Peter O'Toole has died.

Here's his IMDB page. I really haven't seen many of his movies. "The Last Emperor." "Lawrence of Arabia." I'm sorry to lose one of the great old actors. I see that he was going to play the role of Symeon in a 2014 movie titled "Mary," based on The New Testament.

“Lord, now you are letting your servant depart in peace, according to your word; for my eyes have seen your salvation that you have prepared in the presence of all peoples, a light for revelation to the Gentiles, and for glory to your people Israel.”

"An LDS Bishop went undercover as a homeless man in his congregation last Sunday."

"He wanted to use his disguise as a tool to teach on compassion this Thanksgiving." (Video at the link.)

Ward member Jaimi Larsen also didn't recognize the homeless man as [David] Musselman... "He was dirty. He was crippled. He was old. He was mumbling to himself"....

Larsen says she watched from the chapel as Musselman walked to the pulpit - his disguise so real, she had no idea that he was about to reveal himself as their bishop. "He quoted the song 'Have I Done Any Good in the World Today?'," said Larsen.

That story made me think of this passage in the New Testament:

“For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.’

“Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?’

“The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’

George Bush's new art project: Portraits of 19 foreign leaders.

He's moved on from paintings of his own feet in the bathtub and dogs to the various presidents and prime ministers he encountered back in the days when he too was a world leader.

I like that he prepped for famous faces with dog heads and human feet. It suggests that his artistic vision is not about the grandeur of the world stage and the historic personages he walked amongst.

***

Thou, O king, sawest, and behold a great image. This great image, whose brightness was excellent, stood before thee; and the form thereof was terrible. This image's head was of fine gold, his breast and his arms of silver, his belly and his thighs of brass, His legs of iron, his feet part of iron and part of clay.....

"What are these new ways of wearing lipstick?"

"According to many makeup artists, the key is to layer, layer, layer. (First rule of lipstick: any two colors mixed together look snazzier than one alone.) And then, after all that varnishing, strategically undo what you’ve done: engage in some artful blotting. It’s this final step that renders the lips stained, not shellacked."

Blotting. In the 1950s and early 60s, lipstick application always ended with putting a tissue between your lips and pressing them together, leaving a lip-shaped lipstick mark. You'd put it on, then take some of it off. Was that an unnecessary ritual or something you needed to do because lipstick wasn't as good back then as it is today? It was dry and it looked darker on than in the tube. It got darker over the course of the day too. In the 60s, things changed as young women wore frosted, light colors, including white, and then we switched to completely clear "lip gloss." Everything else looked old. It's funny to read an elaborate article today about how to make lipstick "new" again, especially seeing something that is, to me, the epitome of old: blotting.

ADDED: "Blot" is a funny word, which can mean to add spots of staining material like ink (which leads to the figurative use when we speak of dirtying a reputation ("Theres a good mother, boy, that blots thy father!" wrote Shakespeare)). It also refers to erasing and wiping away. The OED has these very old examples:

1611   Bible (A.V.) Acts iii. 19   Repent yee therefore..that your sins may be blotted out.
1667   Milton Paradise Lost xi. 891   Not to blot out mankind.
1593   Shakespeare Venus & Adonis sig. Biiijv,   Like mistie vapors when they blot the skie.

"Frankly, whenever I see a complaint alleging racism these days, I assume it’s a political hatchet job by political hacks."

"That assumption is generally borne out," says Instapundit, linking to this (of mine) and to Above The Law's "A Tale of Sound & Fury (But No Transcript): In Defense of Judge Edith Jones."

My post — "Character assassination attempted on 5th Circuit Judge Edith Jones" — encouraged people who actually attended Jones's talk at the University of Pennsylvania Law School to write to me. I'm still hoping someone made a recording, but I did get this response from someone who attended (and who gave me permission to reprint this):

On February 20, 2013, the Penn Federalist Society hosted Judge Edith Jones of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. Judge Jones was formerly chief judge for that court and is a prominent and well respected conservative judge. The topic was Federal Courts and the Death Penalty. The event was not recorded, but was, as with all of our events, open to the public. We normally do not record events.

The event was well attended, even drawing in members of the community, or so we assumed since we did not recognize these individuals. On April 12, a paralegal from Feldman, Orlansky & Sanders in Anchorage, AK, emailed the law school’s communications department to inquire whether the event had been recorded. Yesterday, an amalgam of special interest groups and individuals signed an ethics complaint against Judge Jones for her remarks. Most prominent is Marc Bookman, a Philadelphia-area attorney who has been happy to provide statements to the press and whose affidavit the student affidavits all refer to as the standard.

Religion

Judge Jones spoke about the death penalty. She was careful to distinguish between the constitutionality, morality, and effectiveness of capital punishment, presumably hoping that her audience was capable of understanding her distinctions. She dispensed with the constitutional question quickly, invoking the familiar argument that it is explicitly mentioned in the Constitution. She also unsurprisingly does not believe that the meaning of the text is susceptible to updating outside the Article V amendment process.

The moral argument was separated out to no avail, apparently. Judge Jones spoke about her faith tradition and the role of capital punishment in the Jewish holy texts (here I would assume most people know that these are part of the Christian Bible). She spoke of the possibility that execution was more humane and that, in many instances, it represented the only course of action that would lead the killer to repentance. She referenced a thought-provoking article that suggested the Roman Catholic Church once agreed with this position.

There is nothing unseemly or improper about a judge having personal moral convictions, whether they are extremely common beliefs (as here) or otherwise.

Judge Jones explicitly declined to cite the Bible as “legal support” for the death penalty, as the Complaint alleges on p 7, quoting Ex. Ep5. She clearly said that she was addressing separately the questions of the death penalty’s moral, legal, and constitutional justifications. It is surprising that someone should be so offended by Judge Jones’ use of moral language to discuss the morality of capital punishment.

Judge Jones deliberately and carefully separated the moral question from the legal and constitutional issues in the death penalty. The goal of this was to disentangle what is often confused.

Race

During her remarks, Judge Jones addressed several of the more common arguments against the death penalty. Among these is the contention that the penalty disproportionately falls on racial or ethnic minorities. It is worth noting that Judge Jones acknowledged this fact and acknowledged that it is not a good thing. She pointed out, however, that the real tragedy is that these communities normally do have a higher crime rate, and tend to have a dramatically higher violent crime rate. She also observed that much of the Mexican drug trade tends to be carried on by Hispanics, an inescapable reality in the Southwest border state where Judge Jones resides.

These demographics don’t make anyone happy, and Judge Jones was not making light of the problem they present. It was here, among other times, that several of the students (in their affidavits) claim they looked around and saw the shock and outrage on the faces of their peers. One of the students, a black man in the back of the room, asked Judge Jones to clarify whether she meant that these groups are actually predisposed towards violent crime. As Mr. Bookman’s own testimony (p28) reveals, she explicitly said that this was not her contention but rather that she was pointing out a statistical fact.

I point out the questioner’s race because lurking amidst the rest of these claims is the real issue of privilege, in this case (my own) white privilege. Most of the other claims of widespread dismay and displeasure reflect on the temperament of the offendee, but not this one. As a white man, I don’t know what it is like to have others cavalierly declare that people with my skin color commit a disproportionate amount of violent crime. If that were happening, I would insist on clarification and careful language each and every time, too. Judge Jones did clarify though, and she disclaimed any suggestion that she meant that a person’s race is determines his criminal propensity. Again, I will not dispute that people with different backgrounds may have been affected differently by her words.

The complaint reaches even greater levels of disrepute. It points to several capital cases in which expert psychological testimony was offered to the effect that the defendant’s race was a factor in the level of danger he posed in the future. The State of Texas publicly denounced this testimony. The complaint asserts that Judge Jones “maintains and publicly defends the very unconstitutional, biased beliefs that the State of Texas has rightly repudiated.”

Judge Jones did – and does – nothing of the sort. She was making no claims about individual defendants, psychology, or sentencing. She was answering the question, “Why are some groups incarcerated at rates higher than their proportion in the population at large?” and pointed out that the fact that those groups commit more crimes may have some connection to it. Her lecture was not about the causes of demographic trends and she refrained from speculating thereabout.

Mental Retardation

Judge Jones expressed skepticism at claims of mental retardation as a defense to capital murder, in part because a capital murder conviction has elements that cut against mental retardation. There is no impropriety in a judge observing that a convict slated for execution is willing to make claims that may not be true.

The complaint attempts to foment an atmosphere of outrage by insisting on putting “mental retardation” in quotes, insisting that “intellectually disabled” is the preferred term. Unlike the complaint, I do not use the term in quotes because the Supreme Court does not use the term in quotes, nor do the courts of Pennsylvania (Commonwealth v. Sanchez, 36 A.3d. 24 (Pa. 2011)), Alabama (Yeomans v. State, 2013 WL 1284361 (Ala. Crim. App. 2013)); or Minnesota (Chambers v. State, 2013 WL 2364079 (Minn. 2013)), just to take a few random examples from a cite check of Atkins. The complaint cites cases (footnote 11) that also use the term. Whatever the merits of what we should call those with diminished intellectual ability, Judge Jones is not calling them “imbeciles” or “morons.”

Not once did Judge Jones express a desire or intention to change the Atkins rule; even less did she give any suggestion that she would refuse to follow it in the courtroom. The complaint’s allegation that Judge Jones “expressed extreme bias… against the law of the United States” is patently frivolous.

Other Frivolous Claims

Innocence. Especially since DNA testing became reliable and widespread, the question of a death row inmate’s actual innocence has been prominent. Judge Jones remarked that these cases are extraordinarily rare and that in her experience defendant successes are due to technicalities, not innocence. The complaint makes no attempt to connect these comments to any impropriety, nor even that the claims are false.

Foreign Nationals: The complaint asserts that Judge Jones denigrated the system of justice in Mexico, then goes on to cite to testimony that does not support that claim. She is certainly right that Mexico does not provide defendants with lengthy appeals with an attorney, all at the state’s expense. I recently discovered that Mexico generally does not have an adversarial justice system. In light of that, Judge Jones’s comments about convicts preferring American correctional facilities were understated.

Individual Cases: Judge Jones was disgusted at heinous crimes committed by convicted criminals. The complaint suggests that because some of the individuals she discussed are still alive that they could come before her in future litigation. Anyone on the planet might come before the Fifth Circuit at some point. The Complaint only suggests that her disgust at brutal murders committed by yet-to-be-executed convicts is somehow inappropriate. Canon 3 (6) (A) of the Code of Conduct for United States Judges prohibits judges from “public comment on the merits” of a pending or impending case. This she did not do. She discussed only publicly available facts that were the basis of a capital conviction by a jury. The canon goes on to say “The prohibition on public comment on the merits does not extend… to scholarly presentations made for purposes of legal education.” The Federalist Society exists to complement formal legal education by providing promoting discourse on important social and legal issues. Although Judge Jones did not discuss the merits of the cases, she

Comments about the Supreme Court. Judge Jones criticized the development of some aspects of U.S. law, noting that some decisions have led to confusion. Her remarks respectful of the Court while criticizing past decisions, and she has demonstrated her willingness to follow the law even when she disagrees with it. She joined a panel in overturning a denial of habeas relief based on intervening Supreme Court precedent in Garcia v. Quarterman, 257 Fed. Appx. 717 (2007).

Emotional Reaction (and the Dramatic Ending)

The complaint also alleges that it was just such bad form for a judge to express emotion. Judge Jones expressed disapproval of those who attempt to evade their sentence by claiming mental incompetence. She was passionate about justice for evil men who slaughtered innocent people. She was passionate for the parents who watched as their child’s killer evaded his sentence on a technicality.

As the event was coming to a close (it was about 1:15 and we try, though usually fail, to end around 1:00), one of the nonstudent audience members asked a question. The question was why we should particularly care what the founding generation thought of the Constitution, since many of them owned slaves, and women did not vote, etc. It is unclear if the questioner meant we should discard the entire Constitution or only those parts that are not to our liking.

The question was so provocatively asked that I looked around and saw that some people were surprised. Students later told me they thought it was rudely presented. The questioner was, after all, challenging the legitimacy of the United States Constitution to an Article III judge. Rather than lead Mr. Bookman down the path of semantic meaning and constitutionalism, or decline his provocation outright, Judge Jones responded briefly and judiciously by defending the value of the Constitution and the nation that it constituted.

Since the time allocated for the event had passed, the president thanked the audience for their participation and we ended the event. The “abrupt” ending referenced in the complaint should not be attributed to Judge Jones or the content of her lecture—it is how the vast majority of our meetings must end because question and answer usually closes the meeting, and people often have a lot to say.

The $495 million art auction — "a new era in the art market."

"The sale included works by Jackson Pollock, Roy Lichtenstein and Jean-Michel Basquiat. The sale established 16 new world auction records, with nine works selling for more than $10m (£6.6m) and 23 for more than $5m (£3.2m)."

These works really are valuable, because they are the last great works in the history of painting — if we are to understand the history of painting as the era when people paid attention to and cared about what painters were painting.

Here's the NYT 1988 obituary for Basquiat:

Michel Basquiat, a Brooklyn-born artist whose brief career leaped from graffiti scrawled on SoHo foundations to one-man shows in galleries around the world, died Friday at his home in the East Village. He was 27 years old....

His paintings sold for $25,000 to $50,000....

Who knows what his work would sell for if he hadn't died young, but his "Dustheads" just sold for $48.8 million. Dust to dust.

Ah! I just had a flashback to the 1970s when — at least in some quarters of NYC — "dust" was slang for money. Urban Dictionary fails to show this meaning. (The favored definition is: "pcp," and that's what the painting title "Dustheads" invites us to assume is the meaning, but maybe the artist hoped we'd see layers of meaning (like layers of paint).)  Here's a nice long list of money-related slang and it includes "dust," but it doesn't mean money. It means lack of money:

Dust -- As in "nothing but." Let me borrow 5 bucks. I got dust.

***

"'Ashes to ashes, dust to dust,' a phrase from the Anglican burial service, used sometimes to denote total finality. It is based on scriptural texts such as 'Dust thou art, and unto dust thou shalt return' (Genesis 3:19), and 'I will bring thee to ashes upon the earth in the sight of all them that behold thee' (Ezekiel 28:18)."

"Be ye not unequally yoked together with unbelievers: for what fellowship hath righteousness with unrighteousness? and what communion hath light with darkness?"

"And what concord hath Christ with Belial? or what part hath he that believeth with an infidel? And what agreement hath the temple of God with idols? for ye are the temple of the living God; as God hath said, I will dwell in them, and walk in them; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people."

2 Corinthians 6:14-16, one reason why Puritans did not celebrate Easter. Another reason was that the celebration (as opposed to the event commemorated by the celebration) doesn't appear in the Bible.

Some Christian groups continue to reject the celebration of Easter due to perceived pagan roots and historical connections to the practices and permissions of the "Roman" Catholic Church. Other "Nonconformist" Christian groups that do still celebrate the event prefer to call it "Resurrection Sunday" or "Resurrection Day", for the same reasons as well as a rejection of secular or commercial aspects of the holiday in the 20th and 21st centuries....

Members of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers), as part of their historic testimony against times and seasons, do not celebrate or observe Easter or any other Church holidays, believing instead that "every day is the Lord's day," and that elevation of one day above others suggests that it is acceptable to do un-Christian acts on other days....

Today is Easter, a day that is celebrated for religious reasons and, alternatively, in a completely secular fashion. It is also a day that some people do not celebrate, and the reasons for noncelebration can also be religious — even among Christians — as well as secular.

Opposition to a celebration can be based on a problem with that particular celebration — as the Puritans objected to Easter because it's not in the Bible — or on a more general objection to holidays — the belief that all of our days deserve equal celebration. That idea too can be religious. As the Quakers say "every day is the Lord's day." And that idea can be secular: the recognition of the beauty and promise in every day.

Happy Easter/Happy Day to everyone, believer and infidel, yokemates and yolkmates.

"Why does the devil in 'The Bible' look exactly like President Obama?"

This is actually an easy question to answer.

1. Mainstream video productions are not going to cast a black man as Satan. Everyone knows better than to do that. If you want to have an actor in the role of God, that's a great time to cast a black actor, e.g. Morgan Freeman. That's something that makes Americans feel good about racial progress. That's what we do here.

2. Needing an actor to play the role of Satan, the casting people working on the History Channel's "The Bible" picked Mehdi Ouzaani, a Moroccan actor. He was chosen because he's a fine actor and he looks like a person who would have lived in the region during Biblical times. Of course, he's not black. They wouldn't cast a black man as Satan!

3. Since Ouzaani isn't black, they didn't think about his resemblance to President Obama. People tend not to see cross-racial resemblance. If you were putting together a "Separated at Birth"-type book, can you think offhand of any black and white celebrities you'd pair?

4. They didn't notice, but when the film went up on television, with millions of viewers, and with particular shots showing Ouzaani's face in the shadows, some of them said "Hey, Satan looks like Obama!" That seemed funny/outrageous. It got tweeted. Soon everyone's talking about casting an Obama lookalike as Satan.

5. And that's how it happened. Or... maybe the Devil made them do it.

The original meaning of the word "bless" is about blood.

"Bless" is the word of the day, blogged already here. Now, I'm looking in the Oxford English Dictionary (which, unfortunately, I don't have a way to link to) to see whether it is only God that blesses, and I see that in the original meaning, it is human beings who do the blessing and they do it with blood.

Orig. meaning (prob.), To make 'sacred' or 'holy' with blood; to consecrate by some sacrificial rite which was held to render a thing inviolable from profane use of men and evil influence of men or demons. (The streaking of the lintel and doorposts with blood, Exodus xii. 23, to mark them as holy to the Lord and inviolable by the destroying angel, was apparently the kind of idea expressed by blóedsian in pre-christian times. Cf. also the history of the Latin words consecrāre and sacrificium.)

Note that the etymology is about blood:

Old English blóedsian , blédsian , blétsian : not found elsewhere in Germanic, but formed on the Germanic type *blôdisôjan , < *blôdo-m (Old English blód ) blood... The etymological meaning was thus ‘to mark (or affect in some way) with blood (or sacrifice); to consecrate’. But the sense-development of the word was greatly influenced by its having been chosen at the English conversion to render Latin benedīcere , and Greek εὐλογεῖν , which started from a primitive sense of ‘speak well of or to, eulogize, praise,’ but were themselves influenced by being chosen to translate Hebrew brk , primarily ‘to bend,’ hence ‘to bend the knee, worship, praise, bless God, invoke blessings on, bless as a deity.’ Hence, a long and varied series of associations, heathen, Jewish, and Christian, blend in the English uses of bless and blessing.... At a very early date the popular etymological consciousness began to associate this verb with bliss n. ‘benignity, blitheness, joy, happiness,’ which affected the use of both words...

Ah! That connects nicely with yesterday's discussion of the necessary connection between religion and happiness.

What did Jesus write in the sand? (Or: things I should have learned in church that I figured out from the Althouse comments.)

Yesterday, when many blogs were talking about the Islamist Facebook page with a cartoon showing how to stone a person who had committed adultery, I added the New Testament story, from John 8, in which Jesus said: "Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone at her." Jesus had just been teaching some people, and the scribes and the Pharisees, looking for a way to trip him up — they wanted to bring charges against him — present Jesus with a woman who had been caught in the act of adultery and remind him that the Law of Moses commanded that she should be stoned. "So what do you say?" Instead of answering, Jesus bends over and writes in the dirt. They keep pushing for an answer, and it's only then that he says: "Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone at her."

I didn't include the next few sentences, but the story was very familiar. After Jesus makes his brilliant remark — which finds a new way into the question — the crowd disperses and Jesus tells the woman to "go and... sin no more."

Some of the commenters focused on what it was that Jesus wrote on the ground. I'd always assumed that what Jesus was writing was irrelevant and that he was simply gesturing I'm not going to talk to you. He invoked his right to remain silent, as we say in the United States of America. He knew whatever he said would be used against him. Later, when he arrives at the New Testament doctrine — the higher law — he speaks up and articulates it pithily. He doesn't write it. Jesus isn't the put-it-in-writing type. The scribes are the bad guys here, and he's about talking to the people. The Word is spoken. (It's only written down later.)

But, reading the comments, I see interest in the subject of what Jesus wrote.

Sydney says: "In the movie The King of Kings, each accuser comes up to Jesus and sees written in the dirt his own sin, and turns and walks away. I love that scene." Is that the standard theory of what Jesus wrote?

And Chip Ahoy, linking here, says: "But what did he write in the sand?" At the link, we get added details from The Urantia Book (which I'd never heard of). There, the idea is that Jesus knew the woman's husband was a "troublemaker" and "perceived" that he'd forced the woman into prostitution and that the husband was now cooperating with the Pharisees to get Jesus to say something that could be used to arrest him. In this version of the story, Jesus doesn't just bend over and write in the dirt right where he is. He walks over to the troublemaker husband and writes something in front of him that makes him rush off. Jesus comes back to his original place and writes on the ground again, and the men, "one by one," leave. Last to go, is "the woman's companion in evil," who gets his own special message written in the dirt.

Kentuckyliz gives us the Old Testament quotes (the law of Moses, which is what the Pharisees threw at Jesus to trip him up):

Deuteronomy 22:22 "If a man is found sleeping with another man's wife, both the man who slept with her and the woman must die."

Leviticus 20:10 "If a man commits adultery with another man's wife — with the wife of his neighbor — both the adulterer and the adulteress must be put to death."

Kentuckyliz adds:

What's interesting about the Jesus scene, is that the law had become misogynistic in practice. The man is not being stoned according to the mandates of the law. In fact, I suspect he was standing in the crowd holding a stone.

Note that even in the extremely concise story told in John 8, we hear that the woman was "caught in the act." Whether he was in the crowd or not, the adulterer was known. Why aren't the authorities proposing to stone both the man and the woman? Kentuckyliz doesn't refer to what Jesus wrote in the sand, but this made me imagine that Jesus wrote "the man and the woman." And if the woman was a prostitute, all of the men who had ever slept with her would deserve stoning too.

In this scenario, Jesus acknowledges the written law of Moses by writing it. That's the Old Testament, which Jesus won't reject, even as his enemies are trying to lure him into rejecting it. He's showing that he knows the law, and in very few words, he's made it obvious to the legal experts that they are getting the law wrong and making them see their own faint-heartedness about equal justice, applying the strict law strictly on its written terms and to everyone. Then Jesus speaks, and the spoken word is the New Testament, calling us to a higher place, above the strict rules, under which we are all sinners. The New Testament demands that we look at our own sins. Go and sin no more.

That ought to keep you busy for the rest of your life. Now, leave other people alone.

ADDED: A second post includes the "King of Kings" clip and more.

"Faithful is not love. Faithful is a subservient position..."

"... in which insecure people can not accept that, despite their tremendous talents, they might be wrong. That's why I like cats and independent dogs."

So says Dante in at 3:01 a.m. in The Faithful Dog Café.

Faithful is not love? That made me think Love is faithful and kind... But it's "Love is patient and kind..."

Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. 

Does that sound like a cat or a dog?

It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful....

Cat?

... it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. 

Cat?!

Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

Cat?!!

Love never ends. 

That sounds like what we mean when we say faithful. (I know Paul goes on to put "love" in a category with "faith" and "hope" and says "love" is the greatest, but the love he describes includes complete faithfulness to the loved one.)

"He literally glowed; without a word or a gesture of exultation a new well-being radiated from him and filled the little room."

There's today's sentence from "The Great Gatsby," in the long-running Althouse blog show called The "Gatsby" Project.

Where do we go with this one? Must we dither over the old hobby-horse "literally"? Did Gatsby literally glow? Was he heated to the point of incandescence? I'd say that F. Scott Fitzgerald continually uses metaphor, asserting that things are other than what they are, without the prissy distance of clutter words like like and as if, so what does it matter if he intensifies one of these assertions with literally?

He glowed. And he radiated. It filled the room. He's an incandescent light-bulb. There are, I assure you, no fluorescent bulbs in "Gatsby." There are a few candles, including 4 that Daisy snaps out with her fingers. There's particularity about lighting in this book. Daisy prefers the sun. Literally.

I've said before that one thing I've learned, reading "Gatsby" sentences, is that if you're having trouble finding a way in: Look for the light. Today, the light source is obvious: It's the man himself, Gatsby.

But, the truth is, I'm not having trouble finding a way into this sentence. It jumped out at me because of the word "exultation," which is there in the negative: There isn't any exultation, not in word or gesture. It's a situation where Gatsby might have exulted, and the glowing/radiation came right out of his skin.

We were just talking about exulting. We were mock exulting at a minor tribulation that afflicted someone we sometimes slightly pretend we don't like, and then we were mock chiding each other for inappropriate exultation. It was nothing, really. Just some passing amusement at the idea of the flimsy sin of exultation.

The original meaning — OED — of exult, now obsolete, is "To spring or leap up; to leap for joy." That physical image is lost now, and it means — literally, now — "To rejoice exceedingly, be elated or glad; to triumph."

1856   E. K. Kane Arctic Explor. II. viii. 90   We..exult to think we need no catering for the morrow.
1865   A. C. Swinburne Satire to C. in Poems & Ballads 50   As plague in a poisonous city Insults and exults on her dead.

Don't confuse exult with exalt, which means "to raise up... to lift up" and "to praise, extol, magnify." The elevation-related physical image survives:

1823   C. Lamb Mod. Gallantry in Elia 184   Exalting his umbrella over her poor basket of fruit.
1832   Blackwood's Edinb. Mag. Feb. 287   Let the rogues swing, And thus be exalted.

And the metaphorical meaning works too:

1611   Bible (A.V.) Psalms xxxiv. 3   O magnifie the Lord with me, and let vs exalt his name together.

There's one other appearance of exult in "The Great Gatsby." It's not the absence of exultation, and it's not Gatsby, it's Tom. He's talking "incessantly, exulting and laughing." Much better to silently incandesce. Exalt appears once:

I stayed late that night, Gatsby asked me to wait until he was free, and I lingered in the garden until the inevitable swimming party had run up, chilled and exalted, from the black beach, until the lights were extinguished in the guest-rooms overhead.

Ah, but that's a whole other fat, juicy sentence. We've had our "Gatsby" sentence today, and it's time to snap out the lights on this post. Figuratively.

"Then David said to Abigail 'Blessed is your advice and blessed are you.'"

"Mrs. Phillips chose her pen name herself, taking Abigail after the prophetess in the Book of Samuel... and Van Buren for its old-family, presidential ring."

Pauline Phillips — "Dear Abby" — dead at the age of 94.

The History of Abkhazia.

"According to The Georgian Chronicles, the first inhabitants of what is now Abkhazia and the whole western Georgia were Egrosians, the descedants of Egros son of Togarmah, grandson of Japhet, son of Noah, who came from the land known as Arian-Kartli."



"... Abkhazia was conquered by Mithridates VI Eupator of Pontus between c. 110 and 63 BC, and then taken by the Roman commander Pompey."

"[T]he kingdoms of Abkhazia and Georgia [were united] into a single Georgian feudal state... reach[ing] the apex of its strength and prestige under the queen Tamar (1184–1213)."

"Towards the end of the 17th century, the principality of Abkhazia broke up into several fiefdoms, depriving many areas of any centralized authority. The region became a theatre of widespread slave trade and piracy. "

"In the Russian revolution of 1905, most Abkhaz remained largely loyal to the Russian rule, while Georgians tended to oppose it. As a reward for their allegiance, tsar Nicholas II officially forgave the Abkhaz for their opposition in the 19th century and removed their status of a 'guilty people' in 1907."

"On 24 October 2008 the railroad bridge of Shamgon-Tagiloni, connecting the city of Zugdidi in Georgia with the Abkhazian Gali district (populated mainly by Georgians) was destroyed. According to Georgian and French sources it was done by Russian army; Abkhazian sources maintained it was a Georgian diversion."

***

And so begins the new year project on this blog, which is to proceed, alphabetically, through the 206 countries of the world, and to read the "History of" page in Wikipedia. The idea is to have had it go through our head, at least once, something of what happened in each place. It is fitting that we start with Abkhazia, which may be an unfamiliar name. Much has happened there! It's touching to see that, to confront one's own persistent, nagging ignorance. But we are all fortunate to have woken up again this morning, still a human being on Planet Earth, and I want to perform a ritual — for the next 206 days — of adding a slight glimmer of awareness of those other human beings who live or who have lived over the long expanses of time and place.

***

It's apt that we encounter Noah on New Year's Day, Noah being our earliest example of an individual overindulging in alcohol.



ADDED: I found a nice Flicker stream of photos from Abkhazia. I recommend beginning here — at Stalin's bathroom — and then clicking to the "newer"/"older" button to see more.