Roland Boer's Blog, page 85

Wheeling and dealing in Shanghai

I had not come to China merely to gape at intersection antics and marvel at the bicycles. I was here to talk to a press that is translating one of my books (Marxist Criticism of the Bible - Criticism of Heaven and Rescuing the Bible are being translated in Taiwan) and a professor of biblical studies who showed me his bum crack. Having slept off the flight's sleeping tablets, I was out early, dodging bicycles, motor scooters and trucks, to make my way to VI Horae Press on Jiangsu Road.

Lisa, or He

Criticism of Religion out now!

This is getting slightly ridiculous, but my third book this year has been published. First we had Political Myth (here) and then Political Grace (here). But now it is time for Criticism of Religion: On Marxism and Theology II (here), which has just been published. This one is volume two in a five volume series with Brill - I'm writing volume five now.

Criticism of Religion deals with Lucien Goldmann, Fredric Jameson, Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Kautsky, Julia Kristeva, Alain Badiou, Giorgio Agamben, Geo

Humour in the face of death

OK, so my father is in his last days from cancer, but that doesn't stop him joking, or me seeing a lighter side. He is a notorious stinge, and yesterday, while we were waiting for him to have a gruesome medical procedure, he showed me a pair of reading glasses. 'You know how much I paid for these?' he asked me. My face said no. '$2.50!' he said. 'They were at a garage sale'. Meanwhile, my mother passed him a letter from his sister in the The Netherlands and he began reading. By the second line,

Negri on Harvard University

You've gotta like this man. He's chatting about Harvard University and says:

because all the corporate leaders send their children there: the whole republican elite, the whole imperial elite is found at Harvard and the other great universities (Negri on Negri, p. 67)

Shanghai Bicycles

I had wanted to come to China, the real China, for a long time. With more and more translations of my writings under way and talks of lecture tours the time was overdue. And I had arrived in the port city of Shanghai. I wasn't overwhelmed by the size of the port (it has the highest volume of goods traded of any port in the world), nor was I overwhelmed by the haze or the size of the city (with a population almost equal to Australia's 21 million). What blew me away were the bicycles.

Any city with

Final Abstracts for the Bible and Critical Theory Seminar 10-11 July, 2009

Darren Jorgensen
Simulating the Sacred: Theodore Strehlow's Songs of Central Australia (1971)

It may be impossible to reconstruct what it meant for the Arrernte people of Central Australia to have the Bible translated into their language. The continuing practice of Christianity among the Arrernte shows just how powerful this wealth of stories was for this remote community. This conversion experience was reciprocated by a whitefella and the son of the Bible translator, Theodor Strehlow, who worked

Welcome to China in an Age of Swine Flu

Sterile white body suits, swimming goggles, face-masks, heavy boots and rubber gloves – six figures dressed as though they were entering a space craft or perhaps a laboratory with a highly contagious disease. Any plane from Australia, a swine flu hotspot, was always going to be suspect. They came onto the plane after we had landed in Shanghai. Temperatures were checked, first with a zap to the forehead and then, if doubt persisted, with a mouth thermometer (that was my fate, but I was cleared).

Alpha males and the thin skin of Mark Brett

Recently I wrote a review (here) of Mark Brett's new book, Decolonizing God. I thought it was a reasonably positive review, although I had my criticisms, as one does with a review. However, via the grapvine I have heard that Mark seems to have taken exception to the review, making it known in various ways that it is a 'simulacrum' of a review, that I make 'cheap shots' against him and that there is nothing 'substantive' in the review.

So let us see what is going on here.

1) Mark has been for some

City of Vertigo

Today I went up to The Peak in Hong Kong. Well, the actual peak doesn't exist anymore, as anyone who has been up there knows, since it has been obliterated with buildings that go back to those benevolent British. Up on the artificial lookout hanging out almost over the city, I realised that it is a city of vertigo. Look up, look down, you are constantly giddy.

Political Grace makes a guest appearance in Publisher's Weekly

Calvin, it seems, was predestined to have books written about him. My Political Grace, which is now available here for USD &18.96, has made it into a short article in Publisher's Weekly here.