Month: May 2007

One, to the fine Flâneur clip from YouTube; the other, to the report of the excavation of King Herod’s Tomb by Ehud Netzer. What, you say you didn’t hear about this archaeological find on CNN, with Hollywood sponsors and best-selling authors claiming that it changes everything about human existence? Right. That’s the point. An academically reputable, serious excavation with warranted claims relative to historically-plausible finds doesn’t need hype; and hype doesn’t make a dodgy find with tenuous claims on historical probability into a world-changing watershed moment.

It’ll be one week till Margaret comes home, for good. If that doesn’t seem strange to you, you probably haven’t lived apart from your loved one for a long time; I’m having a very difficult time thinking through the idea that we aren’t going to be staying together solely by email and rare visits, that we will in fact be living together, constantly, as we had for the twenty-two years before this. Like, every day.

After wringing the book review out this week, I now have to cook up three short exegetical lectionary pieces. That, and referee an essay.

It should be a sedentary day, after Pippa and I biked and walked all over Evanston to show the visiting Jeanniecool the highlights of our town. The intrepid Jeannie had traveled all the way to Chicago to visit her cousin, took a bus to the Red Line of the El, got lost, waited for a train that wasn’t going to run for another few hours, got onto a train that would get her to the right junction to change for the Purple Line, waited for the right train, caught the right train, waited at Howard for the Purple Line train, and ended up arriving for coffee at the Brothers K a couple hours later than any of us had expected. That required a change of plan, so Pippa and I walked her up to Blind Faith for lunch, and then we ambled around Evanston on a quest for camera batteries. Good exercise, delightful company, and further proof — as though attentive observers needed more — that the Internet is what brings us together.

John Pederson (“Javert” in We Know) gave a terrific presentation yesterday at the WiscNet Future Technologies Conference — I’m hoping that he posts some notes at his blog (sadly, no recording of the presentation itself). Because he adverted to his use of LOLcats in the presentation, I spent a certain amount of time online yesterday exploring lolcat culture, with occasionally delightful, frequently painful, and generally illuminating results.

This morning, as if on cue, Boing Boing pointed to an analytical history of Lolcats from the Axis of LOLcat-dom, I Can Has Cheezburger?. McRaney covers many of the bases, and comments pick up some loose ends (such as the O RLY? owl). Still, I was left wishing for a little more intense wit in treating a topic that engages four or five of my favorite discourses (language, visual communication, humor, technology, dissemination); I was hoping for something more like Anil Dash’s account (that predates McRaney’s by a couple of weeks). I had been hoping that Language Log would pick up Anil’s cue, “The fact that we can tell no cat would talk like this shows that kitty pidgin is actually quite consistent,” but instead Mark Liberman notes the possibility, then changes the subject (albeit to Wodehouse).

This doesn’t really have anything to do with Rowan Williams — I was just listening to the Clash when I started typing, and the title wrote itself. There’s some way to make a connection between the song by the Clash, the conflict in the Anglican Communion, and some of the exasperating conversations about race in America that I’ve been sucked into recently, but it isn’t coming together yet. So I’m using the title now, and maybe coming up with the blog post later.

Yesterday Boing Boing pointed to a trailer that promotes a Spinal Tap reunion for Al Gore’s “Live Earth” concert benefit. I took delight in seeing the where-are-they-now segment of the clip, and seeing the band try to negotiate an elementary count-in, but sadly, the Live Earth site and the trailer are crawling with Microsoft proprietary gimmicks. I would have hoped Al “Keynote” Gore would oversee a sustainable-web organization.

I got over that disappointment, and was gathering my wits — OK, my “wit” — OK, half of it — when I observed Boing Boing’s plug for the Stephen Fry talking alarm clock. Pippa loves Jeeves and Wooster, but she already has an alarm clock; now I’m trying to think of someone else to whom I can rationalize giving this delightful implement. Bonus: you don’t need to buy the clock to hear many of the alarms. The clock’s manufacturer has cleverly offered the world the first few messages free, for anyone to download. Their website could use a useability makeover too, so I could point to the downloads page, but if you go to the main page and click on the Downloads button, you’ll have access to such gems as, “The rising and shining cannot be postponed indefinitely. Though shining isn’t compulsory in this intractable world, the rising eventually is.”

I don’t care if he were only blogging about mending socks (don’t worry — he’s not, he says he’ll concentrate on “photography, the cinema, and (indirectly) the Japanese language” but I’ll bet he would evaluate dish cleaning implements or men’s fragrances if the topics crossed his mind); Jonathon’s back, and it feels great to hear his voice again.

The Seabury liturgical corps — faculty and ordained staff — had a thought-provoking all-day meeting with the Rt. Rev. Dr. Neil Alexander yesterday, on the topic of the role of seminary worship in community life. Bp. Alexander proposed a number of ways of looking at the question; perhaps most helpful, and the fairest to take away into a public venue, was a typology of ways that theological schools frame their worship life.

He first suggested a monastic model, where the emphasis falls on the worship itself, according to a consistent usage that is less oriented toward the casual visitor (of whom there usually aren’t that many anyway) or the wide range of possible modes of liturgical expression than on learning well a particular liturgical dialect.

Second, he described a pedagogical model, where the emphasis falls more on learning about worship than on the worship itself. The pedagogical model will trade off depth of familiarity in favor of breadth of exposure. The pedagogical model will be difficult for visitors to join in also, though for a different reason; whereas the monastic model involves expectations and patterns that a newcomer doesn’t share, the pedagogical model entails a certain lack of predictable expectations altogether.

Third, Bp. Alexander presented the model of school as parish, as a peculiar sort of parish — but one where the emphasis falls on replicating the experience that students bring from the parish life that led them to seminary, and on preparing them specifically for the sort of worship that they would lead in parishes after graduating. This model probably provides the most ease-of-entry for a visitor to the seminary worship.

Fourth, he identified creative worship, the function of which is to exercise the student’s liturgical imagination apart from the constraints of past or future expectation. Although this frequently entails disorientation for visitors, that disorientation is shared with the local community, since the liturgical moment is novel for every participant.

There’s no typology without ideology, of course; Bp. Alexander seemed to favor the first two models (he had operated with the first as chapel director at General Theological Seminary, and the second as professor of liturgics at Sewanee), and it seemed to me that he favored the first (though he emphasized that both models have strengths and weaknesses).

Amazon found a copy of that new book everyone is talking about. When I told Pippa the package was a book by David Weinberger, she asked, “Is it called The Lottery, Vol. 2?” She examined the cover carefully, and murmured her approval, noting especially the “daring dot.” I’m eager to read it, especially after Shelley made some very intriguing ripostes to David’s argument (and David has blogged back, in a way that reminds me of the good ol’ days of blogging, rendering my heart warm and my brain soft).

This is Reading Week at Seabury, which might mislead you into thinking that I’ll have time to, ahem, read David’s book very soon. If I can finish off the overdue book review that’s haunting me, and clear some back emails, run some errands, and so on, I may get to it — or I might short-change one of those obligations to get to it right away — but I’m eager to get a squint at it soon.

Eleven days till Margaret comes home — for good! — and twenty-five days till graduation. That’s what I’m concentrating on.

Tired, distracted, between Adult Ed at Wilmette and Evensong at St Luke’s.

Oh, wait — this isn’t Twitter. . . .

Just listening to Bob Mondello’s review and the short sound clips from “Away From Her,” I don’t know if I’ll be able to watch it. I have a very sensitive spot relative to “betrayal,” which evokes some of my strongest feelings of outrage and sympathy — but the movie’s depiction of a separation that arises not even from betrayal but from Lethe, from forgetting — that sounds too heart-wrenching for me to watch.

A few weeks ago, on consecutive days I heard observations that irked me intensely. On one hand, I overheard someone talking about a storm “that would surely have destroyed the ship” if it hadn’t reached harbor; on the other hand, Clive James said, “The author of Jane Austen’s novels couldn’t possibly look like this, or they would be very different novels.” (Watch my veins bulge.)

Biblical scholars talk this way all the time, as though we, they, can arrive at reliable judgments about what can or cannot possibly have happened, about what surely would have happened. To take these items one at a time: in a story about improbable escapes (the context for the characterization), saying that a particular storm “would surely have sunk” a particular ship entails a weird incoherence. On one hand, the story narrates the remarkable adventures and extraordinary resilience of the boat in question; on the other hand, it asks us to assent that a storm that did not in fact affect the boat in question would have destroyed a boat that (in the course of several preceding paragraphs) had already survived several terrible typhoons. What makes this dramatic storm different from the three or four previous ones? If the previous escapes were so amazing, why might not the ship have escaped this last one too? If the last storm were notably more severe than the previous ones, might the narrator not have given us fair notice that these were just middling storms, and that the worst is yet to come? (But that wouldn’t work out, since the boat was in safe harbor for the last storm, so it didn’t survive that one; it needs the dramatic hype of “surely would have” in order to heighten the excitement surrounding “arriving in port,” a not-so-dramatic event on its own.)

That’s all relatively mild, and I’m only mildly piqued about that example — but it plays the same game of retrognostication that Clive James parlays into a prominent appearance on NPR. Foolish me! All along I thought that Jane Austen was a brilliant, imaginative novelist — whose male characters as well as her (plain) female characters conveyed subtle understanding of various sorts of people. Presumably, she could see into the character of a tormented nobleman, a humble, intelligent woman of moderate circumstance, ardent suitors, affable fathers and devoted mothers, but not attractive women — because, after all, we know that she wasn’t attractive, couldn’t have been attractive; an attractive person couldn’t be the author of Sense and Sensibility. Pshaw! Poppycock! Fustian and twaddle!

The world would be a significantly better place if we extirpated misplaced certainty about what we know concerning matters of which we have insufficient evidence. We have no way of knowing whether the resilience and seamanship that kept a ship afloat through a serious of serious storms would have seen that boat through the last one; we have no way of knowing from Austen’s literary oeuvre whether she was beautiful or homely. In each case we can fairly say that “we would be surprised if X” or “ Y would probably have happened.” Why sacrifice honesty and intellectual integrity in favor of pompously inflated claims about knowledge of the past and possibility?

[Later: Unforeseen pertinent connection, care of Dorothea: Race, fiction, chacters, racism (don’t be put off if you feel as though you fell into the middle of someone else’s conversation; you did, but it’s worth mulling over and figuring out.]