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November 25, 2005
Friday Reading List
It is becoming clear that if you don't have any new cute cat pictures for Friday Cat Blogging, it is almost as good to list what you have read in the previous week. I will not bore you with this every week but I thought last week's reading was particularly Abnormal so I'm posting it.
I read Mark Juergensmeyer's Terror in the Mind of God while flying around the country last week. I will have more to say on this later, but for now let me say that it didn't quite answer my question about the worldwide rise of religious fundamentalism over the last several decades. Juergensmeyer does have some extremely interesting ideas on the interaction between fundamentalist religion and violence. I'm not sure I buy all of it; but his reports on dozens of interviews with terrorists are fascinating. The account of the young man who saw nothing wrong with blowing up a supermarket but didn't think he could bring himself to blow up a soccer stadium, particularly if "enemy" soccer players who he admired might be killed, was truly bazaar.
I also read large sections of John Huehnergard's The Akkadian of Ugarit. I was a little shocked to find that a paper I wrote in 1975 on the Akkadian wisdom text RS 22.439 was cited. Now this is not a work that most people would read cover to cover and I am no exception. I did read the chapters on Phonology, Morphology and Syntax with some care and the last chapter on "Dialect Affinities and Substrate Influences" with considerable diligence. While I learned a lot, sleeping was easy this week. Much of the book consists of lists with various appendices making up over a third of the book.
I also read a few papers:
M. Dikstra's "Another Text in the Shorter Cuneiform Alphabet (KTU 5.22)," Ugarit Forschungen 18, 1986, 121-123. This is a flawed paper but flawed for all the right reasons. You'll see what I mean when I post on KTU 5.22 in a few days.
Pierre Bordreuil, "Cunéiformes Alphabétiques non Canoniques, II. Apropos de l'épigraphe de Hala Sultan Tekké," Semitica, 33, 1983, 7-15. I should have read this paper earlier and will at sometime update some of my earlier posts on the short cuneiform alphabet texts.
Manfried Dietrich, Lorenz Oswald and Sanmartin Joaquín's, "Zur ugaritischen Lexikographie XIII." Ugarit Forschungen 7, Münster: Verlag Butzon and Bercher Keverlaer, 1975, 158-169. This is very useful in understanding KTU 5.22.
J. Severino Croatto's "Jesus, Prophet like Elijah, and Prophet-Teacher," Journal of Biblical Literature, 124,3, Fall 2005, 451-465. I sure hope I get through this edition before the next one arrives.
I also got about a third of the way through December's Scientific American. Sorry, PZ and afarensis , except for your blogs and a couple of things in Scientific American, no biology this week.
My teacher Loren Fisher once told of one of his teachers (Gordon?) who believed that a person could not justifiably call himself educated unless he read four books a week: a "fat one" and a "skinny one" in his field and a "fat one" and a "skinny one" outside his field. One of these four books should be in a language other than his own. Well, Loren himself came very close to this standard but I have failed miserably over my life and continue to fail now that I have more time to read than ever before. The good news is I don't have a "field" so I can't figure out how to balance my failure in this regard.
Posted by Duane Smith at November 25, 2005 1:18 PM | Read more on Odds and Ends |
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