realize who he's really after and thus raise the price.

Lewis's book is a throwback in a way, to a time when the sport was first discovering the more efficient way of operating. Teams like the A's and Rays could still take advantage. I'm not sure that's as much the case anymore, as teams like the Dodgers have both the money and the brains now, and it's sad really. In addition, the focus on stats has taken away for many teams things like the steal and encouraged things like the shift, making for more predictable play. Pro baseball has attempted to adjust the rules, making larger bases, taking away the shift as a legal move, as to bring some things back, but at the same time, it's also encouraged more homers and jettisoned pitchers batting such that to one who enjoys the strategy element of the sport, it seems less interesting than it once did.