How can you not be enthused
by this?

I have just pre-ordered two copies of R. Crumb's illustrated Book of Genesis. Raspberry Rabbit being a rather small furry creature in the world of online Anglican personages, I don't get sent advance copies for review like that nice Bishop chap down in Blighty who always has that earnest air about him. I have to wait. As do you.

I used to sell the Georgia Straight on the streetcorner in Victoria and Vancouver back in the very early seventies - back around the time Jim Morrison died - back in the days when the Georgia Straight was an honest-to-goodness underground newspaper. Back in the days when my fellow Junior High School students walked out of school to protest the testing of a nuclear device on the Aleutians and got together and occupied an abandoned bit of University Endowment Land until the Saanich Police arrived and we all had to scatter and then walk back to school looking innocent.

The good old days.

Robert Crumb's women were right out of the Louvre and, being far too young at the time to have seen many (any) women in a state of undress, Crumb's facsimile thereof had to suffice. I've since discovered that not all women have really thick ankles.

A recent article in the Telegraph about Crumb's illustrated version of Genesis consisted of all the predictable boilerplate you'd have expected and included, of course, that obligatory telephone call to anyone who fit the caricature of the media-unfriendly "christian" lobbyist for whom "lip pursing" is considered a charism and, in lieu of genuine holiness, outrage will do in a pinch.

Now that they've gone out of their way to find him, the headlines can "accurately relate" how cross we all are here in Jesus-land that our Holy Book has been illustrated with tits.

The cumulative reaction from most Christian circles (among others) is actually not anger or disquiet - quite the opposite, in fact. Many of us are aging fans of Fritz the Cat who needed work and so slapped on a clerical collar and learned Greek and we can hardly wait to get our hands on a copy.

So what would you want in its stead? The Church of England? Soft floppy people reading a Book which contains scads of PG 13 sex, violence and nakedness though you'd never know it from the way it's read from the lectern in a stained glass voice?

Nah, give me something that I have to pass around in brown paper wrappers. Give me something my 12 year old stepson has to discover while fishing around in my office for a forgotten package of Tic Tacs and then pretend that he hasn't been reading.

Bishop Nick has a bit about it HERE. Church Mouse la-bas. New York Times HERE. New Yorker talks about the research which went into the artwork HERE. Article in the Jewish Daily Forward HERE. A few notes on the translation which Crumb uses HERE