And now there is nothing standing between me and drafting the novel. Which is not going as well as it could be. At least there's death. And sensuality. In fact, so far the thing consists of nothing but death and sex interspersed with Bible quotes, which as a book also has a good amount of death and sex in it.
Which brings me around to Jehovah's Witnesses, and things I haven't said.
A lovely pair of older women came around last week while I was revising and asked me if I thought the dead could live again, and since religious groups are Pertinent To My Interests, we wound up chatting happily on the doorstep for quite a while. I truly enjoyed hearing about their experiences with the church, and how it could improve my life, but when they told me that the Bible contains the blueprint for having a happy family, I bit my tongue.
There is one thing about the PhD novel that is completely autobiographical: I learned to read at my parents kitchen table with a large print NIV bible. We went through the whole thing several times, one Old Testament chapter, one New Testament chapter, a Psalm, and a Proverb every day - we may have skipped the prophets a bit. The book is many things, but full of happy families is not one of them. It could justifiably be called a compendium of models of screwed up families. Absalom and Tamar. David and Bathsheba. Lot and his daughters. The best Happy Family principle in the whole book may be, "do not divorce your betrothed for being knocked up by the Divine," and even that required angelic intervention to bring about.
A lovely pair of older women came around last week while I was revising and asked me if I thought the dead could live again, and since religious groups are Pertinent To My Interests, we wound up chatting happily on the doorstep for quite a while. I truly enjoyed hearing about their experiences with the church, and how it could improve my life, but when they told me that the Bible contains the blueprint for having a happy family, I bit my tongue.
There is one thing about the PhD novel that is completely autobiographical: I learned to read at my parents kitchen table with a large print NIV bible. We went through the whole thing several times, one Old Testament chapter, one New Testament chapter, a Psalm, and a Proverb every day - we may have skipped the prophets a bit. The book is many things, but full of happy families is not one of them. It could justifiably be called a compendium of models of screwed up families. Absalom and Tamar. David and Bathsheba. Lot and his daughters. The best Happy Family principle in the whole book may be, "do not divorce your betrothed for being knocked up by the Divine," and even that required angelic intervention to bring about.
So now I'm hoping that they'll come back, so that I can ask them how exactly their logic runs. Or I may just write my own list of Bible-based principles for a happy family. The first one would probably be, "If you capture a woman in battle, let her mourn for her dead countrymen for a month before taking her as your concubine; there's nothing worse than when your girl starts crying every time you kiss her."
There is one definite plus to the novel - it's given me reason to look up lots of questionable things. Like when the words 'condom' and 'cocksucker' came into common usage, the etomology of slang terms for homosexuality (thank you, OED), when the Pill became widley available, and what a 20 year old female student of journalism might have used to research marital relations in preparation for her wedding in 1973 when her mother wasn't on speaking terms with her because of said wedding. Heaven help anyone that glances at my browser history.
There is one definite plus to the novel - it's given me reason to look up lots of questionable things. Like when the words 'condom' and 'cocksucker' came into common usage, the etomology of slang terms for homosexuality (thank you, OED), when the Pill became widley available, and what a 20 year old female student of journalism might have used to research marital relations in preparation for her wedding in 1973 when her mother wasn't on speaking terms with her because of said wedding. Heaven help anyone that glances at my browser history.
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