Timothy Morton, Hell: In Search of a Christian Ecology

Everything you ever wanted to know about King Arthur and his knights is covered in this fascinating volume: the origins of the Grail legend, the Tristan and Isolde love story in opera and literature, Spielberg's use of Arthurian motifs in Star Wars , the depiction of Arthur in paintings, the presentation of Camelot on the Broadway stage, the twitting of the legend in Monty Python and the Holy Grail and much more.This critical survey of Arthurian history and legend, archaeology, literature, and the arts from the fifth century to the present provides an introduction for the general reader and a useful summary for the specialist. It offers both historical facts and key discussions on Arthurian subjects, from post-Roman Britain to the most recent novels and films. There is a lengthy glossary of Arthurian characters, motifs, and places, a chronology of major historical and literary items, a guide to pronunciation, and a full bibliography.What's new in the Second Edition:All the material has been revised and updated to 1996 since the original 1988 edition; The chapter on modern literature has been thoroughly revised, with new material on writings from France, Germany, England, and America; The coverage of King Arthur in the arts has entirely rewritten by one of the premier authorities in Arthurian studies. Brand-new geneological charts of the ancestry of Arthur and his family and the Grail kings and knights.; A fully up-to-date chronology; Many new illustrations.

Everything you ever wanted to know about King Arthur and his knights is covered in this fascinating volume: the origins of the Grail legend, the Tristan and Isolde love story in opera and literature, Spielberg's use of Arthurian motifs in Star Wars , the depiction of Arthur in paintings, the presentation of Camelot on the Broadway stage, the twitting of the legend in Monty Python and the Holy Grail and much more. This critical survey of Arthurian history and legend, archaeology, literature, and the arts from the fifth century to the present provides an introduction for the general reader and a useful summary for the specialist. It offers both historical facts and key discussions on Arthurian subjects, from post-Roman Britain to the most recent novels and films. There is a lengthy glossary of Arthurian characters, motifs, and places, a chronology of major historical and literary items, a guide to pronunciation, and a full bibliography. What's new in the Second Edition:All the material has been revised and updated to 1996 since the original 1988 edition; The chapter on modern literature has been thoroughly revised, with new material on writings from France, Germany, England, and America; The coverage of King Arthur in the arts has entirely rewritten by one of the premier authorities in Arthurian studies. Brand-new geneological charts of the ancestry of Arthur and his family and the Grail kings and knights.; A fully up-to-date chronology; Many new illustrations.

Despite its brevity and science fiction genre, Terry Gilliam's "aliens sequence" in Monty Python's Life of Brian functions in at least three ways: It is a brilliant parody of Star Wars and other space epics. It addresses concerns that were of profound significance for the religion of Jesus' day and, finally, and it significantly challenges the Christian premise of a divinely ordained purpose underlying Jesus' life. In Memoriam Terry Jones (1942-2020)

Many people can recite pieces of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, The Godfather, or The Wizard of Oz. For me, it ’s Star Wars: I can recite the entire dialogue, almost verbatim, from memory. But I have never seen the textual artifact of moviemaking, an actual script. It is a dubious talent, and one I should perhaps not admit to having quite so readily, but useful for illustrating a point. In memory, there is no difference between whether a text recalled was originally read as a written text or heard as an entertainment. The memory capacity among a whole community of individuals trained to have prodigious memories—such as that at Christ Church Canterbury, which created MS Oxford Bodleian Junius 11—must have been staggering indeed.

In each issue, JATA publishes reviews of textbooks and other books of interest to tax scholars. All book reviews are solicited by the Associate Editor. However, if you know of a book that you would like reviewed, or if you are interested in reviewing a book, please contact the Associate Editor.The Associate Editor is:Jay A. SoledDepartment of Accounting and Information SystemsRutgers, The State University of New Jersey1 Washington ParkNewark, New Jersey 07102Phone: (973) 353-1727Fax: (973) 375-1283Email: jaysoled@business.rutgers.eduThis book can be enjoyed by anyone who has an interest in history, political science, or sociology. It is written with an accessible style, and provides enough relevant detail for any economic term-of-art or concept so that it is understandable by non-experts. Starting with its alliterative title and throughout its clear prose under catchy chapter titles and section headings, the book avoids the thickness that can make scientific work inaccessible. It contains many humorous takes, including a humble self-poke at an author's ig Nobel prize. The book is current, and includes a discussion of the COVID-19 pandemic. It is replete with germane, cultural references, such as to author David Foster Wallace, the comedy Monty Python, singer David Bowie, the movie Star Wars, the book Scoop, and “fake news.” Because the book is about how government raises all revenue (not just taxes), readers who are intimidated by tax can enjoy the material without triggering their own stress about tax.For the JATA subscriber teaching undergraduate tax courses, the book offers many examples of tax in action so as to garner student interest. My own classroom examples of tax in action are becoming stale and not separated enough from modern times to be generalizable. Instead of the abstract example of how pre-tax yields differ between municipal and corporate bonds, consider instead showing students the book's picture of a bricked up window, a technique used by Londoners in response to a window tax. The window tax is a good example of the perennial challenge of government to find proxies for the ability to pay tax and how to deal with taxpayer responses as well as efficiency losses (e.g., Is the benefit reduction to the taxpayer greater than their tax saved?). Scattered throughout the book are scores of examples (often with accompanying pictures) that are easy to share in an undergraduate tax classroom.For tax researchers, the book can be a great resource. Although written by economists, it should also be in the toolkit of tax researchers in business schools or law schools. I especially recommend it for Ph.D. tax students who are not in an economics program. While many Ph.D. programs allow students to take economics courses (aside from mandatory econometrics courses), not all of us take enough courses, such as in macroeconomics or economic history. Advisors should recommend that Ph.D. tax students read the entire book, along with an admonition not to worry about every detail but to instead to let the material wash over them.The tax researcher, however, should be prepared for the challenge of working with a book that is not designed in the format of a compact and efficient literature review or tax treatise (or even casebook or textbook). Because the book is also targeted at the casual reader, the book uses catchy chapter and section headings instead of the formal terms that tax academics use, which I use below. Furthermore, it uses endnotes. When you turn to the endnotes (most with shorthand citations, but many with additional prose), you must then turn to a list of references to obtain the full citation. With over 1,300 endnotes on more than 50 pages—and the separate references section spread over 40 pages with nearly 1,000 references—it becomes time-consuming and momentum-stopping to each time turn back to learn whether an endnote was merely the name of the cited source or had its own set of important additional prose. Another occasional obstacle to efficiently using the book for research is often there are no citations. For example, I had to independently find the source about a urine tax, about states providing pre-populated tax returns, or about a car company's rifle shot tax provision. In other cases, especially often in the last part, there are references to topics I recalled from earlier in the book, but the reader is not told where in the book (a reader may wish to consult the electronic version of the book to facilitate searching for such “supra” items).I now turn to summarizing the five parts of the book, along with examples of cases and lessons the authors glean from history.Part I's general overview starts with many examples of governments' revenue-raising measures throughout time and around this planet. Many of these examples are returned to in latter parts of the book. This part is nearly exclusively objective, but does occasionally slip into normative commentary, something that occurs more often later in the book. It makes the point that any book on revenue raising must address not only literal taxes that many JATA readers are familiar with, but also the fact that government borrowing or creating money is taxation by another name. Chapter 2 has seven pages on making money, ranging from the post-World War I hyperinflation in Germany to the current talk of minting a US$1 trillion coin. Chapter 2 also highlights the recurrent revenue challenges rulers have faced, while Chapter 3 addresses governments' creative attempts to enact a tax but by another name. Examples include forced military service unless one is able to buy their way out or issuing motor vehicle violation tickets in a locale where the red light was deliberately set to suddenly turn red. There are examples of less mandatory forms of tax, such as the figurative “tax” on the poor that is the lottery, which the authors date back to China 2,000 years ago.Part II addresses vertical and horizontal equity and tax incidence. Chapters 4 and 5 address vertical equity; the authors describe the practical need to avoid taxing the rich and the poor similarly (as in the example of a poll tax), lest rebellions arise. The book points out two views of tax fairness. First, taxes are fair if the payer receives enough in return. As a direct example, the more Social Security contributions one pays in, the more benefits one receives; as an indirect example, Bill Gates' father argues that his son should pay higher tax rates because he was only able to succeed because of what taxes pay for. Second, people should pay what they are able to pay, under the ability-to-pay principle prevalent in modern times.Chapter 4 ends with interesting examples of proxies for ability-to-pay such as a tax on hats or on female servants, while Chapter 5 is dedicated to the modern approach of the income tax, including its recent history and whether certain kinds of income should be taxed more favorably than others. Chapter 6 warns that horizontal equity is needed because tax arbitrariness can threaten the legitimacy of government. Violative examples include a targeted tax on followers of particular religions to recent attempts to tax certain products purchased only by females.Chapter 7 focuses on tax incidence, which the authors warn is one of the most difficult questions to answer. The authors point out that the name of a tax—or how it is paid—does not necessarily illustrate who ultimately bears its burden. They also walk through the origin—and relevance to taxation—of the concept of rents (e.g., the premium a landowner receives without any added investment or effort). They also explain how elasticity relates to incidence. Elasticity helps us understand that the answer as to who bears the burden of a tax is a function of the relative ease with which the to-be-taxed person can find a suitable alternative to the taxed item. The chapter points out how markets impound taxes, such as in the common example of yields on municipal versus corporate bonds, along with the “murky” issue of who actually bears the burden of the corporate income tax.Part III addresses taxpayer responses to tax and other revenue-raising laws. Herein is the discussion of excess burden/efficiency, including extreme (and sometimes absurd) examples of distorted behavioral responses.When the authors start Chapter 8 with a tax on luxuries, or a Swiss canton's tax on a certain hair style worn by the wealthy, I was prepared to warn that the authors had inadvertently put this topic here instead of in Part II's vertical equity discussion. However, the authors point out that these taxes were put in for another purpose, i.e., to “keep the lower orders in their place.” Examples of social engineering include encouraging marriage and childbirth through a curious tax on bachelors, which in one setting led to the hiring of professional lady rejecters who—for a small fee—would reject a bachelor's marriage offer so that the bachelor could avoid the tax. England once enacted “a tax on knowledge” when it taxed newspapers in an attempt to keep the lower orders uninformed. The authors also highlight sin taxes—often to address negative externalities—on pollution, smoking, drinking, prostitution, and recreational drugs (surprisingly, gambling is not addressed).Chapter 9 describes the “collateral damage” of tax laws, as reflected in how the taxed party changes behavior to reduce their tax burden. Aside from the bricking up of windows also noted in Part I, this chapter provides the example of amazingly thin homes, designed to reduce the tax levied as a function of the width of a home, rather than how deep or tall. I have now figured out why my cousin never finished a top third floor he started decades ago; in his country there is a 60 percent tax reduction if the building is unfinished. Another example of how taxpayer response pushes the boundaries of reason is the case of a preferential rate on motorcycles, which led to three-wheeled contraptions that accommodated eight people. The authors extend the problem of “line drawing” to the abstract (as opposed to the material world, such as the width of a home). For example, the very current issue of employee versus contractor tax status is addressed with the example of shared ride drivers.The authors remind us that excess burden (as shown in the many examples above) leads to actions that cost the rest of society more than the benefit to the person who changes their behavior. The authors note that the only taxes that create no excess burden are those that taxpayers cannot avoid or evade. Chapter 10 gives examples of how to “pluck a goose” with the “smallest amount of hissing” by seeking that holy grail of tax: a non-distorting yet fair tax system. Examples include taxing rents (such as excess profits tax [e.g., wartime]) and lump sum taxes. A creative method to ensure an owner's self-reporting of the fair value for property tax purposes is a provision that the government has an option to buy the property at or slightly above the declared value. Chapter 10 ends with one of the book's few forays into macroeconomics, including descriptive data on the percentages of GDP represented by taxation. Chapter 11 addresses two major issues, aggravated by globalization: the ability to hide assets outside a home country's eyes and long arms, and the issue of transfer pricing.Part IV addresses how governments have administered their tax laws and sought ways to more effectively and efficiently collect the taxes, with an eye toward minimizing tax evasion (as opposed to tax avoidance addressed in Part III). Chapter 12 includes a discussion of tax gaps, a currently hot topic in the U.S. Examples of other countries are also given, including evidence that in one country self-employed people declare less income than the amount of interest they pay on loans. The authors commend the rise of information reporting, another timely topic in the U.S. The chapter also describes the “carrot” approach (e.g., one country allows honest taxpayers faster passage through lines at government offices) versus the “stick” approach (e.g., for tax fraud, some countries would impose the death penalty, sometimes cruelly (e.g., impaling), and even as recently as in China in 2011). William Tell, known for shooting an apple off his child's head, apparently did so as a tax-related punishment.Chapter 13 provides history of tax collectors and highlights the thankless nature of their task. They give the example of Jesus's disciple Matthew and others, such as Virginia's first income tax collectors a century ago, who were killed doing their duty. The authors thank the tax collectors for our tax systems and thus, “to a large degree, such civilization as we now enjoy.” The chapter continues with approaches to tax collection, ranging from a form of tax outsourcing (“tax farming”), to a commission-based system for auditors, to solely a flat salary, all in an effort to increase tax officials' incentives and reduce bribery. It continues with ideal sizes of tax bureaus and their need to stay on top of advances in technology (be it through electronic communications, storage, and analysis of, for example, drones flying over homes to reveal undeclared pools in Greece).Part V wraps up the book. Chapter 14 addresses how to use the lessons of history across the world, from the examples throughout the first four parts of the book, to make better tax policy and systems. It has a picture of the famous Laffer curve (and the very napkin on which Professor Laffer wrote it), discussions of static and dynamic scoring, tricks of the lobbyist's trade, and games that governments play, such as imposing stealth taxes and creative naming of newly enacted taxes.Chapter 15 contains the authors' 11 pillars of tax wisdom:Chapter 15 ends by wondering what the future will hold. On the horizon are issues such as taxation of robots, how to classify the shared economy worker, and how blockchain can help administer taxes.

The ongoing film, print, and merchandizing phenomenon surrounding J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series makes for a timely interrogation of medievalist, and particularly Arthurian, work. While many university scholars lament the dwindling attention and funds given to medievalist projects, the Middle Ages seems very much alive and well in its popular formations. Both youth and adult cultures are obsessed with the Middle Ages, even beyond the indication that we might perceive from the castle-inhabiting, wizarding narratives of Rowling that have made Harry Potter the best-selling series in publishing history. The fanaticism prompted and fueled by the Star Wars franchise and the Lord of the Rings film trilogy, the cult following of Monty Python and the Holy Grail and its recent re-vivication in the Broadway production of Spamalot, also provide obvious signs of the popularity of the Middle Ages in the contemporary imagination. But there are numerous others to be found in television advertising: IBM, the U.S. Marines, Capital One Credit Cards, and Jack-in-the-Box restaurants each use medieval, and specifically Arthurian, ad campaigns. An IBM commercial, in which a patient relays an Arthurian dream of pulling the sword from the stone to a Freudian psychoanalyst may be the most telling in terms of the location of our medievalist fantasies in our dreams of work, functionality, and computer-assisted productivity. For all its vast distance and cultural displacements, the Arthurian fiction fully inhabits our post-Freudian unconscious and reappears in our dreamwork as well as our enjoyments. Most pervasively, and most consistently, the Arthurian dream inhabits our childhood and the enjoyments we produce for our children. Lego, Playmobile, Playskool, and Barbie have elaborately developed medieval world-building products. With Playmobile one can choose a multi-unit, elaborate 'King's Castle,' or a Viking ship, and re-enact Danish raids on the Angles or the Norman conquest. Playmobile's miniature accessories, which include crossbows, longbows, quiver with removable arrows, frothing beer steins, various helmets (some with nose plates), shields, plate armor, and detachable facial hair, enable a wide variety of historical play. (My children use the 'Fairy Tale Castle,' which appears to be a semi-Restoration-cum-Cinderella affair, to represent the French and mock up the Hundred Years' War with the very English King's Castle noted above.) This is but one example. Children's culture is saturated with medieval dolls, toys, books and imaginative costume of all kinds and levels of elaborateness (take especial note of the Magic Cabin catalogue and its array of medieval dolls, dress, and equipment for Waldorf educational play). Perhaps most recently and potentially most importantly, the world of video gaming takes the re-vivication of the Middle Ages to its greatest possibilities. Operating beyond the annual 'Renaissance Faire' that might be close enough to attend or the 'Medieval Feast' theme restaurants at various tourist attractions we might visit, we are able to inhabit medieval worlds to the furthest extent that our digital imaginations can reach through games like Everquest and Final Fantasy. Where such virtual medievalism poses technological anxieties, we can always turn to the back of the latest airline shoppers' magazine to buy a letter opener in the form of Aragorn's reforged sword, Anduril. Should one want a full-sized replica, one need only get on the mailing list (or website) for 'Museum Replicas Limited,' 'a division of the Atlanta Cutlery Corporation.' The array of 'historically accurate, battle-ready swords, daggers, axes and helmets,' as advertised on the cover of catalog #83, allows for a grown-up, real time version of any kind of Playmobile universe (pirates, vikings, etc.) or full participation in the detailed Hollywood visualization of one's favorite medieval book. These adult devices are not very different from children's products. …