This week's reading

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
slightly related

Tolkien, Shippey writes in The Road to Middle Earth, loved above all things in literature a quality he calls ‘glamour’, ‘that shimmer of suggestion that never became clear sight but always hints at something deeper further on’, a quality he found in Beowulf in particular. While composing his fiction he would deliberately pile up fragmented layers to give the appearance of age, depth, variant versions, mystery, that he so loved in the broken texts he studied by day.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v23/n22/jenny-turner/reasons-for-liking-tolkien
 

poetix

we murder to dissect
Fun! Bible! Facts! The lyrics of Portishead's "Wandering Star" include a line nicked from the Book of Jude - "raging waves of the sea, foaming out their own shame / wandering stars for whom is reserved the blackness of darkness forever" (KJV)
 

poetix

we murder to dissect
I didn't even know there was a Book of Jude - it's quite short, normally placed just before Revelation in the running order - and I was reading it quite innocently when the Portishead lyric just jumped out at me.

If you’re going to quote from the Book of Revelation
Don’t keep calling it the Book of Revelations
There’s no “s”, it’s the Book of Revelation
As revealed to St John the Divine
See also Mary Hopkin
She must despair
 

luka

Well-known member
Hilariously Craner has assigned himself the task of reading the entire western canon. That's why he's reading the bible. That's how far he's got In The timeline
 

poetix

we murder to dissect
Bible opinion: KJV is the Bible, as far as the Anglophone literary tradition is concerned, although honourable mention should be given to Wyclef Jean I mean Wycliffe. This probably stops being quite so true once the Americans start getting in on the act. But even the Book of Mormon signals its authentic Holiness by being written in pastiche KJV English (along with instances of direct plagiarism).
 

luka

Well-known member
There's also that really kitsch thing American novelists do where they try and sound like the kjb, eg cormac mcartney
 

poetix

we murder to dissect
It's said of Randolph Churchill that he read the Bible cover to cover in a fortnight, on a bet by Evelyn Waugh, and kept exclaiming "God, isn't God a shit!" throughout.
 

poetix

we murder to dissect
But that's the thing - the KJV coalesces a sort of gravitas, as a collection of literary effects - which it turns out is highly transferrable. "And the number of thy counting shall be three", etc. This relates to what I was saying about "poetic" language and its ceremonial robes the other day. There are other sources - various attempts to reproduce the prosody of Italian verse in English, or the syntax of ornate Latin sentences - but KJV really is the motherlode, at least as much as Shakespeare.
 

luka

Well-known member
Yeah of course. But if you don't nail it, it becomes kitsch. As in cormac mcartney or any number of American novelists.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Two responses to the Bible that are too obvious to be interesting

1. God's a cunt
2. In spite of my rational atheism, I can see great aesthetic beauty in the book of X,Y,Z - I'm not a monster!
 

luka

Well-known member
Two responses to the Bible that are too obvious to be interesting

1. God's a cunt
2. In spite of my rational atheism, I can see great aesthetic beauty in the book of X,Y,Z - I'm not a monster!

Other-life seems to be reading it in a far more interesting way than any of us are capable of.
 

craner

Beast of Burden
I'll go back to the beginning as long as other_life joins us with his exegetical skills, Talmudic thinking and fancy names like Sefer Shoftim.
 
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