‘Rags and Muffin’ According to Bing Image Creator

I see a lot of people playing around with Microsoft Bing’s new Image Creator, which uses Dall-E 3 as its engine. I’m toying around with AI because, like other people, I find it interesting and fun but also because I’m obliged to familiarize it for work reasons I won’t discuss on the blog.

In any case, I decided to try to get Bing Image Creator to reproduce some scenes from my novel Rags and Muffin. Here we go.

First, I wanted Rags sipping tea in her iconic wingback chair with Muffin curled up nearby. These images, I note, are quite similar in lighting and composition no matter how I tweak them. Also, Bing cannot understand what I mean by a furry, dog-like dragon no matter how I phrase it. I get either a dog or a dragon, no in-between.

Girl sipping tea with a dragon.
Rags sips tea with … Muffin? Is that you?

Some of the images are more convincing than others, but never once has it given me a picture that didn’t have obvious telltale signs of AI generation.

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Children’s Book Update: Back from My Editor

I have the text of my children’s picture book back from my editor. She described it as “really sweet” and “a joy” and made minimal suggestions. I’ve been over the text one last time and think it’s ready to go. Since I’ve never done this kind of book before, I’m flying blind, but I think the next step will be to find an illustrator and, after the illustrations are done, to find someone to handle formatting, which I can’t do myself this time. I have some people in mind, but it would be inappropriate to say who until I get commitments.

I’ve also been toying with Grammarly GO, which is the new “A.I.” plugged into the Grammarly grammar-checking app. Grammarly was already built on the same technology as these new “large language models,” so the introduction of this new A.I. assistant was probably relatively easy. Like the rest of Grammarly, it’s set up more for business emails than for creative writing, though as I’ve played with it, I’ve found it more impressive than I thought at first. It has a few stock questions you can ask it, and one is “Find my main point,” the result of which is the image at the top of the post. But after a little work, I got it to make the following suggestions, which, though brief and vague, indicate that the A.I. has mostly processed the story correctly:

Grammarly suggests more details to flesh out a story.
Grammarly GO’s story suggestions.

It has correctly identified this as a work of fantasy fiction, and it has also correctly identified the protagonist and the villain. Obviously–and unsurprisingly–it can’t distinguish a children’s fairy tale from an adult novel, so its requests for more detail are irrelevant. Its second and third suggestions would only be reasonable if this were a different sort of work. The first suggestion, however, shows the A.I.’s limits: The opening of the story is, in fact, already dedicated to “who Anastasia is and what kind of person she is.” The software apparently couldn’t pick that up.

I wondered if it always gave these same suggestions, so I fed it a longer, more fleshed-out novel, specifically Rags and Muffin.

Grammarly struggles to analyze Rags and Muffin.
Grammarly GO struggles with a novel.

LOL. Ouch. So now it’s asking for less detail. “Clarify the narrative focus” may be legitimate, though not quite in the way Grammarly GO means it, since the presence of some plot lines unconnected to the main story is one criticism I’ve received from real human readers. But characters who “feel somewhat undeveloped” is definitely not a criticism I usually get.

In any case, the impression I get of Grammarly GO is the same one I get of ChatGPT: Its suggestions aren’t entirely bad, but they’re vague and so elementary that I can’t imagine them being useful to any but a beginning writer. For anyone else, they are at best good reminders.

I may be wrong, but I personally suspect the hullaballoo over “A.I” will prove to be a tempest in a teapot.  The company that owns ChatGPT is hemorrhaging money, and these programs apparently degrade over time: A.I.s that were once whip-smart eventually lose their ability to perform even basic maths problems, and because they are really nothing more that advanced versions of word-prediction software, they often “hallucinate” information, presenting fiction as fact. Grammarly, too, is beginning to give more and more incorrect suggestions, especially comma splices.

Besides all that, the creators of these programs deliberately lobotomize them to make them politically correct. Many people have demonstrated this with ChatGPT, which will coyly dodge certain topics or even lie outright to avoid stating inconvenient facts. Grammarly appears to be undergoing a similar sort of deliberate retardation: Previously, it had “inclusive language” suggestions, and enough people complained that they added the ability to turn those off. Now the original “inclusive language” suggestions have been expanded to no less than sixteen different ungrammatical but politically correct settings that are on by default and have to be manually deactivated. The weirdest and stupidest of them is “Show Ukraine Support Message,” an utterly inappropriate setting for a grammar checker:

Grammarly demands I show support for the Ukraine.
I will not eat the bugs. I will not live in the pod. I will not Show Ukraine Support Message.

Once Current Thing has ended and we’re on to the next Current Thing, this option will presumably change to something else, like maybe “Express Fashionable Disapproval of Republican Presidential Nominee”–which will, of course, also be on by default.

Picture Book Update

I will have to roll up my sleeves and format my new book in Adobe Illustrator or InDesign. This is something I wanted to avoid, but I don’t think I can hire someone for the formatting, mostly because I want to have the book in a  finalized draft before I hire the illustrator: I need to know the page count so I know how many illustrations will be necessary.

I think I’ll place the text on the left page, surrounded by an attractive border, with a full-page color illustration on the right page. I’ll print the books in 8 x 8 inches via KDP, with bleed, which will make for a small but adequately sized paperback picture book.

I’m frustrated that Vellum, my usual formatting software, doesn’t offer the full range of trim sizes available on Amazon. It’s set up for novels, of course, but I  thought I could make a picture book out of it with a little coaxing. However, none of its available trim sizes are suitable for that, so Adobe is my best bet. I have some experience with Adobe Illustrator but none with InDesign. This could be fun, especially since I will now have to worry about all kinds of typographical things that Vellum handled for me automatically, such as runts and orphans and so forth.

In slightly different news, I noticed that Grammarly has rolled out its own “artificial intelligence” system, GrammarlyGO, which has automatically been integrated into my Word plugin. Although there’s been a lot of buzz about what it might mean for authors to start using AI in their writing, Grammarly, which is hugely popular, already functioned on similar principles, so a lot of us have already been using AI to assist with our writing, at least in a limited fashion, without knowing it. That Grammarly is an “AI” system similar to ChatGPT explains both why it is more dynamic than most grammar checkers and why it sometimes gives screwy, ungrammatical suggestions: I once had it suggest that I write “more bottomless” instead of “deeper,” apparently because it could comprehend how to employ a synonym grammatically but couldn’t understand subtle differences in meaning, and it has recently developed the annoying habit of suggesting comma splices. If it degrades over time as other AIs do, it will probably become useless in a few years.

If nothing else, it is good for catching my spelling mistakes and cutting out unnecessary words, but it is designed more for business emails than fiction writing.

Anyway, GrammarlyGO is interesting to play around with. You can see from its suggestions in the image at the top of this post that it can parse a document reasonably well, but its tips are quite basic. The first of its three recommendations is the standard “show don’t tell,” which isn’t bad in itself but is inappropriate for the present work, which is a children’s fairy tale. The second recommendation is vague, possibly a stock suggestion it gives when it doesn’t know what else to say. Probably, it can’t understand the conflict that’s already present, or perhaps it doesn’t know how to handle a story this short. And as for the third suggestion–that’s already in the story, which is written with a moral appropriate for its young target audience: The importance of gratitude. But I’m unsurprised that an AI can’t pick that up since it’s built into the story’s fabric and never explicitly stated.

Instead, Watch ‘Masters of the Universe’ (1987)

If you’re hankering to watch a live-action movie based on a Mattel toy franchise, in which the characters make an ill-advised trip to the “real world” that disappoints long-time fans, let me suggest an alternative to the film that opened this weekend. I recommend the 1987 box-office disaster Masters of the Universe, which is based on the hugely popular sword-and-planet toy line of the same name. It stars an oiled-up Dolph Lundgren, fresh off his performance in Rocky IV, as He-Man. The movie was panned by critics and shunned by audiences when it came out, and it is even credited with dethroning the Masters of the Universe line of action figures from its dominance of the toy aisle and helping to shut down its studio, Cannon Films. Nonetheless, I believe it’s past time that this movie gets a re-evaluation. It is undeniably flawed, but it was made with real passion and heart, and it contains some genuinely good performances.

You can stream it for free on Amazon. ( Please ignore it if that link gets crossed out as if it’s dead. WordPress doesn’t like it when I link to streaming services.)

This movie, sad to say, had a minuscule budget and consequently makes some serious mistakes, but let’s face it, it probably really is the best thing to ever come out of the Masters of the Universe franchise, which has never been known for its brilliant writing or high production values. The 1983 cartoon, which is the version of the story that everyone remembers most fondly, is memorable mostly for being surreal, weird, and stiffly animated–and its stiff animation often falls into uncanny-valley territory because much of it is rotoscoped. If you have doubts, I invite you to watch its first broadcast episode, which you can also stream for free, and compare it to the movie linked above. Assuming you can put nostalgia aside and judge both dispassionately, I think you will agree that the film is the superior production.

Continue reading “Instead, Watch ‘Masters of the Universe’ (1987)”

Instead, Watch ‘Barbie: Life in the Dreamhouse’

So, the hotly anticipated Barbie movie has been released, and it is, from what I hear, a giant rug-pull on par with Puella Magi Madoka Magica, except less pleasing. This thing had a massive ad campaign, so enormous that everyone has been buzzing about it (though I am pleased to say that, Luddite that I am, I never so much as saw a single trailer). Its ad campaign promised that it would be a fun, simple, sugary film full of pink. Instead, it is apparently an over-long feminist lecture that actually uses the word “patriarchy” and expects you to take it seriously. And Ken, instead of being Barbie’s love interest, is the villain.

What most annoys me about this is that so many are shocked by it. Everyone should have learned by now that Hollywood is currently incapable of treating a long-running, much-loved franchise with any kind of respect. Smearing their feces on other people’s creations is part of their religion: They can’t not do it. How many fool-me-once-fool-me-twice situations do we have to go through before all of you finally wise up? Stop watching this crap. The people who make these movies and TV shows hate you, and they also hate the titles they’re adapting. How could a new Barbie adaptation from Hollywood possibly be anything but a hamfisted feminist screed? Barbie, after all, is a perennial boogeyman for feminists.

But if you really need some sugary entertainment featuring airheaded dress-up dolls, the best possible adaptation of Barbie has already been made: A series of short, CGI-animated videos called Barbie: Life in the Dreamhouse was produced by Mattel in 2012. It now lives on Netflix, where it has been rearranged into twelve half-hour episodes. (I know that link is crossed out because WordPress is screwy, but the link works.)

Life in the Dreamhouse does what the current movie should have done: Drawing probably on the depiction of Barbie in the Toy Story movies, it gently pokes fun at the Barbie franchise while also respecting it, its history, and its lore. Appropriately set in a fantasy version of Malibu, it depicts Barbie, along with her family and friends, living in a shockingly pink “Dreamhouse” filled with bewildering and sometimes dangerous gadgets. In a nod to the many different Barbie outfits released over the years, it portrays Barbie as owning a clothes closet so large it threatens to collapse into a black hole, and it also portrays Barbie as a self-styled expert on most every subject because she’s had thousands of different jobs. Barbie is a Mary Sue but without the features that make Mary Sues annoying: She is not a self-insert character, and her perfectness is always played for laughs.

In the new movie, Barbie lives in a world where every woman in named Barbie and evey man is named Ken, but Life in the Dreamhouse remembers that there are other dolls in the franchise, so sisters Skipper and Chelsea are regular characters (Chelsea, in particular, is a series highlight), as are several of Barbie’s friends, all of whom are given distinct and appropriate personality quirks. Most ingenious is the show’s treatment of boyfriend Ken: Although always remembering that Ken is essentially an accessory to Barbie and sometimes poking fun at the fact, Life in the Dreamhouse makes him a kind of idiot savant, a himbo who despite his airheadedness is a gadgeteer genius who inexplicably makes over-complicated Rube Goldberg machines whenever he tries to put together simple devices. Unlike in the movie, in which Ken is Barbie’s underling and ultimately her enemy, the affection between Ken and Barbie in Life in the Dreamhouse is sappy but genuine, exactly as it should be.

Life in the Dreamhouse is silly and saccharine. Its only source of real conflict comes from the twins Raquelle and Ryan, who are constantly trying and failing to separate Ken and Barbie out of jealousy. When Barbie isn’t accidentally foiling Raquelle’s plots, crises come from such things as gadget malfunctions or Malibu suddenly running out of glitter.

It’s genuinely funny, but more importantly, it’s short: Originally, the episodes were five minutes. The last few episodes run nearly a half hour, and they drag a bit as Barbie and her friends overstay their welcome. It’s also, unlike the new movie–which makes raunchy jokes and references to Proust–appropriate for kids. We could perhaps have a serious discussion of whether the airheaded bimbos and superficial lifestyle of Life in the Dreamhouse are really quality children’s entertainment, but at least the humor is child-appropriate, with no references to drugs or genitalia, and no resentment of one sex for the other.

In any case, Life in the Dreamhouse is probably the best version of Barbie-themed entertainment we can hope for. As the new movie suggests, it’s increasingly unlikely that such an innocent and sincere take on a franchise like Barbie can be made anymore. If you were looking forward to Barbie because of the trailers and are disappointed to learn that it’s exactly what you should have already guessed it was, then watch Life in the Dreamhouse instead. It’s probably the best version of Barbie that will ever get made.

Orlando Innamorato, Part 1

I have finished the first eight cantos of Orlando Innamorato, which brings us up to almost one hundred pages of A. S. Kline’s translation. That should put us well on track to finish the book before Easter on April 9th, which is our goal.

I think I made the right decision in buying this edition. Further checking has confirmed that Kline’s is one of only two complete translations of the Orlando Innamorato into English and the only one that attempts to imitate the original’s rhyming scheme. However, Kline’s translation varies considerably in quality and is often clunky. It’s entertaining, but I admit I’m looking forward to finishing it so I can get to Barbara Reynolds’s acclaimed translation of Orlando Furioso, which is a much more readable version of a more famous epic.

Historical Background

I neglected to note in my earlier post that these two works are based on another epic called the Song of Roland, written in Old French in the eleventh century, which is in turn loosely based on a real historical event, the Battle of Roncevaux Pass, which took place in AD 778. The situation described in the Song of Roland is unhistorical, though the battle itself really happened. In real life, Basques attacked Charlemagne’s forces in the Pyrenees during their return to France because, after unsuccessfully besieging Saragossa, Charlemagne tore down the walls of Pamplona. All of Charlemagne’s rearguard was slaughtered, including Roland, who subsequently became the subject of epic poetry. As portrayed in the Song of Roland, however, Charlemagne and his twelve paladins have conquered all of Spain except Saragossa, whose king Marsile first sues for peace but then treacherously attacks the retreating French thanks to Roland’s turncoat stepfather.

Summary

The story as Matteo Maria Boiardo and his successor Ludovic Oriosto tell it is even more convoluted and complicated.

A hundred pages in, and we are still a long, long way from the battle that will form the climax of the second of these two poems. Boiardo goes wherever his imagination happens to take him and does not particularly care if all the various adventures and subplots form a cohesive whole. With his tongue no doubt firmly in his cheek, he tells us that his outlandish tale is definitely true because he has it directly from Archbishop Turpin. Turpin is another real historical figure who entered myth, and is in the Matter of France one of fiercest of Charlemagne’s twelve paladins. Boiardo appeals to his authority whenever the details of his poem get especially ridiculous.

The story starts by introducing a great Saracen emperor, Gradasso, who reigns somewhere beyond India. Most of the world is at his feet, but he covets two things, both of which belong to Charlemagne’s paladins: One is the super-sharp sword Durindana, wielded by Orlando (the Italian name of Roland); it can cut through steel or stone, and its hilt (says the Song of Roland) contains several priceless relics. The second is Rinaldo’s steed Baiardo, the fastest runner and highest jumper of all the world’s warhorses. To secure the world’s greatest sword and its greatest horse, Gradasso plans a military campaign to conquer first Spain and then France. Why would someone from, presumably, the area of Myanmar attack France by way of Spain? Don’t ask questions like that; from Boiardo point of view, there is Christendom in Western Europe and outside of that a great, amorphous mass that might be termed Pagandom, the geographical features of which are malleable.

After Gradasso’s brief introduction, the story starts where it properly should, at a jousting tournament: Charlemagne has invited all the greatest warriors in the world, both Christian and Saracen, to compete. Although the poem is greatly concerned with the defense of Christendom against her powerful enemies, it is not especially pious: When a visiting Saracen king asks Rinaldo how to pay honor to Christian noblemen, Rinaldo promptly replies that Christians are gluttons at table and whores in bed, but above all admire martial prowess. One wonders if Bishop Turpin would approve.

The festivities are interrupted by the arrival of Angelica, a princess of Cathay, who offers to marry any man who can defeat her brother in combat. Cathay, by the way, is ordinarily a name for northern China, but Boiardo seems to think it is a city in India. We may envision Angelica as either a Chinese or Indian princess, depending on our preference.

In any case, she’s the most beautiful woman in the world and the paladins fall instantly in love with her, especially the titular Orlando. Charlemagne’s court wizard Malagigi, however, discovers that Angelica is part of a convoluted plot to destroy France. Shenanigans ensue, and when the dust settles, Angelica has disappeared, Orlando and Rinaldo have ridden off in search of her, and Astolfo—the worst warrior but biggest braggart among the paladins—has come into possession of a magic lance that can instantly unseat any opponent. Astolfo then unexpectedly dominates the jousting tournament, leading to further shenanigans that end with Astolfo imprisoned for brawling.

Meanwhile, Rinaldo drinks from a magic fountain that causes him to hate Angelica, but Angelica drinks from a different fountain that causes her to love Rinaldo. Further shenanigans ensue. Angelica’s lament, when Rinaldo flees from her, results in some of Kline’s best poetry:

Should he not offer me a glimpse, at least,
Of his fair face, so that by gazing there,
I might upon those handsome features feast,
Or quench love’s fire, and so no longer care?
Reason would wish to find desire had ceased,
And yet reason has no place in this affair.
I call him cruel, of harsh unbending will,
Yet, be that as it may, I love him still.

The solitary adventures are momentarily interrupted when Gradasso’s forces arrive in Spain. France comes to Spain’s aid but then Spain allies with Gradasso and the united forces attack France, besieging Paris. Charlemagne’s forces are almost defeated but Astolfo is released from prison and, riding forth with his magic lance, challenges Gradasso to single combat, which he wins. Gradasso, surprisingly good-natured about the whole business, turns around and goes home.

Orlando, meanwhile, slays his way through the wilderness, encountering giants and ogres every few steps. As an example of both Boiardo’s use of classical material and his sense of humor, Orlando helps a pilgrim who thanks him by giving him a magic book that can solve any riddle. Soon after, Orlando encounters the Sphinx, who tells him of Angelica’s whereabouts but then demands that he answer a riddle. Orlando, unable to answer the riddle, attacks the Sphinx, kills it after a long and brutal battle, and only afterward remembers the magic book in his possession.

While Orlando—supposedly the greatest of the Paladins even though he’s never where he should be—is dithering around, Rinaldo is abducted by the lovelorn Angelica. Despite her machinations, he easily escapes her. He has various adventures almost indiscernible from Orlando’s and finally arrives at the hair-raising Castle Cruel, where a withered crone and her army of giants feed captured knights to an invincible monster born from a corpse. Rinaldo is thrown into a pit with the monster. He is fighting for his life and bleeding from several wounds. A cliff-hanger ends the eighth canto.

Discussion

Boiardo borrows from anything and everything. The backstory of Castle Cruel pulls from the Metamorphoses and other sources of Greek mythology. The Sphinx from the legend of Oedipus gets a cameo. Tristan and Isolde get a mention. There are probably other references I didn’t recognize.

The story is absolutely all over the place. I wonder if Boiardo had an outline or simply went where his fancy took him. But in either case, he’s very good at remembering his various plotlines. He hasn’t dropped a thread yet, and he has several of them going simultaneously.

But I think what most fascinates me is how all this grew out of a real historical event. If we knew nothing about the Battle of Roncevaux Pass, we might assume the Orlando Innamorato is pure fantasy. But as it turns out, it has an historical core, albeit a deeply buried one. I may muse on that more in a later post.

The Cup of Agamemnon

Yeesh, it’s been a while. So much has happened over here, and we’ve managed to clone the magical girl not once but twice now.

I seriously need to get another novel out. Part of my problem is that I’ve had trouble buckling down on a single project I’ve been drifting back and forth between sequels to my existing work and other things, but I finally grit my teeth and decided to finish The Cup of Agamemnon, a planetary romance I’ve had in the back of my mind for some time.

Below is a teaser from the first chapter. This is rough, of course, and it may be too heavy on info-dumping, so it will likely be trimmed before it sees print:


“Is he dead?” Angelica asked.

“He’s breathing,” I replied.

“Then he’s not dead.”

“Not yet,” said Sam after spitting out a stream of blackish liquid produced by the stuff he’d been chewing, “but he will be if you two stand around jawing.”

“That’s true,” I answered, “but you’re not supposed to move an injured man.”

“Sure. But you ain’t supposed to leave him in the mountains to freeze to death, either.”

“Very well. Sam, grab his legs. I’ll grab—”

“Ain’t no sense in it, him being light. I’ll just carry him myself.”

And Sam, the hulking brute, did exactly that: He bent down, took up the unconscious Gernian, and threw him over his shoulder like a sack of tubers. I winced, but I held my peace. Right now, I wanted to keep my head attached to my shoulders—and considering my situation, that meant holding my peace.

To make a long story short, our interstellar craft had unexpectedly struck atmosphere during a phase-out of its Alcubierre drive’s warp field. An Alcubierre drive is tricky to operate, especially in-system: By compressing spacetime in one direction and expanding it in the other, it can move a ship across the galaxy in a minute without relativistic effects. But traveling such a distance in one go would build up enough energy to produce a nova-sized explosion when the drive deactivated, so it’s necessary to travel in short hops, stretching a minute-long trip into months. Inside a star system, the hops have to be even shorter.

We made a bad hop and collided with our target. The protective ceramics burned off, and the ship hit the dirt hard, so it was now a smoking pile of slag. We were stranded without food and with little water in a barren range of mountains where the air was thin and cold but breathable. There was no snow, either because the wind had blown it away or because the air was too dry.

We were four in number: Three of us were mammals, so our needs were similar, but the fourth was something indeterminate, transcending all mortal classifications. Fortunately, he had his own ways of sustaining himself—ways too disgusting to describe.

The peaks over our heads were rough and came to sharp, needle-like points. The rocks, mostly flint, cut into our feet. But I knew this world was inhabited, or at least had been, and I was confident that we were not the first to walk through this forbidding mountain pass: There were telltale signs of beasts—too many to be random—mostly in the form of droppings but sometimes of churned gravel or overturned stones. At regular intervals, we found trash pits containing steel wire, fragments of what were probably harnesses, and rusted steel cans soldered with lead. All the evidence pointed to pack trains. This was a trade route, and I said so to my companions.

Our de facto leader was Angelica. She told me to shut up, so I did. She had been the ship’s captain, and she was still in charge. Besides, her formidable technology put the rest of us at her mercy. She was our best hope for making it out of the mountains and finding water, and she could also kill us in a nanosecond if she had a mind to.

By the way, she blamed the crash on me.

Continue reading “The Cup of Agamemnon”

New Magical Girl Just Dropped

Had a new baby today, a healthy little girl. Mommy and baby both doing well. No pictures as of yet for the sake of internet security etc.

Anime Review: ‘Fairy Musketeers’

I never knew how much I needed to see Little Red Riding Hood in a sword duel with Gretel until I watched Fairy Musketeers.

Fairy Musketeers (Otogi-Jūshi Akazukin). Starring Nobuyuki Hiyama, Rie Kugimiya, and Motoko Kumai. Directed by Takaaki Ishiyama, et al. TV Tokyo, . 39 episodes of 24 minutes (approx. 940 minutes). Not rated.

Available on Crunchyroll.

In the post-Madoka days when most magical girl anime is about blood, guts, and misery, or else full of snarky “irony,” I like to look back on an earlier, slightly more innocent time when magical girl stories were about giggly, fidgety females who saved the world in between shopping trips and junk-food binges. And when I look back on that time, I like to watch Fairy Musketeers. Fairy Musketeers is not the best-written magical girl show, nor is it the best animated, nor the best edited. But it has an intriguing premise, a likable collection of characters, a satisfying conclusion, and a sweetness that avoids becoming saccharine.

The Fairy Musketeers pose dramatically.
No magical-girl show is complete without goofy catchphrases.

Originally produced as an OVA (that is, a straight-to-video production, which doesn’t have the same stigma in Japan that it has in the States), Fairy Musketeers was later expanded into a 39-episode TV series, which is the more readily available version. Merchandising heavily dictated its content, and the show has a few out-of-place props and plot swerves as a result. Although it drags at times, it’s consistently fun. It is one of my all-time favorites, and it’s clean enough to let the kids watch.

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On Study Bibles

For years, I’ve collected study Bibles. For a while, this was my hobby, but I recently acquired what I believe will probably be the last study Bible I ever buy, both because of the expense and because I doubt any will come out in my lifetime that I like better.

As well as a collector, I am a compulsive Bible annotator. I anotate as a kind of religious discipline: In my office, with no illumination except a desk lamp, bent over the page and writing in my finest print with a Sakura Pigma Micron, I have my own little scriptorium.

Although I own many more than that number, I have over my life used three study Bibles to hold my notes and am now on the fourth. I started with an NIV Study Bible I scribbled in as a teen, followed by the Nelson Study Bible I purchased from its editor at a retreat, followed by the HarperCollins Study Bible, which I purchased while in graduate school, took two years to read, and carefully wrote in for over a decade.

My HarperCollins is now falling to pieces. For that reason, I reecently spent a year and a half consolidating all of my notes. Then I purchased my fourth and (as I anticipate) final study Bible, into which I have begun copying all that work. I expect this project, the complete duplication of my annotations in a new volume, to take three years at least. I will probably add to these notes until I die or at least become incapacitated.

My notes are eclectic: They consist of everything from summaries of sermons to summaries of archaeology journal articles to quotations ranging from Bertrand Russell to the Bhagavad-Gita. There is no theme or discipline to my notes; they consist of things related to the Bible, either directly or through thematic association, that I want to be able to find again.

Continue reading “On Study Bibles”