Best Book Covers (Non-Yet-Existent Edition)

www.betterbooktitles.com

The Best/Worst Book Covers

"The literary classic that inspired the epic video game."















Actually not bad as far as three-word alliterative summaries go. And if that ain't μῆνιν, I don't know what is.














Ah, then there's the arrant patriarchalism of the "let's make everything look like 'chicklit' because teenage girls won't read anything else" genre.















She looks like she may not be from the 1920's.
















This looks strangely familiar.















As a scholar of medieval Christianity, I feel somewhat guilty for how much I laughed at this. Then again, there is no way Chaucer would've passed up this joke.











Shape your child's sexual identity, by requiring him to dress in identical plaid and bowl cut, and by always making sure to keep your genitals at eye-level while you speak to him.
















But didn't he ask Eve to taste the 'fruit' of his 'forbidden tree'?














Is that a metronome in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?














A near perfect academic pun. Not too much, funny, and accurate.











Likely the only time the word "posthuman" will ever appear in a Target.

Enter Bibliolis.

In fact, this cover is infinitely less bizarre than the actual book. Here's a wiki summary:

The mongoose attacks Arabella who shoots it to death. Arabella tears another mongoose apart with her hands. Arabella then murders Oolanga, the African servant, by dragging him down into a pit or hole. . . The White Worm has green glowing eyes and feeds on whatever is thrown to it in the pit. The White Worm ascends from the pit and seeks to attack Adam and Mimi Watford in a forest. Adam plans to pour sand into the pit and to use dynamite to kill the giant White Worm while it is inside the pit

. I'm sure psychoanalysts had themselves a heyday with this one.

With a work with as much imagery as the Divine Comedy, it's actually quite impressive that the artist chose one of the few animals that is mentioned nowhere (I'm working off of memory here so Danteans, please feel free to call me out if I'm wrong).













The horror, the horror!




















I don't think this is what Austen meant by "Gothic."

Biographies, Philosophies, and People of Flesh and Blood

One of the works of philosophy that's had the greatest influence on my own beliefs is Miguel de Unamuno's Del sentimiento tragico de la vida (1913). It's an odd little book: an important precursor to existentialism, deeply personal, less logically rigorous and more creative than most philosophy (but of course that's the point). The main concern is the conflict between faith and reason, framed here as the conflict between our desire to believe in God (which is really a desire for immortality) and our inability to do so. If this topic sounds boring or irrelevant to you, I assure you that I usually feel the same. But with the possible exception of Kierkegaard, no one renders it so urgent and exciting as Unamuno. He writes from a very down-to-earth perspective, although he's not beyond quoting quite often Spanish, Latin, Greek, German, English, French, and Danish texts-- texts which, frustratingly, he rarely bothers to translate.

I was recently reminded of the first chapter of Del sentimiento, "El hombre de carne y hueso" ("the man of flesh and bones"). Unamuno's point is that one cannot separate the ideas from the man (or woman, although in Unamuno it is nearly always the former). If this seems obvious to you, you're probably not a philosopher. Long before Wimsatt and Beardsley introduced literary critics to the "intentional fallacy," logicians identified the ad hominem fallacy. What matters is whether the ideas of Aquinas and Foucault are true (or in today's terms, "useful"), and these are seen as existing in a transcendent sphere, independent of the lives and personalities of the people who thought them up. Unamuno passionately disagrees-- me too-- and what follows is a re-humanization of thinkers such as Spinoza (timid and generally unhappy), Kant (a control freak who did the same things at the same times, every day), Kierkegaard (melancholic and lovelorn), and others.

The ad hominem fallacy still prevails in academia, among other places. I could talk at length about deconstruction and différance and phallagocentrism, but I couldn't tell you what Derrida was like as an undergrad or a friend or a lover. And of course, this is just how Derrida would prefer it, il n'y a pas de hors texte and all that

I now know a small fraction of each of these three areas after reading this piece in the London Review of Books on a new biography of Derrrida. It turns out that Derrida's professors, big surprise, found his papers incomprehensible. Foucault remarked that he wasn't sure whether to give him an A or an F. He was also somewhat of a ladies man and deeply loyal to his friends, even when they turned out to be raving uxoricides or unrepentant Nazi sympathizers. These biographical tidbits aren't just fun, they're important to anyone who takes deconstruction seriously.

Why do women and men of flesh and blood matter? The point isn't to reductively explain the Oedipal Complex solely in terms of Freud's attraction to his mother, or to attribute Calvin's harsh view of the body to the agonizing pain he was in throughout the final decade of his life. It's simply to recognize that our ideas are shaped by our personal circumstances and vice-versa. After all, what good is an idea if it doesn't alter the way you live.

Now, am I about to read a 600-page biography of Derrida? Hell no-- I'm still only half-way through Keith Richards' Life, and haven't even started Derek Pearsall's Life of Chaucer. But I'm glad it exists.

Great Reads V: Sayings of the Desert Fathers

The Desert Fathers. Before St. Athanasius established the first Christian monastery in 344 and about two centuries before St. Benedict, a group of Christians moved out into the deserts of Egypt, Palestine, and Syria in order to live a solitary and intensely ascetic life. The most famous of these is the man who started it all (for all practical purposes), St. Anthony of Egypt (not the one that helps you find shit-- that's St. Anthony of Padua). Dali has a very famous and quite powerful painting of him in the desert which I recommend you google right now if you haven't seen it.

Because these men-- and women, although they were less common-- entered the desert partially in order to withdraw from the newly-legitimized Christian society under Constantine Chlorus and his son, Constantine the Great, they wrote very little. Around the fifth century, many of their sayings and conversations were collected and written down. These were hermits, but hermits willing to share spiritual advice amongst themselves.

Because I don't know Greek, I can't speak to the accuracy of these translations. I can say that I own Penguin Classics edition of Virgil, Augustine, and Boehtius, and have found them all to be wonderful translations.

If you're a Christian, you need to own this book. If you're not, your life will still be poorer without it.

These sayings were not originally uttered with the thought that they would become part of a book. These are tips given from one hermit to another. I have revisited these sayings several times, and still I feel like I haven't come close to plumbing there depth. At the risk of sounding cheesy, I advise that you read them slowly and with a clear mind.

1. Antony said, "Our life and death are with our neighbor."
   
2. Joseph asked to Poeman, “Tell me how to become a monk.” He said, “If you want to find rest in this life and the next, say at every moment, ‘Who am I?’ and judge no one.”
   
3. They used to say that one of the old men asked God that he might see the fathers, and he saw them all, with the exception of Anthony; and he said unto him that showed them to him, "Where is Anthony?"  And he said unto him, "Wheresoever God is there is Anthony."
   
4. Abba Isidore the Priest said, "If you fast regularly, do not be inflated with pride, but if you think highly of yourself because of it, then you had better eat meat. For it is better for a man to eat meat and drink wine than to be inflated with pride and to glorify himself."

Great Reads IV

Blaise Pascal, Pensées (1662)

Always relevant.

1. "L’esprit croit naturellement, et la volonté aime naturellement; de sorte qu’a, faute de vrais objets, il faut qu'ils s'attachent aux faux." (It is natural for the mind to believe, and for the will to love; so that, for want of true objects, they must attach themselves to false.)
   
   
2. "On se fait une idole de la vérité même; car la vérité hors de la charité n’est pas Dieu, et est son image et une idole, qu’il ne faut point aimer, ni adorer." (We make an idol of truth itself; for truth apart from charity is not God, but his image and idol which we must neither love nor adore.)
   
   
3. "Nous ne nous tenons jamais au temps présent...si imprudents que nous errons dans le temps qui ne sont pas nôtres, et ne pensons point au seul qui nous appartient; et si vains, que nous songeons à ceux qui ne sont rien, et échappons sans réflexion le seul qui subsiste….Que chacun examine ses pensées, il les trouvera toutes occupées au passé et à l’avenir. Nous ne pensons presque point au présent; et si nous y pensons, ce n’est que pour en prendre la lumière pour disposer de l’avenir. Le présent n’est jamais notre fin: le passé et le sprésent sont nos moyens; le seul avenir est notre fin. Ainsi nous ne vivons jamais, mais nous espérons de vivre; et, nous disposant toujours à être heureux, il est inévitable que nous ne le soyons jamais." (We do not rest satisfied with the present. So imprudent are we that we wander in the times which are not ours, and do not think of the only one which belongs to us; and so idle are we that we dream of those times which are no more, and thoughtlessly overlook that which alone exists...Let each one examine his thoughts, and he will find them all occupied with the past and the future. We scarcely ever think of the present; and if we think of it, it is only to take light from it to arrange the future. The present is never our end. The past and the present are our means; the future alone is our end. So we never live, but we hope to live; and, as we are always preparing to be happy, it is inevitable we should never be so.)
   
   
4. "Tout le monde fait le dieu enjugeant: “Cela est bon ou mauvais”; et s’affligeant ou se réjouissant trop des événements." (Each one creates his god, when judging, "This is good or bad"; and men mourn or rejoice too much at events.)
   
   
5. "Le christianisme est étrange. Il ordonne à l’homme de reconnaître qu’il est vil, et même abominable, et lui ordonne de vouloir être semblable à Dieu."(Christianity is strange. It bids man recognise that he is vile, even abominable, and bids him desire to be like God.

Greats Reads III

Epictetus, The Golden Sayings

Like Sokrates and Jesus, Epictetus was too preoccupied with living life-- the original business of philosophy-- to write anything. Lucky for us he, also like Sokrates and Jesus, had some pretty enthused epigones. His Plato was Arrian of Nicomedia, to whom we how a whole argosy of practical advice on living. This book is a rather antiquated Harvard Classics edition translated by Plato translator Hastings Crossley and purchased by yours truly for $3.50.

1. A guide, on finding a man who has lost his way, brings him back to the right path—he does not mock and jeer at him and then take himself off. You also must show the unlearned man the truth, and you will see that he will follow. But so long as you do not show it him, you should not mock, but rather feel your own incapacity.
   
2. Considering all these things, the good and true man submits his judgment to Him that administers the Universe, even as good citizens to the law of the State. And he that is being instructed should come thus minded: How may I in all things follow the Gods; and, How may I rest satisfied with the Divine Administration; and, How may I become free? For he is free for whom all things come to pass according to his will, and whom none can hinder.
   
3. Even as the traveller asks his way of him that he meets, inclined in no wise to bear to the right rather than to the left (for he desires only the way leading whither he would go), so should we come unto God as to a guide; even as we use our eyes without admonishing them to show us some things rather than others, but content to receive the images of such things as they present unto us.
   
4. Do not seek to have everything that happens happen as you wish, but wish for everything to happen as it actually does happen, and your life will be serene.
   
5.  If anyone tells you that a certain person speaks ill of you, do not make excuses about what is said of you but answer, “he was ignorant of my other faults, else he would not have mentioned these alone."

Greats Reads II: Charles Williams

Charles Williams, The Forgiveness of Sins (1942)

     Poet, theologian, novelist, dramatist, and critic Charles Williams has been an obsession of mine for some time. Although obscure to the point of being unknown even to fellow English grad students and professors, Williams can boast of an impressive catalogue of his admirers: C. S. Lewis, who became his closest friend after writing a fan-letter for his novel The Place of the Lion; T. S. Eliot, who wrote the preface to his All Hallows’ Eve; W. H. Auden, whose conversion he inspired; Dorothy Sayers, who, after hearing him lecture on Dante, learned Italian to produce what for many years would be one of the standard translations of the Divina Commedia. The list might mention his acquaintance with W. B. Yeats through the esoteric Fellowship of the Golden Dawn; J. R. R. Tolkien and other members of the Inklings, Lewis’s famed Oxford literary circle; or perhaps the bizarre, cultish following of young women he attracted.
     Williams certainly shared common interests with each of these prominent figures—be it Christian mysticism, esotericism, or medieval and modernist literature. Yet, as his critics never cease to stress, he was an anomaly. His theological ideas often ventured to the outer edges of orthodoxy, at times beyond them. His criticism endued poetry with spiritual significance, while his theology devoted entire chapters to Dante and Shakespeare.

     The Forgiveness of Sins, is a slender work of theology that totals to 123 pages. Despite its brevity, Forgiveness well encapsulates the unique way Williams went about "doing theology." As always, he is sincere, personal, idiosyncratic, diffident.. This is not the glaring conviction of a C. S. Lewis or a G. K. Chesterton, but the amateur yet learned, at times abstruse speculation a man whose repeated admissions of his lack of ability are not the platitudes of a humility topos, but the palpable qualms of someone who sincerely feels himself to be in far over his head.

    Williams and I share several favorites, many of which figure prominently in this terse study. The book opens with a chapter entitled "Forgiveness in Shakespeare," while another chapter juxtaposes the prophetic books of William Blake and "Lady" Julian of Norwich, the latter virtually unknown at the time,* and yet another poses the question of forgiving the Nazis (whose victory seemed not unlikely in England at the time).

This is not Williams's masterpiece. That, depending on whom you ask, is either Descent into Hell, his finest novel; The Figure of Beatrice, a seriously overlooked work of Dante scholarship; or his Arthurian poetry, which even Eliot admitted was damn difficult. The Forgiveness of Sins is, however a great help to anyone interested in the operation and practice of this concept that may be called the central tenet of Christianity.

*Julian of Norwich did not emerge from obscurity until Eliot’s famous borrowing of “sin is behovely but all shall be well” in order to conclude The Four Quartets. It is quite likely that Eliot’s knowledge of Julian arrived to him from Williams. If you’re interested in this, check out Barbara Newman’s “Eliot’s Affirmative Way” (Modern Philology 2011; 108(3): 427-461).

1. Love, we have been told, is slow to anger; it is, as a result, slow to forgive, for it will not be in a hurry to assume that there is anything to forgive; and if there is, it will not be in a hurry to make a business of forgiving.
   
   
2. Guilt is in all; it is the guilty who forgives. Entreated to forgive, by another as guilty, it is his whole duty to restore reconciliation by any and every means, for ever and ever, without condition.
   
   
   
3. To forgive is indeed compassion, the suffering with another. To refuse to forgive is to refuse that other as himself or herself; it is to prefer a spectre of him, and to prefer a spectre is to be forever lost.
   
4. If it is forbidden to us to demand as a condition of our forgiveness any promise that the offence shall not be repeated...how much more is it forbidden us to make any other claims, to expect an extra kindness, to ask for an extra indulgence. And how all but impossible to avoid...how easy to claim consideration in return; or if not to claim, at least to expect; or if not to expect, at least to feel we have a right to-- somewhere, somehow, some right! Alas, none but what our injurer, of free choice, gives us.
   
5. We must forgive the evils we suffer because of the dreadful co-inherence of all mankind, even if we do not know who inflicts them; and we must be prepared to be forgiven when we discover, knowing wholly and wholly known, the results of our own sin.

Great Reads I: Žižek

Slavoj Žižek, The Fragile Absolute, Or Why the Christian Legacy is Worth Fighting For

Žižek is not a faithful Marxist in several aspects, being equally indebted to Hegel and Lacan; nevertheless, he has remained a staunch atheist. Yet, tabling the point that Marx was far more sympathetic toward religion-- "an expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering"-- than the infamous "opium" utterance (removed from context) credits him with, Žižek does break with orthodox Marxism in his defense of the Christian tradition as a force not only helpful but necessary to liberation. This, in essence, is the thesis of this relatively short book. This probably isn't the best place to start if you're new to Žižek, but then again, I don't think anywhere is. It demands far less knowledge of psychoanalysis than The Ticklish Subject, and-- this is the clincher for me-- less knowledge of German idealism than, say, The Fragile Absolute. Of course I can't take some of the pop culture references seriously (My Best Friend's Wedding, Kung-Fu Panda): it seems to be a far less annoying equivalent of pomo writers like David Foster-Wallace who think allusions to mass culture and long hair will render their poor writing less intolerably convoluted and pretentious. Still, as it's difficult to think of a cultural critic more widely-read by those outside the confines of academia, there is clearly a populist element here. I think.

1.  “In short, there is a way to avoid responsibility and/or guilt by, precisely, emphasizing one’s responsibility or too readily assuming one’s guilt in an exaggerated way, as in the case of the white male PC academic who emphasizes the guilt of racist phallogocentrism, and uses this admission of guilt as a stratagem not to face the way he, as a ‘radical’ intellectual, perfectly embodies the existing power relations towards which he pretends to be thoroughly critical.”
   
   
2. "Pre-Christian religions remain at the level of ‘wisdom’; they emphasize the insufficiency of every temporal finite object, and preach either moderation in pleasures or the withdrawal from temporal reality in favour of the True Divine Object which alone can provide Infinite Bliss. Christianity, on the contrary, offers Christ as a mortal-temporal individual, and insists that belief in the temporal Event of Incarnation is the only path to eternal truth and salvation. In this precise sense, Christianity is a ‘religion of Love’: in love, one singles out, focuses on, a finite temporal object which ‘means more than anything else.’"
   
3. "In contrast to the New Age attitude which ultimately reduces my Other/Neighbour to my mirror-image, or to a step along the path of my own self-realization. Judaism opens up a tradition in which an alien traumatic kernel forever persists in my Neighbour-- the Neighbour remains an inert, impenetrable, enigmatic presence that hystericizes me. (Another aspect of this same constellation-- the reverse of the fact that the Jewish God is emptied of jouissance, reduced to a self-referential Name, to the subjectivity of a pure, non-substantial enunciator-- is that the only terrain on which to demonstrate your devotion to the Divine Law is that of ‘love for thy neighbour,’ of your social-ethical activity-- again, there is no direct short cut to contact with the Divine dimension through the ‘inner path’ of mystical spiritual self-realization….This injunction [to love thy neighbour] prohibits nothing; rather, it calls for an activity beyond the confines of the Law, enjoining us always to do more and more to ‘love’ our neighbour not merely in his imaginary dimension...not merely in his symbolic dimension (the abstract symbolic subject of Rights), but as the Other in the very abyss of the Real, the Other as a properly inhuman partner, ‘irrational,’ radically evil, capricious, revolting, disgusting...in short, beyond the Good."
   
4. "Here [in the Pagan cosmos] the supreme Good is the global balance of Principles, while Evil stands for their derailment or derangement, for the excessive assertion of one Principle to the detriment of others (of the masculine Principle to the detriment of the feminine, of Reason to the detriment of Feeling…); the cosmic balance is then re-established through the work of Justice which, with its inexorable necessity, sets things straight again by crushing the derailed element. With regard to the social body, an individual is ‘good’ when he acts in accordance with his special place in the social edifice...and Evil occurs when some particular strata or individuals are no longer satisfied with this place. Christianity (and, in its own way, Buddhism) introduced into this global balanced cosmic Order a principle that is totally foreign to it...the principle according to which each individual has immediate access to universality...Buddha pointedly ignored castes and (after some hesitation, true) even sexual difference. And do not Christ’s scandalous words from Saint Luke’s Gospel point in the same direction: ‘If anyone come to me and does not hate his father and his mother, his wife and children, his brothers and sisters-- yes, even his own life-- he cannot be my disciple’ (14:26)? Here, of course, we are not dealing with a simple brutal hatred demanded by a cruel and jealous God: family relations stand here metaphorically for the entire socio-symbolic network, for any particular ethnic ‘substance’ that determines our place in the global Order of Things. "