Well, that was lovely

On May 9, 2026May 10, 2026 By Luther M. SilerIn life3 Comments

The bride is the eldest daughter of my wife’s favorite cousin, and she and her sister are easily my favorites among my wife’s side of the family (who, for the record, are all perfectly fine people; I’ve gotten very lucky with my in-laws) but I was unfortunately unsuccessful in my attempts to encourage either chicanery or shenanigans. She’s marrying into a family that is substantially more religious than anyone on our side, and I am the least religious of our side by a significant margin, so I was at least hoping for some entertainment or at least horror stories out of that, but it didn’t happen– the church was lovely, the reception was gorgeous, the pastor seemed to be a perfectly fine fellow, and I really didn’t feel like the experience as a whole was any more Jesusy than any other wedding I’ve been to, so all good there as well. The wedding was even short! Twenty minutes, in and out.

That said, they put out a Bible next to the guest book, and asked everyone to pick their favorite verse and sign next to it, and … well … never ask an atheist with graduate degrees in Hebrew Bible to pick his favorite Bible verse.

(She will think this is hilarious. I mentioned to her at one point that I had briefly considered flipping her and her mother off as they officially walked into the church– we sat in the back and were the first people she saw when they walked in, and she and I locked eyes for a moment– and she laughed and told me I should have done it.)

They also did a neat thing where they put a card on each of the tables at the reception and asked the guests to give them advice, with each card to be read on the anniversary corresponding to the table number. Ours was table 7, so they will read our card on their 7th anniversary. I did not write that I hope they enjoyed my funeral, which was my first thought, since there is no way 2035 is even a real year.(*)

At any rate, we are back in our hotel room right now, a room which somehow is sporting four queen-sized beds for the three of us, and in accordance with prophecy and our most ancient and revered familial traditions, none of us have spoken a word since we got back. I’m going to read for a while and go to bed, since there’s a family breakfast in the morning and I will need to restore needed energy for further socialization.

(*) Not only is it not a real year, it’s not seven years from now. Shut up, I’m tired.

Dial it back, buddy

On December 13, 2025 By Luther M. SilerIn ReadingLeave a comment

I finished Shadows Upon Time, the seventh and final book of Christopher Ruocchio’s Sun Eater series, about half an hour ago, and I’ve been going back and forth on whether to review either the book itself or the entire series, or whether I should post about something else tonight and let the book marinate for a little bit before posting it. The draft that I had started in my head was probably going to start with the sentence I’m surprised that Christopher Ruocchio resisted the urge to have Hadrian Marlowe crucified. Marlowe, the POV character of the series, is executed by hanging at the end; this isn’t a spoiler, as I’m pretty sure it’s revealed in the literal first page of Empire of Silence, the first book of the series, and if it’s not the first page it’s absolutely in the first chapter. But before then, he’s stabbed in the side and one of his very last spoken lines of dialogue is “It is finished.”

And then I downloaded the cover, because I needed that, and I really looked at it, and for fuck’s sake, dude:

For some reason, it’s the position of his legs that really gets to me.

Anyway, when Marlowe isn’t being Jesus, he’s Obi-Wan Kenobi. This is a quote:

“You’ll never be rid of me,” I said, “even if I do truly die this day. You’ll fear my ghost in every shadow, every whisper. I will be with you, Alexander — all the days of your life.”

I might be being a little unfair, as this makes the book, and by extension the entire series, really feel like hackwork, and it’s not. In fact, I kind of want to do a reread now that the whole thing is out. When Ruocchio is at the top of his game, he’s remarkable; when he’s not … you get that, and any given book in the series can whipsaw back and forth more than once between those two extremes of quality. Ultimately, after really disliking Empire of Silence the first time I read it, I’m glad that I decided to go back and give the series another chance and honestly I think it probably deserves more attention than it’s gotten over the years.

I dunno. There may still be a review coming, as I really don’t feel like this is one, but guys, it’s okay to be subtle when you’re comparing your main character to Jesus. At least a little bit.

On Stephen Mitchell’s GILGAMESH: A NEW ENGLISH TRANSLATION

On March 18, 2025 By Luther M. SilerIn Geek, Reading, Reviews1 Comment

This is very much not a book review. Don’t get me wrong, I’m still gonna tag it under “Reviews,” but the Epic of Gilgamesh is four thousand years old and the notion of putting a star rating on it is kind of ludicrous. Now, Stephen Mitchell’s new translation includes a decently long introduction and 80 or so pages of translation notes, so I could “review” that, but I did not pick this up to read his notes or his introduction; I picked it up because I realized I didn’t have a decent translation of the epic in the house anywhere and I got a wild hair up my ass about it.

Now, that said: Mitchell’s translation– well, his adaptation, and I’ll get to the distinction in a bit– is in fact a lovely read, and it combines being compulsively readable in English with a fine poetic feel that makes reading it out loud flow beautifully. I’m not an expert here by any means– I considered shifting my Master’s degree away from Hebrew Bible and more toward Babylonian studies in grad school before deciding to abandon the entire affair, but that’s as close as I get.

The problem is neither is Stephen Mitchell, who openly admits that he “doesn’t read cuneiform and has no knowledge of Akkadian.” Which makes the decision to publish a new translation, or adaptation, or version, which is his word … interesting? He basically sat down with a bunch of English versions (of, remember, fragmentary texts in one of the oldest languages that humanity can still understand) and some scholarly treatments of the work and pulled together his text from that, first doing a prose pass and then converting it to English verse.

(There’s a whole post or maybe a series of them in here about how one translates poetry from one language to another; needless to say it’s hellaciously complicated and requires a lot of expertise in both of the languages involved and in writing poetry. I could never.)

Fun fact: the Epic of Gilgamesh contains the oldest reference to blowjobs I’m aware of. From Book VI:

‘Sweet Ishullanu, let me suck your rod,
touch my vagina, caress my jewel.‘

Except! In the translation notes at the end, Mitchell states that the literal translation is “eat your vigor,” which … okay, that sounds like a blowjob too, but since he doesn’t know any Akkadian it’s hard to say how reasonable that leap is, right? An actual scholar of the language and the culture might be able to provide some details there that led to that specific choice of words; for Mitchell it’s basically just vibes. This bothers the nearly-dead Bible scholar in me; it may not be especially relevant to other people.

There’s a bit where Enkidu tears the “thigh” off of a bull and throws it at Ishtar, and she takes it and puts it on an altar and makes it a centerpiece, and I’m thinking that maybe it wasn’t the thigh he actually tore off? Would love to see what a scholar had to say about that. But that’s not this version!

Anyway. I enjoyed reading this even if I had some issues with it, and maybe I’ll take a deep breath and find something more academic about the work and maybe a more traditional translation to compare the two. Or maybe not! It’s not like I don’t have a shitton of other stuff (including, remember, a whole other book called Gilgamesh) to read.