But now I’m going to be immoral; now
I mean to show things really as the are,
Not as they ought to be; for I avow,
That till we see what’s what in fact, we’re far
From much improvement with that virtuous plough
Which skims the surface, leaving scarce a scar
Upon the black loam long manured by Vice,
Only to keep its corn at the old price. – Canto XII, Stanza XL

The stock character of Don Juan represents the quintessential ladies man who enjoys spending his evenings seducing women, drinking heavy, partying, and dueling with the husbands of his sexual conquests. He can be found throughout literature and the arts, most famously perhaps in Mozart’s opera under the guise of his Italian name Don Giovanni.

Mozart captures the stock figure well in this aria, which portrays him directing his servant to bring cute women to his party so he can get them drunk and seduce them. Lord Byron’s portrayal is a little less faithful to the traditional character. Byron’s Don Juan isn’t a cold-hearted amoral seducer of women, but a naive mild-tempered young boy who finds himself attracting women sometimes against his will. Byron inverts the character, with the women seducing him for the most part. His character isn’t a libertine, but is rather bland, practically lacking a personality.

The narrative is constructed loosely around Don Juan’s various love affairs and adventures around the world. The first Canto begins when he is a boy who must leave Spain after his first love affair at sixteen with a married woman is discovered. On his journey away from Spain his ship sinks and he lives on a rescue boat where lack of food forces him to become a cannibal. Then he lands on Greece where a young woman named Haidee nurses him back to health in secret, which of course leads to them falling in love. The love blossoms while Haidee’s father who is a pirate is out at sea ransacking ships and selling the people onboard as slaves to the Ottoman Empire. He returns to find his household in disarray and his daughter in love with a strange young man. He fights with Don Juan, beats him, and then sells him into slavery. While in slavery, Don Juan captures the eye of young sultana, which leads to an amusing cross-dressing incident and whose jealousy threatens to kill him. He somehow escapes (between Cantos) and then ends up fighting with Russia against the Turks. He does so well storming a major military stronghold that the military leaders bring him along to see the Empress of Russia; when Catherine the Great meets him she, too, falls in love with him. However, the harsh Russian weather makes him ill and she is forced to send him away on a diplomatic mission to England for the sake of his health. And in England, of course, he has more love affairs. You would think this description would cover the bulk of poem, but in actuality the vast majority of the poem consists of the narrator’s rambling digressions, not the plot itself. Sometimes incidents in the plot inspire the topic of the narrator’s digressions, but ultimately the narrator roams freely from topic to topic.

Tackling Byron’s main theme is difficult because in a way his theme is the ridiculousness of society and the world itself; so major issues the poem addresses is love, how women and men think, British politics, Greek politics, Christianity, philosophy, sexuality, etc. Unfortunately Byron tries to do this through the criticizing voice of his rambling narrator rather than through a unified plot. Dante is another poet who scrutinizes the sins and mores of his society (covering politics, poetry, art, metaphysics, human foibles, sexuality, etc.) by setting the scope of his poem to the known universe, but Dante is far more successful because his poem is structured around the setting and characters found throughout the journey rather than a narrator’s ramblings about the topic.

I am not, however, calling Byron a bad poet. There are definitely moments in the poem where Byron shines, but the feeling I continually got while reading is that the whole composition could be tightened and cut. I tend not to like long poems anyway (as I see poetry’s strength in its ability to say a lot in a little) and I’m not really much of a fan of episodic plots. Certainly Byron was going for comedy rather than tragedy and some of the sloppiness in the lines, such as the forced rhymes, can be explained by this larger aesthetic goal, but often it left me as a reader feeling like he was just being careless and the joke got old fast.

But sighs subside, and tears (even widows’) shrink,
Like Arno in the summer, to a shallow,
So narrow as to shame their wintry brink,
Which threatens inundations deep and yellow!
Such difference doth a few months make. You’d think
Grief a rich field which never would like fallow;
No more it doth, — its ploughs but change their boys,
Who furrow some new soil to sow for joys. – Canto X, Stanza VII

I think the comparison between a river’s changing water levels to grief is a wonderful metaphor.

Don Juan grew, I fear, a little dissipated;
Which is a sad thing, and not only tramples
On our fresh feelings, but — as being participated
With all kinds of incorrigible samples
Of frail humanity — must make us selfish,
And shut our souls up in us like a shell-fish. – Canto X, Stanza XXIV

The ending is an example of those forced rhyme attempts that can be found throughout the poem. It’s not just the rhyme itself that provides comedy, but the image itself of souls being shut up like a shellfish. However, while this can be funny in small doses it can also get old very quickly.

And Death, the sovereign’s Sovereign, though the great
Gracchus of all mortality, who levels
With his Agrarian Laws, the high estate
of him who feasts, and fights, and roars, and revels,
To one small grass-grown patch (which must await
Corruption for its crop) with the poor devils
Who never had a foot of land till now –
Death’s a reformer, all men must allow. – Canto X, Stanza XXV

This line really struck me as powerful. I love how Byron alludes to the Roman land Reformer and employs the allusion as a metaphor for the equality of rich and poor before impartial death: the rich losing all their estates to one small patch of grass where they will be buried and those who never owned any land now possessing the elusive plot of dirt where they will be buried.

Although often identified as one of the big six English Romantic Poets (Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, and Byron), he seems to envision his own epic poem at odds with his fellow Romantics. The opening “Dedication” attacks the poet Laureate of his time, Robert Southey, and other Romantic poets such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth. As the poem progresses Byron continually attacks these poets, especially Southey. His major complaint against them is that he sees them as sell-outs; they sold their liberal political ideals only to become conservative shills working for the government. His attacks, however, extend to the quality of their poetry itself, calling Southey untalented, complaining Coleridge is to obsessed with metaphysics, and suggesting Wordsworth is unintelligible. Ironically, I think Wordsworth won this fight since he is the superior poet by a long shot.

“And the two began placidly discussing political problems with the sound common sense of peaceful, matter-of-fact citizens — agreeing on one point: that they would never be free. And Mont-Valerien thundered ceaselessly, demolishing the house of the French with its cannon balls, grinding lives of men to powder, destroying many a dream, many a cherished hope, many a prospective happiness, ruthlessly causing endless woe and suffering in the hearts of wives, of daughters, of mothers, in other regions.” – from “Two Friends.”

I suppose one should expect a best of collection to be good–leaving the possibility that some duds from Maupassant larger oeuvre might be absent–but since this is my first experience with Maupassant, the consistent quality of these stories proves to me that Guy De Maupassant is a master of the form. I liked every story in this collection. Maupassant likes to write about the Franco-Prussian war (especially what it is like to live under Prussian occupation), the noble-nature of prostitutes and respectable society’s hypocrisy towards them, the french countryside (particularly the Normandy region), and impossible love affairs. Not only does Maupassant exhibit a talent for quality story-telling, but he also displays a mastery of descriptions, particularly of nature, employing an elegant prose style overflowing with beauty. I didn’t know whether to be more impressed with his skill at telling a fulfilling and entertaining story or the overwhelming beauty of his prose.

“Boule de Suif” (translated: Ball of Fat) is a story about an unlikely group of travel companions who gain permission after the Prussians occupy their town during the war to leave in the hopes of getting to an unoccupied town still controlled by the French. The travel companions include a nobleman and his wife, a rich wine merchant and his wife, a rich cotton merchant and his wife, two nuns, an alcoholic democrat, and a chunky prostitute (known as the Boule de Suif). At first, all the rich men and women feel scandalized having to share a coach with a prostitute. However, as the journey to their next stop takes longer than expected due to weather, their hunger gets the better of them and they all curse themselves for forgetting to pack provisions. Boule de Suif did remember to pack food, so she begins to eat in front of all her hungry companions. Eventually out of the kindness of her heart she shares her food with the others, which seems to change their opinions about her, declaring her a noble and kind-hearted person. They finally get to their first stop in another occupied town. The commanding officer in the town tries to proposition Boule de Suif, but she refuses to sleep with any Prussians due to her patriotic feelings. When they try to leave the next morning the commanding officer refuses to let them depart, wanting to sleep with Boule de Suif. Day after day this occurs, but Boule de Suif refuses on grounds of patriotism to sleep with the man. Her companions grow restless and accuse Boule de Suif of being selfish (after all, she’s slept with hundreds of men). They convince her to sleep with the Prussian officer using arguments that it will be a noble act of self-sacrifice that they will forever appreciate. She finally caves in and sleeps with the officer. The next day they leave, but once in the coach together everyone’s attitude is changed towards her, treating her likes she’s lower than dirt for having slept with the officer. This time she forgot to pack provisions. When dinner time rolls around, everyone eats their food, but nobody offers her any being a lowly prostitute and she begins to weep. This is without a doubt one of the best stories in this collection of Maupassant’s best stories. The obvious theme of this tale is hypocrisy. The rich treat her well when Boule de Suif has something to offer them. Her patriotism forms a stark contrast to their selfishness. They treat her as low as dirt for sleeping with the officer and plying her trade, despite being the ones to convince her to do so in the first place. They wouldn’t think of sharing their food with her, even though she shared all her food with them earlier.

“Two Friends” is a story about two friends living in Paris who haven’t seen each other since the Prussians invaded their country. One day they accidentally run into each other on the streets. They decide to go on one of their fishing trips by the lake. A French officer gives them a password to get in and out of Paris. While fishing they discuss the futility of war. They catch a lot of fish, but when they return to shore there are Prussian soldiers waiting for them. They bring them to an officer who accuses them of being spies. He threatens to kill them, unless they give him the password that will enable him to sneak troops into Paris. They refuse. He has them shot. The ending is actually extremely violent. This a story that notes how the innocent who only wish to mind their own business and do a little fishing with a friend get caught up in the war. Their discussion about war’s futility is paralleled by their ultimate fates; the Prussian General doesn’t get the password he wants and two innocent men are murdered. Nothing is gained, except death.

“Madame Tellier’s Establishment” is another story about prostitutes. In this tale, the men of the town are disappointed when they go to find the well-established brothel closed  for a short time as Madame Tellier takes her employees to a neighboring village to visit her brother and celebrate her niece’s first communion. Maupassant explores similar themes as “Boule de Suif” but from a different angle. Maupassant is once again depicting the hypocrisy of society. Maupassant shows the prostitutes as having deep and genuine spirituality, suggesting even “lowly” prostitute who sell their bodies can have noble, virtuous and deeply religious sentiments. All the women in the church who aren’t aware that they’re prostitutes break down in tears before the deep spirituality and piousness of Madame Tellier and her girls. Meanwhile, if they knew they were prostitutes the women probably would’ve been scandalized.  The upper class respectable citizens back home in town that society automatically assumes are more virtuous and respectable than prostitutes never exhibit pious feelings or noble emotions like the prostitutes, but instead worry about not being able to have their fun.

“Mademoiselle Fifi” is a fantasy revenge story in the similar vein as the recent Quentin Tarantino film, Inglourious Basterds (i.e. A lowly person in society takes revenge on her foreign occupiers during a war.) Four Prussian officers living in an occupied chateau amuse themselves by blowing up the expensive art. Being cooped up too long after an extended stretch of bad weather, they decide to amuse themselves by inviting four prostitutes to entertain them. At dinner, Mademoiselle Fifi, a particularly cruel and sadistic officer, starts hurting his prostitute named Rachel by pinching her and blowing smoke from his tobacco into her face. Eventually as the men get drunker they grow bolder and start bragging about their victories over France. This enrages the women, especially Rachel, who murders Mademoiselle Fifi and then manages to escape from the officers. They search the countryside, but are unable to find her. Besides being a fantasy revenge story, Maupassant relies strongly on symbolic stereotypes. Once again we have the noble prostitute demonstrating their superior character to the rest of society. Rachel is not only a prostitute, but a Jewess. The obvious symbolism is that even the lowest of the low in French society (a prostitute and a Jew) are more virtuous, brave, and noble than these German officers. Mademoiselle Fifi and the other officers embody stereotypes about German; when they blow up the art, Maupassant is suggesting that they have no appreciation of art or culture, and they’re nothing more than uncivilized brutes given to violence, too much drink, and prostitutes (the bodily pleasures rather than the intellectual ones).

“Miss Harriet” is a story that begins with a frame. Some bored ladies on a coach ride asks an old painter known for having many love affairs to tell them a story about one of his affairs. He tells them a tale of an old spinster from England passionate about nature and her peculiar version of religion. This woman who has never loved any man accidentally falls in love with the painter, while admiring the beauty of his paintings and realizing he shares her passion for the beauties of nature. Just as her feelings are developing she catches him engaging in a clandestine affair with a younger servant girl, which drives her to commit suicide. It ends with a memorable scene in which the painter kisses the corpse, telling us, “I imprinted upon those lips a kiss, a long kiss–the first they had ever received.” Maupassant’s descriptions of the natural surroundings and his deft hand with language in this story outdo the lushness and sensualness of any painting.

“The Necklace” is one of the author’s most famous stories. A pretty young girl wishing for a more opulent life after marrying a lower middle-class clerk convinces her husband to attend a ball being held by the Minister of Public Instruction so she can live her Cinderella fantasy of being someone important and rich. She borrows a diamond-studded necklace from her rich friend. She enjoys herself at the ball, experiencing for a brief moment what it would be like to be a member of the rich upper-class, but on her way home she discovers she has lost her friend’s necklace. They do everything in their power to recover the lost item, but cannot locate it. Eventually they purchase a new one just like it in a jewelry store that costs an astronomical amount of money, requiring them to take loans. She and her husband take extra jobs. After ten years of doing grueling work, they manage to pay off their debts for the necklace. The life of toil has spoiled the pretty young girl’s beauty. She meets out in public her rich friend years later who doesn’t recognize her anymore because her appearance is so changed from her difficult life. She confesses to her friend that they replaced her necklace and speaks about her hard life, only for the friend to tell her that the necklace she lost was fake costume jewelry, not real diamonds, making the whole story one big ironic punch line. This woman suffers a difficult life of hardship and grueling work on the brink of poverty and financial ruin because she isn’t content to live a sparing, but comfortable lower middle-class life and must put on appearances to pretend to other for one night that she is rich. Whereas she is spoiled and ungrateful for the life she has, the husband sacrifices his desires (such as money for a hunting gun and later taking on all those loans) for the sake of his wife’s desires.

“The piece of String” is a story about a thrifty man who picks up a piece of string on the road only to be caught doing so by his rival. When it is discovered that another merchant has lost his purse full of money, the rival claims to have seen the thrifty man picking up the purse of money rather than the string. The thrifty man tells everybody that will listen that he only picked up a piece of string and it is all a misunderstanding, but everybody mocks him believing he is guilty. Eventually a different man returns the purse to the original owner. The thrifty man believes this will exonerate him and goes around once again to try and convince everybody of his innocence, only for people to mock him further and believe he conspired to return the purse after stealing it. He becomes obsessed with telling the real story about the string and trying to convince people of his innocence, until it drives him mad. It is a story that tells us reputation and hearsay matters more than truth; once you develop a bad reputation in the eyes of society, it is impossible to clear your name, and any evidence that might be brought forth to exonerate a person will only be twisted to implicate them further.

Other stories that appeared in the collection include “Claire de Lune,” “Mademoiselle Pearl,”  ”Madame Husson’s Rosier,” “That Pig of a Morin,” “Useless Beauty,” “The Olive Orchard,” “A Sale,” “Love,” “Two Little Soldiers” and “Happiness.” Although I’m not planning to write about all of them, all of these stories were very good. I liked every story in this collection and I can’t say that about too many writers.

I wrote about 40 of them. I didn’t really see the point in writing about The Christmas Carol since it’s the freaking Christmas Carol. Everyone knows the story of the greedy old miser Mr Scrooge who changes his ways and learns the true meaning of Christmas thanks to the ghosts of Christmas past, present, and future. The themes are fairly obvious: being stingy with money and cold-hearted towards family and the needy is bad, being kind and open-hearted and giving to others in need is good and beneficial to society, not to mention it improves individual happiness. You can’t take all that money with you, so if you’re super rich there is no point in hoarding it. For any lazy students out there who rely on my site to do their homework there are like a billion decent movie versions of the story, you can even watch one with muppets (or you can just read the two sentence summary that I just wrote).

Since I started keeping track of my books in 2006:

• I’m averaging 50.6 books per a year.
•  My lowest year was 27 books in 2010.
• My highest year was 73 books in 2008.

1. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck (link)
2. Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (link)
3. To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf (link)
4. A Room with a View by E. M. Forster (link)
5. A Passage to India by E. M. Forster (link)
6. Howard’s End by E. M. Forster (link)
7. The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford (link)
8. Bone 1: Out from Boneville by Jeff Smith (link)
9. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (link)
10. Sons and Lovers by D. H. Lawrence (link)
11. Bone 2: The Great Cow Race by Jeff Smith (link)
12. Selected Poems of Christina Rossetti (link)
13. Far from the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy (link)
14. World War One British Poets: Brooke, Owen, Sassoon, Rosenberg, and Others (link)
15. Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy (link)
16. White Noise by Don DeLillo (link)
17. The Postman Always Rings Twice by James M. Cain (link)
18. A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens (link)
19. The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder (link)
20. Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe (link)
21. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum (link)
22. Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev (link)
23. The Trial by Franz Kafka (link)
24. The Brother Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky (link)
25. A Dance with Dragons by George R. R. Martin (link)
26. The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka (link)
27. On the Road by Jack Kerouac (link)
28. The Inferno by Dante Alighieri (link)
29. The Purgatorio by Dante Alighieri (link)
30. The Paradiso by Dante Alighieri (link)
31. Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift (link)
32. Don Quixote by Miguel Cervantes (link)
33. Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson (link)
34. The Girl on the Fridge by Etgar Keret (link)
35. The Poetry of Petrarch translated by David Young (link)
36. The Sorrows of Young Werther by Goethe and translated by Catherine Hutter (link)
37. Beware of God by Shalom Auslander (link)
38. The Prelude by William Wordsworth (link)
39. Nicholas Nickleby by Charles Dickens (link)
40. The Bus Driver Who Wanted to Be God and Other Stories by Etgar Keret (link)
41. A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens

Goals for Next Year

I started a new full-time job this year and it cut into reading time. I also find lately, perhaps due to fatigue from being split too many directions, that I don’t always enjoy posting on the blog anymore. I think many of my posts come off as hasty and not as detailed as in the past, reflecting this dissatisfaction and weariness. One possibility for next year is to switch to a capsule response format like the one I did above for A Christmas Carol (no more than three to four sentences), with an occasional more detailed post for books that particularly moved me. Then again, maybe I’ll change nothing and do exactly what I have always done on this blog. We’ll see. Despite my stated recent apathy towards book posts I am considering adding movie reviews again to the blog.

Next year I would like to read all the novels of Charles Dickens that I haven’t read yet, read more poetry (particularly more of the Romantics), add movie reviews back onto the site, and get back into trying to improve my knowledge of the major discoveries of science, which I attempted and stopping doing due to time constraints.

In this collection, Keret writes stories about a convenient shop in Uzbekistan built at the mouth of Hell, a boy learning to save money who starts to care more about his piggy bank than the money inside, a dissatisfied girlfriend who demands her boyfriend bring back his mother’s heart as proof of his love, an afterlife for people who commit suicide, and many others.

In the story about the boy and his piggy bank the father forces his son to keep a piggy bank in order to teach him the value of money and by extension the value of things. The irony of the story is that he stops caring about the money inside and cares about the object carrying the money. The irony is he doesn’t learn the value of money at all. On the surface, it seems he at least understands the value of emotionally caring about other people more than money, but the reader thinks about it more and realizes the “person” he cares about is a piggy bank. He cares about it like a pet, but it is a thing. He has fallen in love with things and emotionally cares about it the way he should people symbolically representing what happens if you take the logic of learning the value of money too far (you fall in love with things, the ultimate form of materialism).

The best story in the collection is the longest “Kneller’s Happy Campers” which is about an afterlife where people who commit suicide go. Basically the afterlife for suicides is basically the regular world, only a little crappier, where pointless miracles happen, but only if they’re pointless and serve no purpose. It is a very clever story. A world that is basically the regular world, only a little crappier is the perfect “hell” for someone who commits suicide; after all, committing suicide is an attempt to escape the world. Well, now they have to live in the world even longer. At the center of this story is a love story in which there are brief moments of happiness, which also suggests that the moral of the story is that we create our own happiness and misery in the world. Our obsessions and mindsets prevent us from being happy.

Dickens throughout his novels is very good at showing the darker side of capitalism and greed, even if he never quite questions the system outright (which is why I wouldn’t call him a Marxist). Ralph as the stand-in for the capitalist is an empty and soulless being caring nothing for empathy or human feeling; he is worldly man, but knowledge of the “real” world and how it really works has transformed him into a bitter cynical human being, caring only for money and his own petty hatred. The Brothers Cheeryble, on the other hand, represent a parallel to him as rich businessman with a troubled past that care deeply about other human beings and the lives of strangers. They put family, virtuous behavior, and love over money, the complete opposite of Ralph, even though, they, too, are rich and businessmen. Ralph in the end destroys himself with his own hatred and need for revenge, literally causing the death of his own son unbeknown to him at first.

The various side characters such as the Mantalinis, Madeleine (who plays the part of Nicholas’ love interest), Mr. Squeers demonstrate all the ways having or not having money can change a person’s lot in life. Each of them represent some sin or virtuous behavior towards money. For example, Mr. Mantalini spends more money than he has, destroying his wife’s business and credit. Mr. Squeers mistreats the children partially out of his greed. Madeleine almost ends in marriage to an old geezer because her father is in debt.

Dickens smartly adds another layer to these characters and themes by having them rationalize their behavior. Mr Squeers genuinely believes at times that he is a good teacher and has the best interest of the children at heart, even as he abuses and starves them. When Ralph repeats calumnies and lies about Nicholas’ characters to try to defame him and destroy the nice little life he is building the reader gets the impression that Ralph himself isn’t just saying it to ruin Nicholas, but actually believes that he is the virtuous businessman wronged by an ungrateful mean-spirited criminal nephew. In a way, Dickens is suggesting that nasty people don’t actually see the reality of their own behavior. Since many of these figures have positions and money in society that protect them, Dickens is also suggesting true virtue is deeper than money. Having money and being on the upper echelons of society doesn’t make one virtuous.

Nicholas Nickleby is gigantic bloated monster of over 900 words. Any time I read a novel by Dickens my feeling is that it could easily be cut a good two hundred pages and streamlined It is one of those books that I really enjoyed when I managed to convince myself to actually pick up and read, but in which whenever I stopped I didn’t have much urge or motivation to continue.

• Amraphel, king of Shinar
• Arioch, king of Ellasar
• Chedorlaomer, king of Elam
• Tidal, king of Goiim

go to war with another group of kings:

• Bera, king of Sodom
• Birsha, king of Gomorrah
• Shinab, king of Admah
• Shemeber, king of Zeboiim
• and the king of Bela.

King Chedorlaomer of Elam with the help of a bunch of other kings invades the region of Sodom and Gomorrah, capturing their wealth and newly arrived resident, Lot, who moved there in Genesis 13. While fleeing, the two kings of these countries jump into bitumen pits, which is actually a rather comical image. News arrives to Abram about Lot’s capture. Abram gathers all his retainers and allies.

At night they ambush the enemy and chase them all the way to Hobah, which is north of Damascus. Abram recovers his nephew and all the lost possessions. King Melchizedek of Salem arrives with bread and wine. He is also a priest of God Most High, and blesses Abram. Abram gives a tenth of all his possessions to the king-priest.

The King of Sodom is so grateful he offers all his possessions to Abram and asks only for the persons (presumably slaves and captured citizens?). However, Abram swears to God that he will not take “so much as a thread or a sandal strap” so that the king of Sodom cannot brag that he made Abram rich, the glory of which belongs to God.

This story foreshadows Abraham rescuing Lot during the destruction of Sodom and Gomorra. In this episode he has to rescue him because of Sodom and Gomorra’s military failures. Lot clearly has bad real estate judgement. Sodom and Gomorra also have bad leadership as evidenced by the comical cowardice of the two kings that leads them to jump into bitumen pits (it’s the ancient equivalent of them literally tar and feathering themselves).

The story also illustrates how God is behind Abram’s fortunes and victories against his enemies, not the power of some King. Melchizedek emphasizes God’s role in the victory during his blessing. This theme is further illustrated when Abram refuses the King of Sodom’s offer of wealth, believing the king of Sodom would brag that he made Abram’s fortunes rather than God. If, like many scholars believe, the Abraham story cycle originates during the time of Babylonian Exile this message takes on additional meaning; the writer would be suggesting that it was the populace’s faith in the strength of the Judaean kingship rather than faith in God that led to their present circumstances living in exile.

Other elements like Abraham sacrificing a tenth of his property to the priest can be considered an early precedent in which the later commandments of Exodus, Deuteronomy and Leviticus will solidify.

The understated warfare highlights major differences from other ancients work like the Greek literary Epics. The Israelite culture and literary tradition is not one interested in the exploits of mighty heroes. Notice, unlike in The Iliad which runs rampant with heroes all trying to brag about their life stories and lineage and prove themselves in battle full of concrete details of the fighting, we never see the battles or get details. All the fighting is handled at a macro level, told quickly via exposition, with little concrete details. If this episode had gotten too deep into descriptions of fighting and Abram’s prowess during battle, the emphasis would change from God as the cause of victory to Abram’s heroic deeds and prowess as the reason for the victory. Whereas Greek literary tradition worships heroes, the same heroic tradition is largely absent from Hebrew literature. Abram wins because as Melchizedek tells us, “blessed be God Most High, who has delivered your foes into your hands.” The battle and fighting is presented almost as an introduction to the second half whose primary parts consist of Melchizedek’s blessing that attributes the victory to God and his favoritism toward Abram, and Abram’s refusal of King Sodom’s offers of wealth as a reward, which would allow King of Sodom to brag he made Abram’s wealth when really God is the one responsible for Abram’s successes and riches.

“Raise your eyes and look out from where you are, to the north and south, to the east and west, for I give all the land that you see to you and your offspring forever. I will make your offspring as the dust of the earth, so that if one can count the dust of the earth, then your offspring too can be counted. Up, walk about the land, through its length and its breadth, for I give it to you.” 13:14 – 13:17

Abram and Lot leave Egypt together with their entire caravan, returning back to the altar Abram had built to God between Bethel and Ai during Genesis 12.  The two relatives soon realize that between them they have too much cattle, people, and possessions for the land to adequately support. Instead of fighting over the land, Abram invokes their shared kinship and they agree to separate to different parts of the land to start their new lives. Lot heads east to the plains of Jordan where Sodom and Gomorrah are located. God speaks to Abram again, reaffirming his promise that he will make his descendants as numerous as the dust and that he plans to give this new land to his offspring forever as an inheritance. He tells Abram to go out and explore this new land. Abram moves his encampment and builds another altar to God somewhere in Hebron.

This part of the narrative repeats a lot of earlier information. The only real narrative progression is that Abram and Lot return to Canaan from Egypt and Lot departs from Abram to settle in Sodom and Gommorah. The issue over the land between the two relatives draws directly from the lived experience of the Israelite readers. In an infertile nation, land to graze your animals and watering rights leads easily and frequently to disputes. In fact, the earlier conflict between Cain (representing agrarian farmers) and Abel (representing animals herders) portends these conflicts, revealing the sophisticated literary scaffolding of Genesis. Instead of the conflict being a symbolic battle between the superiority of farmers and herders over resources and food sources like in the earlier story, the conflict has now shifted to herders battling over limited land supplies. This is a conflict that would’ve been very real and fairly common in the world of the Israelites. It isn’t hard to imagine this situation exploding with one family member killing the other (like in the Cain and Abel story). In this sense, the story is mimetic in that it is reflecting a real-world conflict that the original audience would’ve have related to.  However, the conflict is quickly diffused between Abram and Lot by both agreeing to go their separate ways, with an additional appeal to their kinship. One wonders how often the different tribes within Israel fought with each other over land ownership, especially around the traditional boundaries of each tribal land; this story is certainly suggestive of such a problem existing, in which case the implied moral would be: remember tribes of Israel that when you fight over land for your cattle (and property in general) that you’re family and part of the same nation so please try and work it out without escalating the situation.

Since Lot’s descendants will end up being Canaanite tribes it also hints at the continuous conflict between the Canaanites and Israel that will rear its heard in the later Biblical books. In other words, although those later books will blame the conflict over religious differences, mandates from God, and other cultural differences, the Bible is hinting in this early episode that much of the conflict is really over land issues and limited resources. Abram and Lot work out there problems, but their descendants won’t be able to work it out so easily. In this sense, Genesis 13 is picking up where Genesis 9 left off when Noah curses Ham, the father of Canaan; one theme of Genesis, then, is the explanation of the animosity that exists between Israel and their neighbors.  This section also foreshadows the doom of Sodom and Gomorrah, which will occur in a later episode of Genesis.

The second half of the narrative repeats in different words God’s promise to Abram from Genesis 12, but elaborates that not only is God going to “assign this land to [Abram's] offspring,” but that he is going to give them the land forever and offers this wonderful metaphor of Abram’s offspring being as numerous as the dust of the earth.  This is not mere redundancy, nor is this repeated just for the sake of adding a few new details. The repetition of God’s promise highlights the importance of this covenant with Abram and his descendants; you might say it’s the central theme of the Abraham cycle of Genesis, so we’re going to come back to it again and again. Also, since this is a linked narrative cycle, which might have been read as separate story episodes much like I’m doing on this blog, the repetition allows those who missed last week’s reading (Genesis 12) to catch-up on the pertinent details of the story without having to go back and read it (much like an ancient version of a television story recap, except the major difference being it’s a recap that appears naturally within the flow of the new episode). The ending of Genesis 13 gives an origin of an altar at Hebron, which if I had to guess probably was a real altar that existed during the time of the story’s writing. The ending of Genesis 13 is there to explain where it came from and who created the altar located at Hebron.

The first book begins with his childhood, covering his schooling in Cambridge, London, his journey to the Alps, his experience living in France during the Revolution, his disillusionment with the French Revolution, his reconnection with the world after such disillusionment, and the conclusion at Mount Snowdon.

As I have said before, I’m not a huge fan of long poems; this one is no exception.  There is some beautiful language and interesting ideas here, but the poem comes off as disjointed and runs on in long philosophical tangents that made it a struggle to read and not appealing to my personal tastes. To put it simply, I could appreciate parts of it, but I found it very boring. Even though this a Romantic poem teeming with love of nature and celebrating the glories of unbridled imagination, the style actually reminds me a lot of Virginia Woolf’s stream-of-conscious style with all its philosophical tangents and layering of thought-processes. Part of this difficult style feeds into the larger themes of the work. The work explores the nature of imagination, nature as a fostering power for our thoughts, and the power of memory. Wordsworth disjointed narrative reminds us that our life history are punctuated by random decisive moments that shape the person we will become; memory is selective, our greatest experiences that truly stay with us are often accidental. When I think about important moments in my own life I realize he is at least partially right; many of those moments I didn’t plan, but they just happened when I wasn’t looking for them.

When we least expect it is when we encounter these moments that change our lives forever. In particular, the episode where Wordsworth tries to visit the Alps looking for a sublime experience highlights this when he accidentally passes through the alps without knowing it. Nature affects him the most when he isn’t expecting it, when he is busy experiencing nature for ulterior motives (such as when he is a kid as a backdrop for playing a game with his friends). However, once he experiences these life-changing moments, usually associated with some awe born from a natural wonder, the memory is there to comfort him forever. In many ways, this less a poem about the glories of nature as it is a poem about the power of memory and the way it colors our future life.

Nevertheless, this is a Romantic poem and nature plays an important part throughout his life as a source of inspiration. As the poem progresses, we see Wordsworth’s stance towards nature constantly shifting, initially he has superficial reactions to nature, admiring its beauty, but eventually his entire soul, emotions, and imagination is sparked by nature. Nature is the force that speaks to his soul, not in some vague mystical sense (although he does draw on Christian language and imagery in the poem), but literally it helps him get in touch with his conscious and emotions and people. In his emotional reactions to the beauty and frightening qualities of nature (which he mentions from his youth), he recognizes his own consciousness, that he is capable of having thoughts and feelings in the first place you might say, and that everything in the world has a hidden depth beyond its surface.

The opening story in this collection of short stories is “The War of the Bernsteins” about a Jewish husband and wife fighting an internal war over the direction of their lives and their immortal souls. Bernstein lives his life worrying every moment about adhering to Jewish law and avoiding sin so he can receive a better reward in the world to come, while his young wife frustrated that he won’t take her out to the movies or have sex with her spontaneously in the kitchen or basically enjoy life attempts to sabotage him and cause him to sin unwillingly (such as setting his alarm clock on Sabbath so he has to use electronics and violate the prohibition of doing work on Sabbath). Auslander shows how a person can become so obsessed with rewards and rules that they fail to enjoy this life; he also shows through the character of the wife that one can get so caught up in revenge and trying to sabotage such people that they, too, can miss out on life. It’s a good story, but it isn’t a perfect story. One detail that bothered me was why the wife would have married a guy like Bernstein in the first place. Auslander could’ve solved this problem by adding a single paragraph explaining what initially attracted her to him. This missing detail crucially affected the verisimilitude of the tale.

“Bobo the Self-Hating Chimp” is a story about a monkey named Bobo living in the zoo that suddenly gains self-awareness. With this newfound self-awareness comes the conception of God, death, shame, and guilt. Bobo ponders the painful existence of the other brainless monkeys in his cage and starts creating paintings, first with his own feces and then with paint provided by the zookeepers who want to make an extra buck; these paintings are “scathingly satirical attacks on chimpanzee culture and primate mores.” He sleeps with Esmerelda, another monkey, and apologizes for objectifying her. Unable to cope with being the only monkey with self-awareness, he commits suicide. This is a powerful and funny story dealing allegorically with human existence. The ideas of God, death, shame, and guilt (as well as art) are an inherent part of being human, but by contrasting it with unthinking monkeys who lack conscious self-awareness it raises the troubling question about whether our prized rationality and self-awareness that define us as a species are all its cracked up to be or if it would be better to simply be mindless animals who function on pure instinct. At the same time, the mindless apes live beside their own filth, sleep around with the female apes in casual meaningless sex, especially as means for the alpha male ape to dominate his pack and show who is top dog, which are also behaviors human beings engage in despite our supposed rationality. This adds another layer of criticism about the human condition by suggesting supposedly rational human beings have the worst of both worlds: we have all the animalistic behaviors of the monkeys that Bobo loathes as primitive and debasing to his species, while our rational self-awareness leads to guilt and shame about those behaviors and fear of death. This story introduces the theme of capitalist exploitation that will reappear in other stories.  The zookeepers sell Bobo’s art for large prices on the market.

“Somebody Up There Likes You” is a story about a secular guy who survives a car crash and reevaluates his nonobservant stance on religion after being convinced God spared him. It turns out God, Satan, and Death were actually trying to kill him, but modern technology saved him. The three travel down to Earth to personally take him out, while engaging in a discussion about the best way to kill somebody in a modern society. The story takes the interesting position that God is powerless to change the course of events (a unique perspective on the idea of omniscience), but the ending suggests God sometimes feel guilty over having to kill people as part of the universal plan.

“Heimish Knows All” is a story about an Orthodox kid who feels guilty about masturbating  and his talking dog who personifies his guilt. The dog follows him around and the kid is afraid the talking dog will tell everybody in the community about his “filthy” habit. It’s not clear from the story that anyone but the kid can hear the dog talk, hence why the dog literally personifies his guilt. It’s also not one of the stronger stories; it doesn’t have much of an internal character arc and the idea really doesn’t go anywhere all that interesting.

“Holocaust Tips For Kids” is probably the most experimental and emotionally powerful story in the entire collection. The story is told through snippets of random facts about the Holocaust, random Talmud story about Jewish suffering and anti-Semitism throughout history, and short lists and paragraphs in a which a kid learning all this information on Holocaust Remembrance Day tries to process it, telling us what he would do to survive if the Nazis ever came to his house (such as fill a tennis ball full of matches and use it as a makeshift bomb). On the surface, the story seemingly criticizes the way the Holocaust is taught to Jewish kids as snippets of random images (terrifying the crap out of them and making them frightened, even ashamed, of being Jewish), but I think there is a darker, more disturbing side to this story. There are snippets from various rabbis explaining Jewish suffering as a product of abandoning faith and failing to properly follow the Torah; there is even a snippet from one Rabbi who blames secular Jews for the Holocaust, suggesting it was a punishment from God for abandoning their faith.  However, the story is complicated even further as we get snippets from American newspapers and polls at the time of the Holocaust telling us people believed the concentration camps to be mere rumors and that 24 percent of Americans considered the Jews to be a threat in contrast to 9 percent for Japanese and 6 percent for the Germans. We get lines telling us that “Muslims say that Jews are the sons of dogs and pigs.” We get quotes of modern day anti-Semitic graffiti in France, Germany, and America to remind us these aren’t sentiment from some bygone day. Auslander shows how a young kid psychologically tries to process Jewish history and suffering, how there are unhealthy ways that Jews glorify their own historical suffering, while simultaneously recognizing that suffering is real and anti-Semitism is a real still-existing phenomenon that Jews should be genuinely worried about. It’s an extremely depressing story, but a powerful one.

“Waiting for Joe” is a story about hamsters who believe their owner is God. One is more religions than the other, who borders on secular. This was a funny story, watching the hamsters pray for food and how they interpret everyday things a religious light.

“Startling Revelations from the Lost Book of Stan” is a story about a man named Stan who runs to Israel after losing his job and struggling with financial debt. In Israel, he finds an ancient book in a cave that turns out to be the oldest Bible ever found, but more importantly it contains the words at the beginning, “The following is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to person living or dead is entirely coincidental.” He brings it around to various scholars, experts, and even the Pope who authenticate the book as real, but then start beating him up whenever he suggests they should go public with the book. The implication is their entire careers would be destroyed if it came out the Bible was just fiction, hence it’s a story about capitalist exploitation of the religious industry.  The ideas in the story are interesting, but it doesn’t quite work. He initially tries to sell it to a couple of scholars, but they don’t want anything to do with it and want to keep it quiet, meanwhile by the end of the story scholars and experts are condemning Stan’s book as a fake on major television networks, yet no one will print the book or acknowledge its existence. How did this become a popular issue in the media if no one was sponsoring it in the first place?

“One Death to Go” is a story about Kabbalists who claim the world will end if a thousand more unnatural deaths (murders) occur in the world. This knowledge spreads, but of course, it does nothing to mitigate people murdering and killing each other.

“The Metamorphosis” is a story about a Jewish man who wakes up to find his body transformed into a muscular hairy goy. He attempts to go to Shul, but the rabbis won’t let him, believing he is unclean. The three rabbis get into an intricate debate, quoting various lines to prove his point. Then the same happens with his Yeshiva friends, etc. The story is hilarious in the way it points out the trivial debates and interpretations Jews can have over scripture.

“Prophet’s Dilemma” is a story about a man who hears the voice of God, commanding him to build an ark and sacrifice animals in the backyard.

“They’re All the Same” is a story about an advertising company trying to impress their second biggest client, God.

“Smite the Heathens, Charlie Brown” is another experimental story in which a religious war breaks out between the characters of the Charlie Brown comic strip.

“God is a Big Happy Chicken” is a story in which a Jewish man dies only to discover God is a big chicken and that he has wasted his time keeping Kosher and following the rules of the Bible. He returns back to earth to tell his family they are wasting their time following all these restrictive rules, only to realize the beauty of cultural traditions and customs for their own sake.

“It Ain’t Easy Bein’ Supremey” is a story about man who reads Kaballah for dummies in order to create golem to do the housework. As he gives the rules and procedures for doing the housework, the two golem ultimately start debating about different interpretations of their creator’s instructions, and the argument eventually turns violent.

“I will bless those who bless you and curse him that curses you; And all the families of the earth shall bless themselves by you.” – Genesis 12:3

The Lord tells Abram to leave his native land to emigrate to Canaan (modern day Israel and Palestine, for the most part). There he promises to bless his descendants and make them into a great nation.   Abram takes his wife, Sarai, and his nephew, Lot, with him on his journey. He builds a couple of altars to God at different spots. Then he detours to Egypt because of a famine. He tells his wife, Sarai, to pretend she is his sister because Sarai is so beautiful and he fears the Egyptians will kill him if they know she is his wife. The Pharaoh learns about her, sends for her, and gives Abram sheep, oxen, assess, male and female slaves, she-asses, and camels as presumably a price to have Sarai for his bride. Then God punishes pharaoh and his household with plagues because Sarai is a married woman. Pharaoh sends for Abram where the truth is revealed that Sarai is his wife, not his sister, prompting the pharaoh to express his frustration that Abram didn’t tell him the truth in the first place and spare him the trouble. Abram leaves Egypt with Sarai and all the new possessions Pharaoh gave him as a price for the bride.

Many scholars led by Joseph Blenkinsopp view the origins of this story not in the earliest history of Canaan, but a later date when the Israelites lived in exile from the land under the Babylonians and early Persian Empire. Abram (later to be renamed Abraham) serves as a model for those exiles, encouraging a return to the home land, but more importantly the opening story seems to foster hope in the future of Israel. The opening lines where God tells Abram that He will bless those who bless you and curse those who curse you” seem geared towards fostering a sense of hope in exiles who must have felt defeated, lost, and hopeless. Even lines such as, “And the Canaanites were then in the land” suggest this later dating, implying the Canaanites were no longer in the land by the time the story was written.

The second half of the story in which Abram heads down to Egypt to wait out the famine has the elements of a trickster tale. He tells Sarai to lie and tell the Egyptians she is his sister. The events of the story suggest Abram’s caution was warranted. Pharaoh’s servants inform him about the beautiful Sarai and takes interest in Abram’s wife. Now if she wasn’t available because of an inconvenient fact like she is already married it is likely he would have had Abram killed in order to widow her and make her available for marriage. Since he is supposed to be her brother it is easier to just pay him a price to acquire the new bride. However, God sends a plague on Pharaoh and his household. After learning the truth, Pharaoh no longer wants Sarai or anything to do with Abram; he just wants them to get the hell out of there. Abram gets to keep the animals and his wife, leaving Pharaoh with nothing thanks to his lie/trick, which is what makes it a trickster tale. In the story, Abram also seems to be testing this newfound relationship with God to see if He will actually protect him and his interests when trouble arises. This is important to note because a major theme of the Abraham cycle of tales and Genesis in general will be testing the boundaries of that relationship between man and God.