If we can be sacrilegious enough to rate, Job has been my favorite part of the HB for as long as I've been reading it, mostly for the literary power of Job's lamentations and the voice out of the whirlwind. While I definitely agree that it's there submerged in other chunks of the Hb, Job definitely comes the closest to acknowledging what Morrison calls the "fourth face" of God. Oddly enough given that my favorite part of the NT is John's Gospel, where everything is love and the central promise is of unity with Christ!) I don't know about "one book", (although nothing else is quite as formally perfect as Gatsby) but Fitzgerald is definitely a "one theme" author:"provincial corrupted by the wicked ways of the east" is the plot of basically every novel he wrote aside from The Beautiful and the Damned. On Hemingway: we've talked about this before, but I'm somewhat shocked by how explicitly something is up with him- there's a bit of it in Islands in the Stream too if I recall-and then there's the whole business of him having had an estranged trans daughter to whom he was supposed to have said "we belong to a strange tribe." I also have a certain innate skepticism to the "rehabilitation" of anybody by assimilation into honored queerness, but I'd be willing to say that Hemingway probably was transfeminine (or an Eonist, to use Ellis's never-really-caught-on terminology for someone like that.)
My favorite part of the NT is Mark, or was when I read the Gospels as an undergrad, more for the swift apocalyptic mood, the curt and impatient Jesus, than anything else. I remember judging John too Platonist, but this sounds like a typical undergraduate opinion and I will re-investigate. Re: Hem's rehabilitation, yes, this kind of thing can be like padding your admissions essay with exaggerated claims of oppression, but insofar as it allows for more generative and generous interpretations than the old-school feminist "macho man compensating for his small dick" or whatever it can be useful, and The Garden of Eden really is very good, up there with Barnes and Lawrence and Nella Larsen as far as modernist sexual searching goes; I'm not just saying that for identity politics reasons, especially since promotion on the basis of identity been ruled unconstitutional.
I see why you would think that, it is definitely the most high-flying of the gospels in terms of metaphysical theology, and there is a clear platonist influence, but it’s a very physical sort, a platonism of fish and bread and washed feet balancing all the fire-and-spirit talk. (I’m not accusing you of this at all, but it’s absolutely a mistake to think of Platonism is just “less severe Gnosticism” and I see that a lot in post-voegelin rw antiGnosticism”)
My dad read the Book of Job aloud to me when I was a small boy. I was very upset because of something or other, probably kids at school picking on me, and asked “why me?” The message of Job, my dad explained, is “‘why me?’ The reason is: no reason.”
Oh wait I forgot, caveat about Job: that Hollywood ending is bullshit. IIRC it’s said to have been tacked on later and certainly reads that way. I guess even the scribes had to shop their work with focus groups :p
Yes, I believe the ending or even the whole frame narrative is a later addition to pre-existing poetry. I could defend the ending by saying its arbitrariness amplifies the "no reason" theme—no reason for bad luck, no reason for good luck—like something out of Euripides.
If we can be sacrilegious enough to rate, Job has been my favorite part of the HB for as long as I've been reading it, mostly for the literary power of Job's lamentations and the voice out of the whirlwind. While I definitely agree that it's there submerged in other chunks of the Hb, Job definitely comes the closest to acknowledging what Morrison calls the "fourth face" of God. Oddly enough given that my favorite part of the NT is John's Gospel, where everything is love and the central promise is of unity with Christ!) I don't know about "one book", (although nothing else is quite as formally perfect as Gatsby) but Fitzgerald is definitely a "one theme" author:"provincial corrupted by the wicked ways of the east" is the plot of basically every novel he wrote aside from The Beautiful and the Damned. On Hemingway: we've talked about this before, but I'm somewhat shocked by how explicitly something is up with him- there's a bit of it in Islands in the Stream too if I recall-and then there's the whole business of him having had an estranged trans daughter to whom he was supposed to have said "we belong to a strange tribe." I also have a certain innate skepticism to the "rehabilitation" of anybody by assimilation into honored queerness, but I'd be willing to say that Hemingway probably was transfeminine (or an Eonist, to use Ellis's never-really-caught-on terminology for someone like that.)
My favorite part of the NT is Mark, or was when I read the Gospels as an undergrad, more for the swift apocalyptic mood, the curt and impatient Jesus, than anything else. I remember judging John too Platonist, but this sounds like a typical undergraduate opinion and I will re-investigate. Re: Hem's rehabilitation, yes, this kind of thing can be like padding your admissions essay with exaggerated claims of oppression, but insofar as it allows for more generative and generous interpretations than the old-school feminist "macho man compensating for his small dick" or whatever it can be useful, and The Garden of Eden really is very good, up there with Barnes and Lawrence and Nella Larsen as far as modernist sexual searching goes; I'm not just saying that for identity politics reasons, especially since promotion on the basis of identity been ruled unconstitutional.
I see why you would think that, it is definitely the most high-flying of the gospels in terms of metaphysical theology, and there is a clear platonist influence, but it’s a very physical sort, a platonism of fish and bread and washed feet balancing all the fire-and-spirit talk. (I’m not accusing you of this at all, but it’s absolutely a mistake to think of Platonism is just “less severe Gnosticism” and I see that a lot in post-voegelin rw antiGnosticism”)
My dad read the Book of Job aloud to me when I was a small boy. I was very upset because of something or other, probably kids at school picking on me, and asked “why me?” The message of Job, my dad explained, is “‘why me?’ The reason is: no reason.”
My favorite biblical story to this day.
Oh wait I forgot, caveat about Job: that Hollywood ending is bullshit. IIRC it’s said to have been tacked on later and certainly reads that way. I guess even the scribes had to shop their work with focus groups :p
Yes, I believe the ending or even the whole frame narrative is a later addition to pre-existing poetry. I could defend the ending by saying its arbitrariness amplifies the "no reason" theme—no reason for bad luck, no reason for good luck—like something out of Euripides.