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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   1697 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for September 20, 2026

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

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So, what are you reading?

I finished Nasr Abu Zayd's Rethinking the Qur'an: Towards a Humanistic Hermeneutics. It's a short essay, but very valuable.

It is not only a question of contextualization, which is pivotal in discourse analysis, but more than that it is what the discourse tells about the context and how. Now, the question is which is historical and which is universal, a question that keeps all the modern liberal Muslim scholars of the Qur'an busy. Being confined to the Qur'an as 'text' alone, the conservatives win at the end of the day. When the liberals, for example, emphasize 'togetherness' as the universal eliminating the 'hostility' limiting its meaning to the negative past the conservatives will apply the principle of 'abrogation' to historicize 'togetherness' as abrogated and will universalize 'hostility', as the abrogat [sic]. In the present context of unsolved Palestinian-Israeli trauma, whose hermeneutics or meaning is valid? The winner is sure to be the meaning of ghetto, separation and isolation, the meaning of Mr. Sharon's wall.

Zayd's hope is to fight against that outcome in Middle East/Western relations, which 'hostility' he sees as being supported by the adapting of Islam to resistance.

I find myself going back to older books. A lot of Golden Age detective stories, which can be an acquired taste. Most recent is a collection of short stories from 1925 about a forensic surgeon for Scotland Yard called Reggie Fortune. The tone is very much of the time, and it could be grating in large doses, but for example I found this exchange very funny (of course the big cheese at Scotland Yard is a minor sprig of the gentry, of course the style of badinage is very of its day, of course it is about the well-off upper classes, of course it is very much Entre Deux Guerres and before the Great Depression and economic crash):

In a day or two Reggie made a call on the chief of the Criminal Investigation Department. He was received with a cry of joy. The Hon. Sidney Lomas pranced round the table holding out his arms.

“Reginald! My innocent child! Embrace me! I thank Heaven for your deliverance. Not a stain upon your character, they tell me. Wonderful!”

“You know all about it, do you?” said Mr. Fortune morosely.

“These little things will get about,” Lomas chuckled. “I wish I’d seen you at the police station. The fair young hero, falsely accused, defying calumny. ‘Where are my emeralds?’ says the villain hoarsely. ‘Search me,’ the noble youth cried, ‘search me, varlet!’ And his innocence was proved in the fair light of Heaven.”

“Yes. I wasn’t taking any risks,” said Mr. Fortune. “You see, I’d had the beastly things in my pocket.”

The face of Lomas changed like an actor’s from mirth to gravity. “The devil you had! And what have you been up to, Fortune?”

“I wish I knew. I was stuck in that show behind a woman who was having a spasm of the heart. When we moved on I thought I felt something at my coat-tails. I found that emerald pendant in my pocket. I dropped the beastly thing under the table and looked about for anybody suspicious. All very ordinary people. And then Mr. John Good, of the International Detective Service, was arresting me. Queer sensation, Lomas. Ever tried it?”

“Nobody has arrested me yet,” said the chief of the Criminal Investigation Department modestly.

What's interesting is that this is in the approved style where murder is treated more or less as a lark for the quirky investigator to have fun solving, but the stories are not like that. They're often about serious effects of the crimes on the people involved, and Fortune is more concerned with justice (so far as he can manage it) than the requirements of the law. He's also fully aware of the results of his investigations: if he catches the bad guy/proves his guilt, he gets that person hanged. It's not all fun and games.

The language and behaviour of the characters may be that of the "silly ass" from Wodehouse's Drones Club, but they are in fact intelligent and capable people. Though nowadays describing a male character as "prancing", "conspicuously jaunty", or "sitting in front of his dressing-table perfecting that work of art, the wave in his hair" we would have a very different impression of his, er, personal life.

Maybe the same applied in the 1920s!

I tried a couple Poirot short stories recently. Not super impressed. Sherlock Holmes if he only had 10 pages to work it out. Not that there aren’t some redeeming qualities, but it didn’t wow me at all.

My wife and I are continuing our tradition of reading aloud before bed. We started with Wodehouse but the current novel is Chandler’s The Big Sleep. My God, this is incredible. Marlowe just sort of stands around until people get uncomfortable and either leave the evidence or try to kill him. And there are so many hilarious phrases.

Least expected feature: Los Angeles. I always assumed noir was a New England thing.

Chandler is a very good writer. Less cynical in a way than Dashiell Hammett, but the amount of corruption in the police he describes (and which seems to be pretty historically accurate) is breath-taking. You can tell an honest cop because his clothes are shabby and he looks poor. But that's how business is done in LA!

He has a way with language, I think my favourite bit is "crazy as two waltzing mice" but there are plums in all the books.

She had lovely legs. I would say that for her. They were a couple of pretty smooth citizens, she and her father.

I can’t say why this one hit me so hard. It’s so stupid. I love it. Material for the Lyttle Lytton contest.

But the best scene so far has been the four-way confrontation in some jerk’s apartment.

I hit Agnes on the head with less delicacy than before, kicked her off my feet, and stood up. Brody flicked his eyes at me. I showed him the automatic. He stopped trying to get his hand into his pocket.
"Christ!" he whined. "Don't let her kill me!"
I began to laugh. I laughed like an idiot, without control. Blonde Agnes was sitting up on the floor with her hands flat on the carpet and her mouth wide open and a wick of metallic blond hair down over her right eye. Carmen was crawling on her hands and knees, still hissing. The metal of her little revolver glistened against the baseboard over in the corner. She crawled towards it relentlessly.
I waved my share of the guns at Brody and said: "Stay put. You're all right."
I stepped past the crawling girl and picked the gun up. She looked up at me and began to giggle. I put her gun in my pocket and patted her on the back. "Get up, angel. You look like a Pekinese."
I went over to Brody and put the automatic against his midriff and reached his Colt out of his side pocket. I now had all the guns that had been exposed to view. I stuffed them into my pockets and held my hand out to him.

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