This is an archive of past discussions with User:Nishidani. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page.
Oui, c'était merveilleux, ce calembour-là!. En lisant ce lapsus délicieux de notre amie, je pensais qu'il faudrait bien se dire que, 'Tel qu'en moi-même mon exécution administrative me change, voilà que l'éternité me trouve 'banni', mais au même temps, 'bunny' comme le lapin dans 'Alice in Wonderland', ou membre d'un tribu arabe (Bani), et beaucoup d'autres identités. Pas mal, Bunny. sobriquet du grand homme de lettres, Edmund Wilson!
Pourquoi partir?! Il n'y a pas ici une question de choix et, bien que 'la chair soit triste, hélas, ayant lu tous les articles', il faut 'fuir, là-bas fuir . .je sens que ce lapin est ivre d'être parmi l'écume bien con(nue) de la mer(de)'!!
Je te remercie encore une fois, mon cher ami. Oui, je pense qu'il faudrait maintenir des contactes avec mes amis ici, mais pour le moment, j'aurai besoin d'une période du silence, cultivant mon jardin. Un'abbraccio.Nishidani (talk) 17:14, 9 May 2009 (UTC)
Je pense que je t'ai déjà dit à plusieurs reprises que cette décision de prendre du recul était tout aussi bonne. Profiter des réalités de la vie et s'éloigner du monde virtuel.
Quelle que soit ta décision, ce sera la bonne !
Ton niveau en français m'impressionne vraiment en tout cas !!! Tu as dû le pratiquer intensivement pendant des années !
Thank you very much for your kind note. I feel bad that I'm getting to know you just as you're subject to a topic ban. Let me just say that it's been a pleasure working with you, and I only wish I had encountered you sooner. I hope you'll keep on editing in other areas, and perhaps if you do have an Israel-Palestine related insight, you could post it on your talk page. :-) best, SlimVirgintalk|contribs18:08, 9 May 2009 (UTC)
I reciprocate your sentiments. It should have indeed been a far more creative, productive and pleasant an experience as editor while I still had those rights, if our paths had crossed much earlier. Problems subsist, the swarming effect continues unabated: a flow chart would show the numbers to secure a majority are in a steady-state equilibrium, and one has the impression that the area is a social outlet, like a mall, for playing virtual games, or political rough-house (of course, privately I'm an 'extremist' in most things, but I don't think it influences very much my understanding of what is required by NPOV, and WP:RS[1]) to keep articles in an entropic/dysentropic seesaw full of conflicting POVs, so that readers more or less come away with a confused impression. Comprehensive FA status articles here would shock, precisely because, in modern middlebrow media, to see sensitive, touchy issues treated with olympian equanimity is rare, and coming across them would open the global readership to a more reflective relationship, perhaps reviving over time (or what's left of it!) in our virtual culture what Nietzsche, as a thoroughly trained Pfortian classicist, called the art of 'slow reading' (he calls himself a 'teacher of slow reading', ein Lehrer des langsamen Lesens, in the preface to Dawning).
Ah, too deviously ambitious an intention, however, this covert POV of mine!
As to editing other areas of wiki, no. I don't think I have to brownnose my way back by proving anything, churning out edits in areas I really know well for the good of the encyclopedia. To do so, while the area I was focused on languished, would be to volunteer my time and pay dues not owed, to impress others with my desire for social redemption. Oh, really, I much prefer the company of Max Stirner!, being neither a masochist, nor a Christian, nor someone with some guilty debt to amortize towards superiors. Of course there is a deep aesthetic of pleasure in productive composition (for what is basically a utopian endeavour of singular merit), besides so many other motives, that prod us to join this project, but if the revocation of one's desire to be useful depends on a do ut des, Maussian logic of the gift, donating oneself further, in projects others define and rule over, in order to cash in the payback of being accepted, the spirit of autonomous choice is violated.
Bejayzus, it must have been that extra port I drank over dinner.
Look, that intensive effort to both pick up where Tiamut left off, and drive that page on against the hurdles of humdrum minds, was a delight to observe, and I think I'm not alone in saying you've given, on that page, in short order, a standing lesson to the shabby little world of I/P pov-warriors. Someone should tell them that a nation's moral strength is inversely proportional to its defensively aggressive instincts. The stronger the latter, the more etiolated the former. The genius of the diaspora told us that, so did that Crawford twit, GWB, incidentally.
Oh fuck it, sermonizing and it's still 45 minutes away from Sunday. What a sanctimonious chump. You get, I think, my last post. I hope you stay on in the I/P area without it devouring too much useless expenditure of unrewarded energy. You'll find several excellent editors in there, Ceedjee, but also quite a few from the shady side, strongly tempted to, not swarm, but co-edit towards quality, with rapid informed collaboration. One hopes that our dearest Tiamut, above all, may see this as an opportunity to return. These are all people with strong personal views, which however never blind them to the pleasure of comprehensive NPOV composition, of the kind you've tried to exemplify on the Lydda page. Best regards Nishidani (talk) 21:21, 9 May 2009 (UTC)
^'le premier devoir de l'historien est de savoir résister à ses enthousiasmes'.Jan Vansina, L'evolution du royaume rwanda des origines à 1900, Bruxelles, Académie Royale des Sciences d'Outre-Mer,, cited Luc de Heusch, Le Rwanda et la civilisation interlacustre, Institute de Sociologie, Université Libre de Bruxelles,, 1966 p.70
Thank you
Just wish to round off this sad affair and say thank you for everything. You've been my role model and taught me a lot, and in an immensely entertaining way too. It hurts that the WP system can be so wasteful of resources. Wonder what the knowledge vacuum will suck in when you move to other pastures... if metaphors can be mixed that way.
Myself, I've lost a bit of spirit along with the illusions, so I'm probably not going to contribute that much in the future — unless the permit to take part in the guidelines draft discussion is unexpectedly granted (and I hope you will apply too). However, my girlfriend rightly sees Wikipedia as a dangerous rival for my attention, and if I analyze things objectively, I have in fact neglected her as well as my job and my friends for more than six months now, so, in a few weeks, I'll probably see some merit in the decision. RIght now, I'm just pissed off. MeteorMaker (talk) 00:00, 10 May 2009 (UTC)
Been keeping a wandering eye on all this from afar, but felt the need to interrupt my vacation to drop a line. This place is utterly hopeless, a scholarly encyclopedic article on the least controversial article is near impossible to achieve, and those who strive to achieve such a goal (you, Nickhh, G-Dett, Pedrito, MM, ..., and lest I forget Tiamut) are invariably subject to being chased off or stonewalled by morons who are only good for googling some nonsense (usually some term with "antisemitic" attached to the search). When I get back to the states I think I am just going to finish up an article I am working on and say fuck this place. Don't even know if that is worth the time and effort, but might as well leave something behind. I've learned a lot just by reading your comments, and wish you well in whatever you pursue. Peace and happiness Nishidani. Respectfully, Nableezy (talk) 14:16, 12 May 2009 (UTC)
Nah, Nab. That's not what an old codger like myself expects from a tough young Chicagoan. Chin up, son. You're a gifted editor, and the place needs'em. For the moment, just enjoy your stayover, and don't get fazed by things. Which reminds me, if you're within a cooee of the Naguib Mahfouz Café at the Khan al-Khalili, or near al-Jamaliyyah, it might be worth taking a digitalized snapshot of the café where Mahfouz hung out most evenings, or if you can, get idem of his house in al-Jamaliyyah, or a shot of the Palace of Desire (Qasr el-Shoaq) area, that figures in his great Cairo Trilogy. If you're in Alexandria what about checking out the old 10 Rue Lepsius where Constantine Cavafy lived. The last I heard it was converted into a Pension, pension Amir, in the renamed 4 Sharia Sharm Al-Sheikh. Or a snap of the house where he was born on Seriph Pasha Street. I've just checked and those articles need some photo downloads onto Wiki commons if they're ever to be brought up to snuff.
Had a wonderful conversation about Cairo with an Egyptian Franciscan friar, while guest of my next door monastery last night. He gave me a useful analysis of the meaning of sumud in Arabic. Poor guy can't have his heart's desire fulfilled though. He travels on an Egyptian passport, which means he can't visit the 'Holy Land' (I think that is what is called in rhetoric a cynicdoche!). I greatly enjoyed our work together, and hope you can stay on, if only desultorily to maintain a sane voice in the hubbub. Best Nishidani (talk) 15:38, 12 May 2009 (UTC)
Sorry, didnt see the request for pics until now, and alas it is too late to tote the camera around the city (this was mostly a family oriented trip, didnt go to the touristy parts of either town, though was fortunate enough to spend some time in Alexandria with most of my time spent in Cairo). Next year, if you are still hanging around, you'll see some pics in those articles. The passport thing is interesting as I have recently been informed that those traveling from Israel need not provide any documentation when going into Sinai, only when they get to Suez do they need to present papers. Sadat wasnt big on equal treatment, and Mubarak seems to follow in his footsteps (who knows what Gamal Mubarak will do when he inevetiably takes power, but I am guessing there won't be that much of a difference. Good thing I am typing this from an internet cafe, any wiretapping as a result of these words wont affect me) Peace Nishidani, Nableezy (talk) 11:51, 15 May 2009 (UTC)
Closure. It looks like a tie-break between G-Dett and myself.
Unless I am mistaken, G-Dett and myself are neck to neck in a stiff race to see who will poll the most votes. We've comprehensively beaten the rest of the field, and the judges, though wavering on the stragglers in our wake, are unanimous in acknowledging that honours at the post are to be split between the two of us. One trundles to the stables, in my case, one slouches towards Bethlehem, with head erect, nostrils flairing at the 'stir and keep of pride'! Cheerio Nishidani (talk) 16:42, 11 May 2009 (UTC)
After six months, these editors may individually ask the Arbitration Committee to lift their editing restrictions after demonstrating commitment to the goals of Wikipedia and ability to work constructively with other editors. However, restrictions may be temporarily suspended for the exclusive purpose of participating in the discussion of draft guidelines for this area.
In the meantime, the community is strongly urged to pursue current discussions to come to a definitive consensus on the preferred current and historical names of the region that is the source of conflict in this case. Note that this must be consistent with current Wikipedia guidelines on reliable sources, a neutral point of view, and naming conventions. This decision will be appended onto this case within two months from the close of the case.
That 'also' would appear to include Jayjg in all the restrictive provisions applied to the other 7. However, the exepegetical language following 'also' reading 'prohibited from editing in the area of conflict', would allow a wikilawyer to argue that, thus formulated, unlike the other 7, Jayjg may not edit in the area of conflict, but since, unlike the others, this is not in his case clarified, it may be taken that he can 'edit on talk pages' and 'may discuss (on) the dispute anywhere on the project'.
(c) Observers will note that 5 editors on one side of the divide were sanctioned, while only 3 were sanctioned on the other. This is probably inversely proportional to the numbers of the respective forces in the field. A psephologist reading this, who was a partisan, would, on the strength of the breakdown in the numbers, conclude on the whole that one cause (civic activists for neutrality as per policy (reliable sources, a neutral point of view, and naming conventions ) in public discourse in G-Dett's words) lost out to the other (the nationalist party). Aleatory of course, and I make the remark simple because that is the way the cookie had to crumble, given the original indictment. Regards Nishidani (talk) 18:04, 12 May 2009 (UTC)
Hmwith probably did not watchlist this page after posting her notice here (and many other places), so if you'd like her to respond you might ping her on her talkpage. I'd argue the point about how this decision impacts the battlefield in this area - it isn't accurate, to my mind, to describe one side as nationalist and the other as possessed of the purest democratic motivations. In any case, the ban 'em all approach in this case lumps everyone with a blemished history together regardless of whether any one alone earned the consequence. I'm not sure what conclusion to draw from how it broke out in terms of partisanship (in fact, I'm not sure in all cases who is on which side - perhaps I should pay closer attention?). That the outcome weighs in the favour of a particular point of view is possible, but my feeling is that we'll be right back to "normal" before long. The lasting impact will be that whatever minimal education the rest of Wikipedia managed to give the combatants in this case will need to be repeated, from the beginning, for all those who will arrive to find the field cleared and decide to "right the wrongs" on Wikipedia. Nathan T (formerly Avruch)18:23, 12 May 2009 (UTC)
Fair enough, Nathan. Perhaps I overegged the pud in the contrast nationalist versus policy pushers, but that is how I see it, for the simple reason that I (a life-long anti-nationalist, and academically published on it), Meteormaker, Nickhh, G-Dett and Pedrito, as far as I can make out, are a mixed bunch from, I gather three continents, with POVs, undoubtedly, but not, certainly, here, a nationalist POV (if we were Palestinians, Lebanese, Jordanians, Egyptians etc., perhaps an odour of suspicion in that regard might arise). I think this fact gave many the impression that there must be some common motivation, either 'pro-Palestinian' (which G-Dett is not, no more than she is 'pro-Israeli) or 'anti-semitic' fixations. In short, I find nothing that binds me to those who saw the problem as I saw it. I see something that binds the three on the other side of the divide.(When I say I am 'pro-Palestinian' (strongly so), I hope it should be clear that this in no way implies that I am 'anti-Israel').
I will admit to an antipathy, and Jayjg and Canadian Monkey, aren't the object of it. I think one editor there never showed, from the outset, the slightest interest in wikipedia as anything other than an area of enjoyable conflict. Jayjg could tie one up with rules. Most of those who imitate him, just bore the living daylights out of you with their impressively comprehensive nescience about the subject one edits with them. At least with him there was an atmosphere of almost goliardic thrust and paring at a chess level. With so many, one knows one is just like Sisyphus, pushing rockhard and heavy evidence uphillagainst the huge downward momentum and gravitational pull of an ill-informed POV.
I don't think Arbcom had the slightest interest in issuing a result that would read, in terms of numbers, the way it does now read. In the initial brief, it was virtually inevitable that, given the rules, it would play out as it did. By restricting the issue to the conflict at 'Judea and Samaria' and not to the whole I/P field, it shortlisted, rather arbitrarily just a handful of people, and left out many problematical editors still in there, with the result that 5 'pro-Palestinian' editors were in the dock with 3 'pro-Israeli' editors. I was privately absolutely convinced, from the beginning of the Mohammad al-Durrah article, that Tundrabuggy came from the CAMERA cabal. I suppose quite a few of us knew it, since it was pretty obvious. But one had to, and one has to, put up with this 'tacit knowledge' (Michael Polanyi). Proving the obvious in this system is perhaps the most problematical thing about wiki. One just has to, or had to, soldier on, WP:AGF, knowing full well that often one's interlocutor's edits give one no warrant for such an assumption, pretending one does not know such things. Often such implicit knowledge influences one's prose, or summaries (it happened thus with my edit against Jordandov on Susya, which Risker worried over).
You may say what you will of Jayjg, but a fair judgement would recognize he worked extensively also on many articles, and in several, enriched the encyclopedia. Many remain who have done nothing for it, and hang round kibitizing and quibbling over the I/P area singularly. Though he may have shared their views, he was far more capable than they are of selection, of choosing where to challenge the text and other editors.
What really troubles one in here is the lack of what is the most outstanding feature of Jewish culture, the intellectual trenchancy and brilliance, the ease with difficulty, that is the hallmark of its tradition. Were I an Israeli nationalist, that would be my plaint, my irritation, a sense of being let-down by a blind resolution to push the poorest defences, and employ the pawkiest forms of aggression, in defence of a human reality. These chaps are not doing justice to their country, nor their tradition. Deplorable. Well mate, I must check off. I don't want to make my infractions worse by allowing this page to become a blog, by letting it slouch off into a virtual variant of Simone de Beaver's unending 'Cérémonie des adieux'. Cheers and best wishes.Nishidani (talk) 19:12, 12 May 2009 (UTC)
This is great. We are not nationalists, they are nationalists. We are not POV pushers, they are POV pushers. You're in serious need of a mirror. You did make me laugh though. Then we have some stereotyping in the guise of a compliment. Well done on all fronts. No More Mr Nice Guy (talk) 15:35, 16 May 2009 (UTC)
Sorry to see this draconian, randomly punitive decision. No way to cook a small fish. Indefinite talk page banning? Perhaps the only way to disabuse the arbcom of belief in magic is for them to see its failure.John Z (talk) 06:44, 13 May 2009 (UTC)
Indeed, and this "remedy" will certainly not cure the problem. It's weird, but no more weird than some other aspects of Israel/Palestine articles on Wikipedia, not least the number of editors who appear so keen to promote, indirectly, the slaughter and vilification of Jews, while believing they are doing the exact opposite. Take the positive out of this, it will leave you free to get on with other worthwhile activites, and I won't be wasting so much time reading your contributions . --NSH001 (talk) 08:33, 13 May 2009 (UTC)
What a surprise, 5 pro-Palestinian editors banned and only 3 pro-Israelis banned, despite a lot more being involved in the dispute. Factsontheground (talk) 14:01, 13 May 2009 (UTC)
I wholeheartedly agree with the bestowed Integrity Barnstar. I also note that an indicated 5 pro-P, and 3-pro-I synopsis of the result is overly simplistic; I suspect the ethno-religious make-up of the editors is considerably different, and generally agree with Nishidani that this tends to be specifically a pov-NPOV debate. As Nishidani notes, being pro-one does not automatically mean anti-the-other. I too fall in that category and would characterize the other side as being "pro-one automatically does mean anti-the-other", which I can not see as NPOV-accepting. I see the same 5-3 split, but see it as NPOV and pov; NPOV got trounced and it is simply the project's loss. With many others, I question how much good this will do within the larger I/P arena, but note that the J-S debate is only one definable geographic symptom of the larger conflict. The J-S debate is only one outgrowth of the differences between Jewish, Zionist and outside concepts of Medinat Yisrael and Eretz Israel, and understanding their conflation, or not. It is quite well explained in the introductory paragraph of the latter, and collaboratively edited rather than edit-warred at follow-on other pages.
My best evidence for alleged pov'd conflation of terms lies right here at Eretz-Israel. Notice a difference? That re-direct seems very specifically POV'd to me and very much stating one pov as if it was NPOV. It sure seems to be a case of "such as advocacy or propaganda, furtherance of outside conflicts, publishing or promoting original research, and political or ideological struggle, is prohibited", like that ArbCom decision states. Regards, CasualObserver'48 (talk) 04:07, 14 May 2009 (UTC)
Sorry to muffle your thunder, CO48, but I've gone and changed that redirect. It's only the third edit ever, so it's not as if there's been consultation or a big edit war and WP:Bold,especially in it's and WP:So fix it incarnation applies.--Peter cohen (talk) 10:12, 14 May 2009 (UTC)
Nishidani, I'm sorry to see this happen to you as you are an editor who I respect. However, this repsect means that I consider you well able to be of value to Wikipedia in a range of areas and not just the I/P conflict. I hope therefore that you see yourself as able to contribute to the project elsewhere.--Peter cohen (talk) 10:12, 14 May 2009 (UTC)
hi there. just read the Arbcom decision just now for the first time, as I'd been sort of ignoring this issue area for a while. guess that makes me a model editor of sort!! :-) I too am totally surpised by the odd nature of the arbcom decision. I think this says more about the arbitration committee here than about any of the individual editors!
I am planning to read some of the other comments here and then eprhaps to comment further. feel free to reply though if you wish. --Steve, Sm8900 (talk) 21:29, 14 May 2009 (UTC)
For hours of fruitless effort trying to protect Wikipedia from nationalist bias. Although you have been sanctioned unfairly, your thoughtful arguments and dogged research have given the community a strong background of information to draw on when denouncing future attempts to portray ideology as fact. untwirl(talk) 14:54, 14 May 2009 (UTC)
In July 1948, the Israelis launched the Operation Dani to conquer the cities of Lydda and Ramle. The first attack on Lydda occured on the afternoon of 11 July when the 89th battalion mounted on armoured cars and jeeps raided the city "spraying machine-gun fire at anything that moved". "Dozens of Arabs (perhaps as many as 200)" were killed.[1] According to Benny Morris, the description of this raid written by one of the soldiers "combine[s] elements of a battle and a massacre".[2]
Later, Israeli troops entered the city and took up position in the town centre. The only resistance came from the police fort that was hold by "a small force of Legionnaires and irregulars". Detention compounds were arranged in the mosques and the churches for adult males and 300-400 Israeli soliders garrisoned the town. In the morning of 12 July, the situation was calm but around 11:30 an incident occured. Two or three armoured cars entered the town and a firefight erupted. The skirmish made believe to Lydda townspeople that the Arab Legion was counter-attacking and probably a few dozen snipers[3] fired against the occupying troops. Israeli soldiers felt threatened, vulnerable because they were isolated among thousands of hostile townpeople and 'angry [because] they had understood that the town had surrendered'. '[They] were told to shoot 'at any clear target' or, alternatively, at anyone 'seen on the streets'. The Arab inhabitants panicked. Many rushed in the streets and were killed.[4]
There is a controversy among historians for the events that followed. According to Benny Morris, at the Dahaimash mosque some prisonners tried to break out and escape, probably fearing to be massacred. IDF threw grenades and fired rockets at the compound and several dozens Arabs were shot and killed.[5] The Palestinian historiography describes the events differently. According to it, it was civilians that had refugeed themselves in the mosque, thinking that the Israelis would not dare to profane the sanctuary. The Israelis killed all the people there making 93 to 176 dead.[6] Alon Kadish and Avraham Sela write that there is a confusion between two mosques. According to them, detenees were only gathered around the Great Mosque, where no incident occured and it is a group of 50-60 armed Arabs who barricaded in the Dahaimash mosque. Its storming resulted in the death of 30 Arab militiamen and civilians, including elderly, women and children.[7]
The deaths of July 12 are regarded in the Arab world and by several historians as a massacre. Walid Khalidi calls it "an orgy of indiscriminate killing."[8]Benny Morris writes that the "jittery Palmahniks massacr[ed] detenees in a mosque compound."[9] According to Yoav Gelber, it was a "bloodier massacre" than at Deir Yassin.[10]Alon Kadish and Avraham Sela write that it was "an intense battle where the demarcation between civilians, irregular combatants and regular army units hardly existed."[7]
^Benny Morris, 'The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited', p.426.
^Benny Morris, 'The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited', p.426.
^Benny Morris, 'The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited', footnote 78, p.473.
^Benny Morris, 'The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited', pp.427-428.
^Benny Morris, 'The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited', pp.427-428.
^ abAlon Kadish and Avraham Sela (2005) "Myths and historiography of the 1948 Palestine War revisited: the case of Lydda," The Middle East Journal, September 22, 2005.
^Walid Khalidi, Introduction to Spiro Munayyer's "The Fall of Lydda", Journal of Palestine Studies, Vol. 27, No. 4, pp. 80-98, 1998.
Idée géniale! Mais les délateurs parleraient de moi, dans ce rôle, comme un agent d'influence indirect, agissant à travers ton travail là pour, quand tu écrits ici, contourner les régles de ce système fou! Pour toi, mon ami, il y a un risque à courir, et il ne vaut pas la peine d'offrir aux malveillants l'occasion de clabauder contre toi. Amitiés.Nishidani (talk) 20:14, 17 May 2009 (UTC)
C'est sage mais je ne crains pas trop les contraintes virtuelles.
Je peux te proposer malgré tout l'asile politique de la wikipédia francophone dans son ensemble :-)
Il y a là-bas quelques articles qui mériteraient ton analyse et quelques articles ici qui ne demandent qu'à être traduits là-bas...
Mieux... Je te rappelle que selon la décision du comité d'arbitrage, le contributeur qui prouverait sa dévotion au projet en contribuant à la promition d'un article jusqu'à l'AdQ (FA) verrait sa sanction levée... Cela pourrait se faire en traduisant en anglais un AdQ francophone.
Par principe, si mon hôte me reconduit jusqu'à la porte, je n'y frappe plus, encore moins essayer de rentrer par la fenêtre, fredonnant les chansons qu'il adore!Nishidani (talk) 11:19, 18 May 2009 (UTC)
Je pense que tu commets un erreur de principe. Il n'y a pas d'hôte sur wikipédia. Wikipédia n'est pas une personne (un hôte, un brave, un démon, un ami ou une ennemi...) mais un système, voire une structure ! Les règles qui régissent le comportement des systèmes ne doivent surtout pas être comparées aux règles qui régissent le comportement d'un individu.
Dans un système comme wikipédia, c'est à chaque individu à voir s'il y trouve son compte. Si oui, à lui de louvoyer avec les règles de fonctionnement du système. Sinon, alors il faut jeter l'éponge et passer à autre chose...
Hi, Thanks for your message. A couple of years ago I wrote some text that is here: User_talk:Zero0000/temp#Etymology of the name Jerusalem. You can see it agrees pretty much with yours. I put your text there too, for easy comparison. I think we should work up a combined version and see how long it survives in the article (there are an awful lot of "City of Peace" folks out there as you know). Cheers. Zerotalk09:59, 30 August 2009 (UTC)
AE
Welcome back, I'm hoping your presence means you might resume editing (although your comments at AE suggest otherwise, sadly.) Just wanted to leave a note about this edit - no members of ArbCom have commented in the discussion as yet. Josh Gordon's term expired last go 'round, and FT2 resigned some time ago. Nathan T 20:51, 2 September 2009 (UTC) (formerly Avruch)
Isnt Coren still an arbiter? But welcome back Nishidani, and if you are interested I could use a hand on an article you should be free to edit nableezy - 21:14, 2 September 2009 (UTC)
Nab, I'm not back. I just caught and found it unbelievable, that anyone like myself under a general ban 'encompassing the entire set of Arab-Israeli conflict-related articles, broadly interpreted', could get away with editing a page on Islam and antisemitism, as if that were unrelated to the problem.
Of course if I can help out on something unrelated to the I/P area, let me know. I've got a superb knowledge of the rules of playing bunnyhole with marbles, which I often lost, that doesn't seem to be covered! Nishidani (talk) 21:28, 2 September 2009 (UTC)
Well, see if you would be interested in putting in some work here. I had hoped Ramadan would give me some added motivation but the fact is it has made me lazier than ever. Not sure how interested you would be, but if you are by all means lend a hand. nableezy - 21:35, 2 September 2009 (UTC)
If I came across as intimating that you were trying to be underhanded in the Islam and antisemitism article, my deepes apologies; that was in no way shape or form my intention. I am an expert in neither Islam nor antisemitism, and do not claim to come to the article from a position of scholarship. My opinion is, and has always been, that I/P articles need to follow the guidelines up a tree and off of a cliff, so that when decisions/consensus are eventually made/formed, we have a much stronger defense against claims of POV (like Zero has been making about AfD recently, for example).
In this case, Laquer has made statements about I&AS which have been quoted by others (I think). If everything he brings can be sourced to someone else, that is great. If not, we should discuss his appropriateness on the talk page as we are doing now. I respect your opinion as to Laquer's appropriateness, but the best way to address this, I think, would be to find outside sources that make those claims about Laquer, and either put them in the article or use those to support the removal. Our own opinions are often suspect, even when they should not be :( -- Avi (talk) 16:00, 10 September 2009 (UTC)
Hello, Nishidani. In order to ensure that you don't take my future silence as ignoring you, I have to let you know now that I'm travleing for business much of next week, and then comes Rosh HaShana (Sat/Sun) and the Ten days of Repentance, and then Yom Kippur and then Succos, so my on wiki time is going to be extremely sporadic and short-lived for the next 3 to for weeks or so. Your comments require careful reading and response; they cannot be addressed quickly, because they are content-rich and thought provoking. For what it is worth, I will not oppose removal of the Laquer quote from the article and accept the decision on the talk page. -- Avi (talk) 00:12, 11 September 2009 (UTC)
Hiss
If it's from Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America, Knight was at a conference about the book and I believe remains unconvinced. Something about it in counterpunch a while ago, could follow the links, but too tired to do so now. Best,John Z (talk) 10:05, 11 September 2009 (UTC)
Well, here's her reply to Haynes and Klehr's letter - [1] is their full, unprinted response to Knight's review. I don't see anything definitive from either side on the dating matter. I have no time to explore this stuff myself and am sure you know more about it than me, but diehard? academic skeptics clearly do still exist. Since the material comes through Vassiliev and is not directly from open archives, doubt doesn't seem unreasonable to me.John Z (talk) 21:01, 11 September 2009 (UTC)
Hello, and it is good to hear from you and know that you are still around. As I thought I made clear, I haven't read Segev's account, only Shahak's and Jakobovits'. But Segev wasn't contemporary, and was writing after the other narrators had died. He ma6y have spoken to Shahak about this -- if you have the book, maybe you can confirm this. The fact remains that Boteach, writing last year, states explicitly that the potential caller was not a Jew, without giving any source for this; and he is then treated as a reliable source for this (according to you, untrue) assertion.*(see below)
In any case, it is a remarkable indictment of the orthodox rabbinical tradition that the whole issue turns on whether or not this passer-by was a Jew; and to that extent, Shahak's denunciation is valid, whatever the specifics of this case.
I realise how galling it must be for you to sit silently while others less well-informed or more ideologically than you driven make nonsense of articles to which you would have a lot to contribute. And it would indeed be humiliating to have to beg for an indulgence from those who have traduced and convicted you. Nevertheless, I very much hope that in November you will humour your censors, and request the restoration of the editing privileges of which you should never have been stripped, so that we can all once again benefit from your knowledge. RolandR19:38, 14 September 2009 (UTC)
Not arguing the assertion is untrue (cf.WP:V. Recently, because, beyond the strict call of duty, I like to check things out thoroughly, people get the impression I am involved in violations of WP:NOR or that I ignore that Wikipedia deals with verifiability, not truth). I was merely noting that one WP:RS identifies the person denied the use of a telephone as being Jewish. Nishidani (talk) 20:57, 14 September 2009 (UTC)
Sprechen Sie Deutsch?
Hi, We have a problem at Joseph's Tomb in that the best historical sources are in German. Can you read it? If so and you are willing to help, send me wiki-email and I'll send you a nice German journal article. Cheers. Zerotalk11:26, 16 September 2009 (UTC)
Good to hear from you
I've been in a very isolated part of the world and without any connection to the Internet for the last three months, so only just read your message on my user page. Hope you'll forgive the long delay in receiving a response. It's very good to hear from you. -- ZScarpia (talk) 17:20, 30 September 2009 (UTC)
On November 6, 2009, Did you know? was updated with a fact from the article Al-Azhar Mosque, which you created or substantially expanded. You are welcome to check how many hits your article got while on the front page (here's how) and add it to DYKSTATS if it got over 5,000. If you know of another interesting fact from a recently created article, then please suggest it on the Did you know? talk page.
For the record, I neither created nor substantially contributed to the article and don't desire this badge of recognition on my page.Nishidani (talk) 12:28, 7 November 2009 (UTC)
With all due respect I think you miss my point. I use the phrase "beliefs and practices" knowing full well that these words can and do describe religion (I am not as Tim implies trying to fool anyone, let alone myself). But "beliefs and practices" - speaking as an anthropologist - refer to other cultural domains besides religion. Capitalism is a set of beliefs and practices. Democracy is a set of beliefs and practices. Nationalism is a set of beliefs and practices. I use the plural "sets of beliefs and practices" because this language will include those beliefs and practices we call religion, but also include those beliefs and practices that are central to Judaism but not, strictly speaking, religion.
I honestly thought this was a simple and clear point. I write several times that I do not deny that Judaism is among other things a religion, just that it is other things also. Why do Tim - and I have to say, you to - ignore the "also" and suggest that I am claiming "instead" when I never say that it is not religion. I even wrote that I agree that the word religion belongs in the first paragraph, and in fact it is in there, so it is not being excluded.
My only concern is that by changing "beliefs and practices" to "religion," other things get excluded.
In all of this, I sincerely and upon reflection (and reading your comment) firmly sure, as an anthropologist and as a Wikipedia editor, sure that this is the best wording. Why? Nishidani, I posted several sources: two notable theologians, a historian of Judaism, a popular writer on Jewish topics, and a coupld of websites. All I ask you to do is to start with the sources, not any pre-conceived notions you have about Judaism. isn't this how we should do research? Just look at the sources ... Perhaps you will revise your comment. Slrubenstein | Talk17:50, 12 November 2009 (UTC)
Sources are infinite. Google Islam+beliefs and practices/Christianity+beliefs and practices, and then you get the same result as the one you supply for Judaism. Do you really think that by using 'religion' in the Christianity and Islam articles, we are getting other things excluded?
I look at the generic issue. The main problem of wikipedia as an encyclopedia is that, edited by interested parties, it is subject to the stresses of partisan POV perspective. In itself, there is nothing wrong in your edit, but, to my eyes, if you change 'religion' to 'sets of beliefs and practices', then I expect that a parallel series of edits is therefore suggested for the leads of Islam, Buddhism, Christianity, etc., altering a 'religion' to 'sets of beliefs and practices'.
Thus we would change 'Christianity is a monotheistic religion' to 'Christianity is a monotheism with sets of beliefs and practices originating in the Old and New Testaments'.
We would change 'Islam is the religion articulated by the Qur’an,' into 'Islam is a set of beliefs and practices originating in the Qur'an'. etc.
Interestingly enough, we have on the Buddhism article: 'Buddhism . . .is a religion or spiritual philosophy encompassing a variety of traditions, beliefs and practices.' Here 'religion' is the primary term, and 'beliefs and practices' is not a tautological gloss, but, governed by 'variety', refers to the great number of distinct traditions within the generic tradition of Buddhism.
I don't have, and rather regret you think, that I edit this area, or anything else 'with preconceived notions'. This is very pointed language when one deals with Judaism, since it insinuates I have some prejudice about Judaism, or even Jews.
The effect of your elision of 'religion' and its replacement by '(sets of) beliefs and practices' is, within the context of a global encyclopedia, tantamount to rendering Judaism definitionally unique. That is my primary objection. I'm a generalist, prepossessed by avoiding the all too human error of what Freud called 'the narcissism of minor differences'. That everything is different is, in my private world, true. That the human sciences must, methodologically, address the generic before isolating specificities, is also true.
The obvious immediate compromise solution, in lieu opf the fatigue of altering the parallel articles on other religions as above, would be to write: 'Judaism is a religion embracing sets/a variety of beliefs and practices'. As it stands, in comparative, interwikitextual terms, the edit looks like subliminally suggesting, though I believe this was not your intention, that Judaism, unlike its fellow monotheisms, is not a religion, but a 'tertium quid'. In short, when editing, one has to think in comparative terms. Most pages suffer because we do not take the trouble to think, while we edit, across comparable pages.
I don't think you answered the point my quote from Durkheim made. I could quote any number of authorities, from him through to J.G.Frazer down to Mary Douglas, to underline the point that religion is tantamount to 'a set or sets of beliefs and practices'. As it stands, your edit, unfortunately, suggests to the common reader that Judaism is singular among monotheisms in not being primarily he or she would understand by the word 'religion'. Nishidani (talk) 18:28, 12 November 2009 (UTC)
I should add that I can see why a secular Jewish mind, not necessarily your own, would prefer not to define Judaism as a religion, but rather as a 'set or sets of beliefs and practices', because many Jews, at least of my acquaintance, entertain a Judaism that consists more of practices than of beliefs. But this is also true of most Protestants and Catholics I know. Anecdotally, this morning, an old woman my wife and I met on the street said she'd just come from the local cemetary. She's a Catholic, a regular church-goer and yet in the conversation that developed, it emerged she thought the idea of an afterlife was nonsense. When my wife spoke of the resurrection, she said. 'Only God was resurrected. We're not God.' I could gloss this indefinitely from experiences with other believers, many of them outwardly pious. Their practice, Wittgensteinians would argue, defines them, not their beliefs, in Judaism as in many other religions. Religion is primarily a social praxis, and to think that theology or belief has primacy is to allow oneself to be beguiled by the textuality of high, elitist culture and be blinded to the real practice of most believers. Nishidani (talk) 18:57, 12 November 2009 (UTC)
(ec)Thanks for the thoughtful reply. Just to be clear: I never meant to imply that you might be anti-Jewish let alone anti-Semitic. Also, I thought I had replied to your point about Durkheim as I have stated consistently that among the sets of beliefs and practices that constitute Judaism is religion.
The preconceived notion to which I referred is the notion that there is an objective category, "religion," and that as religions Judaism, Islam and Christianity are comparable. As a scholar, I have two problems with this.
First, I have to tell you more about my experience in anthropology. The way I was trained, the project of defining domains like the political, the social, the economic, the religious, has its origins in 19th century thinkers and persisted in anthropology utnil fifty or sixty years ago. Today - or at least, this is what I was taught - most anthropologists, and generally mediocre ones, believe that there is such a thing as "religion" (I mean, as a universal category) and an anthropologist can go any where in the world and do a study of "the religion of the X." Most anthropologists (again, so I was taught) today see these categories (religion, politics, economics) as Western categories that emerged with modernity and the reorganization of European society with the breakdown of feudalism and the Catholic Church. A good deal of the most cutting edge research in anthropology involves finding "sets of beliefs and practices" that do not neatly fit into any of these Western categories. The best of this research shows how sets of beliefs and practices found in non-Western societies challenge and undermine such Western categories. Durkheim was and remains an important thinker and I would advise any student in the social sciences to read his work, but within anthropology it is at best of historical value. His positivist project, for better or worse, has largely been abandoned by academic anthropology. Anyway, I may be wrong but I wondered if you were not presupposing that "religion" is a category with universal applicability. Because of my training, I start off with the opposite assumption. I do not assume that when I go to my fieldsite that the beliefs and practices I will encounter can or should be classified as "religious," "political" etc. I was taught that doing so usually leads to misunderstanding.
Second, based on my research of Judaism, I have learned that there is a strong argument that most of Judaism developed in Babylonia and Persia. The five books of Moses, according to tradition, were revealed to him in Sinai by God; most historians I have read believe that they derive from a diverse set of oral traditions from many parts of the Near East, from the span of the Fertile Crescent, fron the Nile to the Persian Gulf. But that they were not codified as "the five books of Moses" or "the Torah" until the Jews were in exile in Babylon (and they were brought back to Palestine by Ezra). Similarly, while the Hebrew Bible was canonized in Palestine, much of it was written in Babylonia/Persia. The bulk of classical Jewish literature, the midrash and Talmud, were written in Babylonia/Persia. There is a strong claim that Zoroastrianism had a greater influence over Judaism than Hellenistic culture. My point is that Judaism cannot be viewed as a fundamentally Western religion. Even as much as we can say "religion," it is profoundly non-Western. I think that many Christians - and thus readers of Wikipedia (I am not referring to you as I do not know you background) believe that they understand Judaism because they believe that they are the heris of the covenant between Abraham and God; they are the new Israel. But Christianity is in many ways a Western religion - even "Eastern" Orthodoxy is "Western" i.e. Hellenic (Ethiopian and Syrian Orthodox Christianity having been marginalized a long time ago). But Judaism is an Asian religion. And Judaism, more broadly speaking, emerged long before Islam and Christianity, when a different cultural landscape dominated Asia. When Judaism emerged religions and nations were isomorphic; each nation had its own god. Hellenistc civilization was responsible for many innovations, the claim to universal reason being one of them. And Christianity and Islam emerged in a post-Hellenistic landscape, as religions claiming not to represent a nation but to being universal.
There are two very important differences between Judaism on the one hand, and Christianity and Islam on the other. Judaism is non-credal, and Judaism does not claim this universality. Judaism still refers to a nationality or nationhood as much as a religion. This is something that I know from personal experience many Christians do not understand. They do not understand how one can be Jewish regardless of ones beliefs and practices. It works both ways - I think very few jews understand Christianity.
This is not my argument. My point is not that Jews and Christians do not understand each other, that is a banal point. My point is that Jews and Christians face major obstacles understanding one another because they are so different. And that is what is at stake here. I have read research - including a book by Daniel Boyarin, a professor of jewish studies at university of California Berkeley, who is quoted in the article, who has claimed that Judaism, because it developed before the Western categoriy of religion developed, does not easily fit that category. Boyarin claims that Judaism also challenges Western notions of the nation and ethnicity.
One editor has said that he understand that Jews are also an ethnic group (and of course we have a separate article on jews). I have no problem with one article on Jews and one on Judaism. Bt I think it is bad scholarship to say htat one article is on ethnicity (or culture) and the other on religion. This is like an anthropologist going to Melanesia and saying "This is their religion, that is their politics, here is their economy." Maybe sixty or seventy years ago anthroppologists did that. But even the best ones from back then argued: "here is something that is neither religion nor politics. Or we can say it is both but both in a way that is indivisible, in a way that breaks down Western categories of religion and politics."
I have never said that judaism is not a religion, or that there are no Jews who consider it a religion. Napolean told Jews in france that they could have equal rights only if they abandoned all claims to nationhood and abandoned all civil law, keeping only the religious, and abandoned the prohibition against intermarriage. French jews agreed. It is historically accurate to say that after 1806 French judaism was a religion, period. In the United States reform jews issued a platform declaring that they too would abandon all national claims and consider themselves a religion. it is accurate to say that Reform Judaism (at least, before the seventies, or eighties - things have been changing) was a religion, period. But Conservative Judaism, Reconstructionist Judaism, and certain branches of Orthodox Judaism refused to abandon those claims, and insisted that Judaism is not a religion in the same way that Christianity and Islam are.
Wikipedia is an encyclopedia and must use reliable sources in an NPOV way. That is all i ask for. I am sorry, Nishidani, but it really appears to me to be some kind of prejudice to insist a priori that Christianity, Islam and Judaism are similar enough that they can all be named "religions." Such claims disregard the reliable sources. Some elements of the Jewish nation, following the Enlightenment, considered judaism to be a religion just like Christianity and Islam. But other elements have explicitly argued against this position. And before 1806, notable historians have argued that judaism was not a religion like Christianity or Islam. Christians or Muslims may have viewed Judaism that way for the same reason that 19th century Europeans argued over whether shamanism is religion or magic, insisting that it has to fit one of their categories. But anthropologists today do not consider shamanism to fit either Western category. Why should we assume or insist that Judaism has to? As i said, some Jewish authorities DO accept this position. Many others do not. How can any editor who accepts NPOV insist that we accept the first position but reject the second? I truly do not understand. Slrubenstein | Talk19:42, 12 November 2009 (UTC)
I did not see this, nor the effort you put into writing a reply, when replying below. As I say there, I have a druggie habit of mainlining on political scandal Thursday evenings. I will address your remarks tomorrow. Nishidani (talk) 20:43, 12 November 2009 (UTC)
That pretty much sums it up. In that vein maybe Slr can explain what other things that are not religious but are part of Judaism get excluded and if these "other things" amount to an exceptional case, more so than the "other things" one might find related to Islam, Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, etc. to make it meaningful not to use this label primarily in this instance? I would suggest that if he is making a larger argument about the way we use the term "religion" on Wikipedia, perhaps he should bring it up at the religion Wikiproject for more general input. We don't use these terms because they are perfect, but simply because it is the best we can do in helping people understand how various phenomena are related to each other.PelleSmith (talk) 19:09, 12 November 2009 (UTC)
I see no need to make a larger argument about the way we use the word "religious" or "religion." My larger argument - PelleSmith is correct that there is a lager argumnt at stake - is that our articles should represent significant views from notable sources. That's all! If significant views from notable sources say that several Jewish movements do not consider judaism to be a religion, we have to include that in our articles. it does not matter what my personal point of view is. As to Christianity, I hold the same policy: we should say what significant views in notable sources say. I have not edited the Christianity article because i have not researched Christianity. if i did and I saw that significant views from notable sources argued that Christianity (or Buddhism, or Hinduism) is not a religion, OF COURSE we would be wrong just to call it a religion. Why is this so hard for people to comprehend? I know both of you have been editors in long, good tanding. Don't you know our NPOV, RS, and NOR policies? With all due respect some of you (certainly SkyWriter) seem to have strong feelings about religion, and think I dotoo. But what you or I think about religion is irrelevant.
This all started because Blizzard thought that since Christianity and Islam are defined as religions, so should judaism. Do you guys honestly not see how profoundly wrong this is? Articles should define their subject as a religion because significant views from mainstream sources say so. The second paragraph of the Judaism article calls judaism a religion. i have never, ever, ever, deleted or changed that. Wanna know why? Because it is supported by significant views from reliable sources. But I do insist that Judaism not be identified just as a religion. Wanna know why? Because that view is cntradicted by significant views from reliable sources. Why on earth should anyone think that the Hinduism article has to say something because the Christianity article says something? Whatever the hinduism article says should reflect significant views from reliable sources. Every article should be based on significant views from reliable sources. Where have I ever departed from this view? Slrubenstein | Talk19:42, 12 November 2009 (UTC)
The edit I saw referred to the opening line of the lead. Judaism is, in academic literature, historical writings of all descriptions, and common usage, a word referring primarily to the beliefs and practices, the religion of the Jewish people over time, and is not interchangeable with Jewish history or the history of the Jews. No definition exhausts meanings. Definitions concern the key, or essential point of departure for a concept.Judaism survived the enmity of centuries for one single reason, the admirably fanatical resistance of its religious leaders against bowing to the ideological tyranny of their 'host' societies. Sure there's other stuff but the Catholic Hour refers to men having a drink at 11 am on Sundays in Irish tradition, so being a Catholic is more than the catechism. What's new?
Your quibble grandstands a minority view. Read Jacob Neusner's opening chapter,'Defining Judaism', in the Blackwell Companion to Judaism, pp,3-19 and get back to me. He's translated most of the Talmud so I reckon he's as goopd an authority as you get. In any case, someone should edit out the ridiculous suggestion, below your edit, which identifies Judaism with the Tanakh as interpreted in rabbinical tradition. Judaism, like the word in Greek itself, preceded rabbinical tradition by at least five centuries.Nishidani (talk) 20:25, 12 November 2009 (UTC)
SRubenstein. Sorry, that sounds rudely abrupt. I have to go down stairs to get my weekly dose of toxic news about Berlusconi's Italian miracle on Michele Santoro's Annozero. I'll reply more decently when I get over my newswonky or is that wanky?hangover at the 2 hours of utterly believable scandal, tomorrow.Nishidani (talk) 20:33, 12 November 2009 (UTC)
I'm completely perplexed by this remark for a variety of reasons: But I do insist that Judaism not be identified just as a religion. Wanna know why? Because that view is contradicted by significant views from reliable sources. The issue here is more precise ... how to identify Judaism first and foremost and not how to identify Judaism as only being. Two things have been agreed upon by everyone involved. 1) Judaism is a religion and 2) Judaism may refer to more than strictly a religion. Arguments about the boundaries of the term religion aside, I don't think either of those ideas are in dispute. What Slr is arguing for is the primacy of the second point, and that is what baffles me in terms of "significant views from reliable sources." Judaism is primarily considered a religion, and then depending on the scope of "religion" one may consider the nuances of how components of Judaism are not religious or what claiming to be Jewish but not "believing in the religion of Judaism" actually means. It is a fact that mainstream scholarly opinion (see texts on Judaism, or World Religions for starters) considers Judaism primarily to be a religion. It is my opinion that most working definitions of religion would also allow space for various practices that self identifying Jews may themselves not consider "religious". I have already argued why I believe there is a discrepancy there, and it relates to the mistaken emphasis people have on religious belief. Slr is completely right about one thing -- we should be relying on expert consensus, I just don't agree at all about what that consensus is.PelleSmith (talk) 21:43, 12 November 2009 (UTC)
Well, I've enjoyed my nightmare on Italian politics, and it's late. I share your perplexity. I think the best to untangle this is to review closely our interlocutor's generous statement of his background, and approach. I'll do that tomorrow, but will anticipate by asking him to rethink his remarks on universal categories, recognizably the defect of an earlier school (though still residual in Lévi-Strauss), and Judaism, in terms of how Clifford Geertz, father of the school he appears to subscribe to, would think. Rubenstein has deconstructed 'religion' as a universal in one part of his argument, only to not only 'ontologize' Judaism, but 'orientalise' it, by making it wholly alien (Asiatic') to 'Western' monotheism. In other words, Durkheim is cast aside as dated, and yet, like a rabbit out of the habit, a conception of the orient and Judaism that would not be out of place in the works of Count Gobineau, is whipped out, as though this were the result of both modern research and recent theory. I must sound elliptic, when not obscure. I'll clarify tomorrow.
p.s. SlR, don't take the analogy with Gobineau badly. The lately lamented C Lévi-Strauss held him in the highest esteem as a writer.Nishidani (talk) 22:52, 12 November 2009 (UTC)
I don't take the comment about Gobineau personally. Your point is I am falling back on Orientalist categories. I admit that the way I wrote invited that critique. Actually I would say that we need to be just as cautious about how Europe has constructed Judaism as its Other, as talking about the influence of Western culture on Judiaam. I have provided a few specific examples of where Judaism clearly is a religion. In the examples I provided, this was the result of Western infuence. I do not think that this make Reform Judaism "inauthentic" and I have no problem talking about Judaism as Western as much as it is Eastern. If anything this supports my point that Judaism does not easily fit many categories, that is because judaism takes many different forms. Now I realize you could make the same argument about Christianity (Irish, Polish, Italian) - I'd only say - bravo, now go and improve the Christianity article. My point about Judaism developing in Persia is not to make Judaism inscrutable to Western eyes but to provide a precise historical reason for why people could misunderstand features of Judaism ... it is also to point the way to understanding for example the way Urbach has used knowledge of Zoroastrianism to help explain certain features of Judaism.
I am not sure that we need to pick which of the two views Pelle acknowledges (and I have to admit based on earlier comments of his it was not clear to me that he acknowledged these points) should come first. I know Pelle says religion comes first. Why not Civilization? Why not nation? I see sources that support those as going first. Pelle seems convinced that religion coming first is the mainstream view. But I think that there may not be a mainstream view - we may just need to distinguish between the range of views among Jewish leaders, and views among historians, and views among scholars of religion. My argument all along has NOT been that an "anti-religious" view has to "come first." As i have explained, I chose the words "sets of beliefs and practices" because that phrase CAN refer to religion and it CAN refer to other things. I was trying not to put religion second, but rather to come up with phrasing that is more inclusive i.e. can sigifiy religion OR nation OR civilization. I was not trying to put any one first. But it seems like Pelle insists on putting one first. Slrubenstein | Talk23:54, 12 November 2009 (UTC)
Just a note. I won't clarify, since (a) I think you realize from my hint at Geertz, how wildly your remarks above contradicted the anthropological methods you otherwise espouse and (b) there are so many points, here and on the page, that beg the question. (c) All these issues are resolved in wiki by consensus, and most, not all, of those who will vote show little awareness of the historic background, and nuances of the arguments. So no amount of philology will avail to modify or affect the likely outcome, a muddle, as is the norm.
The hardest test for an anthropologist is to estrange his native vision to the point where he can return to his own culture, tradition and religion, and see it with fresh eyes. All I see on the other page are positions I've seen hundreds of times, almost off a template, stressing, as do most peoples, uniqueness, difference, singularity, all against some monolithic 'other', in your case (America) a variety of Protestant Christianity. Technically what you should have done was to choose the 'emic' term that best sums up in infra-Jewish usage the concept you think shortchanged by the foreign term 'Judaism'. Historically, in early texts the shifts in the meaning of the Latin term religio exactly correspond to those in the rabbinical uses of dīn. But I digress. Best of luck, you'll need it. That talk page is sheer provincialism.Nishidani (talk) 20:18, 13 November 2009 (UTC)
You keep insisting that the language I use to describe Judaism has something to do whith Christianity. I don't see why it should, or why you should think so. Once you and others conceeded that reliable sources actually were saying what I said they were saying (that some major Jewish leaders either did not view Judaism as a religion, or did not view it as just a eligion, and that historians like Cohen also considered the meaning of Judaism too complex to be reduced to one term), your next tactic was to say that my points about Judaism apply to Christianity as well. Ho hum. If they apply to Christianity, well, why not edit the Christianity article accordingly? What is this need for uniqueness, difference, singularity? This is not my need, itis yours - this all started with Blizzard insisting that Christianity and Judaism be described the same way. My point was not that Judaism is unique, just that the reliable sources about Judaism say that Judaism cannot be described the same way as Blizzard, you, others describe Christianity. Now you tell me that Christianity can be described the same way as I describe Judaism. Well, if that is what the reliable sources on Christianity say about Christianity you have to go and change the Christianity article. Does that mean its lead will become more like the Judaism lead? That won't bother me!
Above, I was only trying to explain to you why historians of Judaism on't reduce it simply to religion which you hld Christianity was, which entailed me suggesting ways in which Judaism was different from Christianity. But if reliable sources on Christianity say it to cannot be reduced to religion, please change the Christianity intro. The point is neither to fetishize difference or sameness, as you seem to wish to do. The point is to follow reliable sources by puting all significant views in our articles. Slrubenstein | Talk00:09, 14 November 2009 (UTC)
You keep posting badly sourced nonsequiturs on this page, while not answering simple questions (what is the 'emic' Hebrew for 'religion' and 'Judaism'?), and therefore I've wasted three hours of my time and broken an undertaking (which I emailed to PelleSmith) not to comment because you are confused on very simple issues, and your remarks are as methodologically skewed as your knowledge of Judaism, Islam, Christianity and religion, let alone of the semantics of concepts and anthropology. Sorry, take it back to the relevant page, where I need not comment because I get weary following the varied inputs. For what it's worth, here is my original reply.
I have to tell you more about my experience in anthropology. The way I was trained, the project of defining domains like the political, the social, the economic, the religious, has its origins in 19th century thinkers and persisted in anthropology utnil fifty or sixty years ago.
There's nothing 'contemporary' or 'cutting edge' about your approach. In my heyday, this was all a matter of 'ethnomethodology', which Harold Garfinkel theorized about in the mid-late 50s. It was was strong on rhetoric, but never produced much. See Roy Turner,(ed.) Ethnomethodology, Penguin 1974.
At least, this is what I was taught - most anthropologists, and generally mediocre ones, believe that there is such a thing as "religion" (I mean, as a universal category) and an anthropologist can go any where in the world and do a study of "the religion of the X."
Again, you seem to think that until recently, anthropologists were uninfluenced by the principles enunciated by Franz Steiner in his groundbreaking, posthumous monograph Taboo (1956).
Most anthropologists (again, so I was taught) today see these categories (religion, politics, economics) as Western categories that emerged with modernity and the reorganization of European society with the breakdown of feudalism and the Catholic Church.
Actually most anthropologists for the past several decades have been thinking field-techniques and descriptive methodology as something that must be exceptionally sensitive to the cognitive filters, as Westerners, which they invariably bring to the discipline. Talal Asad's Anthropology & the colonial encounter, 1973: Adam Kuper's 'The Invention of Primitive Society,' (1988) review much of the problem.
'A good deal of the most cutting edge research in anthropology involves finding "sets of beliefs and practices" that do not neatly fit into any of these Western categories. The best of this research shows how sets of beliefs and practices found in non-Western societies challenge and undermine such Western categories.
As Ernest Gellner often argued, most of what you call 'cutting edge research' is poor in actual ethnological description and rich in theoretical quibbling. Like it or not, any one trained within a modern academic discipline, is heir to a discursive and conceptual tradition that, however defective its eurocentric lineaments, cannot, by a touch of the magic baton, be made to disappear. This cognitive baggage or what Foucault called an 'episteme', is always there, in practice as in critics of practice. No one can pretend that, in his fieldwork, what the natives report is unaffected by premises woven into the kind of questions he or she as anthropologist will tender.
Durkheim was and remains an important thinker and I would advise any student in the social sciences to read his work, but within anthropology it is at best of historical value. His positivist project, for better or worse, has largely been abandoned by academic anthropology.
It's a bit like saying Rashi or Maimonides are important thinkers, but their ideas about Judaism are at best of historical value, idem Ibn Khaldun's ideas about Arab polities. The truth of the matter is that any discipline worth a candle is practiced by those who master its history of cognitive mappings, and bear their distinctive contributions in mind while advancing towards new approaches. To cite Durkheim on religion as tantamount to a set of 'beliefs and practices', does not mean one underwrites Durkheim's theories. It simply meant that when you say Judaism is more than a religion, since it involves sets of 'beliefs and practices', that you have forgotten that passage in one of the founders of anthropology.
I may be wrong but I wondered if you were not presupposing that "religion" is a category with universal applicability.
Why should I be so naive? We all know the trouble Evans-Pritchard got into with his Nuer Religion(1956) and the notorious last chapter, and likewise all remember the trouble even Geertz, the ultimate relativist, trod on, according to his critics, when defining religion as a universal category in his The Interpretation of Culture, (1973). Who, interested in these things, hasn't read Talal Asad's essay,'The Construction of Religion as an Anthropological Category,'in his Geneaologies of Religion:Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam, 1882 pp.27-54? Yet Geertz's redefinition of religion, as an anthropological category, in terms of a symbolic order endowing meaning to a culture, understood in the widest sense, did have the merit of disentangling the word from the eurocentric theological bias of 'Western' tradition. His definition more or less of religion fulfils everything you say is lacking in the word 'religion' as a denotation of Judaism. As an anthropologist you should have reflected on this. Geertz's definition of 'religion' makes it perfectly applicable to Judaism.
Because of my training, I start off with the opposite assumption. I do not assume that when I go to my fieldsite that the beliefs and practices I will encounter can or should be classified as "religious," "political" etc. I was taught that doing so usually leads to misunderstanding.
Your training is in anthropology. But this does not mean your position is the anthropological one. Anthropology is a discipline with an extraordinary rich curriculum of competing theories, often regionally and historically distinct (Boasian anthropology introduced Herder's tradition within German ethnology to the US: Malinowski's Machian background inflected British empirical traditions of field-research; the Prague school of linguistics via Roman Jakobson infused French anthropology, with its earlier positivism, when Lévi-Strauss adopted it etc.) and you embrace a particular, I think post-Boasian tradition within it, emphasizing absolute relativism. One patent semantic, conceptual, or if you like, philosophical contradiction in your many remarks on 'religion' as a 'Western' category is that you define it in essentialist terms, commensurate with a Western ideology, and yet while denying 'religion' as a universal, you make anthropology into a universalist discipline.
Then, you say you are trained to refrain from classifying elements in the alien culture you study in your fieldwork in terms of 'Western' concepts, like 'the religious' or 'the political', or 'the economic'. Frankly, this is rhetoric, and nonsensical, and very much part of the self-justifying gossip of 'postcolonial' or 'postmodernist' practitioners of anthropology. For in layman's terms, if anyone raised in the Western or eastern first world visits and studies another people, like the Nambikwara, the Akuntzu, the Pintupi, or the Gilgit, unless he is blind and deaf, he will observe (a)rites of the dead (b) the arrangements with contiguous tribes and inter-group rules governing interactions (c) how people harvest food. That these activities are denominated by words in one's own language like religion, politics and economics does not fatally imperil one's project of description. One can avoid them, in one's field notes, but essentially one will look at such things because all known societies have definable rules regarding the disposal of the dead, the conduct with other groups and the securing of means of subsistance.
Second, based on my research of Judaism, I have learned that there is a strong argument that most of Judaism developed in Babylonia and Persia. The five books of Moses, according to tradition, were revealed to him in Sinai by God; most historians I have read believe that they derive from a diverse set of oral traditions from many parts of the Near East, from the span of the Fertile Crescent, fron the Nile to the Persian Gulf. But that they were not codified as "the five books of Moses" or "the Torah" until the Jews were in exile in Babylon (and they were brought back to Palestine by Ezra).
What has this to do with the price of tea in China? We were told all much of that in primary and secondary school, if we were alert to the teacher lecturing us on the history of religion. To make this recitative only suggests to your interlocutor that you are so prepossessed by your thoughts that you are not listening, between the lines of a dialogue, to your interlocutor, and, instead, presume that whoever you encounter requires a refresher course on the ABC of post-exilic Judaism. Do you think non-Jewish people, of Christian background, are never exposed to quite detailed accounts of the world of the Old Testament, which is an integral part of their tradition?
Similarly, while the Hebrew Bible was canonized in Palestine, much of it was written in Babylonia/Persia.
This is wrong, or, at best, a theory or generalization that begs the obvious question. No one would cavil had you written much of it was edited in the form we now have it during the Persian period (a theory all the same, particularly regarding the Pentateuch).
The bulk of classical Jewish literature, the midrash and Talmud, were written in Babylonia/Persia. There is a strong claim that Zoroastrianism had a greater influence over Judaism than Hellenistic culture. My point is that Judaism cannot be viewed as a fundamentally Western religion.
Meaningless because what Judaism, again, are you speaking of? The Judaism of the Second Temple period was influenced by both Persian and Greece cultures. Rabbinic Judaism? well of course there was a Babylonian ascendency historically, but also a Palestinian Talmud read throughout the diaspora, even in Persia. In the Talmud itself you will find the passage attributed to Rabbi Shimon ben Gamliel, referring to the fact that there were: 'a thousand young men in my father's house; five hundred of them studied Torah while the other five hundred studied Greek Wisdom.' Moses Hadas even had a theory that rabbinical thought owed deep debts to Platonism, imbibed from the Hellenizing period onward. The number of Greek loan words adopted into rabbinical Judaism's language runs into over a thousand, at a minimal count, attesting to the deep familiarity, and continuing dialogue with Hellenism, that characterised the Jewish diaspora. So much so that, correct me if I err, Greek by rabbinical authority, was at one point judged to be the only language into which the Pentateuch could be translated.
Secondly, the last line must strike many as an example of pronounced idiosyncrasy. What do you mean by 'Western' here? Pagans like myself, who think the world little improved after 400 BCE., have their hackles rise every other day when they read, in the Western press, people from the Pope to Presidents of states, talk about the 'Jewish-Christian' roots of Western civilization. A whole campaign has been waged to try to get this term into the EEC charter, and was thankfully torpedoed. Christianity historically, esp. in the form it developed after the Rformation, and in the United States, is instinct with the OT. Indeed to an outsider, much of American Christianity doesn't accord in any way with the variety they were raised in, since it is fundamentalist, more OT-centered, than grounded in the Gospels.
Rabbinical Judaism is far closer to Islam than to Christianity. And one of the central differences, constituting the divide in belief and practices between the the former two and the latter, resides in the lack of a distinction between church and state, or religious and temporal authority or power in the former. Talal Asad, and many others who highlight this in order to question the use of the 'Western' concept of 'religion' as a valid category to describe Islam and Judaism, overlook the fact that Christianity, in so far as it is conceptually indebted, and affiliated, to these Semitic monotheisms' all-embracing worldviews, was perennially tempted to subordinate secular power to sectarian theology. The second reason overlooked is that, in the development of both Islam and rabbinical Judaism, the induction of Greek philosophical thought played a crucial role. But whereas Christian thought knew nothing of Plato's Republic, with its totalizing vision of society, and was greatly influenced by Aristotle's Politics, in both rabbinical and Muslim thought, exposure to Aristotle's works, not least in Maimonides and Averroes, (so much for your hallucination about the 'non Greek' 'non-Western' nature of Judaism!) excluded knowledge of the Politics of Aristotle, while it was deeply familiar with Plato's 'Republic'. That difference in what key texts from classical Greek political thought inflected these respective traditions accounts in good part for the Islamic-Judaism holistic interpretation of 'religion' as a comprehensive way of life including the political, as opposed to the Christian awareness that the political dimension could be treated independently of the purely religious dimension.
Even as much as we can say "religion," it is profoundly non-Western. I think that many Christians - and thus readers of Wikipedia (I am not referring to you as I do not know you background) believe that they understand Judaism because they believe that they are the heris of the covenant between Abraham and God; they are the new Israel. But Christianity is in many ways a Western religion - even "Eastern" Orthodoxy is "Western" i.e. Hellenic (Ethiopian and Syrian Orthodox Christianity having been marginalized a long time ago). But Judaism is an Asian religion.
Well, in the 19th century, people like Disraeli championed the Jewish 'race' for having provided the 'West' with its key spiritual values. In the early 21st century, naturally, this is stood on its head, with the postmodernist fashion for inverting whatever conclusions were current before its rise to fashion, and now we are told that Judaism is something wholly extraneous to 'the West'.
All I can deduce from this weird remark of yours is that your experience of Christianity is extremely parochial, not informed by wide reading, and perhaps tainted with a limited, and intense exposure to certain varieties of American Christianity, which however often strike non-American Christians as quite bizarre. (Just as to my Irish Catholic kin who remain 'in the faith' visits to Italy only elicit, after a week or month, the comment, 'but Italians aren't Catholics, they're pagans').
Your premise deconstructs itself further by the fact that while you vigorously contest the denotative precision of a 'foreign' word 'religion' and its conceptual implications, to describe the 'non-Western' reality you take Judaism to be, at the same time, you hypostasize, as a transhistorical essence, Judaism itself, as both an internally consistent, historical cogent, and suprasectarian unity. This is just false. No one minimally informed about the history of Judaism can fail to note the immense variety of its usages, practices and beliefs, as diverse at times as those which have riven Christianity and Islam. Between Mizrahi, Ashkenazi, Sephardi, Falasha, orthodox, and reform judaisms, and their numerous subgroupings, numerous distinct emphases obtain.
Secondly, by saying Judaism is 'non-Western' 'Asiatic' you are making a clamorous oversight about the centrality to two forms of Judaism that have played a decisive role in the way Jews adapted to the modern world. Ashkenazic Judaism (true also of Sephardic Judaism to a lesser extent) was formed within Christian countries and, despite the Pale, was not in suspended animation, but in constant dialogue with Christianity. A few days ago, I read Ariel Toaff's monograph Bread and Water ('Pane e vino', 1988) on medieval Umbrian Jewish communities, and it confirmed what so many other books say. There was a fluid osmosis of ideas, customs, rites, beliefs flowing between host and 'guest' cultures, and the idea that somehow these Jewish communities were nothing more than isolates nurturing their own beliefs in quarantine from the larger Christian world is unhistorical, as is also the case with Judaism under Islam, where, note Maimonides, there was a long tradition of cultural exchange and influence between host and guest communities.
Judaism, more broadly speaking, emerged long before Islam and Christianity, when a different cultural landscape dominated Asia. When Judaism emerged religions and nations were isomorphic; each nation had its own god.
Sorry, but that is sophomoric in its thumbnail lecture-noted-ness. You are speaking here not of 'rabbinic Judaism' which arose contemporary with Christianity, but with two forms of belief, the inchoate Israelitic religion under the two Kingdoms, of the pre-exilic period (not yet a 'Judaism'), and the exilic/post-exilic 2nd Temple Judaism. There was no one 'cultural landscape' dominating Asia from the 10th. century to the Ist century BC, except perhaps in Will Durant's popularizations. The period embraces Canaanite polytheism, echoes of Egyptian henotheism from memories of Akhnaton, Phoenician and maritime Grecian cit-state cultures, Babylonian theogonies, Assyrian tyrannies, Persian kingships with their Indo-european tripartite ideologies (which inflected Judaism if Dumézil's excursion on this is to be believed, though Brumby dismisses it), Arabian clan-patriarchal idolatries, Edomite, Moabite, etc.etc., regional cultural pressures, splits between Israel and Judah in terms of religious and cultic belief, and 'nations' were not isomorphic with religions, because 'nations' in the modern sense did not exist, only empires, and tribal and clan-thronged peripheries which from time to time resisted their hegemonic onslaughts. You are using 'nation' tellingly, in the Latinate sense (in an argument where you repudiate the latinate 'religion'), and not in its received modern sense, and play on the tacit ambiguity that covers extended kinship-based clan polities and non-kinship based, mixed polities (as historic Israel often was). And, in a further confusion, you assign each nation a god. Most, even early Israel, were polytheistic. You have constructed an orientalist fiction of a Judaic 'other' that is 'Asiatic', when it is neither 'other' nor 'Asiatic' to Christianity, esp. since in early rabbinical writings, Christianity was considered a heresy (minut/minim) within the bosom of the Jewish community, and not some intrusively 'Western' creed. In any case, the whole argument is nonsense because, as Judaism precedes Christianity, so Christianity, as an 'Asiatic' Jewish heresy precedes 'the West', which is a construct that developed quite late in the piece.
Hellenistc civilization was responsible for many innovations, the claim to universal reason being one of them. And Christianity and Islam emerged in a post-Hellenistic landscape, as religions claiming not to represent a nation but to being universal.
So did rabbinical Judaism, whose roots date to post 70CE., and which emerged the victor among many flourishing sects within the bosom of the Judaic world, according to Jacob Neusner and many others, in the 4th-6th cventuries CE. Secondly, Islam, like Christianity, is profoundly indebted to forms of Judaism (and Christianity). 2nd Temple Judaism lived under, and was in intense dialogue with, Hellenism for centuries. Greek was the second language of Jews. Have you never read the voluminous works of Philo of Alexandria, or Josephus? Philo believed in Hellenism and its universal reason. In all your remarks, you are constantly jumping from one period of Judaism to another, glossing over the fact that in terms of periodization, the forms of Judaism were subject to different influences, Greek, Roman, Christian, Persian, Babylonian, Egyptian. The definitive statement in the Talmud about the Jews being a 'nation' understood as a category uneluctably bound together by race (nationality) dates to the Babylonian Talmud period after the 4th century.'An Israelite, even if he sins, remains an Israelite '(Berakhot 6b)
There are two very important differences between Judaism on the one hand, and Christianity and Islam on the other. Judaism is non-credal, and Judaism does not claim this universality.
So what? Calling Judaism a religion, in your grid of assumptions, means by some queer logic, that it must be credal, or universalistic? Most religions are neither 'credal' or catechistic in the Christian sense, nor aspire to universalism. At least, this is what students used to be told if they studied the history of religions under Mircea Eliade at Chicago.
Judaism still refers to a nationality or nationhood as much as a religion. This is something that I know from personal experience many Christians do not understand. They do not understand how one can be Jewish regardless of ones beliefs and practices. It works both ways - I think very few jews understand Christianity.
Go into the details of actual practice among the various forms of Judaism and you will find that this is doctrinal, but rarely as simple as you make out. Were it true in practice, neither Raphael Patai nor Shlomo Sand would write books about the myth of a Jewish race, or the invention of a Jewish people. The pious are strict: the larger community outmarries, and then marries back, as occasion dictates. One of my many sisters-in-law found recently her real father was Jewish, though not her mother. Not Jewish some rabbis said. Jewish, if you undergo the proper rites, another. In any case, that having an impeccable bloodline related to a cultural identity may be important for many Jews. But you just told me below that Ludwig Wittgenstein was not 'Jewish' despite being the scion of a majority of grandparents and parents who were of Jewish origin. See, SlRubenstein, you, like so many, use Judaism, and Jews in various arguments, in various ways, ambiguously. At times it is an ontology, an essence, denoting one historically inclusive coherent reality, and then, in other contexts, it is no such thing. In saying Wittgenstein was not a Jew, you denied, in that context, what you affirm in the passage above, that 'Judaism refers to a nationality' (and note the word 'nationality' is a euphemism here for 'race' 'ethnic group'). Wittgenstein's bloodlines were predominantly Jewish, but his family outmarried and converted, and in saying he is not Jewish, you use a different criterion, by implicitly asserting in this context that affiliation to Judaism is cultural, a matter of maintaining a set of practices and beliefs, which the Protestantising Wittgensteins disowned, and not a matter of descent by 'nation'.
'My point is not that Jews and Christians do not understand each other, that is a banal point. My point is that Jews and Christians face major obstacles understanding one another because they are so different.
Again you are guilty of naive essentialism. Who are you talking about when you say 'Jews' and 'Christians'?. The unlettered hoi polloi? I grew up next door to Jews, and never knew they were Jews until decades later, and we had no trouble understanding each other. Ze'ev Jabotinsky writing of his time in Italy in 1908 said no one ever made him feel he was different, or a Jew. He was both, but this was wholly irrelevant to what interested people in him. They never struck me as different, perhaps because they were, like everyone else, as part of our country as we several others were, spoke our language, worked with us, were 'us'. What they did privately, as Jews, was their business. The same with many of my teachers. It would never have struck my mind, in listening to several luminaries of Jewish origin who taught me, that they didn't understand me. The issue of their being Jew or myself being an ex-Catholic never arose. We were of the same 'nationality', 'spoke the same language', 'discussed the same politics', shared similar interests in sports, chess, etc. That on Friday night they might have been girding themselves for 'shalosh seudot', while I, following an ancient Irish custom, went out to wipe myself off till dawn with whiskey, port and beer was immaterial. This surely is note an isolated experience. I gather you think of Jews and Christians only as people with a pronounced religious commitment who, being assertive in their choice of a religious lifestyle, are notable to each other, and get into conflict or argument, or are prepossessed about blazoning their identities to others in society who do not share them.
Daniel Boyarin, a professor of jewish studies at university of California Berkeley, who is quoted in the article, who has claimed that Judaism, because it developed before the Western categoriy of religion developed, does not easily fit that category. Boyarin claims that Judaism also challenges Western notions of the nation and ethnicity.
Nothing new. Actually the other day, when I decided that the way this was being argued meant participation was pointless, I sent a note on that text (Daniel Boyarin, ‘The Christian Invention of Judaism: The Theodosian Empire and the Rabbinic Refusal of Religion,’ Hent de Vries (ed.), Religion: Beyond a concept, pp.150-177) to PelleSmith, as can be confirmed, saying the point you were arguing had been made with less confusion by Boyarin. Boyarin's conclusion is similar to yours, but the argument is (a) far more nuanced (b) historically articulated as affirming this of a specific variety of Judaism from the late 5th century CE.,(c) can be read as just one more example of the fashionable academic theory, according to which all traditions, concepts, or descriptions of the other are 'invented' (the fad started with a solid book by Hobsbawn and Ranger in 1982). (d) Boyarin does not say what you say, because the Judaism he speaks of is the victorious late rabbinical Judaism, whose victory he sets after many pages devoted to material that shows Christianity and Judaism's early points of contiguity as 'religions'. In any case, the definition of Christianity as a religio arose when Romans decided to define it thus, and not as a superstitio, which was the word they used both of Judaism and its early heretical form, Christianity, superstition meaning an excessively fervid ostentatious mode of worshipping. Boyarin's view is a RS, but it is a thesis, not the consensus of scholarship, or a significant (too recent) view. In defining Judaism in the lead, you need a consensual perspective, and the overwhelming mass of books by Jewish scholars and historians alone in the last 150 years speak of Judaism as a religion. Boyarin has a right to problematize this, but his problematization reflects (a) an academic appropriation of the anthropological jargon of the exotic 'other' to reinvent a subject or challenge the customary terminology used for its description, and as such a symptom, though at the highest level of the academic endorsement of ethnic chic that ran riot in the 1980s, and tempted everyone in the melting pot to retrieve their exotic roots, by marking out differences, real or imagined (b) post-1948, espo. post 1967 debates in US Jewish circles where the political tensions over identity, nationality, religion as they have developed within Israel have been refracted back into the discourse of American Jewry. This, I hazard to suggest, affects your own judgement. You are trying to exoticize a subject that, over hundreds of years, scholars of Jewish and Christian extraction had no problem in defining as a 'religion'. The more 'exotic' Judaism is made to appear to the 'Christian West', the greater the cautions that are then raised in a politely monitory fashion, about all things Jewish, of which Israel is one. Like it or not, this is the subtext, political, not 'religious' that non-Jewish bystanders like myself read as partially, ineludibly, adhering to your textual manoeuver.
'One editor has said that he understand that Jews are also an ethnic group (and of course we have a separate article on jews).
Again, that belonging to a religion can require a genealogical certificate of correct descent by blood in no way means, simply because this is not required in either Christianity, or Islam, that therefore the other faith isn't technically a 'religion'. For the implicit premise here is that the word 'religion' must mean no racial or ethnic lien is required for 'baptism' into its community. Actually, Brahmanism has a similar rule, only formulated in terms of caste. Most historical 'religions' being tribal were practiced by affines.Your emphasis on 'nationality' looks like a smokescreen for the Orthodox view of Judaism. The reality is that half of American Jews 'marry out', and yet this does not mean that, 'ipso facto', their spouses or children lose out on belonging to Judaism. In all forms of Judaism, bar I think one or two Syrian sects, there are appropriate rituals for non-Jews, people lacking the appropriate 'nationality', to convert. The history of this is unbelievably complex, but proselytism and conversion were important in two periods of Judaism,(Judaism in the Hellenizing period, Judaism in the early 'Christian' period) meaning 'nationality' in the strict sense was not always as important as it became under rabbinical Judaism for 14 centuries.
This is like an anthropologist going to Melanesia and saying "This is their religion, that is their politics, here is their economy." Maybe sixty or seventy years ago anthroppologists did that. But even the best ones from back then argued: "here is something that is neither religion nor politics. Or we can say it is both but both in a way that is indivisible, in a way that breaks down Western categories of religion and politics."
Judaism, practiced continuously in Europe (the West) since the 4th century BCE., to which the distinguished Roman community of Jews traces its origins, is not something that Europeans/Westerners stumble across with the same sort of categorical confusion, and headaches that Malinowski suffered from as he set foot in the Trobriand Islands, to which you allude. This ploy of exoticing what is in our midst, of taken as a conceptual puzzle a culture that, either as Judaism, or Judaism's reflex in its filiated form, Christianity, has been fought with, mulled over, learnt from, and studied with high erudition for millenia, doesn't work. Anti-semitism, and the holocaust, were not the products of the rise of semitic philology as a discipline and the development of 'Western' Biblical hermeneutics.
Napolean told Jews in france that they could have equal rights only if they abandoned all claims to nationhood and abandoned all civil law, keeping only the religious, and abandoned the prohibition against intermarriage. French jews agreed. It is historically accurate to say that after 1806 French judaism was a religion, period.
This is just plain wrong. French Jews had been granted equal civil rights 15 years earlier. Napoleon wasn’t imposing a dictate, or ‘telling Jews’ anything. He was asking the assembly of notables to clarify, on 12 points, crucial differences that had emerged between rabbinical law and the laws of France, a country of which they were citizens. In the work of the Sanhedrin, a considerable number of responsa then worked out theoretical positions that cancelled the effects of earlier traditional responsa in rabbinical writ that had justified Jews treating non-Jews unequally. This required revision of a considerable number of ‘religious’ positions and traditions, for the simple reason that Judaism’s beliefs and practices were established by rabbinical consultations on precedent and law, as developed over the ages, precedents and law that in turn go back to interpreting the Bible. The Assembly effectively in its response ‘reinterpreted’ traditional discriminatory religious laws based on interpretations of passages in the Tanakh. French Judaism before and after 1807 was a religion, the accommodation made in 1806-7 was one made by rabbinical authorities themselves, and no principle of Judaism was sacrificed to politics, as we can now understand with the publication of the long hidden responsa. The simple matter was that Judaism changed by rabbinical adjustments to how the laws were to be interpreted.
Conservative Judaism, Reconstructionist Judaism, and certain branches of Orthodox Judaism insisted that Judaism is not a religion in the same way that Christianity and Islam are.
So what? Gridiron is not a sport in the same way that soccer and Australian Rules football are. They are all sports (not ‘good sports’) and have different rules.
I am sorry, Nishidani, but it really appears to me to be some kind of prejudice to insist a priori that Christianity, Islam and Judaism are similar enough that they can all be named "religions."
Then old chap, you must write off to Jacob Neusner and tell him that a lifetime of study is to no avail because like thousands of Jewish historians, thinkers and writers over the past centuries, he is prejudiced since he has had no problem writing in Western languages that ‘Judaism is a religion’. You must write to inform S.Daniel Breslauer that what he wrote 8 years ago about
'the courage required to create some version of a Judaism without religion,’ in his Judaism without religion: a postmodern Jewish possibility, University Press of America, 2001 p.ix
has been superseded by epochal seismic shifts in the meaning of the word Judaism and religion, thanks to a few papers in academic journals. In just 8 years, the need to muster a difficult iconoclastic courage has disappeared, for ‘Judaism’ for three millennia, according to the new revelation, has always been more than ‘just religion’, and in any case, ‘religion’ in the Western sense it never was.
You had better send an hypogeal email to the late Yeshayahu Leibowitz telling him that all his pious writings defining Judaism as ‘coextensive with the observance of Torah and the commandments of Judaism’ reflect nothing more than Western prejudices, he wasn’t aware of.
Judaism, as the Oxford English Dictionary defines it refers to the beliefs and practices of the Jewish religion. If you dislike that, write an article on Yahadut, which is the ‘emic’ term in Hebrew for Judaism. Your problem will then be however that while Ioudaismos has a long history, from the Bible to modern times, Yahadut is absent from the Tanakh, and rabbinical literature, and only became current in modern times. ‘Dat Yehudit’ which is the only instance close to it refers precisely to a Jewish custom or practice. But let me cite Rabbi Louis Jacobs, in his article in the Encyclopaedia Judaica, surely as authoritative as reliable sources come:
‘In modern usage the terms ‘Judaism’ and ‘Torah’ (doctrine) are virtually interchangeable, but the former has on the whole a more humanistic nuance while “Torah” calls attention to the divine, revelatory aspects. The term “secular Judaism” – used to describe the philosophy of Jews who accept specific Jewish values but who reject the Jewish religion – is not, therefore, self-contradictory as the term ‘secular Torah” would be. (In modern Hebrew, however, the word torah is also used for “doctrine” or “theory,” e.g., “the Marxist theory”, and in this sense it would also be logically possible to speak of a secular torah.) A further difference in nuance, stemming from the first, is that “Torah” refers to the eternal, static elements in Jewish life and thought while “Judaism” refers to the more creative, dynamic elements as manifested in the varied civilizations and cultures of the Jews at different states of their history, such as Hellenistic Judaism, rabbinic Judaism, medieval Judaism, and, from the nineteenth century, Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform Judaism. (The term 'Yidishkeyt' is the Yiddish equivalent of “Judaism” but has a less universalistic connotation and refers more specifically to the folk elements of the faith).’ Rabbi Louis Jacobs, ‘Judaism: The Religion, Philosophy, and Way of Life of The Jews’’ (Encyclopaedia Judaica) reprinted in Jacob Neusner, Alan Jeffery Avery-Peck (eds.) The Blackwell reader in Judaism, Wiley-Blackwell, 2001 pp.3f.
No amount of exoticizing haute theoretic play, à la Homi Bhabha, with anthropological fashions can turn a recent position in the 'groovy' groves of academia into a significant position, when the literature on religion over the last two hundred years overwhelmingly uses the word Judaism as Jacobs defined it for the authoritative Jewish encyclopedia. You are confusing Judaism with Jewishness, or the history of the Jews, as youngsters these days often do.Nishidani (talk) 22:31, 14 November 2009 (UTC)
I thought you were going to make an argument based on what religion he was brought up in, but looking at the article I see that the only one of his grandparents who wasn't born Jewish is his maternal grandmother. So by that traditional definition, he isn't Jewish. Didn't save the family from the activities of a fellow pupil at his school. Now was Hitler slow? Or was Wittgenstein two years ahead of most of his year group?--Peter cohen (talk) 01:39, 13 November 2009 (UTC)
According to Ray Monk, Hitler was just a poor student, which accounts for the two year lag. In any case,the ostensibly simple issue of whether one is Jewish or not, is perspectival, as is often the case with all forms of identity. The family wangled its way round, or rather paid its way round, the Nuremberg laws to be reclassified as not Jewish. Slrubenstein's criteria for arriving at the same conclusion are different, but not exhaustive, for foreclosing on other criteria that would affirm the opposite. Proof if any is required of how arbitrary, and variable, identity can be when it is determined by others, and not by the subject him/herself. Wittgenstein was Jewish, but that was only part of his identity, which haunted him in nightmares, as with the famous Vertsag dream. Nishidani (talk) 17:36, 13 November 2009 (UTC)
Nishidani, how can you comment on my criteria for arriving at this conclusion? here as with the other topic on which we have disagreed you seem too easily to jump to conclusions about what I think. What is your source for saying Wittgenstein was Jewish? You never provided any sources for your views about Judaism and religion, is this another case where you have views but no sources? Slrubenstein | Talk23:57, 13 November 2009 (UTC)
Are you one of those insecure academics who think that everytime a commonplace, or something you yourself in your reading have not come across, is uttered, it must be footnoted? The usual practice is to provide sources for new , improbable or unfamiliar ideas. People familiar with Wittgenstein's life and work would never think of challenging the obviousness of the remark I made. In any case, I have answered you above. Cheers Nishidani (talk) 22:34, 14 November 2009 (UTC)
No, I don't think so. About Wittgenstein: I thought Monk's biography showed that his grandparents had converted to Christianity (certainly before he was born) and that Wittgenstein, reared as a Catholic, never identified as a Jew. If I a misremembering I would be thrilled to be corrected, but a page number would help. Dreams are notoriously complicated to interpret and I hope you have more evidence than a dream for your claim. About me: it was you who wrote "Slrubenstein's criteria for arriving at the same conclusion are different, ..." which led me to belived that you thought you know my criteria. Since I did not state my criteria I wondered how you knew. You seem to take it as some sign of insecurity that I ask. But is it possible that you are one of those insecure intellectuals who always will deflect a simple question with obfuscation? Slrubenstein | Talk12:10, 15 November 2009 (UTC)
That you are quite unfamiliar with the niceties of anthropological thinking on method emerges from your statement:-
'Since I did not state my criteria I wondered how you knew.'
Okay, you've studied anthropology, but have no grounding in philosophy or logic.
Criteria, Slrubenstein, since at least the development of the Socratic elenchus, are principles teased out by analysing statements. In field work, one elicits the criteria governing modes of behaviour by posing questions on any topic and analysing the responses. I do not need you to state your criteria formally. I only need to examine the various ways you use your concepts, in the light of their contexts, to grasp what criteria underlie your judgements. You're of course at liberty to think I am treating you as a 'native' and reject my subtle imperialist appropriation of statements you make, an appropriation that allows me to elicit the criteria governing your opinions on this or that. But, in everyday discourse, most people do this, if unconsciously, and unsystematically. I must confess that the repeated questions you throw my way suggest you don't do this, since were you to read what I wrote as closely as I read what you write, our dialogue would have concluded many pages ago, since you wouldn't have thrown out so many vagrant points, and I would not have been required to answer them, tediously, in return.
I'll just take, mostly, your last remark to illustrate the point, about knowing what criteria you have in mind even if formally you yourself do not state them.
You said Wittgenstein was not 'Jewish'.
This affirmation means that you must have a definition of what constitutes being Jewish.
You earlier spoke of the importance of 'nationality' to Judaism, hence (a)descent from Jews, the bloodline, is one criterion.
You write of his grandparents' conversion to Christianity, and that he was reared as a Catholic. This means (b) you take as a criterion of 'being Jewish' that one was raised by Jews as a Jew, meaning within a family that was attached, loosely or strongly, to Judaism as a religion, or raised in a Jewish ambiance.
You write that 'Wittgenstein never identified as a Jew'. The criterion assumed in this statement is that (c)'to be Jewish' requires that one identify oneself as a Jew.
There! You provided three criteria, unwittingly or otherwise, regarding how you think about the issue of what constitutes 'being Jewish'. In terms of them, Wittgenstein was Jewish as regards (a) and (c). As to Ray Monk (there are other sources), read para 4 of p.5. As to point (c), which you might probably challenge, to avoid more wasted time, I note that (among other passages, and other sources) Monk also writes:
'Opinions vary as to what degree of concealment there was about his true background. Perhaps the most important fact is that Wittgenstein himself felt that he was hiding something - felt he was allowing people to think of him as an aristocrat when in fact he was a Jew.' (Vintage ed.1991 p.279).Nishidani (talk) 18:47, 15 November 2009 (UTC)
What an intersting talk page you have
I don't know if you saw it but just the other day the NY Times had a discussion of the new full translation of Hobbes' Leviathan in Hebrew.[2] Apparently there was already a Hebrew translation but it left out the last two sections and much of the intersection between belief and political organization. I couldn't help but think of that after reading your part of the Judaism debate here. --JGGardiner (talk) 09:10, 17 November 2009 (UTC)
Good grief, my friend! My life is plagued by coincidences, I even have a diary of them, started almost 4 decades ago when I read Arthur Koestler's The Roots of Coincidence. Your note arrives after I decided to go back through my tattered copy of Hobbes' masterpiece for bedtime reading. I'd decided to reread it through again late last week, had dropped it for a few days, distracted by wiki, and only retook it up late last night. Now that you mention it, Slruibenstein's remarks on the composition of the OT mainly took place in Persia, could have been annotated by this coincidental reading, that Hobbes wrote 'it is manifest enough, that the whole Scripture of the Old Testament was set forth in the form we have it, after the return of the Jews from their Captivity in Babylon' (Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. C.E.Macpherson, Penguin 1968 p.422). Of course. scholarship has moved on. But marking that caesura, decisive for the emergence of Judaism, was an important achievement for that period.
No, I hadn't noticed the NYT's article, but will examine it. Another line of thought, another source. I must get back to pruning the garden as this Indian summer prevails. I need the kindling. Something to think about, and stoke the mental cockles, as I clip the magnolia today. Thanks again.Nishidani (talk) 11:20, 17 November 2009 (UTC)
Glancing at my 'note' earlier, I notice my link to Franz Steiner is red-linked, and thus wiki has no page on him. He was an extraordinary powerful and creative thinker, not only in anthropology, and though he published relatively little in his lifetime (his massive magnum opus got lost, likeT.E.Lawrence's first draft of The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, or Thomas Carlyle's The French Revolution which John Stuart Mill's housemaid threw into the fire), exercised a decisive impact on a wide variety of later éminences grises (Mary Douglas, Ernest Gellner etc.). There's short work for someone. Perhaps Slrubenstein, or Slim Virgin, who has the right cultural and intellectual background, I gather, to work up a rapid article?Nishidani (talk) 11:31, 17 November 2009 (UTC)
On closer inspection, your link to Steiner is not actually red-linked after all. It may have been a little foolish of us to devote so much time to him. --JGGardiner (talk) 07:22, 2 December 2009 (UTC)
To be honest I don't completely understand SLR's reasoning. As I understand it, most Christians and Muslims also accept that Jews are a nation. Some even believe in dual-covenant theology. So even on this particular question all three have the very same mixture of belief and practice which should disqualify them all as religions.
There is actually a simple de.wikipedia article on Steiner.[3] A simple translation might be a good start for an en. one if somebody wants to tackle that. German and anthropology bring up bad undergrad memories for me so I think I'll leave that to someone else. Enjoy the magnolias. Cheers. --JGGardiner (talk) 00:45, 18 November 2009 (UTC)
Incidentally in all the Darwin celebration recently I happened to read a bit about Pierre Magnol who played his own part in removing botanical classification from the sphere of religion. --JGGardiner (talk) 00:48, 18 November 2009 (UTC)
Islam is the most comprehensive of all, in ignoring the secular/religious divide. Christianity accepts the division canonically, except in the variety that emerged under Byzantine, and which so affected Slavic orthodoxy, of Caesaro-Papism. Judaism, except for its covenant-conquest myth, developed historically as a religion within other Empires (Islamic, Byzantine-Christian, Christian), lacking itself (except for the hypothesis of a Khazar khaganate) an historical state, and it is this peculiarity among the three monotheisms that SlR uses as leverage for his emphasis on idiosyncrasy.
With the rise of Israel, things get complicated, given the importance of defining the state as Judaic, even if it is secular. One can speak of Muslim society (the name of a brilliant and penetrating monograph by Ernest Gellner I strongly recommend if this branch of study interests you), Christian society, and Jewish society now. In all three cases, one is dealing with a broader social praxis than just religion, but one informed, or measured against, the foundational texts informing those religions. Generally, traditional social structures prove stronger than the orthodoxies imposed on them by cultural or religious elites, and inflect the way those generic belief systems are adapted, from zone to zone. Religion, for Gilbert Murray, was whatever system or set of practices furnished one with an escape-hatch from the entanglements of contingent circumstance. For him it was books, for others it is the sense of a tribal affection (patriotism is a form of secular religion), a lien to God or gods, the comfort of soteric rites, or companionate solidarity. All three faiths supply this function in a rich variety of ways, and to define 'religion' narrowly means the historical semantics of one tribe's word for these practices trumps function as we undertake to make generic definitions comprehensive of human societies. This may look good anthropologically, but only in so far as that discipline has reneged on its obligation as a science of man to encompass diversity with conceptual unity.
The German article (for which many thanks) is pretty straight-forward, and basic. I'd do it myself (English sources are fairly rich) only I'm on a perma-strike! Cheers Nishidani (talk) 11:27, 18 November 2009 (UTC)
Yes. I wrote a reply but I deleted it before I posted because there's really no point preaching to the choir here. Although I did see an interesting and somewhat related article in the Atlantic about Einstein's first trip to America for the World Zionist Organization.[4]
I also meant to say yesterday that I noticed a Google Books preview that included most of an interesting biographical essay, An Oriental in the West: The Life of Franz Baermann Steiner.[5] It might be useful for whoever writes that article. --JGGardiner (talk) 23:44, 18 November 2009 (UTC)
Whadya reckon if we shanghai the Nabster into doing it, as penitence for his loutish behaviour, and irresponsible wasting of wiki responsibilities, once the time's expired on the rap they doled out to him? Thanks for the google link. A beauty. I think if yourself, me, sean.hoyland and most of the other people he's harassed and insulted ask him to make amends by a gesture of reparation in this way, he may succumb to shame, and do it. Hadn't taken the trouble to search for that myself. I was relying on my reading of Taboo in 1973, an obit by Mary Douglas and gossip about him I'd picked up here and there.Nishidani (talk) 10:05, 19 November 2009 (UTC)
Probably not, part of the advantage of being such an uncouth bastard is that I never have to show any remorse or attempt to make amends for my behavior. Though truthfully I did search a bit, seems most of the biographical sources I can find are either in German or only available in these places called libraries. nableezy - 15:32, 19 November 2009 (UTC)
Deeply disappointed, Nab. I was expecting you to tell me to get stuffed, that you weren't some scumbag gofer for retired wikipedian wankers, at the beck and call of otiose hustlers from the wiki talk-but-baulk circuit, and that I had more hide than Jessica the elephant (yes, the beast Wittgenstein asserted might well be lurking in Bertie Russell's room, while they were taking tea there one afternoon, in, was it, 1913) for even imagining I could rope you in, a lawless Chicagoan, with a little muscle from the other chaps who happen to be in good standing with the establishment. You're becoming polite. It augurs badly for the future.Nishidani (talk) 19:15, 19 November 2009 (UTC)
Sorry Nishi, my momma taught me to be respectful to the elderly and the infirm. You can thank her for my inability to properly reply to such a defamation of my character as saying I am becoming polite. I moved from Chicago a few years back to a place where the driving ability of the residents can only be described as "doodly", as in "doodly doo, let's take the scenic route and look at the trees". A co-worker remarked that over the past years my driving had become progressively less, let's just say "efficient", and more "respectful". I had to restrain myself from punching him. (Also, if you are a football fan, you have my condolences on being screwed by the French. I was almost as upset about that as the other French team winning Africa's last spot) nableezy - 23:42, 19 November 2009 (UTC)
I didn't remember the Jessica part. But I wonder now if Nableezy believes in logical atomism. He did say that he "calls a spade a spade". But you can probably interpret that either way.
I've read various accounts of this over the years, one relates to an incident in Russell's rooms. But this gives a slightly different version. I think Nableezy, when not burning rubber (or French letters which is the same thing, I guess) on the asphalt in gerontocratic suburbs, subscribes to logical ahemism. I think we'd better end it here, as I have enticed you into an abuse of wiki talk pages. Sorry, and regards.Nishidani (talk) 12:00, 20 November 2009 (UTC)
That's true. I should stop abusing talk pages and get back to abusing articles. But thanks for the distraction. I will get around to that Steiner article some day if nobody else does so at least some good will come of this section. Cheers. --JGGardiner (talk) 00:17, 21 November 2009 (UTC)
Well, fuck it. I suppose, since I complained and tried to strongarm others into doing it, that I'd at least better give some notes. I've used the German article as a template, but it has quite a few errors. I've misplaced, or another visitor has stolen it, my copy of Canetti's memoirs where Steiner is written about, so can't use that source. I can't remember which of Murdoch's early novels portrays him in fictional form, or whether the figure of the intense intellectual in her novels owes more to Canetti than to Steiner. I'll try to look up my notes on the backleaves of her mid 50s work for something on this.
I don't like adding anything to WP since I can't edit the only area, a trash-heap of poor POV editing, where I could really be useful. In my book, that's like helping the rich, while the poor go begging. But, you can use the stuff below as a basis for the future article, when time allows. Best wishes JGG and Nab. It was a pleasure to edit with you two guys, pushing useful shit uphill against the runny landslides of loquacious madness and wildcat editing that was the norm at the Gaza war page! You can see here many points of contact with what Slrubenstein asserted. That's why Steiner came to mind. He said it much better. I agree, on this, with neither, but that is not the point, when writing a wiki article.
His paternal family hailed from Tachov in Western Bohemia, his father was a small retail businessman dealing in cloth and leather goods. His mother’s from Prague. Neither side were practitioners of Judaism, his father was an atheist, but he received elements of a religious education at school. He belonged to the last generation of the German, and Jewish, minority in Prague of the last days of the Austro-Hungarian empire who were to make distinctive contributions to German literature. From his early childhood he was a close friend of Hans Günther Adler. In 1920 he entered the German State Gymnasium in Štepánská Street, where Max Brod and Franz Werfel had studied[5]. He joined the Roter Studentenbund (Red Student Union) in 1926. He was attracted to Marxism early, and his fascination lasted four years, until 1930, and also to political Zionism. With regard to the latter, he may have been influenced, during his year in Jerusalem, by the Brit Shalom circle, which espoused a rapprochement between Jews and Arabs [6]. He enrolled at the German University of Prague in late 1928 for coursework on Semitic languages, with a minor in ethnology, while pursuing as an external student courses in Siberian ethnology and Turkish studies, at the Czech languageCharles University of Prague. He studied Arabic abroad for a year, in 1930-1, at the Hebrew University in Palestine[7]. In Jerusalem, after some time staying with an Arab family, he was forced to move out by the British, and took up digs with the Jewish philosopher Hugo Bergman, a key figure in the development of Prague Zionism, a schoolfriend of Franz Kafka's, and an intimate of Martin Buber, Judah Leon Magnes and Gershom Sholem. [8]. It was from this circle during his stay that he developed views akin to those of Brit Shalom on Jewish-Arab cooperation, though he remained suspicious of fundamentalistIslam.[9]
It was from this intense period, that Steiner developed the idea, already represent in the work of the sociologist Werner Sombart, who had stressed the oriental character of Jews, that he was ‘an oriental born in the West’.[10]. On this premise was grounded his later critique of the imperial cast of Western anthropological writing, as was his sympathy for hermeneutic techniques that would recover native terms for the way non-Westerners experienced their world. He obtained his doctorate in linguistics 1935 with a thesis on Arabic word formation (Studien zur arabischen Wurzelgeschichte: ‘Studies on the History of Arabic Roots'). He then moved to study at the University of Vienna to specialize in Arctic ethnology Cite error: A <ref> tag is missing the closing </ref> (see the help page).. During his exile in England he was taken under the wing by Elias Canetti, whom he had already met in Vienna, who was based in London. During the war he studied under Evans-Pritchard, while in turn deeply influencing him and many lecturers and students of that circle including Meyer Fortes, Mary Douglas, Louis Dumont, M.N.Srinivas, Godfrey Lienhardt, Ernest Gellner. Iris Murdoch, though she had met him briefly in 1941, fell in love with him in the summer of 1951.
He was appointed Lecturer in Social Anthropology at Oxford in 1950, a position he held until his premature death two years later. He is mainly known for his posthumous collection Taboo, composed of lectures he delivered on that subject, after being persuaded by Evans-Pritchards to teach this, rather than, as planned, a series of lectures on Marx[11]
His thought is characterized by an intense commitment to the right of self-determination of non-Western peoples. His analytical technique constantly exposed the biases of the anthropological tradition which, down to his day, had endeavoured to describe these peoples. He included his own ethnic group, the Jews, in this category.[12]. His influence was informal and vast, within the tradition of post-war British anthropology, but is rarely attested in the literature because he published little.Cite error: A <ref> tag is missing the closing </ref> (see the help page).
Shy, whimsical, and endlessly curious, he was regarded by many of his contemporaries as ‘intellectual’s intellectual’ for the extraordinary multidisciplinary erudition he had at his fingertips. [13]. His family was exterminated during the Holocaust. He died of a heart-attack, Iris Murdoch thought that it was the result of his heart-break over the fact of the Holocaust. He is buried in the Jewish cemetery in Oxford.
^H.G.Adler, Über Franz Baermann Steiner:Brief an Chaim Rabin, (hrsg.Jeremy Adler, Carol Lisa Tully Wallstein Verlag, 2006 p.27
^Sir Ernst Gombrich imagined Steiner as ‘a veritable bookworm, practically eating his way through the stock at the British Museum’ Jeremy Adler and Richard Fardon ‘An Oriental in the West: The Life of Franz Baermann Steiner’ in Franz Baermann Steiner Selected Writings, vol.1: Taboo, Truth, and Religion (eds. Jeremy Adler and Richard Fardon), Berghahn Books, New York, Oxford 1999 pp.16-102 p.18
^influenced by Karl Kraus, see Jeremy Adler and Richard Fardon ‘An Oriental in the West: The Life of Franz Baermann Steiner’ in Franz Baermann Steiner Selected Writings, vol.1: Taboo, Truth, and Religion (eds. Jeremy Adler and Richard Fardon), Berghahn Books, New York, Oxford 1999 pp.16-102
p.19
^Jeremy Adler and Richard Fardon ‘An Oriental in the West: The Life of Franz Baermann Steiner’ in Franz Baermann Steiner Selected Writings, vol.1: Taboo, Truth, and Religion (eds. Jeremy Adler and Richard Fardon), Berghahn Books, New York, Oxford 1999 pp.16-102
pp.37f.
^Jeremy Adler and Richard Fardon ‘An Oriental in the West: The Life of Franz Baermann Steiner’ in Franz Baermann Steiner Selected Writings, vol.1: Taboo, Truth, and Religion (eds. Jeremy Adler and Richard Fardon), Berghahn Books, New York, Oxford 1999 pp.16-102, p.32
^Jeremy Adler and Richard Fardon ‘An Oriental in the West: The Life of Franz Baermann Steiner’ in Franz Baermann Steiner Selected Writings, vol.1: Taboo, Truth, and Religion (eds. Jeremy Adler and Richard Fardon), Berghahn Books, New York, Oxford 1999 pp.16-102 p.39
^Jeremy Adler and Richard Fardon ‘An Oriental in the West: The Life of Franz Baermann Steiner’ in Franz Baermann Steiner Selected Writings, vol.1: Taboo, Truth, and Religion (eds. Jeremy Adler and Richard Fardon), Berghahn Books, New York, Oxford 1999 pp.16-102
p.17,37
^Jeremy Adler and Richard Fardon ‘An Oriental in the West: The Life of Franz Baermann Steiner’ in Franz Baermann Steiner Selected Writings, vol.1: Taboo, Truth, and Religion (eds. Jeremy Adler and Richard Fardon), Berghahn Books, New York, Oxford 1999 pp.16-102 pp.38-9
^‘Although Steiner was sympathetic to a wide range of religious expression, one searches in vain in his writings for positive appreciation of two such traditions, between which he seems to find similarities: Protestantism (especially in its German form) and Islam (particularly in its more fundamental forms). Given his own ethnicity and religion, the pairing is strongly motivated. As Steiner’s Oriental solidarity is expressed less in a modernizing context, so Muslim Arabs seem to disappear from his analysis’ Jeremy Adler and Richard Fardon ‘An Oriental in the West: The Life of Franz Baermann Steiner’ in Franz Baermann Steiner Selected Writings, vol.1: Taboo, Truth, and Religion (eds. Jeremy Adler and Richard Fardon), Berghahn Books, New York, Oxford 1999 pp.16-102 p.41
^Adler and Fardon, ibid. p.40 who compare this to the Jewish poetess, Gertrud Kolmar's late view of herself as a 'hindered Asiatic' (hinderte Asiatin).
^Jeremy Adler and Richard Fardon ‘An Oriental in the West: The Life of Franz Baermann Steiner’ in Franz Baermann Steiner Selected Writings, vol.1: Taboo, Truth, and Religion (eds. Jeremy Adler and Richard Fardon), Berghahn Books, New York, Oxford 1999 pp.16-102 p.34
^Jeremy Adler and Richard Fardon ‘An Oriental in the West: The Life of Franz Baermann Steiner’ in Franz Baermann Steiner Selected Writings, vol.1: Taboo, Truth, and Religion (eds. Jeremy Adler and Richard Fardon), Berghahn Books, New York, Oxford 1999 pp.16-102 p.16
Jeremy Adler and Richard Fardon ‘An Oriental in the West: The Life of Franz Baermann Steiner’ in Franz Baermann Steiner Selected Writings, vol.1: Taboo, Truth, and Religion, (eds. Jeremy Adler and Richard Fardon), Berghahn Books, New York, Oxford 1999 pp.16-102
Franz Steiner, Taboo (ed.) Laura Bohannan, with an introduction by Evans-Pritchard, Cohen and West London, 1956
Franz Baermann Steiner, Am stürzenden Pfad: gesammelte Gedichte, (hrsg. Jeremy Adler), Wallstein Verlag, 2000
Mary Douglas, 'Franz Steiner: A Memoir', in Franz Baermann Steiner. Selected Writings, vol.1: Taboo, Truth, and Religion, (Jeremy Adler and Richard Fardon eds.), Berghahn Books, New York, Oxford 1999 pp.3-15,
cleaned up here, but I dont see you citing Steiner (2000) anywhere, and as I cannot read German I wont be able to add anything from it. Anything you wish to add before it goes in the mainspace? And do you have a source for Iris Murdoch thought that it was the result of his heart-break over the fact of the Holocaust? That would be a good dyk hook. nableezy - 18:54, 21 November 2009 (UTC)
Is the line on heartache taken from the quote Franz was certainly one of Hitler's victims in Steiner (2000) p. 433? nableezy - 21:30, 21 November 2009 (UTC)
Yep. Edit-conflict, which is only to be expected between the two of us. I tried to post a minute ago the following, but I'd advise you to enjoy Saturday afternoon, watch some cricket, play pool, drown in a pool, something like that. No one should work from Saturday to Friday, esp. Saturday.
'Cleaned up'+'my momma taught me to be respectful to the elderly and the infirm.'
Yeah, I getcha. I messed up, and you've started to wipe up the mess after my aged, incontinent, editorial imcompetence has left the page spattered like a mad woman's . .excrement. Jeez, the things we old geezers have to put up from the young.
The postscript by Jeremy Adler to his collected poems, Franz Baermann Steiner, Am stürzenden Pfad: gesammelte Gedichte, (hrsg. Jeremy Adler), Wallstein Verlag, 2000, pp.440-462 has a rich and useful compendium of his life and the thematic interweaving of its moments in his poetry.
He had a nervous breakdown in 1946, and a coronary thrombosis in 1949 (2000 p.449). Not an organic problem, it was diagnosed as function, related to stress, and his poverty in England.
As to your two remarks re Steiner (2000) and Murdoch, I was thinking of the following remark, but paraphrased it badly:
'Franz was certainly one of Hitler's victims' Iris Murdoch, cited in Franz Baermann Steiner, Am stürzenden Pfad: gesammelte Gedichte, (hrsg. Jeremy Adler), Wallstein Verlag, 2000 p.433
The same text speaks of his late encounter (actually they met fleetingly in 1941) with her as one which would have led to marriage, though this created problems for him, as an orthodox Jew for it meant facing the issue of marrying a Christian woman.(p.449)
The manuscript of his Comparative Study on the Sociology of Slavery, and all of his notes on sources, the result of 4 years work, was lost during a train trip between Oxford and London.(p.445, thus the German text, in Srinivas's memoir ('Franz Steiner: A Memoir,' in Adler and Fardon (eds) Selected Writings, vol.2, 1999 pp.3-10, pp.4-5, we are told that it was during a train trip from London to Oxford (p.4). Unfortunately Srinivas then ruins his veracity by implying that this occurred during the morning journey from Oxford to London which required him to switch trains at Reading, if he missed the usual 8.40 am express. He apparently went to the loo to splash his boots and propped his briefcase outside, and it vanished. I'm fucked if I know why people don't control the truth of the stories they make up when they write autobiography!)
The German text put his arrival in England in 1936. Mary Douglas put it in 1938. The Postscript to the poetry collection edited by Adler, specifies that he went to London in 1936 in order to work in the British Museum, and study modern field research methodology under Bronislaw Malinowski ((p.444)). So the German text was right and I was ethnocentric in trusting Mary Douglas's memory
I know there is a striking congruency between some of his ideas and his style and that of Theodor Adorno, who was in Oxford at the same time as Steiner's first visit to England. Adorno apparently also tried to get Steiner's letters published, so they must have corresponded. Of the several books on Adorno in my library none speaks of the connection however.
I've left out huge loads of stuff easily available in those books, since I'm on strike. Like his belief Israel could only exist as a theocracy. The connections between his poetry, and concepts of both truth (his influential Chagga paper)and myth (that can be gleaned from the section 'The Poet as Anthropologist' pp.67ff. in Selected Writings, vol.2: Orientpolitik, value, and civilisation,, (eds.Jeremy Adler, Richard Fardon) Methodology and History in Anthropology, vol.3, Berghahn Books, 1999 with a memoir by M.N. Srinivas
Hey, what the fuck!, I'm acting like a scab, subverting my own strike. I'm not going to work on this wiki crap anymore. To hell with it, . . this has already cost me 23 minutes of a Bruce Willis movie rerun. Young people are drinking Guinness over at the pub, a crescent moon is scratching its back on the hills over the valley, people are socializing on Saturday, and here I am getting cerebral hemarroids, redeyed in front of a rather unattractive computer screen, trying to cope with your nagging. Don't insult me, to drive me like a slave, anymore Nab, or I'll get JGGardiner to dob you into the cops over at AN/1 again, for stalking retired wikipedians.Nishidani (talk) 21:52, 21 November 2009 (UTC)
The heart stuff should be phrased per Murdoch. Actually Herz, is a crucial, keyword in his poems, and in one notable text he speaks of it being a sacrificial victim. But that's for some future editor to figure out. We've done our bit, pal.Nishidani (talk) 21:55, 21 November 2009 (UTC)
That looks great. I'm embarrassed now by the rough translation of the de. article sitting in my notes. I was a little concerned that the red link might require another new article but we do actually have one for H. G. Adler.
Don't blame Douglas, the discrepancy in the two sources about his arrival in England is because he actually came twice. First in 1936 but he left in July 1937 to go back to Prague, then came his Ruthenian study followed by more time in Prague and finally a return to England in early 1938. It is on page 46 of the Adler and Fardon biography that I linked to above. Cheers. --JGGardiner (talk) 01:03, 23 November 2009 (UTC)
Thanks JG. I see Nab has entered the relevant edit, linking Adler père to the wiki article on his Franz B.Steiner workpage. Jeremy, who edits all of Steiner's stuff, is his son of course.Well, there's the makings of a good stub, slightly better than the German one, all wrapped up in a few days. I'm not good at finding photos but hope we can eventually get a copyright free one from the net. Perhaps Fardon (at SOAS)or Adler (at King's College) might oblige with suggestions, if all else fails on that score. Sorry for jumping the gun on you. I just got irritated by a series of private messes, and allowed myself to be distracted to get this off my chest, not thinking you both might be mulling the job. I left out the excessive and trivial detail re Canetti on the German wiki page because it seemed unfocused, and eventually a para or two on them will be required. Any further edits can be done on the Nab page. No hurry though. When it's in some readable shape and formatted properly, you can take it to wiki. It's nice to think that, from a bit of wiseacre jawing at each other, we incidentally managed to get together for a few hours to do a neglected figure the honour he's owed. Cheers.Nishidani (talk) 10:48, 23 November 2009 (UTC)
I can't format the last three books in the bibliography in accordance with the obscure citational template everyone uses.
Needs categories at the bottom
A photo
I'm sounding like a spoiled kid asking for Christmas presents from Canuckistan or Ci cago (how Italians write 'Chicago', meaning 'I shit there'). I'll get Andrea Bocelli to sing the Canadian national anthem in this year's Macy Street Christmas parade, or hymn the praises of Chicago in the Potawatomi language, if either or both of you can fix stuff like that? Nishidani (talk) 11:21, 23 November 2009 (UTC)
I've made the Adler/Fardon edit on his return to Prague in July 1937, but the other source I used said his Ruthenian research took place in spring of that year, not late summer, as p.46 suggests. I've a hangover, and have already mussed up some edits, so will leave it for today.Nishidani (talk) 12:13, 23 November 2009 (UTC)
There is still a red link in that article. Taboo (book) does not have an article. If you were interested, I started with a few sources available on JSTOR (let me know if you want pdfs) here. There are a lot more reviews available, I just got tired of filling out the templates. More than a few of the sources in the Steiner article could also be used, and I promise I will put in my fair share of work on this one (and maybe JGG will feel compelled to do the same). So, if you wanted to give more of your time to this place, a decent article could be made. nableezy - 11:16, 6 December 2009 (UTC)
Nabster, what are you dragging an oldtimer with a faulty ticker into, more hard yakka requiring tons of tobaccah that ain't um . . conducive to a serene and coughless senescence! This all started out with a memory, evoked by Slrubenstein's remarks on Judaism being 'more than a religion', being 'other' than Christianity and Islam, that sent my memory back to a suburban backgarden almost four decades ago where, nonplussed by my arguments about Kantian universalism in Lévi-Strauss, a mate chucked me Franz Steiner's monograph in the Penguin reprint with an abrupt, 'Well, argue the point with this chap!' Then a tiff with Stellarkid enlivened the interest, because Sk seemed to share Steiner's views in another regard. I devoured (that night) the borrowed copy of Steiner's book, and it remained with me, mentally, (because my friend, though he stole books for me at times, was more thrifty with his own) until Slrubenstein's remarks tickled my reminiscence, the curse of age. I've had a deep and abiding affection for the man and his genius pocketed away, and was quite happy to sign off with an article on him for wiki. But doing it I kept noting: 'Ioan Lewis has no article, fa Chrissake!'. There's nothing on 'D'Arcy Ryan, Godfrey Lienhardt,’ and so many others.
I said I’d take my permaban as a permaban on wiki full stop, esp. given my wikilegally defined ‘battleground mentality’, which I can only shrug off by shrugging off the encyclopedia generally. Rules are made to be broken, but only once. And my intention is to leave it now that we’ve grubbed up a decent stub for Steiner.
Still, heck, if you can actually access Jstor and can email me pdfs of all those reviews, my curiosity would probably be seduced at least to finish with a stub on a Taboo page for the link. Problem is, I don’t have a copy of Taboo, the one I read now lies on the shelves of a private library in Calgary. The best way would be to have info thrown my way, while I order a copy and finish the damn thing two months ahead, when I have a copy to thumb. Books are like members of the opposite sex(oh heck, to be politically correct, I'd better add same sex for the other tribe), they are best enjoyed and understood when thumbed, fingered, caressed and ogled for real, and not as a virtual blur of prettified pixels on a blank background, grazed by googling orbs like that protrusive one in Joshua Reynolds portrait of Dr.Johnson, on the Italian wiki.Nishidani (talk) 17:21, 6 December 2009 (UTC)
Just trying to help your soul clap. I'll send you what is listed and a few others in a few hours (the pansies are playing now). nableezy - 03:39, 7 December 2009 (UTC)
Deletion criteria
Well spotted with the complete list of British journalists - I had no idea there were that many pages here. This is an interesting category/list as well. Anyway I'm going to steer clear of it now, for obvious reasons - I think a general comment about journalism and/or general notability is fine, but anything more probably risks someone diving in on either of us. It'll be interesting to see what happens - there's a real risk it'll be wiped I guess, because closing admins just tend to count votes and take as read any negative comments about lack of notability. They often don't actually take an independent look - even spending two seconds to do a "Jonathan Cook" +Nazareth Google search would reveal how widely he is cited and his work reproduced online, as well as his status as one of the few Western journalists - if not the only one - permanently based in any Palestinian areas. Just because he is often published in fairly radical outlets - or, the horror, foreign ones - doesn't negate the notability of his writing. An interesting comparison might be made with this AfD, where a couple of passing mentions in one or two media sources of an organisation whose existence or real nature is doubtful, were deemed enough to save it.--Nickhh (talk) 15:39, 27 November 2009 (UTC)
Well Nick, it is absolutely shameful that this sort of politically motivated censorship be allowed even a hearing on wikipedia. Check the arguments against Cook against the following (Hillel Fendel,Yishai Fleisher,Yehuda HaKohen,Daphne Barak,Menashe Amir,Yoel Esteron,Itamar Ben Canaan,Imanuel Rosen,Tzipi Hotovely,Haggai Hoberman just a few) pages of really non-notable Israeli journalists, all poorly or self-sourced. I don't expect an admin to look into this, but it is politics, and has nothing to do with writing an encyclopedia. Yes, technically we should keep out of it. But it is a clearcut case of numbers' stacking, coordinated to wipe out a perceived 'hostile element'. The only way to deter people abusing the rules to play these games is to get an immediate comparative list of all people in the same category who come from the POV area that the deletion-proposer comes from, and ask him if he is willing to include, for the same reasons, all these other articles for immediate deletion. Won't be done though. Wiki is anything but internally consistent.Nishidani (talk) 15:47, 27 November 2009 (UTC)
Amicus certus in rebus incertis cernitur You're my greatest discovery since finding out about how to eat porridge with buttered toast soaked in vegemite.Nishidani (talk) 18:22, 27 November 2009 (UTC)
No, I don't think trying to overturn the permaban is a good idea,(I hate the impression moves like that give of whingeing, or trying to sneak back by wriggling for pretexts to get off a rap) though it now appears strongly possible that at Susya, I was cornered into a 3 revert by a game involving sockpuppets, (I just thought they coordinated offline) and that told against me. If Arbcom wants to get serious, it should simply raise the bar. In contentious areas, only people with 2,000 edits and a GA/FA page qualify. That simple rule, that you graduate to the area by proving your merit, and your dedication to the encyclopedia, would eliminate all that daily anonymous I/P hackwork undoing articles one watches (most recently at Hebron) from the sidelines with dismay. It would destroy the sockpuppetry mechanism. It would also mean that administrative oversight would improve since admins could come in assured they wouldn't be hit by endless boring and ultimately futile AN/I bunfights. But bureaucracies thrive on redtape. To introduce rationality into a system destroys much of the fun many recruited into it derive from outgaming the gamers who try to game their game. It would be like taking the daily drama factor out of Beautiful. Not the sort of environment I really wish to return to. Thanks for all that effort Nab. Steiner was an indecently neglected figure in English anthropology, despite wielding an influence evident everywhere. He deserved a decent stub at least, and now we have it.Nishidani (talk) 12:03, 2 December 2009 (UTC)
Historical note. On reflection if CM and NoCal are sockpuppets, it means the relative Solomonic judgement of the Arbcom decision 3 to 5, now becomes 2-5, and in effect, in terms of production, just one highly experienced editor, Jayjg, was lost at the expense of wiping out 5 on the other side. In military terms this was therefore, contrary to appearances, retrospectively a very successful operation, and there was a clear-cut victor.Nishidani (talk) 15:18, 2 December 2009 (UTC)
Are you accusing me of being blind to my own pathetic virtues? Oh, that reminds me, I must have had Milton in mind: 'They also serve who only stand and wait.'(On his blindness). Actually, to tell the truth for once, I find that there is nothing so congenial to quick productive work if you know an eye or four is being kept trained unobtrusively on what you are doing, and I think this a general truth. If you guys hadn't been around, I wouldn't have rushed it. It's that badgering band of sniping quibblers that puts one off rolling up one's sleeve. They never build, or exercise the supportive foreman-like presence that makes hard yakka a pleasure. NS100 is another example. I could always count on him looking over my shoulder, in my heyday to see I didn't put my foot into it.Nishidani (talk) 12:06, 1 December 2009 (UTC)
Don't like to ruin someone's day but there's a DYK
that reads 'that Akira Iwasaki was the only film critic arrested by the ideological police in wartime Japan? '
That sounds like something Iwasaki's bio claimed. Ovcer 60,000 people were arrested and convicted for thought crimes from 1925-1945, and the idea that there was only one film critic among them (a large number were from cultural and intellectual groups) is odd. Indeed, for one, Kamei Fumio (亀井文夫) was arrested by the thought cops in wartime Japan, and he was, apart from his film-making, at one time a documentary film critic.It therefore seems a bit odd to say there is a substantial difference between a 'documentary film critic' and a 'film critic', a distinction required if the remark awarded today's DYK is to stand up.Nishidani (talk) 20:37, 4 December 2009 (UTC)
Just wanted to say
Nishidani, I have been remiss for not having thanked you for putting the Hugo Salus article up. It was fun researching and discovering the confusion between the two Adlers. I got to research Hans Adler and added quite a bit of material to his bio. Also I enjoyed our discussion with respect to assimilation and Jewish nationalism in European thought. I don't think it violates our respective topic bans as long as we are not discussing it with respect to the Israeli-Arab conflict. I hope to expand on it (a bit) later on. That is an interesting time for Jews, and others, in Eastern Europe, pre-WWII. Stellarkid (talk) 03:57, 5 December 2009 (UTC)
I'm still worried about that use of 'interesting' as in your first remark. It evokes the pseudo-Chinese augury: 'may you live in interesting times', not quite applicable to the Jews of pre-war Europe.Nishidani (talk) 19:56, 7 December 2009 (UTC)
Of course they were interesting times in that sense since many of these Jews were to become terribly affected by the war, unless like Salus they died prior to the '30's. The discussion of assimilation and Jewish nationalism began to develop a greater sense of urgency as some (especially the younger Jews) began to feel the waters of antisemitism rising. Why would you find it not applicable? ? Stellarkid (talk) 21:02, 7 December 2009 (UTC)
DYK for Franz Baermann Steiner
On December 7, 2009, Did you know? was updated with a fact from the article Franz Baermann Steiner, which you created or substantially expanded. You are welcome to check how many hits your article got while on the front page (here's how) and add it to DYKSTATS if it got over 5,000. If you know of another interesting fact from a recently created article, then please suggest it on the Did you know? talk page.
I didn't sir, and am, umm . . .'discombobulated' (an old word that has recently come back to my attention after many years of languishing in mnemnonic desuetude). It's just more proof I'm in bad company, with this Chicagoan jihadi ganjahead manipulating me behind my back, and prettifying up my lamentable record, to make me look like a pansy. What a horrifying way to start the week. Nishidani (talk) 09:13, 7 December 2009 (UTC)
Request for Enforcement
(I have italicized part of the text that follows, to indicate what I find important in these remarks, which a nuisance persists in plunking on my page, despite my protests. I had earlier eliminated remarks, whose faux-amicable tone I prefer not to engage with, since I find this whole campaign distasteful. The editor refuses to take that hint. I hope that with this, the intrusive editor will desist. I will note in fine that in his last reversion he actually elided a gloss I myself made, rather ironical, since he protests at my italicizing, without censorship, of his own unwelcome remarks. I should not be forced, by someone who is formally asking for my ban to be extended, to edit-war on my own page. Could I prevail on any casual reader of this page to undo any further interventions by Mr. Sword Shaft on this page. Thank you. Nishidani (talk) 16:09, 16 December 2009 (UTC))
Hello. Just a brief note to mention that I filed an arbitration enforcement that relates to you. Seehere. I regret that it came to this, especially given that we were at the end of the day both on the same side of the issue at the AfD. But as you know from my comments at the AfD, I was troubled by what I viewed as willful flouting of topic bans, and related editing activity. Thanks.--Epeefleche (talk) 16:34, 15 December 2009 (UTC)
While your extensive midnight lucubrations on the timeliness of taking this arduous step were underway, and you apparently were struggling rigorously with profound questions of conscience ('regret' 'troubled', I love the hypocrisy of these formulae!) and moral qualms, all now finally overcome, I gather, because you hold the best interests of wikipedia at heart, I wrote several articles on the Barasana, on Irving Goldman, Godfrey Lienhardt, Curt Nimuendajú, Franz Baermann Steiner, Hugo Salus, and on Sib and on Taboo. This is not a defense, though I'm sure that curious analysts will look at what you have done for the encyclopedia in the same short time period, other than look for victims. It is merely an illustration of the different ways people spend their time, and define their passions, on wikipedia. Having made your point, argue it as best you may. I couldn't give, sonny boy, a flying ptereodactyl's fuck one way or another, metaphorically speaking. Cheers Nishidani (talk) 16:53, 15 December 2009 (UTC)
Thanks for your suggestion that I find more constructive uses for my time. As a general matter, I'm sure you are correct. On the other hand, I tend to spend a much greater percentage of my Wikipedia time editing articles than do you -- judging by the fact that not even a third of your edits are to articles, while in my case the percentage approaches 80%. Not that we are comparing, of course.
And this is my first time ever at wp:ae. I could barely have spelled it, up until you a few days ago. I would have expected, were I to find myself there, that it would have been with regard to someone with whom I disagreed at an AfD. Not with regard to three editors with whom I agreed on the substance, but whose actions I found so troubling that I thought it best for the project if I were to trigger a review.
Which you pointed me and others to more than once, of course, as here and here. For you to point us to ae, and then criticize me for spending time following your suggestion, is somewhat curious. Best.--Epeefleche (talk) 17:16, 15 December 2009 (UTC)
I once had to take to task an adolescent kid who thought the best way to pass his time, after school, on weekends, was to mount a 'purity patrol', which consisted in acting like a moral ranger, who patrolled his neighbourhood and staked out parking areas and bushy gardens to catch young people out who might be necking, or hiding the Strassburg sausage. When luck brought him that way, he'd raise high hell, and scare the couples off. His pretext was that he was saving many girls from possible pregnancy, and many potential children from clandestine abortions. He was high-minded, serious, absolutely inflexible in his dedication to the good society. The last I heard of him, some 15 years ago, was that my sister recognized him tramping down a country road, and picked him up. He was unwashed, a drop-out, a bum, and her children complained of the smell. But she did the right thing, took him to her home, had him wash, supplied him with decent clothing, sat him down to a replete dinner, had him sleep the night and sent him on his way the next day with money in his pocket. God/Allah(Yahwah save us from people full of pernickety, speciously highminded community principles.Nishidani (talk) 17:30, 15 December 2009 (UTC)
Not for long, by the looks of it, as the wheels of bureaucracy grind blindly on. 'Vengeance is mine,' saith the Lord', seems to be the governing principle in here. The articles I returned to write were just quickies, arising from a response to Slrubenstein, and a comment by my friend JGG Gardiner. I discovered the area on anthropology was scandalously thin. It seems no one works there, and this struck my curiosity since a little knowledge of that discipline's vast studies of tribal behaviour will enable anyone to read with illuminating insight the tribal codes and primitive vendettas that operate here, with bizarre consequences. If people can't read, don't read (except the rule book), suspend all that growingup literate in the 20th century taught us about reading between the lines of certain posturing to twig the motivations behind much of what passes for schoolmarmish scruple, and being a stickler for the rules, and prefer, instead, to play silly games set up by the endemically recycled 'newbies' with a plot and template mentality, in the eternal subtextual politics of this place, and serious admins fall for it every time, then my original decision to not write on anything outside the I/P area, which the rules in any case forbid me, by legitimate consensus, from participating there, was correct. I hope I have time just to finish the series improving the article on Ted Strehlow, since I have Barry Hill's 800 page bio of him. I certainly won't miss wasting my time in here. Cheers.Nishidani (talk) 10:54, 16 December 2009 (UTC)
hmmm!! as usual, you've given me plenty of food for thought! hmmm, hope to read your comment a bit more deeply and reflect upon it a bit. I will say though that I agree that it's too bad that things sometimes get bogged down in nit-picking around here. hang in there though. good to have you here. --Steve, Sm8900 (talk) 14:26, 16 December 2009 (UTC)
Meditate on why this edit was thought necessary. One minute elision to remove an oversight in the complaint which, interpreted in context, tells you what's going on, why, and how, in this shabbily contrived kerfuffle. But enough. I've work to do.Nishidani (talk) 14:33, 16 December 2009 (UTC)
About your dictionary....
Aaargh, time and happenstance are cruel, and my large ungainly dictionary-with-microscope have rendered me unable to update a current FAC I am working on --> Cockatoo, and won't be able to look up the origianl malay meaning for a bit (like, 12 hours I think). If you arew around and have a minute I'd be insanely grateful for a doublecheck. Casliber (talk·contribs) 03:57, 16 December 2009 (UTC)
Stone the flamen crows, mate! D'ja mean that them bananabenders we call cockies, and that wipe out tropical forests up near Townsville and the like, are called 'cockies' because of some Malay origin? D'ja mean that all a' them 'true blue whitemen' on the land that Banjo P. wrote about are kanakas! Me knackers tremble at the thought. If you put that on wiki and some cockie reads it, he'll go for the big spit without even touching a shot of Bundaberg rum.
kakatúa, 'app. immed. through Dutch kaketoe; apparently influenced in form by cock. Several authorities say the name represents the call of the bird but see quot.1850.'
quote 1850 = Journal of the Indian Archipelago, IV., 183 'Cockatoo, Malay Kakatuwah-a vice, a gripe (sic.Nishidani), and also the name of the bird, no doubt referring to its powerful bill.' (Ref. Oxford English Dictionary, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 2nd ed. Vol.3, p.411 sub cockatoo'). Cheers Nishidani (talk) 10:16, 16 December 2009 (UTC)
Award
Added Sauce Award
I award this Added Sauce award to Nishidani for great efforts in hunting down sourcing my lexical queries (and articles are always better with sauces/sources). Cheers, Casliber (talk·contribs) 14:13, 16 December 2009 (UTC)
Hello, stumbled onto your page from a link in FfD, figured I'd let you know that your user page is teetering on the edge of WP:NOTSOAPBOX territory. Consider moving this into a subpage so that people clicking on your name do not automatically find themselves in your quote box. Generally, the user page itself is about the user, not his or her beliefs. Nuclear Lunch DetectedHungry?23:21, 16 December 2009 (UTC)
'Generally, the user page itself is about the user, not his or her beliefs.'
Interesting. My user page hosts four or five opinions, which apparently you dislike being exposed to, perspectives entertained by distinguished writers, it has nothing necessarily about my own 'beliefs', a word I dislike, being areligious, and a Popperanian secularist. I have no 'quote box', unlike most young wikipedians, and administrators, who have beautiful Doric columns of boxes on their user page full of material that details, for the vegetative eye, their 'beliefs' or 'stances' with regard to the world. You have an immense task, young man, ahead of you if you regard this as a problem, and I look forward to following you over several thousand pages where this warning might be more appropriate. Good luck!Nishidani (talk) 10:07, 17 December 2009 (UTC)
Still, by way of a gesture to show my reasonableness in matters of conflict of rule interpretation, I'll be quite happy, if even in these minutiae, I have technically fallen foul of another obscure piece of wiki behavioural legislation, to invite User:Tznkai to cordially double the sanction he has recently suggested might be appropriate in my regard. A man's gotta do what a man's gotta do, as John Holmes would have replied to Kate Millett. No hard feelings. To the contrary. My family history has black spots in it, and I admit I find a covert pleasure in wearing a rap, right or wrong, that puts me on the the criminal side of the regster. The Japanese have a wonderful idiom for this 判官贔屓!Nishidani (talk) 10:24, 17 December 2009 (UTC)
Request for Enforcement
(I have italicized part of the text that follows, to indicate what I find important in these remarks, which a nuisance persists in plunking on my page, despite my protests. I had earlier eliminated remarks, whose faux-amicable tone I prefer not to engage with, since I find this whole campaign distasteful. The editor refuses to take that hint. I hope that with this, the intrusive editor will desist. I will note in fine that in his last reversion he actually elided a gloss I myself made, rather ironical, since he protests at my italicizing, without censorship, of his own unwelcome remarks. I should not be forced, by someone who is formally asking for my ban to be extended, to edit-war on my own page. Could I prevail on any casual reader of this page to undo any further interventions by Mr. Sword Shaft on this page. Thank you. Nishidani (talk) 16:09, 16 December 2009 (UTC))
Hello. Just a brief note to mention that I filed an arbitration enforcement that relates to you. Seehere. I regret that it came to this, especially given that we were at the end of the day both on the same side of the issue at the AfD. But as you know from my comments at the AfD, I was troubled by what I viewed as willful flouting of topic bans, and related editing activity. Thanks.--Epeefleche (talk) 16:34, 15 December 2009 (UTC)
While your extensive midnight lucubrations on the timeliness of taking this arduous step were underway, and you apparently were struggling rigorously with profound questions of conscience ('regret' 'troubled', I love the hypocrisy of these formulae!) and moral qualms, all now finally overcome, I gather, because you hold the best interests of wikipedia at heart, I wrote several articles on the Barasana, on Irving Goldman, Godfrey Lienhardt, Curt Nimuendajú, Franz Baermann Steiner, Hugo Salus, and on Sib and on Taboo. This is not a defense, though I'm sure that curious analysts will look at what you have done for the encyclopedia in the same short time period, other than look for victims. It is merely an illustration of the different ways people spend their time, and define their passions, on wikipedia. Having made your point, argue it as best you may. I couldn't give, sonny boy, a flying ptereodactyl's fuck one way or another, metaphorically speaking. Cheers Nishidani (talk) 16:53, 15 December 2009 (UTC)
Thanks for your suggestion that I find more constructive uses for my time. As a general matter, I'm sure you are correct. On the other hand, I tend to spend a much greater percentage of my Wikipedia time editing articles than do you -- judging by the fact that not even a third of your edits are to articles, while in my case the percentage approaches 80%. Not that we are comparing, of course.
And this is my first time ever at wp:ae. I could barely have spelled it, up until you a few days ago. I would have expected, were I to find myself there, that it would have been with regard to someone with whom I disagreed at an AfD. Not with regard to three editors with whom I agreed on the substance, but whose actions I found so troubling that I thought it best for the project if I were to trigger a review.
Which you pointed me and others to more than once, of course, as here and here. For you to point us to ae, and then criticize me for spending time following your suggestion, is somewhat curious. Best.--Epeefleche (talk) 17:16, 15 December 2009 (UTC)
I once had to take to task an adolescent kid who thought the best way to pass his time, after school, on weekends, was to mount a 'purity patrol', which consisted in acting like a moral ranger, who patrolled his neighbourhood and staked out parking areas and bushy gardens to catch young people out who might be necking, or hiding the Strassburg sausage. When luck brought him that way, he'd raise high hell, and scare the couples off. His pretext was that he was saving many girls from possible pregnancy, and many potential children from clandestine abortions. He was high-minded, serious, absolutely inflexible in his dedication to the good society. The last I heard of him, some 15 years ago, was that my sister recognized him tramping down a country road, and picked him up. He was unwashed, a drop-out, a bum, and her children complained of the smell. But she did the right thing, took him to her home, had him wash, supplied him with decent clothing, sat him down to a replete dinner, had him sleep the night and sent him on his way the next day with money in his pocket. God/Allah(Yahwah save us from people full of pernickety, speciously highminded community principles.Nishidani (talk) 17:30, 15 December 2009 (UTC)
Minor adjustments to wiki essay: Notice
I recently obtained Saul B. Cohen and Nurit Kliot's detailed essay, ‘Place-Names in Israel's Ideological Struggle over the Administered Territories,’ Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Vol. 82, No. 4 (Dec., 1992), pp. 653-680, which has far more detail than I managed to use in my essay. While studying it closely, I reviewed that essay as posted above on this page, in order to update my offline, more complete version. With the version here, of course, it happens to touch on the I/P area, and I cannot alter it: it will remain fossilized, given the I/P ban. I hope no harm is seen, or provocation inferred, or intent to wriggle around the ban suspected, in my using the occasion of this private review against a new source, to (a) add to the bibliography, and (b) provide links that I overlooked were available to the original essay. A lot of silliness can be raised by nitpicking. Despite strong temptations to finish the essay, I have refrained from modifying it, in compliance with my understanding of the ban. But links and the odd bibliographical note will not, I hope, be taken as an opportunity for malicious prosecution.Nishidani (talk) 11:40, 29 December 2009 (UTC)
More linguistic eruditeness required.....
Heh, funny how one meanders around this place - I did tinker with coffee some time ago and now it appears a flash mob by the name of the FA-Team has descended like a flock of proverbials onto the caffeinated article (just as I am trying to reduce my caffeine intake :))...anyways, there is a brief etymology section, and thought who knows? You might have some interesting eruditeness to add :) Casliber (talk·contribs) 14:01, 29 December 2009 (UTC)
From memory I think Australians would call that kind of flash mob something like the Sweet FA push ('push' as in Henry Lawson's famous 'The Bastard from the Bush'), 'Sweet' because also I take my several cups a day with sugar, but also 'Sweet Fanny Adams', which I believe is also an idiom current in the antipodean lexicon.
Two quick points. (1) Note 4 sources the text to Bennett Alan Weinberg & Bonnie K. Bealer's The world of caffeine: the science and culture of the world's most popular drug, but then fails, unaccountably, in the etymology section, to cite the same text pp.24-25, which has several paragraphs on, precisely, the etymology of the word, with several different hypotheses listed, most of them what are called technically 'folk etymologies'. So, the citations in notes 12-15 of the etymology section should have the Weinberg-Bealer reference, pp.24-25 added.
(2)The O.E.D. is referred to in the etymology section, without specifying which edition, long or short, is meant. The full reference would be O.E.D. 2nd edition, Clarendon Press, Oxford vol.3 p.438 col.1 sub. coffee.
(2b) the etymology paragraph relies on a synthesis of OED and Merriam-Webster, technically this makes it a WP:OR violation for nitpickers. For example, the OED gives Turkish kahveh, our text has Turkish 'kahve', small differences, as experienced women remind us, still count.
There's another, double, WP:OR violation is stating that 'the word "coffee" entered the English language in 1598 via the Dutch koffie,' (source OED). The OED doesn't say this. It says the word entered European languages around 1600 apparently from Turkish kahveh. Then the OED gives, as the first known reference to foreign forms of the word coffee in English, the 1598 translation of Linschoten's Travels (Dutch original 1595), where it appears as chaoua. The recognisable English form Coffa dates from 1603 onward. The OED again does not say it came into English via Dutch. It writes:-
'The European languages generally appear to have got the name from Turkish kahveh, about 1600, perh. through It(alian). caffè;. . .The English coffee, Dutch koffie, earlier German coffee, koffee, Russian kophe, kopheĭ, have o, apparently representing earlierau from ahw or ahv.
(3) The text has 'In the languages of Ethiopia, terms such as bunna (in Amharic and Afan Oromo) and būn (in Tigrinya) are used.'
This would require a citation, but the information is unnecessary. The Online OED has been accessed, and perhaps that has updated info. But in my second edition one reads:
'Some have conjectured that it is a foreign, perh. African, word disguised and have thought it connected with the name of Kaffa in the south Abyssinian highland, where the plant seems to be native. But of this there is no evidence, and the name qahwah is not given to the berry or plant, which is called bunn, the native name in Shoa being būn.'
The OED therefore differs from our text, which however cites it. If you look at Weinberg and Bealer's book p.22, they write bunn is the Ethiopian and early Arabic term for coffee beans,'(not bunna).
Suggested text rewrite therefore would be:
The first reference to "coffee" in the English language, in the form chaoua, dates to 1598. In English and other European languages, coffee derives from the OttomanTurkishkahveh, via the Italian caffè. The Turkish word in turn was borrowed from Arabic: قهوة, qahwah. Arablexicographers maintain that qahwah originally meant a kind of wine, and referred its etymology, in turn, to the verb qahiya, signifying "to have no appetite",[1], since this beverage was thought to dull one's hunger. Several alternative etymologies exist which hold that the Arab form may disguise a loanword from an Ethiopian or African source, suggesting Kaffa, the highland in southwestern Ethiopia, since the plant is indigenous to that area.[2][3] Best, Nishidani (talk) 16:13, 29 December 2009 (UTC)
I dunno. I wrote a reply, then wiped it out. I think technically even appealing that decision, by the sanctioned, would constitute an infraction of the perma-ban, aside from, more seriously, looking like whingeing. In any case, as was predictable since late this year, as the drift of obsessive scrutiny ran your way, the odds are you will join us in porridge, before we get out with a freebie to Mayfair! Cheers, Nabster. Nishidani (talk) 10:56, 30 December 2009 (UTC)
If that is, as I suspect, a literary allusion, I should insist in reply that my mien lacks the appropriate 'lean and hungry look', since I'm force-fed several times daily by a master cook, as a way of getting my nose out of a book. I've always had an intense admiration for Cassius, however, esp. after he chucked his Olympic medal into the Ohio river.Nishidani (talk) 16:53, 30 December 2009 (UTC)
You too?
I don't know what to say. I was only joking when I said I'd have to watch over the Steiner article when you two were gone.
I was looking through my first messages to Nableezy because I remember saying something to him about this back then and I came across one where I agreed with your advice to him.[8] --JGGardiner (talk) 20:03, 2 January 2010 (UTC)
Do me a favour and revert me on Barasana. I was upset and injured the encyclopedia. At least one knows that the stuff we all worked on together has a good caretaker to see it won't be damaged. Well mate, as Donald . . um . . Duck said at the Pentagon, 'excrement occurs' or words to that effect. I think Nab took the advice, which is basically Nixon to Krushchev in that kitchen back in 1959 or thereabouts, but to continue the culinary metaphor, too many cooks spoil the brothel for some of us. My very best wishes for the New Year, 'stagulation', and hockeywise. Which reminds me, I'd better ask you to pass one my regards to Canuck champions we all admire. Best. Nishidani (talk) 20:17, 2 January 2010 (UTC)
I'm sorry to see you're off again.
I have tried amending the Arb amendment in the hope that it would get through, but it seems that they want individuals to tug their own forelocks. Ah well.--Peter cohen (talk) 21:58, 2 January 2010 (UTC)
Book of interest
Hi Nishidani,
Each time I "pop out", you decide to leave wikipédia. I hope there is no "cause to effect" link. ;-) Here is a book that may interest you : fr:Gilber Achcar, Les Arabes et la Shoah. La guerre israélo-arabe des récits, Sinbad, Actes Sud, 2009. The book will soon be published in English. You can read a description here. It is a complex study for a very difficult topic (and I am mitigated (= 'I have mixed feelings'? Nishidani) by some analysis) but it is definitely worth reading. There are also 3 large sections dedicated to Amin al-Husseini. Amitiés, Ceedjee (talk) 09:45, 3 January 2010 (UTC)
C'est n'est pas moi qui commande ici. Le système rejette tous les éléments peu conformes à ses besoins logistiques. Il faut être en même temps combatif et conformiste, connaisseur et "connard" (inculte), vraie pelote d'épingles et flagorneur: bref 'psychofainéant hyperactif' dans le pétrin judiciaire attendant ceux qui voudraient mettre à jour des articles fossilisés en idéologie !
Je te remercie pour le renseignement bibliographique, toujours bienvenu. Je me suis dépêché d'ajouter ce tome en tête de liste des choses à acheter pour la nouvelle année. Un abbraccio fraterno, cher ami.Nishidani (talk) 11:27, 3 January 2010 (UTC)
Exactly, I have mixed feelings. The French word is mitigé ([9]). But I still need some time and some work to digest the book.
"psychofainéant hyperactif"... :-) On ne peut pas dire mieux. Personnellement, j'ai cessé de contribuer sérieusement il y a 6 mois. Je n'ai pas ma place ni sur wp:fr, ni sur wp:en.
L'important est de continuer à suivre la recherche actuelle sur ce champ pour maintenir la propre compétence dans ce domaine de l'histoire. Tu as beaucoup de connaissances bien précieuses e précises, et je suis persuadé que les éditeurs sérieux (Slim Virgin, ChrisO, George et caetera )auront besoin de ton collaboration ici de temps en temps.(thank goodness my risky coinage of the word 'psychofainéant' didn't annoy your linguistic sensitivities!) Nishidani (talk) 13:10, 3 January 2010 (UTC)
:::Very honourable, insightful, and eloquent of you as always Nishidani. Tiamuttalk 22:41, 4 January 2010 (UTC)
while editing, and forgot to archive it here. The point was tone. Already I have an unfortunate record, with these endless absurdities of triumphant gaming hitting good editors, of storming off in a theatrical protest like a career-end prima donna, with, not by by will or design, a lot of people then chipping in to plead with me to come back. It's beginning to look like a hack trick by a narcissicist to ring in applause and compliments. This can happen once or twice, the second time causes embarrassment. But when it becomes chronic, suspicions are justified that it's just a sham act to pull in sighs and plaudits from the nostalgia tribe. That's why I said - no comments. And that's why I removed your remark. Un abbraccio.
Afterthought. To apologize for the contretemps. There's a new book out by Adina Hoffman on Taha Muhammad Ali, who as you know, was born a few miles from you. See Adina Hoffman, My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness: A Poet's Life in the Palestinian Century, Yale University Press 2009. It should be the sort of book a public library in your area would access, or allow you to peruse, if you have the service, by inter-library loan. A brief run-down of the contents, with a photo of him at his Nazareth souvenir shop, can be found in The New York Review of Books, December 3, 2009 pp.56-58
Let's hope the usually spyteam for the prosecution is not trawling these archives, to find evidence even in this innocuous note for a flagrant 'disruption' of wikipedia's permaban! The man is, after all, before all, a poet, just as I am, and this is merely a matter of literature. Best for the New Year to you and your family, dearest Tiamut.Nishidani (talk) 14:39, 5 January 2010 (UTC)
Sandstein/Nableezy
Hi Nishidani. I would like to work on two things regarding what has happened to Nableezy. On is to file an appeal of Sandstein's decision which I will begin in my user space shortly. The second, concurrent to this, would be opening a User RfC on Sandstein regading his abuse of his admin powers. I have asked Gatoclass for some advice on how to proceed. I hope he responds soon. When I have drafts up in my user space, I will be contacting you for feedback. I hope you will co-sign both the appeal and the User RfC. Also, check out Nableezy's talk page to see what has happened most recently and why these steps are absolutely necessary. Thanks. Tiamuttalk19:44, 4 January 2010 (UTC)
No. I'm sorry. I can't oblige. I think this is all my fault, for my reckless lapse on Jonathan Cook. If you look back, I predicted that Nableezy would be banned three days before Sandstein's action, precisely when this whole shabby episode was winding down, New Year was beginning, and focus on this trivial pursuit had died off. He said: 'You think too much', dismissing my intuition. I don't think too much, I just felt the antennae tingling in the lull from several things here and there, and drew my conclusion. Lo and behold, out of the blue, he was beheaded. That is the way things can occur here, because commonsense is lost sight of when the mania for rule-wa(i)ving takes a grip.
I think Nableezy, who is an extremely precise man, had a point in challenging Gilabrand's technical right to remove those remarks. Had Gilabrand done the sane thing, she should have simply reported me to AE, drawn administrative attention to my infraction, and got me sanctioned, as I deserved to be for this, and my remarks removed. Honour counts for some people, as does rigour, and playing by the rules. Nableezy has these qualities, but perhaps a vagrant esteem for me, as shown by the effort he's made to get me working here on several extra I/P articles, made him act precipitously and, by a few hours, slightly infringe his own original ban, which itself was absurdly punitive. The cascade effect ensued as the usual operation of scalping got underway. Until sanity is restored, by which I mean contextual understanding of events, knowledge of editors, and a certain discretional leeway in the exercise of punitive measures, esp. when they are pushed by an evident attempt to use wiki's rules for cooperative editing as instruments by adversarial outing of editors you dislike, there is no point in being endlessly dragged into this absurd peggifogging flapdoodle about what constritutes an 'existential threat' to wikipedia. Disruption is nowhere to be seen in the 1 year I have followed Nableezy's work, as many editors from all sides would concur. I objectively was 'disruptive', I alone infringed a ban, and I think the least I can do is shut up. Please don't add more comments on this.Nishidani (talk) 22:38, 4 January 2010 (UTC)
FYI, Nableezy has decided to file an appeal at AE. I'm not sure you are allowed to comment, given Sandstein's interpretation of the extent of your topic bans, but I thought I'd let you know anyway. Tiamuttalk21:36, 5 January 2010 (UTC)
Etymologies redux
Oh dear, and here I was (after trying not to go near the issue of exclusivity of Ethiopianness of the Oromo with an ethnographic bargepole) coming with some fun etymologies...anything to add to brumby, and Killer whaleOrcaKiller WhaleOrca...thought these might be convoluted enough to pique your interest....Casliber (talk·contribs) 23:16, 4 January 2010 (UTC)
Anyone ever try telling you that you're simply too well read?
That's why I think it's a shame that you're mostly retired. There's so much stuff you could contribute here towards the highbrow end of things to help make this a better encyclo.pedia. I do some but I bow down to your superior knowledge--Peter cohen (talk) 13:38, 8 January 2010 (UTC)
Nableezy is no fun
I almost mentioned Genesis earlier. Because God's penis would be sort of like Adam's navel. He'd have no need for it. Not that he's told us about anyway. And the foreskin even less so. I thought that was one of your better puns though. I was trying to think of a Deluge one to go with it but I'm just too tired. Maybe something will come in my sleep. Cheers. --JGGardiner (talk) 11:19, 4 February 2010 (UTC)
Nableezy no fun? Well 'fun' can mean 'irateness' (憤), or even 'shit'(糞) in Japanese, so i guess you mean he doesn't get indignant, and is a 'no shit' sort of guy. It's hard to keep your cool when you come from a world and culture that is so insistently beat up on, by imperialism, crass public stereotypes and sheer malice, as I myself know, being of Irish extraction, in here (present company excepted, except for my own blathering persona). For some of us, the historical West had an internal and (mainly) external class of people subject to odium theologicum: respectively the Jews, and, after the spread of Islam, Muslims. Where they coexisted, they were bundled together by Isabella, and expelled, the former then regrouping under the protection of the latter, in a shared Semitic culture. The Holocaust was the final act of riddance, and, once consummated, collective repentence meant that anti-semitism, understood as hostility to Jews, was wiped from the agenda. Anti-semitism, meaning contempt and hatred for Arabs, was retained. In fact, the reflex odium reserved mainly for Jews down to the Holocaust, was transferred to Arabs. The narrative of the Protocol conspiracy was reformulated as the tale of a sanguinary, intolerant, terroristic Islam. The internal scapegoat became the external enemy, the hated Jew the despised Arab. I've watched the process from up close in Italy, where the minority anti-semites of a few decades ago have won power after they whitewashed their past, embraced Israel, made overtures to the local community, and, pari passu simply changed their instinctive hatred of Jews into a profound and unremittingly violent diffidence, if not hysteria, about Arab immigrants. Psychological structures do not change - only the content.
Differences of course obtain. Arabs always had kingdoms and territory to be themselves, unlike Jews, until the advent of Zionism. But Jewish 'normalization' under Zionism meant the transfer of the resentments against Christocentric oppression in Europe's former terrorized internal proletariat of Jewry into a triumphant self-vindication against, not the West, but the other 'other' of Western antisemitism, the Arab, who by turns is now ghettoized into a new, but miniaturized Pale, as you see all over the Arbcom subject so recently and lamentably adjudicated about. It is not easy to keep one's funny bone rubbed when this obvious logic is rendered all but invisible by the climate of a half-penitant 'modernity'.
I must say, I admire the equanimity of his temper in the face of arrant bullshit. His presence helped me keep my own volatile instincts under tight rein when I edited here.
However, theologically, God was only 'endowed' four millenia later than Genesis, with the incarnation. Since, in the Christian story, the 'word became flesh', and God fully man, and since Jesus was born and died a believing Jew (despite the hysterically ideological refusal to accept him as such, against the scholarly record, on the famous figures of Judaism list), he was circumcised (Luke 2:21), (a nun once devoted much ink in Medieval times to theorizing about the fate of the snipped flesh) which is proof he was normally endowed. The crux arises from the Augustinian position. If erections are a consequence of the 'fall', the delightful side-effect of 'original sin', what is the case with Christ, who was born after the Fall, but, like his mother, at least in Catholic terms, was immaculate of that primary sin? Technically, were Augustine correct, he wouldn't have 'suffered' from priapic disturbances, since he was free of the sin that occasioned (meaning 'fall' in Latin) the condition. But Augustine's view is non canonical: and since Christ was 'fully man', and suffered hunger, temptation, and the pangs of the crucifixion qua man, there would be an anomaly were theology to deny him the normal properties of full manhood. That the legendary Christ was fully aware of the beauties of carnal love is conserved in the stories surrounding the Magdalen.
Perhaps, as you say, to flummox metaphysics with the requisite pun, taking your lead, 'Maybe something will come in my sleep!' Nishidani (talk) 12:36, 4 February 2010 (UTC)
I actually wasn't thinking about Jesus. I meant the penis of the anthropomorphic Yahweh. His penis would seem less useful to me. I have heard questions about how he impregnated Mary. Although he was apparently separated from his wife at the time.
As for Nableezy, I do agree with you. For all of its problems, one of the best things about growing up in Vancouver is nobody felt like there was something strange about being a minority or that there was even some sort of ethnic majority which deserved whatever powers. I don't remember one of my childhood friends from school ever suggesting that they believed in Santa Claus or even God for that matter. There would have been too many children of different backgrounds to poke holes in the idea and make fun of the poor kid. So I can sympathize with the guy but I come from a different world and a different culture. I've not been beaten up on or beaten down by imperialism or crass stereotypes and so on. At the same time though I can't really talk to Nableezy about his background. I've tried a few times and as soon as I mention the word Wisconsin he gets very defensive. --JGGardiner (talk) 01:52, 5 February 2010 (UTC)
I guess that might sounded like I ignored the serious bit in what you wrote. I didn't. My feelings about the whole things is just that I don't like nationalism and I like ethnic nationalism even less. I think that all nationalists play the same game -- the difference is just who's winning and losing. I feel bad for all of the people who suffer in those struggles but that just makes me want to see them stop, not to win. I'm not talking about Israelis or Palestinians or anyone in particular. I was half-joking in my original post to Nableezy the other day but I do feel that the world is a horrible place. The whole Fall of Man story we talked about only exists to explain away how a loving God could let us live in a such a terrible place. But Earth is also a wonderful place full of things I love like poutine, argon and beautiful women. I think that one needs to learn to reconcile that the place can be both at the same time. I was kind of hoping that Nab would feel the same way about Wikipedia and that's why I brought this all up. --JGGardiner (talk) 01:59, 5 February 2010 (UTC)
Case in point. Fuck you JGG, I aint a Wisconsinite. What can I do to make you understand what I am talking aboot? nableezy - 01:56, 5 February 2010 (UTC)
This post edit conflicted with my second one above. But after reading it I guess I should say that there are also times I can see how maybe retirement isn't the end of the world. --JGGardiner (talk) 02:03, 5 February 2010 (UTC)
That's an easy one. 'Deforestation', as opposed to 'Deafterstation' came from German slang used among immigrants building railway infrastructure through the wooded areas of the Eastern Coast of USA in the 18th century. . . .Nishidani (talk) 23:42, 18 February 2010 (UTC)
Shakespeare
Hi, I don't know what sin you think you may have committed with regard to my name on EdJohnson's page. I am of course a true-believer in Stratfordian cause, being in the pay of the Warwickshire tourist industry. However I will apologise in advance that I will not be able to contribute much in the next week at least. I will be away in rural France for the next few weeks. My only access to the internet will be the archaic computer in the local Marie, which many "authorship researchers" believe de Vere wrote the ur-Hamlet. Paul B (talk) 18:39, 10 March 2010 (UTC)
Well, I'd thank you if you could oblige me by indicating the link to the AN/I page or wherever you shifted the discussion about my and Tom's outrageous behaviour. With all the playing around with pages, comments elided, comments shifted, you can hardly expect me to take this seriously.Nishidani (talk) 11:40, 15 March 2010 (UTC)
Shakespeare impostors
I only got involved in this business because I noticed your name in a heading at ANI. I hope that you aren't risking a second topic ban for waving that sword of truth around too close to some rather long noses.
Do you have any idea on who is operating the various sockpuppets that have appeared at the dispute pages. Being new to the area, I haven't got a hang of the mannerisms of the various antagonists. However various accounts do look suspect. Sources offline suggest some might be meatpuppets activated through a mailing list, but others do look like single purpose socks to me.
BTW, I'm disappointed that it is no longer suggested in the RFCU summary that Tom is "teeming" with you? I had imagined Nishidaniesque ectoplasm.--Peter cohen (talk) 15:03, 16 March 2010 (UTC)
Oh well, Peter, if the hatchet falls, I'll just spend more time reading, which may be a good thing, given the gaps in my education. I did get a bit intemperate. After my brother got me to play blindman's bluff at 6 years of age, and then stood behind a wall making noises, to get me to rush his way, and smack my head into unconsciousness, I have never had much time for talking to stone walls, and do, when I encounter them, tend to rhetorical exuberance perhaps out of a less than Freudian, more Adlerian, reaction to the trauma!
No, I suspect here, as in the past on other articles, socks and meatpuppets (all of a sudden editors with no history of interest in wikipedia pop up to balance out the voting of stalwarts who are committed to the project), but, as before never check them because (a) I'm incompetent about doing so, and wouldn't know where to begin (b) I try to stay focused on the material issue for the time I have at my disposal, on background reading, and then editing. It just happened that, on my constrained retirement, I thought I'd do what I'd long wished to do, read the whole of Shakespeare for once in chronological sequence, with the commentaries. Unfortunately I noticed wiki had a problem with the de Vereans, and . . well, . . .here's to another block motion!
I'm sure I've told you before that you are far too well read. It actually looks like I've been misreading "teaming" as "teeming" all along and that the typo never existed in the RFC/U summary. A little thief has relocated my varifocals and that means thinks aren't as nicely in focus as I would like.
BTW, do you feel able to respond to the query that SupremeDeliciousness has placed on my talk page this morning? I don't think it would be covered by your topic ban. I've promised Brian Boulton a peer review and I've been distracted initially by the latest outbreak of rotten appletrees at the JIDF article and a big SPI that I constructed and then by glancing at AN/I when down the boozer on Sunday and seeing your name. This means I won't be abel to deal with SD's request this week.--Peter cohen (talk) 16:19, 16 March 2010 (UTC)
Roper & Burgstahler Refs.
I am most disppointed that you abritrarily deleted the additions of Roper's Proving Shakespeare (2008) and Burgstahler's "Encrypted Testimony..." paper from the list of references/readings in the Oxfordian section. I does not seem that you even bothered to click on the links then provided in order to assess their quality at first hand. Roper's shows that Ben Jonson's inscription on the Startford Monument preserves an encrypted message in a Cardano Grille attesting that Oxford wrote "Shakespeare". This cipher conforms to all the Friedmans' criteria for a valid encryption and the solution is UNIQUE. Burgstahler's paper, which explains Roper's and others' recent work on proving Oxford = Shakespeare, has been presented at many scholarly meetings and is hosted on the University of Kansas webpage. I find it curious that the only reference to Roper on the entry contained an invalid URL, which I corrected at ref. 186. The fact that Roper's book has been ignored by the Stratfordians is not a testimony to the merits and quality of Roper's logic and evidence; it is testimony to the intractability of zealots. Phaedrus7 (talk) 22:48, 17 March 2010 (UTC)
I'm no zealot, in fact in wouldn't matter an iota to me if proof came out that WS was not the author of the works ascribed to him. I've just never read anything that passes master as rational evidence. It's a principle of methodology that is at stake: you cannot supplement the lacunae of the historical record with 'conjectures' that cannot be proved, and then use those conjectures to dispose of the historical testimonies as they exist, and in Shakespeare's case they are substantial.
I clicked on the papers, and could find nothing but headings, no content, on Roper's page. I opened the Burgstahler's article, read he was a retired chemist, and gave a talk in Beijing on his solution. Now the article has to deal with, theoretically, a substantial literature over 160 years, many books and articles, many by notable people who have devoted much time, and part of their professional lives, to raising these theories. Therefore you cannot just plunk in material that is recent, by newcomers, with no peer review in secondary sources (even those 'secondary sources' which qualify as RS though the RS in question are non-peer reviewed marginalia from the fringe publishing world, for the purposes of describing these ideas). Technically, at least in terms of wikipedia's rules, those articles can't get in until they pass all sorts of consensual editorial tests and are shown to0 be adequate to the protocols inn RS. That is why I reverted.
If you wish to press the point, raise the issue of their relevance on the talk page, and vet opinions there firstly. Out of scruple I will reread Burgstahler's 'proof'. I've seen a huge number of 'proofs' over five decades of reading, and most of them were forgotten within a few months or years.Nishidani (talk) 08:20, 18 March 2010 (UTC)
So, de Vere authored Shakespeare. Not one scrap of overt documentary evidence exists correlating the two. On this all agree. It was, if true, a tremendous secret, kept under tight wraps certainly for the period 1588-1623. Cecil tormented the greatest mind of his age by refusing him recognition as the real author. So thoroughly successful was this censorship that even after de Vere's death, and Cecil's demise, virtually everyone knew the truth.
The eminent chemist, Burgstahler, and his retired engineering friends and mathmaticians have worked fiendishly to conjure up the hidden alchemy of pseudonymy, and in doing so, have only undone their results in the very act of publishing them. For by their own testimony,
Henry Peacham knew the truth (1612)
Thomas Thorpe the publisher knew the truth (1609)
Edmund Spenser knew the truth (1596)
John Weaver knew the truth (1599)
John Freeman knew the truth (1614)
William Barksted knew the truth (1607)
Ben Jonson knew the truth (1623)
Hugh Holland knew the truth (1623)
Thomas Walkley knew the truth (1622)
Leonard Digges knew the truth (1623)
John Marsten knew the truth (1623)
John Milton knew the truth (1632)
John Warren knew the truth (1640)
William Basse knew the truth (1622)
All these folks were in on the great secret, because their remarks on Shakespeare can be deciphered to read Shakespeare = de Vere. Even as Cecil's hand ceased to exercise its totalitarian control, none of these, or hundreds of others, given the widespread detection of these coded messages, ever dared to simply jot down into a private diary, or pen a note to a private copy of one of the quartos, or the Folio, or leave a trace concerning the secret in marginalia for a later, less terrified world, to discover, and redeem de Vere's stolen honour! Mr Burgstahler and co., as is the custom, after their strenuous labours, failed to sit back and ask themselves the obvious question. If it was such a secret, why were so many people from all walks of life in the know, and, why, after the comptrollers of the cover-up had passed on, did no one write down what almost everyone in the publishing and poetical trade took for granted, if these cryptograms are to be believed.
In short, keeping in mind a passage in Plato's Phaedrus, τί δεῖ μακροῦ λόγου. (Phaedrus, 241 e) to précis the above in three words, Burgstahler and Roper's stuff is (a)crap (b) paranoid gudgeonry. Nishidani (talk) 12:55, 18 March 2010 (UTC)
And oh, ps. Since MENTE. VIDEBOR, which the essay mentions as an anagram for Nomen tibi De Vere could equally be 'cracked' (as are all such theories) to read: Bedim E.Ver Not, (in short, 'do not dim the name of Edmund de Vere') I'm sure this little gem of a secret I just thought up will cause forests to be axed to fuel the de Verean lobby's pamphleteering with yet one more inflammable 'proof'.Nishidani (talk) 13:36, 18 March 2010 (UTC)
Thank you for your replies, which I am not prepared to answer in full right now, and, in any event, I realize your breadth of knowledge on this subject is greater than mine; but I have read Roper's book Proving Shakespeare and believe that skeptics ignore its contents at their peril. The Cardano grille cipher in Ben Jonson's text on the Stratford Monument, discovered by David Roper and described in his Proving Shakespeare (2008), meets all the criteria set forth by the Friedmans for what constitutes a valid cipher and, as I mentioned before, the solution is unique: there are no other chance solutions as can be the case with, e.g., equal letter spacing "bible code" solutions; yet so far no cryptologist has deigned to evaluate this discovery, the evident feeling being that there can be no such valid cipher and therefore there is no need to evaluate any--at least that was the sense conveyed by mathematician and arch-skeptic Norman Levitt, and others, in emails to me in early 2009. Since both Stratfordians and Oxfordians are able to "explain away" most, if not all, of the biographical evidence dispositive to their case, it seems to me that the unique solution to Ben Jonson's cipher on the Stratford Monument is due respect, regardless how firmly held prior positions and opinions may be. Phaedrus7 (talk) 17:05, 18 March 2010 (UTC)
I'd underwrite every word in yourt reply, except 'at their peril'. You know, most work on Shakespeare is on aesthetics, philology, font types, rhetorical conventions (extremely complex) cultural history and is extremely arcane. People who learn to master this are indifferent to the authorship theories because, in 160 years, no first rate mind, wedded to an alternative theory, and mastering the intricate disciplines of proper Elizabethan scholarship, has ever appeared in print with a kind of methodologically sound argument. Physics professors do not treat alternative hypotheses seriously unless they are advanced by people with the fundamental credentials of qualification in their area. Their indifference is not 'censorship' or 'contempt': it is simply that a glance usually tells one the theorist making noise hasn't got beyond the elemental algebra of textual and historical analysis, and so dealing with it is just a waste of time.
To most dedicated readers, who Shakespeare is, is not interesting, and certainly poets and creative people have a long history of asserting, from their own experience of the mystery of composition, that far too many curious things an outsider will never have the dimmest knowledge of, go on in the mind when it strikes a creative pitch. (An early, classic work on this is John Livingston Lowes, The Road to Xanadu (1927). For example, the normal perception of time, in the heat of intense concentration, is lost: hours can pass, and yet, to the writer, the writing done feels like it was done in minutes. For example, labyrinthine congeries of associations well up with damascened brilliance and baroque connections, only to subside in the most recondite and invisible patterns, often of assonance and tonal wordplay, that all but an experienced critic will miss, etc.etc.) One primary criticism of the cryptogramic and identitarian obsession with 'who' Shakespeare was, is that these theories are wholly indifferent to what is the primary value of 'Shakespeare', the texts, not as an echo chamber of society and history, but as props to sheering our eyes deeper into that inner monologue of what we, in our private depths, are. This is true of all great writers, of course. To reduce a work of art to a cipher is to affirm that the imagination is rulebound to work 'correspondences'. The imagination, sir, is subversive, not subservient.
It is irresponsible, worse, sheer mental laziness, for those technically competent in these areas not to analyse and evaluate a proposal that would exercise their ingenuity, and ground their generic scepticism in specific arguments. Mind you, the theory's a year old, and, as any published author knows, it often takes two to three years for a significant peer review to get out. I've had a life-long curiosity about and at times attraction to marginal theories, they in no way disconcert me. To the contrary. What disconcerts me is a matter of sociological, and to a lesser extent, psychological observation, the imperviousness of minds, once they are involved deeply in theories, marginal or not, to empirical or logical evidence that would undermine one's persuaded faith. What is true of fringe theories, which do attract a certain sensibility, is also true of 99% of our 'normal' everyday world of thought: we're wired to prioritize as a matter of biological efficiency a routine cast of behaviour. That is why I can't read newspapers without a sense of nausea. We take everything on trust, it is our nature to do so. Fringe theories, and their exponents, are useful objects of study because they bring into relief obsessional mechanisms that have been so long domesticated by culture that they are no longer felt as exceptional, and remain latent, or dissembled under conventions of public commonsense, in the quotidian mind of 'l'homme moyen sensuel'.
Your further comments are most welcome and applicable to my interests in a few select "fringe" theories, some of which are very valid subjects for investigation/research whose validity is rejected almost out-of-hand by the "experts" in the fields being challenged. The prime example for me currently is the rejection by many scientists of the Younger Dryas Boundary Event 12,900 B.P. as the result of a cometary impact over the Laurentian ice sheet then covering the Great Lakes. See Sept. 2009 Sky & Telescope cover story and any number of recent cable TV documentaries on History Channel, Discovery, NGEO, etc. One very accomplished impact researcher declared that an impact of that magnitude would have such a low probability of happening that it cannot have happened so recently! This flies in the face of elementary statistics and the nature of the probability of independent events. In cases such as this the rejection from some scientists is so visceral that erroneous and nonsensical reasons are thrown out almost thoughtlessly. My first exposure to such a phenomenon was the Velikovsky Affair over the controversial publication in 1950 by Immanuel Velikovsky of Worlds in Collision which, to the satisfaction of many, was resolved when the Greenland ice cores in the 1980s showed conclusively that Velikovsky's claimed extra-terrestrial cataclysms did not happen; but the zealots did not accept this conclusion. Many of the early criticisms of Velikovsky were the sort which, as Carl Sagan was later fond of saying "did not survive close scrutiny", such as the notion that if Earth stopped rotating for Joshua when the Sun stood still that everything not tied down would "fly off the Earth"; but Earth does not rotate fast enough for this to happen. Later I was chagrined upon learning that the reaction of Velikovsky's diehard supporters was precisely the same as the flat earthers in the 19th century at the Old Bedford Canal in England whose six mile straight run was ideal for Alfred Russel Wallace to demonstrate the Earth's curvature to settle a flat earther challenge; but the flat earthers would not look through Wallace's surveyor's transit and did not accept the referee's verdict in Wallace's favor. The "peril" I referred to was the peril of Stratfordians being shown wrong. My background in Shakespeare is meager. I memorized a few sonnets in a high school English Lit. class. In my senior year of college I took the sophomore elective "Masterpieces of Literature" under a British grad student who was emphatic in the belief that it was invalid to subject Shakespeare's characters to Freudian analysis; "Antony and Cleopatra" was in the syllabus and I earned an "A" for my term paper inspired by Eric Auerbach's Mimesis, "Figure and Fulfillment in Dante's Paolo and Francesca". My interest in the Authorship Question goes back to the time I was involved with a high school English teacher who was A.B.D. in Chaucer studies at Univ. Georgia and The Atlantic published an article on it. I was surprised at how adamant she became over this question. It simply was not fit for polite discussion. And she would not discuss it. A few years later, Harper's published a forum discussing the Question with pro and con essays and the only thing that sticks in my mind from the letters printed later was the observation that great writers never retire as "Shakespeare" did when he returned to Stratford. Great writers write, regardless their immediate circumstances of fortune and health, with examples of great writers who wrote until the day they died despite all manner of hardship. The letter writer's point was that the man who retired to Stratford cannot have been the same person who wrote Shakespeare's literature. By contrast, it is fairly certain that de Vere wrote until the day he died. One point that sticks out in my mind from reading Roper's book a year ago is that the first version of "Titus Andronicus" can be shown to have been written in 1574 before de Vere went to Italy/France for a year, which is also too early for it to have been written by that Stratford fellow. I shall reply to your closing question to the best of my ability as soon as I can after looking into the matter. Phaedrus7 (talk) 17:30, 19 March 2010 (UTC)
Just a quick note after reading one of my emails last year to Norman Levitt to refresh my mind on what "hot buttons" I used from Roper and I find "The copy of the First Folio at Univ. Glasgow was first owned by someone who knew the actors named therein and his annotations show this original owner knew Wm. S. to be a phantom." Just as an historical anecdote, this information begs for explication, it seems to me. Phaedrus7 (talk) 17:44, 19 March 2010 (UTC)
I presume this is the author's construction on the gloss 'Leass for making' attached to the actor William Shakespeare's name in the Glasgow Folio?Nishidani (talk) 18:08, 19 March 2010 (UTC)
My comments today will be in two parts: several points that can be provided quickly followed by quotes of passages from Proving Shakespeare to reply to your questions about Drummond and the annotations in the Glasgow First Folio, which will take longer to type out. While not all that important but a notable omission from my earlier depiction of my background is the fact that prior to college I did read three Shakespeare plays: The Tempest, Julius Caesar, and Macbeth. Since college I have also attended performances of several plays: The Merchant of Venice, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Romeo and Juliet, and Twelfth Night. I have also seen movies of several others plays including Henry V and Hamlet. In the course of finding the passages in Roger's book I intend to quote soon, I was reminded of two more quickie "facts" that argue in favor of Oxford: River Avon does not necessarily refer to the Stratford location because a second river Avon flows in Warwickshire, a locale significant in Oxford's life, and the association of Shakespeare with harbours in tribute has nothing to do with the Stratford fellow, but does allude to one of Oxford's official titles/duties in his career. Previously, I mentioned Titus Andronicus having been written in 1574 when the Stratford fellow was only eleven years old. For more on this matter, I invite you to read Roper's "Henry Peacham's Chronogram: The Dating of Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus" <http://dlroper.shakespearians.com/henry_peacham.htm>. Finally here, read Roper's comments to me concerning Jonson's conversations with Drummond, which he has granted me permission to post:
"Your correspondent questions my opinion of William Drummond and his
conversations with Ben Jonson during the Christmas of 1618. Surely, these
conversations are about Jonson and his opinions regarding both his
contemporaries and their failings, and which stretch to many classical
writers. He also has much to say about his own life. Elsewhere, Jonson's
conversation is full of tittle-tattle, the sort of talk that would not have
been out of place in the Mermaid.
"As I recall there are just two mentions of Shakspear (sic) recorded by
Drummond. On one occasion Jonson says "Shakspear wanted Arte". Assuming
Drummond reported this correctly (the original manuscripts are missing and
present information is based upon copies) then it must be countered by
Jonson's couplet in the First Folio, "Yet must I not give Nature all: Thy
Art, / My gentle Shakespeare, must enjoy a part." Jonson presumably wrote
these lines soon after 1618, for they were published in 1623.
"Drummond's second reference is to 'The Winter's Tale' in which he records
that Jonson mocked Shakespeare for bringing some men to shore from a
shipwreck off the coast of Bohemia, which is landlocked and some 100 miles
from the sea. I have been given to understand that older maps of Europe,
which Oxford may have seen since cartography was Burghley's favourite
subject, showed Bohemia when it once stretched to the coast. If your
correspondent is wondering why Jonson referred to Shakespeare and not
Oxford, it is necessary to understand the reason for Oxford's disgrace, and
the fact that Jonson was in the employ of Oxford's son-in-law. Oxford's
disgrace was a taboo subject, Burghley would have likely considered it as a
serious threat to national security, which is why Jonson was compelled to
conceal Oxford's authorship in Cardano's recently invented method for
encrypting secrets.
"There are four major reasons for accepting that Oxford wrote the works of
Shakespeare: (1) Ben Jonson's Cardano grille encrypted into the inscription
on the Stratford monument. (2) The identity of the rival poet and his poetry
and to whom both rivals were addressing their verse, indicated by the 16th
century usage of the second person singular, you, reserved for the nobility
when addressing each other, (3) The date, 1574 on Henry Peacham's chronogram
at the foot of the Titus document. (4) Thomas Thorpe's asyntactic dedication
to Shake-speares Sonnets. Combined, they amount to proof likely to be
acceptable in a court of law.
"BTW Your correspondent's alternative anagram for Peacham's 'Mente Videbor.'
Roper's text concerning Drummond in Proving Shakespeare, pp. 426-7: "It has been said that if one gives a lie sufficient start, it will never be caught. The chase is on. It is time those who are concerned to see the truth prevail engage themselves to the fact that when a repressed people are struck dumb by autority, honest men will speak in the language of secrecy.
"Ben Jonson was one of those to whom this refers. In his conversations to William Drummond (Conv., 1, 658), the Laird of hawthornden remarked: "of all styles he loved most to be named honest."
"Jonson's passion for literature and admiration for Shake-speare rebelled against the censorship made necessary to avoid a scandal involving three of the noblest families in England (the houses of Burghley, Oxford, and Southampton). Playwrights and actors had not then the elevated status they now enjoy, and suppression by the ruling class against the acting fraternity was commonplace. Jonson's response was to employ the latest method of secrecy invented by Girolamo Cardano, and use it to secrete the truth about Shakespeare within the inscription on the monument at Stratford-upon-Avon.
"Added to this, he took virtual control of the dedications to Shakespeare that were to appear in the First Folio, and saw to it that Droeshout's engraving complemented his own encrypted avowal of de Vere's authorship. At the same time, with one eye on the censors, he praised Shakespeare's work in glowing but ambiguous terminology. The facts are there; they all fit neatly together, acknowledgement of them is all that is required for thruth to prevail."
Here is Roper's discussion of the Glasgow First Folio, pp. 433-4: "Peacham appears not have been alone in believing that William Shakespeare's name in the First Folio did not automatically signify Shaxpere was the person who had written the plays. A copy of the First Folio, owned by Glasgow University, was originally the property of a person fairly close to many of the actors named at the front of the book. To signify this, the owner had annotated the list of names with a short pithy comment. For example, against John Lowine the word "eyewitness" is written; against Richard Burbage are the words "by report"; this, presumably refers to the fact that Burbage died in 1619, four years before the First Folio went on sale. William Kemp had left the company in 1599 and so there is nothing against his name; William Ostler's name is adjoined by the word "hearsay", and the words "so to" appear for Nathan Field who is next on the list. The real surprise is to read the annotation against the name William Shakespeare: it says, "lease for making".
"According to the OED, and The Concise Etymology of the English Language (W. W. Skeat, Oxford, 1882 and 1936), "Leasing", means falsehood, "from leas, false". The word "making" is conventionally defined as: "to fashion, frame, construct, compose or form: to create, to bring into being..." (Chambers English Dictionary, Cambrdige, 1989).
"William Shakespeare was therefore 'false for bringing into being', or whatever synonym one prefers to replace 'making' by; that is, according to the original owner of Glasgow University's volume of the First Folio: a person, who may be judged from his other comments, to have been contemporaneous with that era.
"In view of what has preceded this last disclosure about Shakespeare, the statement should not come as a great surprise. Jonson said the same thing when he encrypted his avowal into the inscription on the Stratford monument, reinforcing it with ambiguous phrases in his testimony to Shakespeare at the front of the First Folio.
"Thorpe made a similar disclosure when he encrypted Vere's name into the Sonnets' dedication. Peacham's Minerva Britanna, Nashe's 'Will Monox', Barnfield's, play on the word 'ever', Marston's silent name bounded by a single letter, Chettle's cunning dig at Shakespeare by referring to him as t he 'god of harbours', and Droeshout's clever engraving of a cartoon figure filled with symbolism, indicating Oxford to be Shakespeare all point to two momentous facts. Edward de Vere was Shakespeare, and the connection between the two names was such a taboo subject that it could never openly be referred to in public.
"The original owner of Glasgow University's edition of the First Folio was very clearly aware of this, and decided to signal the same information in how own provate way. He made a note against William Shakespeare's name, denouncing him as a playwright inside the very volume that suggested otherwise."
At pp. 428-31, Roper discusses anagrams with respect to MENTE.VIDEBOR, emphasizing that the goal was the "perfect anagram", "those in which the rearranged letters are logically connected to their original formation; for example, The 'Statue of Liberty' is a perfect anagram of 'Built To Stay Free'." Previously you remarked that the absence of reviews of Proving Shakespeare so far is not necessarily significant. I have since learned that when the book was published review copies were sent to many publications, pro and con, that would presumably be interested in this topic; but none of them has shown any interest in printing a review! It would seem that authors such as Sobran and Price have sucked all the air out of the room, as the saying goes. Finally, as a counter to your position that the Authorship Question is not important, a mathematician friend of mine with an interest in history wrote recently that it is "a great historical mystery and intrigue of vast historical ramifications"; and he is not alone. Phaedrus7 (talk) 21:14, 21 March 2010 (UTC)
I have houseguests for several days, and prospective hangovers for most of that time, but will reply later, when I have time to sober up. Most of the authors I reread constantly, Homer, Virgil, Dante and Shakespeare, or Cao Xueqin, Kakinomoto no Hitomaro, or Li Bai have no biographies to speak of. If the extemporizer of the Odyssey were female, as hypothesized several times, I don't think classical scholars would snort, or the world tremble. It doesn't matter. Dante couldn't read Boethius or Cicero easily, as late as 24, yet the Divine Comedy shows a comprehensive mastery of medieval learning, which was in Latin. etc.etc. The only impact a change of authorship would have would be champagne bottles popping among Ayn Randist elitists. I think your mathematical friend should read the first vol of William Empson's biography: he was a very promising mathematician, but threw it over for language study and wrote some of the most important critical work of the last century. This is a subject adjudicated by rigorous historical knowledge, aesthetic touch acquired by close aural parsing and reparsing of many books, not by the elegant geometry of one or two 'ciphers'. The court of law would dismiss this flimsy evidence if the jury were simply given a comparison of deVere's distinctive dialect spellings of key words, and the way those words are spelled in Quartos and the Folio, which often reveal Midland dialect. Shakespeare hailed, unlike de Vere, from the Midlands. Hard philological traces will always trump one or two reconstructed ciphers, however ostensibly neat. This is a long argument: there is a vast occult French tradition of reading ciphers and numerology into famous books. Pierre Pascal's numeric deconstruction of the latent significance of Edgar Allan Poe's the Raven, being a case in point. I suggest you read a little more broadly. It helps to memorize at least 2000-3000 lines of Shakespeare before venturing into these areas, mastering the rhythms that reveal the stylistic fingerprint of whoever wrote the plays. Read for example Pericles, or Titus Andronicus as an experiment, without the intros, and, stop and mark those passages where you suddenly feel the tone and style has changed. If you can twig the essential shifts, then you are on the right path to grappling with real evidence about authorship.Nishidani (talk) 21:51, 21 March 2010 (UTC)
Enjoy your company and endure the anticipated hangovers; but when you get back to business here, after considering the true nature of Jonson's Cardano grille encryption and reading Roper's reasons why Titus Andronicus was written ca. 1574 (see URL above) when the Stratford fellow was only a lad, I should hope you would be in a position to reconsider your earlier remarks "no first rate mind . . . has ever appeared in print with a kind of methodologically sound argument" and the "elegant geometry of one or two 'ciphers'" alluding to Ben Jonson's deployment of the then-new Cardano grille to encrypt his message on the Stratford Monument, whose solution is unique and meets all the criteria set forth by the Friedmans who categorically declared that if, and I quote: "independent investigation shows the answer to be unique, and to have been reached by valid means, we shall accept it, however much we shock the learned world by doing so." While we may end up having a "failure to communicate", it will also be, in my opinion, another instance, to paraphrase Thomas Huxley, of "the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact." Also in the seventeenth century, the Church marshalled various textual evidences against Galileo's science concerning the mechanics of the Solar System, but science prevailed. Surely the science of cryptography today would trump the vagaries of dialectical composition, an art well practiced by many gifted playwrights--then and now. Phaedrus7 (talk) 18:24, 22 March 2010 (UTC)
No hangovers yet. We're on a limit of one litre of wine each a day, though no threshold on beer.
(a)"failure to communicate". Someone of my generation, on hearing that, cannot but remember Strother Martin's fatal words, 'What we have here is a failure to communicate', as he prepares to despatch the irreducibly contrarian spirit of Cool Hand Luke.
(b) re first rate minds. I qualified this with the key words 'mastering the intricate disciplines of proper Elizabethan scholarship', which should read 'proper to Elizabethan scholarship'.
(c) I still wonder how the large number of people I listed as, according to the Cardano solution, being in the know, can be reconciled with the idea that there was a huge secret. It turns out everybody knew, but no one was supposed to.
(d) Why didn't de Vere use the simplest channel for his works, Anthony Munday? He has a servant, a man he patronized, who wrote for the stage. Why did he choose the Stratford yokel, who has been mocked for 80 years for his hick background, as frontman?
Funny how life runs to parodic archetype. Three days of drinking, and I caught, with one other of the crew, a 24 hour virus, which ran through me like a dose of salts. I protested over the ceramic bowl that I was neither Ben Jonson, Michael Drayton nor WS of Stratford in 1616. The break gave me time to reread Roper's essay. But today, after this short note, I will be rejoining the ongoing wassail. I have several remarks to make. For the moment this.
Fixing the date at 1575 means that Roper has to argue that Henry Peacham must be the father, the minor bellelettrist cleric, and not, as orthodox scholarship maintains, his homonymous son, the Henry Peacham of 1578ca-1644.
Well yes, the father did write minor books. But only the son is known for his distinguished career as a graphic artist and painter, with the kind of interest that lies behind the painted draft of the scene from Titus Andronicus. Where is the evidence that the father had this gift, or pictoral interest?Nishidani (talk) 11:59, 26 March 2010 (UTC)
Alas, you beat me to the punch here. I trust you are no worse for the revelry and porcelain ritual. I note your concerns regarding the talents of the elder Peacham; but at this time choose to comment on your earlier alphabetically indexed points. (a) Of course Stother Martin's line from Cool Hand Luke is iconic and almost universally recognized; well dug. For (c) and (d), I rely on Roper's expertise again, for my amateurish and pedestrian approach could only come up with the colloquially appreciated idea that any frontman would need to be removed far enough from the principal to establish some semblance of "plausible deniability", which the Stratford fellow provides as Munday does not. However, as might be expected, Roper is much better skilled and knowledgeable here: "Take for example (c) Censorship in England was controlled by a spy network that was every bit as efficient as in Stalin's USSR. The penalty for writing material considered injurious to the State ranged from a whipping to amputation. Why risk it when Oxford had himself agreed to be separated from the authorship of his poems and plays? He confesses this when writing sonnets number 72 and 81. William Camden also wrote that the 'present powers' were intent upon 'extinguishing' some recent event from 'the memory of succeeding generations'. How well this fits Oxford's shame, especially since Camden was a friend and former tutor of Jonson, and he would therefore have known about this. As for (d) Munday dedicated his 'Mirrour of Mutabilitie' to Oxford in 1579. In 1580 Munday also dedicated 'Zelauto' to Oxford. It was not until 1592 that Oxford schemed to have 'Venus and Adonis' published as a work by Shakespeare under the patronage of Southampton. Oxford needed someone unknown to the literary world, any familiar writer would have been ridiculed for the hoax once he was discovered, as he very quickly would have been. The name Shakespeare was derived from Shaxpere or Shakspere: a former horse attendant outside the Curtain who had begun work as a 'Jack-of-all-trades' inside the playhouse. He was chosen because he was bright, unknown, trustworthy for the right price, and because the hoax was never intended to last. For four years after 'Lucrece' when the author of 'Willoby His Avisa' lampooned the old player W.S. and the young actor H.W. (Wriothesley had played the role of patron to W.S. but once the hoax was discovered, the patronage was never heard of again) Shakespeare's name disappeared. It was resurrected in 1598 to account for the anonymous plays that had appeared, but for which Oxford had agreed to part with in order to cover his family name as well as that of Southampton and Burghley."
I cannot help but note that for as much as you profess "indifference" as to the outcome of the Shakespeare Authorship Question, you seem to be decidedly averse to crediting any argument in Oxford's favor as though scholasticism trumps science, a tendancy I referred to earlier; and cryptography is a science. More pointedly here, I am reminded of what Georgio de Santillana wrote concerning this duality in his "On Forgotten Sources in the History of Science", "Galileo established forever the principles of exact science against the Aristotleians, when he wrote that one necessary reason, once found, destroys utterly a thousand merely probable reasons..." (Crombie, A.C. (ed.), Scientific Change: Historical studies in the intellectual, social and technical conditions for scientific discovery and technical invention, from antiquity to the present (Basic Books, New York, 1963), p. 823. Phaedrus7 (talk) 16:34, 26 March 2010 (UTC)
At the risk of giving the appearance of "piling on", see here Roper's reply to your concern over the the elder Peacham's instrumentality: "The answer is that 1575 rules out the younger Peacham. If Nishidani abides by proof, it is for him to disprove that the date on the Titus manuscript is 1574. If he cannot, and all alternative suggestions have been shown to be deficient, then the report made by Joseph Quincy Adams should settle the matter for good. “The elaborate and detailed drawing at the top of the Titus document seems to be not in the style of, and very distinctly superior in technique to, the numerous drawings we have from Peacham’s pen.” And again: “in the Folger manuscript of Emblemata Varia we have twenty pen drawings by Peacham, carefully executed for presentation to Sir Julius Caesar, which are, I think, quite obviously different in style and inferior in craftsmanship to the Titus drawing. . . . The faces in Peacham’s work are entirely without character, the details often clumsy in execution, and the whole drawing lacking in vitality.” Nishidani should also note that the handwriting on the Titus manuscript is totally different from the handwriting on the younger Peacham’s Basilicon Doron." Phaedrus7 (talk) 17:57, 26 March 2010 (UTC)
just briefly.
(a)We are not dealing with proofs here, but Mr Roper's hypothesis, and the just-so story that might be made were the hypothesis true, in order to, as the Greeks said, save the phenomena. His conjecture on the date is just that, a conjectural reading, which excludes by its assumption ('The 'q' or 'g' can only refer to a number from zero to nine.') such commonplace practices, at least commonplace for philologists who muck round with manuscripts, as dittography. Since there is no certainty over g/q any construction based on either g or q will always result in an hypothesis.
Mr Roper chooses 'g' as the third value, but since we are dealing with a classical convention, he must show that g can bear this value in Latinate, and Renaissance sources. G in classical Greek relates to '3'. In classical Latin, it has no numeric value, as far as I recall, but is the seventh letter in the alphabet. The OED he cites says that in English it is 'used to denote anything occupying the seventh place in a series'. Yes, but the actual examples in English usage all relate to musical values, such ‘g’ representing the fifth note in the diatonic scale of C major, and the earliest recorded instance of such numerical (let us say Pythagorean) symbolism is 1596, more than two decades after the period he conjectures it was written. Nishidani (talk) 18:57, 26 March 2010 (UTC)
(b)
'Censorship in England was controlled by a spy network that was every bit as efficient as in Stalin's USSR. The penalty for writing material considered injurious to the State ranged from a whipping to amputation.'
Why was 'Venus and Adonis' or 'The Rape of Lucrece' or even 'Titus Andronicus', the earliest works, a potential threat to the Elizabethan state, regarded by Burghley much as Suslov regarded the works of Andrei Sinyavskiy and Yuri Daniel? Nishidani (talk) 21:57, 26 March 2010 (UTC)
(c)The quote from Santillana, in the context of an analogy with censorhip in the Soviet Union, an author who gave me much pleasure, particularly with his Hamlet's Mill, in the 60s, reminded me, among many other things, of a line in his The Crime of Galileo,
Inter hos judices tamen vivendum, moriendum, et, quod durius est, tacendum ((1955)Mercury Books 1961 p.323)
Well, the doubters are, despite much inframural gossip about suppressio veri, and frequent suggestions there is a vested interest by the Shakespearean 'establishment' in covering up a scandal of historic proportions that, if known, would echo through the welkin, the doubters are alive and kicking, vocal, and not subject to sanctions for the thesis they push. No nihil obstat is required for their work. No Damoclean sword hangs over the head of anyone breaching a putative ukase to maintain strict silence. Their major problem, and, since I haven't read Mr Roper's book, I do not extend this general judgement to his work, is that the quality of their work is, frankly, appalling. As far as I can see, Mr Roper's ingenuity suffers from association with a fringe school which lacks his analytical perspicuity, and is as eager to latch on to his contribution as he has been, outside of his given field, unwittingly incautious in treading into theirs and taking their non-mathematical discursive assumptions to be grounded on solid earth.
There is far more variety in Shakespearean interpretation than there is within the de Verean fold. There is a consistent probing of hermeneutic premises on most questions that is all but absent from the alternative authorship promotors. It is not scholarship that constitutes a closed post-medieval world of discourse, hedged round by a Bellarminic praetorian guard ever alert, with prickly ears and prying myrmidons, to defend its crumbling ramparts from the small but impressive vanguard of a new science of reading armed with a 'post-Aristotelian' commitment to empirical inquiry. To continue the metaphor, those in the citadel or 'ivory tower' of contemporary Elizabethan learning suffer from a certain complacency perhaps, because the slings and arrows of outraged skirmishers fall far short of the bastion, cause no casualties, and can be brushed off because unlike the American Administration's tendency to read, and then massively overinvest in counter-subversive strategies to put down, systemic threats of seismic proportions when the evidence from abroad and within for a challenge to their imperial authority has the decibal force, at most, of a Gargantuan fart, no more, the academic establishment does not conjure up a non-existent threat. It does not, because, as I said earlier, the sallies and forays of most alternative authorship books and articles are puerile, and won't stand more than a few minutes of serious scrutiny.
They are jejune because there is no coherent method, almost no cogent argumentation that accounts for all elements of a perceived anomaly, and, above all, no close scrutiny, if any, of their own hermeneutic principles. As one can see in these endless discussions on the relevant pages, give people like Smatprt and Benjonson exhausitvely detailed reasons, Latin citations of primary sources, dates for usage that rule out their eccentric spinning of evidence (the 'Mute Swan'), and they just dodge around it. Fighting this unreason is exhausting, not exhilarating. It has no payback, and one feels like George Foreman flailing Mohammed Ali's arms down to the 8th round in Kinshasa, with the difference that the beaten adversary has no rope-a-dope strategy, and seems intent on winning, not by counterpunching his exhausted antagonist with a magisterial king-hit, but simply by absorbing punishment until the stronger party collapses on the ring, or, as an Australian might say, on his ring.
One has more respect of course for people who bring to an argument a knowledge of the less subjective, harder sciences, such as mathematics (Roper)and chemistry (Burgstahler, even though I would have wished Dr Burgstahler had left his discipline of Chemistry, as did Helen Vendler, to devote his life to the molecular deconstruction of the aesthetics of language, rather than embrace the alchemical-Paracelsian mode in his spare time to tease out a doctrine of hermeneutic intrigue in Elizabethan verse), for at least, one persuades oneself, a shared commitment to rational hermeneutics that might allow intelligent discourse does exist in terms of formal training. Over the next two days, I'll try to parse over what has been said, and frame my objections in a systemic way. Apparently, age is beginning to protest vigorously against the convivial rituals of hard-drinking, and has made an ally of a 24 hour virus to assist it in protesting that I rethink seriously my commitment to drink my houseguests under the table. Nishidani (talk) 11:54, 27 March 2010 (UTC)
(d)Since I do best to enjoy every minute of remission from talking in kalaidoscopic cascades to the toilet bowl, in jotting down here my comments, I may as well anticipate a key point.
In scientific method, it is not enough to make an argument to 'solve' one problem if the solution engenders, at the same time, many others. If, for example, TA were pinned down to 1574/5 by the Peacham document, then automatically the proposer of that solution is obliged to explain how the rhythms of blank verse, so challenged and mocked by Green and Nashe after Marlowe's Tamberlaine (1587) set a new high watermark in this form of dramatic poetics, pre-existed by some praeternatural mystery the evolution of Elizabethan prosody by some 15 years, and, though recited in private viewings at Court, never had an impact, though it would have been a dazzlingly audible break with the clunky experiments in that mode thitherto made. TA is in Senecan mode, and Seneca was much the rage in that early period, true, but no translation of Seneca into English in the 1560s and 1570s, as far as I know, ever employed blank verse. Just one small example of why I think Roper's 'solution', in short, creates as many anomalies as it proposes to erase. Nishidani (talk) 12:08, 27 March 2010 (UTC)
It was not until 1592 that Oxford schemed to have 'Venus and Adonis' published as a work by Shakespeare under the patronage of Southampton. Oxford needed someone unknown to the literary world, any familiar writer would have been ridiculed for the hoax once he was discovered, as he very quickly would have been. The name Shakespeare was derived from Shaxpere or Shakspere: a former horse attendant outside the Curtain who had begun work as a 'Jack-of-all-trades' inside the playhouse.
(e)One sure way to persuade people not to read beyond page or para 1 of one's thesis, is to write like this. One cannot be a sceptic, training one's eyes to scan and scour with lynxish acuity the defects in traditional scholarship, only then to compound the errors one takes exception to in the normal narratives of Shakespeare's life.
(i)We have the factual voice 'Oxford schemed' camouflaging a pure hypothesis devoid of any documentary basis.
(ii)One avows a certainty as to Oxford's inner thoughts, his plans, his needs, here to find a front-man
(iii)one knows exactly what criteria Oxford was searching for, an unfamiliar writer whose name would not give rise to suspicions that might unravel the charade of Oxford's pseudonym
(iv)Oxford seizes on 'Shakespeare' normalizes the name of a whilom horse-holder outside the Curtain theatre.
(iv) Apropos. Note the jump in logic. There is no reason why this Shakspere (I much prefer Shagspère, the father of fucks, but that is a private idiot's sincrazy, as James Joyce would say) would be preferred to anyone else like Oxford's servant and theatre-writer Anthony Munday.
(v)The only detail here as to Shakspere is culled from a late anecdote, related by Samuel Johnson circa 1765 who got it from Pope, who got it from Rowe, who got it from Betterton, who got it from Sir William Davenant, as Halliwell-Phillipps once wrote (Outlines of the Life of Shakespeare, 1889, Part 1, p.89), that Shakespeare held horses outside the Curtain for a period until he finangled a job inside. Traditional scholarship is highly wary of this anecdote for various reasons (M. C. Bradbrook 's Shakespeare: the poet in his world, Columbia University Press, 1978 p.36, says ostlers were regarded with distrust in horse-thieving London, and most riders had attendants, etc). Yet what, on methodological grounds (treat with extreme caution anecdotes attesting to what may have happened 180 years after they were recorded) is here a certainty, and the only visible basis for approving of the yarn is that it makes Shakespeare of Stratford look like the oafish unkempt ostler de Vereans like to imagine, as they contrast their front-man to the splendid noble whose dazzling appearance is lushly described in the incipit of Osborn senior's folly-riven fantasy of 1952.
(vi)'Jack-of-all-trades' alludes to the 'Johannes Fac-totum' in Greene's lancing squib against Shakescene in 1592, but only leaves the reader asking why, apart from the fact it may mean just 'busybody' if this is accepted, do we not accept the rest of what Greene wrote: that this Shakespeare 'bumbasts out a blanke verse' as well as anyone. That remark of Greene's, it is often forgotten, is actually a dying man's lazy recycling of a similar remark made by Nashe against the 'alcumists of eloquence' who think they can 'out-brave better pens with the swelling bumbast of a bragging blanke verse'(Menaphon, 1589, Pref.). Both Greene and Nashe, university men, were pissed off that untutored upstarts had started to write material that proved more successful for the stage than their own compositions, and the putdown is filled with the envious contempt for the way natural genius seemed to outshine their laborious wits.
You just cannot use as a modus operandi two distinct and diametrically opposed strategies of narrative reconstruction, (1) an arid, or anal scepticism concerning generations of close traditional scholarly analysis of the given documentary record in order to undercut its version of the probable story of Shakespeare's life, let us, given the Soviet allusion, call it the Potemkin village approach to the actual evidence of the historical record, in which everything in the documents is a massive charade jerrybuilt to blindside the world, only then, (2) with a volte-face, or is that volte-farce?, turn around to proffer a counter-argument, based on an imaginary scenario that lacks even a single shred of empirical evidence to prop its contentious yet highly detailed fantasy. Let us, for rhetorical balance, call this second inverted method, the Traumarbeit macht frei approach to the empirical, where the trauma of a raw fantasy trumps for veracity the scarce but hard data.
Do this, and you should never complain that people don't review you. Sorry for the harshness, but this obvious contradiction seems not be be understood, whereas it is what you learn in any opening seminar for Ist year BA students of English.Nishidani (talk) 14:32, 28 March 2010 (UTC)
So you are trying to have your cake and eat it too, in writing like this, exercising pyrrhic scepticism on the methods of documentary assessment used by the historical temper in all fields, and applied, to Shakespeare's life, only then to burst forward with hypothesis as fact, just-so stories as evidence, and anecdotal trivia as data secured for history, simply because they fit the preconceived schema of the alternative hypothesis, with its assumption that the real man of history was a backward hick. One could go on, but I feel I've another urge to go for the big spit, as the inimitable Bazza McKenzie would say.Nishidani (talk) 14:32, 28 March 2010 (UTC)
I fear your replies are getting far ahead of my ability to keep up. But I'll do my best, hopefully with a little help from my friends. I'll be brief here. Interesting that you also have read Hamlet's Mill, one of the few books I have read more than once, namely thrice since 1974. Interestingly enough, while many scholars, such as Philip Morrison, Thomas Worthen, William Sullivan and Harald A. T. Reiche, accept the book's heretical claim that our ancestors knew the effects of precession, which knowledge was coded in myth, the archons of the History of Astronomy Academy most emphatically do not. Surely there are parallels here between H. Mill and the S.A.Q. with respect to the resistance of academic authorities to change. You might be interested to learn, if not already, that The Economist on-line has a review of James Shapiro's new book Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? followed by comments, most of which reject Shapiro's defense of the Stratford fellow, with no. 28 recommending Jonathan Bond's THE DE VERE CODE: Proof of the true author of SHAKE-SPEARE'S SONNETS (2009): "A 400-year-old cypher unlocked, An epic Elizabethan love story uncovered". In the wake of your many recent criticisms, I think I am in a position similar to that Velikovsky found himself in March 1965 after his encounter with Abraham Sachs at Brown University; but I shall not be as brazen as Velikovsky was when in the moment he boasted: "Dr. Sachs threw so many accusations in that Phillipic of his that I am at a difficulty to answer; but I invite Dr. Sachs to spend the hour and a half tomorrow at the meeting, and everyone of you too, and point by point each of his statements will be proven wrong." Unfortunately, the next day Sachs did not show up for the Q&A at Diman House where Velikovsky volunteered nothing and never did complete any "point by point" rebuttal as he did for the other faculty panelists who confronted him at Brown. However, on one point above I would venture that you are wrong: you contend that in 1574 Oxford could not have read any English translation of Seneca in blank verse; but this assertion is undermined by Wikipedia's entry for blank verse: "The first known use of blank verse in the English language was by Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey in his interpretation of the Æneid (c. 1554)." Phaedrus7 (talk) 20:52, 29 March 2010 (UTC)
I've been out dancing on the tiles all night, so just a brief interim answer to your last riposte before I hit the fartsack for a couple of hours. No, I don't think I'm wrong on that point: I was talking of blank verse renditions of Seneca, not of Vergil, though I'll need some time to dig up where I read it, certainly in some 'outdated' book for decades ago. Don't read Wikipedia for information, unless the page has GA status, and you must be careful even there. I haven't yet checked the blank verse page, but all the world knows Surrey used it in his version of the Gavin Douglas's Scots version of the Aeneid (much beloved by Ezra Pound), though he got the idea from an Italian decasyllabic vernacular version a decade or so earlier. You can find it in stray passages of Gascoigne whom, I tactically expected you to use, because he experimented with it in the mid 1570s. However had you mentioned Gascoigne I would have come back, in this chess match, with the assertion that it was played in court, before Lyly's plays etc., to anticipate my moves. Still I need to punch out some zeds.Nishidani (talk) 10:48, 30 March 2010 (UTC)
followed by comments, most of which reject Shapiro's defense of the Stratford fellow, with no. 28 recommending Jonathan Bond's THE DE VERE CODE: Proof of the true author of SHAKE-SPEARE'S SONNETS (2009):
I've a bad tendency to behave like 'Bad Bob' in the noted film when people use 'public opinion' or a 'blogger majority' as though it bore some pertinence to technical discussions. I repeat, these things are not decided by plebiscite. As to Mr Bond's work, I haven't and won't read it, simply because most people who read stuff like that have never taken the month out of their lives it requires to get the basic information simply on how that sequence can be parsed. It must have taken me, like most other lovers of poetry, at least a month to absorb fully, with the sonnets, Stephen Booth's Empsonian masterpice Shakespeare's Sonnets, (1977) and Helen Vendler's The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets, (1997), i.e. over 1,200 closely written pages of exegesis. Perhaps Mr Bond did that before writing his book, one of hundreds on the cipher syndrome. I expect 99% of his readers don't have this elementary homework done while appraising its merits in blogs. So I read neither bloggers, nor the Bonds of this world, not even if they are Flemings. If it manages to uncover something intelligent, that will be picked up by the academy. Terribly snobbish of me? No, it's just that life's too short there are hundreds of great authors to read and reread, and fine books and scholarship too abundant, for me to be drawn even into much mainstream secondary lit.Nishidani (talk) 18:26, 30 March 2010 (UTC)
Given your apparent aversion to accepting inferences in the absence of explicit documentary evidence, I wonder whether or not you'd agree Dante was justified in consigning Paolo and Francesca to Hell since all we know is that "they read no more that day"; shucks, we do not know they made the beast with two backs. At least Dante does not tell us what they did when they stopped reading. They could have switched to parchesi or some other innocent pastime. I also recoil at your referring to the documented biography of Shakespeare as the standard against which to judge the case for Oxford's authorship when the biography of Shakespeare is nothing but a concatenation of conjecture fabricated to link a few isolated biographical events that has assumed the status of unchallengeable dogma over the centuries. Since you are so thorough a critic, you should really read Roper's book Proving Shakespeare so that you are privy to all the details which you assume he does not command since they are missing from the excerpts you have read. A justification for this suggestion resides in Roper's reply to your recent commentary:
I am grateful for the observations made by Nishidani; it helps refine future references. It is however clear that he has fastened upon one part of an argument that stems from another, but without acquainting himself with the details of the other. He mentions Greene's Groatsworth, but he is apparently unaware that Nashe has identified Oxford as the host of the banquet attended by himself, Marlowe, and Greene. He is therefore unaware of the motive behind this unusual gathering, which was for Oxford to prepare these wits for the arrival of Shakespeare. This new arrival on the literary scene, akin to Athene plucked from the head of Zeus, was about to publish Venus and Adonis. Enquiries would soon reveal he was an impostor: a
stratagem for Oxford to get his work into print without identifying himself. Nashe, Marlowe, and Greene were being buttered-up to pre-empt their interference and with a request to remain silent. Chettle misunderstood the meaning of Greene's scribble, as he admitted later, he was unable to read part of it. The author of Willobie His Avisa tumbled the ruse and hinted at
it, along with other matters, in his booklet that came out soon after Lucrece. Once the ruse was uncovered, the connection between Southampton and Shakespeare was redundant, and no more was heard of Shakespeare until Meres published Wits Treasury, fortuitously after Oxford's father-in-law, the head of censorship, had died. Like a jigsaw puzzle all the pieces fit together.
If you try to fit the same pieces together with a genuine Shakespeare, the pieces do not fit; there are unanswered questions. Nishidani throws doubt upon the story told to Davenant. But it rings true. It does no favour to the reputation of Shakespeare to repeat it, and for a new arrival from the country, with no education, horse minding was an obvious choice. One also has to understand the levels of superiority attached to the Elizabethan class system. The aloof manner in which Oxford treats Dogberry or Bottom is indicative of the way he would have thought of Shakspere. It is essential to understand the aristocratic mind, especially Oxford's, and that can only be improved upon by reading the different accounts of his life, as seen by different authors.
In short, there are no gaps in logic. Everything flows from one link in the chain to the next, based upon the evidence available and with deductive reasoning joining them together. If Nishidani believes I should have presented the case more efficiently, I bow to his wisdom and will look again at where improvements can be made.
He mentions Greene's Groatsworth, but he is apparently unaware that Nashe has identified Oxford as the host of the banquet attended by himself, Marlowe, and Greene. He is therefore unaware of the motive behind this unusual gathering, which was for Oxford to prepare these wits for the arrival of Shakespeare. This
It could be Chettle's Groatsworth for all we know.
I don't know about the banquet alluded to. However, everything here is a just-so story. This is a matter of not understanding what exercising historical judgement consists in, as opposed to re-imagining events for which we have only scraps of evidence. I'll address the Dantean analogy toorrow.Nishidani (talk) 20:23, 30 March 2010 (UTC)
My general difficulty here is that I am interacting with people with a distinguished background in the hard sciences, hard in the sense of empirical, or in the sense of the rigorous proofs of mathematical demonstration, and yet I can see no evidence of an understanding, despite conspicuous evidence of wide reading and high culture, of what the practice of assaying historical evidence at the highest level of sophisticated analysis, actually entails. I.e. I see no transfer of the comprehensive evidential survey and exact weighing of evidence that we get, for one, in Prof.Burgstahler's 'Searching for Hydrocarbons on Venus,' (in Stephen L.Talbott et al., (eds.) Velikovsky Reconsidered, (1976) Sphere Abacus edition 1978 pp.179-199) to the area of research, theory and method evaluation customarily exercised in the humanities. It is as if the rigour were suspended. I can understand Mr Bond on this, for mathematics is based on rigorously austere extrapolation from logical premises, wherein one builds out from solid bases, always secure in the internal consistency of derived reasoning, and he appears, from the précis here, to think this can be done, mutatis mutandis with the substantive, qualitatively different 'evidence' of a historical-documental record. But one simply cannot apply mathematical reasoning, nor enchained syllogistic deductions and inferences from scraps and pieces of documentary material in order to construct narrative for which there is no direct evidence (*There is a form of historical mathematics, true, that fills in lacunae (demographic, epidemiological, military, agricultural, and ecological etc., but that is quite distinct). This, at least to my eyes, stands out like dogs' balls, the urbane confidence of a practitioner of mathematical method in an area which, by contrast, lack all secure premises, and wherein each item of data is itself subject to complex 'evaluative interpretations' on its own, and thus cannot constitute anything like, item by item, a firm set of building blocks. To the contrary, the effect is of a spiral of hypotheses trending out tangentially on shifting sands, where the mathematician feels confidence in the internal geometrical cogency of his 'model', but each element in the bases, each link in the chain, has several interpretative variables, and thus the choice of what variable at each level is to be privileged as the 'real' one is determined by the subjective apriori hermeneutic preference guiding the calculus. But it is lunchtime, and, in this country, all cerebration must yield to the 'force majeure' of the appetites.Nishidani (talk) 11:09, 31 March 2010 (UTC)
(2)This leads to my charge of 'hermeneutic exceptionalism'. Almost uniquely, of great writers, and as a direct consequence of the cult of bardolatry (and its German outrider Shakespearomanie) it is assumed by the doubters that there is something exceptional about Shakespeare that requires a suspension of the normal functioning of historical analysis. Mainstream scholarship, methodologically, applies to the available documentary record on Shakespeare the same approaches and techniques which are routinely used in studying any historical character. We have quite a bit of evidence about a 'Shakespeare' and, yet while it has none of the abundance we would desire in our infatuation with his work, and from that curiosity of the man behind it which is part of popular and academic pathology, we must make do with what we have, as we do with Sappho, Dante, Homer, Lucretius, etc.etc., leaving speculative fantasies to novelists. The doubters have a counter-methodology which reduces the normal, exiguous evidence in the paper trail to a paper trail of false leads, misleading directions, foxily seeded over history to throw the world off the scent. The hermeneutics of suspicion calls 'all in doubt, elementary texts are quite put out;/our sight loses purchase on the common earth, nothing's to be taken at face value for its worth, and no man's wit, save Ogburn-Looney's, can well direct us where to look for it'. Neither Mr Bond nor Prof. Burgstahler address this problem of doubling up methodology, whereby all normal rules of evidence and inference are to be suspended in this unique case, in favour of the higher testimony of crypotograms that with narcissistic insistance (the precedent exists in Baconism) scrawls a hidden signature over every piece of work ostensibly assigned to Shakespeare. That this assumes a particular vim of excited speculative logorrhoia in the United States is understandable sociologically, as is the de Tocquevillean paradox that democracies can metastasize into a monarchical style of presidency (as de Vere the noble trumps the hardscrabble genius of the 'Stratford man'.) For we knew this long ago, when Richard Hofstadter's pungent essay 'The Paranoid Style in American Politics,' came out in Harper's.Nishidani (talk) 12:43, 31 March 2010 (UTC)
Given your apparent aversion to accepting inferences in the absence of explicit documentary evidence, I wonder whether or not you'd agree Dante was justified in consigning Paolo and Francesca to Hell since all we know is that "they read no more that day"; shucks, we do not know they made the beast with two backs
Not quite correct. One makes inferences invariably from evidence. The mind works no other way. There are legitimate, and unjutified inferences: a legitimate inference is to take a sentence the way it is commonly meant to be understood. An unjustified inference is to read into a sentence something it does not appear to imply, or mean. It is characteristic of the alternative authorhip methodology that the two are conflated, as if there were no substantive distinction between the two, placing on a par their strained counterfactual interpretations with the exacting construal of what an item of evidence may fairly be taken as meaning typical of (mainstream) scholarship.
If I say, 'I bought some peas at the market today', one could take this to mean the legume, or one could take it to mean there was a vendor selling P's to the illiterate, or else to people who wished to have more of them to gain an edge in scrabble. (The obvious reply to latter would be: 'Did you have to stand in a Q?') It is not absolutely 'illegitimate' to make the latter inference, but contextually it would only fit once in a million times, if you knew that in one idiosyncratic context, the market was of the Marxist variety and also made a roaring trade in alphabet soup.
In Dante's case, there is his text, and there is history. In reading the text quel giorno più non vi leggemmo avante (Inferno, V.138), we know that the model is Lancelot (shades of Shakespeare!) and Guinevere (Oh my o my, shades of the Earl of Oxford!), the matrix involves adultery, and coveting (the 7th and 10th commandments), and that in saying 'that day we read no further' after a passionate kiss, that the inference is plain: 'they play hide and seek with the Strassburg sausage/buried the bishop/made ends meat'etc. Poets of the high style do not say, 'we fucked': they allude to a notus calor (Vergil, Aeneid,Bk.8.ll.389-90). From the reader's perspective, that they read no more, after a kiss, conjoined to the place where they are now located, hell, the conclusion is deductive. Those who violate a key commandment, without confession and repentence before death, go to hell. Therefore, Dante in locating Paolo and Francesca in hell, would have us understand that they did indeed violate the two commandments. It is we who make the deduction that they must have done what little boy Blue did with Miss Muffet's muff, not Dante. It was not Dante who consigned them to Hell, but Catholic theology, to which both Dante and they subscribed.
Of course, the textual critic will consult his Boccaccio, and the relevant section of the Comento. That is to be used with caution, since it clearly has a tendentious purpose, to exculpate Francesca. But, perusing commentaries, we will learn that Dante stayed at Ravenna with Guido Novello, Francesca's nephew. We make the inference that he heard the story from directly from a relative of the deceased. There is an external source that lends credit to the view that the story as Dante told it approximates to a scandalous incident in 1285 ca.
Yet all this, while interesting, is not to the aesthetic purpose of reading Dante, or Shakespeare for that matter. Dante tells that witheringly piteous story, as he does that of Ulysses, in canto 26, to create an intense narrative tension between the severe moral structure of his world (the 'fate' of antiquity), and the compassionate humanity of the reader (the 'open' structure of the mind untrammelled by the harsh legalism of the given Law). The 'historical' facts, sparse as they are, throw light on the hinterground, but the reader may dispense with them, for all we need to know is in the Comedia itself, which is much larger that the dryasdust chronicles of documentary history. Nishidani (talk) 15:57, 31 March 2010 (UTC)
but without acquainting himself with the details of the other. He mentions Greene's Groatsworth, but he is apparently unaware that (a) Nashe has identified Oxford as the host of the banquet attended by himself, Marlowe, and Greene. He is therefore unaware of (b) the motive behind this unusual gathering, which was for Oxford to prepare these wits for the arrival of Shakespeare. This new arrival on the literary scene, akin to Athene plucked from the head of Zeus, was about to publish Venus and Adonis. (c) Enquiries would soon reveal he was an impostor: a stratagem for Oxford to get his work into print without identifying himself. Nashe, Marlowe, and Greene were being (d) buttered-up to pre-empt their interference and with a request to remain silent.
The allusion is to the fatal banquet of Rhenish wine and pickled herring, I assume. There is no evidence for (a) (b) (c) and (d). The passage stitches together conjectures in Mr. Roper's just-so story, or is that Vaihinger's Als ob fiction at work? Why Marlowe, Nashe and Greene were 'in the know' but no one else of the dozens of writers active at the time, is not explained. Why a man as powerful as Oxford need 'butter up' the three cerebral 'scones' of English letters is unexplained. Where was the payoff? Did then Oxford poison the herrings that killed one of the trio? Was the incident at Deptford then an extension of the plot, to kill Marlowe as well, who knew and might have spilled the beans, or the greens? Why did he allow Nashe to live on? becauswe he feared Lord Hunsdon? Speculation can run rife, but all this is of the 'if my auntie had balls, she'd be my uncle', variety. Nishidani (talk) 16:23, 31 March 2010 (UTC)
If you try to fit the same pieces together with a genuine Shakespeare, the pieces do not fit; there are unanswered questions.
The metaphor you are using is that of a jigsaw puzzle. Again, however, you are pretending there is one, while using, implicitly two. There is the jigsaw puzzle of Shakespeare's life which, filled out, would be an imposing 10,000 piece mosaic, for which we have a scattered 90 pieces for the overall picture, and there is the complete mosaic of his plays, inset within the larger panoramic mosaic of Elizabethan times. You are trying to triangulate the three, using the inset mosaic of the plays in order to recompose the biographical mosaic for which there are no pieces. This assumes as an iron premise that there is a thematic overlap between the life and the work, It's like recomposing Dante's life from l'Inferno, il Purgatorio and il Paradiso, but he never went there, except in his imagination, which was indeed his real life, but not the objective life he actually led.
All history, not just Shakespeare's life, is replete with unanswered questions, and one thinks of Auden's lines:
Finally, as to the Velikovsky parallel, which is as salutary as it is double-edged, it breaks down because, while it is true that all academic and intellectual communities betray a tension between the older supporters of an achieved paradigm and the younger paladins who challenge its premises, and with Shapley and co., Velikovsky was subject to the authoritarian censure of elders, who tried to suppress public discussion of his wide-ranging theories (my own interest was in his potential contribution to problems in ancient chronology, and his short monograph on Akhnaton and Oedipus), this doesn't translate as an analogy for the Shakespearean issue. For one, Velikovsky found, as back issues of 'Pensée' amply document, an open-minded willingness by a younger generation of scientists to examine, test and verify his theories. Shakespearean mainstream scholarship has been listening on the sidelines to authorship doubter theories for 160 years, it has dedicated time, despite the understandable insouciance of much of the estabishment, to addressing these theories:Schoenbaum himself, from the very peaks. No fresh-thinking from a trained academic younger generation has arisen over those six generations to break down the putative authoritarian stranglehold, because the SAQ is way below par, based on a thorough misunderstanding of methodology. Unlike Velikovsky, who was a broad-brush polymathic genius, with a fair grounding in several disparate disciplines, no countervailing figure of intuitive and analitical power has emerged to make a strong case that might bear serious examination. One drops most of these books after a few pages. I'm sure younger scholars do look at this de Verean stuff out of more than idle curiosity, but 10 pages of Osburn senior or junior, and one returns to the works, or Schoenbaum or masterpieces of historical writing on the Elizabethan age for some real testing of one's wits. It is not a matter of gaining access to the inner sanctums by toeing the standard line, but of finding challenges that titillate, challenge and seduce one's curiosity, and none exist in the doubter literature.Nishidani (talk) 10:25, 1 April 2010 (UTC)
Asmahan
Nishidani, there has been a very long dispute on this article and it ended up in arbitration. If you or Peter would like to edit Asmahan again on behalf of SD, then let's open this whole issue for public debate again... or it will be another round of meatpuppetry. Nefer Tweety (talk) 22:12, 23 March 2010 (UTC)
No meatpuppetry has occurred, I talked with the drafter of the arbitration case Wizardman, I explained to him that when I previously got blocked was because of a misunderstanding. He has now told me that I am allowed to ask a neutral person to take a look at points of correction I have posted at the talkpage. The neutral editor is free to do whatever edits he himself feels the sources support. Many of these corrections I have pointed out are things that has already been agreed repeatedly during past mediations but has been edit warred away to the wrong version. --Supreme Deliciousness (talk) 23:08, 23 March 2010 (UTC)
I'm usually pissed as a newt, except when the other carousers have flaked out and gone to bed, which however, at the witching hour, is not good for reading extended discussions, and making sober judgements. I know nothing of the subject, but, what I examined showed me SD had several good reasons for contested edits. I'll be in Florence for a few days, if I manage to get on the right train, and so cannot dedicate the time I should. I'll look in again, next week, if Peter is not available. Nishidani (talk) 23:01, 23 March 2010 (UTC)
Nishidani, thank you for taking a look at the corrections as a neutral part. I have made a reply to nr 1, and there is still also five points left, will you go through them or? --Supreme Deliciousness (talk) 00:29, 29 March 2010 (UTC)
Pal, it's good to get an out of gaol card, but it's a long haul to Playfair, as Monopoly addicts may recall. I don't think anyone took that seriously. I don't think the big chap rumoured in credulous quarters to be in the cerulean top tent had much to do with it. Let's see in our lucida intervalla if, detaching oneself from these pages, some progress can be made. An abstentive WP:AGF move, or self-suspension, to see if we are the problem. Let them have the pages for a while. (This is just an excuse for my being too drunk most of the time to turn on this computer).Nishidani (talk) 23:12, 23 March 2010 (UTC)
Swan reference
I'd join you for a drink but I might be afraid of the Chalice from the Palace! Anyhow, I thought you might be interested in this link:[[10]]. Check the opening line of graph 1, as well as all of Graph 2.
Also, a poem for you from Shakespeare's era, composed in 1612 by Orlando Gibbons: (it appears the Elizabethans did know the legend of the silent swan).
The silver swan, who living had no note,
When death approach'd, unlock'd her silent throat;
Leaning her breast against the reedy shore,
Thus sung her first and last, and sung no more.
Farewell, all joys; O Death, come close mine eyes;
More geese than swans now live, more fools than wise.
That, for once, is very interesting Smatprt, and shot a neat hole through my assumption in one important regard, apart from the fact that I'm in your debt for introducing me to a madrigal I should have known. It of course doesn't help your case, since I showed that everything you had construed around the 'Swan of Avon' was WP:OR based on faulty misprisions about classical sources. For your argument was that classical literature wrote of a 'Mute Swan'. As far as I have checked, in such authoritative books as Pollard's Birds in Greek Life and Myth, and in various commentaries on Ovid and Horace's use of the motif, the references are not to the 'Mute Swan', thus classified in English in 1785, but to the Whooper Swan, which is another variety altogether. You got Ovid badly wrong. The lesson for both of us is, don't rest, and don't make adventitious judgements, until you have surveyed, quietly and over time, the relevant literature thoroughly, and don't jump to conclusions. The 'swan', had you pressed me to provide more details, was to a London mind at that time, apart from its universal association in classical literature with Apollo and music (not death), associated with both the arms granted to the Worshipful company of Musicians, with its wings argent (hence silver swan) and with George Carey, 2nd Baron Hunsdon's badge, and he, as Lord Chamberlain until his death in late 1603 was patron of the Lord Chamberlain's men, of whom Shakespeare was one. It was the mark, as in all ancient literature, of love of music, and of great poets. You still have quite a bit of homework to do, in tracking down the antecedents to Gibbons's apparently innovative conceit of the swan as deprived of voice until it dies. And I, dutifully, will get and read the text your link provided, whose first two paragraphs are, however, full of superficial errors.
I'll pay the debt with one of the greatest lyrics in German, appropriately on the Swan:
Hölderlin's Hälfte des Lebens:
Mit gelben Birnen hänget
Und voll mit wilden Rosen
Das Land in den See,
Ihr holden Schwäne,
Und trunken von Küssen
Tunkt ihr das Haupt
Ins heilignüchterne Wasser.
Weh mir, wo nehm ich, wenn
Es Winter ist, die Blumen,und wo
Den Sonnenschein,
Und Schatten der Erde?
Die Mauern stehn
Sprachlos und kalt, im Winde
Klirren die Fahnen.
(Michael Hamburger, Hölderlin, Harvill Press, London (nd.but it must be 1942) p.158, to be read, in part, as a response to Goethe's 'On the Lake' (see Nicholas Boyle, 'Goethe', vol.1, Oxford University Press, 1991 pp.204-5, my marginal note says, though there is no swan there). Nishidani (talk) 10:19, 28 March 2010 (UTC)
'it appears the Elizabethans did know the legend of the silent swan'
I was going to point out the methodological error, frequent in de Verean circles, in this sort of generalization in my reply to Phaedrus, who also makes the same error. One textual reference invariably leads to the generalization: 'the Elizabethans knew'. Just as earlier, Roger Ascham's reference to two of Terence's plays being written by other people led to the generalization:'Elizabethans knew Terence was a frontman for nobles', whereas we only had Ascham for the idea that two of his plays had been authored by his patrons. One swallow does not make a spring, as Aristotle said at Nicomachean Ethics 1098a18 (μία γὰρ χελιδὼν ἔαρ οὐ ποιεῖ, though perhaps it would, for some, if we were to take 'swallow' here in its vulgar sense, being a metaphor for a woman's parts:of course, 'spring' in the sense of 'springe', a game-catching device, as in that marvellous double entendre (very tender) from A Winter's Tale, 'If the springe hold, the cock's mine,' no doubt Shakespeare's late conjecture of what Annie Hathaway must have thought the night she caught young Shagspear's toe in the sheets while jousting in the Stratford haystack.)
Off subject but it made me laugh, the sliver swan leaning her breast against you -
Maybe Nishi will believe me now that in Elizabethan England, the swan was, indeed, thought to be "silent" or "mute" during its life. Smatprt (talk) 00:02, 28 March 2010 (UTC)
I've replied on my page, but note here, as there, that you persist in citing one Elizabethan in order to write 'in Elizabethan England . .it was thought', Elizabethans thought. Do I need to remind you that if Berlusconi says something, this does not translate as 'in Italy it is thought' or 'Italians believe'.Nishidani (talk) 10:54, 30 March 2010 (UTC)
That makes sense, of course. I suppose its the same as the fact that I knew of the legend and you did not, in spite of you knowing many many many many things that I do not know. Allow me to refactor here and just say that "some" Elizabethans were aware of the ancient belief. No big deal, as the words you quote are not even in the article, rather that the De Vere Society mentions it. Smatprt (talk) 14:47, 30 March 2010 (UTC)
Oh Christ. Sometimes I think you deliberately provoke me by feigning not to understand, so that I will provide more detailed notes for you and save you the trouble of doing a simple piece of research yourself. You did not know the 'legend'. You spoke of an ancient 'myth', which it is not. I corrected that to 'legend'. There is no evidence adduced so far that an ancient legend of the 'mute' swan existed, though I will happily stand corrected if you manage eventually to cite a source that such a legend existed. By 'mute swan' here is to be understood a legend that says, as in Orlando Gibbons' madrigal, a song of that species which withholds from singing except when it is dying. The swan that does sing, dying nor not, is the 'whooper swan', (Höckerschwan in German). Neither Aesop, nor Plato, nor Aristotle, nor Horace, nor Ovid, nor Aelian, nor Pliny speak of the 'mute swan' or any other swan restraining itself from its song until its death throes. They say there is a swan that sings while dying (i.e. the last song of many sung during its life of the whooper swan). If someone says, 'Nishidani sat up and sang before croaking it' it would be WP:OR to infer thereby that Nishidani never sang before that 'swansong'. This inference is precisely the one you made from, and imposed on, classical sources.
All you did was cite an English poem from 1612 where clearly this 'topos' of a swan that never sings until it dies crops up. You cited A.M.Kinghorn's The Swan in Legend and Literature. I read it, noted its many errors (he must be a prof. of modern languages, since his summary of ancient sources is wrong, and then followed his refs, i.e. his reference to an ancient legend of the 'mute swan' (all wrong) he cites Pierre Belon's L'histoire de la nature des oyseaux, (1555) as referring to the 'mute Swan'. I checked it (Bk.3 p.,151) and there is no such thing, only a paraphrase of Aristotle saying some swans are said to sing when they die. Of course, but we are looking for a book earlier than Orlando Gibbons' which refers to swans which do not sing until they die, a distinct concept. Sir Thomas Browne will tell you ancient or, for him, more modern authorities, are divided as to whether swans sang also before death, or sing and yet survive. A learned note (Vulgar Errors, Bk.3. p.358) by Simon Wilkin (1852) will tell you something of the laryngeal distinctions between the singing (w)hooper swan, and the mute swan, the latter not singing even when it dies. So, thanks for the Gibbons poem, which does not solve a mystery, let alone clarify Ben Jonson's ostensibly cryptic allusion in his poem, but simply spurs the curious to search for the sources for Gibbons' conceit, as yet unknown to this and other related pages. Whatever, none of this has anything to do with Ben Jonson, who cannot be referring to de Vere in 'Swan of Avon' because earlier he says, the 'Swan of Avon' had small Latine and lesse Greeke', whereas de Vere had a classical education.
The new tone of courtesy is fine. The old tone-deaf manner of not understanding what your interlocutor is actually saying, less so.Nishidani (talk) 16:08, 1 April 2010 (UTC)
Edit Warring at Hamlet
Nishidani, it is clear that you and Tom are teaming up to edit war as you carry out your agenda to delete all mentions of the SAQ and in particular, any mentions of De Vere, anywhere on Wikipedia. Your "Reverting to enforce certain overriding policies is not considered edit warring" is the latest policy advice that you are abusing. The example of an "overriding policy" cited has to do with BLP issues, which Wikipedia is very sensitive to. To claim that the ONE-WAY rule is an "overriding policy" is just plain wrong. It's an abuse of policy. Smatprt (talk) 23:18, 19 April 2010 (UTC)
Thanks, Sir Oracle, but your opinions on wiki policy, as you fantasies about my tagteaming with Tom, are as reliable as your edits on Shakespeare. As to teaming up I think you should analyse your own behaviour which is consistently backed by editors belonging to the Oxfordian pushwho are rarely present, except, along with some sockpuppets, and occasional editors, to revert anyone who reverts your nonsense (User:BenJonson, User:Schoenbaum, User:Ssilvers; User:Sjabeyta: User:Rick 2.0, User:Afasmit; User:Nemo Neem; User:Alexpope; User:Mizelmouse; User:Wysiwyget; User:Fullstuff; User: Methinx;User:Temperance008, etc.etc.etc.but otherwise do not actively engage on the talk pages.) And please don't fraudulently misrepresent facts on my page, which is dedicated to correcting them. The facts are that de Vere has a page, the SAQ has a page, rightly so, and I have never said those articles should be removed from wikipedia. To the contrary, I edit them to haul them out of the lamentable sludge of factitious pseudo-data in which they wallow. The few people who are familiar with both Shakespeare and with the history of the de Verean scam, which to date, has not presented one iota of evidence acceptable to established Shakespearean research for its off-the-planet speculations rightly work to ensure that this encyclopedia does not allow its articles to be exploited as promo sites for a fringe lunatic 'theory'.Nishidani (talk) 08:46, 20 April 2010 (UTC)
Nishi, if I might make a suggestion. Try not to respond to Smatprt at the WQA board; if some uninvolved party says something then respond. Dont let this distract you or be a waste of time. Also, try and keep that other hand on the keyboard. Cheers, nableezy - 20:22, 19 May 2010 (UTC)
You should patent your temperament, and retail it on-line, discounted at say $100 bucks per buyer. You'd make a fortune, Nabster, not least from myself, because I'd probably have to keep buying it, as my aged body and mind would tend to generate antigens to expel any medicine that was incompatible with my DNA's ineluctable wiring for going overboard. Cheers, pal. Nishidani (talk) 11:07, 20 May 2010 (UTC)
I dont think you can actually patent ganja smoke. I wish I could help with all this, but I hated Shakespeare. He stole that shit from my brother Africans, put some white boy names on the characters and called the result a masterpiece. nableezy - 03:37, 21 May 2010 (UTC)
Hey, badman, I did you the fucking courtesy of keeping the real author Sheikh-Spahi out of the false attribution list just so the secret wouldn't be defamed by association with that other bunch of aristocratic wankers. You must know that Shake/Sheikh-Speare/spahi was an Ottoman warrior who came back with Cervantes from الجزائر in 1580, like his ancestor Azeem did with Robbing Hood, only Spain was too small for two geniuses, so he moved on to England, and lived under a cipher, I mean a 'Sifr', while writing the world. People called him the bard, partially because he was 'cool' (bard), but also because he was as 'polished' (bardah) as a pack-saddle (albarda), though his detractors like the farting Edward de Vere though he was a clown or idiot (al bardán).
Yes, you fucking fuck, your profanity is well-known, and duly noted! Personally, I'm so sick of this tired shit I'm ready to ignore his campaign to insert his obsession into every nook and cranny of Wikipedia while we finish the sandbox 2 article. Apparently most editors don't care anymore that he does so; they just don't want to deal with him. The reader looking for reliable information takes a back seat for editors and admins when they are inundated with unending bellyaching from a well-known and supernaturally persistent POV warrior, as the lack of responses to his noticeboard requests testifies. We can clean it all up after we're done with the article and a jury has rendered a verdict. Meanwhile, it's all a massive waste of time that sucks our energy down to nothing, which I'm sure is his purpose. Cheers! Tom Reedy (talk) 02:08, 20 May 2010 (UTC)
Profanity? Pro-fanny-ity is how we spell it in my nook, or is that nookie?, of the woods. I keep glancing out the window, for that lasar-guided missile from Arbcom, which, some venture to think, might 'nuke' me for calling a spade a fucking shovel. Well, I won't complain. Shit-shovelling is the name of the game, and I'm game, particularly in my right leg after trying to re-boot my computer. This place is terrible. No one enjoys the odd to-and-fro of rough, at times, comical argument, which sensible people employ to leaven out the sheer boredom of having to negotiate texts with wit-less editors (I hyphenate because that was Elizabethan practice, and to emphasize that 'wit' is used in the sense of (esprit). We're all doomed to watching our appeasing Pees and queasy Ques, lisping sweet nothings to ensure that the world of whingeing wimpery can operate with equanimity in plumping blathering bullshit into articles. Nishidani (talk) 11:07, 20 May 2010 (UTC)
^O.E.D, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1989 vol.3 p.438 col.1, sub coffee.
