The Bible: A Biography by Karen Armstrong

Karen Armstrong presents a precise history of how The Bible was written and assembled and then she concisely chronicles how Jews and Christians have used The Bible for the last 2,000 years in her short volume, The Bible: A Biography, from Atlantic Monthly Press.  Armstrong’s narrative runs just 229 pages – it’s intense, scholarly, and very readable.  If there’s a better short one volume overview of The Bible let me know, but for now, this is the book I’ll recommend to anyone who wants to study The Bible in a historical context.

The Bible is not a single book, but an anthology of narratives written over hundreds of years, by many writers, with some text blended together by unknown editors from multiple earlier sources.  The books of The Bible are not always in chronological order, and most of the main characters are presented differently by various writers.  How do you sum up the most read, most written about, book in history?

To understand the scope of Karen Armstrong’s task, I thought I’d list pertinent Wikipedia articles.  Reading these articles will enhance your understanding and enjoyment of The Bible: A Biography.  Whether you are among the fundamental, faithful or unbelieving, The Bible is completely woven into the fabric of Western society and history.  The Bible is actually the Rosetta Stone between prehistory and history, between oral tradition and the dawn of writing.  Studying religious texts written down in the Iron Age reveals concepts first formulated in the Bronze age, giving clues to the childhood psychology of homo sapiens.

Take the time to read these articles even if you don’t buy Karen Armstrong’s book, but I really recommend her elegant digestion of this vast intellectual feast.  I was especially impressed with her whirlwind survey of how The Bible has been used to back so many different belief systems, and inspired so many philosophers and philosophies.

I read Armstrong’s book first, and now I’m going back researching all this stuff on Wikipedia.  I wish I had found a review like this one, telling me to read the Wikipedia articles before I read Armstrong’s book because I think I would have been even more impressed with her writing.  I just finished listening to the unabridged version of this book and I’ve already started back at the beginning and I’m now reading a hardback copy with my eyes.

Edward R. Hamilton Booksellers has the hardback edition remaindered for $5.95.

The Bible: A Biography is part of a series from Atlantic Monthly Press called Books That Changed the World.  Other books in the series are:

  • The Republic by Plato
  • The Prince by Machiavelli
  • Origin of the Species by Charles Darwin
  • Rights of Man by Thomas Paine
  • The Qur’an
  • The Iliad and The Odyssey by Homer
  • The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith
  • On War by Clausewitz
  • Das Kapital by Marx

JWH – 1/27/10

The Age of Wonder and Joseph Banks

I started reading The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science by Richard Holmes, but because each chapter features a different historical person, I decided to review the book chapter by chapter, as I read it, and discuss the biographies separately.  The Age of Wonder came out last year, getting glowing reviews.  I immediately bought it, but didn’t start reading it until after I saw it on several best books lists of 2009.  Chapter one starts off like gangbusters with a thrilling tale of Joseph Banks, an unknown historical figure to me, but after finishing the chapter, I wondered why he isn’t one of the more famous dudes in history.

Joseph_Banks_1773_Reynolds

Sir Joseph Banks (1743-1820) was a handsome Englishman that would have put Jane Austen’s Mr. Darcy’s riches to shame.  Banks was wealthy enough to finance himself, and his assistants, as the botanist on James Cook’s first voyage around the world in 1768-1771, and he could be one of the many models for James Cameron’s Avatar, because Banks went totally native in Tahiti decades before Fletcher Christian, falling in love with sexual free island women, the Eden-like Tahitian culture, learning their language and ways, shocking his fellow crewmen on the Endeavor, and bringing back concepts of free love and earthly paradise to European society on his return.  By exploring new ideas about morals and behavior, Banks became a proto-anthropologist.  Joseph Banks became famous in a time when it was hard to become famous, when the only mass media were the newspaper and the recently invented general circulation magazine – literacy was far from universal.

Richard Holmes could have written a whole book on Joseph Banks the size of The Age of Wonder and it would have been riveting,  leaving his readers begging for more.  I know I wanted more, but when I went looking, the pickings were slim.  Patrick O’Brian, author of the popular Jack Aubrey-Stephen Maturin  sea novels, wrote Joseph Banks: A Life which I plan to buy, even though the reviews on Amazon have been less than enthusiastic.  Amazon also offers Journal of the Right Hon. Sir Joseph Banks: During Captain Cook’s First Voyage in H.M.S. Endeavour in 1768-71 to Terra del Fuego, Otahite, New Zealand, Australia, the Dutch East Indies, etc, but I don’t know if I’m hard core enough to read that book yet.   I really wish for a David McCullough biography of Banks, because I love reading the big predigested cerebral view of history, rather than reading contemporary journals and diaries myself.  Amazon also has Sex, Botany, and Empire: The Story of Carl Linnaeus and Joseph Banks by Patricia Fara, which tempts me with the big picture, but not enough to buy yet because of limited reviews.

Banks claim to fame now, and in his own time, was more than just titillating adventure stories about getting his penis polished by South Sea babes.  Banks was the Internet Entrepreneur of his day, not for being rich, but for being part of a 18th century gang of geeks ushering in the new paradigm shift of science.  We think we live in exciting times because of the Internet Age, but is that really true?  What blows our minds today are but spring storms compared to the mental hurricanes of the Age of Enlightenment.  We debate freedom of information, they fought for personal freedoms, and dared to step away from God to discover science.  We’re excited about ebooks, but they were excited about real books becoming popular with the common man and woman.  We’re excited by Twitter and Facebook, but they were discovering scientific journals and the magazine.  We have Google, but Joseph Banks was promoting Carl Linnaeus and the classification of plant and animal life and building a natural history database.  Banks crawled the real world indexing its features.

We take too much for granted in the 21st century.  And we’ve all forgotten far too much about how we got here.  Few of us even have a glimmer of the real story.  Reading The Age of Wonder is a voyage of discovery into the 18th century where the foundation of modern mind was created.  Slowly, as I’ve gotten older, I’ve been working my way backwards in time.  Growing up meant getting comfortable with the 20th century, but I’ve spent a lot of time exploring the 19th century in books, and only now at 58 am I starting to really push back into the 18th century.  I routinely flit up and down the timeline of history, and even prehistory, but I seldom get comfortable in any era for anything length of time.  Reading The Age of Wonder convinces me I need to make a major expedition into the 1700s.

Some websites to browse:

JWH – 1/23/10

Being An Old Dog Learning New Tricks

I’ve been in my present programming job since 1987.  I’m a database programmer, but I’m not part of IT, but was hired by a college within the university where I work.  I was employed way back then to set up a Novell network and develop a multi-user dBase III system to shadow the university’s canned student information system.  In the mid-nineties, I rewrote everything in HTML and classic ASP for IIS and Microsoft SQL Server, and switched our network to Windows and TCP/IP.  I have cranked out hundreds of thousands of lines of custom code since.  Now our university IT department wants all us non-IT programmers to rewrite our code to meet IT standards that runs on their servers.  I’m totally behind that, because I know when I retire someone will have to maintain my code.

The trouble is, I’m 58 and this means I’ll have to learn a whole slew of new languages – XHTML 1.0  Strict, CSS 2.0, PHP, and JavaScript, new frameworks JQuery and CodeIgniter, switch from Textpad, a programming editor to Eclipse, an IDE, and they want me to learn generic SQL that works with an abstraction layer in case we switch backend databases.  Plus I’m switching web servers from ISS to Apache.  This is a lot of new stuff for an old dog to take in.  My very comfortable environment that I’ve lived and worked in for 15 years is now totally Alice in Wonderland.  It’s like moving to Paris and having to learn French.

I do believe this is good for me, especially for exercising my aging mental stamina, but I can feel that it’s pushing the limits of what my mind can handle.  I’m sure in several months I’ll be comfortable in the new paradigm, but for now I feel like I’m a couch potato going on the Biggest Loser.  I wonder if all this mental weight lifting and running, all this programming huffing and puffing, is going to kill me.

Now that I’m getting old, I know why old dogs don’t want to learn new tricks.  It’s so much easier to stay in the comfort zone of doing my old tricks.  What’s weird is I’m learning all this new technical stuff at the same time I’m becoming so forgetful in everyday life.  More than anything, I’m in a USE IT OR LOSE IT phase of life.  It feels like I’m surfing and the only thing I can remember is the wave I’m riding right now.

The famous urban legend is we only use 10% of our brains.  I’ve read about scientific experiments that disprove that.  One set of experiments had test subjects learn something new and test their retention ability, then after awhile, switched them to studying something different.  As they learned new stuff they forgot old stuff.  Other experiments mapped the brain with various scans.  There aren’t any unused portions.  What they learned is we all use our brains fully, but fully varies from person to person, and I’m guessing also varies at different times in our lives.  It’s like that circus act where a guy keeps 30 spinning plates all twirling at once.  When we’re young we can keep 25 things going at once, but as we get older, that number decreases.

Learning my new programming paradigm is like trying to be young again.  It’s fun and exciting, but this time around I realize I’m pushing my limits.  I can feel my limits in a way that I never imagined when I was young.  I wonder how far and how hard I can push those limitations, and for how long.

JWH – 1/20/10     

There’s No Such Thing As Free TV

In the early days of television it appeared the shows were free, just put up an antenna and watch your favorite programs for nothing.  But as we all know, we paid for our viewing by watching commercials.  Then came cable TV.  We paid a small fee to avoid the hassle of messing with antennas, but we still watched a lot of commercials.  However, this started the upward cost of watching television.  Cable providers slowly added more channels and raised their fees.  They even offered commercial free networks like HBO and Showtime, but at an even greater cost.  It’s not uncommon today to pay over $100 a month for cable or satellite access.  Then they charged even more for DVR boxes and services so we could skip over the commercials.

Now people are abandoning their cable/satellite services to save money and going retro by using antennas again, and getting over-the-air (OTA) HD television.  They supplement their viewing variety with Netflix, HTPCs and now DLNA compliant devices.  Getting TV from the Internet gives the illusion that we’ve finally found a way to get free TV.  Don’t count on it.  We still pay $25-50 a month for broadband Internet access, and we still watch a lot of commercials.  And if the movie and television industry has their way, they’ll find new ways to charge us for watching our favorite shows over the Internet.

Netflix, at $8.99 for 1 disc service and streaming video via a Roku box is probably the cheapest way to get the most TV watching bang for the buck.  Now Netflix is under attack by the Hollywood Studios.  As the Business Week article points out, studios don’t like the all-you-can-eat streaming pricing.  They want a cut of the action for each movie you watch, because they consider streaming equal to cable/satellite pay-per-view movies, that cost viewers $4 a pop.  And the studios, like Warner Brothers, want to slow the access to movies that Netflix rents because Netflix is cutting into sales of DVD/BD discs.  I know I don’t buy discs anymore, so I can understand this.  And if you haven’t noticed lately, a lot of streaming content on Netflix started showing expiration dates.  Bummer.

Generations of television viewers who grew up after the Baby Boomers don’t remember “free” TV.  Every house had an antenna sprouting from the roof and you didn’t have to pay a monthly bill to watch your shows.  Of course, we didn’t have the power to skip commercials, and we only had 3-4 channels in our nightly lineup.  We had NBC’s Saturday Night at the Movies showing new to broadcast films, and each station had a library of old films they could show at odd hours of the day, usually in the middle of the night.  Life was simple then.  Of course, so were the shows.

Decades later, television shows and movies cost untold millions to make, far more than what broadcast commercials and movie tickets can finance.  Movie makers want to maximize their profits by selling their films several times, in a standard tiered released system where they get the maximum revenue at each stage:

  • Theatrical releases
  • DVD/BD sales
  • Pay-per-view
  • Premium cable (HBO, Showtime, etc)
  • Basic cable
  • Broadcast networks
  • [Netflix streaming?]

So where in the hierarchy do they release titles to Internet streaming?  And if DVD/BD sales are hurt by rentals, when do you release titles to Netflix?  Right now, I pay the most for movies because I watch a lot of flicks on the big screen.  I could probably save $500 a year by waiting for movies to come to Netflix.  This is one reason why I don’t care about getting cable TV anymore, or when movies get to Netflix.  But if you aren’t big on going to the movies, this does matter.

The trouble for movie makers is Netflix is so damn efficient and cheap.  Even without streaming, for $8.99 a month you can watch about a 100 movies a year, and with streaming, your selection is overwhelming.  Who needs to watch more?  And if you count that Netflix rents/streams TV shows and documentaries, that makes $8.99 a month the cheapest form of TV watching other than OTA viewing.  Sports is the main thing missing, and probably why more people don’t give up cable/satellite.

Now Digital Living Network Alliance (DLNA) is catching on, allowing you to stream video content off the Internet directly to your TV, without using a computer.  Geeks have been hooking up their computers to their TV for years, but it’s not an elegant consumer oriented solution.  All the major TV manufacturers are starting to build DLNA technology directly into their TVs, meaning you won’t need a Roku box to stream Netflix and Amazon videos.  Each manufacturer can choose which streaming system to support, or in some cases, they can support PC servers like PlayOnTv that will talk to your TV directly, or via your Wii, PS3 or Xbox 360, so you can watch Hulu and other emerging Internet TV networks.

Essentially, online TV networks like Hulu.com, CastTV and TV.com are ways to get broadcast and cable network shows free off the Internet, or free if you ignore your ISP bill.  But when content providers realize that these services will undercut services higher up the economic viewing ladder, will they continue to offer their content for free?  Will there be more commercials, or even subscriptions required?

I installed PlayOnTV on our Wii and played around with Hulu.  The Wii remote made a decent TV remote and worked well with the Hulu menu system.  This bit of testing provided an epiphany for me.  Internet TV is like cable TV – too many channels and too much to see!  Since I’ve given up cable TV and lived for a few months with just ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS and Netflix, I’ve learned to love simplicity.  I thought I wanted more documentaries which Internet TV might offer me, but it’s not worth the hassle of finding them. 

I like the higher quality of watching Blu-ray discs, or even DVD quality, over watching Internet TV quality.  Broadcast HD seems better than cable HD, and Blu-ray 1080p is even better yet.  I’ve gotten used to pristine picture quality, and for me at least, visual quality is better than viewing quantity.  I don’t mind waiting for BD discs to come in the mail.  I know my viewing habits aren’t typical.  My wife is a channel surfer and loves to see what’s on by flipping through hundreds of channels.  If you’re like her, then you’ll need to pay for cable/satellite, or spend the money for Internet TV options.

I pay $16.99/month to Netflix for 2 discs out at a time with Blu-ray.  That’s as cheap as I can get while getting the most TV watching for my dough.  If the movie studios force Netflix to charge more for streaming, I’ll live without streaming.  I’m a little annoyed that Blu-ray discs cost more to buy and rent than DVDs when they look physically identical, but the extra visual quality is worth it to me.  I don’t mind watching Big Love or Weeds months after their HBO and Showtime broadcasts.

TV isn’t free, but it doesn’t have to be expensive either.  How much you pay for TV depends on how impatient you are to see new shows and films.  As I get older I’ll probably stop going to the theater as much, because paying $10 to see a movie the first week it’s out won’t be as important.  I know a lot of old guys who stopped going to the movies altogether.  If you’re young, restless, twitchy and impatient, then you’ll probably love flipping through 300 cable channels and won’t mind paying $100 a month for that pleasure.

When I heard Warner Brothers wanted Netflix to wait a whole month before renting movies that had just gone on sale, I laughed.  At 58, a month is nothing.  To a teenager or twenty-something, waiting a month is probably unbearable.  I’m still finding new movies from the 1930s to watch, and I’ve seen thousands of them already.  I’d much prefer Netflix maintaining it’s low rates than getting movies sooner.  Let the young finance the movie and television industry – if you’re patient you can save your money for retirement.

JWH – 1/17/10

Songs Rated 10

I am home today because of a snow day, and I felt deliciously sleepy, so I put on my Songs Rated 10 at Lala.com, turned up the volume, kicked back in the La-Z-Boy, covered up with a warm fuzzy blanket and let my mind float away with the music.  I absolutely LOVE listening to my favorite tunes when I’m half asleep, drifting in and out of slumber land.  I play the music loud so it constantly jerks me back to near wakefulness, usually as each song begins, and then I slowly fall back into unconsciousness.  This is as close as I can get to listening to music high anymore – it’s been decades since I  mixed music and smoke.

My Songs Rate 10 playlist are cuts that I can listen to anytime, in any order, and repeated endlessly.  My lullabies currently represent 47 songs from various genres dated from 1965-2009.  Click on the link and you can see and even play the list.  This is the magic of Lala.  They let anyone play a song once for free, so it’s a great site for sharing music.  I wonder if anyone else in the world has this particular list of 47 songs?

These songs resonate in my mind in a way I can’t comprehend.  Somehow these songs are on the same frequency as my emotions because when I play them they make my feelings well up and become highly sensitive to the music’s words and notes.  Their rhythms stimulates my thoughts, their melodies flow around my synapses freeing old memories.  My mind releases random images stored away in neural chemistry that float to the surface of my dreamy consciousness.  I’ve often thought this is the state of mind I want to be in when I die, so I’d just drift away, returning to the blackness of nothingness while my awareness floats between two notes.

JWH – 1/8/10