I first heard about the Baha’i Faith through my experience with Esperanto. (The two have some ideological overlap and Baha’is believe in a coming universal language, hence many have learned Esperanto.) However, I picked up this little book because I met a Baha’i at a dinner party and wanted to know a bit about it. At just over 100 pages with equal parts exposition and selections from their founding writings, it was exactly what I was looking for. It is divided into three parts. Part One tells the history of the Faith. Part Two explains its primary tenets. Part Three describes how its institutions operate.

Now, regarding the Faith itself: meh. While I readily acknowledge that the doctrines of this religion are an improvement in some ways over other religions, it has some serious problems. The primary idea of the Baha’i Faith is that all major religious traditions contain true divine revelation and any disharmony between them results from two possibilities. Either (1) the invalid tenet was applicable only for that time and place or (2) it is due to human error. Each “dispensation” of divine revelation supposedly exhibits tell-tale signs which enable one to identify frauds.

There’s a lot I could say about the problems with this view, but I don’t think it is quite fair to critique a world view based on a tiny introduction. If I ever read on (which I probably won’t), the key texts are The Book of Certitude and Gleanings from the Writings of Baha’u’llah. Which reminds me, the English translations of these works (made in the 1930’s by the 3rd Guardian of the Faith, Shoghi Effendi) are done in the style of the King James Bible. This is ridiculous, annoying, and pretentious.

What follows is a review of this book itself, not its contents. Chaucer rules; this book sucks. Here’s why:

Let me state at the outset that I am not an anti-capitalist. Quite the contrary. I think free markets are awesome, unfairly denigrated, and usually blamed for things that are actually the result of unfree markets. This book is a classic case.

This book is a chore in every sense: to buy, to carry, to read, to cite. No consumer would choose this book of their own free will. For the cost, you could buy Chaucer’s works as a multi-volume set instead (think Norton Critical Editions). This solution would be more pleasurable to read and less likely to give you a hernia. It is also a pain to cite from Riverside when you want to delineate various works, critical introductions, etc. “But Dave,” you say, “its a one-volume authoritative edition!” So. What possible reason is there for forcing everything between two covers? Price? Since when do colleges care about the cost of textbooks? Convenience? What about this book is convenient? No, this book screams “I don’t give a crap about the reader. You’re gonna buy this big-ass book and you’re gonna like it. You will never read this book after college anyway so who cares. This form is convenient and functional for the institutions and our convenience matters more than yours.”

If consumers [students] had any say in the textbook market, this garbage would not exist. It is only because of the ridiculous hegemony of our system of higher learning that such affronts to good taste exist. Design by committee blows.

“In a recent piece about the Manual for Civilization […] I lamented the fact that Stewart Brand’s 76-book contribution to the Manual contained only one and a half books authored by a woman. […] In grappling with the challenge, I faced a disquieting and inevitable realization: The predicament of diversity is like a Russian nesting doll.” – Brain Pickings

I love book lists, especially the “great books” variety which attempt to amass a representative sample of Western intellectual culture that can be realistically read over the course of a single lifetime. One of the most common and most annoying criticisms of these endeavors, exemplified by the above quote (which is not a particularly egregious example, it just happens to be the most recent I’ve read), are that they are insufficiently diverse.

The fact is that the vast majority of our most important works were written by men, and by white (a racial term that is anachronistic in many ways) men at that. This might be a sub-optimal state of affairs, but it is inescapable. Packing such a list with women and non-whites because they have different genitals or skin color is as bad as excluding them on the same criteria.

As the above article almost realizes, when you start building your list based on arbitrary gender, racial, and socio-economic quotas, the quality and historical importance of the selections becomes a secondary factor–to the detriment of the collection. If books by women or minorities are better works of art, more historically important, etc. then by all means they should knock out their male competitors, but show them the courtesy of basing our decision on the quality of their content. That means no bonus points awarded for missing a penis.

I am convinced that all ratings of this book are inflated by at least one star because people know going in that Morris was a key figure in the development of modern fantasy and an important influence on Tolkien and C.S. Lewis.

Granted, there are several of good ideas here which are utilized much more effectively by Morris’ intellectual heirs–archaism, medieval revival, appropriation of myth, etc. However, these are not deftly applied here. This book simply cannot stand on its own without the post-hoc crutch of superior derivative art. The plot is plodding and disjointed–rampant with loose ends, coincidence, and characters devoid of plausible motivation.

Walter’s unhappy marriage and the tedious love triangles practically beg a modern reader to draw parallels with Morris’ own unhappy marriage and the blatant affair between his wife and the poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti. From this angle, the story doesn’t feel romantically hopeful or even cathartic, just desperate and pathetic.

One redeeming feature is that my copy is a facsimile of the Kelmscott Press edition. Kelmscott Press was a Morris venture for reviving old-school bookmaking. Originals must be truly gorgeous works of art. This certainly adds to the effect Morris is going for in the narrative.

The Wood Beyond the World is only worth reading today as a scholarly exercise. If you want medieval romance, read actual medieval romances. If you want quality fantasy, read the authors he inspired.

I’ve been interested in the JFK assassination since the 90s, probably due in large part to the Oliver Stone movie. (Indirectly. I was pro-conspiracy before actually seeing the film.) I’d read Jim Marrs’ Crossfire, Fletcher Prouty’s JFK: The CIA, Vietnam and the Plot to Assassinate John F. Kennedy, Murder in Dealey Plaza, and others. None of the various conspiracy stories seemed quite right, but it seemed to me that there was enough oddities to the official story that “where there’s smoke there’s fire,” as the saying goes.

Marrs’ book in particular had so much detail that impressed me at the time. Many years later, I discovered to my dismay that Marrs also had similar books about aliens and other crazy conspiracies–Rule by Secrecy and Alien Agenda–which made me begin to question my earlier estimation of the quality of his research in Crossfire.

With the assassination 50th anniversary media blitz, I decided to actually read a book which supported the “lone gunman” view. Case Closed was recommended to me by skeptic Kenneth Feder, one of my professors in college. Posner didn’t disappoint. Not only is the book very well-written and engaging, he covers many of the issues which caused me to lean pro-conspiracy all these years. He does an admirable job explaining, without defending, the missteps and obfuscations of the FBI, CIA, etc. while clearing up a lot of misinformation masquerading as evidence of conspiracy.

In one passage that stuck with me, an interviewee stated that the assassination has become almost a religious experience, complete with relics, sacred texts, and a holy site that people pilgrimage to. I think this comparison is more accurate than he perhaps realized. I’d add that the conspiracy narrative also has a heavy dose of mythic power that resonates with people in the same way that religion does. It is truly an American myth–and with an extremely well-documented event. Can you imagine how easily such myths would overwhelm the truth in history where they cannot be debunked by surviving evidence?

So yes, I now think Oswald acted alone. The government wasn’t co-opted by an evil conspiracy, it was just a bureaucratic rat’s nest of petty infighting and incompetence. sigh