Tuesday, February 13, 2007

Pssst...

It's been a while since I've been able to focus on anything in time to post on this blog, but as it's the Brit Awards tomorrow I've snuck in some of my own personal awards for last year's recordings over on the Hit Parade blog. Enjoy!

posted by Chris Brown @ 11:51 pm 1 comments

Sunday, December 03, 2006

You've been sleighed

It seems like a date that ought to be marked somehow - last night, the Second of December 2006, in an act of desperation I tuned the kitchen radio to Virgin. And for the first time this year I heard 'Merry Xmas Everybody' by Slade. It's almost like an annual rite of passage isn't it?

posted by Chris Brown @ 4:28 pm 0 comments

Friday, October 06, 2006

Every minute of every hour, I love a sunflower

Hi folks, sorry it's been a bit quiet lately. So there's something new this month, I thought I'd experiment with photoblogging: here are a couple of snaps I took near work a couple of weeks ago. I've attempted to crop them so as to protect the privacy of the people who live in the houses.


















Ideally, I suppose I should have started taking photos in the summer when the flowers are in fuller bloom; but then I suppose ideally I should have known what I was doing.

And here's a picture of a calf we saw in the New Forest. Aaah.

posted by Chris Brown @ 10:11 pm 1 comments

Thursday, August 31, 2006

There will be no white flag above my door

I meant to mention a while ago something I'd seen recently as part of the bloom of St. George's Crosses during the World Cup. One, probably intended for a car but seen sitting on a garage, bore the name of a well-known manufacturer of glue products in one of the white squares. You know, in a lot of countries people would find it offensive to do that to their flag.

The other morning I saw it in the gutter. It had probably been blown there by high winds, but it caught my eye precisely because it hadn't occured to anyone to remove it from there. Myself included actually; and for all that "English" isn't the first word I think of to describe myself, it's odd that it had no effect on me. It only struck me as something I could mention to Laura as a counterpoint to her experiences in the US and as an amusing point to make on the blog. Strange nation, we are.

posted by Chris Brown @ 10:56 pm 0 comments

Sunday, August 20, 2006

A Girardian interpretation of Genesis 22:1-14

(This is one of the essays I wrote for my Hebrew class last term.)

The thought of the French philosopher René Girard 1 provides an interesting context in which to read the story of Abraham and Isaac. Girard believes that sacrificial rituals arise when uncontrolled violence threatens to destroy a society. The usual way for a community to survive this crisis is for the violence to become focused on a particular victim, or scapegoat; a real or imagined transgression is usually cited to justify the victim’s selection, but the choice is in fact arbitrary. Once the victim is destroyed, peace is temporarily restored. The people therefore believe this violence to be divinely sanctioned; they establish rituals that re-enact the “founding murder” and develop a mythology that justifies it.

This sacrificial mechanism, however, can work only if participants do not understand what is really going on. Girard believes that the Judaeo-Christian scriptures chip away at the myths of violence to reveal the inner workings of scapegoating and sacrifice and so destroy them. This process begins in the first books of the Old Testament and gradually becomes more radical until it reaches its conclusion in the Gospels.2

Genesis 22 retains some characteristics of primitive sacrificial myths, but at heart it is very different -- and not just because of its surprise ending. A number of elements in the text subvert the sacrificial theme and show that the story is not simply part of the usual cycle of violence.

The difference begins when Isaac is named as victim. The victim in a sacrificial myth is generally depicted as having done something to deserve his fate; Isaac is not shown to have done anything at all. Indeed, it may be to emphasise his innocence that the author depicts him as if he were a young child, even though the timescale of Genesis suggests he would have been an adult.3 Girard believes that this acknowledgement of the victim‘s innocence is the first step in dismantling the sacrificial process: “The true ‘scapegoats‘ are those whom men have never recognised as such, in whose guilt they have an unshaken belief.” 4

As Abraham prepares to kill Isaac, the language used is not that of ritual but that of butchery. In his translation of the Pentateuch, Robert Alter points out that the word מאכלת, which is used throughout for the knife, usually refers to a cleaver used in butchering rather than a weapon used for sacrifice. Likewise, עקד (verse 9), while it does not appear elsewhere in the Old Testament, is used in rabbinic Hebrew to mean trussing the legs of animals, and שחט (verse 10) means not “sacrifice” but “slaughter.” 5 It is difficult to see the attempted killing as having the dignity of a divinely approved ritual when this brutal vocabulary is used.

Another very significant change in vocabulary occurs when the angel saves Isaac. Up to this point, the word used for God has been אלהים. While often used in the Old Testament to mean the God of Israel, this is really a generic term that can refer to any god or goddess. Only when Isaac is rescued does the true name of God -- יהוה, “the Eternal” -- appear in the text. The Girardian scholar Paul Nuechterlein believes that this change holds the key to the story:


Very important to a Girardian reading of this crucial passage is the idea that the God at the beginning of the passage who demands the sacrifice from Abraham is a different God from the one at the end who stops it. … Is this story trying to sort out the gods? Abraham begins hearing the common tribal gods of ancient polytheism who demand human sacrifices. On the mount of Yahweh-yireh, however, he begins to hear and envision the one true God who wants us to stop that nonsense. 6


This is not to say that a pagan god literally speaks to Abraham. It seems likely that Abraham starts by acting upon his own conception of God, the one men have made in their own image as part of their cycle of violence. Only when the true God, the Eternal, intervenes will Abraham begin to realise how wrong this conception is.

After Isaac is spared, Abraham sacrifices a ram in his place. To modern eyes, this, while undoubtedly preferable to child sacrifice, hardly marks the beginning of a kind and enlightened era. It is notable, however, that God does not ask for the ram to be sacrificed: Abraham merely sees it and assumes that it is to be killed. It is as if, now that the crisis has reached this point, it is impossible to leave without shedding blood of some kind.

We must also consider what sort of animal is being slaughtered. When Abraham and Isaac were discussing an alternative victim for the sacrifice, they assumed it would be a sheep (שה) -- a passive and neutral animal 7 that was bred for the purpose of sacrifice. A wild ram (איל) is a very different creature!

How did the ram come to be caught by its horns? This sort of accident is not uncommon among wild hoofed mammals during the battles of mating season. It usually happens either when the animal is ‘horning’ vegetation to intimidate a rival, or as it charges in a blind rage. An animal caught this way is doomed: it will either be killed by a predator or starve. 8 Could it be that the ram appears in the story, not to provide Abraham with a “surrogate victim" 9, but as another warning of the destructive effects of rivalry and violence?

Abraham chooses a telling name for the mountain: not “the Eternal spared my son,” but “the Eternal sees.” The Eternal does see, but man does not quite yet. There will be many more victims to come in our story; but something has already changed. The revelation on the mountain is just the start of a process that will reveal the truth about God to man.

1 The most thorough account of Girard’s theories on sacrifice is given in his 1972 book Violence and the Sacred. Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, published in 1978, considers his theories in relation to scripture.
2 Things Hidden, pp. 141-144, 157-158. Girard does believe, however, that many Christians have given the Gospels a “sacrificial interpretation” that defeats their true purpose.
3 Most of what I say about Isaac here can also be said of Ishmael in the preceding chapter of Genesis.
4 Things Hidden, pp. 46-47.
5 Alter, p. 107.
6 The Girardian Lectionary, “Proper 8A."
7 The Hebrew word literally means “one of a flock.”
8 In her classic account of the wildlife of the American Southwest, The Land of Little Rain, Mary Austin describes finding the skeleton of a young ram with its horns still embedded in the trunk of a tree (p. 58). And Richard Despard Estes, an expert on the hoofed mammals of Africa, tells a true story that could just as well serve as a parable. Two fighting springboks found their horns inextricably locked; each spent the rest of its life face to face with its rival as they starved to death together (African Mammals, p. 83).
9 See Violence and the Sacred, pp. 101-103.

Works cited

Alter, Robert. The Five Books of Moses: A Translation with Commentary. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2004.
Austin, Mary. The Land of Little Rain. New York: Dover Publications, 1996 (first published 1903).
Estes, Richard D. The Behavior Guide to African Mammals. London: University of California Press, 1991.
Girard, René. Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World. London: Continuum, 2003 (originally published in French, 1978).
Girard, René. Violence and the Sacred. London: The Athlone Press, 1988 (originally published in French, 1972).
Nuechterlein, Paul. “Proper 8A,” The Girardian Lectionary. Published on the Internet June 27, 2005; accessed March 27, 2006. .

posted by Laura Brown @ 11:23 pm 1 comments

Genesis 22:1-14

And it happened after these things that a god tested Abraham and said to him, “Abraham.” And he said, “Here I am,” And he said, “Please take your son, your only son whom you love, Isaac, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him up there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains that I will tell you.” And Abraham rose early in the morning and bridled his donkey and took two young men of his and Isaac his son, and chopped wood for the sacrifice, and got up and went to the place the god had told him. And on the third day Abraham lifted his eyes and saw the place from a distance. And Abraham said to the young men, “Sit down here with the donkey, and I and the youth will go upon this place and worship, and we will return to you.” And Abraham took the wood for the burnt offering and put it on Isaac his son, and he took the flame in his hand and the cleaver, and the two of them went as one. And Isaac spoke to Abraham, his father, and said, “My father.” And he said, “Here I am, my son.” And he said, “Here is the flame and the wood, but where is the sheep for the burnt offering?” And Abraham said, “God himself will see to the sheep for the burnt offering, my son.” And the two of them went as one. And they came to the place that the god had told him, and there Abraham built an altar. And he set the wood in order and trussed Isaac his son and put him on the altar above the wood. And Abraham put out his hand and took the cleaver to slaughter his son. And a messenger from the Eternal called to him from heaven and said, “Abraham, Abraham,” and he said, “Here I am.” And he said, “Do not stretch out your hand against the youth, and do not do anything to him, for now I know that you fear God, for you did not withhold your son, your only son, from me.” And Abraham raised his eyes and saw, and behold! a ram behind, caught in a thicket by its horns, and Abraham went and took the ram and offered it up as a burnt offering instead of his son. And Abraham called the name of that place “The Eternal sees,” as it is said to this day, “On the mountain the Eternal has been seen.”

(my translation)

posted by Laura Brown @ 11:12 pm 0 comments

So oddly interrupted

Apologies for the long, long silence on my part, but real life caught up with me unexpectedly. A few of the things I have been doing since March:


  • I completed my diploma in Religious Studies (with an emphasis on Biblical languages) at Birkbeck College. Now I just need to work out what to do with it. My last class involved writing several long papers; I'll try to post the less embarrassing of these here.
  • I spent a couple of months writing a poem for BBC Wildlife Magazine's Wildlife Poet of the Year competition. I hadn't written a poem for many years, but enjoyed this one enough to think I ought to do it more often. It appears that my entry didn't win anything. But I still maintain that it is the best sonnet ever written about the reproductive cycle of moss.
  • Some stuff was going on at work that I can't talk about in detail, but that has now been resolved (favourably, I'm glad to say).
  • Most recently, I've embarked on a project to read all the books on my "to be read" shelves before the next influx of books comes in at Christmas. I had nearly 80 to read when I started, and am now down to 48 (though admittedly I took a few books to the charity shop without finishing them when I decided they weren't worth struggling through). I've just started Keats and Embarrassment by Christopher Ricks, which is interesting if not wholly convincing. (I bought my copy used, and it appears that the previous owner was not impressed, having written "JESUS WEPT!" in several places in the margin.)


I can't predict when regular posts will resume, but will try to pop in now and then to confirm that I'm still alive. I'm sure Chris will keep you entertained in the meantime.

posted by Laura Brown @ 10:51 pm 0 comments

Wednesday, August 02, 2006

But there's no reason to cry

In recent years there haven't been a lot of reasons to praise the world's record companies. So I thought it was only fair to give some public recognition to Lo-Max Records, the label that released the final Go-Betweens album I mentioned in a previous post. After complaints about the sound quality on the original CD, they not only remastered the album but kindly offered to exchange the discs for those of us who bought the original version at no charge. I got mine by return of post too. How many other labels would do that for you?

One good turn deserves another, so here's a plug: if you haven't got the album at all, you can obtain it in the usual places, or Lo-Max's online shop.

posted by Chris Brown @ 11:16 pm 0 comments

Sunday, July 09, 2006

How should I feel?

You know, it's not really my place to fuss about the withdrawl of Top Of The Pops, especially not several weeks too late. But it is my place to be a pedant, so let's have a quick look at this response from the usually trustworthy Economist. It's not that I always agree with their position on an issue, but the level of research is impressive. So how did some of this slip through?


FOR a comparatively young genre, pop music is suspiciously full of “historic” moments. But the announcement on June 20th that the BBC was to cancel Top of the Pops (ToTP), a weekly tour of the singles chart that has been broadcast since 1964, surely qualifies. The programme itself was embarrassingly naff: presenters often seemed bemused by the bands; many acts refused to perform, objecting to the requirement to mime along to a pre-recorded track; and skimpily clad dancers were a main attraction. Nevertheless, at the height of its popularity in the 1970s, 15m people tuned in each week.
A fair start, there, although I'm not sure how many acts really did refuse to show up - the Clash are the obvious ones, and New Order refused until they were finally permitted to attempt a live 'Blue Monday' - and over the years the programme did have dalliances with a no-miming policy which proved less than succesful. There's no question that the naffest incarnation of the show was also the most popular. There follows a reasonable reference to the alternative outlets for musis in the multi-channel world, but then it goes a bit wrong:
More recent is the rise of the internet, which has made finding new music even easier. In March Britain made musical history when an American band named Gnarls Barkley reached the top of the singles chart before its song was available in shops. For the first time anywhere, a song had been propelled to the top spot entirely by internet downloads.

Anywhere?
But let's overlook that question and get to the actual point here. It's true that Gnarls Barkley (actually a duo, but that's fair enough) reached the top of the singles chart on download sales alone before the single was released in the UK - but the fact that they were the first is not necessarily unconnected to the fact that a change in chart rules a few weeks previously had allowed download sales to be counted the week before physical release; had they sold as many downloads three weeks earlier it would have made no difference. In fact, sales of the record increased when the CD single appeared, with even its download sales more than doubling (presumably as a result of the publicity). What really matters though is why people were downloading it - they may have had a slightly novel way of purchasing it but the reasons were the same as always: it was a huge radio hit. Furthermore:
Sandi Thom, a Scottish singer, recently signed a £1m contract with Sony after tens of thousands of internet users watched her play live “concerts” from the basement of her Tooting flat. (Some think her success was masterminded by Sony from the start.)
Actually, more of us think her manager orchestrated it. But again, that doesn't really matter because for the bulk of its history, TotP refused to feature a record until it had entered the chart, and they wouldn't repeat it unless it was Number One or had increased its sales by a certain amount. Under modern industry conditions that would be more difficult, which may well be why the rules were abandoned some years ago, but the fact remains that it's never been the job of the programme to find the hits, even though it was a valuable promotional tool once upon a time. It was supposed to report the hits that were already happening, by whatever means. Personally, breaking that link was one of the things that put me off the programme around the turn of the century (that and age of course) because it began to lack a real raison d'etre when the big stars could waltz straight on to it with a performance they'd taped months in advance. By the time they were desperate enough to combine it with TOTP2, thus interspersing new and old performances to avoid satisfying anybody, it seemed to become a waste of time and the writing was really on the wall. I'm still a little grudging in admitting this, but if it really couldn't survive in its original form it's better off being put out of its misery.

The better news is that, for the time being at least, the website is staying up. I've been enjoying their Blog Party archives, and there are a few brief clips of performances through the ages. New Order? They ended up miming 'Regret' on a beach.

posted by Chris Brown @ 4:14 pm 0 comments