Mark Five: Weird
Posted: January 21, 2018 Filed under: Christianity, religion Leave a commentFifth in our series about the Book of Mark:
Mark One, about the scraps of Mark on Papyrus One.
Mark Two, an intro to Mark, and what’s going on with it.
Mark Three, about “The Secret Gospel of Mark.”
Mark Four, about J. B. Phillips.
As a kid the first time I heard The Book of Mark was read aloud to me, in deliberate boring tone, in Catholic church, a notoriously stiff and elderly kind of place, not all that appealing to the average child.
On the plus side, you did get a good education in a way in the Bible and some aspects of human behavior.
Wanted to stand up and cheer when I got to this part of Ross Douthat and Tyler Cowen’s conversation. Connecting Catholic theology to what the Guy says on the hillside in Galilee in the Gospels takes insane mental labyrinth building. A fun project in a way but not what the Guy himself seems to describe as the way forward.
Take, for example, Mark Five. (Turns out we’ve discussed it before).
Here’s what the NIV gives as the rough sections of this chapter.
Jesus Restores a Demon-Possessed Man
Jesus Raises a Dead Girl and Heals a Sick Woman
JB Philips gives it:
Jesus meets a violent lunatic
Faith is followed by healing
Weird, supernatural type stuff. How’re you gonna deal with this? Unpacking the events of Mark Five could probably be a career for a theologian.
Hard to make your church last 2,000 years without sanding the edges down a bit I guess but when you go back to the source you can sometimes feel like what’s missing is the compelling, almost alarming strangeness of the story.
Let’s say only that by Chapter Five of his book, Mark’s Jesus is unstoppable, coursing with power that flows almost like electricity.
If Mark is avail they should hire him for a Marvel movie.
Next time:
PTA
Posted: January 19, 2018 Filed under: actors, writing Leave a comment
Liked this quote from PTA’s AMA where he says the script is “just a temporary thing”
Twelve Tweets
Posted: January 14, 2018 Filed under: tweets Leave a comment
source
Resent the feeling I’m writing for @jack for free on his website, so I’m putting my Twitter-length thoughts here.
Anecdotally feel people are getting MORE into astrology as some demonstration or fuck you and I love it!
Already pissed about my smartass grandkids giving me some revisionist take on how Trump “actually did a lot of good”
I find it very boring to just sit and watch TV. I don’t think I’m alone and I think this will lead to enormous changes.
Big Bang Theory is a less a comedy than a kind of therapy that helps American moms and dads love their gay sons
Feels impossible to express my main opinion, which is we don’t need everyone’s damn opinion on everything
What if Oprah runs and loses to Donald Trump?
Saying “you make me laugh” can either be loving or mean
My worst most evil opinion is I can’t help kind of liking Steve Bannon because he’s funny
Hard to really wrap your head around how unnecessary the movie The Trip To Spain is. But here I am watching it.
Always enjoy the importance Drudge places on Bret Easton Ellis’s annual movie picks
Heard a sound outside like NRRNRNRNRNRNRN — it was a truck sucking the piss and shit out of the Port-A-Potties at the construction site!
Fun to try to eat a salad like it’s a bowl of chips
Mark Four
Posted: January 14, 2018 Filed under: bible, Mark Leave a comment
this is the fourth in our series on the Book Of Mark.
Mark One, about the scraps of Mark on Papyrus One.
Mark Two, an intro to Mark, and what’s going on with it.
Mark Three, about “The Secret Gospel of Mark,” and now Mark Four, about J. B. Phillips.
Also He said to them, “Is a lamp brought to be put under a basket or under a bed? Is it not to be set on a lampstand? 22 For there is nothing hidden which will not be revealed, nor has anything been kept secret but that it should come to light.23 If anyone has ears to hear, let him hear.”
That’s how the King James Version does Mark 4:21. Here’s how J. B. Philips does it:
Then he said to them,
“Is a lamp brought into the room to be put under a bucket or underneath the bed? Surely it’s place is on the lamp-stand! There is nothing hidden which is not meant to be made perfectly plain one day, and there are no secrets which are not meant one day to be common knowledge. If a man has ears he should use them!
Wanting to know more about the guy I was trusting to translate my Mark for me, I read J. B.’s book:
It’s good and short and clearly written, much like Mark. J. B.’s strongest point is that the Gospels seem true to him because, well, who could make this stuff up?
That kind of reminded me of the several times in the Quran where Allah says, hey, if you don’t believe this, let’s see you write a Quran.
Surprised to find, in the next Phillips I picked up, a description of my workplace.
I can’t say The Price Of Success was exactly a page-turner. JB Phillips had a hard childhood, but through diligence earned himself a place at Cambridge, became an Anglican churchman, and started translating The New Testament during World War II.
No surprise that he was pals, or at least sometime correspondents, with C. S. Lewis.
I often heard Lewis’s Screwtape Letters recommended for young Christians in my youth. When I finally got to the book (audiobook) I found it a really stiff and unattractive vision. How did Christianity, which, when you get back to the source, was unquestionably weird, get claimed by stiff collar types like C. S. Lewis?
I found Ring Of Truth to be a more compelling read.
In Price of Success, Phillips is very open and honest about his struggles with depression.
I
No doubt hearing this, from a respected Christian leader in 1984, was really helpful to people. The book was published two years after his death.
Am I allowed you quote you by the way, J. B.?
Thanks!
NEXT TIME:
Mark Five: Strange Tales Of Jesus!
Mary Anne Trump
Posted: January 6, 2018 Filed under: America Since 1945, Ireland, Irish traditional music, mothers Leave a comment
One of our most popular posts is on Fred Trump, outrageous, villainous, smiling agent of chaos much like his son.
But we never really thought about Trump’s mother. Mothers should be off limits maybe? Even Trumps have mothers. A hasty misreading of this Kellyanne Conway quote:
Got us to look into it.
Stunned to find Trump’s mother was a Gaelic-speaking immigrant from a remote Scottish island.
Hailing from the Outer Hebrides
Mary Anne MacLeod was born in Tong, on Lewis in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland, United Kingdom, in a pebbledashcroft house numbered “5 Tong”
Tong
She was raised in a Scottish Gaelic-speaking household with her second language being English, which she learned at Tong school where it was reported she was a star pupil. Mary attended the school up until the eighth grade. Her father was a crofter, fisherman and compulsory officer (truancy officer). According to one profile, she was “brought up in an environment marked by isolation, privation and gloom.”
Wow. She’s pretty much from the Iron Islands.
You can see her interviewed in 1994 on Irish television, RTé, here. She has an interesting accent. She speaks of her love of Irish and Scottish music.
She claims Trump is meeting Steven Spielberg?
Dreamtime and Dreaming
Posted: January 4, 2018 Filed under: Australia Leave a comment
This book is absolutely great. A+. 
Read it because my explorations of Aboriginal art
led me to want to know more about the Dreamtime and the Dreaming concept.
Stanner is so thoughtful and patient. This book is worth it for the essay on Aboriginal humor alone:
What do Aborigines think is funny?
One of Stanner’s points is the “abiding” quality of Aboriginal life: the sense that the world is not necessary here for us to change and improve it. As Robert Manne says in his intro,
for them changelessness was both the desired and the anticipated state of the world.
Very pleased this book was published by my own Australian publisher, Black Inc Books
Leading lights of Australian lit.
Some of W. E. H. Stanner’s essays were originally published by Australian National University Press as White Man Got No Dreaming (1979). That’s not true, I thought, so I picked up a book about white man’s dreaming.
We certainly do have different ways of thinking about dreaming, and Dreamtime. 
Architecture
Posted: January 2, 2018 Filed under: architecture Leave a comment
Reviewing my notes and recalling that one of my projects over the holidays was designing a house.
Training Literature Field Unit No. 1
Posted: December 24, 2017 Filed under: America Since 1945, photography, the ocean, Wonder Trail 1 Comment
Helytimes began in 2012. Our idea was
- become good at writing for the Internet
- a writer should have a website
- have a space to collect, digest and share items of interest.
We’ve tried to come up with a mission statement or guiding purpose, but the truth is, this is stuff we had to get out of our head.
The healthiest thing to do was share it.
The best way to put it might be a place to share crazy interesting things we’ve come across.
Since then we’ve published over 1,050 posts. We’re just now starting to get good at it, in our opinion.
Here are the twenty-one most popular posts:
The moral here is probably that we should start a local LA news-and-takes site written by other people.
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Sundown, Gordon Lightfoot (1974)
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Mountaineering Movies on Netflix Instant, Ranked
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Fred Trump
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Cinderella and Interrogation Technique
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The Great Debates
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Karl Ove Knausgaard
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Fascinated by: Ray Dalio
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How Big Was Mexico City in 1519?
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American Historical Figure Who Reminds Me Of Trump
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Losing The War by Lee Sandlin
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Conversations With Kennedy
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Oil Wells In National Parks
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THE WONDER TRAIL
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Gay Hobo Slang
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Vertigo Sucks
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Jackie Smoking Pregnant
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The story of Cahokia
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Ireland should take in two million refugees
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Twenty Greatest Australian Artistic Accomplishments of All Time
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The White House Pool
One lesson here might be to have more local LA journalism written by other people. Keep meaning to start a whole site for that but I do have a full-time job plus several other projects.
In our opinion the most successful post on Helytimes was
Record Group 80: Series: General Photographic File Of the Department of the Navy, 1943-1958
although it didn’t crack the top 21, just felt like a time where we added something of value to the Internet and readers responded.
It’s about the work of the Naval Aviation Photographic Unit, also known as the Training Literature Field Unit No. 1, assembled by the great photographer Edward Steichen.
One thread of Helytimes is attempts to reach into the past and find the sources that give us understanding of the past.
Two personal favorites:
Everything is something.
and
Special Snowflakes
This has been the annual performance review and address to the Helytimes readership:
That photo taken by one of Steichen’s guys, Wayne Miller:
Thought this was interesting
Posted: December 22, 2017 Filed under: business, China Leave a comment
Ever heard of Shijiazhuang? Well it has ten million people.
Here’s an essay by Puzhong Yao, who tells of his journey from there to Goldman Sachs, and his love for Costco:
It seemed like whatever I wished would simply come true. But inside, I feared that one day these glories would pass. After all, not long ago, I was at the bottom of my class in China. And if I could not even catch up with my classmates in a city few people have even heard of, how am I now qualified to go to Cambridge University or Goldman? Have I gotten smarter? Or is it just that British people are stupider than the Chinese?
With these mixed thoughts, I began working as a trader at Goldman in 2007.
(ht Tyler Cowen)
One class was about strategy. It focused on how corporate mottos and logos could inspire employees. Many of the students had worked for nonprofits or health care or tech companies, all of which had mottos about changing the world, saving lives, saving the planet, etc. The professor seemed to like these mottos. I told him that at Goldman our motto was “be long-term greedy.” The professor couldn’t understand this motto or why it was inspiring. I explained to him that everyone else in the market was short-term greedy and, as a result, we took all their money. Since traders like money, this was inspiring.
Rupert
Posted: December 19, 2017 Filed under: Australia Leave a comment
Murdoch is, in person, charming. Everyone agrees. You get a glimpse of this in the account of working for him written by Philip Townsend, who was his butler in London during the 1980s. (Townsend had a dog who died, and whom he kept in Murdoch’s freezer.) When Murdoch made the switch to living more healthily – influenced by the fact that his father died at 67 – he did so by announcing to his butler: ‘Phil, I’m into yin and yang and all that shit.’ This charm is no small factor in his success, and comes across in many of the stories people tell about him, and in some of the things he says about himself. ‘I am sober after lunch, and in some parts of Fleet Street, that makes you a genius,’ he once said.
from this 2004 roundup on Rupert Murdoch by the great John Lanchester.
Elizabeth Warren, Pocahontas, and The Pow Wow Chow Cookbook
Posted: December 14, 2017 Filed under: America Since 1945, Boston, native america, New England, politics, presidents 1 Comment
What is the deal here when Trump calls Elizabeth Warren Pocahontas?
At Helytimes, we like to go back to the source.
Sometime between 1987 and 1992 Elizabeth Warren put down on a faculty directory that she was Native American. Says Snopes:
it is true that while Warren was at U. Penn. Law School she put herself on the “Minority Law Teacher” list as Native American) in the faculty directory of the Association of American Law Schools
This became a story in 2012, when Elizabeth Warren was running for Senate against Scott Brown. In late April of that year, The Boston Herald, a NY Post style tabloid, dug up a 1996 article in the Harvard Crimson by Theresa J. Chung that says this:
Of 71 current Law School professors and assistant professors, 11 are women, five are black, one is Native American and one is Hispanic, said Mike Chmura, spokesperson for the Law School.
Although the conventional wisdom among students and faculty is that the Law School faculty includes no minority women, Chmura said Professor of Law Elizabeth Warren is Native American.
Asked about it, here’s what Elizabeth Warren said:
From there the story kinda spun out of control. It came up in the Senate debate, and there were ads about it on both sides.
A genealogist looked into it, and determined that Warren was 1/32nd Cherokee, or about as Cherokee as Helytimes is West African. But then even that was disputed.
Her inability to name any specific Native American ancestor has kept the story alive, though, as pundits left and right have argued the case. Supporters touted her as part Cherokee after genealogist Christopher Child of the New England Historic Genealogical Society said he’d found a marriage certificate that described her great-great-great-grandmother, who was born in the late 18th century, as a Cherokee. But that story fell apart once people looked at it more closely. The Society, it turned out, was referencing a quote by an amateur genealogist in the March 2006 Buracker & Boraker Family History Research Newsletters about an application for a marriage certificate.
Well, Elizabeth Warren won. Now Scott Brown is Donald Trump’s Ambassador to New Zealand, where he’s doing an amazing job.
source: The Guardian
The part of the story that lit me up was this:
The best argument she’s got in her defense is that, based on the public evidence so far, she doesn’t appear to have used her claim of Native American ancestry to gain access to anything much more significant than a cookbook; in 1984 she contributed five recipes to the Pow Wow Chow cookbook published by the Five Civilized Tribes Museum in Muskogee, signing the items, “Elizabeth Warren — Cherokee.”
“I like my corn with olives!” source
What is the best way to handle it, the best strategy, when the President is treating you like a third grade bully, repeatedly and publicly calling you a mean name?
Best advice to someone getting bullied? I googled:
We would amend “don’t show your feelings” to stay calm. We would urge any kid to put “tell an adult” as a last resort.
A suggestion:
- if the problem persists, hit back as hard as possible, calmly but forcefully, at the bully’s weakest, tenderest points.
Such a Lisa Simpson / Nelson vibe to Warren / Trump. Are all our elections gonna be Lisa vs. Nelson for awhile?
from this 2003 episode:
Lisa easily wins the election. Worried by her determination and popularity, the faculty discusses how to control her.
Empty Bucket Land
Posted: December 13, 2017 Filed under: the California Condition, the world around us Leave a comment
Insane?
Posted: December 11, 2017 Filed under: food 1 Comment
Deluxe mac & cheese costs LESS than regular mac & cheese?
There must be a term in economics for where the fancier version is less desirable than the regular ol’ version and ends up less expensive.
I’ll pay more for minions, sure.
Witch Hunts
Posted: December 11, 2017 Filed under: Boston, history, New England, North Shore Leave a comment
In 1693 Cotton Mather wrote a book called Wonders Of The Invisible World, defending the Salem Witch Trials.
A few years later a guy named Robert Calef wrote More Wonders Of The Invisible World, which was kind of a sarcastic slam on Cotton Mather.
Calef objected to proceedings that lead to “a Biggotted Zeal, stirring up a Blind and most Bloody rage, not against Enemies, or Irreligious Proffligate Persons, But (in Judgment of Charity, and to view) against as Vertuous and Religious as any they have left behind them in this Country, which have suffered as Evil doers with the utmost extent of rigour.”
Can’t say I got a ton out of the book, but I did get some good stuff from the introduction, by Chadwick Hansen. 
If a witch is attacking you boil a pin in urine:
Even Chadwick Hansen appears ultimately baffled by what Robert Calef was up to, since much of his book is lies about how Cotton Mather fondled up a girl named Margaret Rule while curing her of bewitchment.
Hansen attempts to provide the context to a baffling historical period. 
Later Mather would write a book called The Right Way To Shake Off A Viper:
Wild times in old Massachusetts. Few people who were taken to the Salem Witch Museum in childhood ever forgot it.
Previous coverage of witch hunts.
Google satellite views of California landscapes
Posted: December 11, 2017 Filed under: the California Condition Leave a comment
are cool.
Mark Three: Secret Mark?
Posted: December 10, 2017 Filed under: Christianity, Mark, religion Leave a commentLatest posts in our series on the Book of Mark, one of the weirdest and most popular books of all time.
Mark One
on Papyrus One
Mark Two
Why Mark?
and now:
MARK THREE
Did Mark look like this? by Bronzino
Or like this?
or this? by Mantegna
Here we see the Mar Saba monastery in Israel, twelve miles outside Jerusalem:
Cool structure. Would make a dope boutique hotel.
This is where Morton Smith supposedly found a
previously unknown letter of Clement of Alexandria transcribed into the endpapers of a 17th-century printed edition of the works of Ignatius of Antioch
The letter, which would’ve been from like the year 200, says (I paraphrase) “hey there’s a more spiritual, weirder version of the Gospel of Mark floating around, heads up.”
Was there a “Secret Gospel Of Mark”? Says Wiki:
Ron Cameron (1982) and Helmut Koester (1990) argued that Secret Mark preceded the canonical Mark, and that the canonical Mark is in fact an abbreviation of Secret Mark. This would explain the narrative discontinuity above. John Dominic Crossan (1985) has also been supportive of these views of Koester: “I consider that canonical Mark is a very deliberate revision of Secret Mark.”
An interesting question for sure. As Wiki says:
The process of canonization of the New Testament was complex and lengthy.
Mark?
The version I’m using is this one:
I don’t think the late J. B. will mind my excerpting his helpful introduction:
When J. B. talks about “the manuscript of Mark,” I’m not sure what he means. Wiki tells me the oldest complete version is the Codex Vaticanus,
and the Codex Sinaiticus, which they found at St. Catherine’s Monastery:
which would also make a cool boutique hotel. The Codex got taken to Russia, and then:
In 1933, the Soviet Union sold the codex to the British Museum for £100,000 raised by public subscription (worth £6.5 million in 2017)
You can read it if you want online.
The oldest known written scrap of Mark appears to be Papyrus 45:
which came from who knows where. American-Anglo-Irish industrialist Chester Beatty, the “king of copper,” was mad for papyri apparently and bought tons of them from illegal dealers.
His first job in the mines earned him $2 per day as a ‘mucker’, clearing away rock and soil from mine tunnels. He was quickly promoted to supervisor of the Kektonga Silver Mine.
Alfred Chester Beatty by Colin Colahan.
© Mrs. Monique Colahan. From the Chester Beatty Library website.
Papyrus 45 is now in Chester’s library/museum in Dublin:
source: Wiki user Charles Curling
NEXT TIME in our series on Mark:
Translator J. B. Phillips, who started working on the New Testament in a bomb shelter during the London Blitz.
Lou Harrison’s Centennial
Posted: December 8, 2017 Filed under: advice, music, the California Condition Leave a comment
an email from Redcat informs me that there will be a concert this Saturday as part of the ongoing celebration of Lou Harrison’s centennial.
Out in Joshua Tree there is the Harrison House, a residency and performance space.
Built with straw bale architecture:
from Wiki user Jonathan Cross, “Straw Bale Construction.”
Checked out Lou’s music on Spotify and found it fantastic and soothing and terrific.
Lou Harrison:
Cheers to Lou.
Books I got rid of
Posted: December 7, 2017 Filed under: books 2 Comments
Pained me to get rid of it. But look how long it is!
Let’s be reasonable!
I hate giving away books. I wish I could read them all.
This one I got because I saw John Laurence on Ken Burns and Lynn Novick’s The Vietnam War
and kind of related to him. 
But I mean, these books’re spilling over into in my kitchen!
The Idiot I read and loved, that is my second, demolished copy on the right. The Other Paris can stay.
This book is incredible. The part about the Judge and The Seducer should be its own book.
This one I got because it was recommended someplace. Again, I regret parting with it and perhaps we’ll meet again.
This book I got because I wanted to track down the origin of JFK’s alleged claim to Macmillan that if he didn’t have a woman every few days he got headaches. Unfortunately the source appears to be yet another book! Goodbye, this book. Macmillan’s life worth a peak into.
I like Melbourne a lot. But I did feel this book was attempting to exaggerate the charm somewhat.
For me the best thing to do in Melbourne is take a train to the countryside or drive the Great Ocean Road. No need to oversell Melbourne, it has some cool buildings.
Flinders Street station is a personal fave.
Discussed in a review by Thomas Ricks. Pickett’s Charge is interesting, and I was curious as to how you write a whole book about what was pretty much four thousand guys getting blown to pieces.
But then I was like I don’t want to read a whole book about four thousand guys getting blown to pieces.
A page selected at random:
One reason why there are so many statues of Lee is that he really did do some cool shit. Something like this really did happen:
But whatever. Remember he did just get four thousand guys blown to pieces.
Phillip Thomas Tucker I believe makes the case that Pickett’s Charge wasn’t as crazy as it later seemed and Lee almost won.
A tough guy detective type book recommended by fellow tough guy detective type writer Don Winslow. Interested in tough guy detective type books. But I just didn’t get to this one and it’s probable I won’t ever so best to pass it along to a new home.
Like I say, I am sad to part with any book.
I thank these books for their service!
If you want these they should be at Goodwill on Beverly.
TWIST:
Two books got a last minute reprieve!
Is this interesting: The Usual Suspects
Posted: December 5, 2017 Filed under: actors Leave a comment
Kevin Spacey first came to my (and many people’s) attention playing a character in The Usual Suspects who pretends to be harmless if annoying, but who is actually an evil monster.
Now, Kevin Spacey the real man, is revealed to have been pretending to be harmless if annoying when he was in fact a bit of an evil monster.
Interesting?
McPeak vs Earthman
Posted: December 5, 2017 Filed under: America Since 1945, war Leave a comment
Have we entered a new way of war in which air power isn’t as important? That this is America’s asymmetric challenge and air power isn’t as wanted?
If so, how do we overcome that? How do we get past that, the fact that our adversaries have figured out how we fight?
Merrill McPeak: Well, it’s not so much that the adversaries figured out how we fight.
That’s dead easy. Everybody can see it. I mean, we don’t make any mystery of it.
What we’ve done is taken the risk out of the kind of operations that we do now with officers.
I mean, we’ve got stealth airplanes. So I’m sitting in a stealth airplane and I’m on super-cruise. In the F-22, you’re cruising at 1.7 to 1.8 (mach) in a stealthy machine.
Who’s going to touch you?
I mean, I never felt vulnerable when I was flying an airplane. Period. Not against any kind of earthman.
Got a lot out of this looooong interview with former Air Force chief of staff and Ken Burns & Lynn Novick’s Vietnam War star Merrill McPeak in the San Diego Union Tribune, (ht Tom Ricks of course).
McPeak on Boyd, whom we have discussed:
So they got the argument a little bit wrong. But then along comes Boyd with the OODA Loop and some philosophy kind of concepts and people said, ‘Wow, a fighter pilot with a brain!’
They tended to listen to him when in many respects he was a failed officer and even a failed human being in some ways.
Carl Prine: There’s an entire cottage industry built around him now.
Merrill McPeak: I was at Nellis the night he jumped out of an F-100. I was a student there and he was an instructor in the Weapons School. He had a bet that he could get anybody from his 6 o’clock to his 12 o’clock in 40 seconds, or whatever it was.
He tried his special little trick and the airplane quit on him. It overstretched the hydraulic system, the plumbing, the flight controls, and the airplane went crazy and he had to jump out.
Here he is coming back to Nellis and they went out to pick him up in a chopper. And he’s dragging his parachute back to Nellis. He didn’t look so good that night.
The general likes Mozart:
Carl Prine: I had this image of you, as a general, appreciating the grand, comprehensive, overwhelming symphony and yet you prefer the smaller pieces? The elegant and tiny works?
Merrill McPeak: Well, you know the big G minor symphony? Ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta, ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta. That’s the famous one, the 40. It’s in there with Jupiter and the later symphonies.
But Symphony 25 has that crystal clear quality to it. If it were a stream, you could look clear through it to the bottom.
There’s something magical about it.
Helytimes 
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