Poem Page

I

n October of 1962 there appeared in the Halloween issue of The Star a short poem in honor of the season. It read (more or less):

     A Halloween Poem. Copyright 1961

You’re looking at a post
When suddenly a ghost
Jumps out and gives a very frightful BOO!
A witch goes riding by
Away up in the sky
And suddenly a black cat howls at you.

The goblins have begun
To have a lot of fun
And then you think “Good grief! It’s Halloween!”

The Star was a short-lived periodical put out by a couple of grade-school kids (me and a friend, actually) from late 1961 to mid-1963 with a brief revival in early 1965. There were perhaps a dozen issues, with no more than fifteen or twenty copies made of each. We sold them to friends, family, and classmates. Only a handful of scattered copies survive.

The poem was mine (I say with reservations), and I wrote it in fifth grade—for what purpose I’m not sure. I wrote stuff like this constantly, often takeoffs and imitations. (I burlesqued Sara Coleridge’s “The Months” for one, by featuring the drawbacks of each month; and I transformed Jane Taylor’s “The Star” into a celebration of artificial satellites.) Most of it had no purpose except to entertain my friends and family, and to some extent to relieve the frustrations of school.

Fifth grade was particularly irritating, what with having a teacher who began the day with prayer and fire-and-brimstone preaching, before launching into a program of rote learning and copying paragraphs off the blackboard or out of books to be handed in and never seen again. (Mrs. Allen didn’t believe in creative writing or returning papers.) Definitions had to be memorized exactly; deviate from the text as handed down by Mrs. Allen by as much as a single word and that answer was wrong. None of this new-fangled nonsense about the idea being the important thing for her; no, memorization was the key whether you understood it or not.

It was in Mrs. Allen’s class that I wrote a poem about Halloween, a poem that my friends at least found amusing enough to hear, recite—and in at least one case, remember. It was not quite the poem as given above, however. You may have noticed something off about the second verse—it is half as long as the first, and is missing a rhyme for the word “Halloween.” As originally written it was a full verse, and there was a rhyme-word—but I have no copy of it from that time, and have to rely on my aging memory. The missing first three lines should have read:

From somewhere up the street
You hear a “trick or treat,”
And a yellow jack o’ lantern can be seen.

In spite of the lapse of time I’m actually quite certain of these lines, although I suppose it could have been down the street rather than up it. At least when I turned this paper up a few years back the other lines were all as I’d remembered them. But even with that the story is a little more complicated.

As I said, I don’t know why I wrote this—but I must have intended it for something, because I gave it to my mother to edit, which I normally did only for something I was submitting to somebody somewhere—a teacher, an editor, whatever. It wouldn’t have been for my teacher; Mrs. Allen had no tolerance for creative efforts by children. (Her light reading, she told us repeatedly, consisted of the Bible and Emerson’s essays.) We didn’t have any sort of literary magazine at the school, as far as I can recall. I might have planned to submit it to a contest or something—but if so that detail now escapes me.

It might have been intended for the first issue of The Star. I was definitely working on it in late October 1961, and I might have planned on including it. I probably didn’t, since the issue actually came out in early November (the last item I added, which I had to make room for, was the death of James Thurber on the 2nd), but that might have been my plan. As far as I know no copy of that issue survives; there were only three of them (since I did it with typewriter and carbonless paper) and I sold them all. But anyway, if I was planning on including it that might explain why I submitted it to my mother.

And that’s where I ran into a problem. You see, the final three lines originally noted that what with things looking as peculiar as they do, you exclaim Good God—maybe it’s Halloween. My mother said that the piece was fine as it stood except for one thing—the expression “Good God” had to go. She suggested “Good grief” as a replacement.

That was all very well and good, but as originally written God was my rhyme-word at the end of the fifth line, probably rhyming with odd at the end of the fourth. (I remember the sense of the thing, but not the exact wording.) Changing God to grief necessitated rewriting the fourth line as well. And, although the original lines had come easily to me, now I couldn’t think of anything that worked.

Abruptly a couplet—the one about goblins given above—popped into my mind and I threw it out at my mother. That’s fine, she said, but how are you going to finish it now? Well, it was easy enough. I didn’t like it, but I truncated the original line about it maybe being Halloween to a sudden realization in half a line, and the verse was done. And my friends seemed to like it as well as the original, so I just let it lie. And a year went by.

During that time my best friend took over as publisher and general manager of The Star (so the surviving issues say) while I held the position of editor. Other friends and relatives are listed as artists, reporters, and so on. We were now using a hectograph (or rather two hectographs) as our printing press. And I seem to have been losing interest in the thing. The Halloween issue of 1962 appears to be almost entirely my friend’s work. Page 3, the poem page, begins with the piece as noted, defective second verse and all.

You see, my friend had memorized the poem—but had forgotten part of it. (Years later he reprinted it in the same defective form for a school paper—also from memory.) It was flattering, I suppose, but I would have been a lot happier if he had managed to remember the whole damn thing—or better yet given me a chance to fix it.

Well, sic transit I guess. Time has passed on, and so has the publisher of The Star, and its chief reporter as well. But I survive, and even if I don’t give a damn now, I feel as if I owe something to the kid I once was. So here, as an act of belated justice to the ten-year-old who would have liked to see his poem published the way he wrote it, I will give it as best I can, allowing for the limitations of my sources and my memory:

You’re looking at a post
When suddenly a ghost
    Jumps out and gives a very frightful BOO!
A witch goes riding by
Away up in the sky
    And suddenly a black cat howls at you.

From somewhere up the street
You hear a “Trick or treat”
    And a yellow jack o’ lantern can be seen.
Since things are looking odd,
You stop and say, “Good God!
    I think perhaps it might be Halloween!”

Sing It, Fat Lady!

Today’s question comes from a long-time reader (hi, Mom!) who wants to know where the expression “It ain’t over till the fat lady sings” comes from. The expression has been around for a bit, at least since the empty eighties, and it’s roughly equivalent to the old proverb, “It ain’t over till it’s over,” attributed to the well-known cartoon character, Yogi Berra. It means apparently that nothing is settled until all the accounts are totaled up, or something like that.

It’s a good point. I remember years ago as a backgammon game wound down my opponent wanted to throw in the towel, seeing that I clearly had the game won at that point. Like an idiot I pointed out that things were really closer than they looked. “If you were to throw double sixes on the next roll,” I said (and boy have these words stuck with me), “and I were to say get a two and a one on my next, well you could easily win the thing.” And much to my chagrin (I should have kept my mouth shut) my opponent did in fact throw double sixes on his next roll, and I got a two and a one or something equally useless on mine, and I ended up losing. It really ain’t over till it’s, well, over.

But the fat lady—where the hell does she come in? Personally, I first remember hearing the expression shortly after I left college, during the reign of the late unlamented Ronald McReagan, Czar of all the Americas. It was a punch-line to a joke I no longer remember, but the set-up was rather like the old Homer and Jethro routine, where the pair wanders into an opera to get out of the rain thinking they were going to see a western, and instead forty-seven people sung without a horse in sight. Hekyll nudges his buddy during a pause and asks, “Is it over yet, Jekyll?” And his buddy replies, pointing to the soprano, “Nah, it ain’t over till the fat lady sings.”

So, maybe, it was a bit of belated Green Acres style humor to enlighten the tedium of those dark days when nuclear holocaust lurked just around the corner. Poking fun at the rubes, as it were. Even those of us who wouldn’t be caught dead creeping into an opera house get the joke. But—but—how do sports come into it? Don’t we usually hear it in connection with some sporting event—a dramatic cliffhanger of a ninth-inning foos- or kickball spectacular? “And there he goes, [I hear this in Billy Crystal’s Howard Cosell voice] bobbing and weaving down the stretch, shedding backstops like ninepins into the goal zone and it’s all over!” “Well, Ed, [comes the reply] there’s still two seconds left on the clock and anything can happen. Remember, it ain’t over till the fat lady sings.”

Okay, well, according to the nearest thing we have to absolute truth written by a roomful of monkeys hitting random keys (full disclosure: I too am a Wikipedia editor) it came about something like this. Ralph Carpenter (described as a Texas Tech sports information director) and Bill Morgan (presumably the nineteenth century baseball player) were calling a game of some sort “in the SWC tournament finals” early in 1976. The score was 72-72, and the dialog went like this:

Bill Morgan: Hey, Ralph, this … is going to be a tight one after all.

Ralph Carpenter: Right. The opera ain’t over until the fat lady sings.

Bill Morgan still remembered the incident in 2006. He believed that Carpenter came up with it on the spur of the moment. “Oh, yeah, it was vintage Carpenter. He was one of the world’s funniest guys.”

A couple of years later it turned up again, after a basketball (is there such a game?) contest in April 1978 between the “San Antonio Spurs” and the “Washington Bullets”. Broadcaster Dan Cook observed after the Spurs victory that “The opera ain’t over till the fat lady sings,” meaning that a single victory didn’t determine the outcome of the series.

Now if you’re like me you may well be wondering, what the hell does opera have to do with sports? (Well, other than the fact that I personally detest them both.) Why would an opera metaphor end up as a sports cliché? And also, you know, the fat lady pretty much sings throughout the opera. It’s not like the soprano waits till the end before she sounds off. It’s sort of an ongoing thing.

Well, there is an alternative explanation out there, and in this one the fat lady has a name—Kate Smith. Yes, that Kate Smith, the songbird of the south, whose function in the world (if we believe the supply-siders) was to sell Studebakers and Jell-O, is supposed to be the fat lady of the cliché. She, goes the story, used to finish off sports events of some kind (something called the “World Series” is often mentioned) by singing Israel Isidore Baline’s patriotic hymn “God Bless America” to a no-doubt attentive crowd trying to beat the rush to the exits.

Smith, who weighed a ninth of a ton in her prime, could certainly have been described as a “fat lady,” so that’s one point in the story’s favor, but the rest doesn’t work very well. First, the singing, if any, is usually done at the beginning of sports events, and in fact on those occasions when she did sing for games (more typically a recording was used), it was before the game began. There was even an expression, a reference to the one under discussion, that “It ain’t begun till the fat lady sings.” And also—well, if she did sing at the end of the game, then “it ain’t over till the fat lady sings” wouldn’t actually be true, as the game would have ended before the fat lady sang. Truth may be expecting a lot from a cliché, but still, there are limits to artistic license, aren’t there?

Now I should warn you that this isn’t going to be one of those pieces where at the end I triumphantly announce Aha—it was Jacques Mallet du Pan, writing in The Virginian, and he did it with the Lead Pipe! No, on this one I’m as Clueless as the next guy. But I’ve got to say that neither of these explanations cut it. They both stink of folk etymology, after-the-fact retrojections into the unknown. Campfire stories. Legends.

Is there another option? Well, another story has it—and like the Kate Smith tale I picked this one up surfing the interwaves—that it’s an old Southern proverb that originally ran “Church ain’t over till the fat lady sings.” You see, this explanation has it, in Southern churches services ended with a song usually sung by choir members who (we may suppose) were specially selected for their weight. It was only when these ladies had warbled their best shot that the doors were opened and the parishioners allowed to finally leave, no doubt giving thanks to whatever God they still believed in after all that.

This explanation has at least one merit—church services do indeed use music to cue the audience as to when to stand, when to sit, and when to beat a hasty retreat. I personally examined many church services on this very point for a college paper I wrote for an anthropology class (Music in Culture), and that one fact stands out very clearly in my memory. Music was liminal, a delineator used to separate events. But I don’t see how the fat lady gets into it. Singing, sure, church choirs are even a cliché themselves. But unless, say, Southern Baptists have some special fat-lady tradition I don’t see how the saying is relevant. And again—in my personal observation music is used in church services throughout—not just at the end. It don’t fit—and if it don’t fit, you must acquit.

Apparently quite a few people have written on the subject, but nobody seems to have hit the nail squarely on the thumb. If anybody has something resembling evidence on the subject, let me know. Or write it up in Wikipedia. It has a whole article on the subject.

Amazing Grace

Amazing grace! (how sweet the sound,)
That sav'd a wretch like me!
I once was lost, but now am found,
Was blind, but now I see.

John Newton

My bones hurt and I'm alternately shaking and burning up—it's possible I have a disease of some kind. Could be the end of the world, I suppose; the voices in my head were saying something about that, but I'm inclined to doubt it. Mostly they keep singing this horrible Christian hymn.

The news arriving through various portals is beyond bizarre. Conservatives are supposedly rewriting the Bible again (I thought that was the point of the Living Bible?), though I'm inclined to suspect somebody is having a little fun at our expense with this one. There are very sound textual reasons, by the way, for leaving out the story of the Woman Taken in Adultery, at least as part of the Fourth Gospel, liberal conspiracies aside. And it's by no means certain that Jesus' "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do" is really an original part of Luke. I personally think that textual evidence and not ideology should be the basis for making these sorts of decisions, but separating the two is not always as simple as it seems like it should be.

You know, textual evidence is important. People who simply accept the text of a piece as a more-or-less one-dimensional given have always baffled me. I really want to know what I have in front of me, where the text came from, how it got to where it was, and what its basis is. I like critical editions; I want sources, analogs, revisions, notes, second thoughts—the whole package. It's the difference between color and black-and-white, between 3D and 2D, between high definition and youtube.

Back in high school I thought it was ridiculous that neither literature nor history classes covered even the basics of text criticism. When we did Melville's Billy Budd in American lit my teacher thought an important key to Melville's point of view lay in his naming of the British ship the Indomitable. Okay, fair enough, but MS analysis shows that Melville changed his mind; at some point he decided to call the ship the Bellipotent instead. Does this make a difference to the analysis? Maybe not, but still, Bellipotent and Indomitable are not quite the same thing.

Billy Budd was quite an interesting puzzle to me at the time; the edition we read in school (Weaver's) differed in numerous ways from the copy we had at home (Freeman's). I had no idea why, but I ended up basing my paper on Freeman's edition rather than Weaver's, largely because I liked it better. Similarly, when we listened to a recording of a portion of Shakespeare's Othello while reading along in our books I was amazed at the differences between them; at the time I ignorantly blamed it on the liberties taken by our textbook editors, but in fact one was based on the Q1 text and the other based of the First Folio. Go figure. And when it comes to Murder in the Cathedral—well, maybe the less said, the better. There weren't enough copies to go around, you see, so those of us who could brought copies from home or the library and, well, confusion resulted when we attempted to read the thing aloud. Thank you T. S. Eliot for an entertaining and very confusing couple of afternoons.

Yeah, anyway, the point is—it's important to know your text. What exactly is it that you've got in front of you?

When I was working on a piece about the Modoc War I had occasion to refer to the wire dispatches sent out by the Associated Press (not the modern assocation; this one was connected with the Western Union telegraph system) from Ashland and Yreka. In a March 1873 dispatch describing the aftermath of a tumultuous meeting with the Modoc leaders it is said that Captain Jack (the principal Modoc leader) met with the Peace Commissioners in the morning wearing a woman's hat. At least that's what the Portland Oregonian version of the dispatch said. Most of the other papers I looked at (the San Francisco Call, various New York papers, etc.) however said it was a warrior's hat. Same dispatch, different reading. Which is correct?

Most people that I've thrown this out at over the years have responded that I should go with what the majority of the newspapers had, that is, warrior's hat. As one person observed, didn't it make more sense to suppose that he wore a warrior's hat rather than a woman's hat? Maybe so, but that wasn't the way I looked at it. I did what you're supposed to do in the textual world; I constructed a tree. It was easy to show that all versions of the wire stories from Yreka (not just this one) fell into three different groups. One of these was found in the Oregon papers, one in the Sacramento papers, and one in all the other papers. (This could actually be broken down still further; the Salem papers received their text from one of the Portland papers, for example, and the text that went out to New York was derived secondarily from the San Francisco text, but that gets beyond what is necessary for solving this particular puzzle.) The thing is there were three more or less independent branches to this particular textual tree. If two of them agree against the third, there is a strong probability that those two represent the correct text. And in this particular case the Sacramento and Oregon branches agreed against the Majority Text, making it clear that Captain Jack wore a woman's hat on this occasion, not a warrior's hat. (And in fact I later confirmed this through examination of independent accounts of the meeting, but that doesn't alter the significance of the textual analysis.)

The thing is that texts, whether they're being recopied or reprinted or whatever through the course of time, tend to become increasingly corrupt. Errors accumulate, and even when they're corrected, there is no guarantee that the corrections are in fact, well, correct. All that annoying apparatus that accompanies a decent edition of Melville or Shakespeare exists in the main to guarantee the purity of the text. It keeps the editors honest, and informs the reader of exactly what has happened over the course of time. Is what you're reading what appeared in the second quarto of Romeo and Juliet. or is it some editor's fix for an apparent misprint? Without the apparatus you don't know.

One of the most extraordinary textual feats of antiquity was the freezing of the Hebrew text of what Christians call the Old Testament. A group of seventh-century scribes, called the Masoretes, made an extremely interesting decision. They'd inherited a corrupt text, but rather than trying to fix it, they decided to quick-freeze it instead. Instead of correcting ungrammatical constructions, they called attention to them in commentaries running alongside the text. They made notes on how many words there should be in a section, where the center should be, stuff like that. The point of these notes, which some people have called arid and fruitless, was to provide a check on the text. They were in a way the medieval equivalent (though crude and superstitious) of a modern textual apparatus, and the result of this work was that they preserved an ancient text-type largely intact, as modern MS discoveries have shown.

By contrast the Greek translation of the Old Testament, which goes back to an independent text-type from the Hebrew, is a mess. Sad to say, some of this is the result of the efforts of a pioneering textual scholar, Origen of Alexandria. As part of his attempt to clarify the exact wording and sense of the Old Testament he set the various Greek translations side by side in parallel columns, something that would be of enormous use to us today, if only substantial portions of it had survived intact. What it actually did was make it easy to muddy the textual waters with eclectic texts, as readings could easily be transferred from one version to another.

The New Testament provides an even greater contrast. No textual care whatsoever was taken of the text by ancient and medieval scribes, and errors simply accumulated over time. Local text-types were eventually swamped by a single type, known as the Byzantine text, and a version of it, much later called the Textus Receptus (TR), became the basis for the first printed New Testament. A guy named Desiderius Erasmus created the text early in the sixteenth century on the basis of a handful of late manuscripts; for sections of the Apocalypse of John his basis was so defective that he had to use the Latin version, retranslating it into Greek. Many of the famous national translations, including the terminally ugly King James Version (KJV), are based on the TR.

Now as the years went by new manuscript discoveries, including the two oldest Bibles extant (Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus), as well as the work of many scholars, changed the picture considerably. Whole verses fell by the wayside as better manuscripts became available. 1 John 5:7b-8a (the Comma Johanneum) was one casualty, and John 7:53-8:11 (the Pericope Adulterae) was another. Readings changed. Scholars like Brook F. Westcott, Fenton J. A. Hort, and Bruce Metzger engaged in the Herculean task of evaluating thousands of pieces of evidence to establish the best and purest text possible with the material available.

But not everybody has been happy with the results of their patient conservative efforts. Some people actually resent it. One of my fellow house-denizens, for example, burst out in a tirade the other month about how textual criticism was anti-christian—this in response to a comment I'd made about textual criticism and Mark Twain. There is in fact a not-inconsiderable movement against text-criticism, at least as far as it applies to Sacred Writ.

Actually, that's not quite the case. They may call it the "curse of textual criticism", but they can't get out of it that easily. There's no text available that didn't involve some sort of textual criticism—the only real issue is over whether it's done poorly, or done well. If you go with the TR you're using a text thrown together out of a half-dozen late manuscripts. If you go with say Nestle-Aland 27, you're using a text based on literally thousands of manuscripts, versions, patristic citations, and that is entirely transparent, since it tells you exactly where a particular reading comes from and what the alternative readings are.

So from this perspective, at least, these guys aren't so much anti-textual-criticism as pro-bad-textual-criticism. The reasoning behind this is convoluted, or rather, there is no reason behind it at all, just pure emotion. And for the most part it comes from attachment to a particular translation.

I've expressed elsewhere (though apparently not on the internet) my dislike, contempt even, for the King James Version. It is a poorly-written committee-driven hack job, devoid of style or class, except where expressions have been stolen from earlier translations (Tyndale in particular). To borrow an expression from one of William the Bloody's friends, listening to it is like having a railroad spike driven through your head. Still, some people like it. Hunter S. Thompson, the greatest prose stylist of the twentieth century, for one. And Brother David Phillips of the Amazing Grace Baptist Church in Wedowee, Alabama, for another.

Brother David was kind enough to supply us with his five reasons for preferring it to more accurate translations: it is (he writes) a (1) pure, (2) preserved, (3) powerful, (4) plain, and (5) perfect book. Now Brother David seems to be using the words in a sort of Humpty-Dumpty sense, so we'll have to kind of figure out what he means as he goes along.

The purity of the text is guaranteed (he claims) because it is a translation from the TR, which he (wrongly) asserts is in agreement with 95% of all Scripture-related manuscripts. He claims (again wrongly) that modern translations are based on a text derived from only two manuscripts. "What does all this mean?" he asks rhetorically. "Simply this, the King James Bible is derived from a more accurate Greek text, not from 2 suspect texts of suspect origin. Therefore, the King James Bible is a pure Book!" He then goes on to extol the scholarship of the KJV translators—and in all fairness, it was pretty decent, for 1611. Of course their knowledge of Hebrew was extremely limited, and their knowledge of the koine dialect of Greek—in which the NT was written—nonexistent, but what can you expect? We've learned a lot in the four centuries since then. Still, apparently Brother David is impressed.

Okay, point 2—preservation. What on earth does he mean by that? The text of the NT, whether TR, Byzantine Majority, or Nestle-Aland, is derived from preserved manuscripts. The length of the preservation might be relevant; the TR and BMT are based primarily on very late texts, while the Nestle-Aland is based primarily on early, but no—it seems that Brother David has something else in mind. "God has promised to preserve His Word," he writes. But "Preservation is not present in any modern version!" Certain late additions to the text (Brother David explicitly cites Acts 8:37 and 1 John 5:7) that were mistakenly printed in the TR on the basis of a few late Greek MSS are no longer included in modern translations. But Brother David likes them. On the basis of this personal preference of his he claims "These are 2 pretty important verses and they belong exactly where the Lord put them!" Yeah, okay, whatever. He goes on to add a bunch of jibber-jabber about how the TR (which actually didn't even exist until Erasmus created it) was "Written on tanned animal skins" and "1 mistake on a page, destroyed. 3 in a book, whole book destroyed!" This is absolutely baseless, as he'd know if he'd ever actually looked at a Greek manuscript.

His third point—power. The King James Bible is a powerful book, he says. I assume by powerful he means it's a committee-written piece of Jacobean crap. But no, apparently he knows "the King James Bible has power because I have felt it and seen it at work in my life and in the lives of others. It is a powerful Book!!" So yeah, Brother David, you like it. I got that. Well, I like Pink Floyd's "Atom Heart Mother." There's a powerful work, if you like. But I don't worship it, and I sure as hell don't confuse emotional appeal with textual authenticity or accuracy in translation.

Okay, number four—plainness. The only thing I get out of his gibberish here is that he thinks the King James Bible is written at a fifth grade level. Since I don't see how that's either a virtue or a fault, I really don't get his point. It certainly isn't that difficult to grasp for anyone with a working knowledge of Jacobean English; I don't know how many fifth graders are included in that group.

And finally, perfection. Again, he is using this word in some strange manner of his own. He picks several passages where he prefers the KJV translation—Isaiah 7:14, for example, where he prefers the KJV's "virgin" to the original Hebrew word meaning "young woman". I don't know what this has to do with perfection. Determining which translation you like best on the basis of personal feelings is all very well and good, but it doesn't really add up to much. It's just really not that persuasive, especially when the evidence is against you.

I probably shouldn't try writing this stuff when I'm running a high fever and "Amazing Grace" keeps playing in my head; I've somehow wandered way off the topic. And my hands are shaking so much I'm having trouble typing. Still, it beats lying down and feeling miserable, and I don't actually have to post the damn thing.

The point is, I just like knowing where my text comes from. If you want a translation based on the accumulated crap and errors of centuries, by all means use the King James Version or the World English Bible. I'm not going to join you, but I don't quarrel with your choice, if it makes you happy. Enjoy! The world is large. There's room for all kinds at the table.

But when it comes to hosting a good old-fashioned anti-American Halloween sacred book-burning and barbecue, my mind begins to reel. Is this actual news, or are fever-induced hallucinations kicking in? Apparently a certain pastor Marc Grizzard of the Amazing Grace Baptist Church in Canton, North Carolina, is in such desperate need of publicity, that he's hosting his own holy holocaust, and all translations not based on the TR (as well as at least one that is) are going to be ceremonially burned, along with works by Metzger, Westcott, and Hort. And there's going to be music as well, a delightful variety of "country, rap, rock, pop, heavy metal, western, soft and easy, southern gospel, contempory [sic] Christian". No, they're not going to play it, they're going to burn it. Really, these are delightful people. And there will be words from the likes of Billy and Franklin Graham, Chuck Colson, and Mother Teresa—yes, you guessed it, also burned. It sounds like a lot of fun. If all fourteen members of his congregation show up, they can do a reenactment of the Last Supper, with a couple of spares.

And people wonder why Christianity has fallen to such low repute. Seriously, with people like Marc Grizzard, Fred Phelps, Jimmy Swaggart, Tammy Faye Baker, and Jim Jones as its representatives, it's not really surprising.

Passing Notes

Okay, I'm still here, still alive, still breathing, still connected with the web world. As far as I know this is going to be another placeholder entry, something to try to keep the blog alive while I scurry about looking for acorns, or something equally productive.

Well, let's see... My family has returned from visiting my mother (their grandmother) at the coast; my niece is in a foul mood, but as far as I can tell from talking with my mother things went well there, and they got her yard in good shape and the new wall on the house painted, so I'm putting it down to exhaustion.

I'd hoped to have something more solid to include, but I will note a couple of recent blog entries I've read with enjoyment. John J. McKay (archy) has a fascinating piece entitled "Zombies of the mammoth steppes" involving an interesting piece of fake history: the 1846 discovery of a complete mammoth specimen—a discovery that never happened. Although some of the details seem to be a bit fuzzy, the story originated in an 1859 children's book by Philipp Körber, entitled Kosmos für die Jugend. The discovery soon made its way into the scientific literature, and "By the end of the century, some of the details were so well established that they had could stand up against newer, and more correct, data." While certain details of the story were especially appealing to crackpots (see for example its use here at Creationscience.com), legitimate scientists also have continued to cite the nonexistent discovery. McKay attributes this to three elements:

First, the original story was well told, filled with many plausible details, and included the solutions to some outstanding mysteries about mammoths. Probably because of the verisimilitude and answers, the story was adopted and retold in considerable detail by some very influential scientists. Their credibility led to many retellings in both the popular and scientific press. Finally, debunkings of the story have been weak, made by not credible writers, or located in hard to find places.

One of the "not credible" debunkers was Henry Hoyle Howorth, a champion of the Flood and an opponent of the concept of ice ages, who wrote in The Mammoth and the Flood:

It is very strange that if genuine no accounts of this discovery should have reached the ears of Baer or Brandt, Schmidt or Schrenck, who none of them mention it, and that it should be first heard of in a popular book for boys in 1862. Until some proof to the contrary is forthcoming, I shall treat this tale as a mere romance constructed out of what we know about the Mammoth from other sources as an amusing story for boys.

Not that Howorth was the only one; still, given his biases, he didn't help matters much. Anyway, the piece is a great follow-up to McKay's earlier Mammoth on Ice (also very much worth reading, if you haven't seen it already).

On a completely different note this piece (h/t James McGrath) took me back a good many years to Dr. James M. Robinson's class in Q when the subject of the western non-interpolations came up—why, I don't remember. (The western non-interpolations are a group of passages, mainly in Luke, that don't appear in the western text, but do appear in most new testament manuscripts.) Most of the class was unfamiliar with the term, and Dr. Robinson pointed out that it wasn't exactly a neutral term for the group, as it basically presupposed that these passages had been interpolated into the Alexandrian (and Byzantine?) texts, and that the Western text preserved the original readings. If I'm remembering correctly Dr. Robinson felt they should be considered on a case-by-case basis, rather than making sweeping pronouncements—though I would point out that getting his own views on anything was always tricky. He was great at clarifying the positions of other scholars, and at showing what the consequences of those views might be; he was amazing at picking up suggestions thrown out in class and presenting how they might fit in with the larger body of knowledge; getting him to pronounce on what he thought was another matter altogether.

Anyway, to get back to the matter at hand, James D. Tabor muses over the restoration of these passages to certain modern translations, based largely on the testimony of P75, which, though an early representative of the Alexandrian text, is still, when all is said and done, just another representative of the Alexandrian text. There may well be good reasons to restore these passages to the text of Luke, but in the end the matter should not rest exclusively on the age of a particular exemplar of a text.

Recovering the original text of any ancient document requires a number of related approaches, and one is clearly the careful dating of the sequence of manuscript witnesses and variants. But the “older” is surely not the more original, and judgments of content and substance must finally prevail. I remain convinced, after all these years, that my initial judgment that Wescott and Hort’s position on the Western non-interpolations was self-evident remains the case.

Personally I've veered on that topic over the years, but the secondary nature of some of these passages (at least) seems manifest, whether supported by textual evidence or no. I mean, is it really likely that the original author of Luke-Acts would have had Jesus twice rise up into the sky (Lk 24:51 and Acts 1:9)? I mean, I can understand if he did why some scribe might remove the first reference in the interest of harmonization, but isn't it easier by far to suppose that some scribe added it to the end of Luke after Luke's separation from Acts? I mean, come on people, just because it was ancient times doesn't mean that everybody was batshit insane.

Anyway, James D. Tabor's piece is both interesting and relevant and is well worth reading. I enjoyed it, anyway.

Mark Twain's Literary Afterlife

One of the books I mentioned as influencing my life, certainly my literary preoccupations, was a 1962 Mark Twain collection entitled Letters from the Earth. The story behind it is an odd one, and takes us down some bizarre pathways of history.

In his own time Mark Twain was known as a comic writer and lecturer. There were a lot of them around then, most of them forgotten. They were very roughly the equivalent of present-day stand-up comedians, and for the most part were relatively harmless. One of my favorites—and certainly a more typical example than Mark Twain—was an Oregon lecturer named Elisha Applegate. His most famous routine was on the topic of "Mohammed and the Koreish". The lecture was so popular in Oregon that when Applegate was appointed to be a sort of cultural ambassador for the state in 1873, Portland's leading citizens urged him to deliver the lecture one last time before departing for the nation's capital. The content of the lecture is not apparently available, but we do know that he took a somewhat tolerant view of Islam, sometimes comparing it favorably to Christianity. One much quoted bon-mot regarding Islamic polygamy vs. Christian infidelity was to the effect that Islam had the harem system, while Christianity had the harum-scarum system.

Humorous lecturers were, well, not uncommon, and not especially respected, and it was to this class that Mark Twain was seen to belong. The genius of, say, Huckleberry Finn was recognized in Europe long before it was recognized in the United States. And, not to put too fine a point on it, a lot of Mark Twain's success in the United States was as a harmless necessary comedian.

But funnyman Mark Twain was a creation of Samuel Clemens—and Clemens was a much more complicated fellow than the comic lecturer. As a child young Samuel had trembled at each thunderstorm, fearing the wrath of God. And as he grew up he more and more came to lose his childlike faith in the god he had learned about in Sunday school. The mindless workings of nature—the young spiders who preyed on their mother, the parasitic wasp who laid its eggs in a living but paralyzed host—convinced him more and more that God was not merely wrathful, but downright malevolent. Tormented by visions of the worthy being punished while the unrighteous prospered, of the unworthy motives behind even the most seemingly altruistic actions—in short, by the way the world actually worked, he relived these images in a series of works destined to remain unpublished in his lifetime. Some of them—The Chronicle of Young Satan, for example, or "Letter from the Recording Angel," are among his best work.

One of these was something he called "Letters from the Earth." In it a supernatural being visits our planet and writes back to his fellow super-beings about the religion he finds there—specifically about Christianity as it was practiced in nineteenth-century America. Naive views of heaven, prayer, and the nature of God are satirized freely. He wrote to a correspondent (Elizabeth Wallace) on 13 November 1909 about it:

I've been writing "Letters from the Earth," and if you will come here and see us I will— what? Put the MS in your hands, with the places to skip marked? No. I won't trust you quite that far. I'll read messages to you. This book will never be published—in fact it couldn't be, because it would be felony to soil the mails with it, for it has much Holy Scripture in it of the kind that . . . can't properly be read aloud, except from the pulpit and in family worship. Paine enjoys it, but Paine is going to be damned one of these days, I suppose.

Albert B. Paine was Twain's biographer, and he certainly seems to have enjoyed "Letters from the Earth." He made no serious attempt to get the work published, however, though he did include one short passage (with unmentioned excisions) in his biography. Other than that the work remained unknown for decades. Several of Twain's unpublished pieces made their way into print, often with rather dubious editorial emendations (see my piece on The Mysterious Stranger for an example), but not that one.

In 1939 literary critic Bernard Devoto made a determined effort to get it out. He put together a collection of unpublished Twain fragments and provided it with notes and explanations. But Samuel Clemens' daughter Clara objected to it strongly, and the volume didn't appear. She felt it presented a distorted reflection of her father's views. She may well have been right—but Samuel Clemens did write these pieces, and they by no means stand alone.

Now Devoto made some interesting choices in several of the items. "Papers of the Adams Family" for example are somewhat unrelated sketches written many years apart, having in common only that they were attributed to various antediluvian figures. It's not exactly bogus (and Devoto was straightforward about what he was doing)—but it's not exactly Twain either. "The Damned Human Race" is likewise made up of fragments—various vaguely philosophical notes Clemens wrote late in his life—assembled in their present form by Devoto. "Cooper's Prose Style" is made up of two manuscripts—an unfinished lecture and the original ending to "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses."

Which takes us back to "Letters from the Earth." To provide the letters with a prolog, Devoto turned to another earlier MS of Twain's—an unfinished piece called "The Creation of Man." This describes the Creator's invention of the universe and the reactions of Gabriel, Michael, and Satan to it. At the end of it Satan heads off to earth and starts a letter back to Gabriel and Michael about what he finds there. The MS breaks off in mid-sentence.

Paine wrote about the two pieces that "Letters from the Earth" was suggested by "The Creation of Man," but was "not a continuation of it." Devoto overruled Paine, however, commenting "Nevertheless the transition is direct and the continuation unmistakable"; he therefore omitted the final lines of "The Creation of Man" and attached it to "Letters from the Earth." In point of fact it is nowhere stated in "Letters from the Earth" who exactly is writing to whom; the focus is on mankind as seen from a supernatural perspective. The author only becomes Satan as a result of Devoto's combination of the two MSS.

Some of the material slated for the book, also entitled Letters from the Earth, made it into print during the next couple of decades. (Should you be interested, and I feel quite certain that you are not, they were "The Gorky Incident" (1944), "Cooper's Prose Style" (1946), "Letter from the Recording Angel" (1946), and "A Cat-Tale" (1959).) Nothing of "Letters from the Earth" itself seems to have escaped.

Oddly enough it was cold war politics that at last allowed the appearance of "Letters from the Earth." Mark Twain was something of a hero in the old Soviet Union, and charges of censorship stung in America, the land where free speech was a valued right. Not willing to give the Soviets a talking-point, Clara Clemens Gabrilowitsch finally relented, and the book at last appeared.

It made ripples, but it was by no means as shocking in 1962 as it would have been in 1939. I read it with considerable interest as an eleven-year-old; it was a side of Mark Twain I'd never seen before, though people who had read more of Twain than appeared in The Little Golden Library (or whatever the real name of the series was) would not have seen much that was new. In an earlier entry I wrote about the effect the book had on me; especially the violence and injustice recorded in the Bible about the conquest of Canaan. The effect on more sophisticated (or at least more adult) readers was not so striking. One reviewer parodied The Screwtape Letters (1942) to express his disappointment that this book was not really the devilish concoction the demonic realm had been hoping for. And many reviewers observed that the naive views of religion and the afterlife attacked in it were not the views of sophisticated theologians—as if those views were actually shared by the majority of the American people. Certainly the delay helped blunt the effect of the work—though in point of fact, it may never have been as unpublishable as Twain thought it was.

One of the oddities of this publishing history is that this piece, "Letters from the Earth", a hundred years old this year, is still in copyright in the United States. It will be in copyright in the United States until 2057—a fact that would please Mark Twain no end, as he was a great believer in perpetual copyright. Samuel Clemens has been dead for nearly a century now, and most of his works have quite properly entered the land of public domain, but not this tiny handful. Clemens' dead hand will hold these works with an iron grip for more than a century and a half before they become part of the general heritage of the American people. It's interesting—but tough.

As Thyme Goethe Bye

When I did a series a while back on "Forsaken Roots" (or whatever you want to call it) I ended up establishing a text for it, mostly because there was no authoritative source, and I'm picky about my texts. If I'm going to take the time to write a commentary on something, I want to be sure that I have something resembling a definitive text to work with, else what's the point? For my purposes at the time I simply picked four texts sort of at random—but not quite. I looked for older examples, and I wanted examples that were textually divergent. If the textual tree had branches, I wanted samples from as many as possible.

Actually I already knew that the tree had at least two branches, a longer recension and a shorter one. I'd picked that up pretty quickly when I went to Ed Brayton's commentary with questions from the longer recension only to find he didn't cover them; his commentary was based on the shorter recension. I suspected the most likely explanation was that the longer recension had grown by accretion from the shorter recension, but I didn't assume anything, which was just as well, as that hypothesis proved incorrect.

Since for technical reasons (the width of my screen mainly) I wanted to restrict my comparison to four versions, I decided to pick two from the longer recension and two from the shorter. If I could construct something resembling a reasonable text from them then I'd be off and running with my real purpose—doing the commentary. Close enough for jazz.

When my laptop died one of the things I lost—I'd never bothered to copy it—was the "Forsaken Roots" synopsis I'd used to construct the text. I figured I was done with it. But as I see new versions of it surface again like a goddamn hydra my textual sleuth keeps being activated—there's another one of those, I say to myself, noting the missing word "Supreme" in front of "Court" and the telltale period after "first" and before "Harvard". Where are they coming from? Idle Googling produced some answers (those missing-Supreme copies for example all go back to a website published by one Mary Jones), but I kind of wanted to know a bit more. I didn't particularly want to repeat the work I'd done, but I wanted something. I decided to see if I could establish a text for the longer recension.

So I went back to hunting for these things, examining example after example, looking for particular textual characteristics. Most examples turned out to be either from the shorter recension or from the Mary Jones family, neither of which were any use to me. A kind of sadness came over me as I examined these things in their original context, often a blog entry or a comment thread. First the text itself would appear, typically cut-and-pasted from the Mary Jones or some other familiar site. Next would come the admiring comments. This one is pretty typical:

Thanks for sharing. This was very informative. Neither in my secondary or college education, do I recall this information be read, taught or discussed. It shines a brighter light on the foundation of America for me.

(If you're wondering about the text of the version immediately above this comment, it's from the longer recension, but not part of the Mary Jones family, which, if the date is correct, had yet to be established.) All the elements are there—gratitude, admiration for the research, enthusiasm for the Christian light on early America, and curiosity (or anger) about why this information had been suppressed. Missing is the clear light of common sense which, for some reason, nobody ever seems to think to switch on. Is it bloody likely that these guys would have said or written the sorts of things attributed to them here? Would Patrick Henry really refer to this "great nation" before it had been established? What conceivable set of circumstances would have prompted Congress to pass a resolution recommending the Holy Bible for use in all schools? (The "1782" is a particularly nice touch on this one.) What on earth does it mean for the Bible to be quoted 94% of the time?

Sometimes the next question will be, Did you write this? And the reply comes (if at all) No, I got it from the internet. From the internet. Words from on high, I guess, supplied by the Internet Genii for the benefit of us lesser mortals. What do you mean, you got it from the internet? You might as well have said you found it blowing in the wind alongside the road one day, or you found it scurrying through the fields of Elysium. The internet? Somebody wrote those words, and somebody did the research behind them, and, you know, that somebody deserves credit.

Now, in all fairness, in this case not a lot of credit. The writer/researcher here has simply bundled together a clutch of remaindered misinfo, and retailed the package to the gulls. He or she may even be quoting from memory for some of them; there are pointless variations in them from the authentic text (though speaking of the authentic text of a forged passage seems a bit on the paradoxical side). The fake Madison is a case in point:

We have staked the future of all our political constitutions upon the capacity of each of ourselves to govern ourselves according to the moral principles of the Ten Commandments

sounds more like a fuzzily-remembered

We have staked the future of our political institutions upon the capacity of mankind for self-government: upon the capacity of each and all of us to govern ourselves, to control ourselves, to sustain ourselves according to the Ten Commandments of God

than a poorly-copied one. (It is quite possible that a skip of the eye from the first capacity to the second caused the omission of the one genuine bit of Madison in this whole farrago—the capacity of mankind for self-government; that wouldn't explain the mangling of what follows, however.)

Occasionally—not often, but occasionally—somebody will question the item. Once I noted somebody actually asking the key question—what are your sources? More often it will be a remark to the effect that this can't be true, since the Founders were all deists, and anyway, what about the treaty of Tripoli? or something like that. And then maybe somebody will contribute a story about some kid they heard of from a friend of a friend who wasn't allowed to bring her Bible to show-and-tell, or some such idiocy. (Okay, I made that one up, but it's always something in that vein.)

But the thing that really gets me is the pitiful sense of gratitude emanating from these comments. Children picking up pretty pieces of broken glass and telling themselves they are diamonds. Playing with them, passing them around. The pathos of it all starts to overcome me. I almost want to depart from my rôle as observer and help out. The "Forsaken Roots" I could write for them! Oh, it probably wouldn't have Madison in it, but there are many famous names among the Founders, and I can cherry-pick with the best of them. Of course that would only be what Archie Goodwin calls fancy lying, rather than Forsaken's plain lying—a matter of taste, really, I suppose.

But, getting back to the textual issues at hand—the one thing that really bothers me, and for which I can see no answer whatsoever, is—what on earth created the shorter recension in the first place? Some horrible and malign force, early in the transmission history of this bagatelle, blew two large holes in it, seemingly at random. And yet, and yet, the disseminators of this savagely shattered version went right on distributing it, never noticing its broken condition, as mindless as those ants who, upon running out of food, start cutting off the back ends of their larvae to try to keep the front ends fed. And the hosannas of joy were just as heartfelt, regardless of the presence of palpable nonsense like

Let every student be plainly instructed and earnestly pressed ... to lay Jesus Christ as the only foundation for our children to follow the moral principles of the Ten Commandments?

(And that question-mark is part of the original text.) Did they not read what they were writing? How do you go about instructing a student to lay Christ as a foundation for our children to follow anything at all, let alone the moral principles of the Ten Commandments? It's madness—but nobody seems to notice.

And the other hole that makes it look as though Thomas Jefferson, rather than John Quincy Adams, was an officer in the American Bible Society—this is greeted as a welcome new discovery, rather than as a sign of the corruption of the text. And they say random mutation can't generate new information! Tell Jefferson! He never would have made president of the ABS without it.

The whole thing reeks of corruption. Fake quotations, themselves misquoted, and then further mangled through copying errors. False interpretations given new false twists, without anybody apparently bothered enough by any of it to even check the goddamn internet, their source for it all. Random holes fixed by random guesses—

Seriously, how much trouble is it to Google something? No, it looks like it's easier to just plain guess. Here's an example. The original text read:

However, in 1947, there was a radical change of direction for the Supreme Court. It required ignoring every precedent of Supreme Court ruling for the past 160 years. The Supreme Court ruled in a limited way to affirm a wall of separation between church and State in the public classroom. In the coming years, this led to removing prayer from public schools in 1962. Here is the prayer that was banished: “Almighty God, we acknowledge our dependence on Thee. We beg Thy blessings upon us and our parents and our teachers and our country. Amen.”

The Mary Jones version dropped a piece of it here, producing:

However in 1947, there was a radical change of direction in the Supreme Court. Here is the prayer that was banished: "Almighty God, we acknowledge our dependence on Thee. We beg Thy blessings upon us and our parents and our teachers and our country. Amen."

(Note also the change of "direction for" to "direction in"; this is one of the seven distinguishing characteristics of the Jones text. Of course the omission that follows is another.) And here's how one transmitter "fixed" the problem:

In 1947, it all changed! The Supreme Court removed the prayer that had been used for over 100 years at the opening of each session of the Court. "Almighty God, we acknowledge our dependence on Thee. We beg Thy blessings upon us and our parents and our teachers and our country. Amen."

Again, is it likely that the Supreme Court began each session with a prayer begging the blessings of God upon parents and teachers? Doesn't this sound more like a school prayer? Hello? Is nobody awake in there? And this version is supposedly reprinted from the February 2005 edition of the Liberty Tree newsletter. No checking, even with the quasi-immortality of print in view? Just guesswork?

I guess. Sometimes my sense of exasperation overcomes my feelings of pathos. People this unreflective deserve to eat garbage.

But nobody deserves this. Not even those poorly-informed clowns who blather on about how Jefferson invented the concept of separation of church and state when he wasn't even in America at the time the Constitution was being written—how would he know anything? And besides, wasn't it some unknown justice named Hugo Black who decided to pull it out of an old forgotten letter written to the Danbury Baptists, of all people, and foist it off on all of us as settled law?—yeah, not even these crackers deserve this kind of treatment. Even canonical critics and flat-earthers deserve better.

Well . . . maybe not canonical critics.