Benjamin asked me to play him an audiobook this afternoon. Which one? “One with monsters.” I played him Geraldine McCaughrean’s Odysseus, but my favorite of her monsters is this one, from a chapter in Perseus called "Love at First Sight":

At the sight of the monster watching her from among the waves, Andromeda fainted. The beast was transfixed; the answer to its longings was suddenly there. It had been formed and made to hunger after Andromeda. As Poseidon took a piece of alligator, a shred of shark, a morsel of whale, a section of moray eel, and molded his ravenous vengeful monster, he poured into its sea-cold blood all the heat he had felt for Medusa, all the hunger he still felt for beauty, all the violence he normally reserved for causing tidal waves and earthquakes. So the monster thought and dreamed and pictured and bayed for Andromeda. And when it found her staked out as a gift, its ecstasy was horrible to see. It leaped and pranced in the sea, and its tongue lolled out through its thousands of teeth. Its nostrils were full of her sweet smell. It scraped its clawed fins on the shallowing seabed and stretched out its neck… (pp. 79–80)

What an amazing fan letter:

Dear Mr. French,

First of all, we have to tell you that your "Mises" blog is fantastic. The breadth of subject matter, the depth of scholarship, and the overarching wit and sense of humor distinguish it from virtually every other blog in its space. We know that’s not news to you, but it’s always nice to hear it from someone else. As a matter of fact, we were stunned that it was not chosen to be among the Wall Street Journal’s Top 25 Economics Blogs. (They certainly weren’t paying attention to your Alexa U.S. traffic rank of 4,854!)

We have spent months researching economy blogs and "Mises" stands out for posts that are intelligent and educational without being pedantic. And even though you are coming from a very distinct point of view, you don’t beat readers over the head with it. You address timely topics and explain in them in layman’s English (mostly).

We are also impressed that your writers do their own writing and thinking in stark contrast to so many economics "bloggers" who merely cut and paste the work of others, making only the minimal creative effort of putting a headline and single-sentence comment on it.

Your range of topics is mind-bogglingly broad, from economic policy and healthcare reform to WWI, pornography, intellectual property, music piracy, advertising, public education, labor unions, nuclear energy, mobile phones, and on and on. The selection of topics virtually guarantees readers will find something compelling, informative and, often, entertaining every day.

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• "Global temperature Changes Caused by Postage Stamp Increase"

• "What’s Wrong with Advertising on the Moon?"

• "Michael Moore Kills Capitalism with Kool-Aid"

• "How Mao Dealt With Green Shoots"

• "Keep Your Self-Righteous Fingers Off My Processed Food"

• "If We Don’t Recover, It’s Your Fault"

• "Green Baptists Preach Salvation by Breaking Car Windows"

Your writing style is approachable and often conversational, inviting the reader in for a chat as opposed to a lecture. Your writers craft many memorable lines but here are some of our favorites:

• "So there we go, the typical NYT theory that we are all as stupid as Pavlovian dogs, but governments are as smart as Pavlov."

• "Moore is a rather simple guy. He is likable. He sees the world as good guys (people with no money) and bad guys (people with money)."

• "’Goddess of the Market’ by Jennifer Burns just arrived. I ripped open the package and got stuck reading and reading and reading. The emails, phonecalls, and IMs just had to wait."

• "So when you look up at the night sky, instead of seeing the same old "Man in the Moon" face, you could see the Nike swoosh or the McDonald’s arches. And what’s wrong with that?"

We very much enjoy your blog and would like to give you more exposure here in the United States and around the world.

We are John Wilpers, global blog coordinator, and Laurent Belsie, Money editor, for The Christian Science Monitor, an award-winning international news organization that covers news and feature stories from every corner of the globe. The Monitor has won hundreds of journalism honors including seven Pulitzer Prizes and more than a dozen Overseas Press Club Awards

Earlier this year, the 100-year-old Monitor became the first nationally circulated newspaper to replace its daily print edition with its website plus a weekly print and daily e-mail edition. Nearly 2 million readers visit the Monitor’s website every month and that number is growing significantly.

To keep the momentum going, we are expanding. We are looking for enlightening, informative posts from bloggers writing about the economy. And we were pleased and excited to find the "Mises Economics Blog."

We would like to extend an invitation to you for your blog to appear on the Money page of csmonitor.com as part of a family of high-quality blogs we are assembling there. We would be co-hosting your blog, running it on our site in parallel with your own, although we would link back to you for all comments and interactivity.

What we offer here is more impact and visibility through a larger audience that wants to understand what’s going on, craves a global context, and tends to be very rich in C-level executives and people with graduate educations. We hope further for a multiplier effect by aggregating a number of high-quality economy blogs that will draw more readers for each other.

We’d like to discuss a possible partnership.

Sincerely,

John Wilpers, Global Blog Coordinator

Laurent Belsie, Money Editor

The Christian Science Monitor
210 Massachusetts Avenue
Boston MA 02115

The boy and I were walking in the woods. His mother phoned me to say that we should look up.

From Introduction to the Old Testament (Hebrew Bible), Lecture 20, November 15, 2006, “Responses to Suffering and Evil…” (available in MP3):

Professor Christine Hayes:

… I think the most important thing about the Book of Proverbs is its almost smug certainty that the righteous and the wicked of the world receive what they deserve in this life. There’s a complacency here, an optimism. God’s just providence and a moral world order, are presuppositions that it just doesn’t seem to question. The wise person’s deeds are good and will bring him happiness and success. The foolish person’s deeds are evil and they are going to lead to failure and ruin. The key idea is that a truly wise person knows that the world is essentially coherent. It’s ethically ordered. There are clear laws of reward and punishment that exist in the world.

Proverbs 26:27: “He who digs a pit will fall into it / and a stone will come back upon him who starts it rolling” [RSV translation]. Or 13:6: “Righteousness protects him whose way is blameless; Wickedness subverts the sinner.” If the righteous suffer then they are being chastised or chastened by God just as a son is disciplined by his father. He shouldn’t reject this reproof, he should welcome it.

This insistence, on the basic justice of the world, and the power of wisdom or fear of the Lord to guarantee success and security was one strand of ancient Israelite thought. It reaches crystallization in the Book of Proverbs. It was available as a response to or an explanation of the catastrophes that had befallen the nation. We’ve seen it at work in the Deuteronomistic school, unwilling to relinquish the idea of a moral God in control of history and preferring to infer the nation’s sinfulness from its suffering and calamity. Better to blame the sufferer Israel and so keep God and the system of divine retributive justice intact.

But it’s precisely this formulaic and conventional piety that is challenged by two other remarkable Wisdom books in the Bible: the Book of Job and the Book of Ecclesiastes. In Job we find the idea that suffering is not always punitive. It is not always a sign of wickedness. It’s not always explicable. And this is the first of several subversions of fundamental biblical principles that we encounter in the Book of Job.

The Book of Job — we really don’t know its date. It’s probably no earlier then the sixth century BCE, but scholars disagree and there are portions of it that seem to reflect a very old and very ancient tradition. It’s one of the hardest books of the Bible for moderns to read, and I think that’s because its conclusions — to the degree that we can agree on what the conclusions might be — its conclusions seem to fly in the face of some basic religious convictions.

You have to allow yourself, I think, to be surprised, to open your mind, to allow yourself to take Job’s charges against God seriously. After all, the narrator makes it clear that God does take them seriously. God nowhere denies Job’s charges and, in fact, at one point the narrator has God say that Job has spoken truly. So no matter how uncomfortable Job may make you feel, you need to understand his claims and not condemn him.

[Read more.]

Via Jeffrey Tucker:

“Smugopedia is a collection of slightly controversial opinions about a variety of subjects. We offer you the chance to buy a fleeting sense of self-satisfaction at the small cost of alienating your friends and loved ones.”

I’m very much enjoying “auditing” this course:

This is the third Hebrew Bible course I’ve listened to. (The first two were from Modern Scholar and the Teaching Company, respectively.) This is the first one to teach me more than Asimov’s Guide to the Bible did.

In the Country of the Gillikins, which is at the North of the Land of Oz, lived a youth called Tip. There was more to his name than that, for old Mombi often declared that his whole name was Tippetarius; but no one was expected to say such a long word when “Tip” would do just as well.

This boy remembered nothing of his parents, for he had been brought when quite young to be reared by the old woman known as Mombi, whose reputation, I am sorry to say, was none of the best. For the Gillikin people had reason to suspect her of indulging in magical arts, and therefore hesitated to associate with her.

Mombi was not exactly a Witch, because the Good Witch who ruled that part of the Land of Oz had forbidden any other Witch to exist in her dominions. So Tip’s guardian, however much she might aspire to working magic, realized it was unlawful to be more than a Sorceress, or at most a Wizardess.

[Excerpted from chapter 1 of The Marvelous Land of Oz.]

I love Stanley Lombardo’s translation of the Iliad. I love it in print and I love the audio version, which he reads himself. Audible is having a sale right now on 150 of its unabridged classics for $8.95 each. Both Lombardo’s Iliad and his Odyssey are included in the sale. Very highly recommended.