THE OBLIGATORY HUMANITIES CLASS: The one the school requires you take in order to graduate? I'm taking it now. Despite the fact I read most of this stuff back in high school. I'm looking over the syllabus and seeing Genesis, the Odyssey, the Aeneid, Oedipus, and thinking, I guess the public schools really have collapsed. But maybe the point is more to revisit these things on a college level.

So it's all good. Besides, I'm enjoying revisiting these things, and it's not like I was going to do it on my own. I mean, I am on the cusp of finishing my first book for pleasure of the calendar year 2004 (Jonathan Lethem's Fortress of Solitude) so I am grateful in a way for being forced to take this course and forced to read non-biological texts. In another way it's a hassle but there you go.

Our instructor was having trouble getting some people to treat the Bible as literature, and not the infallible word of God or what have you. He handled it well, not insulting anybody, but you could tell this was not a direction he wanted us going in.

BEHOLD; I have a blog; thus I can pronounce thoughts of the Book of Genesis, King James version: What's up with the "There were giants in the Earth in those days" line? Google reveals the usual Internet array of crankitude and knowledge. And another picky plot point: is there an origin of Egypt in those genealogies somewhere? Because I don't see it and then all of the sudden, there Egypt is, oppressing Abram. So it's interesting how Genesis goes between being a universal tale (the first creation story, the Babel story) and a specific historical epic of the Semitic peoples, His chosen people in particular.

BEHOLD: I, who have little knowledge of things I just wrote about, have now added them, for all time, to the aether of Google, and the archives of Blogger. And so that came to pass.

We also read Gilgamesh, which is like your 70s buddy picture for the first half and your bleak 70s revenge picture where the hero seeks revenge and does not find it, only bleak meaninglessness in the second half. You can see why it was so popular in the ancient world.

Tomorrow: I blog again. I may even mention the Detroit Pistons.