I admitted in a note a few hours ago that I didn’t exactly know something that I had typed as if I actually knew it. To my credit I have typed about a bazillion times this millennium; What the Fuck Do I know? And probably half a bazillion times, the older I get the more I realize the less I know.
Conversationally it’d be difficult to ever get past citing sources or, honestly, citing how the sources know shit. I’m really only positive about shit I actually witnessed and even then as any cop will tell you, eye witnesses aren’t all that reliable.
I took this class at PSU once, maybe 1983, called the bible as literature. It was like a 200 level class, which used to mean sophomore, universities do shit differently now. From 1965 to 1968 I went to Sunday school. That’s really the only qualifications I have for saying anything about the bible. I’m not really even all that interested in it, but it fascinates the fuck out of me how many people are, like it was somehow a line in the sand. It’s not.
I probably know more about 100 years of solitude. I liked that book. I couldn’t tell you how old Marquez was when he wrote it or how much came from his head and how much was oral tradition, whether he knew he was opening a latin American fiction market in the States or if he even liked writing it. I can tell you my opinion, like the bible bits and pieces of 100 years of solitude are brilliant, profound and can’t really be said in any other way than the way they are said. No, I am not trying to denigrate the bible, I just really liked 100 years of solitude, but rarely to never to I quote it in an argument about … anything.
By the same token … hmmm, like a bus token, a coin, the same side of the same coin, I really disliked The Davinci Code and I quote it the same amount of never for the same amount of arguments I’m not in. The poor fucking bible does not have the same luxury and has had that no luxury for a long fucking time in many different languages.
For clarity’s sake I wasn’t arguing about the bible in a note; but I have. You know that circle game that you probably played for the first time in kindergarten? Someone whispers a sentence in your ear, you whisper in the next kids ear, and by the time it gets al the way around it’s a different sentence altogether? Books like the bible and, say, the Iliad, came from an oral tradition, both went around the kindergarten class for a few hundred years before someone wrote them down. Oh, yeah, and the bible was put together by committee, I mean the parts to keep and the parts that hit the editing room floor after a few thousand years, at least for the old testament, of making it around the circle of kids.
Again, not to denigrate, just saying, I wasn’t there, but neither was anyone else. There are guys who took vows not to get laid or not to make a buck just so they can study that book and they aren’t 100 percent. I figured I saved the economy and made a lot of gals happy (well, half of the ones I slept with, I made half of them half happy for a half an hour) by not studying the bible and I still might know as much about it. But, I’m satisfied with how little I know about it. In fact if a Marquez scholar wanted to get in a pissing match over 100 years of solitude, I’d concede. That’s funny because of how very unlikely that is to happen. Wars have been fought over which version of the bible was right (I’m thinking England and Ireland, but I’m sure there’s better examples).
Shit. Now I’ve forgotten what the note said and what this entry is about. Oh well, what the fuck do I know.
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