The Great Transformation: The Beginning of Religious Traditions

I literally found Karen Armstrong's book on the street (Park Avenue in the 70s), with the name of an Upper East Side over-privileged girl-child inscribed on the front of the dust jacket in black felt-tipped pen. Her underlinings stop on page 5.
I have just finished the book. It took some patience, but Armstrong is a truly engaging writer. The mere fact of the phenomenon of the Axial Age when Judaism, Greek religions, Hinduism, Confucianism, Daoist, and Buddhism (and soon after Christianity and Islam) are evolving all at the same time is extraordinary in itself. The most familiar to me were the Greeks; the least were the Chinese. The most engaging were the Jews- I had no idea that there were Jews still worshipping gods other than Yahweh long after they reached Canaan.

Snakes

I don't like serpents. They're right up there with rodents in my personal bestiary of horrors. Don't get to use "bestiary" much, do you? So I've had two encounters with snakes-on-the-page lately. First, I spent many Sundays in church as a child. These masses usually but not always contained readings from the Hebrew Bible. But the Catholic lectionary is pretty limited; it tends to be the same passages read over and over again. The Episcopal Church has a much wider selection, so I;m often running up again Hebrew Bible stories that I don't know. So a couple of weeks ago, I'm listening to this reading from Numbers (21:4-9, for the more Bible literate), and the Israelites are journeying to the land of milk and honey, and some of them are complaining that they're thirsty because there's no water. And what does God do? He send "poisonous serpents" that bite people so they die. What? I don't remember any serpents after Joseph turns the Pharoah's staff into one. This really blew my mind.
So this week I'm reading the New Yorker and there's an article by Burkhard Bilger ("The Natural World: Swamp Things," link above) about exotic animals in Florida that have escaped from pet stores or homes, and are living in the wild there, many in the Everglades. The most troubling of these animals (to me) are the Burmese pythons. There are a lot of them already, and they're breeding. At one point he mentions that there are so many that if you account for a hundred years of global warming, the pythons could be living in New York City by 2100. This is so freaked me out I had insomnia.

Ways of Seeing

Somehow I lost a contact lens on Thursday night. It was the last lens I had for the worse of my two bad eyes. So I have been wearing glasses since then. It takes my regular glasses plus reading glasses for me to thread a needle, much to my boyfriend's amusement.
I assume going back to wearing glasses for awhile is good for my eyes. I'm fairly careful of them (wash them every day), and they aren't too scratched. But I don't see as well without the contact lenses, particularly detail. I had a bad reaction to them last year (it turned out to be the solution I was using), and my ophthalmologist told me that was it. If I develop a reaction to the current solution, then no more contacts. I see this current lens deprivation as a foretaste of that inevitability, and I don't like it. With any luck, I can pick up my new, special-ordered lenses from Cohen's on Friday, and happily be done with this for awhile.

My Favorite Blog, Part II

There is a memorial to Robert Guskind on Gowanus Lounge (see sidebar). There was also an article about him and the fate of the blog in Sunday's Times (link above). Opinion seems to be split on whether the blog should go forward. I for one think it should. It was originally very much in Bob's voice, but as he added more collaborators over the past year, that changed. My bog-reading is not the same.

My Favorite Blog

My favorite blog was edited by a man I've never met, Bob Guskind (though I have emailed him several times). Bob cast a wide journalistic net for Gowanus Lounge, all about and all over Brooklyn. Moving to Brooklyn was difficult for me, after 20 years in Manhattan. I was forced to leave because I couldn't find an apartment I could afford with room for both my bed and my books. But Gowanus Lounge made the transition possible. I was an avid reader of it- every weekend I'd plow through the week's postings. And Guskind was a kind man- it showed through his writing.
This morning I received multiple emails from the neighborhood listserves I'm on that Guskind was found dead in his apartment yesterday. Above is a link to the somewhat snarky Brooklyn Paper obituary. It's not clear what the cause of death was. I didn't know him except through his writing, but in that respect I feel like I knew him very well. The photo is by Louise Crawford.

Mumbai

There is the oddest description of animal cruelty I've ever read in the February 23rd issue of the New Yorker (link above, but you have to register to read it in the archives). Katherine Boo writes a Letter from Mumbai about the airport slums juxtaposed with the opening night of "Slumdog Millionaire." In describing the daughter of the man who owns the local whore house, Boo writes about her brother "who was ugly and liked to make lizards smoke cigarettes before setting them on fire." And I thought the kid I heard about who executed cats on a scaffold was weird.

Happy Birthday, KW

I didn't realize it until I heard it on the radio just now, but today is Kurt Weill's 109th birthday. He is one of my favorite composers. A cantor's son, he studied composition with Busoni, wrote many great songs, not to mention Die Dreigroschen Oper, and married Lotte Lenya twice. Weill died when he was 50- not old by today's standards- in 1950. Perhaps Weill alone of all the German emigres became an American artist- he embraced American musical theatre in a way that Mann did not embrace the novel, for example. And his work still resonates; not just Bobby Darin's "Mack the Knife," but Teresa Stratas' interpretation of "I'm a Stranger Here Myself" and Elvis Costello's "Lost in the Stars." Not everyone likes Weill, but I think he's unfairly neglected. Have you ever heard Walter Huston sing "Venus and Mars" from Knickbocker Holiday? Or Lenya herself sing "Surabaya Johnny"? Or Mary Martin sing "It's Him"?