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To AKMA's Seabury-Western Home Page Email me at Seabury AUTHENTICITY PREMISES Voice, Authenticity, Style, Politics Faculty and Administration of the University of Blogaria  Prof. of Hyperlinked Humanities, Primus Inter Pares David Weinberger Provost and Vice Chancellor of Imaginary Affairs Frank Paynter Wealth Bondage Registrar Halley Suitt Dean of Memetic Engineering and Reader of Thoughts Kevin Marks Research Professor of Markup Cryptology Phil Ringnalda Murasaki Shikibu and Sei Shonagon Foundation Professor of Early Japanese Literature Jonathan Delacour Abraham J. Simpson Chair of Desultory Conjecture Steve Himmer Clued Professor of Micro-journalism and Women's Studies Jeneane Sessum Prof. of Digital Psychometry Eric Norlin Christopher Locke Prof. of Comparative Kim Novak Ray Davis Ho Chi Minh Chair in Vietnamese Studies & American Poetry Joseph Duemer Section 508 Prof. of Web Accesibility and Useability Mark Pilgrim Professor of Haemophagy and Laputan Linguistics Naomi Chana Harley Davidson Saddle of Comparative Literature Tom Matrullo Prof. of Melanesian Hermeneutics Alex Golub Prof. of Linguistics Dorothea Salo Zimmerman Professor of Music and Poetics Mike Golby Senior Lecturer in Tlonian Area Studies and Chaplain A. K. M. Adam Szarkowski Chair of Photography Jeff Ward Prof. of Analytic Philosophy and Korean Area Studies Stavros Alfred E. Newman Foundation Chair in International Blogging Relations Shelley Powers Prof. of Gluation and Scissorology Mark Woods Professor of Folklore & Mythology Renee Perlmutter Crone-in-Residence, Purveyor of Eclectic Mysticism�??�?� and Professor of Rhetorical Ritual Elaine de Kalilily Prof. of Fractured Philosophy Tom Shugart Director of Music, Blogaria School of Divinity Tripp Hudgins House Band Shannon Campbell Audio-Visual Guy Josiah Adam Campus Cat Dizzy, at Allan Moult's place DAILY BLOGS The Usual Posse Doc Searls Dave Rogers Victor Echo Zulu Gary Turner Textism Jordon Cooper Elke (Sisco) Zimmermann sacra doctrina Mike Sanders ZINES The Ekklesia Project Fellowship 
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Saturday, May 11, 2002 ( 10:51 PM ) Exposed!Within a matter of hours, I've been featured in my undershirt over at Jonathan Delacour's (brandishing a Dishmatique knock-off), and Dorothea has undressed my site to its lacy template. I feel a draft in here. . . .But in both cases, I'm not ashamed of my homeliness (as DylanBoy would point out, "when you ain't got nothing/you ain't got nothing to lose"), and indeed Dorothea is not simply displaying my nude template, she's volunteering to perform the surgery necessary for my site design to grow in health and beauty. If only Delacour could do the same for my appearance! In answer to Dorothea's question about <div> etc. tags, your pentapartite analysis suits me just fine. And I took out the second BODY tag, and re-commented the wayward comments (this was part of the legacy of my template catastrophe from last week).And for the record, I occupy no administrative post at the Univeristy of Blogaria (and visiting reporters, please note for the record that our name is pronounced "Blog ARR ee yah" not--as our detractors at Blog State call us--"BLOG uh REE uh"). Frankly, I'd nominate David Weinberger for President or Chancellor or Provost-for-Life, though if prefers simply to chair the Philosophy Department, then we'll make him welcome there. Permalink -Main Page- ( 6:55 PM ) Hoist by my own ideological petardJust when I was about to falsify all my claims about peaceableness and non-partisanship by enlisting in the ranks of the defenders of bonnie Scotland, allying myself with Porridgeboy in his defense of oatmeal, bagpipes, and the Scottish way against the wheezing vocal barrages of South Africa's DylanBoy, the raspy-tongued devil himself emailed me a reminder that as Chaplain of the Blog, I was ineligible for polemical combat. "So put that kilt away and call Himmer off." (As though Golby were in a position to deny Gary his allies, when he himself has conscripted the ordinarily level-headed Nithia to his nefarious imperialistic agenda.In the end, I have to confess that I have no kilt, though I have a fetching sarong, and I have no control over Himmer; he is out of my diocese, and even if he weren't, a chaplain has no authority over a distinguished professor of anthropology. But I can still cheer for auld Reekie. ( 1:44 PM ) PlaudoWell, it doesn't take much of a bribe to get five-star service on the web. I merely inquired, timorously, if Dorothea thought I ought to clean up my HTML's act--and she too-generously offered to do it herself. Now I'm going to impose even further, and ask her to explain to me what she's up to, what needs changing and why. Of course, if she declines I'll just thankfully accept whatever she gives. (The template code is in the mail.) Of course, the tenured professorship at the University of Blogaria may have swayed her a little bit.In response to her more important question, however: The tenure policy at UBlog is the same as at every internationally-admired institution of higher learning. Tenure is absolutely guaranteed, to ensure freedom of inquiry and expression (although you may be fired at any moment either under the guise of "economic exigencies" or, more freely, "for cause" at the whim of an invisible and capricious administrative committee of demonic provenance). We proudly aspire to--and uphold--all the best practices of the most renowned educational institutions inthe world. And while we will enthusiastically welcome the Happy Tutor and Dick Minim to the Development Office, we regret that their authority in exercising disciplinary authority through the Admissions Office has been relocated to a different branch of the University. ( 10:29 AM ) A Welcome AdditionJonathan Delacour doubts (O ye of little faith!) that I was using an American variant on the Dishmatique theme when I began musing on my resistance to binary approaches to complex problems. I now have to make good on my promise to mail him a picture of me and my "liquid detergent dish washer" (a product that is made in the USA and, and I emphasize this, fully guaranteed, though I now notice with regret that the snap-on sponges lack that scrubbing surface that would make the product ideal, and a tapered end would really cinch the product design) for his Dishwashing Apparatus Hall of Fame.But he soars to the heights of my respect by inquiring after the possibility of a named chair (of which none had hitherto been endowed) at the University of Blogaria ("U Blog"), which after lengthy, painstaking deliberation, extensive background checks, and consultation with the Univeristy's Director of Development, the Happy Tutor, Jonathan has indeed been appointed to the Murasaki Shikibu and Sei Shonagon Foundation Chair in Early Japanese Literature. (By the way, the most recent appointment brings the bottles for faculty get-togethers). Further appointments upon application. Permalink -Main Page- ( 9:21 AM ) Drive-by blog-ettesAt the interdepartmental sherry reception last night, Prof. Ward corrected my too-casual misconstrual of his Augustine blog. Sorry, Jeff; you reveal my native dull-wittedness. Visible Darkness was commending Augustine's subtle practice of constructing a tedious paragraph to illustrate the sort of writing that the defenders of truth should avoid. D'oh (as St Homer would say)!And a query, now, perhaps addressed especially to Prof. Salo of the University of Blogaria's Linguistics faculty: my Blogger output doesn't validate. Is this something I really ought to put effort into (while an editor scrapes his fingernails on the blackboard waiting for an article I really mean to write soon), or is extracting vaild code from Blogger a problematic endeavor from the beginning? And when I put the RSS tags in my blogs, am I supposed to surround the whole blog, or just the headline? Since I'm baring my ignorance this morning, I might as well go whole hog. Friday, May 10, 2002 ( 5:09 PM ) Hands off my saint!Jeff Ward, rhetoric professor at the University of Blogaria, cites a sentence from St. Augustine's On Christian Doctrine as evidence that the Bishop of Hippo was a bore. Two quick responses: first, that the inflected syntax of Latin makes it possible to write sentences that do translate badly into English, but which are much more readily intelligible to careful Latin readers. Case structure makes a big difference. Second, the quality of the translation matters. Here are two alternatives to the translation Jeff offers (the passage, by the way, appears at the beginning of Book 4, section 2,3) :Now, the art of rhetoric being available for the enforcing either of truth or falsehood, who will dare to say that truth in the person of its defenders is to take its stand unarmed against falsehood? For example, that those who are trying to persuade men of what is false are to know how to introduce their subject, so as to put the hearer into a friendly, or attentive, or teachable frame of mind, while the defenders of the truth shall be ignorant of that art? That the former are to tell their falsehoods briefly, clearly, and plausibly, while the latter shall tell the truth in such a way that it is tedious to listen to, hard to understand, and, in fine, not easy to believe it? That the former are to oppose the to melt, to enliven, and to rouse them, while the latter shall in defence of the truth be sluggish, and frigid, and somnolent? (from the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers series I, volume II, online edition) Rhetoric, after all, being the art of persuading people to accept something, whether it is true or false, would anyone dare to maintain that truth should stand there without any weapons in the hands of its defenders against falsehood; that htose speakers, that is to say, who are trying to convince their hearers of what is untrue, should know how to get them on their side, to gain their attention and have them eating out of their hands by their opening remarks, while there who are defending the truth should not?That those should utter their lies briefly, clearly, plausibly, and theseshould state their truths in a manner too broring to listen to, too obscure to understand, and finally too repellent to believe? That those should attack the truth with specious arguments,and assert falsehoods, whilst these should be incapable of either defending the truth or refuting falsehood? That those, to move and terrify them, move them to tears, make them laugh, give them rousing encouragement, while there on behalf of the truth stumble along slow, cold, and half asleep? (translation by Edmund Hill, O.P., in Teaching Christianity, New City Press, 1996, page 201)My Early Church History class loved reading On Christian Doctrine--but they were reading Hill's translation, which they found lucid and even exciting. Permalink -Main Page- ( 4:45 PM ) Friends and EnemiesAgain, Mike Sanders takes issue with my choice of words. This morning I'm not quite so quick to back away as I was yesterday. Yesterday I said,If [my resolute resistance to parsing conflicts into "us" versus "them" is] not satisfactory to Mike, I am sorry, and he will have to count me as one of his enemies--but for all the reasons I'm giving here, that doesn't seem to me to be the most sensible way forward for him or me.to which Mike says, "I am sorry that AKMA chose to use the word enemy. It is not a word I used."Quite so--absolutely--Mike didn't say "enemy." I did, and this is why. My resistance to binary approaches to complex problems stems from my conviction that simplification generates more advanced cases of the very problems it's invoked to resolve. Since at the time I was talking about arguments about the church, let's stick with my example; if someone says, "Ordained ministry engenders a sense of supernatural moral privilege among those so ordained, so we have to give over the entire notion of ordained ministry," he or she reduces a complex problem--the relation of the tradition and practice of ordaining leaders to ministry for the church--to the more simple issue of its pernicious effects on some predatory personalities. That reduction, obviously unfair to the vast preponderance of patient, kind, humble ordained ministers, provokes understandable defensiveness on the part of apologists for the church's tradition, which defensiveness dangles like a red flag before the wrath of those who mistrust ordained clergy, and in short order we have a cycle of attack and defense that has lost track of the point of having the argument in the first place. When I suggested that if my case for non-binary approaches to didn't satisfy Mike, he might consign me to the category of his enemies, I meant not to suggest that he had accused me, nor that I was eager to be counted anyone's enemy--just that if a binary option were enforced on me, I would not sign on to the side that was pressing the case for binarism. In a binary world, that plops me into the side of whoever someone is against. Observe here, please, that I'm prefacing the whole schmeer with the hypothetical "if," so that I'm not suggesting that Mike will in fact be dissatisfied with my non-binary stance. Mike offers me the open hand of friendship. I am fine with that, so long as he understands that my friendship doesn't preclude my acknowledging the complexities of vexed issues that lie close to his heart, my endeavoring better to understand the basis for behavior I find disagreeable or even abhorrent, and my unwillingness to cut off lines of communication with people with whom I may disagree. Indeed, all three of those characteristics seem to me to provide a basis for the very strongest and richest of friendships. Thursday, May 09, 2002 ( 10:00 PM ) Yes, I am a Catholic (in this figurative sense)Halley indicated surprise in an email the other day that I sounded like a Mac user. I've been circumspect about appearing publicly to take sides in this divisive sphere of life, but yes, I am a long-term Mac user (my Mac Plus is no longer with us, but my Classic II still plays Risk and solitaire in one or another of the boys' bedrooms). In fact, we're a one-household Mac farm, and we're about to take at least one step further as Nate prepares for college by buying an iBook. And I have a wicked case of TiBook lust.Not simply a case of Brand idolatry, Tutor--having talked various family members through various computer crises, this is the pragmatic judgment that if I'm going to give out on-call advice, I can only afford to keep up working knowledge of one platform. Indeed, if no one guessed for this long, then I've tuned down my Apple fervor considerably from the days I taught at Princeton. Once a couple of seminarians stopped me to ask whether I could confirm a rumor for them: "We heard that before you went to seminary, that you used to work at Apple, but then God called you to this ministry." It was such a great rumor that I could only just barely disconfirm it. Yes, I used to work in computers from '80-'83; yes, I'm a Mac proponent; no, the two don't go together. But it'd be great if they had. ( 9:36 PM ) Please Don't Let Me Be MisunderstoodMike Sanders made me his lead story this morning, challenging my resistance to "us" vs. "them" language in divisive situations. He makes a point to which I want to concede right away; the alternative to "right-thinking" should more appropriately be the symmetrical "wrong-thinking" (which is what I wrote first; I switched to "bad" to reflect the common tendency to make of our enemies not simply a mirror-reflection of ourselves, but perverse demons. "Wrong-thinking" makes a fairer alternative).That being said, Mike's more pressing dissent involves side-taking in general. He connects his response to the Israel-Palestine conflict with his mother's experience as a Holocaust survivor, with his grief at his friends' deaths in the World Trade Center collapse, and with his own and others' fears of anti-Semitic violence in a world persistently hostile to Judaism. I don't question any of the personal responses Mike cites; I sympathize with them all, as any humane soul would. The pertinent question then becomes, "Do the experiences that Mike describes compel my advocacy of the causes with which he identifies?" That question puts me in a multi-dimensional bind. Saddened as I am about the suffering that cruel souls have imposed on Mike's friends and family, I am every bit as saddened by the suffering of countless others: of Iraqi citizens whose lives are stunted by the caprices of a tyrannical regime; of impoverished Black youth in the USA; of gay and lesbian, bisexual and transgendered people around the world who live under the threat of torture or assassination even in the most open and tolerant quarters of the world; and I could go on down a list that grows with each seminarian whose conscientized to struggles for the just reward for labor, the protection of children from adult predation, globalization as the relocation of minimal-wage slavery to harder-to-find locales, and the slaughter of civilians in political conflict. So far I haven't learned the technique for comparing miseries to determine who suffers more. And if I had a technique I believed in, I'm not sure how I'd convince the people whom my technique identified as suffering less. People who believe that their suffering accords them the basis to kill others tend not to assent to arguments against their position--for understandable reasons. I haven't noticed large numbers of participants in the amed conflicts of today's headlines saying, "I think the other side is ight, and that I'm a criminal to behave this way--but I'm doing it anyway." Everyone interviewed seems to think that the other side has done such horrible things that their side is justified in taking extreme measures. When I hear Mike's plaint, I hear also the plaints of millions of others. And when I hear the voice of the blood of all these my sisters and brothers crying out from the earth, I have to remember that I am taught specifically, explicitly to reject the use of violence as a means of pursuing resolution to these intractable problems. If that's not satisfactory to Mike, I am sorry, and he will have to count me as one of his enemies--but for all the reasons I'm giving here, that doesn't seem to me to be the most sensible way forward for him or me. By the way, Mike, I remember that I owe a discussion of forgiveness; I'm working up to it. Permalink -Main Page- Wednesday, May 08, 2002 ( 9:41 PM ) I used to think you were politically correct 'til. . . .Had to blog this, because it reminds me that the derisive use of "politically correct" grew up within left-leaning causes to describe just the unswerving, uncritical, ideologically-rigid behavior that Carbone identifies as "identiopathic."Actually, I was just thinking this about the church, while I was washing dishes after dinner (Jonathan, I have a photo for you one of these days). The Housemartins were on the CD player, singing "World's on Fire," and I pondered the difficulty of thinking critically about the church from within the church. People gravitate very quickly either toward a defensive orthodoxy-vs.heresy polarity, or to a hidebound-past-vs.-enlightened-futurity polarity, and resist the imperative to acknowledge that the past wasn't a golden age, but that it did provide the stratural elements of Christian identity, and to grant that as Giuseppe di Lampedusa wrote (in The Leopard), "Se vogliamo che tutto rimanga come è, bisogna che tutto cambi" ("If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change"). Non-binary again: we can say (and hear) critical things about the church without saying, "The church is a dopey idea; I could dream up a better way of respecting The Sacred in a half hour or so," and we can say that our teachers among the saints formulated their doctrines, even their authoritatively binding doctrines, in ways that we need to restate in order to preserve the insights toward which our teachers were striving. The same applies, mutatis mutandis, to politics--as Carbone's "identiopath" needs to learn. The gesture of saying "It's us or them" effects a rhetorical power move by which one hopes to clarify an ambiguous situation and to draw a line that includes as many as possible of the right-thinkingpeople while excluding as many as possible of the badpeople. It's a powerful technique when applied wisely and carefully, but all too often it gets bandied about as a simple rallying cry (as I recall from my own experience of the civil rights struggles of the 60's, the peace movement, the post-Vietnam cold war, and the many war-ettes that the US has conducted in more recent years). Wise public thinkers will hold back from this tactic to the extent possible, if only because there are so many amateurs deploying it. Intellectually-active speakers and writers will avoid this tactic because it instantly falsifies the situation: there are never just "us" and "them." And so far as I can see, the main earthly hope for resolution, true resolution of us-vs.-them conflicts lies in the capacities of concerned participants to the conflict to transcend the oversimplifications--so why impose the impediment of oversimplification in the first place? ( 12:49 PM ) "Content," or whateverI had been avoiding the Weinberger-Suitt-Searls (twice!)-Golby-Marks axis of eagles who recently swooped down on the whole notion of "content." That's partly because (gulp) I used "content" in print, in an article that was supposed to be right-on and forward-thinking ("Practicing the Disseminary: Technology Lessons from Napster," Teaching Theology and Religion 5 (2002):10-16). I just carried it over from all the unthinking uses of the word that I had seen, and thus I reproduced their conceptual carelessness and descended to that level. Also, partly because I feared I would have too much to say, and would spend a whole afternoon blogging about content instead of doing the other things I ought ot be doing all afternoon. So much for that degree of prudence! And a big part of why I was haninging back is that, as Margaret reminded me, my own work in biblical hermeneutics has pushed hard against the idea of "content" as a literary characteristic in general. If I'd been reading my own work, I'd have known better.Here are some thinking points from the biblical-interpretation industry's side of content issues: (1) Once you buy into the premise that texts (be they HTML texts or printed copies of the Greek New Testament) have "content," you open the door for pernicious inferences about what that content really is (or "means"), and what it isn't (or "doesn't"). That'll mislead us ninety-nine times out of a hundred, because no one I've encountered deals with texts in order to present as an "interpretation" something she or he thinks the text didn't mean. In more intelligible English, when we interpret a text we assume from the beginning the outcome of any hypothetical argument about "what's in the text" or "what the text really means"; if we didn't think the text meant that, we wouldn't be interpreting in that way. So claims about what's in the text or not tend to be viciously self-serving; they don't help us understand why we come up with divergent interpretations. If we exorcise the myth of textual interiority, however, we're obliged to invoke more productive criteria and explanations for our interpretive disagreements--so I fiercely advocate abandoning the rhetoric of "content" when referring to texts. At least I do when I'm paying attention to what I write. (2) If there were "content" to the text (for my vocational purposes, the Bible), then what would be sacrally authoritative would not be the text but the content, and you can run all kinds of invidious paradoxes that way. (3) If we distinguish web "content" from any other aspect of online textuality--MIDI background music (argh), Flash animations, "blink" tags, Java-scripted moving buttons, whatever--we deny the meaningfulness of auditory, graphical, kinetic stiumuli, a pretty mess into which I wish I hadn't stepped. So David and Halley and Doc are right, and now I'm embarrassed to have been a content-monger. But much as I admire Mike Golby, (and not just because he said that I was smart to say "cyberplace" instead of "cyberspace," not least because I don't remember saying it and besides, I know he doesn't think I'm smart and I have evidence to prove it, so there, but also because I just Goggled "cyberplace" and it turns out everyone and their online dog has used the term long before I dropped it into my blog a couple of days ago. Do you remember what I was talking about when I started this parenthesis? Neither do it, and it's all Golby's fault. Which provokes the question, "If Chris Locke is 'Rageboy' and Gary Turner is 'PorridgeBoy,' what is Mike Golby? I mean, what can we call in in family-friendly settings?)--as I was saying, much (or little) as I admire Mike Golby, I will have a hard time using "stuff" to fill the blanks left when people stop using the word "content" for what we all do online. The terminological problem presses me not because I believe in a text-vs-ornamentation dichotomy, but because I need to talk effectively with people who do so believe. I want to make the point that in the long run, some online agencies stand to benefit more from a rich verbal emphasis on their web offerings than from gussied-up pictures of thoughtful-looking, racially-balanced student groups. But maybe I need to rethink that premise along with my usage of "content." ( 12:32 PM ) Boys in bikinis, girls with ebooksI have too much else to do, but a couple of things (besides Tom Tomorrow) caught my attention recently and I wanted to join in the blog-a-round.One: Dorothea distinguishes "book people" from "Beach Blanket Bob," sighing that her connections in the ebook industry are lusting after the latter and ignoring the former. She points out that although Bob is more numerous, the Lovers buy more books per capita. And, I would add, the Lovers are more intimately attuned to what makes a book buyable, usable, re-sellable, valuable, recommend-to-others-able. Lovers are closer to being writers, editors, and publishers themselves (and in many cases they do indeed belong to those categories), so they bring to the question "what makes an eblook good?" an existential expertise that ebook marketers should see right off the bat as a vital resource--in contrast to One-Book-A-Year Bob, who's likely to be pretty inarticulate about why he buys what he does ("an interesting cover" or "enthusiastic reviews" won't jump-start the ebook market to life or solve any technical dilemmas). Lovers buy Beach Blanket books, too, and our ebook marketers could do themselves a huge favor by addressing the Lovers' desiderata, at which point they would probably discover that they had won over Beach Blanket Bob. Permalink -Main Page- ( 10:56 AM ) Mr. Bloom with open mouthI'm a big fan of Tom Tomorrow (and of Ruben Bolling and of Alison Bechtel, okay that's enough for now), and I enjoy visiting his blog, but mercy sakes alive! Today, after apologizing for describing two occasions on which he was the subject of (well-deserved) recognition, quoth Tom, "Enough onanistic back patting."Yikes! I'm getting a dislocated shoulder just imagining "onanistic back-patting." Permalink -Main Page- Tuesday, May 07, 2002 ( 3:45 PM ) Where'd that come from?A sizable part of the fun of blogging comes when you rig one of the bots that tells you whence people came to your site. For instance, lots of people come here looking for Joseph Campbell, and numerous others come looking for Michelle Shocked and her mightysound web site (still no sign of a page there as of May 7). But others. . . . Why would "intercourse diagram" bring someone to my page, and why did they want to know?Does anyone remember if I blogged about the Olympic Beer riots? I don't, but someone came around here on the impression that I had. Monday, May 06, 2002 ( 10:12 PM ) Wait! Wait! Go to Adam Felber's Blog!Eldest son Nate called my attention to the blog by a star of NPR's Wait! Wait! Don't Tell Me!, Adam Felber. While he's no Sue Ellicott, it's a funny blog and a reminder of why Margaret and I can't be away from our radios at 10 AM Saturday morning (and why we keep our eyes open for ludicrous, bizarre, and otherwise outlandish news stories all week). If you go to the Wait! Wait! website, be sure to look for our friend Lorna White in the second picture down on the page with pictures from the Arizona show. Permalink -Main Page-( 9:28 PM ) Whoa!Something's gone horribly wrong with Blogger--I can't edit the Template (and found this out in the context of a whopper of a series of template-editing glitches, so I need to edit it badly. Youch!Okay, got that straightened out. I think it may have developed in connection with my trying out Mozilla, which I rather like, but with which I will be very cautious. Permalink -Main Page- Sunday, May 05, 2002 ( 2:29 PM ) Non-Binary and CopyrightOne of the ways that we're betrayed by a proclivity to oversimplify, to reduce options to incompatible binaries, lies in the argument over copyright in the hyperlinked world. The loudest voices divide the world into respectful, law-abiding consumers (on one hand) and maleficent pirates who would deprive hard-working musicians of their daily bread. But in the field of intellectual property, as in everything else I pontificate about, it's not as simple as that.We have prima facie evidence that free distribution of tapes, for instance, didn't stifle the sales of Grateful Dead albums, and especially not tickets to their performances. We have some statistics that suggest that file-sharers are more active purchasers of recorded music than are non-sharers. We have a history replete with examples of established-industry promoters taking desperate measures to constrict changing market conditions rather than recognize the terrain of the new markets and adapt accordingly. Sometimes these backward-looking capitalists lie down with the dinosaurs; sometimes an unmerited grace permits them the resiliency to come back and duplicate their folly at another cultural transition (read, "Jack 'VCRs-will-kill-Hollywood' Valenti"). One of the factors in this sort of determined tunnel-vision grows from the pronounced tendency to view complex systems in terms of whatever binary possibilities we can hold onto for dear life. Instead of panicking, attacking what he doesn't understand with proposals that can be shown logically, practically, and economically to be fatally short-sighted at best, and designed to fail at worst, and generally making an ass of himself, Valenti might use all that energy, all the dollars with which he's fighting the tech industries, to learn the vectors that have been guiding the markets he cares about, and about the technological circumstances that inform those changes. He might scout out the ways that money will be made in the digital economy of infinite duplication, and help Hollywood to move in that direction. I don't believe in that ending to the story, it would make a nice surprise; "villain sees error of ways, develops statesmanlike understanding of complex issues, negotiates effectively with adverse circumstances." They should make a movie about it; maybe then JV would understand. ( 1:13 PM ) Johnson on Composition and SermonsOne of my students, John Bross (I'd link to one of the pages on which his name appears, but it appears only on long lists of philanthropists and benefactors, and that's not so interesting; impressive, but not interesting), dropped off the following excerpt from Boswell's Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides (the photocopy doesn't reveal the date for this entry, but the next date given is for August 20; and you have to imagine the text set in Janson, with the distinctive slashed italic "J"):We talked of composition, which was a favourite topick of Dr. Watson's, who first distinguished himself by lectures on rhetorick.--Johnson. 'I advised Chambers, and would advise every young man beginning to compose, to do it as fast as he can, to get a habit of having his mind to start promptly; it is so much more difficult to improve in speed than in accuracy.'--Watson 'I own I am much for attention to acuracy in composing, lest one should get bad habits of doing it in a slovenly manner.'--Johnson. 'Why sir, you are confounding doing inaccurately with the necessity of doing it inaccurately. A man knows when his composition is inaccurate, and when he thinks fit he'll correct it. But, if a man is accustomed to compose slowly, and with difficulty, upon all occasions, there is danger that he may not compose at all, as we do not like to do that which is not done easily; and, at any rate, more time is consumed in a small matter than ought to be.'--Watson. 'Dr. Hugh Blair has taken a week to compose a sermon.'--Johnson. 'Then, sir, that is for want of the habit of composing quickly, which I am insisting one should acquire.'--Watson. 'Blain was not composing all the week, but only such hours as he found himself disposed for composition.'--Johnson. 'Nay, sir, unless you tell me the time he took, you tell me nothing. If I say I took a week to walk a mile, and have had the gout five days, and been ill otherwise another day, I have taken but one day. I myself have composed about forty sermons. I have begun a sermon after dinner, and sent it off by the post that night. I wrote forty-eight of the printed octavo pages of the Life of Savage at a siting; but then I sat up all night. I have also written six sheets in a day of translation from the French.'--Boswell. 'We observed how one man dresses himself slowly, and another fast.'--Johnson. 'Yes, sir; it is wonderful how much time some people will consume in dressing; taking up a thing and looking at it, and laying it down, and taking it up again. Every one should get the habit of doing it quickly. I would say to a young divine, "Here is your text; let me see how soon you can make a sermon." Then I'd say, "Let me see how much better you can make it." Thus I should see both his powers and his judgement.'I am no equal to the great Johnson (a particular hero of my father's), but this piece sounds as though it reveals more about Johnson than about composition. (I'm impatient with slow dressers, too, but I don't regard rapid dressing as an ethical imperative.) Now, be it admitted that I'm a slow and careful composer; still, if someone comes to me with a gift for rapid composition and subsequent editing, I would not try to convert her to the refine-as-you-go approach that I practice. If Dr. Johnson wanted me to compose a full draft before I was allowed to edit, I'd feel just the aversion that he describes as the result of having to do something that is not done easily. Moreover, experience teaches me that it's simply not true that "a man knows when his composition is inaccurate"; one of the hardest jobs in teaching students to write better comes in persuading them of the value of writing with any degree of precision. A sizeable number of students adhere to the attitude of "if I know what I meant, everyone else should be able easily to apprehend what I want them to understand." So God bless you, Dr. Johnson, and I admire the capacity to write quickly (Margaret's a faster writer than I, by a significant margin)--but I'll hold out for the principle that one writer's compositional meat is another writer's poison. ( 12:02 PM ) Like a DreamLast night, I dreamt that I was being interviewed by a dean (whom I didn't recognize) and students (likewise unknown to me). The dean ushered a number of cordial students out of the room, leaving me and a small committee of strangers, and he began asking me about my web activities. My beleaguered-faculty instincts jumped into gear and I expected the worst, especially when he noted that Wendell Gibbs (a Seabury trustee, the Bishop of Detroit) had noticed my site. I mentioned the Rt. Rev. Dr. Gibbs several weeks ago in the context of a preaching controversy, so in the dream I figured his name turned up in someone's Google-search and that led them to my site.So I'm thinking, at dream-speed, that I'm canned because a bishop/trustee didn't like my blog--when it turns out that he had loved the blog, had convinced other trustees that I was really onto something, and the purpose of this little meeting was to let me know that they had established a Research Professorship for which I would have four years to spend working on writing projects with no teaching responsibilities. Then I woke up. Margaret says, "So when you wake up from a dream like that, you feel good about finding out that you don't have that fellowship?" Can't help it, I guess; when I wake up from a nightmare, I feel good that it wasn't really happening to me. Margaret reserves the right to be see the half-empty side of good dreams and bad. Permalink -Main Page- ( 9:20 AM ) Columnists and coffeehousesSo I'm reading the highly insightful Newspaper of Record when, lo and behold, an article on blogging graces the last page of the Book Review section. Judith Shulevitz joins the parade of writers who report on and evaluate the phenomenon of blogging.My response is mixed. Shulevitz is mildly positive about blogging (Haven't generations of cultural transitions helped us grow out of the habit of having to decide that "rock'n'roll is good" or "hip-hop is bad" or "skateboarding is good" or "hula hoops are bad"?). She quotes David Weinberger with approval ("in a smart new book"), but she misses some important angles. She (in contrast to Weinberger in Small Pieces) cites only the most prominent bloggers (Andrew Sullivan, Mickey Kaus, and DW, and she cites DW as a book-author rather than as a blogger); indeed, the print-media critics of blogging get more column inches than do bloggers themselves. She commends Weinberger's observation that blogs counteract the corporatization of mass media, but bypasses Weinberger's central premise that the Web and blogging constitute a different mode of community-building and communication. She (as so many of her antecedents) concentrates on the red herring of whether blogging displaces journalism. I'm intrigued that the harrumphing from the walls of journalism's bastions (Shulevitz appears in the Times, Alex Beam wrote in the Boston Globe, Eric Altermann sniffed in The Nation) comes from columnists, not from reporters. I haven't observed Sylvia Poggioli soul-searching over whether her on-the-scene investigations would be replaced by Web-based bloggers. I suspect that the anxiety comes precisely from the fact that the very columnists who write about blogging warrant the closest comparison to the bloggers themselves, and many print columnists come off looking worse than their online counterparts (especially in the display instance of John Dvorak, to whom I decline to link here). Blogs aren't "the antidote to the blow-dried anchor, the unsigned editorial, the pronunciamento of the token credentialed expert"--they're the alternative to those fountains of commercialized homogeneous news nuggets. I don't want to say anything harsh about my own flesh and blood, but I think Doc Searls scrambles his phenomena when he pushes the blog-as-journalism case; it's not "journalism" per se that blogging threatens (blogs complement news-gathering organizations nicely, but professional reporters won't go away anytime soon)--it's the analysts, pundits, and columnists who become more nearly dispensible in a domain where thoughtful, provocative blogs are relatively easily available (and I don't remember having heard anyone use "blogosphere," much less advocating it as a "term of choice"). Margaret reminds me that blogging can more usefully be compared to a coffeehouse, where Tom and Halley hang out, with rickety seats you can pull over to listen as Mike Golby cuts loose with another spellbinding saga (in what sense could any sensate reader think of this as a rival to "journalism"?) or Steve Himmer falls into a lovely theoretical discussion with Mark Woods and Jeff Ward. Or you can lean over close to Jeneane and listen to her reflect on Helene Cixous, family, and poetry. Or wander over to Burningbird and ask her about networking and weblog client-server software. And everyone argues about politics. And when one of the local celebrities drops in, some internationally-known web visionary or another, Doc and Chris and David turn out to be regular people (surprise, surprise!). Okay, Chris isn't exactly just "regular people," but we like him that way. And there are so many more folks who wander through; this is just the corner of the cafe where I usually sit. Would I stop listening to NPR just because I have the privilege of listening to such a fascinating array of voices? Reporters need have no such worry. Commentators, pundits, columnists, however, take note: when the conviviality at Café Express (just down Hinman from St. Luke's; tell them that priest who comes in on Sundays sent you) is more interesting than what you're paid to propound, you may find your editors cruising the coffeehouses for fresh voices. Permalink -Main Page- All times are local. Local times may vary. Minutes do not expire. A. K. M. Adam That which we have not yet bothered to imagine is not therefore impossible. |
He seems like a nice guy. Has he written any books? Would he come speak to us?
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