Sometimes wastes of time come full circle. From the good folks at McSweeney's Books, naturally.

art, books, cultural worlds, lists, music

Nate

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The 300 page book All Known Metal Bands is a simple listing of every heavy metal band name that exists or has ever existed, in every genre, that I could find, in what turned out to be a year and a half of research. Where a name was used by more than one band, the name is listed once for each band. The pages are black, the type is silver, and it will make you want to do naughty things. Of the 51,000 bands listed, the most commonly used name is Legion. There are 24 bands named Legion. There are 20 bands named Genocide, and 20 called Requiem. There are 2 called Cryptic Stench, but there is only one Black Darkness.

Interesting example of gender fluidity in a very traditional culture. (Well, perhaps fluidity is too fluid a term).

clothing, cultural worlds, europe, family, gender, horizons of the possible

Nate

:

The tradition of the sworn virgin can be traced to the Kanun of Leke Dukagjini, a code of conduct that has been passed on orally among the clans of northern Albania for more than five centuries. Under the Kanun, the role of women is severely circumscribed: Take care of children and maintain the home. While a woman’s life is worth half that of a man, a virgin’s value is the same - 12 oxen.

The sworn virgin was born of social necessity in an agrarian region plagued by war and death. If the patriarch of the family died with no male heirs, unmarried women in the family could find themselves alone and powerless. By taking an oath of virginity, women could take on the role of men as head of the family, carry a weapon, own property and move freely.

They dress like men, adopt a male swagger and spend their lives in the company of other men.

Wait a minute. We pray 'for the delay of the final consummation'? What happened to hoping to hurry up and have the rapture? As Tertullian explains earlier, "we know that a mighty shock impending over the whole earth— in fact, the very end of all things threatening dreadful woes— is only retarded by the continued existence of the Roman empire. We have no desire, then, to be overtaken by these dire events; and in praying that their coming may be delayed, we are lending our aid to Rome's duration." Fascinating.

early church, empire, government, pentecost and beyond, revelation

Andy

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I shall at once go on, then, to exhibit the peculiarities of the Christian society, that, as I have refuted the evil charged against it, I may point out its positive good.  We are a body knit together as such by a common religious profession, by unity of discipline, and by the bond of a common hope. We meet together as an assembly and congregation, that, offering up prayer to God as with united force, we may wrestle with Him in our supplications. This violence God delights in. We pray, too, for the emperors, for their ministers and for all in authority, for the welfare of the world, for the prevalence of peace, for the delay of the final consummation.

Many of the early missionaries to this corner of NE India were Welsh — I suspect being from a non-dominant culture of their own may have made Christianity seem more understandable than in the rest of India, where many of the missionaries were of (and often used by) the dominant English colonial culture. Of course there's also just the excellent Welsh choral tradition which may have helped it all sound that much better too.

blues, bollywood, cultivation and creation, europe, india, missions, music, rock

Nate

:

This annual incantation is more than one man’s act of madcap devotion. It is also a peephole into the love affair with Western music that goes on every day in this pine-wooded outpost in India’s northeast. Shillong, a British-era hill town that is now home to dozens of boarding schools and colleges, is its hub, especially when it comes to rock.

On Mr. Dylan’s birthday weekend a visitor could drive down a narrow, rain-soaked road and hear young men with guitars serenading, or stumble upon thousands gathered under a Christian revival tent, singing modern gospel in their native Khasi. On a football field, at twilight, you might be pulled into a mosh pit of teenagers dancing to a Naga tribal blues guitarist, or on a Sunday morning find schoolchildren in a chorus of 19th-century hymns in a prim Presbyterian church.

“God has given us a special gift — the gift of singing,” marveled the Rev. J. Fortis Jyrwa of the Khasi Jaintia Presbyterian Assembly here.

Many theories are offered for Shillong’s fascination with rock and the blues. Some argue that the area’s indigenous Khasi traditions are deeply rooted in song and rhyme. Some credit the 19th-century Christian missionaries who came from Britain and the United States, introduced the English language, hymns and gospel music and in turn made the heart ripe for rock. Some say the northeast, remote and in many pockets, gripped by anti-Indian separatist movements, has not been as saturated by Hindi film music as the rest of India.

bible, early church, empire, gospel, government, pentecost and beyond

Andy

:

[S]ometimes Mark’s Gospel has been called the first Christian book, in large part based on the reference in Mk. 13.14 where we find the parenthetical remark, “let the reader understand”, on the assumption that the ‘reader’ in question is the audience. But let us examine this assumption for a moment. Both in Mk. 13.14 and in Rev. 1.3 the operative Greek word is ho anagin?sk?n, a clear reference to a single and singular reader, who in that latter text is distinguished from the audience who are dubbed the hearers (plural!) of John’s rhetoric. . . .  [N]ot even Mark’s Gospel should be viewed as a text, meant for private reading, much less the first real modern ‘text’ or ‘book’. Rather Mark is reminding the lector, who will be orally delivering the Gospel in some or several venues near to the time when this ‘abomination’ would be or was already arising that they needed to help the audience understand the nature of what was happening when the temple in Jerusalem was being destroyed. Oral texts often include such reminders for the ones delivering the discourse in question. So in fact it is not likely the case that the reference to ‘a reader’ in the NT functions like it would in a modern text.  The reader in question is not the audience of the discourse or document, but rather its presenter who knows the text in advance and can appropriately and effectively orally deliver its content to the intended audience or audiences.

Ephemeral, large-scale art by artist Jim Denevan.

Nate

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Take the huge dry lake bed. Choose a stick. Make the largest sand drawing on Earth.

Next on the list could be - aliens see it, make contact. Well, even without aliens, this art is more than mind-boggling in its scale. It’s planet-altering.

Jim Denevan made the world’s largest freehand drawing a few weeks ago on a dry lake in Nevada. How big is it? Three mile across, which took 100 miles of walking to draw the pattern.

[. . .]

Even though esthetically it’s a welcome addition to the landscape, it is also a sort of a transient mark - like a cloud, or a river-bed. Immense in its scope, and lasting only a moment in the large scale of things.

We asked the artist, how long did this stupendous artwork last?

“Completely erased in a rainstorm the next week… It felt strange to work so hard and not see tide come in. But rains did come which is sort of the same thing.”

I wonder whether they could even out the results by getting the engineers to write some new sandbagging directions?

directions, disaster, engineering, volunteers

Nate

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Researchers at the University of Manitoba conducted an experiment (PDF) in which they asked two groups—one made up of professional engineers, the other of volunteers given standard instructions—to construct a dike using standard sandbags. The professionals were able to create a sandbag dike 12 feet tall that proved quite effective. But the 6-foot-tall dike prepared by the unsupervised volunteers failed when the water reached its peak level.