Not having biked in almost five years (my last bike rides were through rough neighborhoods in East Oakland, and while nothing ever happened to me there, I came to realize that there were probably smarter things to do than to ride through those hard streets on a new bike, not to mention more efficient public transportation-oriented ways of getting to and from my house), the roughly 5-mile round-trip bike ride I took with Steve to the Malletts Creek Library this afternoon was at first a little nerve-wracking, but it was worth it. I think I’ll be biking a lot more often from now on.
Daily Archives: 17-Jul-04
Six Words
Page Six reports on a contest in which 25 celeb-writers were asked by BlackBook Magazine to write a short story in no more than six words. (This was evidently a follow-up on an episode in which Ernest Hemingway, given the same challenge, wrote: “For sale: Baby shoes, never used.”)
Here’s Rick Moody’s response: “Grass, cow, calf, milk, cheese, France.”
Um. I don’t know. Dale Peck says that Rick Moody is “the worst writer of his generation,” and as much as I loathe Dale Peck’s writing, I’m beginning to wonder if he’s not on to something.
John Updike’s response was: “Forgive me!” “What for?” “Never mind.” Meh.
Norman Mailer’s was not bad: “Satan—Jehovah—15 rounds. A draw.”
Irvine Welsh’s was pretty good: “Eyeballed me, killed him. Slight exaggeration.”
Well, nobody topped Hemingway. Of course.
The Rock on Which It Was Built
From The Reformation by Diarmaid MacCulloch:
‘They had no chance of knowing the strange tangled history of the Christian Church: how a small Jewish sect had separated from all the other Jewish identities of first-century Palestine after it proclaimed its founder, Jesus, to be the Messiah whom all Jews sought. Over four centuries the little sect had grown into the Mediterranean-wide community that was Christianity, and after 312 C.E. it had grown powerful when it allied with the emperors of Rome. Judaism and Christianity were fully distinct from the end of the first century C.E., and their relationship thereafter was tangled and often bitter. Though Christians shared with the Jews a sacred book of Hebrew Scripture they called the Old Testament, and they could never forget their debt to the Jews, they frequently resented it and turned their resentment into condemnation of the parent religion. They borrowed from the law contained in the Hebrew Scripture to suite themselves: They invented a distinction between moral, judicial, and ceremonial law that was wholly absent from the intentions of the writers, labeling what they wanted to use as moral law, selecting at will from what they defined as judicial law, and relegating ceremonial law to Jewish history.’
[Emphasis added.]
‘Borrowed,’ ‘invented,’ ‘wholly absent from intentions of writers, ‘selected at will.’ Sounds familiar.
Ouch
My hands hurt worse than ever. I don’t understand it. They were fine before May and then grew steadily worse in June. And now I’m beyond frustrated with the situation.
I’ve never felt this kind of consistent pain and achiness before. Have appointments with physical therapy and the surgeon in two weeks. Can’t wait, believe it or not.