Here are some books for your holiday shopping.:

If the lucky recipient  likes both poetry and gardening, Stanley Kubritz brings them both together in The Wild Braid: A Poet Reflects on a Century in the Garden 

Whether the recipients are  sailors or not, they will enjoy Roland Barth’s Cruising Rules.

Sardonic? Ambrose Bierce’s A Cynic’s Word Book. is, admittedly, occasionally misogynistic but always  acerbic. Originally published in 1906 it’s still in print.

And, of course, don’t forget Veritas. It may be the best read of the year. –

​Answer: About 7.175 million years ago with Graecopithecus freybergi . See Tim Flannery “Out  of Savannastan”  New York Review November 4, 2021 pp. 17 ff.  It’s a great story.

​Tolle, lege, ”Pick it up an read,” the kids shouted.  Augustine heard them and did just that – he picked up a text and it  (eventually) changed his life.
          Strange story and a strange idea that some texts are “transformative.” You take a few dozen squiggles, called  letters, scramble them in various ways, page after page. Someone, perhaps centuries later,, unscrambles them and comes away change for life.
          Implausible, but when I asked some trusted friends whether they knew of “transformative” texts, no one seemed to doubt that there were such things.
Here’s a tabulation of the ones they named, followed by a few observations of my own:
 
 
Adams, Henry The Education of Henry Adams
Apuleius The Golden Ass
Augustine (or maybe Peter Brown’s  Augustine of Hippo and Religion and Society in the Age of St. Augustine 
Marcus Aurelius
Buddhist texts or books about them, e.g. Buddhism is True by Robert Wright.
T.S. Eliot Four Quartets
Ralph Ellison Invisible Man
Epictetus
Nietzsche Also sprach Zarathustra  
Plato, esp.  Apology (
Young, Jeffrey Reinventing Your Life 
Observations:
The responses aren’t a sample designed  to delight the heart of a pollster. I just wanted to know what friends would think about the matter.  But maybe most interesting has been  what they didn’t say:

• No Greek epic or tragedy.  No Vergil, no Dante. Very little of the old Great Books canon.
• Nothing from the Jewish or Christian scriptures. Have these lost their hold on our imagination?
•  Most (but not all) of these texts are “intentional,” that is, intended to induce change  in their readers. A few (e.g. Apuleius?)  are “immersive,” that is, they invite you to get absorbed in a narrative  and thereby find  you are thinking in a new ways, One example, Peter Singer and Ellen Finkelpearl’s new  version of The Golden Ass

• - - Long! These are all B-I-G texts. no short ones like the individual Federalist Papers, the Declaration of Independence, the Gettysburg Address, the “Great Simplification” in Deuteronomy 6 and Mark 12, or short poems such as  Milton’s sonnet 19 (“When I consider    .” ), or, shorter still, the Delphic maxim  “Know Thyself.”  Do long texts really have a monopoly on transformation, or do I just have a short attention span?

Special Thanks to:   
Jane Chaplin, Michael Gillespie, Bob Kaster, Harry and Peregrine Kavros,  Tom Martin, Dan-el Padilla, Jason Pedicone, Gil Renberg, Paul Woodruff   
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PS These suggestions often came  with explanations and stories, rich and intense,  but in some cases quite personal. So I have held back from quo ting them. But, many thanks for all!

•      This conversation is ongoing. Post your thoughts as a Comment and invite others to join in. 

A spectacular ancient mosaic is now on view in Antakya, Turkey (ancient Antioch). You can see this  huge mosaic  and in  fact you can drink, dine, swim and sleep next to it in the  at the new Antakya Museum Hotel
Grounded?  OK. The hotel’s web site has some good photos.
​Have any readers see the mosaic?
Thanks to luthier Steve Connor for  calling this to my attention.  

​Dan-el Padilla  (Classics at Princeton) and Roosevelt Montás (whose book Rescuing Socrates was discussed in our last blog post) have a lot in common and, if I read them right, some important differences in their views of literature and education .  They will be talking to each other at the Strand bookstore (828 Broadway at 12th Street) in New York City on  Friday November  5th from 7:30 to 8:30 pm  . It should be lively! 

 “Transformative texts?” Most people reading this blog have, I bet, encountered such texts, but perhaps not in the way Dominican born Roosevelt Montás has.. It couldn’t have been easy moving to the States and growing up in the Big City, but now he’s   Senior Lecturer in American Studies at Columbia University.  On November 16 Princeton Press will release  his  book Rescuing Socrates: How the Great Books Changed My Life and Why They Matter for a New Generation. You can preorder it now.          But why wait for the release? The Teagle Foundation, under the skillful leadership of Andy Delbanco, will provide an on-line opportunity to explore “how certain books transformed the life of this immigrant from the Dominican Republic—"and why they have the power to speak to people of all backgrounds.” You can  interact with Roosevelt Montás   in a Teagle  virtual workshop  on November 4th from 12:30-1:30 p.m. EST. (Foundation staff will remain from 1:30-2:00 p.m. EST to answer questions about the Foundation’s  Cornerstone: Learning for Living initiative.)  The workshop is free and open to current  Foundation grantees and prospective applicants.  You can  Register for workshops > here.

​Thirty words of Coptic on a scrap of papyrus, discussed in the preceding blog post, caused scandal enough for any field of scholarship.  But now there’s more  affecting the study of ancient texts – more , and maybe worse.
The scam about the so-called “Gospel of Jesus’ Wife,” exposed  primarily institutional weaknesses – a prestigious journal, a venerable professorship, and university governance were all swept off their well-heeled feet by a snippet that any alert classicist would find suspicious from the outset. A careful check of its provenance and a radiocarbon  dating of the papyrus itself confirmed such suspicions. The question then becomes why did institutional structures fail to rein in the scam before it wasted such energy and caused such damage.
But there’s a parallel, or rather intersecting story about a no less serious crime against scholarship. In this case the most interesting questions are at the individual, rather than the institutional  level..
This time the story centers on Dirk Obink,, the MacArthur award winning papyrologist suspected of having stolen and sold some Oxyrhynchus papyri to some of the same over-zealous  buyers involved in the “Gospel of Jesus” scam. Again, the story is well-told by Ariel Sabar in the June 2020 issue of The Atlantic. (The electronic version has the title “A Biblical Mystery at Oxford,” – but it’s not just about biblical papyri.  Nefragments of Sappho” are involved as well.)
New developments in the story have now been  reported in the   New York Times article, “He Taught Ancient Texts at Oxford. Now He Is Accused of Stealing Some”..


If Obink is found guilty, the most puzzling and enduring question in the case,  to my way of thinking, will be  how such an intelligent and devoted scholar could fail to recognize that while  he could destroy some  evidence of the theft, another list of these papyri existed – of course it did!  How could he fail to know that? This record was very likely to be checked when the stolen papyri surfaced. 
But there’s more to it than that. The most serious crime against scholarship in this case is not the theft itself, but the misdating - for a while at least -  in an apparent effort to increase the market value of a text.  Again, such misdating would eventually be discovered once the papyrus was properly published. In the meantime, the reputation of the great scholar would mislead anyone interested in its implications.
 When such things happen, the whole foundation of scholarship in the field is shaken.  So the questions multiply:
What could have caused such blindness?
Who can now be trusted?
 
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Please enrich the discussion by posting a comment or adding information..

​Ariel Sabar’s book Veritas is a must read.  Its subtitle tells where it’s headed, “A Harvard Professor, a Con-Man and the Gospel of Jesus’ Wife,” but doesn’t give a clue to the brilliant sleuthing, deft writing, and crafty exploration of the implications of his story..
By the time Sabar’s detective work is over very few of the elite players  are left standing; as if it were the last scene in a Shakespearian tragedy. The reputations of   well respected papyrologists, eminent scientists, holders of endowed chairs and  senior administrators from journal editors right up to the president in Massachusetts Hall.  
Those still standing are not the princes of the realm, but a few ragtag amateur scholars who do the heavy lifting, while others chase fame and fortune. And, of course, there’s  Sabar himself, without whose prodigious work the full implications of the scandal would never have become clear.
Here’s the scenario: An email comes in from someone you have never met offering to give you (or your university) an ancient   papyrus written in Coptic. The would-be donor says he has no expertise in Coptic but with a dictionary and grammar has puzzled out enough to offer a rough translation, including “Jesus said to them, ‘My wife…’”
Take it from there. but don’t expect  to learn much about Jesus’ marital status, his relationship to Mary Magdalene, the attitudes of early Christians to sex, the place of women in the early church, or even what the term “gospel,” entails. The book touches on each of these topics, but is not really about any of them. Instead, it poses the question whether universities today cam distinguish genuine scholarship from self-serving deceptiveness,– if they try at all.
The detective work plays out on two levels,  individuals who succumb to  personal advantages of one sort or another,  and institutions  that fail to uphold the standards they profess to defend. . The real importance of the book lies in the question whether post-modernism in its current form and similar movements have now  eroded the university’s traditional determination to “get it right.” Getting it right involves, to be sure, taking time to make careful comparisons, working out the chronology, determining provenance, avoiding conflicts of interest,  consulting people with genuine expertise and resecting their judgment even if it isn’t what one wants to hear.  It’s a slow, unglamorous process but its better than rushing into feel-good story telling, or cliches about “Indeterminacy” and “enriching the conversation,”, or substituting “operational effectiveness” for accuracy, or trying to redress today’s injustices by rewriting the past
Read it and post a comment on what you find.

When you know someone for almost all your adult life, you don’t expect to be surprised when you read his obituary. I felt that way when Jim Tatum routed me to Benjamin Fortson’s memorial on the death of Don Cameron.… But I was surprised, moved and enriched by it.  Whether you knew Don or not, Fortson’s words are worth pondering.  They catch the spirit of a remarkable human being, and of an era in American liberal education. 

​ Over the years Don may have taught  15,000 undergraduates at the University  Michigan, most of them Honors students enrolled in the Great Books classes he taught. He loved the texts he taught and teaching itself.  It worked: eyes were opened and lives changed.
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But it didn’t stop at the classroom door. Andy Szegedy Maszak told me a story about Don reaching out to him. While an undergraduate at Michigan Andy for various reasons never enrolled in any of Don’s classes,
“ … and yet I think of him as one of my cherished teachers.    It was a turbulent time, and Don was not happy about a lot of the student protests, which I tended to support. I think I learned from him what it meant to have a spirited, civil, adult conversation.  “
What a gift! I wonder whether that capacity was simply a feature of Don’s personality, or whether it was also nurtured by the books he so valued and taught so well.  Synergy, I bet.
          I admire the work  he did on Aeschylus and Thucydides,  but for me he was the embodiment of the study of the Great Books.  That means of course than in addition to personal loss his passing marks for me the end of the era in which liberal education was nurtured by those books.
          Where do we go now? I’ll explore that question in a subsequent post,; meanwhile, a moment  of blog silence in honor of H. Don Cameron.

​She is classically trained with important publications on ancient democracy; she has seen clearly how it links to the problems democracy confronts today; she left a cushy post at the Institute for Advanced Study to direct Harvard’s Edmond Safra Center for Ethics and helped launch the Educating for American Democracy project of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Now she has decided  to put all this academic experience to the test in the “real world.”
Here’s the link to the Boston Globe’s coverage of Danielle Allen’s announcement of her candidacy for the Democratic nomination for governor of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.  And, if you share my enthusiasm for her candidacy, here’s  the link  for contributing to her campaign.  Or, if you’re like me and prefer to write a check, send it to:
Committee to Elect Danielle Allen
124 Washington Street, Suite 101
Foxborough, MA 02035