After mass, I went to lunch with the adult education coordinator of the parish (St. Elizabeth’s, Glencoe — which always makes me think of Scotland’s infamous massacre) that’s invited me out to talk about The DaVinci Code. She and I traded ideas about the panel discussion, which includes Prof. Barbara Newman of Northwestern University and Brian Hastings of Church of Our Savior, over an Indian buffet. She’s rather more sympathetic to Gnosticism than I am, but we held a lively and wide-ranging converstion. It sounds as though the church will be packed; she’s estimating three to four hundred people will attend, overflowing the sanctuary and spilling into an adjacent parish room. If you’re coming, come early, I guess.
When I got back to my office, the Dean rang me up; the Board of Trustees had voted to promote me to full Professor. It sounded as though he said “effective immediately,” but I got lost in a jumble of subsequent topics. To be on the safe side, you may kneel and call me “Full Professor Adam” when you address me.
Then, alas! I had to drop Margaret off on the train. Pip did her Halloween bit, Si is off at a (church) all-night lock-in, and I’m exhausted. I didn’t sleep well last night; tonight, I’m about to crumple altogether.
Today’s All Saints Day mass went well, I thought. The liturgy at Seabury is a bit odd, since we do something different almost every day, and there’s little chance to develop a rhythm of liturgical practice. On a day when we aim High (Church), the relative of habituation makes the whole exercise seem a great adventure. Still, we used up a good quantity of incense, we processed out to “I Sing a Song of the Saints of God,” and the liturgical team kept mostly in synch. I didn’t botch any of the chants, though when I’m intoning a long passage it can be hard to know whether I’m staying quite on pitch. Anyway, a wonderful mass, and prayers for Joey’s father and mine were wafted heavenward in billowing clouds of incense.
The sermon went well, although it was gauged for a slightly different congregation than actually showed up. I’d forgotten that today begins the two-week parish immersion part of the second-years’ “Plunge” course, so that a third of the seminary was away on location; and I had hoped that one or two more of the faculty would be there, but the Board of Trustees was meeting at the same time as mass. The first-years and some seniors were there, though, and I tried to modulate the tenor of the sermon better to fit the smaller, less-Seabury-ized congregation. It still could have benefited from a little more ripening and a finer connection to the congregation — but enough temporizing. This is what I preached:
Mass of All Saints
Charles Palmer Anderson Chapel of St. John the Evangelist
Seabury-Western Theological Seminary
October 31, 2003
In spite of all the learned have said
We hear the voices of the dead.
This is the beginning of a favorite poem of mine, John Hollander’s “The Widener Burying-Ground” (alluding to the name of the Harvard University library). The poem evokes a way of thinking about interpretation that disarms some of the imaginary barriers to rich, exhilarating interpretations of the texts our ancestors have left to us. We who preach are neither undertakers, who dress up still corpses as best we can, nor Frankenstinian scientists who shock a semblance of life into dead bodies. We who read poems and prophecies assimilate the words we read into our selves, and we renew their echo in a joyful, rich, responsible freedom to take up and resonate again.
Our marginalia all insist
– Beating the page as with a fist
Against a silent headstone – that
The dead whom we are shouting at,
Though silent to us now, have spoken
Through us, their stony silence broken
By our outcry (We are the dead
Resounding voices in our stead). . . .
Hollander captures the gravity of our place in the communion of saints. Our inheritance from the saints settles onto us as a constraint on our freedom. We are not free to scorn the saints, pleasant or prickly, great or small. We may not simply repudiate their wisdom. The saints have built up for us a place in the household of God, and we may not casually tear it down – even if we need to redecorate it once in a while. The saints, all the saints, testify that God’s plan is not all about us.
But with this unasked-for home the saints bless us more richly than we can imagine, entrusting us with their faith, to keep their hope alive and effective. We are the saints’ voices; we don’t invent, but we inherit the saints’ good news, which we proclaim anew in our own accents, our own dialects, from every tribe and language and people and nation. We are the saints’ bodies, bearing in our ?esh the marks of their suffering, renewing their ministry and testimony. We are the saints’ hearts, grieving and rejoicing and growing, ever growing in love for this fractured world and the lovely, stressed-out neighbors in whom we love God.
And here’s the pivotal point that this morning’s poem misses: As we indeed are the saints, as we bespeak their gospel and enact their faithful ministry and empower the church with their spirit, so the saints are not dead.
The saints are not dead, and we know that. We study at the side of African Augustine, learning how we can knit together diverse lives in a harmoniously-ordered City of God. We journey with Patrick and Francis Xavier to situations we can’t anticipate, learning to trust God’s care for us. We learn from Macrina the meaning of “resurrection,” from Sojourner Truth the meaning of endurance, from Thomas Aquinas the meaning of practically everything, if you know where to look in the Summa. And we learn not only from stained-glass saints, but from the Seabury saints who’ve warmed these pews before us, to whose inextinguishable lives we testify: Charles Harris and Jim Griffiss, alive! Lois Hart, Enmegabowh, Effie Alice Keith, Mary Gladkowski, alive! All saints, sisters and brothers, saints remembered and forgotten, saints present and absent, saints yet unborn whom we will someday parent and teach, all saints, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, robed in white, singing, “Amen! Blessing and glory and wisdom and thanksgiving and honor and power and might be to our God forever and ever!”
Amen.
It seems as though that Halloween picture I posted a year ago is getting a lot of traffic. It's pretty sweet; I just have to laugh every time I look at it and think about Nate and Si, and even their friends Brad and Cally.
Now that some of you have had a look at the flesh-and-blood Josiah, or even his most recent photographic manifestation, you may enjoy the past version all the more.
I’ have just left this as a comment at Joey’s place, but I seem to have screwed up my Reader account with Blogware, so I’ll write it here. Accordion Guy’s dad is in the hospital with an infection; but it’s not just an infection, it’s complicated by the fact that he’s a transplant recipient with a compromised immune system. We ask your prayers, wishes, hopes, candles, whatever for Joey’s dad — and for mine. My father’s wending his way through an epic array of sequential medical stunts: they want to take care of this, but they have to do that first, and there’s a risk if they don’t do the other thing. He’s negotiated the first round, but there’re a couple more ahead of him. Double up your spiritual energies, and let’s get these fathers through the obstacle course on a two-for-one.
I'm saying mass on Friday, so we’ll do a “special intentions” dedication for Accordion Guy’s dad and mine.
“I wanna say right now that this mass is goin’ out for a couple of special guys, the dad of a friend of mine and my dad, too — so Dad, so Mr. deVilla, if you’re out there, this prayer is for you. . . .”
I’m preaching Friday at the All Saints service here at Seabury. I have actually gotten pretty far along in preparation before I remembered that some people like to read about how I get from notion to sermon — so here’s where things stand.
I oinly found out which lessons we’ll be using yesterday, but since a service for All Saints will be heavily thematic anyway, I’d been mulling over how to address a Seabury congregation (which might even include a handful of trustees, who will however probably be kept too busy to worship) about one of the theological premises of All Saints: namely, that in all our servanthood and leadership, in our discipleship and spiritual growth, we are not alone, but we constitute integral elements of a greater whole that comprises all the saints, all the faithful of every generation. If I had more than five minutes, the designated maximum for sermons by people who aren’t the Dean, I’d probably throw in an excursus about Small Pieces, Loosely Joined, complete with sales pitch; but David will have to settle for a quick allusion this time.
Anyway, I looked around the chapel and made a connection with one of my favorite poems, “The Widener Burying-Ground” by John Hollander (sorry about the bleak page layout for the poem; there’s no excuse for treating a lovely poem so brutally). I’ll begin by quoting the opening couplet, and expound the burden of the remainder for a paragraph or so (this part’s giving me headaches just now, since the job of summarizing a poem falls so far short of just reading it — but I don’t think I have the luxury of assuming that the congregation would catch it well enough in a once-through oral presentation). I’ll then turn to the climax (“we are the dead / resounding voices in our stead,” in italics in Hollander’s original presentation).
At that point, I’ll wrest the stream of the homily toward the theological point that the voices we hear, the voices to which we in turn give new voice, are not dead, but alive. I’ll name some of the saints memorialized in the chapel, and make connections between their testimonies and our work as a seminary.
But I don’have a conclusion yet, and that’s the killer. I’ll have about a sermon-and-a-half’s worth of exposition, which I’ll have to trim back, and I’ll have to work with the material to see what coalesces for the wrap-up. I’ll report when anything comes clearer, but this is where things now stand.
Not only am I running late on my links to Britt, but I also neglected to point toward Richard Soderberg’s sensible advice for blog writing. Too many people want to pre-define what a blog can be, or how everyone has to write their blog; Richard just says, “This is what I learned.” What he learned sounds right to me.
Apart from the “long-winded essay” warning; those, after all, are my specialty.
In the whirl of activity that’s keeping me from losing vast amounts of ground to my mountain of obligations, I had let get away from me two points of interest regarding Britt Blaser. The first is that yesterday was his birthday, according to Doc, and I hope I look as good when I’m 61 as Britt does now. In fact, Britt probably constitutes an upgrade over how I look right now.
Second, a long time ago, Britt suggested that I check out The Right Christians. I needed a reminder because I hadn’t been back in too long. Allen Brill invited me around TRC when he first started it up; it looked cool, but a little sparse, and I have a hard enough time keeping up with my usual blogs that I didn’t come back very often, and eventually forgot to come back at all. Then Britt prodded me, and lo and behold, the site has gotten going. While the TRC team and I differ on a number of issues — on the whole, I get the sense that they’re classic theological liberals, and proud of it — it really is a remarkable site, strong and bold and firm liberal theologizing. Happy birthday to Britt, and cheers to Allen Brill and The Right Christians for keeping the torch aloft.
Look, I’m all about disagreement. I believe disagreement constitutes the most fundamental discursive element; “agreement” is at best transitory, more often illusory. So I’m not trying to force anyone’s conscience, anyone’s hand.
But let’s give the most charitable take on this story (that John Adams called to my attention). A history teacher/academic chaplain articulates one way of looking at a contemporary controversy — and for that, the administration fires him and drives him off the property.
I haven’t read the article; there are ill-considered, inflammatory ways of tackling our contemporary sexuality headaches, and the article may have been a fiery blast of liberal ignorance. More likely, from the tone of the report, the editorial just espoused a position unpopular with the school’s donors.
Either way, the administration’s hasty convulsions reflect the unproductive kind of panic reaction that so often substitutes for deliberation and reflective response (witness Gregg Easterbrook). The ways we might deal with unwelcome talk, disagreeable perspectives, or flat-out dumb mistakes, surpass what we imagine — but we typically jerk our knee and fire, blast, purge, shout down, stifle those whom we identify as transgressors. I’m willing to insist, though, that the vast preponderance of productive, healing, educational responses fall into the unhurried, imaginative category rather than the sudden, sweep-it-out-the-door-and-under-the-carpet category. I’ll apply that claim to international relations, to theological disputes, to child-rearing and spouse-coping, to domestic politics, to parish crises.
Practice thinking or saying:
“What if I’m wrong? What would I want to have done that would command respect in retrospect?”
“How can we work our way out of this mess?”
“Granted that this happened once: how can we pattern our lives to reduce the likelihood that it’ll happen again?”
“Did you say (or do) that because you’re an unreflective bigot, or because something distracted you so that your commitment to fairness and even-handedness slipped?”
“How can we make clear that we think you’re wrong, without muscling you into submission or flight?”
Maybe the school in this story does better for philanthropic gifts by its misanthropic policies — but I’d bet that they’d come out ahead in the long run if they demonstrated a principled, firm, policy of adhering to their institutional premises while permitting disagreement. Trying to suppress dissent has a nasty way of starting revolutions.
A lot of lovely people have said complimentary things about Josiah since they met him at BloggerCon (some who only heard others talk about their impressions of him), and this morning our friend Halley linked to his blog with kind words of praise. That inspired Frank to go over and check SiBlog out, and he seconded Halley’s affirmation; then that jogged his memory, and he posted pictures of Si and me back at BloggerCon. They’re fine photos (allowing, in my case, for conventional wisdom about silk purses and sow’s ears), and I’m especially pleased at the picture of Si looking over at the screen of my TiBook (taken the first day of the conference). Thanks, Frank, for the images and for your encouraging words about Josiah — and thanks likewise to all who have been praising him. He’s a great guy, and it makes me glow with parental pride to hera that others think so, too.
Frank Paynter pointed to this blogpost that I’d missed on Andrea’s ARJLog. The story ends with my allegedly saying, “It is improper squid etiquette to eat garlic with a fork.”
I read that to Margaret last night, and we relished the runaway absurdity of it all. Then last night, Margaret dreamt that we went to communion, where there was widespread murmuring about the communion bread, because it was supposed to have been marinated in cooked garlic, but it had been prepared with raw garlic instead. (She knew, because she went to investigate and took a bite out of one of the pieces of garlic, so she could tell from its consistency that it was raw. She sampled the garlic — but not with a fork, since she knew that just wasn’t done.)
Before today’s half-day ATR Board meeting, we celebrated a mass for theologians, especially remembering our late friend and colleague, the former editor of ATR, Jim Griffiss.
His former colleague, Bill Petersen, told the story of a time he and Jim were commiserating after an especailly vexing encounter with an exceptionally irritating neighbor. “Petersen,” quoth Jim, a pipe clenched firmly between his teeth, “you must remember that although all interesting people are difficult, not all difficult people are interesting.”
Perhaps there’s something in the air, or it’s the phase of the moon, but Bishop N. T. Wright isn’t the only one denouncing postmodern errors. (Honestly, I would feel a lot less like a postmodernist if I weren’t constantly running into shoddy denunciations of that way of thinking.) Bob Carlton points me to someone’s announcement that postmodernism is dead, that critical realism has finally done in the evil monster in the black turtleneck.
It strains my charity to take seriously a philosophical essay that includes the words, “Indeed, it is hard to give an overview of the major postmodernist tenets without seeming to fall into parody.” The author of such a claim manifestly hasn’t the slightest sympathy or respect for the ideas or thinkers he professes to represent; why should anyone expect the representations, under these circumstances, to amount to more than a parody (and a gross one at that)?
Critical realism has been around a long time; Bp. Wright actually makes it the premise of his historical work in The New Testament and the People of God , published in 1996, and biblical studies doesn’t come by its philosophical underpinnings hot off the presses. One can make a strong case for critical realism (it’s way better than uncritical realism), but I remain unconvinced that setting “realism” over against some supposed alternative — as though some of us might deliberately flout reality in our thinking — adequately deals with either the problems of our describing reality or the complex philosophical arguments that surround those problems.
And composing a jeering epitaph to one approach to these problems strikes me as a cavalier, perhaps nakedly rude rhetorical gesture. I don’t adhere to process thought, but I admire the depth of thoughtfulness that goes into it. I’m not a critical realist, but I can recognize its efforts to circumvent the weaknesses of simple realism. I would ask the same respect of those who promulgate opposing philosophical platforms, but then perhaps their response would simply be that I and the teachers whose arguments impress me are nothing but a bunch of dunderheads whose labors don’t deserve a serious, respectful rebuttal. More fool I.
I’ve spent the day so far (and will resume spending it in an hour) at meetings of the Board of the Anglican Theological Review (I’m sending you to these web pages, but they’re redesigning and moving to a new domain, and I fear that they’ll indiscriminately break links.) It’s been down-and-dirty thrill-packed Board of Directors action, with all the attendant soporific consequences — even as we get good, effective work done. In a break-out committee toward the end of the day, though, [name deleted by request], a colleague from [another educational institution whose name is withheld here by request], noted that she had agreed to write a double-digit number of book reviews on which she was long overdue.
“I only review out-of-print books,” she summarized.
Not quite in a category with International Talk Like a Pirate Day, today is Mole Day, a day dedicated to honoring the achievement of Amedeo Avogadro. All I remember from Chemistry class — apart from the surreal experience of taking the exam for the American Chemistry Society scholarships and actually doing well on it — are a few random names and notions, such as “acid-base titration” and “PV=NRT” and “Avogadro’s number.”
I have several numbers, not just one (a Social Security number, telephone numbers for home, work, fax, and cell). Still, if Avogadro had to have only one number, he chose a much bigger number than I’ll ever have: 6.02 times 10^23. That (to return to the subject of this post) is the number of molecules in a mole. A mole, if I remember correctly, is the quantity of a gas or compound or whatever equal to its molecular weight in grams. After copious research dedicated to bringing you a full explanation of this important day, I still can’t figure out quite why moles matter.
But then, chem majors need days like this to give them occasions for geeky fun, so (thinking especially of Betsy this morning) Happy Mole Day, and Avogadro bless us, everyone!
A couple of weeks ago, Trevor and I conducted our “Webbiness for Congregations” consultation as a continuing education event at Seabury. One of the features of our presentation is the “Let us cast obloquy on your parish website” portion. Among the participants who volunteered their parishes was the Rev. David Cobb, a priest whose congregation’s website wouldn’t load. We went ahead to another congregation and a wonderful time was had by all — but a couple of days later he sent me a note, observing that it was just possible that I was acquainted with his parish, Christ Church, New Haven.
Well, duh! It’s only the parish that was our home base while I was in seminary, where I served as an assistant during my second masters program, where I was ordained to the priesthood, where Si was baptized, where Margaret attended Bible study classes while very pregnant with Si (and after he was born, nursed him through Bible study). I returned his note gladly; I remembered Christ Church vividly, and sensually — Margaret and I both recall with strong affection the distinctive scent of Christ Church’s custom-blended incense. Well, yesterday, we received in the mail a lovely gift: a jar of Christ Church “Angelus” incense, which Margaret and Si and Pippa and I sat around, sniffing fondly. Si and Pip don’t even remember Christ Church, of course, but we all were enraptured by the deep message of reverent devotion that those grains of frankincense signified. “Walk in love, as Christ loved us and gave
himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.”
My respect for Tom Wright, even on topics about which we disagree, is profound; the church is better off with thoughtful bishops with whom people like me disagree than it would be with shallow head-nodding fellow-travellers.
So I’m all the more irritated when Tom ascribes his (correct) disagreement with Karen Armstrong to her proclivity to “ignore what the texts actually say and to attempt, in classic postmodern fashion, a synthesis of widely disparate traditions in support of that contemporary western phenomenon, ‘the religious quest’ ” (my emphasis). Wright’ positive case rings true to me: “resurrection” figures much more prominently in the pertinent texts than does the wan category of “life after death.” But his negative case effects just as grievous a misrepresentation as the one Armstrong foists on him.
Bishop Tom, if you’re so concerned with “what the texts actually say,” please cite for me one single scholar of postmodernity who invokes “a synthesis of widely disparate traditions in support of that contemporary western phenomenon, ‘the religious quest’.” I’ll even try not to quibble over who counts as a “scholar,” trusting that if you care enough to think about what you said, you will care enough not to scrounge up some shabby lackwit who justifies theoretical fustian by labelling it “postmodern.”
What makes this groundless casual accusation all the more bizarre is the way it misses the opportunity to score points against positions Karen Armstrong actually holds. Armstrong is no “postmodernist,” but a (very modern) comparative-religion writer. Instead of discrediting her assumptions and scholarship, Wright takes a random potshot at some uninvolved French guys smoking Gauloises in the next department over. If it’s worth starting a public argument — and in this case, I agree that Wright has a legitimate complaint — then it’s worth joining argument instead of attacking straw philosophies.
Micah and Laura both blog — I should’ve remembered them when I alluded to blogging partners. Sorry, youns!
And Micah pointed me to a great resource for ways to handle the preaching others’ sermons problem, which led me to another page on the same topic, both treating the practice sensibly, sympathetically, and very helpfully.
Wonderful, committed, I-sure-wish-I’d-had-her-when-I-was-in-second-grade (even though I had a wicked crush on Miss Fogg) second grade teacher Susan Hunberger has started a blog for her class. The coolness of this knocks my grade-school media experience sideways; yes, David Eddy and I did mimeograph a semi-underground school newspaper back in the sixties, but blogging in second grade would be a massive thrill. Especially when grown-ups from all over the world are leaving comments.
Which brings up a fascinating dimension of the matter: the varying ways that respondents address the second-grade authors. Some leave comments that look to me as though they’re taking part in a conversation with the second graders. That’s certainly what I was trying for — respectful attention to the authors and to other respondents, as though we were sitting around the family dinner table, batting ideas around. Other respondents, though, feel the need to tell the students what’s what. I’m sure Susan has the situation well in hand, but now I’m almost more interested in how Susan negotiates the varying voices that the blog students will be reading. (I have the feeling that this experience will play an important role in a presentation for a conference I’ll be addressing in the spring. I intend to challenge the conference-goers to begin to think of technology less as a pedagogical tool than as a pedagogical environment, though of course I’ll eschew spatial metaphors. I don’t treat gravity as a pedagogical tool; it’s just there, and I count on it to keep me vaguely tethered to the class I’m presumably teaching, but I don’t spend time thinking about gravity as a feature of my pedagogy. This connects with my presentation and Susan’s class inasmuch as the question of authority arises with particular force and complexity when one adds digital communication and technology to the pedagogical situation. Where some writers think the answer lies in filtering and editing web-based material, I will argue that the more immediate, appropriate response involves focusing the more vigilantly on students’ own capacity to ascertain the differences between “reliable” and “unreliable” information, an important human capacity that we ought to be doing better, always, regardless of whether we’re spotlighting technology in our pedagogy.)
Hey, yo! Evanston-area HTML-capable readers!
Seabury is looking for part-time (low-cost, naturally) help for website maintenance: updating links, adding copy, correcting typos, light-weight non-design tasks. If you need a few dollars for webby odd jobs, or if you know someone who might, please email me.
Euan was surprised (he actually used the word “scary”) when he noticed that an estimable theologian (and critic of sermons), to whom I am married, left a comment expressing strong dissent from what I had said about preachers who reuse others’ sermons without adequately acknowledging their source. What Euan doesn’t know is how mild her rebuke was, compared to what she can generate when really, really provoked.
That then led me to think of how few blogging relatives I know of. Jeneane and George at the head of the list, of course, and Elaine and B!x; Si and me (sometimes surprising people in Joi’s IRC channel); and in a different current of the blgostream, Teresa Nielsen Hayden and Patrick.
Do they always agree? Or are we supposed to keep our disagreements secret? (I’m not suggesting Euan spposed any of these things, just following what I take to be the vector of his thought.) Is Blogaria a “one-of-a-pair-of-spouses-only” club, such that the first partner to get a blog effectively edges out the other? I hope not; I hope that Margaret’s occasional dope-slap to me constitutes a step toward more partners feeling comfortable participating more generally in our Blogarian conversation. Unless I’m wrong about that, dear.
I’ve been having trouble leaving comments at enetation sites; sometimes they go through, but other times it seems as though Safari (my browsing weapon of choice) doesn’t agree with enetation. Or are their servers just erratic? Do other browsers miscarry sometimes?
Visitors to Digital Identity World may recall seeing the strained expression on my face as my trusty TiBook ran out of memory after a mere forty-five minutes or so of activity. I had ordered a new battery to be available Tuesday, before I left for Denver, but wouldn’t you know it — the battery delivery was late, and I had to fly away with only limited power.
I picked up the new battery yesterday, though, and I have to say that it feels intensely exhilarating to see the “time-remaining” estimate in the upper-right-hand corner hit three hours again, as in the olden days. Last year.
Let me stipulate at the outset that I may be one of the most cranky sermon-listeners in the known world. This is not a virtue: it’s fussiness and hyperbolic liturgical/theological intensity. OK?
That being conceded from the start, I have a couple of complaints. First, if you're going to ignore the Bible readings for the day, why not just save us the trouble of listening to them? Or ignore the ones that are mandated for the day, and read the lessons that you're actually going to preach from? It doesn’t advance the gospel to read three lessons (four, if you count the psalm), then preach from lessons that the congregation hasn’t just heard.
Second, sermons that feel obliged to pick up certified pop-culture themes (I heard a buncha sermons on The Lion King) frequently fall into any of several traps. Sometimes they over-summarize the plot, on behalf of the congregants who haven't seen the movie (or read the book or whatever), taking up sermon-time with superficial-overview narration; if the book or movie can't safely be assumed to have been seen by everyone listening, think twice about preaching on it. Second, it risks eclipsing the Bible readings: if what you really want to talk about is The Lion King or Everything I Needed to Know I Learned in Kindergarten, why bother with the pretense that you’re preaching on the gospel? Again, save us the time of readings to which the sermon will not pertain. The strain that a preacher goes through to wring some connection to a Bible that’s diffidently silent on issues of leonine orphans or the sufficiency of elementary education doesn’t enhance any congregational sense of the relevance of Scripture, or the skill of the preacher.
Rant, rant, rant. Time for me to quiet down and go to bed.
Anyone out there know anything about Aberdeen, as a city or as an academic entity? Just asking.
While I was away, David “My memory is longer than yours” Weinberger pointed in a JOHO note to a long-ago post of mine. He’s worked up, as I was, about the RIAA’s assault on its customers, and my cold wrath has only intensified after having spent three days in close proximity to Cory Doctorow. Now, Micah Jackson (who has a history of involvement in both game design and law) has pointed me to Greg Costikyan’s recent recapitulation of the nonsense that Big Media has been generating over copyright problems. They’re even more ludicrously incoherent than Microsoft’s complaints about the iTunes Music Store (&ldqu;;Microsoft customers like choice” — I wish that one had come out while I was still within heckling distance of Peter Biddle). Cory, of course, linked to Greg’s rant, too.
Let’s keep things as simple as humanly possible.
My DigID World posts lack the hyperlinks that etiquette and webby-ness require. My project for tomorrow is to go back and add some links — didn’t mean to be rude, but was blogging as fast as I could.
While Doc and I were recapping DigID world, we sympathized about feeling, in Doc’s now-canonical metaphor, like farmers at a paving convention. I wondered what more we were doing there than hanging out with friends. I suppose that it may deflect Microsoft a few microdegrees further toward openness by mingling the Man Behind Palladium/NGSCB with Cory Doctorow (I’d say "more than a few" out of respect for Peter, but I don’t want to overestimate the extent to which the ocean liner’s course could be altered by an encounter with a couple of friendly marine mammals) , but perhaps there’s something else at work. Just unadulterated speculation, but maybe bringing grassroots advocates to DigID World extends the "real human being" pole of the DigID discourse further out, putting such admirable ventures as PingID and its related enterprises closer to what can be seen as the center.
Whatever. For no obvious reason, Eric and André and Phil made space at what was fundamentally an enterprise conference for outsiders to hold up mirrors, to tell the corporate behemoths (and would-be behemoths) what they look like from mere mortals. That’s a gesture of unusual hospitality, and I thank them very much.
I had a spectacular two-part afternoon today, after goodbye-ing everyone at DigID World. Chris Locke offered me a lift to the airport, by way of lunch and (of course) Starbucks. We talked about everything under the sun — life, love, DigID presentations, God, Feuerbach, Heinz Kohut, and Chris’s various gigs and book projects. We talked about the menu at the Original (TM) Pancake House, which promised "hand-crafted omelets" that might take as long as 30 minutes to prepare.
We talked about music and coffee and blogging. We talked about an idea for a keynote on teaching and technology that I’ll be giving in the spring. We talked about how to get to Denver International Airport. We were still talking to each other as I headed into the terminal and Chris pulled away.
And as soon as the Transport Security Authority decided that I wasn’t a threat to safe air travel, I headed to where Doc Searls had suggested that I meet him in Terminal B. We talked about organizing our digital photos, about conferences, about home-schooling, about people at the conference.
Next time somebody tells me that the Net makes people antisocial, I’ll be thinking about the precious gifts of friendship that I’d never have known apart from the Web. Thanks from the heart, guys.
Doc is offering the closing keynote again this year. He’s beginning with a Weinberger-instigated "Invasion of the Body-Snatchers" reference. He points out that Andre Durand’s notion of identity management puts the user at the center: "assumed identity" (me), "assigned identity" (relationships with others), and "abstract identity" (marketing aggregate blah blah blah). Tier 3 doesn't concern us as people, but as wallets. "Wallets are Tier 2 habitats" — aspects of our identity assigned by others. Mailboxes are Tier 3 habitats, the homes of junk mail and spam.
Doc and Andre ask, what happens when your own identity (Tier 1) gets equal power in Tier 2 relationships? Doc cites the Chris Locke line from Cluetrain, "Networked markets get smarter faster than most companies."
So, where are we now? The enterprise people are talking to each other. Theyre speaking in BuzzPhrases. But they're talking about "markets" in too many different ways, for big aggregates, "the Chinese market" or "the lipstick market," for sales, for lots of different things when markets are, places people meet for exchange and conversation. No one is in charge; the buyer and seller always negotiate. Hence, every transaction makes for a relationship. This translates Andre's three tiers to Doc's Mydentity (roots), Ourdentity (relationships), and Theirdentity (spam). To us grassroots types, this conference sounds a lot like a paving convention.
What do customers want? That's what companies should care about. Doc needed a cable for his TiBook; an interested seller could have sold him a cord, if they knew he needed one. Doc thinks that by shifting attention to the customer, we're dismantling the Matrix (which he construes as a metaphor for marketing).
Our morning discussion begins with Esther Dyson and Cory Doctorow taking the measure of RFID advocates Ken Traub and Someone Else. Cory is a media animal, with anecdotal fact bites at instant recall; he can call up a rebuttal example to just about any pro-DRM or pro-RFID booster point. Esther just poses calmly reasonable queries that oblige the RFID delegates to acknowledge some awkward dimensions to their technology. On the other hand, the RFID proponents staunchly defend the possible benefits of smart refrigerators that can tell us which food has spoiled, or smart medicine cabinets that warn us about dangerous drug interactions.
Cory: "Privacy never exists apart from power relationships. Privacy is all about power."
(Identity: I have to say that so this post turns up in the DigIDW aggregator.)
Last night we all attended the dinner that honored three DigID luminaries. I was at a table with Chris Locke, Marc Canter, Doc Searls, Elliot Noss (beside whom I sat at last year’s banquet, too), Simon Grice, Peter Biddle, and several of the guys behind the nTags most of us are lugging around. Peter won one of the DigID awards for Microsoft’s Palladium/NGSCB endeavor — an award that was not universally applauded. (Our table was adjacent to the table with Cory and the BBC delegates, a relative island of tepid enthusiasm.) (Peter, as you will see below, is a Good Sport about these matters; he conversed with some of us at length about how bad a PR year the Evil Empire West, as distinct from the George Steinbrenner’s Evil Empire East, has endured.)
After dinner, a crowd of us decamped to the hotel sports bar to watch with horror as the baseball season came to an end. Yes, Kassinda, the Yankees will play another four or five games, but there’s no reason to pay much attention anymore. During the agony, we struck up a series of shuffleboard games. At first, we guessed at the rules, and in a couple of imprecise non-games, Alice and Fiona and Nat and Cory and I skidded pucks around (I 0wnz0red — but these have to count as nothing more than a spring training version of the real games that ensued once we learned the rules).
When we got down to brass tacks, the team of Bryan and Fiona fell to Alice and Cory. Then representatives of God and Satan joined forces; Peter "DigID Ice Cube of Quality" Biddle and I teamed up to conquer the previous champions. Various subsequent games passed, including a Battle of the Sexes between Alice and Fiona and Cory and Peter, and the night wound down with Peter and me succumbing to Bryan and Simon in a winner-take-all death match. Well played, all, and took some of the edge off Pedro’s collapse.
Identity.
Cory Doctorow grills three participants — Denise Howell, Steve Potash (an eBook publisher), and Marco DeMello (of Miscrosoft). I’m not blogging it, because I’m both too interested and too distracted, but Cory is definitely exercising command of the podium; he regularly responds to panelists’ remarks by interjecting, "it should be noted that. . ." and adding a datum from his compendium of EFF knowledge. Steve acknowledged that eBooks have in the past exercised a hyperbolic control over the buyer’s uses of their purchases, and indicated his expectation that the market would even out the speed bumps and potholes. Marco defended Microsoft’s track record; it has made mistakes, but it’s really on the side of consumers. Denise represented her interest as an articulate advocate of fair use and sane DRM policies. Strong panel, fair and balanced.
Identity.
From lunch to now, I’ve been busy at various ends that didn’t appear on the published agenda. I had a long lunch listening to Elliot and Jamie, talking with Elliot about ways that Blogware might extend sideways to accommodate and encourage grassroots growth of DigID.
Then I spen