Some Notes On Editions of the Towneley Cycle: Part 2. Description of the Manuscript HM1

This is a continuation of my notes on the manuscript HM1, the only manuscript source for the Towneley Cycle, begun here. I look at the manuscript in terms of what Jerome McGann calls "bibliographic codes," features of the manuscript that communicate non-lexical meaning (that is, meaning apart from the signification of the actual words of the text).

You can't have more fun than this with your clothes on.

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Some Notes On Editions of the Towneley Cycle: Part 1

One of my interests is old manuscripts and how they come into the modern world.  Whether those texts are biblical, legal, historical, poetic, or whatever, they tend to preserve in their physical form some fingerprints of the time and place in which they originate.  As products of human minds and endeavors, they therefore also contain signals about the minds that produced them.

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Reflections About Boredom And Scripture Stemming From Reflections on James Joyce's Unreadability

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If you have no pleasure in scripture, it has no power in you.  Only power over you, like a really brilliant but dismally dull book that you're made to read and which takes 24 hours to read and produces no real pleasure or insight.

Scripture is boring until you know this.

That's why it never does to exclude yourself as the real evidence for either the Resurrection or the Redemption of creation.

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The King James Version: An (Admiring) Bicycle Trip Through Its Demerits

“I was wondering if you could expound a bit more on the ‘defects’ of the KJV. What are ‘inferior’ originals and what are ‘superior’ originals? How do they determine this?”

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Bart Ehrman and Scripture's Dirty Secret: It's Not All That

[U]nfortunately, the way that Western theology has shaped itself, the idea of a perfection in scripture has become its chief cornerstone. Which is really a very pagan idea, as it slips in the intermediary of scripture for the experience of a god.

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Oncology & Mistakes

Love has its price, and we're paying it.  I mustn't make my students pay it today.  Instead I must, ironically (and for the last time in the foreseeable future) judge how they have done against an ideal, and what mistakes they have made against a pattern that has been set for them.

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