Contents

• The Internet
  • Internet pest type 1
  • A desperate bid for fame
• Literature
  • Who was Samuel Pepys Jr?
• Museum-going
  • Good America comes through
• Religion
  • St John and (re-)creation
  • Translating Mark
  • Peter's tears

The Internet

At the moment, I'm thinking of a particular kind of troll that pops up on virtually any forum with scholarly pretensions.

• These people are always men.
• They always claim to be experts on the topic under discussion.
• Indeed, they are evidently well-educated, and their posts are full of nice long words, academic jargon and convoluted sentences. However, when they are finally deciphered, their posts turn out not to be saying very much, and certainly nothing very original.
• They claim to have access to special or secret knowledge. One such person on the Hopkins mailing list claimed to know things about Hopkins that the rest of us would be unable to handle when they finally came out. (This is highly unlikely; Hopkins' outward life was so uneventful that desperate biographers have tried to spice things up by revealing, for example, that he may have masturbated as a student. Anyone who had really uncovered something juicy about him could publish it and instantly make a name as a scholar, not use it to taunt people on an obscure Internet forum.)
• Although they have never started the forum on which they are posting, and never showed signs of starting anything similar, they are convinced that they could run things better than the person in charge and are constantly giving condescending advice, and may become abusive if it isn't taken.
• They behave in much the same way toward their fellow posters, and detect nasty personality flaws in anyone who dares to disagree with them.
• They seem to have a particular problem with women. (I don't say this because they attack me personally -- for the most part, they don't. I know enough by now to stay away from them.)
• They are obsessed with sex and vulgarity and will bring these subjects up even when there's no call for them. Furthermore, they seem to think that they are being very bold and daring by doing this, and that it is sure to shock the prudes who make up the rest of the forum.
• They assume that everyone is intently interested in them and their activities. Even though we'd never corresponded, one troll sent me a long e-mail ranting about the fact that he'd been banned from the Pepys' diary site.

A desperate bid for fame
I've begun an experiment at work. I'm trying to start one of those endlessly circulating e-mail jokes -- the ones you get four times a week from acquaintances who have you on their forwarding lists despite not having corresponded with you directly for years. Forgive me. I have a boring job.

With the help of Chris, Jordan and Zoë, I've made up a list called 'You might work for First National if ...' I think it's about ready to be launched on our colleagues. My aim is to see:

• how long it takes to come back to me
• how many times I get it
• whether/how often people change it along the way
• whether it mutates and migrates outside the company.

You might work for First National if ...

• You can tell the time of day by the stench in No. 79's stairwell.
• When someone asks how you are, you say, 'I am unable to comment on individual circumstances; please see your line manager if you have any queries.'
• You panic-bought sausage rolls before Treats closed for refurbishment.
• According to focus groups, your employer's brand profile is 'that building with all the people smoking outside.'
• When you hear the words 'customer service,' you just laugh.
• Your kitchen cupboard contains 9p baked beans, Tesco Value lager and Harrods paté de foie gras. [We got Harrods hampers for Christmas -- our parent company runs their store card scheme.]
• When a colleague threatens to mow down everyone in the office with a machine gun, you smile and say, 'That's just part of his charm.'
• Your parent company just spent Ł2m on a cutting-edge webcast, but you're having trouble seeing it on your workstation's Commodore 64.
• You decide to live with it, because anything's better than ringing the help desk.
• You tell people the continuum loop logo represents the never-ending interest our customers have to pay.
• You ask to change the dress code to black eyeliner and Slipknot hoodies so you won't get mugged on your fag break.
• You pray your parents don't retire to Spain, because you couldn't face the commute.
• When typing your phone number, you put +1+ at the end. [Has to do with our computer system.]
• Someone e-mails you the sleevenotes to the new Radiohead album, and you read the message three times before realising it's not from Internal Communications.
• You're worried you could get sacked just for reading this.

Literature

A few excerpts (with supplementary links, mainly from the very useful firstworldwar.com):

May 18, 1916. To the club to committee, where I did bring up the first of my complaints, to wit, the foulness of the windows; and we carried it for a sub-committee to enquire hereon with the steward, namely, myself and two other members; to my great content. Home, and seeing by the way gooseburies being now marked 4d. the lb., I did allow my wife that she now order them for our table; of which I have till to-day eaten only at the club or at others' tables.

July 19, 1916. Up, and an urgent message from Mr. Grainger, our warr works secretary, of his great need of all hands for making splints; and, upon this, seeing news from Genll. Haig of the Germans falling upon our army with the greatest possible force of numbers, I to work with all speed, and had a dozen pr. (the wood-work) done ere I halted for refreshing, thinking of the poor cripples that shall soon need them. So to the club, and ate of a very good veal pasty, to which a pott of ale. The talk is all of the sad condition of our army in Mesopotamia, which is, it seems, now smitten with the cholera morbus. And presently, Major Maggs coming, who was himself of Aylmer's army, but now home of a dysentery, a most grievous report he makes of the whole business from the time of their retreating from Bagdad; how the poor sick and wounded men suffer for lack of chyrurgeons and physick, and other matters, having no beds to lie on, nor boats nor carts to carry them, and, among other things, flyes and scorpions tormenting them to madnesse. ...

Aug. 3, 1916. This forenoon was hanged R. Casement, and at the last moment, it seems, did turn Catholique and has 2 priests to confess and housel him, and were, I hear, a mighty long time about it. His thus turning Catholique is judged a stranger thing in him allmost than his turning German, being Irish, and they do ever make the stoutest Protestants.

Aug. 20 (Lord's Day), 1916. With my wife to the Regent's Park, and to see the menagerie; where I was sorry to find that the great man drill is dead that lived in a hutch by the monkeyarium, and was the ugliest beast that ever was in the world allmost. Speaking of whom with one of their keepers, he laments very grievously our having no longer in London any beast so ugly as he believes the men be in Berlin, by their pictures; allbeit hath hopes of the baboon they put in the man drill's hutch, that he shall grow as ugly as von Tirpitz, if it please God spare him. ...

Museum-going

By the time Chris and I had been through the first couple of rooms, though, I felt irritated and depressed. The Art Deco style didn't look the way I'd remembered it. The pieces we'd seen were cold, humourless and seemingly designed without a thought for the user. The Paris Exhibition of 1925 featured an iron-grille chaise longue that would emboss its pattern into the lounger's flesh, and armchairs that required bending the body into chiropractor-horrifying contortions. It reminded me of today's art-for-artists'-sake, with its music no one listens to and books no one wants to curl up with.

It wasn't until we entered the next room that I found the missing link. It turns out that what I'd thought of as Art Deco was actually Moderne, the style that developed in the 1930s after the stock market crash -- and, crucially, after America entered the scene. (The U.S., a sign told us, had not participated in the Paris exhibition on the grounds that 'there was no new design in America.' Just as well, if it had all looked like that.) Moderne objects were inspired by skyscrapers and jazz, they were mass-produced for everyday use, and they had the sense of fun I had missed so much in the earlier European designs.

Religion

Translation forces you to come to some decision about ambiguities in the text. Take the story of Jesus healing the leper at the end of chapter 1. In modern translations, verse 41 usually says something like, 'And, feeling sorry for him, he [Jesus] stretched out his hand.' The Greek word translated as 'feeling sorry for him' is splagcnisqeiv, which comes from splagcna, 'innards,' and literally means 'moved to the innards,' or (in British slang) 'gutted.' But a few manuscripts don't have splagcnisqeiv at all, but rather ěrgisqeiv -- 'angered.'

There isn't enough support for ěrgisqeiv to justify replacing splagcnisqeiv, but the alternate reading can't be entirely dismissed. This is partly because of the principle that the more difficult reading is likely to be the more accurate one. It's hard to imagine a scribe writing that Jesus had been angry if he didn't have some good reason to believe it. By contrast, it's relatively easy to imagine a scribe being shocked at the thought of Jesus getting angry, and choosing splagcnisqeiv as a more palatable alternative. There is also evidence elsewhere in the text to support the notion of anger. Verse 43 is often translated as something like 'He sent him away and told him sternly [not to tell anyone of his healing],' but this is a wishy-washy substitute for the original. What the text actually says is, 'And straightaway, snorting at him (ťmbrimjsamenov aÇtű), he threw him out (ťxebalen -- the same verb used when Jesus 'casts out' demons).'

I decided that to translate splagcnisqeiv/ěrgisqeiv, I needed a word that would 1) convey the sense of one's physical insides being affected by emotion, and 2) leave some ambiguity about precisely what the emotion is. For the moment, at least, I've decided upon the half-forgotten English word 'heart-stricken.' Whether I keep it remains to be seen.

The obvious question is: Why would Jesus be angry? One suggestion is that Jesus, seeing the leper's exclusion, is angry at a social order that makes ill and disfigured people into outcasts. Thus when he tells the man to show himself to the priests 'as a witness,' he does not mean as a witness to them, but as a witness against them.

Another interpretation is far more subversive. It suggests that the leper is not a meek supplicant at all, but is part of a plot to entrap Jesus. According to this view, when the leper asks Jesus to 'cleanse' him (kaqarisai), he is not asking him to cure him of the illness, but to declare him ritually clean -- something that could be done only by the priests, and that would have been grounds for arrest. Jesus calls his bluff by literally curing him, and then sends him back to his co-conspirators as a witness that their plan has failed.

I don't think there is enough evidence to support this view. But whatever the explanation is, studying the Greek shows that there is more to this story than the traditional pious interpretation of humble faith rewarded.

Peter's tears
In Mark's gospel (14:72), after the cock crows, Peter begins to cry: ťpibalwn ťklaien. This use of the verb ťpiballw -- which literally means 'to throw upon' -- is rather odd, and has caused disagreement among translators. The King James version says, ‘When he thought thereon, he wept,’ while J.H. Moulton’s Grammar of New Testament Greek, published in 1908, has ‘he set to and wept.’ Modern translators appear to have settled on something like ‘he broke down and wept’ (The New American Bible) or ‘he burst into tears’ (The Jerusalem Bible). But lexicons that give this meaning at all list it as doubtful, and offer only this verse to support it. Various discusssions of this can be found on the web (see Matthew Henry's commentary, Vine's Expository Dictionary, Word Studies at Christadelphian Books Online, or this discussion or the various posts here at ibiblio.org), but there's one possibility that no one seems to have mentioned.

@Epiballw occurs 18 times in the New Testament, and in nine of those instances it refers to seizure or arrest. In fact, Mark has used it just a few verses earlier to describe the arrest of Jesus (oł de ťpebalon tav ceirav aÇtű, 14:46). But this is the very fate that Peter has avoided through his denial of Jesus. (It's significant that his denial makes no difference to Jesus' own fate; Jesus has already been condemned.) Peter's motives were understandable: he was frightened and wanted to keep out of trouble, but he did not yet realise that for a true disciple, keeping out of trouble is not an option.

If this interpretation is accurate, it ties in with Ched Myers' idea of the two competing 'courtrooms' in Mark. In Binding the Strong Man: A Political Reading of Mark's Story of Jesus, Myers draws parallels between Jesus' discourses in Mark 8 and 13 and the apocalyptic visions of Daniel 7-9:

This mythic discourse functions to help us interpret the outcome of the story; it gives us ‘eyes to see’ the apocalyptic moment of the cross as the ‘glory of the Human One [é ułov tou ‡nqrwpou].’ But more important still is the way in which the myth instructs us in our real, historical choices between these two competing ‘authorities’ and their respective ‘courtrooms.’ The disciples/reader must choose which ‘reality’ we will trust: to be vindicated in the ‘Danielic’ courtroom is to be condemned in the Jewish/Roman one, and vice versa. (249)