Whether we or our politicians
know it or not, Nature is
party to all our deals and
decisions, and she has more
votes, a longer memory, and
a sterner sense of justice
than we do.
Wendell Berry
I grow a bit rueful when I hear people talking about “saving the planet” in discussions of climate change. Au contraire mes amis, it’s not the planet we are trying to save but our place on it. The earth is 4.5 billion year old. We are recent tenants. It got along fine without us and it will note our passing nary a speck.
Robert, if only I could! I’m not the writer so many of you are. If I were, then I’d begin with What the Robin Knows (Jon Young) that Jill told us about. I had no idea birds we see regularly know us. There’s a mockingbird who sits on the top of a lantern at the end of a picket fence outside my kitchen window watching birds at the birdbath. I’m careful around him and he knows I’m okay. The book tells how to disarm wildlife.
Judith I don’t think Robert was asking for a book report or an essay. Just your impressions and notes. Kind of like your post I quoted!
I enjoy writing. I did a lot of it on my job and since I’ve retired I don’t see myself stopping. I’m not really the diary type but what I have begun is a “Weather Journal” like folks used to do in earlier times. I have always been fascinated by the weather (including space weather) and I can include other stuff as inspiration strikes.
Robert said:
We incentivized the farmers to preserve their farms rather then sell to developers by reimbursing them for what they would have made selling their land at the previously zoned acreage per lot.
What good work.
The loss of the family farm is so sad.
In looking for information on Wendell Berry, I came across his ** you do not have permission to see this link **, which looks like a great read.
Any Japanese movie monster (** you do not have permission to see this link **) fans? Like a lot of American kids I watched these movies in heavily edited, dubbed versions on TV. When you’re young you have no filters and you drink stuff in without discrimination. It’s only later you go back and make value judgements. These movies just rolled in with all those 50s’ science-fiction movies, westerns and war movies. Occasionally there were those that stood out from the rest and turned out to have an interesting backstory.
Take possibly the most famous, ** you do not have permission to see this link ** (1954). The version that made it to the states had scenes edited in with American actors, including Raymond Burr, who later achieved fame and fortune as Perry Mason. But if you go back and look at the original Japanese version you find a movie with a much darker tone and an overt social and political subtext. The movie was released less than a decade after the war and reflected popular Japanese attitudes towards current events like the then ongoing American occupation and the Cold War. As a reaction to these events there were strong public pacifist, isolationist sentiments and a growing resentment of the American presence which seemed guaranteed to drag Japan into the Cold War. In the American version all that stuff was toned down and the explicit anti-nuke and anti-militarist themes were eliminated altogether. Even if you’re not a Japanese monster fan I recommend checking out the original Japanese version. It’s very revealing. And not at all what you probably expect.
There was a sequel along the same lines but it bombed so the genre didn’t really pick back up until the 1960s and then it switched focus towards a child audience. I think if you’re at all familiar with the genre those are the ones most people probably remember. (King Kong vs Godzilla,. Ghidrah, Rodan, etc)
However, mixed in with the usual stuff there were occasionally interesting – and weird – releases. One of my own favorites was ** you do not have permission to see this link ** (1962). In this case the monster was a giant moth (yes, you read that right, a moth) who caused chaos and destruction by generating hurricane force winds by flapping his giant wings. Mothra was telepathically linked to a pair of one foot tall singing twins who lived on a south sea island that had been the site of Cold War hydrogen bomb tests. As a result of a shipwreck caused by a typhoon, westerners investigated the island, inhabited it turned out, and the whole adventure began.
Why am I writing about a Japanese monster movie in a thread devoted to books? Well… it turns out there is an interesting literary backstory. Most of these genre movies were written for the screen but in this case the source material was a serial novelette consisting of three short stories written by three very well known Japanese authors. For the first time the original novelette has been translated and published, accompanied by a very illuminating essay about the entire production of the book and movie by the translator, Jeffrey Angles.
** you do not have permission to see this link **
Aside from its entertainment value this book succeeds as a historical/cultural study. Who knew that up until 1964 (twenty years after the war!) most Japanese, with only very exacting exceptions, were forbidden from traveling outside of Japan? Who knew that the American occupation of Japan included active suppression of political dissent, including of anti-nuke and anti-militarist political organizations? American military bases were simply too important in the Cold War to allow democratic expression of isolationist political sentiments. There were widespread public protests and political demonstrations. (The famous “Yankee Go Home!” slogan originated in eastern Europe but was quickly adopted by Japanese political parties.)
Also it turns out that the Japanese language is largely gender neutral. They have pronouns but they can be effectively left out of writing and speech because of the grammar of the language. This became an issue in the translation because in various places Mothra, the giant moth, could be referred to as masculine and neuter and feminine. Angles’ solution is quite clever. (He differentiates between the stages of the moth’s development, egg, larva (caterpillar), pupa, and adult, from “it” to “he” to “she”.)
After reading the book I went back and watched the move. The movie follows the narrative pretty closely. There is some comedy and a love interest added. In the book there are four of the “fairies” but only two in the movie. The book includes a creation myth that is left out of the movie for budgetary reasons no doubt. The only cringey aspect of the movie are all the Japanese and American actors in blackface playing the inhabitants of the island. (But then I can’t count the number of westerns I saw growing up where white European actors played “Indians”. Let him without sin…etc.)
The story of the movie production is equally interesting. It seems as if the entire genre was stimulated by the Hollywood rerelease of the original King Kong (1933) to celebrate its 20th anniversary. The novelette seems to have been influenced by the Doctor Doolittle book series, one of which depicts an encounter with…you guessed it, a giant moth. There is for me one laugh out loud moment when a Toho studio executive sends out a memo to the production crew worrying about there being too many special effects in the movie and not enough character development and human drama! Now there’s a memo you’ll never see in Hollywood!
I enjoyed this book enormously. It succeeds because it makes me want to investigate the other writings of these Japanese authors, famous in Japan, but much less well known elsewhere. Hopefully there will be translations.
Stephen said:
Whether we or our politicians
know it or not, Nature is
party to all our deals and
decisions, and she has more
votes, a longer memory, and
a sterner sense of justice
than we do.Wendell Berry
I grow a bit rueful when I hear people talking about “saving the planet” in discussions of climate change. Au contraire mes amis, it’s not the planet we are trying to save but our place on it. The earth is 4.5 billion year old. We are recent tenants. It got along fine without us and it will note our passing nary a speck.
I suppose you’re partly correct in that opinion, Stephen. I will take an exception. For example, last Fall, we (the husband and I) finished cutting down a flowering crab tree that I planted as a stick around 1995. The tree flowered every spring most beautiful right in our front picture window. The robins, especially loved the tree for fruit in winter and nesting in Spring. I mean we could see right into the tree at eye level. I say finished cutting down because I did plant the tree too close to the driveway and the house — thus the beautiful bloom in the front window. The branches after a rain dripped on our heads going out the front door. We cut off whatever became necessary as the years went by. Finally last year, it didn’t bear fruit and being just a sad shadow of what it once was, we finished the job. The point is that I preserved that tree as long as possible because, I think I can say, in essence it was an extension of me and I rather mourned its potential loss. But, anyway, I have the memories.
My father planted a flowering magnolia I guess in the late 60s and every year while I grew up we looked forward to seeing that tree bloom in the Spring. He would protect it from frost some years by putting a big sheet of clear plastic tarp over it and pegging it down, etc. Of course, over the years, the tree grew so tall, the blooms were no longer visible from the windows of the house. Anyway, I buried my father’s ashes under that magnolia and I can tell you the fragrance of magnolia is in that soil where his ashes lie.
I think the shame of it is that we don’t know our place and how deeply connected we are to the earth and nature nor do we recognize it’s true value – or even care how it operates — only what it can give to us. Gosh — just take a deep breath in a cool wooded area — aahh. Yes, she’ll note our passing nary a little. She’ll just get rid of us like a parent robin does with an unwanted baby bird that can’t keep up with the brood.
There — I’ve said my piece.
Stephen said:
The movie was released less than a decade after the war and reflected popular Japanese attitudes towards current events like the then ongoing American occupation and the Cold War. As a reaction to these events there were strong public pacifist, isolationist sentiments and a growing resentment of the American presence which seemed guaranteed to drag Japan into the Cold War. In the American version all that stuff was toned down and the explicit anti-nuke and anti-militarist themes were eliminated altogether. Even if you’re not a Japanese monster fan I recommend checking out the original Japanese version. It’s very revealing. And not at all what you probably expect.
I’d like to see that original Japanese version. And I see it’s available for borrowing from my local library! I thought Godzilla Minus One (2023) to be engaging. Much better than the ’54 version.
I thought Godzilla Minus One (2023) to be engaging.
I saw that one too. I thought it was successful because it went back to the original approach. Looking back a lot of those sixties movies are really silly. The Japanese wound up doing what the Hollywood studios did with Frankenstein and Dracula in the 1940s. Having all the monsters in one movie. Poor Frankenstein’s monster! They would bury him, drown him, freeze him, and charbroil him, but he aways came back for more.
Jill, I agree that we can interact with nature in a positive and creative way. But too many people view nature like some big campground park or worse, as natural resources, to exploit and waste. How will we explain to our great-grandchildren (who will bear the brunt of our foolishness) that we knew what was going to happen and we did nothing!?!
Instead of starting a new thread about Stephen A. Geller’s book, Sacred Enigmas – Literary Religion in the Hebrew Bible, which I did begin an attempt, but it proved so daunting a task, I’ve abandoned it. BUT, I did find ** you do not have permission to see this link ** free to read on-line version of what is actually a Chapter in his book although it has undergone a few changes. The chapter in the book is equally interesting and compelling, but I think I might like this on-line Prooftexts version better. He gives us a well-organized, step by step approach covering the final redaction of Deuteronomy 4, and demonstrates the processes taken, with a literary critical analysis of the text to find the various ‘slights of hand’, that bring about a final description of a transcendent God whose Word as contained in the Torah has ultimate authority.
I recently finished ** you do not have permission to see this link **.
As a local boy with an interest in the subject I was fortunate enough to attend several of Prof Cline’s lectures and presentations over the years both at GWU and at the National Geographic Headquarters (whose largesse helped finance a lot of the work being done).
As the subtitle indicates this book really tells two stories, and brings alive for us two worlds. Both filled with fascinating characters, all too human, and incidents both bewildering and astonishing. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
When we consider the remains of ancient civilizations we often think of fading inscriptions on decaying monuments. But these texts were on tablets of unfired clay inscribed with the earliest known written script. ** you do not have permission to see this link **. Most were relatively small and portable, typically measuring around 2 or 3 inches wide and 3 or 4 inches high. I ask myself if I was totally unfamiliar with this type of writing and picked up a fragment of one of these tablets would I even recognize it for what it is?
Cline recounts head-spinning horror stories of the loss of such priceless artifacts simply through ignorance or carelessness. One purblind French professor, merely on the basis of having examined a single 16 line tablet, sniffed, and dismissed the entire find at Amarna as a hoax. (This had the effect of taking the French out of the competition to secure and translate the tablets in one fell swoop. This left the spoils to the English and the Germans. The wishes of the Egyptian government seem never to have ever been considered.) Currently we have almost four hundred tablets; if we credit the original reports, about – gulp – half of the amount originally excavated! What time couldn’t do, greed and clumsiness and shortsightedness certainly accomplished.
The Brits were led in their effort by credit hogs who rushed to be the first to publish. One wit (George Bernard Shaw maybe) once opined that the Victorian British archeologist went about his work with a trowel in one hand and a Bible in the other. Sure enough in these hasty translations who should appear but Moses and Solomon and even David! (Inevitably enough when they got to tablets that actually mentioned Jerusalem they completely missed it.) The German team was younger and more circumspect. And of course all the early, seminal work is in German.
But what of the world revealed by the proper translation of these texts?
Here was an interconnected collection of prosperous, stable Mediterranean civilizations, practicing cultural exchange and vigorous trade, full of rivalries of course though expressed mainly through proxies, lasting for centuries. Then, in a “perfect storm” of mass migration, invasion, disease, and natural disaster, swept away in less than a century. Some powers survived, like Egypt, but vastly weakened. Some, like the Hittites, utterly vanished from history until they too were rediscovered by archaeology. Our cultural and intellectual predecessors, the Greeks, entered a dark age that lasted three hundred years and was only very slowly overcome.
I can’t help but imagine “what if?” What if these cultures had not passed away but had advanced even further? Might we have had some kind of “classical civilization” a thousand years before Alexander and Hellenism? If so history would have been vastly different. The center of civilization would have been further east, its culture myths not Greek but from the Ancient Near East, its lingua franca not Greek but Akkadian.
I remember Emerson’s line about growing giddy when he contemplated the spinning wheels of history. And Cline is not blind to the lessons we moderns can learn from the discovery of these ancient civilizations. They were born and prospered and then they passed away. Could a Roman of the first century contemplate the domination of his civilization by a Middle Eastern religious cult? Can an American in 2026 imagine a future without us in it?
I was already a fan of Cline’s work but I can’t imagine a better book on ancient history being published this year.
Wait, there’s more:
As a companion to his original book ** you do not have permission to see this link **. Well done, and very entertaining. And accurate in its representations. It’s useful to see what these folks actually looked like. You have to congratulate Prof Cline on his media savvy and wish that more scholars were. And this work will undoubtedly reach an audience impervious to the charms of his other books.
I wonder if Prof Ehrman has ever considered a project like this?
Robert said
A few years back Bart did speak of A Graphic Novel (Textbook) on the New Testament, but I’m not sure what became of that project.
Yeah I forgot. In the comments I actually asked him about a version of Revelation. Of course now I’m thinking what a super cool graphic “novel” the Book of Enoch would make!
Since Prof Ehrman is looking back at earlier posts I think I’ll ask him.
For the longest time I’ve been meaning to get ** you do not have permission to see this link ** but I haven’t got round to it yet.
I would be interested to look at how Mr. Crumb handles the story of the capture and sale of Joseph into Egypt. I just finished a reading of Edward Greenstein’s ** you do not have permission to see this link ** which I enjoyed very much. This is an essay found in Literary Interpretations of Biblical Narrative, Volume II, Abington Press 1982.
I have my eye on ** you do not have permission to see this link ** by the same writer.
Yeah I forgot. In the comments I actually asked him about a version of Revelation. Of course now I’m thinking what a super cool graphic “novel” the Book of Enoch would make!
Oh. I didn’t see this. oops. (well, now I have! 🙂 )
I would be interested to look at how Mr. Crumb handles the story of the capture and sale of Joseph into Egypt. I just finished a reading of Edward Greenstein’s ** you do not have permission to see this link ** which I enjoyed very much. This is an essay found in Literary Interpretations of Biblical Narrative, Volume II, Abington Press 1982.
I’m hoping to pick it up in the States, and if I do, I’ll let you know how he handles it.
Thanks for the essay. I’m looking forward to reading it.
I have my eye on ** you do not have permission to see this link ** by the same writer.
Both look good – the second one especially.
The ** you do not have permission to see this link **specializes in what I love: poetry and wisdom literature, so she’s certainly someone whose work I’m going to explore.
I’m hoping to pick it up in the States, and if I do, I’ll let you know how he handles it.
Okay, good. A good possibility could be “horizontally, side by side” (as as was suggested by a commenter of Prof. Ehrman’s post concerning his writing the synoptic gospels segment; ** you do not have permission to see this link ** ) That seems like the only real way to go about it in an honest way, rather than to try to make the two versions harmonize.
…as was suggested by a commenter of Prof. Ehrman’s second post concerning the synoptic gospels segment of how he would write his graphic novel; ** you do not have permission to see this link **
The very one who stands before you. When the last software reboot was accomplished it retained the use of my initials in the post comments and my first name everywhere else.
The Bible does cry out for graphicalization (if that’s even a word – spellcheck is most distressed). I originally suggested Revelation as a standalone. The key would be to find the right artist, with the necessary mixture of attention to detail and whimsy. I have a comic book version of Hal Lindsey’s Late Great Planet Earth Earth done in a 70s psychedelic style, full of then current slang. Far out, man!
If they had the budget they could have a different artist do each gospel. That would add to the contrast that often gets elided in such comparisons.
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