ari :) > Recent Status Updates

…i may have gotten distracted from my other reading.

anyways apparently Puerto Rico in 1700 had a population of only 6,000 people, most of whom were women, an economy based mostly on smuggling and effectively no government outside of San Juan. can you imagine the yuri

reading through these rubāʕiyyāt by Sarmad Kāšānī, a Jewish and/or Armenian trader turned naked sufi in the Mughal court after falling in love with a Hindu boy. the edition is bilingual, though the Persian text (in Latin transcription) is dubious at best; working through it with a Persian/Urdu copy of Sarmad’s dīwān

enjoying Nasr’s (rather opinionated!) commentary, with lots of references not only to Biblical antecedents but Islamic repercussions of the Qurʔānic revelation. i wouldn’t call him a feminist, but he deals with Q 4:34 and similar verses with a good deal of transparency and openness. excited to keep going

just read through al-Baqarah so i guess that means we’re reading the Qurʔān now. very funny to be doing this *after* having taken two classes on the subject. world’s most educated first-time reader

i have unfortunately decided to abandon my New Testament read through. cannot get in the headspace to slog through 100 pages worth of out-of-context letters from the 1st c. and their reception history. i hope to get back to it at some point.

done with exams and back to Proust !! i am so terribly happy to be back to reading for pleasure good lord

alright: i think À la recherche has finally clicked. the Paris of the Belle Époque is a much more familiar setting than 19th c. rural France; i’m beginning to envision the whole thing in the tones of a Toulouse-Lautrec or Renoir.

combray pt. 2 is not an easy read. it is, nevertheless, terribly beautiful.

marcel is having fun writing the longest sentences known to man

…i confess that i am beginning to have second thoughts. Zweig has a certain tendency for auto-fellatio and smudging unflattering details about himself and his world.

enthralling.

finally getting to an item long on my "to read" shelf, in preparation for an upcoming excursion to Central Europe. (it should be noted that i am a massive fan of The Grand Budapest Hotel.)

enjoying it thus far!

done with Galatians! a letter on faith versus Torah-observance, with some glimpses into Paul's conflicts with the other apostles. interesting indeed, and rather brief (as are the rest of the epistles, as far as i understand)

empezando el Tsurezuregusa de Yoshida Kenkō, el asceta-esteta. un personaje de cuidado

and that was 2 Corinthians. i think this is my favorite of Paul’s letters thus far, if only because it’s not often that we get to see a figure like him at his wits’ end. chapters 11 and 12 are really something special.

haven’t read any Buddhists in a while; coming back to that frame of mind feels familiar and yet so strange.

an anthology from a couple thousand years of Sanskrit poetry, in a decidedly non-academic translation. greatly enjoying the selection though

back to it!! done with 1 Corinthians

i saw a tweet once that said that the experience of reading the classics is finding these timeless cross-sections of the human experience, expressed in the most beautiful words, followed by a list of all the slurs the author knows. reading Paul is like that.

done with the epistle to the Romans. a weighty text, and one much abused by the theologians (faith, works, salvation, original sin? all in here. also some homophobia for good measure). it doesn't help that Paul is not a particularly transparent writer, especially taken out of his context. there are some moments of great spiritual beauty here though.

on to Corinthians.

guess who's back ;)

i did not care for the Acts of the Apostles. granted, the Gospels are a tough act to follow, but Acts’ mix of hagiography, martyrdom and sanitized controversy is hardly a fitting sequel. there are moments where Luke’s gift for narrative shines through, like the sequence surrounding the death of St. Stephen. they are surrounded by the worst kind of preaching.

on to Paul’s epistles.

done with John. what a strange book, filled with signs and glory. i will admit it took me some time to warm up to the Johannine Christ, a rather hermetic character compared to the Jesus of the Synoptics, but He is capable of a remarkable tenderness.

the rest of the New Testament is fairly unknown to me; next up are the Acts of the Apostles.

done with Luke. to me, Luke's gospel is lit with the blue and gold of Fra Angelico's Annunciation; it is easily the most literary of the four. in spite of this light and this craft, though, the New Testament has a remarkable ability to unsettle the reader, once we set aside our preconceptions of what Scripture is supposed to mean.

what to do with the Gospels? Matthew and Mark were completely and utterly convinced that the Kingdom of God was absolutely imminent, and that their lynched Anointed would be back any day with to judge the cosmos. any day now, i suppose...

i am filled with more questions than answers. on to Luke.

DBH's introductory material and scientific postscript on the lexicon of the New Testament are marvelous. his translation is meant to read like the Greek does—amateurish, clunky, breathless testimonies of God made man. i have really enjoyed Matthew thus far.

Chronicles was a quick read—it is effectively a (self-censored) summary of material we've seen in Samuel and Kings. and with that, I have now read the whole Hebrew Bible. damn.

well that sucked. Ezra-Nehemiah (in theory two books, treated as a unit since Late Antiquity) is a collection of documents relating to the founding of the Second Temple and the canonization of the Torah. they are mostly lists and imperial edicts. the rest is a staunch polemic against the intermarriage of Jews with the local population, enforced by banishment and violence. now to read Chronicles, and we're done!

Daniel is a weird little book. it points forward in time, for the most part: angels have names, the dead are resurrected on Judgment Day, and the post-facto (!) prophecies are about Greece and Rome. much closer to Christ's milieu than that of the Yahwist. on to Ezra and Nehemiah!

this is kicking my ass. (i am told that after the first chapter it gets easier but oof)

the Book of Esther is a raunchy, violent comedy culminating in the bloody revenge of the Jews against those who would wipe them off the face of the earth. that is to say, it roughly shares a plot with the 2009 Tarantino film Inglourious Basterds. in this video essay i wi

i took my time with Ecclesiastes. much like Job, this is a dissenting voice in the Biblical canon: if Job asks whether God is just, Ecclesiastes asks what we should do in light of our ephemerality. he doesn't give us a straight answer, but rather works through contradiction and dialectics. as is often the case in the Bible, Ecclesiastes is possessed of a rare beauty; thought expressed through prose poetry.