The Infinite Divine Extraordinariation Paradigm

That is no spelling error, for ‘extraordinariation’ is one of the many stunning insights from some unsolicited books I received today. They are by one David Birnbaum, whom one must admire infinitely for giving his life to self-publishing a string of works. I have before me books one and two of Summa Metaphysica (the website will take you everywhere). A sample: the chapter on angels:

The guardian angel of snow-flakes

The guardian angel of cumulus nimbus clouds

The guardian angel of bubbles

The guardian angel of snowstorms on school days

And so on.

Or:

Timing, Timing, Timing

Location, Location, Location

Preparation, Preparation, Preparation

Focus, Focus, Focus

Or:

Life would appear to be both -

an end in and of itself of QP4

as well as

- a portal to greater QP4

These rich and fruitful themes need to be developed

You get the picture, but if you wish to explore more, check out Birnbaum’s own press, Harvard matrix (which adds ‘independent of Harvard University’), or indeed the thoroughly enthralling ‘Cosmic Womb of Potential Paradigm‘.

I’m in awe.

 

Kinki University at Wanker’s Corner

A degree with a difference, from Kinki University. Which may be linked via this vaguely rude world map to scintillating Wanker’s Corner.

(I’ve been meaning to post this for ages, so I can get rid of the damned link from my bookmarks.)

 

Call for papers on religion and secularism: POPCAANZ

An exciting new kid on the block: POPCAANZ (Popular Culture Association of Australia and New Zealand)

Call for Papers (due 1 April):

Papers that explore popular culture and the everyday in relation to issues of religion and secularism are invited for the Religion Area at POPCAANZ’s Annual Conference. The conference will take place June 24-26, 2013 in Brisbane Australia.

Please submit a 200-word abstract and short bio to: religion@popcaanz.com by 1 April.

For further information go to the conference website: http://popcaanz.com/conference-information-2013/

 

It’s your duty: on institutionalisation and the academic life

It is said that once you have spent some time in prison, your modes of thinking become framed by the institution. What happens within the walls is vitally important; everyone’s concerns are your concerns; if you get involved, then you can make a difference for the other inmates. Institutionalised behaviour, it is called.

I’ve been pondering these matters since a fascinating conversation a few nights ago. A couple of people, overburdened by administrative responsibilities, castigated me for well over a decade of avoiding the weight of administration and the hurly-burly of institutional politics. Various phrases were tossed about: it’s your duty; everyone must take a turn; you can wield power for younger scholars; you can foster your own discipline. They were particularly vocal when I mentioned that I had turned down an offer to be nominated for the College of Experts at the Australian Research Council. Why not? I was asked. Then you can make sure that we get grants.

I will leave aside the point that those making such observations are paid way more than I am, up to three times as much, and that they have permanent positions. What interests me more are the assumptions that lie behind such comments:

1. One is committed to the institution.

2. That one wishes one’s discipline and thereby institution to prosper and outdo competitors.

3. Or, if pissed off by aforesaid institution, one is committed one’s colleagues and/or students (the institution has you by the tender parts there)

4. One can change the institution.

5. By doing so one can change the world.

6. One does not piss off everyone who expects much (positions, grants, money, etc) from one’s elevation, and then finds that nothing is forthcoming.

The catch of course is that all of the above do not apply when you have – as a colleague puts it – only two toes on the diving board.

 

How to respond to: ‘have you read …?’

I suspect many of us have experienced (and probably enacted) one of the standard put-downs of intellectual life. It may be a seminar paper, a student presentation, a conference lecture, but at some point or other someone will ask: ‘have you read such and such?’

Given the veneer of respectability that surrounds such events, you usually have two options: say yes, you have, and cut the person off; say no, and give up the high ground completely.

So, after discussing this with Christina, let me make a few alternative suggestions for how to respond:

1. ‘Given that your suggestion is a blatant effort at one-upmanship, I’m not going to engage in your desperate game’.

2. ‘Isn’t word association a wonderful thing! Obviously, a word I said has triggered something in your cerebral cortex, and out pops a suggestion for a book’.

3. ‘Could you say a bit more? … No, I’m afraid that’s completely irrelevant to my work and I have no idea why you brought it up, you tool’.

4. ‘I bow to your superior knowledge and wide reading …’

 

Beware Islam … according to a classicist

In his nervous effort to reassert the glorious myth of the classical heritage of ancient Greece and Rome, George Kennedy writes:

Islam was not only the greatest danger to Christianity in the Middle Ages, but also the greatest threat to the classical tradition of Europe, for its acknowledged no significant debt to the classical world, rejected its art, and neglected its languages and culture in favor of a new, all-sufficing revelation. The exception to this, of course, is the Arabic transmission of some knowledge of Greek philosophy, primarily the Aristotelian corpus. But a glance into Hermannus Alemannus’s thirteenth-century Latin translation of Averroes’s twelfth-century paraphrase of a tenth-century Arabic translation of a seventh-century Syriac translation of Aristotle’s Poetics is enough to reveal how impoverished the classical tradition would have been if Islam had prevailed in Europe. Averroes lacked even the slightest knowledge of Greek epic or tragedy, and his attempts to make sense of Aristotle on the basis of forms of Arabic poetry is totally obfuscating. (George Kennedy, International Journal of the Classical Tradition, 1.1 1994).

You can sense the sigh of relief as he wrote that piece of tripe.

 

Flaubert: beware of Latin

LATIN. Language natural to man. Harmful to good writing. Is useful only for reading inscriptions on public fountains. Beware of Latin quotations: they always conceal something improper.

Flaubert, Dictionnaire des idées reçue

 

On skin colour and the myth of classicism

Two somewhat different quotes, the first of which offered a new theory of skin colour – over against the standard theory, which held until about the eighteenth century, that skin colour was due to exposure to the sun. This one has more to do with cooking time in the womb:

A man of discernment said: The people of Iraq have sound minds, commendable passions, balanced natures, and high proficiency in every art, together with well-proportioned limbs, well-compounded humours, and a pale brown colour, which is the most apt and proper colour. They are the ones who are done to a turn in the womb. They do not come out with something between blonde, buff, blanched, and leprous colouring, such as the infants dropped from the wombs of the women of the Slavs and others of similar light complexion; nor are they overdone in the womb until they are burned, so that the child comes out something between black, murky, malodorous, stinking and crinkly-haired, with uneven limbs, deficient minds, and depraved passions, such as the Zanj, the Ethiopians, and other blacks who resemble them. The Iraqis are neither half-baked dough nor burned crust but between the two.

Ibn al-Fakih al Hamadhani, from Kitab al Buldan (Book of Countries, 903)

And a great example of how the myth of classicism took off in places like Germany in the nineteenth century, turning the Greeks into good Europeans, so much so that the ancient Greeks – with their slave-holding, veils for women, and a penetrating culture (for adult men) – would hardly have recognised themselves:

We regarded Greece as our second homeland; for it was the seat of all nobility of thought and feeling, the home of harmonious humanity. Yes, we even thought that ancient Greece belonged to Germany because, of all the modern peoples, the Germans had developed the deepest understanding of the Hellenic spirit, of Hellenic art, and of the harmonious Hellenic way of life. We thought this in the exuberance of a national pride, in virtue of which we proclaimed the German people the leading culture of the modern world and the Germans the modern Hellenes. We announced that Hellenic art and nature had been reborn more completely in German poetry and music than in the poetry and music of any other people of the contemporary world … Our enthusiasm for Greece was inseparable from our enthusiasm for our fatherland … We looked back to classical antiquity as to a lost paradise.

Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl, on student life in a German Gymnasium. From his Kulturgeschichtliche Charakterköpfe (1891).

 

Desperately trying to please the institution

Every now and then I catch myself on the edge of falling into one of the most treacherous traps of intellectual life – vainly and pathetically seeking to please the institution. It may take the form of trying to impress the powers that be so they smile favourably upon you, or of pursuing ‘esteem factors’ so that one’s status in the twisted world of academia rises, or of having one’s photograph on the institution’s webpage as a reward for some paltry achievement, or of wanting to see the small corner of intellectual life one inhabits grow and prosper, or of aspiring to be invited to the sad bodies known as the ‘academy’ of whatever disciplinary area, or of putting together a ‘promotion’ portfolio, of of wanting – God forbid – your own institution to do well on the league table. I don’t usually teeter on the edge of all these traps, but they are all there to catch the unwary and grovelling. As I have pointed out a number of times in the ‘Typology of Scholars‘, the catch is that the institutions in question rely on both the ideology of achievement and on the fact that most people engage in intellectual pursuits due to a sense of vocation. Given that institutions will not hesitate to make one redundant for unexplained reasons, or close down a program, centre or department  at a whim, or screw you over whenever possible, these are dangerous and soul-destroying snares. Apart from that they are thoroughly empty and unsatisfying if achieved – a little like the cars, house, 2.3 kids, resort holidays, healthy bank balance and successful career. Thankfully, I usually avoid that crap, but every now and then I’m tempted.

 

Higher degree research students at Newcastle

Despite my policy of avoiding posts about the University of Newcastle on this blog, and even though I do my best not to advertise higher degree research in this place, for some reason we seem have gathered a rather scintillating number of students – from China, Russia, Iran, South Africa, and even Australia. Their research topics all deal in one way or another with religion and politics, often of a distinctly leftward bent:

Joel Kelsey:

Zionism with a Human Face?: Humanitarian Ethics and Being-for-the-other in an Israeli Human Rights Movement

Sergey Kozin:

Religion of Labour, Democracy, and Satan: The Socialist Gospel according to Anatoly Lunacharsky

Yazhi Li:

The Role of Religious Criticism in Marx’s Theory

Niall McKay:

Liberation Hermeneutics: An Intertextual Analysis of the Interpretation of the Gospel of Mark in Liberation Movements

Amir Rezapourmoghadammiyandabi

Political Myth: Tabari’s Narration of the Foundation of Society in the History

Fiona (Fang) Yuan:

Marx’s Critique of Modernity: Labour and Religion