Is no one going to comment on the goggly eyes or 8mm data tape? You people disappoint me.
Seven books I keep close because I love them
91–100 of 205 posts
Re: Seven books I keep close because I love them
#92Speaking of “witty, and learned, and wise, and humane”, this post is all of the above. The kind of writing that, before you’re even done reading, makes you eager to look up everything else the author has written.
His book Higher-Order Perl was really good and introduced me to some interesting programming concepts, but it also helped me realize why no one uses Perl anymore
I feel the same about Haskell...
Re: Seven books I keep close because I love them
#93We read some passages from Decameron back in high school. Lovely book really, I should take the time to really read it cover to cover.
A great feature of The Decameron is that it's easy to read and the chapters are short and largely self contained. It's not one of those books that you need to be in the right head space for, and have a big chunk of time where you can sit down and dig in. I read The Decameron over 6 months or so in random little moments, a chapter sitting on the subway, a chapter during lunch, while laying in bed, etc.
Reading it in Italian (my native language) is fascinating, as it's a weird mix of mostly modern Italian flexion and Latin sentence construction. It's incredibly taxing, enough so that I stopped after 70-ish stories, but it also makes it very clear that the whole thing was written 700 years ago.
Re: Seven books I keep close because I love them
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm curious, what would you be your translation?
I can't speak for the OP, but in my research, the translation works out to be: "Let me die with the foreigners" I usually see "foreigners" replaced with "Philistines" (as noted above). It's Samson's line just before he braces against the pillars and brings the building down on himself and the thousands of Philistines inside, so I understand why it is usually translated that way. Also, ψυχή here renders Hebrew nephesh…
But the original Hebrew word is "פְּלִשְׁתִּים֒" which is "Philistines", not "foreigners".
P.S. My only reaction to the response is "whoosh!".
Re: Seven books I keep close because I love them
#95This is a solid collection, one that shows real intellectual curiosity. Something that would be interesting to add would be something that falls entirely out of the canon of Western philosophy - you have what is by all measures a diverse sampling of the various permutations of the intellectual procession of western thinking, but nothing reflecting traditions from outside that procession, eg Chinese, Islamic, Indian, or even Mayan or others from the Americas. It’d be interesting to pull from something entirely outside the intellectual tradition you’re well steeped in, to take a play horizontally instead of vertically.
(Note this isn’t a knock on the author for staying within western tradition, which is both deep and interesting and also diverse in a way which provides a wide breadth of ways of thinking about the world; rather, getting outside the tradition entirely would provide yet another perspective on that tradition, eg its bounds and the lines it doesn’t realize its prescribing itself within even as it changes dramatically over different eras.)
Re: Seven books I keep close because I love them
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's been eye opening to read books from the Old Testament in the word-by-word translation of ancient Hebrew. A lot of the semantic accretion over the millennia comes off and you get a more raw iron age tribal wisdom glowing through. One example is that often Exodus goes from narrative to descriptions of genealogy tree in modern translations. It happens that words interpreted as names of people are also abstract noun…
I've become intensely interested in the meanings of Biblical names. Of course, names are the words least likely to be translated into a plain meaning, and knowing a name's translation and connotations gives the opportunity to pierce the veil on some very important meanings, meanings that were patently obvious to anyone who actually spoke those languages. Discovering that "Jonah" can mean "dove" was certainly eye-open…
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Re: Seven books I keep close because I love them
#97What an inspiring post! So much surprise and depth in each selection.
Yeah, I just saved these books on my wish list to read later.
Re: Seven books I keep close because I love them
#98This is a solid collection, one that shows real intellectual curiosity. Something that would be interesting to add would be something that falls entirely out of the canon of Western philosophy - you have what is by all measures a diverse sampling of the various permutations of the intellectual procession of western thinking, but nothing reflecting traditions from outside that procession, eg Chinese, Islamic, Indian,…
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Re: Seven books I keep close because I love them
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm curious, what would you be your translation?
"let my soul die with the Philistines" is the literal translation of the Latin. I'm not an expert on Greek but I'd translate that as "let my soul die with the foreigners ." ἀλλοφύλων more literally means something like "different people / people belonging to another group"
But the original Hebrew word is "פְּלִשְׁתִּים֒" which is "Philistines", not "foreigners". The Greek has already suffered a translation.
Re: Seven books I keep close because I love them
#100> knowing full well that [Delilah] will betray [Samson] It is not clear from the text that Samson is aware of the presence of Philistines the first three times. We are told they are lying in ambush in an inner chamber. We are not told that they make themselves known, attempt to subdue Samson, or interact with him in any way. Instead, we are told that Delilah announces their imminent presence, with no follow-through.…
> A shallow reading that concludes the characters must be dumb and naive to explain the ridiculousness of the plot is rarely the most appropriate reading. That's a neat summation of Biblical hermeneutics if I've ever seen one and more generally of religious hermeneutics. What is being defended as a "close and thoughtful read" implicitly is from a more cynical view, a projection of nuance, complexity, and deep structu…
Thanks. I'm reframing that as god playing 5D chess.
The same issue seems to occur with "deep" thinkers in other areas (e.g. trying to understand French intellectuals).
The trouble is that it can be worthwhile thinking about something without depth, or paying attention to a smart persons' thoughts on something shallow. And a priori we can't always know what is worthwhile.
E.g. I liked the blog, because here's a smart guy who has explained a little of what he gets out of a few divergent works.