1. Texts of Terror: Literary-Feminist Readings of Biblical Narratives by Phyllis Trible.
This is one of those books you read about in a lot of places and so, coming across it in a friend’s library this last week, I thought I would give it a read.  For those who know the literature around OT scholarship or feminist-critical readings of the B.I.B.L.E. there probably isn’t that much new here — so many people have picked up and ran with what Trible wrote since this book was published that a lot of people have probably pretty much read this book already.
However, that doesn’t take away from any of its significance.  More than most I know, Texts of Terror is the sustained work of exegesis that absolutely damns any superficial understanding of the Bible as the plain and simple, divinely inspired Word of God.  In exploring the stories of four women — Hagar, Tamar, the unnamed raped, murdered and dismembered concubine of a Levite, and the daughter of Jephthah — Trible demonstrates not only the atrocities and violence performed by the human characters within the stories but also of the narrators and of God as God is portrayed in those stories.  Any acritical approach to the the biblical stories is pretty much impossible after one encounters Trible’s text.  And thank God for that.
2. Time Regained (Vol 6 of “In Search of Lost Time”) by Marcel Proust.
I’ve gotta say that, after Vols 4 & 5, I was pretty nervous to get into the conclusion of In Search of Lost Time.  Those contributions were so disappointing that I was worried the story would continue its downward slide and end in disappointment.  Thankfully, however, this volume really does rise up to meet the expectations set by the first two (maybe three) volumes.  Once again, the sort of insight Proust demonstrated earlier surfaces and some of his descriptive moments put into words things that we take for granted but perhaps would never know how to actually express (here Proust lives up to the role of the writer as he describes it in this volume: “The function and the task of a writer are those of a translator”).
I very much enjoyed this volume and, all in all, am glad that I undertook the reading of this story. I very much enjoyed Proust’s reflections not just on time but on the ways in which people move through time, the ways in which people construct their identities, and the ways in which each individual person is, in fact, a whole host of beings — (each one a multitude that signals: “I am legion” to borrow from Hardt and Negri’s borrowing from the Gospels).  Thus, we are, all of us, constantly in the process of creating and recreating ourselves and others and, at any given moment, who we are is rather different depending on who describes us (and who is to say whether one person’s description of us is more accurate than any other person’s description or our own?  Are we not, rather, all at once, everything we are taken to be?).  To share simply one quote from this volume in this regard:

As I made my way home, I reflected upon the speed with which conscience ceases to be a partner in our habits, which she allows to develop freely without bothering herself about them, and upon the astonishing picture which may consequently present itself to us if we observe simply from without, and in the belief that they engage the whole of the individual, the actions of men whose moral or intellectual virtues may at the same time be developing independently in an entirely different direction.

Consequently, Proust sets out to explore the “notion of Time embodied, of years past but not separate from us.”  In this regard, memory is also an ongoing theme throughout the book as, for example, demonstrated in this passage:

I understood that the reason why life may be judged to be trivial although at certain moments it seems to us so beautiful is that we form our judgment, ordinarily, on the evidence not of life itself but of those quite different images which preserve nothing of life–and therefore we judge it disparagingly.  At most I noticed cursorily that the differences which exist between every one of our real impressions–differences which explain why a uniform depiction of life cannot bear much resemblance to the reality–derive probably from the following cause: the slightest word that we have said, the most insignificant action that we have performed at any one epoch of our life was surrounded by, and coloured by the reflexion of, things which logically had no connexion with it and which later have been separated from it by our intellect which could make nothing of them for its own rational purposes, things, however, in the midst of which… the simplest act or gesture remains immured as within a thousand sealed vessels, each one of them filled with things of a colour,k a scent, a temperature that are absolutely different one from another, vessels, moreover, which being disposed over the whole range of our years, during which we have never ceased to change if only in our dreams and our thoughts, are situated at the most various moral altitudes and give us the sensation of extraordinarily diverse atmospheres.

To close things out, here are a few final references and quotations.
First, of all, on a somewhat interesting trivia note, I found it interesting that Proust refers to the air battles fought over Paris during WWI with several references to Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries.”  Of course, Francis Ford Coppola ended up using that same piece of music for what might be the most famous scene in Apocalypse Now–when the American helicopters fly in and assault a Vietnamese village.  The parallels are pretty striking and I reckon he must have borrowed this from Proust.
Secondly, in this volume, characters reflect in more than one instance about the role that media plays in the formation of perceptions that people than internalize and take to be their own.  To quote M. de Charlus: “”What is astonishing,” he said, “is that this public which judges the men and events of the war solely from the newspaper, is persuaded that it forms its own opinion.”  I reckon the same is true of people today, although the nature of the media has changed — instead of newspapers, people rely on sources like twitter, facebook, and wikipedia in order to discover their own opinions.
M. de Charlus also as some good things to say about war:

The creation of the world did not take place once and for all, you said, it is, of necessity taking place every day… ‘Now that Germany has determined on war, the die is cast,’ the truth is that every morning war is declared afresh.  And the men who wish to continue it are as guilty as the men who began it, more guilty perhaps, for the latter perhaps did not foresee all its horrors.

Something that we should keep in mind today both as we sustain old wars and create new ones (pardon the overlap with our contemporary context but, as Proust also observes in this volume: “In reality every reader is, while he is reading, the reader of his own self.  The writer’s work is merely a kind of optical instrument which he offers to the reader to enable him to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have perceived in himself”).
Moving on to a related theme, I also enjoyed the following passage on love, wherein Proust quotes Jean de La Bruyère:  “Men often want to love where they cannot hope to succeed; they seek their own undoing without being able to compass it, and, if I may put it thus, they are forced against their will to remain free.”  Although, some pages later, Proust slightly alters what this may mean in his own reflections on love: “to the woman whom we have loved most in our life we are not so faithful as we are to ourself, and sooner or alter we forget her in order… to be able to begin to love again.”  This, quite a bit later, leads to further reflections upon love in relation to the ways in which we construct our selves:

In the past the fear of being no longer myself was something that had terrified me, and this had made me dread the end of each new love that I had experienced (for Gilberte, for Albertine), because I could not bear the idea that the “I” who loved them would one day cease to exist, since this in itself would be a kind of death.  But by dint of repetition this fear had gradually been transformed into a calm confidence.  So that if in those early days, as we have seen, the idea of death had cast a shadow over my loves, for a long time now the remembrance of love had helped me not to fear death.  For I realised that dying was not something new, but that on the contrary since my childhood I had died many times.

So, anyway, I hope that you all get a glimpse of Proust’s ability to write well and also see the ways in which he anticipates many of the themes that arise in twentieth-century social theory, philosophy, and hermeneutics.  Really it is quite incredible and I am glad that I undertook the task of reading this book.
3. The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare by G. K. Chesterton.
Not that long ago, I read an essay by Žižek reflecting on this story by Chesterton.  So, seeing it sitting on a friend’s shelf, I sat down and read it the other day.  I can’t say I found it all that exciting.  In fact, I found it mostly mildly annoying.
On the meta- level, Chesterton is reflecting upon questions about good and evil and how such things can exist in the company of a God who is both powerful and loving.  He does this by writing a story about secret police officers (who belong to the special “thought police” section of the force) who are on the tail of an international anarchist conspiracy.  Neither level of the story plays out all that well.  In relation to matters of evil, this isn’t entirely Chesterton’s fault.  As far as I can tell, nobody can offer a satisfactory answer to that issue.  Chesterton’s proposal is that when we focus in on evil and suffering and pain, we are basically seeing the back of God — or of the world — which appears monstrous, but our encounter with the face of God makes everything seem beautiful and playful and makes the monstrous stuff appear as some sort of joke just awaiting its final revelation.  So, for those who are desperate for some sort of romantic ideological overcoding of life, I suppose this might sound nice… but, for myself, it just sounds like the sort of story told by people who don’t want much to do with suffering.
Moving to the details of the story, Chesterton shows (a) an obvious love of law-and-order and (b) a total lack of comprehension about anything related to anarchism as a political philosophy or as something that has inspired people to try and act on behalf of life-giving change in the world.  Really, he ends up sounding like one of the “good old boys” who seems to think that British imperialism is essentially a benevolent force for good in the world (speaking of being a good old boy, Chesterton’s story also lacks any significant female presence — just one woman shows up for a few pages at the start and then is mentioned again at the very end — all the other main characters and speaking parts are male; plus, a lot of the story seems like a school boy’s fantasy about running around saving the world from bad guys [like “anarchists”] and wearing flashy clothes and carrying a sword will sitting on a throne or a horse… yippee).
Of course, Chesterton realizes that just doing what you’re told to do seems less flashy and exciting than being involved in some sort of revolutionary action, and so that’s why the God in his story goes around creating a plot that adds a whole lot more excitement to the lives of those who both follow and enforce the laws of society.  “I was just following orders… and, boy, was it exciting!”  Unfortunately for Chesterton, this line of thinking is about as accurate as R. R. Reno’s recent assertion that the true way to demonstrate a preferential option for the poor is to wear a tie and not watch trashy TV.
Not really recommended reading.  Also not really something that makes me interested in reading much of anything else Chesterton wrote.
4. Soldier X by Don Wulffson.
This book is the story of a German soldier who fought on the Russian front during WWII.  I enjoyed it quite a bit because it brings a human face to people — German soldiers/Nazis — who are generally treated as animals or as those who deserved to die, in our more culturally dominant reflections upon that war.  This story is written as fiction, but the author claims that what occurred accurately reflects the experiences of two people.  I don’t want to say too much about the plot because there are some very interesting twists that make this story a little different than other war memoirs I have read… and because the book is so small that you could sit down and read it in a few hours to find out for yourself what it says.  All I can say is that war is fucking hell, I have no ability to imagine what it is like to live through something like that, and I hope I never find out.
5. Hey Nostradamus! by Douglas Coupland.
Coupland tends to have a bit of a cult following up here in Canada and Hey Nostradamus! has probably become his most highly praised novel (prior to that, I think it was Life After God).  Some of my friends really love this guy and can offer pretty captivating readings of his books, but I’ve always had a bit of trouble connecting with Coupland’s writing.  This book wasn’t really that different than his others in terms of the impact I felt from it.  It was… good… not great or stunning.  There were moments when it began to verge on something more exciting and the writing started to feel like it was rising to another level, but those came and went quickly and mostly it remained in the realm of… good.  Enough to keep you turning the pages and feel interested, but that’s about it (the story, by the way, centres upon a high-school shooting that occurs in the ’80s and the impact that has upon four related characters over the years).

Finished off a number of books this month.  Mostly lighter stuff, as I’ve been writing again (Hello, Paul-and-kinship-honour-patronage-economics-and-power-chapter!  It’s nice to finally meet you!).  Too lazy to proof-read right now… will follow-up later.
1. Come Be My Light: The Private Writings of the “Saint of Calcutta” by Mother Teresa (ed. with commentary by Brian Kolodiejchuk).
Throughout her life, Mother Teresa made it a point of always submitting to the Roman Catholic hierarchy and chose to view her bosses as though they were Christ himself.  She would make her requests, plead her case, and then totally submit to their decisions — which they would make based upon criteria other than those Mother Teresa had chosen.
The publication of these private writings — letters, retreat notes, and so on — are a fine example of that sort of submission and authority.  Mother Teresa had begged her bosses to destroy these documents (she was always wishing for less and less of a focus upon herself as an object of any sort of interest) but they chose, instead, to publish them after she died.  They decided that the ways in which the writings would edify others trumped any thoughts Mother Teresa had about sharing her most intimate reflections.
Of course, like a vulture, I swooped in, disregarded what Mother Teresa requested, paid my money to the authorities who also disregarded her, and read the writings.  And, my goodness, it’s been a long time since I’ve felt as connected to a “religious” or “spiritual” text as I felt to this one.  Now, don’t get me wrong, I ain’t no Mother Teresa but, shoot, her reflections on godforsakenness absolutely capture what I have been experiencing the last three years.
Because this is what few people knew about Mother Teresa during her lifetime: ever since she founded the Missionaries of Charity at the end of the 1940s, she felt as though God had completely and utterly vanished from her life.  This feeling continued unabated until her death in the ’90s.  Part of what made that so devastating for her was that, prior to founding the Missionaries of Charity, she felt as though she was in constant intimate communion with God (and it was this communion, in their conversations, that drove her to founding the M.C.s).  This was the cornerstone of her life so when God vanished, she was left with a wound that never stopped hurting her.  Now, I won’t claim anything like what Mother Teresa experienced but, this is what I’ve been feeling as well.  The emptiness of the last three years has been hard, not just because they are empty, but precisely because I know what the alternative can be like — as she writes: “this darkness and emptiness is not as painful as the longing for God.”
Thus, she remains constantly on the edge of breaking — and speaks of no longer feeling any love or trust or faith — yet she persists with her labour, she continues to serve others, she tries to smile more and more… and for some reason those who come near to her feel as though they are closer to the presence of God.  A funny twist, no?
In thinking through the work Mother Teresa did and the changes she helped to create, it was startling to see how totally submissive she was to the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic church (which, we should recall, is just as death-dealing and corrupt as pretty much any other political or corporate hierarchy).  The catch is that it was (partly) be means of her submissive to this oppressive hierarchy that resulted in Mother Teresa being able to do what she did.  For those of us who want to more actively resist the death-dealing Powers this is a somewhat disconcerting observation…
Anyway, this is highly recommended reading.
2. The Twenty-Piece Shuffle: Why the Poor and Rich Need Each Other by Greg Paul.
A little while ago, somebody left a comment on my blog suggesting that the primary people saved by liberation theology are liberation theologians.  The theology they develop is ultimately their own road to salvation.  This comment came to mind while reading Greg Paul’s book — although full of many good stories, and obviously written with a lot of love for a lot of people — because it seems to me that the implicit theme of this book is really Greg’s defense of his own lifestyle in light of the work that he does.
Of course, there’s nothing wrong with writing such self-reflective books (indeed, I think this is the implicit theme of a lot of writing — even outside of the realm of memoirs or autobiographies).  However, I do think Greg’s conclusions are problematical.  Before saying why, however, I should mention how much personal respect I have for Greg and the folks at Sanctuary — the place he helps to organize and run in Toronto.  I really to think Greg is a wonderful man and Sanctuary is one of two churches-that-call-themselves-churches that I think do an excellent job of actually being the way that churches should be (the other being The Mosaic here in Vancouver… in comparison to these two churches, every other one that I have attended falls far short).
That said, Greg’s argument in this book is pretty bad.  He remains strictly at the personal level of analysis and never moves beyond that to anything structural.  In fact, by writing in this way, Greg’s argument fits easily into the perpetuation of oppressive social structures.  This happens because Greg thinks that the poor and the rich need each other.  He shares stories about the brokenness of people on both sides of that divide, and he shares stories about how people have their lives enriched on both sides when they cross that divide and get to know others from different socioeconomic backgrounds.  Hence, their need for one another.
What Greg never does is challenge wealth and poverty, what creates it, what maintains it, in any sort of thoughtful manner.  In fact, his focus on the personal level of things, his assertion that the poor and the rich need each other, leads pretty straightforwardly to the conclusion that we need to live in a world (or in local communities) where there is always wealth and poverty.  According to this argument, there is no point in challenging that, no point in looking at moving beyond wealth and poverty to a community wherein there is neither poverty nor riches but enough for everybody (the sort of community that was to exist in Israel according to the Law and the Prophets, that was developed by Jesus in Palestine, and that Paul tried to expand into the Roman Empire).  Such a suggestion seems totally foreign to what Greg writes in this book.  Instead, Greg focuses on life stories, the personal divorced from the structural, and — despite many of his more “radical” stances — ends up writing a basic defense of the forms of charity that make a difference in the lives of individuals but end up perpetuating and strengthening the death-dealing status quo.
Finally, on a personal note, it’s interesting to observe how different it is for me to read stories like these now, compared to how I used to read them ten years ago.  When I was first getting involved with homeless folks, I read a number of journals or memoirs written by folks associated with this population.  Truth be told, at that time, a lot of the stories struck me as romantic, exotic, wonderful, and exciting.  Adventures dripping with pathos, ruptured by the in-breakings of Death or Life.  It’s a bit shameful to admit this (if I ever felt shame anymore…), since I was actively engaging in a process of Othering, dehumanizing and exploiting an already oppressed and vulnerable population by reading in this way.  Thankfully, I realized that I no longer read stories like those Greg offers in this way.  Having moved more and more into the context of the street-involved (in both “personal” and “professional” ways), the romance and exoticism have disappeared.  That’s probably a good thing, since what remains, more and more, is just people.  Peoples is peoples, to quote a character from one of the Muppet movies.
3. The Diaries of Louis Riel by Louis Riel (ed. by Thomas Flanagan).
So, given that I’ve been exploring more about the history of Canada’s First Nations’ people, the topic of the Northwest rebellion has always lingered around, and I stumbled onto Riel’s diaries in a bookshop and picked up a copy (I’d already read Chester Brown’s pretty fascinating graphic novel about Riel).  It comes through quite clearly in Riel’s diaries is that he was obviously very much committed to his religion (which began as Roman Catholicism, morphed into something of his own creation, and then kinda sorta returned to Catholicism in the end when he was trying to avoid execution).  The other thing that comes through pretty clearly is that Riel was a self-absorbed prick who thought he had some sort of divine calling that justified him in being a self-absorbed prick.  He speaks penitently and contritely about his “gluttony” or his drinking, but all this humility just masks (probably from Riel himself) that he seems to be largely motivated by a desire for wealth, status, and power.  God make me rich and smite my enemies!  Egad.  And all the time acting like he is on the side of the Natives, when really he only cares about the Métis (probably only because he is a Métis), and he has no vision of the Natives being present in the new nation he wishes to create.  Even then, despite all his revolutionary talk, he was still secretly writing letters to John A. MacDonald offering to sell-out the revolution.  Double egad.
It’s interesting to compare the diaries of Mother Teresa with those of Riel.  Some folks might be inclined to see them both as nuts based upon their visions, ecstatic experiences, voices or signs from God and so on.  Both also claimed to want to try and make a positive difference in the lives of people who were suffering and oppressed.  The major difference, is that Mother Teresa tried to abolish any sense of pride she had, whereas Riel was so in love with himself that he couldn’t even recognize how prideful he was.  I’m not saying that this is the only factor leading to the different end results they experienced (it’s not!), but I think it’s an interesting comparison.
4. Hope Dies Last: Keeping Faith in Difficult Times by Studs Terkel.
Studs Terkel is an historian who interviewed a good many of interesting people around America over the span of the twentieth century.  In this compilation — very roughly structured around the theme of hope — Terkel interviews everyone from politicians to priests, union organizers to veterans, activists to workers.  There are some big recognizable names who did big recognizable things, but there are also a good number of people who are unknown to the broader public who did just as big and exciting things.  It’s really a beautiful collection.  I often think there should be more work done to document and share the news of those who work in their own communities to create life-giving changes.  Personally, the section I think I found most interesting was when Terkel interviewed people — both students and (mostly illegal migrant) workers who became involved in in the movement for a living change for workers at Harvard, which occurred from around 1997-2001.  Like all major universities, Harvard (despite its billions of dollars in funding) employed migrant workers to do the cleaning and cooking and so forth.  These workers did not receive a living wage.  The students coordinated a number of efforts to try and change this policy and, after reviewing everything that was submitted the President of Harvard essentially said: “That’s an interesting idea but, no, we’re not going to give the workers a living wage.”  This prompted a moment of less-legal direct action, wherein about fifty students occupied some of the main admin space in the university for over twenty days.  The police tried unsuccessfully to remove them.  The President tried unsuccessfully to over to negotiate with them if they left (they refused — having already seen what happened with that kind of negotiation).
Along the way, and this is what I found so incredible about the story — the workers and the students united with each other.  Previously, the workers had been like an invisible non-human slave force to the students, and the workers had viewed the students as a bunch of rich assholes.  However, once students realized the humanity of the workers and once the workers realized the sincerity of the students, a wonderful community of creativity and resistance was born.  The end result?  A living wage for the workers.  And this caused a ripple effect throughout university campuses in the United States.  Wonderful stuff.  Now if only the students, or young activists, could be doing more in our time to be co-ordinating their efforts with the working classes and the poor…
5. Holocaust Poetry compiled by Hilda Schiff.
I’ve been trying to read a little more poetry lately, since falling in love with Rilke’s writings, and I figured it had been enough years since I touched this genre and, who knows, I might end up connecting with it more deeply than I have in the past.  Anyway, I don’t know if this collection was the best place to turn — it’s terribly sad and it feels almost sacrilegious to read and even more sacrilegious to review… so instead I’ll just post one poem from the collection, written by Lily Brett.  I think I was drawn to it because it circles around the unspeakable, without quite speaking it but, by doing so, thereby communicating something of it.  It’s called “My Mother’s Friend”:
my mother
had a schoolfriend
she shared the war with
my mother
looked after her friend
in the ghetto
she laid her out
as though she was dead
and the Gestapo overlooked her
in Auschwitz
she fed her friend snow
when she was burning with typhoid
and when
the Nazis
emptied Stuthof
they threw
the inmates
onto boats in the Baltic
and tried
to drown
as many as they could
my mother
and her friend
survived
in
Bayreuth
after the war
my mother’s friend
patted my cheeks
and curled my curls
and hurled herself
from the top
of a bank.
6. Baltasar and Blimunda by José Saramago.
I enjoyed reading Blindness awhile ago, and so I was feeling like a change of pace and tone (what with working through Proust) and so I thought I would pick up Saramago again.  I can’t say that I enjoyed this story all that much.  There were some moments when it felt like it had potential (especially early on) but nothing ever really materialized… it almost felt like Saramago didn’t really know where he was going with the story and so was just having fun rambling on with his descriptions, and lists, and names, and so forth.  I would suggest giving this one a pass.
7. Duino Elegies by Rainer Maria Rilke.
Speaking of Rilke, I decided I would reread the Duino Elegies.  I think they just get more rich and breath-taking with every reading.  There’s no point in even making little marks in the margins — the pages would just fill up.  I’ve decided that this is probably the closest thing to a perfect piece of writing that I have ever read.  Stunningly good.
8. Possible Side Effects by Augusten Burroughs.
A friend recommended this autobiographical series of sketches to me.  It’s in the same sad/comedic vein as some if the things written by David Sedaris.  Although I didn’t laugh a ton (when do I ever, right?), there were definitely parts that made me chuckle and Burroughs does a pretty decent job of entwining the painful or sorrowful with laughter and courage.  I liked it enough that I decided I would read his more famous book — Running With Scissors.  My wife told me to read it years ago, so I’ll see how that goes.