November 29, 2002
Right On, Sister
High-level international consultancy BlogSisters has relocated its headquarters to Blogaria, the cosmopolitan capital of cool for the online environment and home to the University of Blogaria (motto: “Buy some junk from CafePress so we can keep the store open”).
One of the most compelling ways in which sisterhood is powerful is in the demonstration that people don’t need to play control-and-manipulation games, but can occasionally, gracefully, cooperate and support one another without trying to extract something for their efforts. That’s Blogaria at its best, and we’re counting on our BlogSisters to amplify local efforts toward cooperation and, pardon the expression, fellowship. Weve saved the best table for you, Elaine and Jeneane!
*Some, by the way, ask where to find Blogaria. Of what state is it a city or region? The correct answer, insofar as Blogarian topographers have been able to determine it, is that Blogaria is an autonomous convergence of interests, wills, energies, and ideals, to be found wherever webheads act in accordance to non-geographic allegiances. Blogaria is not to be found here or there; Blogaria is an event. . . .
DRMA: "Twenty-Five Miles" by Edwin Starr; "Heavy Metal Drummer" by Wilco; "The River Of Jordan" by Louvin Brothers; "Lounge Act" by Nirvana.
Quickly, Now
I'm trying to clear my email inbox today—you know, the inbox I was also going to try to clear a couple of weeks ago. So under this heading, I’ll list a bunch of noteworthy items that I haven’t been able to grapple with in extenso.
- Jeneane gets merited space in the New York Times. Although the article appears with a picture of the author with her lovely daughter and new kitten, the reporter’s angle muffles Jeneane’s particular voice, which is a shame (the muffling, not the voice). And when the article reports links to “blogs by men,” the Times reporter listed the same old suspects. Top-notch fringe benefit: this picture of Jenna and Hunter.
- I’ve been meaning for months, now to acknowledge that body upon whom bloggers are deeply dependent, namely readers. Their importance was driven home to me during the Digital ID World Conference, at which Elliott Noss regaled several of us with his long list of reasons for not blogging. Some involved company politics, and others involved time and liability, but his A-number-one reason for not blogging was that he felt it was time for someone to stand up for readers. Elliott suggested a BlogReaders Liberation Front or something like that, but before anyone answers the clarion call to take direct action I want to bow publicly to Elliott and to other deliberate readers, without whom we bloggers would simply form a closed circle of mutual admiration. Tonight at dinner, I will lift a glass in honor of Elliott, of my beloved Margaret, and all the other readers who encourage us to keep on blogging. (I should mention that the “Disseminary” domain name is registered courtesy of Tucows, through Elliott’s intercession—so if anyone wants to construe this as grovelling, she or he has exactly that much ground for suspicion.)
- Readers with long memories and too little to think about may remember that I had written an essay on the future of biblical interpretation. The book for which that essay had been solicited, though, was not finding a print publisher. At the SBL meeting, though, Robert Fowler (the volume’s editor) suggested that a contract was near, and yesterday I got a Thanksgiving message that Trinity Press International would publish New Paradigms in Biblical Interpretation sometime very soon. Now we’ll see whether the legal eagles make me take down the online version of my article.
- One morning in the book display of the SBL, somebody tapped me on the shoulder and said, “AKMA?”
This is not that uncommon; a lot of us know one another strictly from books and articles, or we met once a long time ago in a different context, or have been pointed to one another by some third party who thinks we should talk. So I turned, nodded, and my interlocutor said, “Hi, I’m Arni Danielsson, from Iceland. I read your blog.”
This was a first for me, at a professional meeting at least. Arni and I had a short but good talk about the ideals I’m trying to help bring to reality in the Disseminary, and some ventures on which he’s working in Iceland. Blogaria at its best: thinking and dreaming and actualizing together, in remote geographic locations. Greetings, Arni! - Clifton Healy has started writing online. One more [former] student to the blogs!
DRMA: "Call Me" by Blondie; "Yeh Yeh" by They Might Be Giants; "You Got To Step Back" by the New England Blues Prophets; "Electric Avenue" by Eddy Grant; "Thank You Lord" by James Cleveland; "Nothing" by the Fugs; "Hallelujah Here She Comes" by U2; "I Want to be Ready" by Ben Harper.
November 28, 2002
SBL Recap Part Two
For the afternoon, I dedicated some time to the book display and catching up on sleep. It had been a late night and an early morning (breakfast meetings need to start at 7 to allow enough time to eat, conduct business, and get to 9 AM sessions), and another late night lay ahead. Had dinner with my editor at Chalice Press, Jon Berquist, and his wife Sally (pastor of First Presbyterian Church, Flemington NJ). Dinner ran late, so we missed the Fortress Press reception, but nothing would keep us from the Brazos Press reception where we closed down the room along with several of our usual companions.
Sunday morning I had a meeting of the Editorial Board for Teaching Theology and Religion, then I presided at the first of a series of sessions on reading Scripture in the light of Derrida’s works. Daniel Boyarin, Regina Schwartz, Hugh Pyper, Tim Beal and Tod Linafelt, and David Jobling read papers; all were strong, and the impact of several observations stirred intense response (on which more later). Derrida himself could not make the session; he was sleeping off some jet lag, from having travelled over only the day before.
After lunch, I toured the book display again. This is not simple consumerism (I usually don’t buy much per hour at the display) but a social impulse, and an interest in keeping my blood flowing more steadily than results from sitting in sessions all day. I drifted up to our hotel room to check in with Margaret, who was working on the response she was going to read Monday morning to papers she hadn’t received until a week ago (and one of which she never received in advance).
Rings Silliness
Well, after days of scouring the Evanston area, I found a copy of the extended version of
After our traditional Thanksgiving dinner—Margaret’s Spectacular Enchiladas—we were reporting to the boys about the online fan clubs for elves-without-speaking-roles (Figwit and Rumil), when I clicked on the Hobbit Name Generator, which reported (to general mirth, and mild pleasure) that we turned out to be Mungo (me) and Autumn (Margaret) Moss of Lake-by-Down, with children Olo, Bolo, and Flora Moss.
Then Nate—or “Olo,” pardon me—followed the link to the Elvish Names companion site, which revealed that our family comprises Fëanor and Isil Vardamir, with children Findecáno, Findaráto, and Nindë Vardamir.
I think I came out pretty well as an elf, but Margaret started snickering uncontrollably when Si told her my name was “Mungo.” And that’s despite the fact that St. Mungo was among the saints who evangelized Scotland (his proper name was “Kentigern,” which may explain why he let people call him “Mungo”) and we visited his cathedral in Glasgow on our tour of Scotland several years ago.
Tonight we watch Koyanisqaatsi. I can’t wait; one of my most vivid movie-going experiences is of heading down to the York Square Cinemas on Broadway in New Haven to see the plotless movie with the funny name. Wow. It won’t be the same on the small screen, but maybe someday I can commandeer the projector and screen in the Seabury Lounge.
SBL Recap
Having slept and showered and sorted the five days’ email into stacks labelled “spam,” “trash,” “answer immediately,” “ignore for now,” and “ignore for a long time till you can just trash them,” I now proceed to offer my overview of the SBL meeting from which I just returned.
Margaret and I traveled on Friday, flying out of O’Hare uneventfully and arriving comfortably in Toronto’s Pearson International Airport. After a we satisfied the relevant security personnel that we were neither terrorists nor smugglers, we connected with our dear friends Phil Kenneson and Steve Fowl, and all caught a taxi to our hotels. We regrouped for dinner with some other friends, most of whom were Duke grad students around the same time I was (which, if it were French wine, would be an increasingly valuable vintage), and wandered thence to the Ekklesia Project reception. We lingered there with the great EP folks till the staff closed us out of the reception room, and wandered back to our proper hotel.
Two digressions: first, Toronto’s convention area is honeycombed by a network of underground passages from block to block, designed to permit pedestrians to get around without unnecessary interactions with traffic or weather. These are no unadorned steam tunnels, but instead form a veritable underground mall with boutiques, food courts, and dentists and opticians. The system permits conference-goers to get from hotel to hotel to conference center without wearing heavy coats, but by the same token they channel unprotected pedestrians to only those locations that lie along the walkways (and conceal what looked, when I ventured into the outside world, like a significant problem with homelessness). I do wish I had a good picture of that illustration of the Michelin man in a diaphanous skirt, though.
Digression Two: The Royal York fairly radiates traditional elegance. It doesn ont, however, radiate “connectivity.” I had assumed too much when I left for the conference, and had not (I don’t know how this happened) loaded AOL into my applications folder. Wouldn’t a major business destination have in-room ethernet? No, it wouldn’t. So there I was, without AOL for dial-up connectivity or ethernet for broadband. I discovered Monday morning that they have a wireless area in the lobby for Those Who Know, probably their Presidential Club members, but I had neither the time nor the membership to work my way onto the network. Friends who had registered at other hotels smirked at me through the weekend as they had lovely broadband access, while I sweated through five days’ withdrawal from on-line-ity.
Saturday morning I had a committee meeting, then attended the session at which John Milbank represented the interests of Radical Orthodoxy to a panel of Mennonites who, in their turn, represented the Radical Reformation. Milbank, in vigorous form, argued that the Mennonites ought to seek a more epsicopal (I’m assuming he meant small-e “episcopal,” not “more like the Episcopal Church”) structure, and that pacifism (a fundmental element of Mennonite identity) was misguided and unrealistic.
You may imagine that this met with some resistance, though most of the response was patient and respectful; Gerald Schlabach took a couple of potshots at Milbank, one more pointed and justified than another. John had some ingenious, profound points to make, but he grossly underestimated (as he has in the past, and as he may well into the future) the sophistication of the peace churches’ commitment to pacifism. One ought not simply blow off anabaptists as though they were nothing but bourgeois North American liberals who feel real bad about something as tacky as war; the lived testimony of the peace churches demonstrates an ingenuity of nonviolent resistance that resounds from historic changes in the peoples and cultures with which they’ve interacted. And if, as John seems to suspect, the truly profound, dedicated pacifists have engendered a sort of “pacifist chic” (and if there is such a thing, I haven’t seen it, but then I might be the sort of low-depth intellectual hanger-on that John has in mind), one might well ask whether the cause of testifying to a deep Original Peace that passes human understanding is furthered better by dismissive scorn at pacifism, or by drawing as close as possible to the real thing (even if that doesn’t culminate in the total lived commitment that the peace churches themselves aspire to, and often attain).
(Sorry—that last sentence was pretty barbaric, eh?)
I’ll continue the Annual Meeting update in a series above. . . .
November 27, 2002
Escape!
They news they put out was that a snowfall in Chicago had paralyzed air traffic into and out of O’Hare, but the truth of the matter was that I was whisked from the arms of my beloved Margaret (on the pretense of subjecting me to a “random” search of my bag full of discount books from the Society of Biblical Literature conference), to an unmarked office building in an unnamed locale where they pay no rent nor any utility bills, nor need they meet any auditing requirements (not that that differentiates them from any corporation that makes significant campaign contributions).
It was a close-run thing, but through the determined (and in this case, pacific) intervention of the combined wiles of PorridgeBoy and Mike Golby, I have been released from the clutches of Admiral Poindexter’s Total Information Autocracy headquarters. I was blessed indeed to have such loyal friends to plan and execute this elaborate maneuver, and to infiltrate the series of checkpoints and boobytraps that surrounded my undeclared prison. Eric set his insiders mandarin intellect to devise the successful ploy (professional loyalty is one thing, but friendship trumps all cards). My captors were distracted by a peripheral action on the periphery of the compound; Halley had dressed in nondescript, baggy, grimy attire, was cussing, sweating, and belching at the entrance gate (which threw off my captors’ assumption that she was only a girly-girl). Meanwhile, Denise deluged the Feds with motions, writs, liens, petitions, and motions, and Steve Himmer walked Checkers in the fog, valiantly risking the chance that they would sweep him up for anopther canine interrogation). As puzzled minions of the Naval Intelligence felon gathered at the monitor focused on Halley’s behavior, Shelley’s cat and Dorothea’s goth-kitties hacked the security system (these friends would have done it themselves, but Shelley’s on break, and Dorothea had a gaming obligation; moreover, the security system was constructed to foil human intrusion, and hence was no match for the intricate perverseness of feline minds).
As Halley postured and cats hacked, as Denise habeas corpused and PorridgeBoy and Golby marched directly up to the loading dock of the office complex wearing charcoal flannel suits—a tactic that Poindextrine plotters would never have imagined possible—knocked politely at every door, whispered the pass-phrase “We’re here on behalf of G.,” and eventually obtained custody of me by convincing the last guardians that a Greek text of the Epistle of James was actually an elaborately-encoded custody warrant.
I have seen terrible, terrible things. I have been put through innumerable pharmaceutical experiments (some of which, I must admit, I quite liked) and physical torments, all in a furious effort to break through my Dominican meditative mind-control techniques. None broke my placid recitation of “Hail Mary”s, “Our Father”s, and “Glory Be”s.
They never extracted from me the secrets that my interrogators craved. They couldn’t persuade me to reveal precisely why George W. Bush stood to benefit from Doc Searls’s death. They couldn’t make me divulge RageBoy’s pharmacist. They couldn’t make me betray the title of Margaret’s term paper for her “Does God Suffer” seminar (now that I’m free, I’ll stipulate that it’s “Mission: Impassible”).
They will never, ever make me expose the secret of David Weinberger’s inevitable triumph over the corporate forces bent on controlling the Internet; I refused to answer their fiendish inquiry, “if we’re writing ourselves into existence, how does the story come out?”
November 21, 2002
Hard Day's Week
If I didn’t have so much left to do in the scant hours till I depart for Toronto, I would be rejoicing that I had lived through a harsh week of stuff. As it is, I’m content to be nearly ready to go, apart from packing, paying bills, shifting money from savings to checking to cover the bill payments, and more packing.
Don’t ask, though.
November 20, 2002
Between David Salo & A K M Adam
My son Josiah just got back from a visit with his mentor for confirmation, Paul Steinbrecher. David will be impressed to note that part of Si’s preparation for confirmation includes memorization of the Lord’s Prayer in Sindarin. I wonder how the translator handled the word customarily rendered in English as “hallowed” (αγιασθητω). . . .
Sigh. . . .
I just read about Sony’s latest efforts to prevent paying customers from treating their possessions as something they paid for, rather than as something they’re borrowing from a megacorporation.
I like music and movies, and I want people who make music and film to make a decent living. That’s the starting point.
I do not believe that the way musicians and filmmakers have derived their income for the past seventy years or so (somewhere betweeen a hundred and fifty, depending on how one refines one’s crtieria) has become the necessary model for how they derive their income from this day forth for evermore, Amen. (As a side note, I want to observe that much of the music meagcorps’ income has developed from shifts in media: from LPs to cassettes, from cassettes to CDs, now possibly from CDs to SACDs; none of this has anything particular to do with “the artists,” just with the manufacturers.)
The ease with which we can reproduce and duplicate recorded performances means that any effort toward sustaining the business model of the mid-twentieth century will fail. It will, friends; and it drives me batty to see vast amounts of energy and resources thrown at shoring up a defunct system.
Here’s the clue: rethink the system (as Kevin, among others, is trying to do), don’t figure out ways to stick more digits into a swelling, leaky levee. Especially don’t try to stop the flood by making gravity illegal. All it will take is one daring executive decision by one major music distributor and the deluge will come—only we, the listeners, would be the beneficiaries of that flood. All it would sweep away is the rotten infrastructure of a corrupt, decaying industry.
Marking Papers
I’m marking papers today, getting them done in time for this afternoon’s class. I won’t even say how many; it would be embarrassing to stipulate, since they are so few (in contrast to the vast volume of papers that my colleagues at larger schools evaluate). Still, I hate marking papers, and (as part of my avoidance behavior) I thought it might be worth asking why.
First, because the disparity of expectation and realization forces me into a Grinch-like position. Students work hard on papers, but in relatively few cases do the paper’s achievements match what the student hopes for. That leaves me in the position of telling students that their work isn’t as strong as they think it is, and I dislike that part of my responsibility.
Second, because the comments and constructive advice I give don’t usually affect the quality of future papers. I put a fair amount of effort into giving suggestions for ways to strengthen a student’s writing style, or approach to arguing a case, and often as not a student simply doesn’t assimilate my comments and endeavor to improve his or her work. Some do—readers of this weblog, of course, are the very most diligent and attentive students—but many others tend to isolate my comments to the specific paper in question, without seeing that if they do something different next time, they might not encounter the same criticisms.
Third, because I hate the idea of fitting students’ work onto a quantified spectrum, especially when the spectrum is false. Everyone knows that grades are inflated everywhere; no one knows just how inflated other people’s grades are. Setting student achievement into a one-dimensional scale is bad enough, but when the scale itself is unreliable, the practice of grading feels even worse.
And more reasons that I may think of later in the day, when I need another break from grading.
November 18, 2002
We Tried
Si and Pippa (no blog yet, but watch out, world, when she does) went to see the new Harry Potter movie last night, so Margaret and I were (as Shelley) going to watch the new extended-version of the Lord of the Rings (“The Fellowship of the Ring,” right?, but it was shelved under “Lord” everywhere I went shopping). We were going to, but Evanston was naked of copies of the extended version. Except for one copy packaged as a Gift Set with bookends, for which I’d have been expected to pay $70. No, thank you.
So instead we settled down for cribbage, and then retired early (our drowsiness to be interrupted, of course, when Pippa exploded into the room to describe the movie to us).
That put me back onto the web, where I discovered the blasphemous fraud that Ryan Irelan has perpetrated on the world. I hope snopes.com is on top of this; it could imperil my standing at the Duke reception at the Society of Biblical Literature meeting next weekend. . . .
(Typing all this has been made much more complicated by the bandaid on the end of my right index finger; I cut myself yesterday, possibly while doing the dishes, possibly while cleaning up the second-floor hall, in which process I remember seeing what I had thought was brown ink. Anyway, my finger doesn’t work on the trackpad, and I keep typing extra and erroneous letters. In a minute, the bandage comes off.)
November 17, 2002
Another Angle
Because I resist cynicism with all my strength, I keep thinking about the problems surrounding copyright and file-copying (instead of resigning myself to assuming that the conflict will be decided in favor of which side has bought the correct politicians). I had an idea yesterday that won’t by any means revolutionize the discussion, but may cast some different light on it.
One reason the world can live with my capacity to photocopy the chapters of a book that Shelley Powers wrote (clearly the most valuable part of the book) is that a photocopy is very far from being the same as those pages from the book. They hold the same words, they convey all the insight, but the bound book is more convenient, more nicely printed, more durable, with a clever animal (or power drill) cover from O’Reilly. I might be able to sketch an animal on the flip side of one of the copies, and staple them and fold them in half, but there’s a quantum of difference between the photocopies and the book. The copy is a reproduction at an identifiable remove from the original. One wouldn’t under any ordinary circumstances prefer the photocopy to the original.
When reproducing recorded music meant transcribing records onto cassette tapes, the reproduction was tolerable again because cassettes are a volatile medium (as anyone with car stereo experience can attest), the analog-to-analog copying process degraded the audio signal, and the packaging of the tape was decidedly less satisfactory than that of the LP.
You can see where I’m going here. A dual problem arises in an age of digital recording. One element involves my capacity to make a copy of Shannon Campbell’s Grammy-award winning (yet-to-be-released) debut album, with a bit-for-bit identical set of AIFF files, a handsomely-scanned and printed cover, and a jewel case just like that which housed the original CD; since this iteration is no longer discernibly distant from the original, it isn’t simply a reproduction, but a duplication. This sort of duplication muddies the fair-use water by closing the gap that former means of reproduction opened, and I’m sympathetic to music-industry professionals who feel that that amounts to unfair use. (I’m sympathetic, in the way I’m sympathetic to anyone who loses her or his job. I’m not ready to say, “So we should shore up a business model that now no longer works.” Not that sympathetic by a long shot.)
The second complication is a nasty twist from the first. My CD of MP3s is not in any way a duplication of anyone’s album. The cover is nothing more than a printout of the list of files on the disk. The files are not duplicates of the originals, but have much less information in them. Even if I expand the MP3s into AIFF format, the signal will have been affected by the compression/decompression process (especially if I adopted the conventional bit rates of 128 or even 192).
So I offer this distinction to the legal eagles: allow “reproduction” as fair use (and encourage music indutrialists to use MP3s to their advantage instead of stifling them), but maintain laws pertinent to duplication of files.
The biggest weakness of this proposal, as far as I can tell? I mean, aprt from the fact that I’m not a lawyer and therefore am likely to be overlooking Abercromby v. Fitch, in which the Supremes ruled that You Can’t Hurry Social Change when you don’t; have standing before this court? The biggest weakness I see right away is that I’m not saying anything about video (and if Hollywood saw the chance to seal up video with a move that would ditch usic recordings, I’ll bet they’d do it in a heartbeat), largely because I don’t know much about video file formats or file trading (not being that kind of guy). Maybe I should go download a movie to see what it’s like, but reading Paul Boutin’s column about file sharing (thanks to Dave Winer for the link) makes me think that it would be a waste of bandwidth.
November 16, 2002
Legal Pageant
Our neighborhood’s contestant for typographic recognition seems to be Denise Howell, who professes herself to be Ms. Bauhaus as a blogger, but Ms. Univers in her briefs. . . .
A Deconstructive Soapy Stud?
Margaret’s comrade in Thomist (paleo-Thomist?) (or pomo-Thomist?) theological endeavors Jacob Goodson came over for dinner last night fresh from having seen the Derrida documentary (review from Alex Golub here, with some snarky words about Derrida on the side.)
As I recall, Jacob enjoyed it, though it wasn’t mind-blowing or life-changing or particularly (as he said) Derridean. The main reason I was moved to blog about Jacob’s description of the movie is that Jacob observed that Derrida does the dishes at home. If only he had the good judgment to take up blogging, we’d have a veritable supermodel for the “Sudsy Studs of Cyberspace” calendar. Speaking of which, Jonathon had better get working on the production end of it for it to be ready for holiday gift-giving. Maybe that’s what he’s up to now. . . .
As for being snarky about Derrida, there does seem to be a general sentiment that he’s fair game. I don’t know how to dissent from that premise without seeming to pass judgment on folks who take a dim view of him. I suppose the fairest response I can give is that I don’t see the basis for taking pot shots at him. Maybe I don’t understand him well enough to detect what an intellectual sham he is, what a pompous poseur—but so far as I’ve been able to tell, he’s a pretty sharp thinker whose difficult job it is to try to push already-smart people to think even harder about matters they don’t especially want to reconsider. And I’m inclined to think he does a pretty good job of it.
Conspiracy Theory Alert!
Well, no one needs a conspiracy theory alert, since the Bush Administration is enacting a big old Soviet-style Big Brother operation before the enthusiastic public’s eyes. Still it makes me feel even more creepy—did anyone else notice this?—that the acronym for John Poindexter’s new spookocracy is IAO.
Bear with me. I know they were going to name it something, and it could’ve ended up with just any initials, but IAO was the name of the Gnostic deity roughly based on the God of Israel. Gnosticism (roughly sketched, since there was and is no single essence of Gnosticism) identifies human salvation with knowledge (Greek gnosis). Of all the names of all the divinities in all the world, the name that winds up attached to the secret police agency that the highly-literate John Poindexter just happens to chair belongs to a deity who signifies the confluence of knowledge and power.
Canadian friends: can we get a discount for a mass emigration?
November 14, 2002
He Put It Into My Brain
Steven Berlin Johnson (the Emergence author) says that Jacques Derrida looks like Peter Falk playing Columbo.
I’ll be spending some time with Prof. Derrida next week, and now I’ll keep waiting for him to say, “Oh, une chose de plus.”
Where Are We Going Now?
Yesterday, I read David Weinberger (as always, and then and went back to the archives for some more cool, deep stuff from the past), and read “Lessons of Lucasfilm’s Habitat” (in Clay Shirky’s sidebar on BoingBoing). It was heady. Oh, and I scanned some publicity for Macromedia’s new Contribute application (actually, this piece by Norm Myerowitz helped trigger what I say below.)
Then I dipped my toe back into the Game Neverending, where (yesterday) a group of revolutionaries had taken control of the one bank in the game, and were charging a small toll to enter and exit. If you didn’t pay the toll, they evidently would stab you with a marshmallow dagger. It doesn’t sound bad, but people seemed very upset by it, and when I briefly passed through the area, I paid the toll, so I can’t tell you what the penalty was like.
But the confluence of Weinberger’s wisdom and the description of Lucasfilm’s precursor MUD and the experience of public outcry at the innovative (if inconvenient) rebellion in Stencilton turned my mind to see something that I hadn’t seen before. You all, being unusually discerning and thoughtful web surfers, are probably way ahead of me on this. I’m sure, for instance, that David has said it before somewhere.
I was struck by the fact that the revolution in Stencilton had to make do without grafitti on the walls. There is no user-alterable landscape feature in the game, apart from moving objects from one place to another.
I was struck by Meyrowitz’s description of the one-way-ness of web-page composition.
I was struck by David Weinberger’s persistence at pushing a spatial/“place-ial” metaphor for the Web (this time, I’m not quibbling about that metaphor, so readers can heave a sigh of relief).
And the penny dropped, and I saw the Web as a vast MUD, but one in which the only thing players can do is read their ways from one poster-covered wall to another. Some of us devote energy to plastering more and more onto our walls; others just browse. But despite all the breakthroughs we’ve made in transforming the media landscape, we online grafitti artists each stake out our turf, and visitors stay on the far side of an electronic velvet rope. At most, our compositions refer from one wall to another with hyperlinks. That’s a big change from the three-TV-network, one-or-two-local-newspaper, various-radio-station, broadcast media environment (now anybody who can sit at a terminal in a public library can have a weblog, their own (sponsored) patches of wall on which to speak their minds)—but it’s very far from a fully-realized interactive online environment.
Comments—which I resisted until they came packaged with my Moveable Type installation—are a first step toward something like a more fully interactive Web, but they’re still highly limited (and many of us who host comments are glad they’re so restrictive, and others of us won’t go even so far as to host function-restricted comments). I can’t pile up bouquets of pixellated memorial bouquets at the Paul Wellstone web page. I can’t watch the Duke basketball team practice (and I usually can’t see them play). I can see (mostly “read”) much more than I ever could before, but (in contrast to what users could do in the Lucasfilm Habitat, in contrast to what players can do in the Game NeverEnding, in contrast to what may be opening up on us in Macromedia Contribute) I can affect the online environment in very few ways.
But the pressure is building; the that more people play massively multi-player online games, the more that people get accustomed to being able to leave comments, the less “special” and “different” the online environment begins to feel, then the more people will bring their physical-environment habits and expectations to online interactions. And interesting as things are now, that time is when they really begin to take off.
[I was trying to think of the application that promised a way for viewers to mark up, comment on, interact with the pages they view. Kevin reminded me that it was called “Third Voice.” I’d post a link to their site, but there evidently is no site for them any more.]
November 13, 2002
On [Blog] Absence
Margaret says:
When someone who blogs regularly stops for a few days, I always wonder what the best thing to do is. If you write and say, where are you? you might be bugging someone who just wants a break and doesn't want to feel pressured to write all the time. If you don't say anything, then someone who is deathly ill or who is feeling unloved might think that noone cares. I wonder if it might be good to establish a little e-postcard checklist that could be sent out to someone who has lapsed a bit, just to ease (or alarm) the minds of the rest and to clarify the situation to everyone's benefit. It might
include some of the following:I have not been blogging recently because:
I am really sick and can't even focus to see the keyboard.
Please leave me alone.
Please send flowers and lots of email.My inlaws/old college roommates/IRS auditors are here.
Please leave me alone.
Please distract me with lots of email.My dog/cat died.
Please leave me alone.
Please send flowers and lots of email.I am having a nervous breakdown.
Please leave me alone.
Please send flowers and lots of email.
I have lost my internet connection.
Please send money.
It's pointless--I can't even get this email.I have lost my job/spouse/house/lover/therapist.
Please leave me alone.
Please send money/spouse/house/lover/therapist.
I hate blogging this week and never want to blog again.
Please leave me alone.
Please blog why I am right.
Please blog why I am wrong.
Please send Tim Tams.I had a birthday/anniversary/blogging anniversary/great blog entry/conference and no one noticed/came.
Please leave me alone.
Please call me on the phone, everyone.
Please send chocolate.No one understands me anyway.
Please leave me alone.
Please just pretend I'm Chris Locke and don't try to understand me.
Please just pretend you understand me and leave clever comments.
Honest, when I was offline for a few days last week, it was cause of server problems. But if you want to send Tim Tams or chocolate, that’s fine with me. Just don’t pretend I’m Chris Locke. I leave that to Halley. Or was that Tom?
Around Blogaria
Doc blogged John Gatto’s site the other day, with a quotation from his book, The Underground History of American Education. Margaret and I don’t know this newer book, but we were blown away nine years ago when Margaret saw him at a home-schoolers conference and bought his earlier book, Dumbing Us Down (note to Gatto’s webmaster: permalinks on the individual books on the “store” page, please).
Gatto’s scathing critique of modern American education gains impact from his evident success at teaching and his compassion for those whom the conventional approach to education runs rough-shod over: the kids and the earnest teachers. Pedagogically speaking, he’s got game, and our kids would be better off if more people listened to him—if only to avoid giving him more examples of ideological behavior in the education industry.
Then, Eric Norlin took the theologian quiz, and found out that he has a genetic predisposition to Methodism (Margaret got John Wesley, too, much to her dismay—but maybe that’s why I get along so well with Eric). So my follow-up question, for which there’s no necessary quiz, would be “Which theologian would you like to be?”
Below, I said I’d like to be John Henry Newman; I’ll stand by that for now, but having brought the question up differently, I’ll think the question over some more.
[Update: Chris Locke has evidently taken the quiz and taken up my less formal question concerning the theologian with whom he’d like to be associated. My next question is, “Which theologian did the quiz tell Chris Locke that he was?”]
Webbius Tertius
With regard to this and its subsequent comments:
The contact and the habit of Tlön have disintegrated this world. Enchanted by its rigor, humanity forgets over and again that it is a rigor of chess masters, not of angels. Already the schools have been invaded by the (conjectural) "primitive language" of Tlön; already the teaching of its harmonious history (filled with moving episodes) has wiped out the one which governed in my childhood; already a fictitious past occupies in our memories the place of another, a past of which we know nothing with certainty - not even a that it is false. Numismatology, pharmacology and archeology have been reformed. I understand that biology and mathematics also await their avatars... A scattered dynasty of solitary men has changed the face of the world. Their task continues. If our forecasts are not in error, a hundred years from now someone will discover the hundred volumes of the Second Encyclopedia of Tlön.Then English and French and mere Spanish will disappear from the globe. The world will be Tlön. I pay no attention to all this and go on revising, in the still days at the Adrogue hotel, an uncertain Quevedian translation (which I do not intend to publish) of Browne's Urn Burial.
(Jorge Luis Borges, “Orbis Tertius, Uqbar, Tlön”)
November 12, 2002
If Only We Had Known
A way back, a long time ago, I had the fateful appointment with my bishop, at which I would negotiate which seminary I might attend (a bishop can usually determine which seminary you go to). I sat down nervously and explained that although I respected the local seminary to which he sent most of his seminarians, I really was a northeastern kind of guy, with historical loyalties to Yale, so that I'd like his permission to go study in New Haven.
We talked and talked. He picked up my earnest excitement about the prospect of attending Yale Divinity, and after he made a final pitch in favor of the nearer seminary, gave me his permission to attend Yale. As a parting gift, he gave me a recent book by theologian Lesslie Newbigin and signed it for me, writing on the flyleaf, “We need another Augustine; go for it, my brother!”
Those of you who appreciate Augustine will sense what an absurd weight of expectation that represented to me; those of you who think that Augustine was an inkblot on the history of Western thought may feel offended on my behalf (I won’t complain). Little did either of us know that decades later:
| "God will not suffer man to have the knowledge of things to come; for if he had prescience of his prosperity he would be careless; and understanding of his adversity he would be senseless." |
| You are Augustine! You love to study tough issues and don't mind it if you lose sleep over them. Everyone loves you and wants to talk to you and hear your views, you even get things like "nice debating with you." Yep, you are super smart, even if you are still trying to figure it all out. You're also very honest, something people admire, even when you do stupid things. |
What Christian theologian are you?
A creation of Henderson
I don’t usually take these quizzes, but when I saw this one on Naomi Chana’s site, I knew I couldn’t resist. Naomi turned out to be Erasmus. I was worried that I might turn out to be a theologian I didn’t care so much for—I wouldn’t have been able to hold my head up if I had gotten a Calvin, for instance, or a Wesley. Luther or Erasmus I could have handled, though less comfortably. But what about Aquinas or the Cappadocians, Newman (he would probably have been my first pick) or Bultmann?
Not that I'm complaining—Augustine was certainly my top choice among the possible answers.
November 10, 2002
Bogus Brother
You all may have heard this now, but it got a lot less fanfare than the first wave of publicity. Evidently the first-century ossuary that recently surfaced, was cracked in transit from Israel to Canada, did not belong to James the brother of Jesus.
This frisson of excitement helps illustrate one reason that (textual) biblical scholars shy away from grounding their arguments more richly in material archaeological evidence. Textually-oriented scholars see the material remains that archaeologists vaunt as real-er than texts (after all, anyone could fake up an documentary account of Sennacherib besieging a city--but a monument that narrates such an event would be intrinsically more reliable) turn out themselves to entail every bit as many complications and ambiguities as texts themselves.
It’s all a hard job, at high stakes (albeit mostly abstract stakes, for us practitioners), and the archaeologists’ complaint that textualists don’t pay them enough attention hits some sound points. But the textualists aren’t simply closed-minded, fearful, under-experienced library potatoes. We’ve seen enough frauds, enough ambiguous evidence, that we stick with our field of specialization.
Well, most of us do, the sensible ones; others write about buying used cars on the internet, digital identity, metaphors for the Web, and MUD performance art.
Auction Over
Well, after some quick and fevered bidding this morning, the auction concluded with Margaret and me having agreed to buy a ’96 Subaru Legacy Outback, which does not smell bad. It’s more than we’d wish, but if wishes were Outbacks, beggars would drive a fleet. I think it’s a good deal (pending confirmation from our mechanic). Now, the question becomes, what do we do with the Caravan?
November 09, 2002
Change in Plan
Remember the part about catching up on me email? Ain’t gonna happen. The day filled up solid from bottom to top, and I only just looked a couple more messages in my inbox. I’ll try for tomorrow; sorry.
Automobile Redivivus
Thanks to Ryan and Jeff and especially to Jeneane for their helpful advice on the Caravan situation. I favor Jeneane’s suggestion, but I have even less experience working on ponies than I do on cars, plus I think they’re probably not allowed under Evanston’s zoning laws (though I could try to make an appeal on First Amendment grounds, arguing that this involved my humble effort toward the imitatio Christi).
So, what happened immediately after I posted the last blog? I looked up on one of the cars-for-sale websites and saw that somebody was selling a 1996 Outback for $8,700—exactly the model and price-neighborhood we’d been searching for. We called right up, and the owner pleasantly invited us over to look and to test-drive the car, but she forewarned us that two other callers were interested, also.
We walked out to Wilmette to check the car out (with a scenic detour, since Wilmette and Evanston divide along the the street on which our owner lives, and the two municipalities number their streets differently, and the owner’s home lies on the opposite side of the commuter transit tracks and the Chicago River canal from the Wilmette address that corespond’s to the owner’s address), arriving after another couple of prospective buyers. The owner won us over immediately with her light-hearted manner and agreeable candor; we test-drove the Subaru (which is just right, all things considered), and agreed that we'd pay asking price and would probably go over asking price if we were bidding against another buyer, though we can’t say how much. We’ll be in touch with her later.
The kicker, though, was that she asked how we got her number, and we said, “On the web, of course” (duh!). It turns out that she had advertised on the Web two weeks ago and not heard a peep. She then went out to area supermarkets and put up tear-off posters, and the two callers against whom we [might] be bidding both came to her from the ads. So, if I had bothered to look at the web thingy a day or so earlier, we could have gotten the car right away, and with no bidding process. Am I kicking myself? Do you need to ask?