Against The Day
I finished Against the Day. Head spinning like a surrealist's kaleidoscope, I wandered into the Pig and sat on the deck, smoking furiously, mostly silent, thinking about grace, the electromagnetic spectrum, defenseless families consigned to misery by wicked wealthy men, silver-nitrate photography, quaternions and the mathematics of four dimensions, dirigibles, the Ludlow Massacre, star-crossed lovers, Bosnian ghosts, death rays, the White City, Minkowskian space-time, Nagant 8mm revolvers, bilocation, the Great Game, the set of all sets that are not members of themselves, grim long-riders crossing death-haunted mountains in winter, Nikola Tesla, dynamite and its many practical uses, the Hallucinati, non-Euclidian geometries, passion and its inevitable cessation, the Golden City Lost To History And Time, transnational blood vendettas, Mysterious Bob Meldrum, the E region, Bela Lugosi, tunnel rats, the Ace of Spies, mayonnaise, vector space, Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his regrettable self-insertions into European history, calcite, simultaneity, the Tunguska Event, tesseracts, the Mexican Revolution, the direction of "remembering," penance and redemption, colliding parallel universes, multiple copulatory combinations I am unlikely to experience first-hand, infernal machines, Philip Marlowe's mean streets, Third Ypres, an elegaic Chopin nocturne plinked upon a ukulele, the aether, girls with wings, serial killers, the birth of the movies, a dog reading The Princess Casamassima and [much more][1] zooming through, over and around me like dark jangly radiation from an extradimensional star as yet unknown to astronomers (the Pynchon Effect being not unlike the late stages of an alpha-o trip, vivid and engrossing but prickly, filled w/ low-level anxiety, occasional tremors, intermittent double-refraction, unregistered colors and so forth), and thus was momentarily unmanned when a woman of more than casual interest to me appeared out of the darkness, seeming to step from the very pages of the book, I having attached her dark and mysterious beauty to the novel's Yashmeen Halfcourt. Quite unsettling.The Pig, after all, is exactly the kind of place one would expect to find le vrai Yashmeen, and in that first disassociated moment, trapped in the novel and half-convinced that I was out-of-phase w/ my own world line, I thought of Vienna and almost blurted out: "No matter what, don't go to the Excelsior Hotel. No matter what...."--This sort of thing has happened before. I read Gravity's Rainbow, the title of which refers to the arc of the trajectory of a ballistic missile, while underwater on a nuclear submarine carrying nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles. Of course my head exploded.--It's good to be back. [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstruse_topics_in_Pynchon%27s_Against_the_Day
Bailey
I didn't go to the scene, about an hour away in neighboring Park County. Instead I went to the radio station, called our sheriff to find out if Park County authorities had requested assistance from the Summit County SWAT team (they had not), and then hunkered down on the wire and the television and watched the standoff unfold.I didn't see many mistakes. It is always preferable to wait out situations like this one, and that's exactly what the Park County sheriff tried to do, but in this case the gunman imposed a hard four p.m. deadline, and the tactical situation precluded any attempt to deploy less-than-lethal force. Questions will be asked about it came to pass that the gunman had time to fire at the police officers, shoot a hostage and then shoot himself as the tac team was making a hard entry, but this is--God help us--an academic question; he barricaded himself in the classroom and was using his two remaining hostages as human shields, which guaranteed that he had time to fire at the police and shoot at least one student no matter what the tac team did. In any event he was a dead man the instant he pulled the trigger, whether he did himself in or fell in a rain of police .223. The other hostage was not injured during the entry.My media colleagues did as well as humans can be expected to do under the circumstances. Accurate data is at a premium during incidents such as this. There were a few cases in which broadcast reporters passed along erroneous information, but these were minor and in each the reporters qualified their reporting, stressing the fluid state of the emergency, the rapidly changing circumstances, the tenative nature of what little information was available. Associated Press did a tremendous job, as did Denver's NBC affiliate, KUSA-TV. (Full disclosure: My employer is a former KUSA anchor, and both she and her husband, a former KUSA general manager, continue to have a relationship w/ the station, although I know none of the details. I have no relationship w/ KUSA.) AP beat everyone on the gunman's death by about 10 minutes, which is the equivalent of about a century in modern media-time.I'm a little distressed by the repeated references to the Columbine massacre that keep popping up in the national coverage, such as this, from yesterday's first AP update: "The lines of students fleeing the high school and middle school, the bomb squads and the frantic parents scrambling to find their loved ones evoked memories of the Columbine attack, where two students killed 13 people before taking their own lives." Columbine High School is less than an hour from Platte Canyon High School, so I suppose this is inevitable, but in many ways what happened at Bailey was the anti-Columbine. The officers who arrived first at the scene did not waste time establishing a perimeter or setting up a command post; instead they immediately entered the school and moved toward the sound of gunfire. The school was quickly and expertly evacuated, which was possible in part because the school was designed after Columbine and offers intruders limited sight-lines and lines-of-fire. The gunman was contained to a single room, and the police immediately opened up a dialogue. The gunman refused a throw-phone, communicating instead through one of his hostages, and over a period of hours the police negotiators convinced him to release four of the six hostages. Thirteen innocent people died at Columbine. One innocent person died at Bailey. This was no Columbine.The more comparable prior incident occurred in Chicago in 1966, when a man named Richard Speck invaded a nursing dormitory and spent a night raping and murdering eight student nurses. All but one of Speck's victims died. All but one of the victims in Bailey survived. The difference can be attributed to the professionalism and energy of the law enforcement response in this case. The Park County Sheriff's Office and the Jefferson County SWAT team will be replaying this tape for a long time, and so will every other agency in Colorado, but this time the cops did just about everything right.Sometimes you can do everything right and still lose people.
and 2 others
Nothing special
Vacation and some personal mandatory formations have kept me off the boards, but this week I'll return to my New Testament reading w/ Second Thessalonians.--On the basis of sincere assurances from people I trust, I am provisionally assuming that Phil Cauthon really exists. Phil and I have a relationship right out of The Twilight Zone. Phil has been my editor for something like three years, and I've never met the man. I was determined to hook up w/ him when back in town a couple of weeks ago--but he was on his honeymoon (congratulations!). I visited the offices of Lawrence.com while I was in town and received a guided tour from Mssrs Ryan and vonHolten, who were kind enough to point out Phil's desk. I even visited Phil's house, which was under the watchful eye of Tom King while Phil was out of town. (Phil's house is vy cool, and his back yard rocks.) I bounced back into Lawrence last weekend for an unscheduled 36-hour crash visit, but I had a lot on my plate and couldn't get loose for a meeting. Many thanks to the J-W and l.com staff for taking time out of their busy day to show me around their remarkable operation.--I attended one of Tom's [School Nights][1], now held at Fatso's. Tons o' fun even at 90 degrees. I was especially impressed by Log Lady, an honest-to-God power trio featuring a guitar player who occasionally soared into Jeff Beck territory. Keep an ear out.--Vacation interrupted a protracted silent film binge that started w/ [LES VAMPIRES][2], an eight-hour serial thriller from France directed by Louis Feulliade in 1915. Fabulous. At the moment I'm watching John Gilbert and Greta Garbo fall in love in [FLESH AND THE DEVIL][3]. I just finished reading THE HAUNTED SCREEN, by Lotte Eisner; it's one of those books I've been reading about since I was a kid. Ms. Eisner fully lived up to her lofty reputation. No one can displace Pauline Kael from first place in my cinema heart, but Eisner is now a close second. I'm thinking about an essay devoted to expressionism in early German film.--Snow in Sunday's forecast failed to materialize, but there's frost on my car when I leave for work in the morning. It's s'posed to warm up in the next few days, but the aspen have started to turn. My skier buddies are starting to salivate. We may not see last season's 400 inches, but the weather gurus say we'll see a lot. It looks like summer (such as it was) is over. [1]: http://www.myspace.com/schoolnight [2]: http://www.coolfrenchcomics.com/vampires.htm [3]: http://www.billyates.com/navarro/reviews/fleshanddevil.shtml
a few days in lawrence
Comeau and Lazz were up for the weekend, and this morning, while Comeau was attending to some business, Shib and Lazz and I drove to Hot Sulpher Springs for a soak. It's a spectacular drive, classic Colorado Rockies scenery, towering jagged mountains, belts of tall aspen, the river meandering through green valleys, bluebird skies. "It's not quite a Kansas country road," Shib said."Not quite," said Lazz. "But it's still vy nice."Beginning this afternoon and for the next several days I can be reached at the BP. Stop by and say hi.
p15: The Letter of James
[The Letter of James][1] is so saturated w/ Judaism that Martin Luther thought it ought to be excluded from the canon. In particular James 2:24--"You see that a man is justified by works and not by faith alone"--has always been a problematic text for Pauline theologians.James, Hebrews and the Gospel according to Matthew are the documentary artifacts of the community usually referred to as "Jewish Christianity," those first converts who were, like Jesus, observant Jews, and remained observant even after the announcement of the Kingdom of God. Several such communities, called by various names--Ebionites, Nazoreans etc.--are mentioned in early texts, and seem to have coexisted w/ several apocalyptic Jewish sects that stressed purity, righteousness and the coming Kingdom. Over a period of about 70 years, from 65 CE to 135 CE, these communities (and most of the Jewish population of Judea) were killed or driven into exile by an empire that lost patience w/ the violent politics of Judea. The catastrophic events of that time bear considerable responsibility for the spotty nature of the surviving documentary record, and ensured that at the end of the day Pauline Christianity would have the evangelical field largely to itself.-- [Popular New Testament scholarship][2] is a lot of fun. It's vy tendentious, as good scholarship often is, and in the normal course of things each of the leading lights of the discipline is associated w/ a particular interpretation of the data, which they defend against attacks from other scholars holding differing opinions, often w/ great verve and occasionally w/ a snarl. I have but dipped my toe into this rich pool of knowledge, but it doesn't take long to get a handle on the various factions and arguments.The most balanced and enjoyable of the books I've read is [From Jesus to Christianity: How Four Generations of Visionaries & Storytellers Created the New Testament and Christian Faith][3], by L. Michael White, the Classics and Christian Origins chair at the University of Texas. White is thoroughly mainstream. He dates late--he puts many essential Christian texts in the first half of the second century--and he has his doubts about the authorship of the Pauline corpus outside Romans, Galatians, and the two Corinthian letters, but he cites conservative scholars w/ approval and his book shows great respect for the archeological data and great respect for the texts. Best of all, From Jesus to Christianity is refreshingly free of the controversialist polemic that's so much a part of the discipline. Highly recommended as an overview of a rapidly changing field.And then there is Robert Eisenman's massive [James the Brother of Jesus: The Key to Unlocking the Secrets of Early Christianity and the Dead Sea Scrolls][4]. Eisenman is a celebrated scholar of the [Dead Sea Scrolls][5], the rich trove of ancient texts discovered near Qumran, on the northwest shore of the Dead Sea. Among the scrolls are texts from every book of the Tanakh--the Hebrew Bible--except Esther and Nehemiah, along w/ a number of noncanonical texts such as the Book of Enoch. Also discovered in the caves near Qumran were a number of previously unknown documents, some of them apparently related to a separatist Jewish sectarian community commonly thought to be Essene; these scrolls include the "Community Rule," the "War Scroll" and the "Damascus Document." These texts do not identify their authors or intended audience, which has left much room for debate. For many years the scrolls were kept secret, under the control of a small group of aging bureau-scholars who refused access to most outsiders. Eisenman played a major role in making the scrolls public, for which he deserves thanks from the academy and from the whole world.[Eisenman][6] is among the most prominent controversialists in New Testament studies. He thinks the first Christian community in Jerusalem was a legalistic, nationalistic, Temple-centric variant of Judaism led by James, the brother of Jesus, in perpetual conflict w/ the assimilationist Herodian establishment, and that James' assassination in the mid-60s CE sparked the Jewish Revolt that led to the sack of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Temple. It is this doctrinaire James, and this xenophobic (and ultimately revolutionary) community, that Eisenman thinks were Paul's opponents. This position necessarily implies a schism in the Jerusalem Christian community in the mid-60s, as tradition holds that Christians abandoned the city to seek refuge in Pella in the run-up to war. Under Eisenman's interpretation, another part of that Christian community, under the leadership of James and his successors, remained in Jerusalem to face the Romans.I think Eisenman makes a plausible case for a Jamesian Christian community in Jerusalem, and had he stopped at that, his book would not be the lightning rod it is. But Eisenman goes much further. Because he dates the Dead Sea Scrolls later than the current scholarly consensus and believes that some of the material is related to early Christianity, Eisenman draws repeated comparison between the figure of James and that of the "Teacher of Righteousness" in the Scrolls. Most scholars disagree w/ the dating and the identification. Eisenman insists that his identification of a Jamesian Christian community in Jerusalem is independent of theory that some of the Scrolls describe that community, and that may be, but his book is so saturated w/ Qumran citations and Scrolls exegesis that it's nearly impossible to separate his theory about James from his theory about the Scrolls.James the Brother of Jesus is the first of what has been announced as two books discussing Eisenman's theories regarding the composition and practices of the early Church. Presumably the second volume will specifically address issues only hinted at in the first, such as whether or not Eisenman believes that Paul is the "Spouter of Lies" attacked in some of the Qumran documents. In any event I hope the second book is more reader-friendly than the first, which is tortuously circuitous and extraordinarily repetitive. It is nonetheless a valuable, if occasionally maddening, discussion of the political and religious landscape of Judea in the first century.--The truth is we have little detailed information about the size, composition and politics of the first Christian community in Jerusalem, and not much more about the Jewish community. Some of the missing data fell victim to time (perishable media). Some of it was no doubt destroyed by later orthodoxy. But it ought not to be forgotten that a big chunk was certainly destroyed by the Romans. Those factors combined to produce one of the first consequential data extinctions on record. I am always optimistic that tomorrow will produce another buried jar, another codex in a bog, but at the end of the day we must accept that a substantial portion of the texts produced in the first century are gone forever, and will never be recovered.Popology suggests that early data extinctions are more far-reaching than later ones, and that the biggest one was probably that caused by the introduction of the printing press. It is nonetheless the case that the lacunae in the documentary record from the first century have proved to be of far more interest to scholars (of all varieties) than the lacunae in the fifteenth century record. Popologically speaking, the events in Judea in the first century are among the most significant events in the history of the species. [1]: http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?book_id=66&chapter=1&version=49 [2]: http://earlychristianwritings.com/theories.html [3]: http://www.harpercollins.com/book/index.aspx?isbn=9780060816100 [4]: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/other-editions/1842930265/ref=dp_ed_all/103-6541029-4603053?ie=UTF8 [5]: http://www.ibiblio.org/expo/deadsea.scrolls.exhibit/intro.html [6]: http://jmm.aaa.net.au/articles/15611.htm
p15: The Gospel according to Mark
I prefer the short ending, at 16:8.I'm inclined to accept the tradition that attributes [The Gospel according to Mark][1] to Peter's secretary, who is said to have here recorded Peter's teachings, taking "especial care, not to omit anything he had heard, and not to put anything fictitious into the statements."It's nice to at last encounter Jesus, not Paul's "Christ Jesus" but Jesus the man. Paul devotes no time to, and apparently has no interest in, the flesh-and-blood Jesus who rattled the towers of Jerusalem. Peter, I suspect, had little time for, and no interest in, Paul's Hellenized Christ. I'm w/ Peter.Mark's is the only gospel account that strikes me, as a reader, as coming from an eyewitness to the events described. Mark's gospel is best described by a word that didn't exist when Mark wrote--it's hallucinatory, and surely Peter would've seized upon that word to describe the extraordinary events that turned his world topsy-turvy. One second he's an illiterate Jewish fisherman in Capernaum; the next he's been snatched up by an extraordinary teacher and miracle-worker who places himself and his followers in direct opposition to the powers that run Judea. I suspect none of this was in Peter's life-plan.Thus the absence of genealogy and infancy narrative, which would be of no interest to those who witnessed Jesus's miracles. I imagine Peter sitting on the ground outside the house of Lazarus, who has been dead for some time, who has, well, started to turn, and then Jesus appears and suddenly Lazarus bounces out of the house looking just fine, asking what he's missed while he was away, and of course the eyewitnesses to the event would be speechless, they would be thunderstruck. Were an historically minded onlooker to sit down next to Peter and say, "You know, Peter, Jesus can trace his lineage all the way back to--""Lineage? Lineage?! Did you see what he just did? Just now? DID YOU SEE THAT?!"Whether Jesus's public ministry lasted three years or 10 months (I prefer the latter), it must have been a rocket ride for those who followed him, a far more vivid, intense, disruptive, and yes, hallucinatory experience than the conversion experiences of all those who came later, and processing those events must have been the principal preoccupation of the first disciples for the rest of their lives. It is one thing to learn of the feeding of the multitudes second-hand, and quite another to actually see the bottomless baskets of fish and jars of wine. It is one thing to hear the arrest and crucifixion preached, and quite another to personally participate in those events. Luke's gospel is the sanitized, mannered version of the story, a version told by someone who admittedly wasn't there and who naturally attempts to present his account in the most comprehensible, coherent fashion possible. Mark's gospel is the opposite, a first-hand recollection of kaleidescopic, world-transformative upheaval that makes vy little conventional sense--just as the events of Jesus's public ministry must have made vy little sense to those who witnessed them.--Peter is my favorite character in the New Testament. The texts make him out to be a faithless dunce, which I don't believe for a minute. Peter's problem was that he thought about things too much--thus the incident on the storm-tossed waters. He is said to have been the first Christian leader in Antioch. It was probably while he was at Antioch that he learned to read. It was also probably at Antioch that he first encountered Paul.Peter was the man in the middle, equipoised between Paul and James, the one preaching an unrecognizable, antisemitic, assimilationist "Christ Jesus," the other far gone in eschatalogical Jewish nationalism, both of them manic latecomers to the ministry Peter served from the beginning. I imagine that the Jerusalem Council was like any other meeting of opposing factions, that both Paul and James walked out of the room sincerely convinced their personal position carried the day, and that only Peter was clear-eyed enough to realize that the Council was an utter failure, and that no agreement had been reached or even was possible. The man in the middle was the perfect man to send to cosmopolitan Rome, where Paul's theology would seem just another magical mystery tour and James' revolutionary nationalism would sound quaint and a little silly. I have no doubt Peter hated the whole business.Hellenistic Pauline theology eventually triumphed in Rome, but there's no evidence that Paul himself did, or even that he found much of a welcome in the city; his prison letters suggest he was largely ignored by Rome's Christian community. The tradition of Paul's martyrdom under Nero is thin; if he was indeed executed, it appears to have caused hardly a ripple in the local church. It seems just as likely that Paul was released, and that the Petrine community in Rome gave him a hearty slap on the back and a ticket to Spain. If Peter had a sense of humor--and I can't imagine him surviving as long as he did w/out one--he might have added, "Don't forget to write." The Petrine tradition in Rome is much stronger and includes a site revered as Peter's tomb since the second century. Even the Vatican's own archeologists seemed a bit stunned at the discovery."Alienation" is thought to be the distinguishing postmodern sensibility, but surely Peter was completely alienated in Rome, and I imagine his alienation grew more severe the longer he was there. What had this sprawling, dirty, overpopulated hive to do w/ that momentous, long-ago year in Galilee and Jerusalem? What had this cynical, corrupt Empire to do w/ the good news preached by the Son of Man in Judea? I am sure that more than once Peter looked over the filthy, stinking, ever-busy city and longed for summer days in Capernaum, his boat and his nets and his family. --For about the past century, a large majority of biblical scholars have held that this is the first of the four canonical gospels to be written. Virtually the entire Gospel according to Mark is included in Matthew, often verbatim, and more than half is included in Luke. Mark's appears to be the ur-Gospel.Mark exhibits the highest incidence of textual variants in the New Testament manuscripts--I think it's something like 10 per page, about half again as high as the next highest book. This speaks to a vy early date, as texts are much more fluid before they are canonized than afterward. It's even possible to argue that Mark dates to the 40s; so argues [Dr. Wallace][2]. Conventional dating puts Mark right at 70 CE or a little later, the year X Legion took Jerusalem, but this dating is based almost entirely on the famous paranthetical attached to the Little Apocalypse in Chapter 13, where it seems that Mark himself peeks out from behind the authorial screen. Jesus is speaking:13:14 But when you see the ABOMINATION OF DESOLATION standing where it should not be (let the reader understand), then those who are in Judea must flee to the mountains._Convention holds that "abomination of desolation," a citation from the Book of Daniel, refers to the destruction of the Second Temple and the raising of the X Legion's standards in the Holy of Holies, and if that is the case, then "(let the reader understand)," if it was written by the author of the Gospel, is most naturally read as a reference to the fact that the prophecy has been fulfilled, as indeed it was in 70 CE. But no one is quite certain what "abomination of desolation" means, and the paranthetical may well have been a later interpolation.I think that the initial impetus behind _Mark was the appearance of Paul's Letter to the Romans, which in Rome could easily have been read as a challenge to Peter's authority. Peter's associates, if not Peter himself, would've seen the need for a countertext, and so I think the original intention was to collect and publish Peter's memoir in the capital. That apparently did not happen, at least right away, because there is no evidence that Clement, writing from Rome in c.95 CE, had before him a copy of Mark, or even knowledge that the text existed. Thus it seems most likely to me that Mark began collecting his materials in the late 50s, when Paul's letter was circulating in the capital, but was prevented from completing his gospel by the tumultous events that overtook Rome and the Christians in the city in the early 60s, not least of which was the Great Fire of 64 CE and the Neronian persecution that followed it. All of this is nothing but my speculation.Thanks to Bill I am now familiar w/ the traditions that place Mark in Alexandria in the 60s. Alexandria was Rome's brain, a city filled w/ scribes, home of the largest library in antiquity. If Mark published his gospel in Alexandria, he would be required by law to deposit a copy of it w/ the library, which would have made the text available to the most educated audience in antiquity and done much to transmit the Christian message throughout the literate world.--Which was big, but not all that big. Prolly a million people tops.The bandwidth equation as previously presented understates the bandwidth inventories in the examples cited because the equation isn't complete. Thus "n," representing network size, is actually a sum: (kilometers of road + km of sealanes + km of railroad + km telegraph wire + km of fiber-optic cable....), which suggests that the numbers for the contemporary US and for Lawrence are too small by prolly an order of magnitude, given the density of the modern network.Further, "L," the multiplier to account for data storage capacity, is also a sum of multiple factors: The network contains data storage devices and repeaters, and repeaters, like storage devices, are network accelerators that increase network performance. Thus in antiquity L = (libraries + scribes). W/ the introduction of printing, L = (libraries + printing presses). In the Digital Age, L = (number-of-hard-drives).One additional modification is required to ensure that the formula provides a baseline for low-bandwidth illiterate societies, which are punished w/ an inventory of zero bandwidth in the above construction because they lack libraries or other high-capacity storage devices. Where L = 0, bandwidth = 0, and we know that illiterate societies possessed bandwidth. Therefore the expanded factor must be (L+1).Thus if we assume that the pre-Columbian indigenous population of North America was 50 million, and that population possessed 50,000 km of trails but no libraries, we see thatb = (0+1)(50,000/50,000) = 1.0 bandsMoreover the equation permits us to arbitrarily define the population size subject to analysis. It may be that native Americans possessed a bandwidth inventory of only one band, but that is a continental figure. A group of villages w/ a total population of 2,000 that controls 50 kilometers of trails would possess a local bandwidth of (50/2) = 25 bands.What follows is a bit of a mess, as my computer doesn't support Equation Editor and lawrence.com doesn't support mathematical notation. Apologies all around. Anyway....Given the above modifications, the bandwidth equation is now:b = (L1+L2+L3...+1)[(n1+n2+n3...)/p]If we assume 1,000 scribes in the Empire and apply the modified equation to Rome, the result is:b = (50 libraries + 1,000 scribes)(90,000/50,000) = 1,890 bands = 1.9 kbands.This is a much more realistic number for the largest bandwidth inventory in antiquity.--Earlier I described culture as an ever-growing sea. If we run history backwards, we can watch that cultural expansion in reverse, and if we run it back far enough, we eventually reach a period in antiquity where our sea is nothing more than a few unconnected lakes. In each lake there are a few referents that persist throughout the historical expansion, and a great many more referents that (to stretch the metaphor) die off before the lakes join. I think Rome's culture is the product of the first significant joining of the lakes; the Empire is the origin of most of the cultural sea in which we swim today.In this respect I think the theory (at last) holds up pretty well. Popology posits that there exists some point in cultural history at which the mediaverse is sufficiently dense to allow important texts some chance of survival, and I think that point is probably the first century Empire. Nearly every text we possess dated from before the common era was conserved by Rome.Phaps the best examples of the dicey odds of survival facing manuscripts from before the common era is offered by Plato and Aristotle. In terms of their contribution to Western culture, the two great Greek philosophers are almost certainly the most significant writers in history, but that we possess any part of their work is almost accidental. Ancient Athens, home of Plato's Academy and Aristotle's Lyceum, failed to conserve the writings of Plato and nearly lost all of Aristotle's work, which spent a century locked away in a moldy cave before a BCE book collector found them and returned them to circulation. Sulla transported those scrolls to Rome after the conquest of Athens in the first century BCE. Plato was altogether lost to antiquity and returns to the historical record only after his work was redicovered in the East during the medieval period.Such losses continued under the Empire, but the imperial practice of building libraries and copying texts increased the liklihood that a book would survive. The destruction of Alexandria's Great Library, which apparently occurred in stages and was principally due to the fact that thousands of papyri scrolls were a fire waiting to happen, illustrates the continuing threat that faced all early documents, but beginning in the first century I think we begin to see an increase in conservation rate.Conservation rate can be approximated by dividing the number of surviving texts by the number of total cited texts (most of which are lost). One object of historical popology is to compare conservation rate w/ bandwidth inventory. I am convinced that even in antiquity conservation rate is directly related to bandwidth inventory, and I suspect that we'd see a marked increase in conservation rate at about two kilobands of bandwidth. [1]: http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?book_id=48&chapter=1&version=49 [2]: http://www.bible.org/page.asp?page_id=1093
Syd Barrett
[Syd Barrett][1] died Friday. The cause of death is described as "diabetes-related." He was 60, a fact that astonishes me. I allowed for the passage of years w/ the rest of the band, but in my mind Syd never aged. Shine on you crazy diamond. [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syd_Barrett
p15: Hebrews
Authorship of [Letter to the Hebrews][1] has been disputed from the earliest days of Christianity, largely because the Letter makes no authorial claim. Daniel Wallace has proposed an elegant popological explanation for the lack of attribution. This from [Wallace's Introduction][2]:The author of this work does not state his name, though he assumes that the audience knows him (cf. 13:19, 22, 23). Most likely, the reason the author's name is not appended is because this epistle was published on a scroll. Ancient papyrus scrolls frequently listed author and addressee on the verso side, while the text was written on the recto side. If this letter was written in such a manner, it is easy to see how the author/addressee would not have been copied; in fact, such a "label" could easily have been lost, smudged, etc., shortly after reaching its destination._It was Origen, the first and phaps greatest theologian of early Christianity, who first threw up his hands and said that the author of _Hebrews is known only to God. Hebrews is said to be written in the most refined Greek in the New Testament. It contains a large number of citations from the Septuagint that suggest the writer had a copy at hand; the citations are generally more precise than those found in the other letters. The reference to Timothy suggests a member of Paul's circle, which contained several evangelists--Barnabas, Apollos, Priscilla, etc.--who seem to have maintained close contacts w/ mainstream Judaism; all of them have been suggested as possible authors. (Martin Luther liked Barnabas.) Whoever the author, he or she was an educated scholar by the standards of the time.It seems to me self-evident that the writer is addressing a Jewish audience, but everything about Hebrews, including its destination and audience, is in dispute, and [Edgar Goodspeed][3] rejects a primarily Jewish audience and argues instead that the letter was intended for the church at Rome. Dr. Wallace prefers Corinth or one of the other Aegean churches. --I've received a lot of feedback in the past few weeks, and one common note has been concern that the purely popological parts of these posts (say that five times fast) are too dense. I quite agree, and am working toward a clearer exposition, but that will be cold comfort for readers who make it through what follows here. Apologies in advance for the next couple posts.The sea provides a useful metaphor for culture. Bandwidth is the water; culture is all the marvelous, infinitely varied things that live in it. Counting the fish--referents--in the cultural sea is straightforward, esp in the modern mediaverse. ("World Cup final" = 14.9 million). But how big is the sea? Can bandwidth be meaningfully quantified and compared across cultures? I think so.We begin by defining bandwidth as unit network size per unit population.Let's arbitrarily define bandwidth in units, "bands" (b), such that one band equals one meter of road per person.Or, one band = 1,000 people connected by one kilometer of road, or 1,000 people per kilometer of network. Thusbandwidth = b = (n/p)where n is the network size and p is the population in thousands.That's out base unit. The conventional numbers for the first century Empire assert that it contained about 55 million people and about 85,000 kilometers of roads; we'll call it 90,000 kilometers to account for the sealanes. 55 million people equals 55,000 groups of 1,000 people, so our network/population ratio for basic bandwidth in the Empire is 90,000/50,000, which tells us that the Empire possessed about 1.8 bands of bandwidth.b = (90,000/50,000) = 1.8 bandsOr at least that would be the Empire's bandwidth inventory if its data network consisted solely of people and roads--but that's not the case. Networks also include data storage devices (archives, libraries, hard drives etc.) Adding a storage device substantially juices the network, the result is a product, not a sum, and so we multiply our basic bandwidth unit by the number of storage devices on the network. The first and most important external storage devices adopted by humans were libraries, so I call the multiplier "L." Thusb = L(n/p)where L is the number of storage devices on the network.I'll pull a number out of the air and say the Empire contained 50 libraries (several sources mention that Rome itself contained about 30 libraries just before the barbarian invasions) Thus the Empire's bandwidth isb = L(n/p) = 50(90,000/50,000) = 90 bands.It's a rough-and-ready metric, but it (more or less) holds up across cultures and eras. Thus:** Rome built about 12,500 kilometers of road in Britain, which had a population of about 3.5 million people and phaps 5 libraries. Thus the bandwidth inventory in Roman Britain wasb = L(n/p) = 5(12,500/3,500) = 18 bands England in 1770 possessed about 50,000 kilometers of roads and sealanes and a population of about 7 million; lets assume 200 libraries:b = L(n/p) = 200(50,000/7,000) = 1,425 bands, or 1.4 kilobands.** The US in 1910: 92 million people, 5 million kilometers of network, call it 700 libraries:b = L(n/p) = 700(5,000,000/92,000) = 38,043 = 38 kbands The US today, population 300,000,000, 6.5 million kilometers of network, call it 100 million computers:b = L(n/p) = 100,000,000(6,500,000/300,000) = 2.2 billion bands, or 2.2 gigabands.* The present population of Lawrence is about 75,000 people. If we assume the city contains 100 kilometers of roads and 10,000 hard drives, our formula tells us b = 10,000(100/75) = 13,333.333...Lawrence possesses a bandwidth inventory of about 13 kilobands, or about 70 times more bandwidth than the whole Roman Empire.--As we'll see, the basic equation can be considerably improved, even tailored for different cultures and different levels of technology. [1]: http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?book_id=65&chapter=1&version=49 [2]: http://www.bible.org/page.asp?page_id=1360 [3]: http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/goodspeed/ch16.html
p15: Colossians
The [Letter to the Colossians][1] is usually grouped w/ Philemon and Ephesians. The letters refer to the same people, and Ephesians reproduces multiple verses from Colossians. In Colossians Paul is addressing a church in a city he has not visited. The Christian community in Colossae was founded by Epaphras, one of Paul's disciples. It seems that now the community is confronted w/ new teachers who are delivering a variant Christian message, and presumably Epaphras asked Paul to send along a letter of support for orthodox teachings. That Paul is sending instruction to a community he never visited is a perfect example of the unprecedented documentary model of organization so prominent in early Christianity.Significant verse:Col 4:16: When this letter is read among you, have it also read in the church of the Laodiceans; and you, for your part read my letter that is coming from Laodicea._Laodicea is one of those maddening names from antiquity that, like "Antioch" and "Alexandria," is applied to [several places][2] at once--Laodice was the beloved of a Seleucid king who apparently named a city after his wife every time they made up after a fight--but in this case we are almost certain that the Laodicea referred to is [a city in Anatolia on the Lycus River][3] not far from Colossae. Laodicea is one of the celebrated Seven Churches in Asia to which John addresses _Revelation.Here we have a Pauline reference to a letter to the Laodiceans that seemingly has not survived. An apocryphal "Letter to the Laodiceans" popped in and out of the canon for a few centuries but has maintained only a small audience in the past 500 years. Many scholars consider Ephesians to be the lost letter to Laodicea, as several early mss of Ephesians omit the words "in Ephesus," on which the traditional attribution is based. It is nonetheless vy likely, given the difficult conditions of the time, that more than one Pauline letter failed to survive.At any rate here is the machine in action: Paul instructs the Colossians to read this letter in their churches and then forward it to Laodicea to be read in those churches. He has also sent a letter to Laodicea to be read in Laodicean churches, and instructed the Laodiceans to then forward it to Colossae for reading to the Colossians. This kind of circular distribution is the likely forerunner to an eventual collection of all the Pauline letters extant, and when the letters were finally collected, it was almost certainly in the form of a codex.--Codices start showing up in the documentary record in a big way in the early medieval period, but there are codex pages extant from the early Christian era and significant evidence that the codex was the preferred medium for early Christian writings. Early Christianity did not invent the codex--there are indications of occasional codices in the centuries before Christianity, and a charming (and phaps true) story about an impatient Julius Caesar, while on campaign in Gaul, fan-folding scrolls to make them easier to manage. But there is no evidence in the documentary record of any other organized group seizing upon the new medium w/ the alacrity that Christianity demonstrated.Thus John Dominic Crossan in [The Birth of Christianity][4] (1998):The Christian preference for the papyrus codex is very striking when its ratio of scroll to codex is contrasted w/ the ratio for pagan Greek literature in discoveries dated before the year 400 CE.... For pagan Greek literature, the ratio of scroll to codex is eight to one. For early Christian literature, it is almost the reverse. There the ratio of scroll to codex is one in seven. It is only in the 300s that the ratio of scroll to codex finally and irrevocably reverses itself in favor of the book format in Greek literature (scroll to codex is one to three). But even in the 200s [the] Christian ratio of scroll to codex was one to thirteen. The victory of codex over scroll happened only slowly and late for Greek literature but almost instantly and early for Christian literature._Crossan presents data compiled by the scholar Colin Roberts, who lists 14 manuscript fragments dated to the second century as the earliest witnesses to documentary Christianity. Twelve of those fragments are from codices; one of the remainder is written on the _reverse of a scroll, suggesting the use of what's available, not a choice of scroll over codex. [p. Oxy 405][5], a fragment of Irenaeus'Adversus Haereses dated c.190 CE, is the sole extant second-century Christian manuscript from a scroll.This is quite remarkable.The fragments also provide some remarkable evidence of the people who wrote them. [Paleographers][6], the scholars of antique handwriting, distinguish between "literary hands," the writing produced by professionally trained scribes, and "documentary hands," the writing produced by literate everyday people. ("Documentary" in this usage applies to all documents that are not literary texts.) Crossan again:Roberts described the authors of the items on his list as "far from unskilled," but [w/ three exceptions] they were "not trained in calligraphy and so not accustomed to writing books, though they were familiar w/ them; they employ what is basically a documentary hand but are at the same time aware that it is a book, not a document on which they are engaged. They are not personal or private hands; in most a degree of regularity and of clarity is aimed at and achieved. Such hands might be described as 'reformed documentary'.... Their writing is based, w/ some changes and a few exceptions, on the model of the documents, not on that of Greek classical manuscripts nor on that of the Graeco-Jewish tradition.... Behind the group of papyri is is not difficult to envisage the men familiar to us from the documentary papyri in the Arsinoite or Oxyrhyncus: tradesmen, farmers, minor government officials to whom knowledge of and writing in Greek was an essential skill, but who had few or no literary interests."_I think there are a couple of factors at work here. One is that a codex was apparently a lot cheaper than a scroll; literate Greeks and Romans looked down upon codicies as little more than scratchpads. But [codices offered a substantial bandwidth advantage over scrolls][7]. Scrolls were inscribed only on one side: the "back" side of the roll served as protection for the interior text when the scroll was furled. A codex provided double-sided pages, just like a book, and for a given sheet of papyrus doubled the available writing surface as compared to a scroll. Codices were almost certainly more common than scrolls in the realms of business and agriculture, and more familiar than scrolls to the first literate Gentile Christians.Thus first century documentary Christianity was created and promulgated not by professional scribes, trained scholars or priests, but by literate representatives of the common people. They selected against the high-falutin' and expensive scroll as their preferred medium, adopting instead the inexpensive and vastly more accessible codex. These same people are privately distributing their documents in an organized way throughout the Empire's urban centers. It was the first media revolution since the invention of writing. What happens when you throw a media revolution and no one comes?The Dark Ages.--One of the Things I Thought I Knew when I started this was that early Christianity led the way as the codex steamrollered the scroll in the first/second centuries. Not so. Christianity led the way, but hardly anyone followed for about 200 years. In this early Christianity is so far out in front of the cultural curve that it's hard to overstate the gap between the church and the empire at large. My favored description, that "Christianity got online before everyone else," hardly does it justice. Literate Christianity initiated a media revolution--and hardly anyone paid any attention. Had the culture of the empire embraced the unprecedented Christian model of popular documentary organization and distribution in the third century, the Dark Ages would've been considerably less dark.What's missing is popular literacy. That's in part because of bandwidth limitations; it would have been difficult (but not impossible) to initiate an empire-wide push for popular literacy in the third century, or for that matter in the tenth century. There existed no standardized training texts in sufficient quantity to reach out to millions of people, but such texts could have been created easily enough had the social elites of antiquity wished them created. They did not. So far as I can tell, education in the Empire was an urban, class-based privilege; a tiny fraction of the population was educated vy well in both Greek and Latin, and everyone else was consigned to the 95+ percent of the population that was illiterate.Early on, it appears that the thoroughly pagan nature of existing educational institutions alienated many early Christians. [_Brittanica][8] informs us that in the third century schoolteachers were denied baptism, which makes modern Christians shudder, but by the fourth century schools were well-integrated into Christian society and most of the schoolteachers were themselves Christians. And yet I can find no indication of a blooming documentary popular culture in the late Empire. It just didn't happen.At the moment I'm inclined to think that the relevant metric is per-capita literacy. The Empire contained something like one million literate subjects, which ain't hay; we ought to be able to make the game go w/ a million players. But those players are scattered across a population of 50-60 million, and the way the curve collapsed suggests that one million out of 50 million isn't enough. I'm poking around web sites looking for literacy data for the first five centuries of the common era, but so far I'm not having a lot of luck.In 50 years, sadly, literacy will likely not be a determinate popological variable. One doesn't have to be able to read to watch a movie or a TV show, and in another half-century the mediaverse will be even less reliant on text than it is now. But for the ages stretching from the invention of writing to just vy recently literacy was a necessary attribute for full cultural participation, and popular literacy was a vy spotty thing for much of that time. This sharply affects the applicability of the theory.At any rate the Empire's low per capita literacy rate and magnificent roads combine to create an unusual popological condition: a bandwidth surplus. In [Popology 10][9] I assert, "Bandwidth is where culture happens. Bandwidth is finite. Bandwidth always increases. Bandwidth is scarce. This is the lens through which popology views media, culture, history." From the introduction of the printing press until the end of time, those assertions are true. They are not true in antiquity. In the Roman Empire, great steaming piles o' bandwidth are lying around doing nothing. [1]: http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?book_id=58&chapter=1&version=49 [2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laodicea [3]: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/cgi-bin/ptext?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.04.0064&query=head%3D%236023 [4]: http://www.harpercollins.com/authorintro/catalog/book_xml.asp?isbn=0060616601 [5]: http://www.tyndale.cam.ac.uk/Tyndale/staff/Head/POxy405.htm [6]: http://autocww.colorado.edu/~blackmon/E64ContentFiles/LinguisticsAndLanguages/Paleography.html [7]: http://penelope.uchicago.edu/~grout/encyclopaedia_romana/scroll/scrollcodex.html [8]: http://www.britannica.com/eb/article-47482?hook=89077 [9]: http://www.lawrence.com/blogs/patrickquinn/2004/may/18/popology/
p15: Philemon
I was raised a believing Roman Catholic, the grandchild of pious Irish and Italian immigrants. My father, the youngest of nine boys in an Irish Catholic family in Chicago, was his parents' last hope for a priest in the family, and so was dutifully packed off to seminary at Loyola. I am here solely because in 1942, after Pops invested a couple of years in a half-hearted pursuit of holy orders, the wise monsignor summoned him to a short interview that included a statement my father quoted for the rest of his life: "Let's face it, Quinn. There's not much more we can do for you, and there's not much more you can do for us. There's a war on. Phaps you should join the Army."Pops ended up in the Navy, but later married the daughter of a devout Italian family in Philadelphia and established an observant household. My godfather was a priest, as are a couple of distant cousins. All of which is to say that w/ my mother's milk I inherited a bit of the heresy known to Rome as ["Americanism."][1] Americanism is a formal expression of what's better known as "buffet Catholicism": Many American Catholics walk down the serving line sampling only the doctrines they like, and pass over the rest in silence. Americanism is hardly limited to North America or to Catholics. There are plenty of buffet Christians of all varieties, as well as buffet Muslims, buffet Buddhists, buffet Jews and so on. There are few better examples of the buffet tendency in religion than the history of the [Letter to Philemon][2].Philemon, a vy short text, is unique in the NT canon; it is a personal letter from one individual to another. Paul addresses "Philemon our beloved brother and fellow worker, and to Apphia our sister, and to Archippus our fellow soldier, and to the church in your house," but the letter that follows is clearly intended for Philemon, who is the owner of Onesimus, a runaway slave who has sought out Paul for sanctuary. Paul is imprisoned at the time of writing, phaps in Rome, and under his tutelage Onesimus has become a Christian. Paul now sends him back to Philemon under the protection of this letter. In it Paul never quite instructs Philemon to emancipate Onesimus. On the other hand, his intentions seem clear enough. Paul wants Philemon to do the right thing:Philem 1:10-17: I appeal to you for my child Onesimus, whom I have begotten in my imprisonment, who formerly was useless to you, but now is useful both to you and to me. I have sent him back to you in person, that is, sending my very heart, whom I wished to keep with me, so that on your behalf he might minister to me in my imprisonment for the gospel; but without your consent I did not want to do anything, so that your goodness would not be, in effect, by compulsion but of your own free will. For perhaps he was for this reason separated from you for a while, that you would have him back forever, no longer as a slave, but more than a slave, a beloved brother, especially to me, but how much more to you, both in the flesh and in the Lord. If then you regard me a partner, accept him as you would me._The apostle is addressing an awkward situation, as other parts of the letter suggest that Onesimus made off w/ money or property belonging to Philemon; Paul effectively says, "Put it on my tab."Slaves represented something like 50-60 percent of the Empire's population and remained a prominent feature in European society for a millenia-and-a-half. _Philemon is the earliest Christian text to directly address the morality of slavery, and for modern readers, particularly American readers, it is difficult to escape the conclusion that Paul thinks at the vy least that Christians ought not to own Christian slaves.In the past, not everyone has agreed. It is a historical commonplace that Christianity led and won the war against chattel slavery in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Nonetheless I have read in several sources that Philemon was quoted by both sides in the American debate over slavery, which I find remarkable, especially given Southern slaveowners' practice of converting their slaves to Christianity. As all buffet operators can attest, some people skip the vegetables.--Marcion bugged me.I entered into this reading assuming that the appearance of Marcion's book sparked the first collection and dissemenation of Christian writings, a vy common opinion in the popular scholarship, phaps the common opinion, because it fits the available data vy well and it makes sense. I still think it's more or less true. I think a number of factors over many years moved the Church's literate leadership toward establishing a canon, and Marcion's book was a big factor--but at the moment I see no suggestion of immediate cause and effect.I expected the literate Church leadership to freak out when they saw Marcion's book, but in fact they seemed to have yawned. Big intellectual guns swiveled to target Marcion's challenge (Tertullian's invective is quite entertaining), but there's no hint that the bishops of the time were shooting letters to each other saying, "Whoa! We need to get out there! Let's put together a book!" Instead it looked to me as if the leadership was content to allow Marcion a bandwidth advantage for something like two centuries. In fact there's a distinct sense that formal canonization was finally achieved only because Constantine demanded it after Nicea, a sense that the imperiously pragmatic emperor said something like, "Stop screwing around and give me a list. Now."Orthodoxy's documentary sloth isn't so surprising when we remember that what Constantine really wanted was formal, official validation of a list that had been around for a couple of hundred years. Orthodoxy wasn't especially slow about settling on its list, the list was more or less in place pretty quickly; instead orthodoxy was slow to embody the list in an authorized book. Christianity was reasonably expeditious about establishing a canon but curiously slow about making copies of it. That seemed contrary to theory.Passively ceding a bandwidth advantage to a competitor seems utterly uncharacteristic of early Christianity, and anyway the theory asserts that, barring external constraints, competing referents will maximize their media presence. Marcion created a Sacred Book and used it to start a religion competing w/ Christianity. The theory said that Christianity should have responded by immediately creating its own Sacred Book--but Christianity didn't. The first indication we have of publication of a Christian Bible doesn't appear until the early fourth century, about 150 years--five generations--later, and then in response to the emperor's requirement.But this (like everything else in popology) is a question of bandwidth, and the significant phrase is "barring external constraints." Marcion's Sacred Book was almost certainly in the form of a [codex][3], a spine-bound book of parchment or papyrus pages that over a period of centuries replaced scrolls as the chief documentary medium. Here is an image of the Nag Hammadi codices, which date from the late fourth century but are representative of the type. A single volume like this is probably a reasonable representation of Marcion's book, which contained 10 Pauline letters and an abbreviated version of Luke:![][4] - - - - -Here's a fourth century codex of the Christian Bible:![][5]- - - - - - - - -Metaphorically speaking, Marcion's volume is a $50 book; the Bible is a $5,000 book. That would be an "external constraint."Moreover, the instant I compared the images I realized that my framing of the case was incorrect. I saw Marcion introducing an unprecedented Sacred Book, and expected Christianity to follow suit. In truth Christianity already had a Sacred Book, the Septuagint. I don't know precisely how widely distributed the Septuagint was, I don't know the numbers, but it is everywhere in the documentary record from about 100 BCE, it seems to have been one of the best-distributed texts in the world. Christianity and Judaism already commanded a substantial bandwidth advantage when Marcion appeared on the scene. Marcion wasn't blazing a new trail. He was trying to catch up. Not surprisingly, one of his earliest doctrinal decisions was to throw the competition's Sacred Book under the train.First Clement, about 50 years after Paul and about 50 years before Marcion, is an example of the prominence of the Septuagint in early Christian thinking. First Clement, a tedious document, cites Paul and is a valuable example of the early distribution of Pauline letters, but of its about 100 Scriptural citations, about 90 are from the Septuagint. When Clement says "Scripture," he means the Septuagint. Thus from the beginning literate Christians possessed a text upon which to erect an orthodoxy. I think it likely that the Septuagint attracted a large audience vy early, an audience that seized upon it and viewed later additions or redactions w/ great suspicion, and that for the first couple of generations that audience was the dominant literate Christian audience.I think the vy large size of the vy essential Septuagint, and conservative reluctance to alter or add to its content, easily explains the apparent delay in the appearance of the Christian Bible. [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American... [2]: http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?book_id=64&chapter=1&version=49 [3]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codex [4]: http://www-relg-studies.scu.edu/facstaff/murphy/courses/images/coursepics/codices-lg.jpg [5]: http://linceuldeturin.free.fr/codex%20vaticanus.jpg
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