I’m currently enrolled in a graduate course called The Bible as Literature. Because I am excessively inquisitive, I have taken to attending my professor’s office hours before class to deal with a handful of my questions, so as to avoid derailing class discussion over pet-peculiarities.
Yesterday, I brought in a passage I wanted to discuss with him in more detail. It comes from Joshua 5:13-15:
Now when Joshua was near Jericho, he looked up and saw a man standing in front of him, grasping a naked sword. Joshua walked towards him and said to him, ‘Are you on our side or on that of our enemies?’ He replied, ‘On neither side. I have come now as the captain of the army of Yahweh.’ Joshua fell on his face to the ground, worshiping him, and said, ‘What has my Lord to say to his servant? The captain of the army of Yahweh answered Joshua, ‘Take your sandals off your feet, for the place where you are standing is holy.’ And Joshua did so.*
The scene is reminiscent of Moses and the burning bush (Exodus 3:1-6), but also of the many scenes that involve a test of faith before going on a mission (Genesis 32:23-33, Exodus 4:24-26).
During this discussion, I brought up a detail that seemed odd to me—which I then realized was the result of a mis-reading, not a point in the text. I had read that both the man and his sword were naked, instead of realizing that the man wasn’t naked and the sword was unsheathed. We laughed over my error (and possibly wishful thinking) and moved on.
Nevertheless, once I had drawn that image of a naked man with a sword, it was permanently lodged in my brain every time I read the passage. I told my professor, “that image, however falsely acquired, is now implanted in my brain. All I see is a naked man, looking fierce and brutal and barbaric.”
My professor laughed, “I think you’re revealing something about yourself now.”
I shot back, “I didn’t say it was an attractive image!”
*The New Jerusalem Bible. New York: Doubleday, 1990. Print.
A few months ago, I found this ultrasound photo taken while my mother was pregnant with me. I scanned it and put it in a card I made for her for mother’s day.
Summer Reading List
*Edward Hoeppner: Echoes and Moving Fields
*e. e. cummings: Complete Poems
*W. S. Merwin: The First Four Books of Poems and The Second Four Books of Poems
*John Ashbery: Collected Poems
*C. L. Barney Dews and Carolyn Leste Law: This Fine Place So Far From Home: Voices of Academics from the Working Class
*Gertrude Stein: Portraits and Prayers
*Alexander Irwin: Saints of the Impossible: Bataille, Weil, and the Politics of the Sacred
*ed. Christopher Beach: Artifice and Indeterminacy: An Anthology of New Poetics
*Jorie Graham: Hybrids of Plants and Ghosts
*Charles Altieri: Painterly Abstraction in Modernist American Poetry and The Art of Twentieth Century American Poetry
*Jonathan Levin: The Poetics of Transition
*Timothy Steele: Missing Measures: Modern Poetry and the Revolt Against Meter
*Anne Carson: Decreation
*Plato: Phaedrus
*John Milton: Paradise Lost
*Longinus: On Sublimity
*Sir Philip Sidney: The Defence of Poesy
*Edmund Burke: A Philosophical Enquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful
*Kay Ryan: The Best of It: New and Selected Poems
*Percy Bysshe Shelley: A Defence of Poetry
*Edgar Allan Poe: “The Philosophy of Composition”
*Matthew Arnold: Selections
*Stephane Mallarme: “Crisis in Poetry”
*Ferdinand De Saussure: Selections
*Foucault: Archaeology of Knowledge, Discipline and Punish, and History of Sexuality
*Martin Heidegger: “Language” and Poetry, Language, Thought
*Erich Auerbach: Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature
*Edmund Wilson: “The Historical Interpretation of Literature”
*Roman Jakobson: The Poetry of Grammar and the Grammar of Poetry
*Jean-Paul Sartre: “What is Literature?” and “Why Write?”
*Simone de Beauvoir: “Myth and Reality”
*J. L. Austin: How to Do Things with Words
*Paul de Man: “Semiology and Rhetoric”
*Jean-Francois Lyotard: “Defining the Postmodern”
*Wolfgang Iser: “Interaction Between Text and Reader”
*Harold Bloom: The Anxiety of Influence
*Judith Halbertstam: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: Men, Women, and Masculinity
*William James: Pragmatism
*Jacques Derrida: Writing and Difference
*Gilles Deleuze: Difference and Repetition
*D. J. Allerton: Essentials of Grammatical Theory
*Otto Jespersen: The Philosophy of Grammar
*Herman Melville: Moby Dick
*Walt Whitman: Leaves of Grass
Saw a performance by Complexions Contemporary Ballet this past weekend in Detroit. Absolutely beautiful. Their bodies move like magic.
The month after the month they say is cruel
is and is not.
Source: proustitute
I alternate living in two different houses, in two different cities. One is tucked away in the woods. In the morning, I wake up to the song of mourning doves.
A nice note from one of the students in the class I teach!
I scanned some of my pressed flowers.
I’m so happy spring is here. That there’s sounds in the trees again, that there’s this cacophony of smells. Everything feels alive and vibrant.
So once upon a time man lived in harmony with his fellows and his surroundings. All men shared a perspective of the world that went unchallenged—a true picture of reality—, and each man felt at home. Man, society, and environment comprised a unified continuum.
I mean, except for all those queer barbarians.
I kept reading for a while to make sure it wasn’t satire; nope, he’s serious.
