Zoological Adjustments

Well, well, well. I guess you'd think I was pretty foolish if I went out and bought the first few books of Aristotle's METAPHYSICS just so I could fact-check Thomas Aquinas when he says there's an owl in it. But that's just what I did. And hold onto your hats! There's NOT an owl in it! Here's what it says in my brand spanking new (by which I mean 1933) translation of the METAPHYSICS: "just as it is with bats' eyes in respect to daylight, so it is with our mental intelligence..." That's right! It's bats! Not owls! NOW what are you saying? I bet you're saying "Money well spent!" I troubled myself to scrounge about halfheartedly on the "internet" to find out why Aquinas says owls instead of bats. And you know, I found out a couple of things, sort of. I skimmed over a scholarly article called "Power and Limits of the Human Mind: On the Arabic Reception of the Analogy of Bats and Daylight..." Look. There's more to the subtitle but I'm getting tired of typing. It's like an email I got from McNeil this morning. He was writing about the movie DOCTOR, YOU'VE GOT TO BE KIDDING! but had the energy to type only "Dr. ... kidding" (ellipses McNeil's). And I mocked him for it! But look at me now. Anyway, if I'm reading it correctly, this guy (his name is Amos Bertolacci) says that when translating from Greek to Latin, people began subsituting "owl" for "bat." And he explains why, but I don't think I understood it. Here, I'll quote it for you: "The interpretations of the bats’ analogy in Latin philosophy and theology have a different character from the ones considered here: Latin translators from Greek made Aristotle’s text less problematic by means of zoological adjustments, i.e. by identifying Aristotle’s bats with other night animals (night ravens or owls)." Then he goes on to say that some people even substituted eagles for bats! That's just crazy. (The latter being my conclusion, not Mr. Bertolacci's.) The article led me to another "web" site containing, in full, Thomas Aquinas's critique of Averroes's gloss on Aristotle's metaphysics, where I read with my own two eyes and my own pea-sized brain Aquinas taking Averroes to task for his bat observations... leading me to conclude (and bear in mind "I ain't no doctor with a degree" to quote Aretha Franklin) that Aquinas knew very well that they were bats in the original, not owls! All of this is to come to the shocking point: for the FIRST TIME EVER, I am going to REMOVE a book from my BIG LONG LIST OF BOOKS WITH OWLS IN THEM. So long, Aristotle. You had your chance! And you blew it. To quote Bill Boyle imitating Robert De Niro in COP LAND, "YOU BLEW IT!!!!!"

Aquinas Mania!

I'm sure you've been keeping up with the adventures of Jerky the Li'l Jerk, that rascally rapscallion who has stolen America's heart by telling people to go to hell. In that case, there is no need to remind you of Jerky's recent encounter with Thomas Aquinas. In order to compose that little masterpiece, I first fetched my "concise translation" of the SUMMA THEOLOGICA. Well, friends, that "concise translation" was a little TOO "concise"! Ha ha, what a fix. So I had to crawl around on the "internet" in search of the mot juste, as I call it. Then I started thinking, "Jack," I started thinking, "why don't you have a COMPLETE edition of the SUMMA THEOLOGICA in several volumes like a normal person?" So I tracked down just such a set. I made it to page three of the first volume, you will be impressed to hear. And that's where I read about "the weakness of our intelligence, 'which is dazzled by the clearest objects of nature; as the owl is dazzled by the light of the sun.'" As you can plainly see, due to my expert rendering of the punctuation, Aquinas is quoting from something there, which appears to be, based on his note, the METAPHYSICS of Aristotle. All right! That means that not only does the SUMMA THEOLOGICA have an owl in it, it borrows that owl from another work with an owl in it, a nesting phenomenon, if you will, which we have examined before, and I would include a "hyperlink" to prove it, but I'm starting to depress myself. And you! (Please "click" on this important correction.)

Chicago Millionaire

My current "nighttime book," as I call it because I read it at night, is an Elmore Leonard western. In it, we meet a millionaire from Chicago who comes out west to show off with the fancy pair of guns he keeps in a rosewood box. He shoots "bottles, cans, pine cones at twenty paces, chimpmunks, ground squirrels, ospreys and horned owls." Don't worry, something bad happens to him. Anyway, this means that GUNSIGHTS is a book with an owl in it, a type of book I have devoted my life to cataloging, I guess. No one told me it would be like this.

Talking Hamburgers

You know, in OUTLAWS OF THE MARSH, every character has a nickname. There's the Black Whirlwind, the Red-Haired Demon, the Dry-Land Crocodile, the Elegant Tiger, the Blue-Faced Beast, and so on. There's even the Timely Rain! But then toward the end of the second volume, we get the Magic Calculator. Ha ha! He's a guy who is good at math. But is that really funny? I don't know. Right after the Magic Calculator comes the Elfin Flutist. And I was like, are these nicknames becoming progressively less bad-ass? I was reciting such observations to Dr. Theresa in the car yesterday and she was like "Uh-huh." I can't say she seemed that interested! Then I tried it out on Tom Franklin at lunch. "The Magic Calculator!" I said. "Ha ha ha," I continued. Tom laughed politely. It all got me to thinking about an occasion quite a while ago when I was going over the history of humanoid hamburger characters in various media and Hanna yawned. And I said with wry self-knowledge, "Is my catalog of talking hamburgers boring you?" And Hanna said, "No, it's riveting." My wry self-knowledge was suddenly replaced with some other kind of self-knowledge! Maybe I need a personal focus group to try out topics on. You know what? I'm going to email Jimmy about the Magic Calculator.

You Just Got Bartlebyed

In today's installment of Jerky the Li'l Jerk, Jerky meets Melville's immortal character (well, he dies in the story, but you know what I mean) Bartleby the Scrivener. Jerky tells Bartleby the Scrivener to go to hell, because he's the rascally little boy who tells people to go to hell. Then Bartleby says "I would prefer not to." You know Bartleby! Ha ha ha. What a guy. Then, in the final panel, he adds, "You just got Bartlebyed." Anyway, I think it would have been great in the original story if every time Bartleby the Scrivener said "I would prefer not to" he would have added "You just got Bartlebyed." I did a search of the "internet" and found zero matches for the phrase "You just got Bartlebyed." As its inventor, I hope to get in on whatever money can be made from this exciting phrase.

Li Kui

"Li Kui, naked as an owl, angrily seized a broken pole and charged up the bank to continue the battle." I'm still reading OUTLAWS OF THE MARSH because it's so dang long. Also, if something else comes up that I need to read, I feel okay putting it aside temporarily, because its episodic nature makes it easy to pick up where you left off and just dive into the next adventure. It might be longer than JOSEPH AND HIS BROTHERS, the longest thing I've ever read! OUTLAWS OF THE MARSH has more pages for sure. But it's a set of mass-market paperbacks, so the pages are smaller. I guess we'll never know. I wonder what "naked as an owl" means. I recall that Travis McGee played a game called "naked owl" with a friend, but I think that involved the nakedness of the human participants, not the supposed nakedness of owls. What about all the feathers? It seems to me that feathers should count against nakedness.

All the Cokes Are Good

Last night, as I lay in bed reading THE PHILOSOPHY OF ANDY WARHOL, I was given reason to recall the time I tried to convince Sarah Lloyd (with partial success?) that Queen Elizabeth II ate a foot-long chili dog every day. Andy Warhol claims that Eisenhower took the queen to a baseball game and bought her a hot dog. While I do find evidence that FDR once fed the queen a hot dog, I have trouble backing up the Eisenhower story. That, however, does not detract from Andy Warhol's point, "that she couldn't have had delivered to Buckingham Palace a better hot dog than the one he bought for her for maybe twenty cents at the ballpark. Not for a dollar, not for ten dollars, not for a hundred thousand dollars could she get a better hot dog." He makes his point more forcefully, I think, in an earlier part of the section, when he says, "the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good." This is, according to Andy Warhol, "What's great about this country," which means that reading about Andy Warhol on the Fourth of July is arguably more appropriate than what I usually read about on the Fourth of July, which seems to be werewolves. In fact, Jerky the Li'l Jerk meets Andy Warhol in today's episode of Jerky the Li'l Jerk.