Week 1

Sticks and Stones: a study of American architecture and civilization - Lewis Mumford
Matthew, Mark, Luke, John (KJV Authorised)
God's Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible - Adam Nicolson

  A couple years ago I got on an architecture kick, reading a sack of books on the subject, but I retained little to no info. When I try to reach back and grab the name for this column or the style of that arch, I just come up with handful of 'p' words...pillaster Palladian pediment stupa Pantheon pagoda step pyramid. If you asked me to describe a building, I would probably just end up spiting in your face. I'm a millennial version of Leonard Bast from Howards End, trying to "improve" myself by reading The Stones of Venice (haven't read it) and going to Beethoveen's Fifth (haven't been to it). What the heck, I'm having a good time; E.M. Forster and the Schlegel sisters can feel sorry for me all they want. If I had to choose a way to die, being crushed by a bookcase wouldn't be so bad (I guess he technically died of a heart attack).
  Sticks and Stones is short but full. Broad opinions, bold connections, fun to read. "Such a book could have been written only by a young man," writes a 30-years-older Mumford in the preface to this edition. I especially enjoyed chapter one, "The Medieval Tradition," and six, "The Imperial Facade." 
  In "The Medieval Tradition" he describes early New England architecture and communal organization as a continuation of the medieval European village: a few communal structures in the center or town, houses radiating outward along paths or water courses, buildings spread out enough for family gardens but close enough together for mutual aid and defense, the town perhaps surrounded by a stockade. While the "enclosure" of public lands and urbanization transformed the face of England, the New England colonies kept Old England alive, at least in architecture and village organization, for another hundred years.
  "The Imperial Facade" is Mumford's sharpest and most intense chapter, covering the last decade of the 19th century and first of the 20th. "The twenty years between 1890 and 1910 saw the complete rehabilitation of the Roman mode, as the very cloak and costume of the imperial enterprise." Think of the White City at the World's Columbian Exposition in 1893 Chicago, the Lincoln Memorial, our very own Robert E. Lee statue and the development of "Monument Avenue," giant railroad terminals and museums with giant columns, arches, and domes. Listen to this:
   "The Roman development of New York, Chicago, Washington, and the lesser metropolises, had an important effect upon the homes of the people. Historically, the imperial monument and the slum-tenement go hand in hand. The same process that creates an unearned increment for the landlords who posses favored sites, contributes a generous quota - which might be called the unearned excrement - of depression, overcrowding, and bad living, in the dormitory districts of the city. This had happened in imperial Rome; it had happened again in Paris under Napoleon III...,and it happened once again in our American cities."
  Wow!

  Why did I choose the KJV to read the Gospels? Not sure, but I'm glad I did. I don't usually read the KJV, and I didn't grow up hearing that version in church. The syntax and rhythm 1) provide an enchanting reading pace, 2) create a consistent tone, even between John and the synoptic gospels, and 3) sound fresh because they're old (or just because they're well done?) -- they helped me to sit-up and listen.
  I marked down some particularly charming word uses: he was an hungred; he sat at meat; when ye come into an house, salute it; sore and exceeding as flat adverbs - sore afraid and exceeding glad; dureth (endure); straw (scatter); cast the same in his teeth; winebibber; wist (know); list (desire); desireth (ask); halt (lame); trow (think); penury (poverty); stricken in years (old); quicken (enliven). It is the spirit that quickeneth...
  I am also glad I read the gospels straight through. (I don't usually read straight through any book of the Bible; I don't really have any systematic Bible reading practice) It was overwhelming and humbling. Usually I read a short section (a chapter or less) for personal devotion or group study, and I usually end up feeling "closer" to Jesus in the process. Swallowing the gospels whole had the opposite effect. I am so so so far away from living like Jesus lived! Culturally of course, but also materially, morally, and spiritually. How can I honestly claim to be his disciple?

  I have also wondered over the years if anyone ever spoke KJV English. Well, it's yes and no. God's Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible weaves together the history of late 16th c. to early 17th c. England, personal stories of King James and the political and religious figures involved in the new version, and Nicolson's own literary love of the KJV vis-a-vis other English versions. There's plenty of drama in this book, believe it or not. The atmosphere of intellectual passion and religious-political soap opera reminds me of scenes from Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose -- if you like that book you would probably like God's Secretaries, too.
  The KJV was written primarily to be read out loud in church, so in that sense KJV English has been spoken since its creation. But it wasn't written in the daily language of the "man on the street;" it was high-fallutin, written in the language of "majesty," "far more regal than demotic." Neither was it the daily language of the man in the throne; it was deliberately "archaic," sounding old-timey even back in 1607. No one ever spoke KJV English in day-to-day life. It is special occasion language. Religious performance language. "Ceremonial," "musical," "rich" are words Nicolson uses to describe the style.
  To Nicolson, the KJV committee struck the balance between clarity and mystery, between earthly and heavenly, between faithfulness to the meaning of the Greek and Hebrew texts and faithfulness to the poetic possibilities of English. Nicolson argues that the KJV has an "aural fluency" unmatched by any English version before or since. 
  The only English he can positively compare it to is that of Shakespeare's "great tragedies." He describes the KJV and King Lear as "mirror-twins." "...the King James Bible enshrines what it understands as the guarantee of all meaning; the rhetoric of King Lear breaks and shivers into multi-faceted shards of songs, madness, grandeur, argument, pathos; the [KJV] masks its immensely various sources under one certain, all-over musical sonority; everything in Lear falls apart; everything in the [KJV] pulls together; one is a nightmare of dissolution, the other a dream of wholeness."

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  As a Christian reading the Bible, I'm obsessed with finding the true meaning of a teaching or passage. I want to shuck the husk of style and vocabulary and eat the nut of truth. I want to break open the linguistic shell and possess the "inner" pearl of wisdom. I often think of reading like Miles Smith, one of the Translators and author of the preface to the KJV, thought of translating: "Translation it is that openeth the window, to let in the light; that breaketh the shell, that we may eat the kernel; that putteth aside the curtain that we may look into the most Holy place; that removeth the cover of the well, that we may come by the water" (Nicolson 144).
  Reading a fashion-forward version of the Bible like the KJV or The Message reminds me that Scripture, or any text, isn't a transparent pane of glass through which I view meaning. Scripture is words, matter, sound in my ear, ink on paper, gears turning in my head. Scripture is something I must interact with, like a building. Glass windows, yes, but also stone foundation, brick walls, wooden doors, maybe even a pediment over a portico where I see pillasters flanking the portal (throw me a bone Leonard Bast!). Regardless of the degree of inspiration we ascribe to it's authors, we all know that the Bible was written, built, word by word, edit by edit, year by year, piece by piece. It has style, form, meaning, all joined and fastened (or at times, unhinged and loose) into a marvelous structure. Texts are a type of building and buildings are a type of text. Reading the KJV reminded me of that. "It is easy to see [the KJV] as England's equivalent of the great baroque cathedral it never built, an enormous and magnificent verbal artifice..." (Nicolson 70).