I Don't Think I'm Going To Be Able To Avoid Entitling This Post "Bunking"

So obviously, where I come from, Julian Barnes is a big deal. If you wanted confirmation, then there he is with Rushdie as one of the literati cameos in Bridget Jones's Diary. Is there a higher literary accolade? Much to my undergraduate embarrassment, I found Flaubert's Parrot so tedious I really couldn't tell you whether it's a book with intellectual merit (which is totally different to interest).
So now I'm reading A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters and I'm enjoying it as far as it goes. Tony Martin says he couldn't get passed the first word in The Da Vinci Code - TM: "'Renowned curator somebody somebody'... why do we have to know he's 'renowned'?" EK: "Makes it sound classy, Tone" TM: "Isn't that called 'bad writing'? Isn't that crowbarring information in too early?" EK: "Very early." - Anyway, I couldn't get passed (without comment) the first page in A History where it described the women on Noah's Ark as 'too delicate' to muck out the animals. Barnes does realise this is the Ancient Levant these people come from, right? Not Victorian England?
But more bizarrely, Barnes, in his attempt to deconstruct one of our (many) genesis myths and to do it from a non-human perspective, seems to have got hooked on committing character assassination on Noah, as though we were all deeply invested in Noah as a really top bloke in the first place. The Bible isn't especially positive about Noah, and that's nothing to what the English Miracle Play tradition does to him. Why is Barnes spending quite so much effort debunking something we really never bunked?

Geneses

Stupidly, I've never noticed that there are two Creation myths, side by side in Genesis, and distinguished, so I'm told, by different words for 'god'. (There is certainly no distinction in the Greek text but maybe there is in the Hebrew Bible, which I will struggle through to make sure, but not today, eh? It's gloomy and I have enough trouble with the languages I actually know.)

The first myth is the one in which God makes the world in six days and rests on the seventh. This one is particularly concerned with the fruitfulness of the earth and here God creates humans male and female, in his own image. I suspect (and will check on a less gloomy day) that personal pronouns are against us, but even still, in this version women are made in God's image too. Think about the implications of that. And now think about it back to front.

The second one starts at Gen 2:4 with the words "This is the book of the generation of heaven and earth, when they were made in the day". It does sound like the beginning of a new Creation myth, which is why I feel so exceptionally daft to have missed it. In this version a fountain rises out of the earth and waters the land and then god makes man out of dust and makes Eden for Adam to live in. Then, not wanting Adam to be alone, He creates birds (made on the fifth day in the first myth) and land animals (made before men and women on the sixth day in the other story) and brings them to Adam to name. It is only then that He makes Eve out of Adam's rib.

So, I gather the consensus is that this represents two competing myths that the writer(s) of Genesis (or Geneses as I am now in no way going to have the restraint or good taste to refrain from calling it) tried to amalgamate. The first probably suggests a more peaceful and agrarian society, in which the abundance of the natural world is evident. The second suggests a society under various kinds of pressure, probable econmic hardship and resulting social change, hence the desire to explain their excusion from plenty in the face of being God's Children through the Expulsion from Eden story and to justify the antagonistic relationship between the natural world and Mankind, not to say towards women.

Adam's rib is a truly strange story. There's a relief sculpture of it in the Museo dell' Opera del Duomo (right). BlueJ and I watched a group of Koreans looking at this and, through their body language, I got a fleeting glimpse (I can't speak for BlueJ) of what an unnatural myth this is and how inexplicable the story's idea seemed to them. This sculpture, of course, stresses the already fairly pronounced womb-envy aspect of the myth, but even without that, what strange creatures we are and how strange our ideas and our religion.

But to go back to the Book; what I can't help noticing is that, although, the first myth is the more commonly known, we have opted for the story of the creation of humans from the second. Since it seems to me the more cynical and mean-spirited of the two and since we have used it as the basis of so much of our theology, I am wondering if we couldn't do a bit of a rethink on some of these issues?

So Get This...

I was listening to old podcasts and I came across the one where Tony Martin is talking about the French Revolution 'way back in the 15th century or whatever.' And it struck me that he has a fairly good grasp of the manners, customs and events of the French Revolution, so it's not that he doesn't know when the Revolution was, he doesn't know when the 15th century was.

Shocking Cock Up, The Mice Were Furious.

I have been attempting to teach my cats, Bingley and Lucrezia, to use the cat flap. For months now. Unsuccessfully.

Millions of years of human evolution and decades of personal education combine in me so that in approaching a problem like this I try to make out the pattern behind every failure. I try to work out how cats learn, how they think, why they don't seem able to grasp this concept when they are able to grasp others, but of course I missed the most obvious thing about the way cats think.

In Bingley, it became clear pretty early on, I had simply taken on a lost cause. Bingley really is loving and warn and heart on sleeve and very stupid.

But Lucrezia, Lucrezia knows how to get out through the cat flap and given her love of independence I was sure I could teach her to come in by it too. But no, she would sit by the back door waiting for me to notice her and let her in. Ever the diadact, I would take these opportunities to demonstrate the utility of the cat flap and she would look at me with her mesmeric eyes behind her most innocent sorry-Hannah-I-no-speak-English expression until I let her in by the door.

But last night she got caught out in the storm. There was the creak of the cat flap and then the drenched Lucrezia was by the fire.

I don't speak English indeed.

I suspect she has been able all along but was caught up investigating my capacity to learn and think and also that she has not been overly impressed with the results.

Toclifane

First there was the Eurovision Song Contest. Well, no, I suppose first there was 1066 and all that. But the Hundred Year's War didn't help and neither did Mary Stuart or Napoleon or the Rugby. And now (well, now for me, I'm only just finishing series 3) Russell T. Davies implicitly compares William of Normandy to the Toclifane. If the French watched Doctor Who or cared what English people think anyway I'm sure they'd be outraged.

Fountain

A couple of weeks ago one of the most innovative shows on radio, Hamish and Andy, broadcast a pissing contest they held between themselves and which Hamish Blake won to his obvious delight.

I know.

I know, too, which Rudyard Kipling quote you are not thinking of: 'It's very clever, but is it art?'

But, I've been asked by grown ups to take Surrealism, Dada and Duchamp seriously. I have been told that Fountain interrogates and challenges my prejudices about what is and is not art. (In fact, contrary to the experts, I have always thought that Fountain is a work which powerfully advocates conservative attitudes towards art, but then, I always was a bit of a death-of-the-author girl.)

So anyway, if it ever comes to a choice of one or the other, I really hope the Tate take Hamish and Andy.

Get Smart

I never thought Get Smart was subversive so I'm a bit freaked that the makers of the Get Smart film remake do.

In the TV series, Agent 86 was an incompetent though highly regarded top operative constantly being made to look good (after a period of looking bad) by outrageous fortune and 99. In the film (according to the trailer, I don't think I could face the film itself), Agent 86 is a depressed junior desk spook, disliked and ridiculed by his masters, who is, of necessity, thrown into field work as a clean skin when Kaos discovers the identities of every Control field agent.

Can it be that the premise for an American TV show filmed at the height of Cold War paranoia is too subversive for America now? Or is it that the secret services have, after Iraq and Afghanistan, been shown to be so incompetent, that they feel the original premise would amount to letting out trade secrets?

Thoughts on the Cultural Implications of 'Guess Which Supermarket Aisle'

On today's Hamish and Andy Show, the boys played the gnomically titled 'Guess Which Supermarket Aisle'. Hamish described it as a game, but essentially it came down to the question 'do you think the olive oil is shelved in the aisle with the pasta or the aisle with the vinegar?'

Hamish answered 'vinegar', Andy 'pasta'.

Much to my mother's disgust, Andy was right.

My interest is anthropological. In Ong's famous Orality and Literacy he describes a question which demonstrates one of the cognitive differences between people from oral societies and those from literate societies. The question is 'axe, spade, block of wood, saw: which is the odd one out?' Literacy tends to produce the answer 'block of wood because all the others are tools of one kind or another', while orality tends to conclude 'spade because all the others are to do with wood.'

Hamish and Andy's answers reflect the same divide: oil is like vinegar, it has a related place in cooking and eating, while oil and pasta are associated because both are used in the cooking of Italian dishes.

After all the trouble the Greeks went to to straighten these things out in the first place and millennia, we are quietly shifting our mental processes backwards, but without the culture to support it. Such a big shift at such a small level implies a massive shift on higher levels.

I'm pretty sure it's computers. Computers developed so amateurishly that early models show the odd thinking of their creators which then becomes the template upon which later models are built. Now, no one even notices how odd it all is, unless they have to try to teach a pensioner to navigate around email. The logic needed to find things online or to do things on computers is closer to Andy's answer than Hamish's.

This is bad news for me because a quick look round Silicon Valley, then and now, gives me a remarkably full list of people I don't want to think like.

I'm not saying they're not brilliant people and I'm not saying that computers haven't made the most amazing things possible, I'm just saying I don't want them wearing away at the organizational structures of my thought. My thoughts are unstructured enough without any more help.