Having received a Kindle Touch for Christmas, I thought I’d offer a quick review and comparison with the Kindle 3 (now known as the Kindle Keyboard). I’ve also included a list of gestures near the end, since I’ve not been able to find one elsewhere.

My wife got a Kindle 3 over the summer and we both fell in love with it immediately. It is an extremely well-designed device that can make reading digital text virtually as easy and natural as reading on paper. I’m not one to spend a lot of money on ebooks–though Amazon does have an impressive library of them–so mostly we’ve used it for reading classics, which are generally free since they are out of copyright. Amazon has a number of them itself, and many more are available through Project Gutenberg. I’ve also used it here and there for academic reading, either of classic texts like Wellhausen’s Prolegomena, contemporary articles that are available as PDFs through the university library, or personal notes and documents.

Sometimes this works great, other times less so. For documents that are not already formatted for the Kindle (.mobi), you either have to load them unconverted, which limits their functionality, or use Amazon’s conversion service, which is great but not without problems. One need only email the document to them with “convert” in the subject line and it will be sent directly to your Kindle within a few minutes, but unfortunately it only really works effectively with Word documents and searchable PDFs that are exclusively in English, and it can’t handle Hebrew or other right to left scripts at all. Even German comes out a bit garbled when converted, and transliterated semitic languages are unreadable. In all cases, original formatting will tend to be lost or cause display issues. Unconverted PDFs can be loaded instead, which will preserve the original scripts, formatting and images, but such cannot then be searched or highlighted, and unless they are saved to a smaller page-size to begin with (as with many journal articles), they tend to be too small to view comfortably without scrolling.

The Kindle Touch shares most of these advantages and disadvantages with the Kindle 3, but it does have a couple of additional limitations. In particular, there is no landscape mode, and you cannot highlight across a page break. The first is the more irritating, as unconverted PDFs, as I said, often cannot be viewed comfortably as whole pages, and work better in landscape mode (half a page viewed at a time). It is unclear why they deleted this feature–perhaps it would have made the page-turn gesture recognition software more complicated?–but hopefully they will bring it back for future models, or preferably through a software update (unlikely?). As for highlighting across the page, there is a workaround: simply decrease the font side using the pinch gesture until the full quote is on one page, make your highlight, then restore the text to its usual size.

Apart from those limitations, the Touch is in almost all other ways an improvement over the Keyboard version. Besides being smaller and lighter (it easily fits in my jeans pocket), while still keeping the same 6” screen size, the new burnished aluminum look is much more attractive, yet is still rubberized so as not to slip in the hands or feel cold. I can comfortably use it with one hand, including page-turning and for longer periods of time, though I find that I most often tend to use my other hand to turn the page.

In general, I find the touch interface much quicker and more natural for navigation and highlighting than the Kindle 3′s directional pad, not to mention saving a great deal of clicking. Simply being able to press and drag from the first word to the last is much easier, and adding a note is no more difficult with the on-screen keyboard than with the tiny little hardware keyboard on the Kindle 3, which I always found rather ugly. Granted those with big fingers will find either one difficult, but personally, I find I can type a bit faster with the on-screen keyboard. Neither model is conducive to extended note-taking, however.  The only real downside of the Touch on this score, and it is not a small one, is that there does not appear to be any way to make corrections within a note except to delete everything that follows and retype it. Tapping at a point earlier in the note does not move the cursor, which seems a rather glaring omission from the software. At least with the Kindle 3 you could move the cursor with the directional pad.

The E-Ink display is noticeably clearer and brighter over against the Kindle 3, since the touch capability it provided by inferred scanners built into the bezel, rather than built into the screen itself. This also means that unlike an iPhone or iPad,  it works without direct skin contact, so you can read with gloves on or even use the back of a pen or other pointer. The latter can be helpful if you have thick fingers, though the touch sensitivity does not appear to be quite as good with a pen as with my finger. The downside is that bumping the screen (e.g. with your sleeve) will be treated the same as your fingers would be.

In general, the touch capability is reasonably accurate, but not quite as good as I would have hoped. You really have to hit the on-screen buttons directly in the middle to activate them, and it does not always recognize my taps to turn the page, while other times I apparently have not held long enough to begin highlighting and instead accidentally turn the page. Presumably that will improve simply by getting more used to the device. There are also a small number of gestures built in, though for some reason Amazon does not (yet) appear to have any documentation for these. Trial and error and some help from Google has turned up the following (note that not all of these work with all kinds of documents, but with standard ebooks they normally do; if you know of any further gestures I’ve missed, please let me know!):

• Tap the Page moves forward one page
• Tap the Right Edge moves back one page
• Tap the Top Edge accesses Back, Search, Menu and Formatting Options
• Tap the Top Right Corner adds or removes a bookmark.
• Swipe Left moves forward one page
• Swipe Right moves back one page
• Swipe Up jumps to the next chapter (or section break)
• Swipe Down jumps to the previous chapter (or section break)
• Pinch Inwards reduces the font size one level
• Pinch Outwards increases the font size one level
• Press-and-Hold (2 seconds) accesses a pop-up dictionary definition with additional options
• Press (2 seconds) then Drag adds a highlight, then opens a pop-up dialogue with additional options. Close with a Tap.

The Swipe page turns are not really necessary when reading a book, since a simple tap accomplishes the same goal. I tend to do it anyway, though, as it feels more like turning a real page, and makes the refresh delay seem less unnatural to me. The Kindle also seems slightly more accurate at recognizing swipes than taps. On the Home Screen, where tapping a book title opens it (and press-and-hold accesses additional options), swiping appears to be the only means of turning the page. One issue I have had, and at first irritated me a great deal, is that occasionally a stray bump is interpreted as a Swipe Up, which jumps you to the next chapter. If this happens though, you can simply tap the top of the screen to access the menu, then click the Back button (looks like an arrow) to return to your previous position–much easier than trying to find your place by paging back repeatedly!

Accessing the menu does take an extra step compared to the Kindle 3, and also adds a bit of extra time for the additional page refresh. Indeed, the page refresh speed in general appears to be slightly slower with the Kindle Touch compared to the Kindle 3, and the Kindle 4 is quicker still, but most of the time I don’t even notice. Even the Home page takes a bit longer to load, despite there being a hardware button to access it (the four little lines on the front that look like a speaker), so as others have also noted, this is likely a software issue rather than a hardware problem, and might hopefully be improved by software updates.

I should also note that both our Kindle 3 and Kindle Touch were purchased with Wi-Fi and “Special Offers.” I have no need for the 3G and in any case prefer the convenience of emailing documents to my Kindle, which is free with the Wi-Fi version, but costs a nominal fee with the 3G version. As for the ads, I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how unobtrusive they are: They do not show up in reading mode at all; you only see them in sleep mode and as a small banner on the bottom of the Home page. Moreover, they sometimes even offer legitimately good deals, such as free ebooks and audiobooks, half-off coupons for Amazon itself, and similar things. That said, I have noticed that the number of these seems to have decreased lately, with more standard ads taking their place (e.g. currently they are cycling through a $15 off ad for jeans on Amazon, a $50 discount for Travelocity, and standard ads for T-Mobile and a Katherine Heigl movie). If the latter two type of ads come to replace more and more of the former two, I may become rather less happy with the Sponsored Offers version than I currently am, but if it really gets bad, I can always pay the difference for the non-ad version later.

All around, I’m very pleased with the Kindle Touch, and definitely prefer it to the Kindle 3, even if it still leaves plenty of room for improvement in future models. Beyond the above complaints, I would like to see a model that had a touch screen with a small number of hardware buttons for Home, Menu, Back, and Search (useful for dictionaries especially), as the latter three currently require an extra tap each. The one button design seems an unnecessary concession to the iPhone/iPad, and I see no reason to stick with it. On the other hand, though at first I thought I would miss the hardware Forward/Backward buttons, in practice they are unnecessary and would probably just get in the way.

Image by neoporcupine on Flickr, by Creative Commons License.

Like any American male, I’m genetically obligated to love driving. I grew up building race tracks for my Hot Wheels and drawing pictures of Porsches and Lamborghinis. My best friend had a gas-powered go-cart that we used to race around the neighborhood, pretending we were in the Indy 500. To a kid, a car is freedom–to go where you want, when you want, without parental supervision. To drive is to be an adult. Unfortunately that is only too true.

The first day I had my license, I caused an accident. I changed lanes on the freeway without double-checking my blind-spot and ran a guy off the road. The worst was that I didn’t even realize I’d done it, and continued on my merry way. After a while I noticed that some jerk was following me, and when I got to my destination he stopped right next to me and stared the whole time I was getting out of the car. I gave him a dirty look and walked away. That night, we got a call from the state patrol informing us of the accident, which the guy who followed us had apparently reported. Needless to say I felt like an idiot, and never again forgot to check my blind-spot.

Luckily the damage was minor, but the affair still cost us $300. Another accident a couple of years later seemed even less significant (I backed into a parked car) but ended up costing a lot more because it just so happened to catch the driver-side door at the wrong angle. A $1000 deductible and 3 years of higher insurance premiums for what looked like a little ding. I haven’t been in an accident since high school, but owning a car never gotten any cheaper. Loan payments, insurance, regular oil and filter changes, maintenance and repairs and gas, gas and more gas add up to an incredibly costly investment.

I’ve owned four cars, which were purchased for $6000, $1000 (from a family member), $11,000 (plus $3000 interest) and $5500 (plus $800 interest). I ran the first one into the ground, prematurely, as I did not realize the problem was fixable until it no longer was. The second was traded 6 years later for $800. The third I sold for $2000 (that was some serious depreciation!), and the fourth I also sold for $2000. That’s over $20,000 in sunk costs, not to mention hundreds of dollars a year for insurance, thousands of dollars a year in gas, and who knows how much more for repairs, major and minor.

Today I own no cars, three adult bikes, three children’s bikes, a bike-trailer and a Laufrad. All-told they cost somewhat less than 500€, require no gas or insurance beyond my normal personal liability insurance (pretty much necessary in Germany), and I can repair almost anything that goes wrong with them myself. If the worst came to the very worst, I could replace any one of them for under 200€. If I had to do that every other month all year, it would cost me less than I was paying in insurance for my cars in the US.

Last night I spent two hours fixing a flat tire on my bike, re-aligning my daughter’s chain, and adding a new coupling for the bike-trailer to my wife’s bike. It was the most effort I’ve had to spend on the bikes at one time all year, and it cost me 11€ for the coupling and a 10-cent patch. Later this week I might replace my rear brake-pads. That will set me back another 5€ and about 20 minutes. I don’t even want to think about what a blown tire, a drive-shaft problem, a new trailer hitch and new brakes would have cost on a car, even if I could fix them myself, but I’m fairly certain it would be just a bit more than 16€.

Living in Göttingen, I go almost everywhere by bike. I have a basket that suffices for a small bag or a few items, and if I need to move something bigger, I can use the bike trailer. If we need to go somewhere too far for the kids to bike themselves, they also can ride in the trailer (which is what it is actually designed for). We even have a kid’s seat on my wife’s bike that can be used in good weather. Two or three times a month we might take a bus instead, especially if our destination is up a steep hill or the weather is really nasty, and a couple times a year we may have reason to rent a car for a longer trip, though we usually just take the train. That goes everywhere, is comfortable and convenient, and isn’t necessarily expensive if you buy your tickets in advance or take the slower trains.

When I think of all the years I insisted on climbing into my car to drive 2 minutes down the road in the states, it seems absurd. Who on earth decided that it was a good idea to power 2000 lbs. of metal, glass and plastic by burning an expensive and highly explosive liquid, when a 20 pound bicycle powered by your own two legs could get you there just as quickly?

To state the obvious: A bike requires virtually no natural resources to use, produces no pollution, gives great exercise, and costs pennies on the dollar to maintain. On a sunny day it is better than a convertible, and far more peaceful. It is fully customizable and just about anyone can learn to repair one. When was the last time you tried to replace anything more complicated than a lightbulb on your car? I don’t even know what half the things under the hood do, much less how to fix them, while even my five year old can understand how a bike works. Yet despite all these advantages, few Americans even consider using a bike as a regular means of transportation, much less an exclusive one. For most of us (myself included before this year), biking is a form of recreation, nothing more.

To be sure, shopping and other errands require better planning on a bike, but that’s a small sacrifice. There are also risks involved–if a car hits a bike, the bike loses, every time–but I’m not convinced that biking is any less safe than driving in general, particularly in a city with good bike paths. A more common problem is weather, though with proper clothing that is not as big of an issue as one might expect. Heavy snow can sometimes make biking impossible, but personally I’d rather bike in the snow than in the rain, especially when the temperature is in the mid-30s–like today. Often the best you can do then is wait it out, as even wet days are rarely consistently rainy.

A bigger headache is broken glass. Bike tires are a lot more fragile than steel-belted radials, and people around here seem to have a bad habit of breaking beer bottles right in the middle of the bike lanes. It happens so often, I’ve begun to suspect it’s intentional. It’s rare if I can go a week before finding a new patch of broken shards somewhere along my usual route to work, and it is not always easy to see them quick enough to avoid them. Even so, the city has enough street-sweepers to do a reasonably good job of clearing such things up, and my flat tire this week was surprisingly the first I’ve had on this bike, and only the fourth I’ve had to fix all year.

Of course, if you’d rather not face the weather and the beer-bottle mine-fields, you can always ride the bus. It would take a lot of 2€ bus fare to add up to the cheapest used car, and even a monthly pass will be a fraction of the typical car payment. Sure, buses are less convenient than your own sedan, but they certainly beat sitting in traffic. That I once to looked down on people who took the bus just seems silly now. Why drive when I can sit and read while someone else takes me where I need to go? And if I do want to get there faster, even a car is no quicker than a bike over short trips, since a biker doesn’t have to stick to the roads or find a parking place. All told, I could probably count on one hand the number of times I’ve actually wished I had a car in the last year.

Granted, there are probably few better places in the world to live without a vehicle than in Göttingen. It is a medium-sized city in a mostly flat valley, with moderate weather and a compact city-center. Besides the excellent transit system, there are bike paths on almost every street and most other places as well. Many stores have more bike-stands than parking spots, and drivers are well-accustomed to watching out for riders. Much of the downtown area is closed to traffic entirely, and it is amazing how that one rule can make a city of 100,000 feel more like a small town, without eliminating the conveniences of living in a city. It is almost impossible to go downtown without running into someone you know, simply because everyone is walking rather than racing past each other in their cars. Seeing a friend means you can actually have a conversation, not just a honk and a wave.

Unfortunately, it simply would not be possible to live without a car in most places in America. Urban sprawl, lack of decent bike lanes and unwary drivers would make biking impractical if not dangerous, especially with kids. Before we moved to Germany, my wife worked 30 miles from home and I went to school 60 miles away, and the only way we could have moved closer would have been to quit my job. Even going into town meant driving a couple of miles along a stretch of highway with a 55 mph speed limit and no sidewalks. Bus service was spotty at best, and train service a joke. To live without a car there would have been virtually impossible. But maybe if more people were willing to try it, more places would devote the resources necessary to make it feasible.

Sometimes I wonder how long it will take me to fall back into the habit of driving everywhere again, if and when we move back to the US. As it stands, I’d be happy to live the rest of my life in a place where I don’t need to own a car. But at the end of the day I can’t deny that a part of me would still love to drive one now and then. After all, I am living in the land of the Autobahn.

Polyglot Bible; image by sukisuki on Flickr, by Creative Commons licence.

Perusing the bewildering array of sessions at the Society of Biblical Literature Annual Meeting, it would be easy to wonder whether “Fostering Biblical Scholarship” (our official mission) can mean fostering just about anything to do with the Bible. Is there anything beyond an interest in the Bible itself that holds us together as a society? What, after all, has “Bakhtin and Biblical Imagination” to do with “Economics in the Biblical World,”  “Linguistics and Biblical Hebrew” to do with “Bible and Film”? Are our approaches to the text so diverse that there isn’t even a common standard of measure?

I have a theory: The art of biblical scholarship—all biblical scholarship—is the art of making meaningful connections between a text and something else. “This text is better understood in connection with X” or “X is better understood in connection with this text” could summarize the vast bulk of what we call biblical scholarship. That might seem like nothing more than a restatement of the problem, since X could be almost anything: another text or set of texts, another aspect or portion of the same text, a tradition or source or redactional layer, a scribal practice or transmission error, the history of transmission, the history of tradition, a genre or typescene or trope, a symbol or metaphor or any other particular form of language, a literary theory, a sociological theory, a way of life (whether ancient or modern), a ritual or custom, an archeological find, an image or icon, a people-group, an historical event, a theory of history, a theory of midrash, a theory of myth, a theory of mind, a method or methodology, a social, religious, political or economic movement, a philosophical system, a theological system, a theological tenet, a theological error, an ideology, modern science, ancient science, modern film, medieval children’s stories, teaching, preaching, blogging.

But this is not just to restate the diversity of biblical scholarship, it is also to see that each of these otherwise very dissimilar topics shares a similar structural relation to the text. Each of them is drawn upon to argue either that some aspect of the text can be seen more clearly in the light of the thing to which it is compared, or vice versa. Such a wide range of things to which the text can be connected explains the wide range of kinds of scholarship we engage in, the wide range of standards of evidence and argument we employ, and the wide range of conclusions we come to, but all such comparisons operate within a similar set of parameters.

Namely, virtually all good biblical scholarship, regardless of its methods and emphases, 1. makes an original connection, 2. provides compelling reasons for accepting that connection, 3. acknowledges the limitations of the connection, and 4. shows how the connection helps us to better understand either the text or the thing to which it is compared. Whether focused on historical criticism or queer theory, semiotics or Christology, any good biblical scholarship will try to show how the connection it proposes is original, convincing and fruitful. Any particular piece of scholarship may focus on one of those areas more than others, but one cannot completely ignore any of them for long.

When biblical scholarship goes bad, it tends to happen on one of those same points (whether due to poor writing or poor thinking): Either it fails to make connections that are original or non-trivial, or it fails to offer cogent, relevant and compelling reasons for accepting the connections it proposes, or it fails to counter damaging objections to its proposals, or it fails to show a significant interpretive pay-off that would result from accepting them. Non-scholarly readings of the Bible, in general, are uncritical in their making of such connections–even if sometimes insightful–but they cannot avoid making them, whether they are drawn from one’s personal life, social context, theological framework, secondary sources, or their own familiarity with the text. All of us are in the business of making connections with the text; what makes our reading of the Bible “scholarship” is our attempt to do so critically, by being explicit about the reasons, sources and implications of our proposals.

That’s my theory, anyway. Whether it is original or has any interpretive pay-off, I’ll leave for you to decide.

“The High Septon once told me that as we sin, so do we suffer. If that’s true… tell me… why is it always the innocents who suffer most, when you high lords play your game of thrones?”

George R.R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones may be the most “realistic” fantasy novel I’ve ever read. It’s extremely well-detailed, emotionally gripping, endlessly surprising without being improbable, and unflinchingly dark. This is no children’s fairy tale, but a deeply troubling and moving epic, full of violence, brutality and sex, but also honor, valor and humor. Driven by its characters more than its plot, it gives us images of humanity at its best and (more often) worst.

Though set in a fictional world rather like Middle-Earth, there are no elves or dwarves or orcs, in fact little supernatural activity of any kind. But if there is no magic object to find or destroy, there is also no single villain to expose and defeat. The action is driven by the intrigues and wars of seven kingdoms, none of which are fully innocent nor guilty. The attention is on the Stark family, who mostly try to be noble, with varying levels of success, as they face off against the Lannisters, who mostly range from arrogant to conniving to downright wicked. If in most other series the Lannisters would be nothing more than the hissable villains, though, Martin refuses to let us hate them all. In fact, the most entertaining character of all is a Lannister.

The book allows for a spiritual dimension to the world–both giving piety a central role in many of its characters’ lives and in hinting at monsters on the edge of the world–but it is men and women who are most to be honored and feared here. The gods are real–or maybe they’re not–but it is the selfish and selfless, cowardly and courageous decisions of human beings that drive this story, often to heartbreaking ends. There may be a dark evil force on the horizon, but there is unquestionably one in the human heart, turning friends against one another, and twisting even honor and loyalty to ruin, while the wicked walk free and seize power.

The story is told through the eyes of several different characters (each in separate chapters), which pays off beautifully, giving the book a great deal of psychological depth. At times, though, Martin makes surprising choices about which character to follow at key points. This is never more obvious than when he refuses to give us a first-person view of the two climactic battles in the book. The first is experienced through a person too far away to see more than fragments. The second and decisive one is even further removed, as we only hear of it as it is described to a character on the losing side, well after the fact.

At first this seems disappointingly anticlimactic, but maybe that was the point, as it prevents us from feeling too smugly victorious, ignoring the trail of blood that led there. Unlike so many other fantasy books I’ve read, the emotional climax for me came not at the turning of a battle, but in a quiet decision to give up vengeance for honor and solitude for brotherhood, a decision that almost no one else saw.

And more than anything, that is what makes the book so enjoyable, despite its darkness: that there are still people left–broken and flawed though they are–who will choose nobility and justice even if it kills them. And unlike in most books of this sort, it often does.

Many people seem to feel a strong taboo against writing in books. Maybe they don’t want to ruin the aesthetic of a clean printed page. Maybe they don’t want to disrupt the author’s train of thought. Maybe they just can’t bear to stop reading and pick up a pen. All very noble ideals, no doubt, but not very practical for serious research. In my opinion a book is a tool, and as much as we all wish we were Will Hunting, most of us need to do more than just read if we hope to remember the details later, and marking up a book is probably the quickest way of facilitating later recall. Besides that, no book is entirely correct or in all parts equally insightful or useful, and I see no problem at all with indicating your judgments on such matters directly in the book itself.

Personally, the only times I bother restraining myself from underlining and adding marginal notes are: 1. when I’m reading fiction purely for pleasure, 2. when the book is so lousy that nothing seems worthy of underlining, but not so outrageous as to demand vigorous rebuttal, or 3. when I do not own the book. And there’s the rub, since as a poor graduate student I simply cannot afford to buy most of the books I must use.

If I do own the book, or have a photocopy of it, I mark it up like crazy, underlining everything significant or interesting, starring anything especially important to remember, and even writing little notes and comments in the margins. I always do this in pencil, in part because I find the grey less obtrusive than a pen or (worse) a highlighter, but most of all so that I can make adjustments if I change my mind about what was important, or realize a particular marginal note has misunderstood some key point (which of course, never happens to me!). When I can underline in this way, I generally do not take external notes on first reading, except when I am struck by some novel thought that requires fuller discussion than is possible in the margin.

This approach makes for a messy book but not only does it take far less time to underline than it does to summarize the key points in a separate document. It also facilitates finding the information I’m looking for later in a way that even detailed notes do not necessarily improve upon. Not only do you have the key information already marked on the page, but the simple act of underlining requires you to read the line at least twice, and stopping to add a marginal note only further solidifies the idea in your head. Both require you to pay fairly close attention to the position of the text on the page, and I often find that even months later I can remember approximately where on the page the information I underlined will be, if only I can find the proper page.

Even more valuable is that marking up a book or article in this way allows one to reread it by skipping from underline to underline, which takes a fraction of the time of rereading the whole book, while still capturing the main points. I find that if I do this immediately after finishing the full work for the first time, I can not only quickly take fuller external notes (in a notebook or on my computer, depending on my mood), but I am also in a much better position to evaluate the value and validity of the author’s statements than I was upon first reading (and I can always reread the larger context around the underlining, if necessary later). By contrast, when I have not been able to mark the most important lines in a work, a second reading takes virtually as long as the first, and is only feasible for the most important resources.

In short, I find that by marking up my books and articles, and only afterwards taking fuller notes from the underlining, I can read both more quickly and more effectively than trying to both read and take notes at the same time. The trouble, of course, is that I cannot do this with library books. Well, I have done it with library books, but I’m older and wiser and hopefully a lot more considerate than that now. And in any case, I have a feeling Göttingen’s libraries would be far less forgiving of that sort of thing that my old liberal arts college.

What to do then? So far none of the solutions I have found are ideal: Either I photocopy or scan all the key parts of the book (as I always do for articles) and mark up the photocopies as usual, or I take detailed notes while reading, combined with the use of sticky notes or page flags.

The problem with the first, aside from the little legal and ethical issue of copyright violation, is that it really isn’t practical to photocopy the whole of any but the shortest books, and it is often difficult to predict in advance how much of the book will actually be worth reading in detail. I’ve often found that many of the sections I photocopied either prove unnecessary, or else depend on some other section that I had not photocopied. There is also the expense of the photocopies themselves, and though I am currently blessed with a virtually unlimited budget for that sort of thing (I sure wasn’t while writing my M.A. thesis!), there is still the environmental issue and even the practical problem of having piles of photocopies everywhere.

Using digital scans on the computer or similar device could alleviate some of these concerns, but I’ve yet to find a digital technology that allows all that I would want to do with a book, from smoothly flipping through, to naturally taking notes in context, all while sitting back in a chair rather than leaning over a desk. I also find that I write better when I can lay out my sources and notes side-by-side while I am writing, and even having a second screen for the computer is not sufficient to replicate that experience. As much as I still long for the day when I could carry all my books and notes around in my pocket–if not as a replacement, at least as a supplement–I don’t see that happening any time soon.

As for skipping the copies and just taking full notes as I read, this is feasible if the book is only tangentially relevant to my interests, such that I only need to keep track of a few of the points it makes, but if it is a monograph devoted directly to the question I am currently researching, this method is way too time consuming to be practical. It takes long enough to read a 300 page book without taking notes, but it takes 10 times as long if I try to type or write out summaries or quotations of all the key points as I go. Unfortunately, failing to do so makes it far less likely that I will be able to remember or find the required information later, even if searchable online versions have made that somewhat easier.

If I know that I can keep the book for a while, I can take less detailed notes if I combine them with sticky flags stuck to the pages of the book themselves. This is still less precise and more time consuming than underlining, but for longer and more important books that cannot simply be purchased or photocopied, it is better than nothing, at least until I have to remove all the flags and return the book. My main problem with this, though, is that unless you use a whole lot of them, such flags can only point out the general part of the page and not specific sentences. I also find that the more flags I use, the more difficult it becomes to flip through the book, and the less useful they are as a means of quickly finding an important section later.

My latest method, which I like quite a bit better, uses little strips cut from sticky-notes, not to hang off the page as flags, but simply stuck in the margins in place of underlining (pictured at the top and in close-up here). It is no substitute for underlining when I can do that, but it needn’t take any longer and can be nearly as precise, without disrupting page-turning like too many flags do.

I simply cut a very thin strip of sticky-note and put it directly next to the sentences that I wish to highlight, cutting it down or adding additional depending on how long a section I need to emphasize. For important details, I use a brighter color like pink, and for especially important points, I can still hang a flag off the edge of the page like normal. Full size sticky-notes can also be used in place of marginal notes, so long as one does not go overboard with them.

Using this method, I can then go back through the book a second time to take fuller notes nearly as well as I could with an underlined copy, without having to do any damage to the book itself. It also saves greatly on the number of sticky-notes I need to use, and should I need to return the book, I can always scan the marked pages before doing so and keep the digital copy for context, without needing to print it off (since it is already marked up), nor needing to determine in advance how much of the book I’ll need.

So that’s my current approach. I’m sure it could use improvement  (one trouble I anticipate is the little strips falling out too easily), but in the mean time I’m curious what methods other people use to keep track of what they read. Do you aim for speed and efficiency, or do you have a more detailed and methodical approach? Either way, what tips and tricks have you found?

Images copyright Warner Brothers.

Love is stronger than death. – Unknown

The power of love over death has been a major theme of Harry Potter ever since his mother’s self-sacrifice first saved Harry’s life and caused Voldemort’s initial downfall. Throughout the series, Harry’s love for and trust in his friends were also critical in many of their narrow escapes and victories, though cruelly exploited in the Order of the Phoenix. In fact, the whole thrust of the series can be seen as a profound meditation on what it means to truly overcome death, and this theme comes to a head in the Deathly Hallows (or die Heiligtümer des Todes, since I watched it in German).

Without giving any Part 2 spoilers for the sake of the one or two people left in the world who haven’t read the book, the film admirably emphasizes the power of self-sacrificial love. This is seen not only in the resolution of various love-interests (and I’m convinced that showing that love wins out is one of the major purposes of the infamous epilogue), but most especially in the climactic scenes involving Harry, Voldemort and a professor who will go unnamed. No, the film does not quite live up to the book in the latter case, but it comes close enough.

That love is stronger than death does not, in this story, mean that no one dies, but that love wins out through death, indeed that love is most perfectly expressed through bravely facing death for the sake of one’s friends, not cowardly killing to preserve one’s own life. This is, of course, one of the many ways that Harry Potter reflects the Christian story, and it is embodied not only in the climax of the the Deathly Hallows but also in the scene from Part 1 involving the Slytherine Horcrux and the cross-shaped Sword of Gryffindore. Closely mirroring a baptism, here it is only by diving to the depths of the deathly cold pool that the sword can be retrieved and evil destroyed. Harry cannot save himself in this instance, but must be saved by another, as he so often was before, just as he also does for others. One could hardly find a better image of the communal nature of salvation.

Thus it was especially satisfying to see both halves of the film back to back (our theater played them as a double-feature, with the second half beginning at midnight). I haven’t been in as full and enthusiastic a theater since The Return of the King, and the audience clapped and cheered and laughed out loud on numerous occasions. Between the two halves, they fit in most everything important from the book, with just a handful of explicit changes, many intended (it seems) simply to limit the amount of time the characters spent under the Cloak of Invisibility or disguised with Polyjuice Potion. Logically, this strains the credibility of the plot a bit, but emotionally you really want to be able to see your character’s faces, so I don’t begrudge them the change. That they expanded many of the duels is also understandable, though somewhat unbelievable in a world in which one unblockable curse can end any fight in a second (though the same complaint could be raised about the books as well).

A few of the other changes were less necessary and therefore puzzling (for instance, why move the Voldemort-Snape scene from the Shrieking Shack to the boathouse?), but all around they were much more faithful to the book than any other adaptation I’ve seen. The main thing to get cut down was the material about Dumbledore’s past and Harry’s resulting doubts, which left the King’s Cross scene less moving than it should have been, but it didn’t overly detract from the story. The only change that really bothered me involved Voldemort’s use of the Elder Wand in the final battle, but now I’m getting too close to spoilers, so I’d better move on to more technical aspects of the film (feel free to discuss spoilers in the comments though!).

The acting was all around very good, as was clear even through the excellent German translation. Germans are quite proud of their dubbing, and rightly so. The voice actors all fit and did an outstanding job, and the only time I even noticed the dubbing was in the opening scene of Part 1 with its extreme close-up of the Minister of Magic giving a speech. There were a couple of scenes where I found the German difficult to follow, but I’m sure that says more about me than the film. There were also a couple of one-liners that I could understand in German, but would rather have heard in the original English. For instance, Molly Weasley’s last line (if you’ve read the book, you know which one I’m talking about) always seemed more deliciously startling in a series that almost everywhere else avoided profanity. It just doesn’t have the same punch in a foreign language.

Finally, as this was my first experience with modern 3D I should say a word about that as well. All around the 3D conversion seemed to be very well done, certainly better than I had been lead to expect of the genre. This was true not only of the full-blown action scenes but also of more mundane settings. The Gringotts sequence was particularly impressive in 3D, though sitting one row from the back of the theater significantly diminished the effect, since I could easily see the edges of the screen. I sat that far away intentionally, as did not want to risk a headache, but next time I would sit closer to the middle of the theater.

Whether because of this or despite it, I found the 3D overall more distracting than immersive, and it did not feel any more realistic than 2D. But neither did it feel boxy, and unlike some forms of 3D, I was able to look anywhere on the screen at any time, without finding it blurred or hard on the eyes. Our theater used Real-D 3D (without even charging extra for it!), and the glasses fit just fine over my normal ones. Certainly the 3D did not ruin the movie for me, nor was the picture too dark, but I wouldn’t have paid extra for it. Indeed with 3D or without, the special effects where phenomenal, and the action and magical warfare were every bit as exciting and imaginative as you could hope.

In short, it deserves every bit of the 97% it is currently getting on Rotten Tomatoes. It is exciting, moving, thrilling and at times hilarious,  and as brilliant and fitting a conclusion to the franchise as anyone could hope for, surpassed only by the book itself in scope and depth.

To such a question it seems that most scholars today would give a short answer of “No” and a slightly longer answer of “Absolutely not!” The problem is not just that the “Old Testament” is no uniform thing to which we can attribute any one theological viewpoint, monotheistic or otherwise, but that “monotheism” itself is a highly problematic term in its own right.  As the papers in the “Monotheism” sessions at International SBL this week have reemphasized, the definition and applicability of “monotheism” as a category are always controversial and often rejected. “Monotheism” is not an ancient term at all, but a modern one, burdened with ideological baggage that limits its usefulness as a description of any part of the Hebrew Bible, much less the whole taken together.

For instance, Isaiah 40-55 is often considered the preeminent example of “monotheism” in the Hebrew Bible, even forming the climax of many treatments of the subject (as Nathan MacDonald argued, though not without some vigorous protestations from the audience!). This is, after all, one of the few places in the Old Testament to claim “there is no other” besides YHWH. Yet even here it is doubtful that Isaiah can be fit entirely comfortably into modern definitions of “monotheism,” particularly if that term is linked to the traditional divine attributes of omnipotence, omniscience, omnipresence and omnibenevolence, or the absolute exclusion of all other divine beings.

In one paper this week, Saul Olyan argued that even Isaiah is willing to set its denials of other gods as incomparable to YHWH alongside explicit and implicit references to just such deities. So where 45:5 claims “I am the LORD, there is no other; beside me there is no God,” 40:26 also admits that YHWH knows the heavenly hosts “by name,” and 51:9 refers to YHWH’s defeat of the divine monster Rahab. This is not, Olyan insists, a “monotheistic” text, at least in the sense in which that term is normally used. Indeed, he claims that even the most exclusive claims are not unprecedented in the ancient near eastern world, with similar things being said of other national deities by people who clearly accepted a wider pantheon. “Apart from me there is no god” is rhetoric, not philosophical description. That this is the preeminent example of “monotheism” in the Old Testament leaves it doubtful, for Olyan and others, that any of the Old Testament can be helpfully described as “monotheistic,” however we define that term.

Certainly we must be careful not to distort these texts, either by reading later conceptions of Christian belief about God into them, or by comparing them negatively to such beliefs. To most people today, “monotheism” carries a variety of associations that are simply irrelevant and inappropriate in an ancient near eastern context, no matter how we understand the Old Testament. Ancient Jewish religion was extremely diverse, but as other papers insisted, always far more concerned with how one acts towards God and others (ethically and ritually) than with what one thinks about the existence of other divine beings. Even at its most monotheistic-sounding, the emphasis remains on who you trust, not whether your conceptual universe includes one rather than two deities. On that score, the Old Testament is not so far from its “polytheistic” neighbors as we sometimes imagine.

All of these are important cautions, and leave the area of research extremely difficult to navigate, as we not only must seek in a sense to examine and even get behind the more direct interests of the texts in light of their ancient contexts, but also to keep in hand difficult modern controversies that cloud the issues when using terms like monotheism, polytheism, monolatry, and so on.

And yet, the conversation can at times seem to be pressing too hard in the other direction, no doubt in reaction, underrecognizing the distinctiveness of the Old Testament in its final form. A couple of papers (by Mark S. Smith among others) rightly stressed that while perhaps no text in the Hebrew Bible exactly expresses “monotheism” as someone on the street today would tend to define it (would the average person on the street be able to define “monotheism”?), there is something new and distinctive in texts like Isaiah that we must seek to understand, even if we lack a term to precisely define it.

In fact, I wonder if this point could even be expanded. To be sure, the Old Testament preserves many “relics” of non-monotheistic religion, but the text as we have it still never approaches the kinds of depictions of the divine pantheon that we find in so many “polytheistic” ancient near eastern texts of a variety of genres. Everywhere in the ANE we find lists of deities identified by name, sometimes as characters in a narrative, sometimes as recipients of praise, blame or sacrifice, sometimes to reinforce blessings and curses in treaties, other times as the resident deities of various temples, and so on and so forth. This is an extremely important way of speaking about the divine that recurs constantly, yet as far as I know we lack a single real parallel to it in the Old Testament.

To give just one example: This week I had the great privilege of visiting the British Museum, where I spent the bulk of my time in their collection of Assyrian wall reliefs (I think I took about 400 pictures, including the one above). One of those is the so-called “Standard Inscription” of Ashurnasirpal pictured above (produced around 865-860 BCE), which decorated his palace. Now Ashurnasirpal clearly worshipped one deity above all others–Ashur, whose name is reflected in his own–and the text singles out Ashur in particular for praise, as the one who supported his rise to kingship. Yet the same text is also generous in its praise of many other deities, beginning:

“Palace of Ashurnasirpal, priest of Ashur, favorite of Ehlil and Nimurta, beloved of Anu and Dagon, the weapon of the great gods, the mighty king.”

He later goes on:

“When Ashur, the lord who called me by my name and has made my kingdom great, entrusted his merciless weapon to my lordly arms, I overthrew the widespread troops of the land of Lullume in battle. With the assistance of Shamash and Adad, the gods who help me, I thundered like Adad the destroyer over the troops of the Nairi lands, Habhi, Shubaru, and Nirib.”

There is simply no parallel to this kind of thing in the Old Testament, where even texts that clearly accept the existence of other deities besides YHWH tend to only mention one or two, and virtually always in polemical contexts. True, only a small handful of texts explicitly claim that YHWH is the only god, and even those can easily be read as exalted rhetoric in praise of one’s primary, national deity, but a great many other texts reflect an implicit but equally powerful assumption that only one god, YHWH, needs or even ought to be invoked, while other divine beings, if they exist at all, stand somewhere on the outside or fade from view entirely.

No, the Old Testament as a whole is not “monotheistic,” and given its frequent polemics against other gods, the ancient Israelite culture from which it grew certainly was not “monotheistic.” But the term does at least get at a real and important tendency seen across much of the Old Testament (not just Isaiah 40-55). Therefore however much we need to nuance our definitions to avoid imposing later categories onto the text, we should not let that danger blind us to the distancing developments that are to be found there. Indeed, as James McGrath and Mark Smith both noted, many of the terms we must use–religion, culture, gender, Bible–are later and difficult to define precisely, but should not therefore be abandoned.

Then again, maybe the more important point is simply this: Any attempt to reduce so complex a reality as our beliefs about ultimate reality to a single term is bound to end in failure. This is as true of our various names and terms for “god” as for our attempts to categorize them.

For all bibliobloggers [and bibliotweeps! Is that a word?] and those interested in biblioblogs who will be attending SBL in London, I propose that we meet for dinner at 6:30 on the 6th at The Samford Arms, a pub just down the street from the conference (Menu). The Address is:

62 Stamford Street, London SE1 9LX

If you would like to attend, please leave a comment, send me an email (see the About page) or simply show up. If I get enough RSVPs I’ll make a reservation, but otherwise we’ll just go informally. And obviously feel free to spread the word on your own blogs [translation from the German: Please do!}.

I hope to see you there!

Having emerged from my German-learning cave, I’m wondering who is planning to attend the International Meeting in London next week, and whether we can schedule a meal together? If you plan to attend, please leave a comment, and mention any papers you might be giving as well. Also if anyone familiar with London can suggest a restaurant, all the better. If not, I’ll poke around a bit and see if I can come up with something.

Thanks!

That means “I passed!” for you poor benighted non-German speakers. I passed the written test on the 17th without too much trouble, and then today I just barely passed with DSH 2 on the oral exam. I can’t tell you how glad I am to have that behind me, although this comes close: