AKMA’s Random Thoughts

This Morning’s Sermon

I preached today at Seabury. I know, I usually let readers in on the preparation phases, but I just didn’t have the time or temper to process my thoughts in public last night. I’m preaching Sunday, too, so maybe I’ll work on that one in full view.

Anyway, I’ll post the sermon in the “read more” portion of the entry. I was thinking of Marek J as I wrote it; I could not end with a direct quotation from the mastermind of Kombinat!, but I came as close as I thought decorum, piety, and rhetoric would permit me.

Anderson Chapel of St. John the Divine, Seabury-Western

Daniel 3:14-20, 24-28/John 8:31-42

March 31, 2004

If you remain in my word, you are truly my disciples.

Jesus doesn’t teach us, in John’s Gospel, exactly how we might come into his word. Perhaps it’s when we are baptized; perhaps when we are born from above, not by the will of flesh or the will of men, but of the will of God; perhaps when hear and believe, or when first we testify that Jesus is the Son of God. But however, whenever we enter into Jesus’ word, he urges us to stay with him, to come along and see; he teaches us not simply to cling to a single spasmodic moment of conversion, but truly to show ourselves to be his disciples by remaining, abiding in his word. If we have begun to pronounce Jesus’ word with our lips, from deep in our heart, if we dare to express Jesus’ word with our lives — we need to speak the whole word, not just a mumbling first syllable. We need to abide, not merely to visit Jesus, as though discipleship were a theological theme park. Discipleship isn’t a Motel 6, an overnight refuge for busy spiritual travelers who have more important things to do the next day; discipleship is our home, where we remain.

And you will know the truth. . . .

Oddly, John offers us the opportunity to recognize the truth, but not as the condition for taking up Jesus’ way. Instead, Jesus promises the truth to us as the effect of our faithfulness; his followers believed, in order that they might understand the truth. Just as sometimes we don’t know what we’re saying until we’ve blurted it out — so when the Spirit moves us to broach the word of Jesus, when unbidden faith comes to faith-impaired tongues, there’s nothing to do but spill out the words whose truth we can’t yet claim. We try on faith, we venture a word or two in this strange new language, and after we’ve begun conversing in faith, acting on faith, after our lives have acquired the accent that comes with this heavenly dialect, then we can tell that we’ve been grasped by the truth, that truth has begun thinking through us, and — when we open ourselves to the possibility — the truth pours itself out in our words and actions.

As we continue in the word that Jesus taught us, loving one another as he loved us, yielding rather than coercing, enduring what we must and protecting what we can — as we continue in the word, and recognize the truth, the truth may break down, break apart, break out of all the encrusted certainties that support and confine us. We will have to give up the illusion of control to which we mortals so desperately cling, but that’s how it is with the truth. We can’t control the truth, we can’t dictate terms to the truth, and if we try to use the truth to merely temporal purposes, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us. But if we relinquish control, if we turn the truth loose to blow where it will, if we take those first hesitant steps out into the brilliant openness of the light that shines from the word — we will know the truth.

And the truth will make you free.

But it won’t be easy.

Amen

What is a Weblog?

Shelley’s recent post reminded me of the good ol’ [sterile] debate about the essence of a weblog, but — much as I agree with her (“Might as well ask, what is proper writing and hope to find a universal answer that will satisfy everyone”) — today I’m going to just link-comment-and-post.

So, first (or “second,” since Shelley was first), Micah pointed me to a story about cost-saving for college textbooks. Micah noticed it because of the rant he’s heard from me over and over about the opportunity for the Disseminary to function as a textbook depot, and (ideally) as a by-chapter textbook depot. We’re trying top scare up a grant to commission chapters for a hypothetical textbook (on any of a number of relevant topics) — the premise being that once a given collection of chapters has been assembled, we can also collect alternative chapters, so that an instructor could select the constituent elements of the textbook she’s using, even the order in which they appear, and call for print-on-demand copies if she so desires. If you have a generous backer, we’ll name the textbook after them.

Jeremy pointed me toward interesting-looking papers that I won’t have time to read, from a University of Canterbury (NZ) conference on technology.

Vergil Iliescu pointed me to an articulate apologia pro vita sua by Justice Michael Kirby of the High Court of Australia. As I read the Justice’s words, it seemed increasingly likely that the present stresses over sexuality in the church will not be resolved by new arguments, or even by new attention to arguments that presently have been relegated to the sidelines of the public strutting contest. Rather, I think that it will settle out based on people’s sense of with whom they would want to align themselves. Most of the facile arguments have already been drilled into our heads; most of the subtle arguments fail to command the kind of traction that could make someone change the direction of their thinking; but sooner or later, people will begin to say, “Aw, they can’t be that bad,” or “I just have to stick with this group no matter what.”

The vocational theologian in me regrets that, but the regular human being (supposing such a spirit to subsist in me at all) thinks that’s about par for the course.

I had a great talk with David Akins of the Toronto Globe and Mail this morning about the Lessig phenomenon. If I end up in print, I’ll impose on my friends in Accordion City to save a copy of the page for me.

Finally, for tonight, Jordon just put together a simple, effective, useful church website in a few minutes on a free hosting service. Now (a) be it granted that Jordon saying “ no knowledge of html needed” may be comparable to Ken Dryden saying “no knowledge of hockey needed,” and (b) I would set as an absolute first step the acquisition of a durable domain name for the church, so that you might be able to change providers without redirecting all over creation, but Jordon shows that the basics are indeed free, are indeed easy, and if you read the comments to my initial post, there’s just no reason on earth why a congregation shouldn’t have a website. Not having a church website is like locking the church doors, so that only members can get in.

Time For Bifocals

I thought the (boldface) headline on the cover of today’s issue of Digital ID World read, “Can RFID Live up to the Hypo”?” It got me thinking of injectable identity tags. It gives new meaning to computer operators as “users. . . .”

Times Changing

Micah and I were wondering, the other night, when the last film strip will have been shown to the last bored classroom full of elementary-school kids? I recall none of the content of those tedious audio-visual exercises — but the thought always calls to mind the Firesign Theatre’s segment on the American Revolution (from Everything You Know Is Wrong), which always sounded to me like “Nerdy Clockwork Films”: “An alternate past. . . for an alternate future.”

How Was Your Weekend?

Ummm. . . . wild.

The short version runs this way: The Lessig Audiobook project took off with much more energy than I anticipated when I drifted off to sleep Friday night. After a frenzy of offers, suggestions, inquiries, and updates, the following have developed:

Dave Winer has archived a heap o’ files, which he lists in his comment to the previous progress report.

Eric Rice has archived another heap at his place.

A. J. Wright has arranged that SunSite at archive the audiobook, too.

Doug Kaye has posted a segment of IT Conversations on the project, including interviews with Larry Lessig and Simon Carless (of LegalTorrents and Archive.org.

Hats off to everyone who’s taken part, whether by reading, hosting, downloading, encouraging, linking, promoting, or just reading with interest. We still need versions of chapters Six, Ten, Thirteen, Fourteen, and the Afterword (as well as the extremely brief introductory sections to the “Property,” “Balance,” and “Afterword” sections.

I’d like to take note of a point Doug made, and ask that readers and (if possible) custodians add to the ID3 Comment field a note that says something such as, ”Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig, published by Penguin Books, distributed under a Creative Commons license . Chapter read by Suw Charman (or whomever).” We want not only to acknowledge Prof. Lessig’s work and Penguin Books’ courageous foresight, but also to underline the Creative Commons’s role in promoting a free culture.

[Later]: For some reason, the edit window of Moveable Type doesn’t want me to alter the main post from several days ago any more. Here’s the lineup of chapter files from the sources at which I last knew of them.

Preface: Kevin Marks, available here

Introduction: Raph Levien, available here

Intro to the “Piracy” section (thanks for noticing this!): Chris Farmer, available here

Chapter 1: Doug Kaye (download it here already! And it’s terrific), George’s version here (I’m glad they took this chapter; I’m not ready to try to pronounce doujinshi.)

Chapter 2: Victoria and A. J. Wright available here

Chapter 3: Victoria and A. J. Wright Now available here.

Chapter 4: Eric Rice (may be able to help with hosting), Adam Brault available here

Chapter 5: AKMA here it is

Chapter 6: Les Hall, Guan Yang (available here), and Adam Brault (available here)

Chapter 7: Michael Shook (probably can’t host) Available here.

Introduction to Property Section: Adam Brault, available here, Raph Levien available here.

Chapter 8: Suw Charman available here

Chapter 9: Tara now available here, Chuck Welch

Chapter 10: Giles Hoover

Chapter 11: Neel (can probably host it), Dave Winer (available now, here!)

Chapter 12: Dave Winer, available here

Intro to Balances: Raph Levien, here

Chapter 13: George and Jeneane Sesssum, available here

Chapter 14: Ted Fletcher, available here and David Weinberger, here

Conclusion: Enoch Choi, available here

Afterword: Linda and George, available here, and Tim Samoff, available here

Preliminary Aftermath

The Lessig Read-a-thon (as David Weinberger called it in an email) has taken off. The main post below will be the center of activity — it’ll keep life a little simpler if no one needs to hop around from URI to URI looking for news — but for the sake of a quick overview: We now have versions of the Introduction, Chapter One (here and here), Chapter Three, Chapter Five, Chapter Seven, Chapters Eleven and Twelve, and the Conclusion.

We have volunteers for most of the other chapters, and some volunteers who are asking, “What should I do?” The answer is: “Record the chapter of your choice.” There’s no reason not to have multiple alternatives for the chapters.

I would ask, though, that you start with a chapter that hasn’t been posted yet (at the moment, that’s Four, Six, Nine, Ten, Thirteen, Fourteen, and the Afterword). Other volunteers may have recorded them and not posted them yet, or planned to record them but haven’t gotten around to it, but we oughtn’t to just wait around.

Here are three four very kind offers: Dave Winer and Eric Rice and now Asheesh Laroia have offered to host chapters, and Noah Glass has offered the audblog.com service for readers who want to use that system for recording their chapters (I’m waiting for specific instructions from Noah — will post them as soon as I get them).

Eric and Dave, I invite you to download and post chapters as they become available unless the reader indicates some impediment to so doing (I take it that Doug’s Chapter One forms part of his ITConversations enterprise, so unless he explicitly offers us permission to host his recording, I’d think it poor form to take it from him, especially since George has generously provided an alternative). We can talk about the paradoxes of whether one should make a Commons-based performance available only from a restricted site some other time. Right now, I’m only pleased that people want to take part.

Thanks, everyone!

Why Churches Should Have Websites

First reason: “No one after lighting a lamp puts it under the bushel basket, but on the lampstand, and it gives light to all in the house.” Too many churches operate on the assumption that they should be like the comfy little restaurants where you stumble across them, fall in love with them, get to know the regulars, and hope no one else discovers them because that would ruin the ambiance.

The church should be all about standing out where it can be seen. Some of the people who might come to your church will only look online. Now, that’s good enough reason for having a website right there. (And to the dour parish expert who says, “Oh, no one around here would do that,” the correct response is “By not making the parish perceptible online, you’ve already guaranteed that no one will.” Online access and broadband access are both increasing at a rate that itself indicates that someone you want to reach is looking for your parish online.)

Not only that, but (a) these are visitors who have already set out to find your parish in one way or another. They’re not just passing by, they aren’t getting up to go to the bathroom while your expensive cable-access commercial is on TV, they came looking for your church. And (b), many people who set about looking for a church online come from a body of our neighbors who are disproportionately underrepresented in church (in Episcopal churches I know of, anyway).

So by taking the simple step of putting a web page on an ISP somewhere, with directions, service times, and a non-repellent design, a church will significantly increase the likelihood of being available to a would-be visitor when that visitor comes looking. (Which would our hypothetical visitor prefer to encounter: a simple web page, or a voice mail phone chain?)

Second reason: Because part of the value of a web page is its constituting a public self-definition of a congregation. “This is who we are, and what we stand for.” That definition serves not only to invite (or fend off) visitors, but also to help the congregation recognize its own reflection in the mirror of the culture. Of course, that works better if the self-identification is clear and honest, which can’t be said of every website. But even a deceptive site plays that role to some extent, since it communicates to parishioners the message that their congregation is living a lie, even if that’s the way (uh huh uh huh) they like it.

Third reason: The attention that an effective web site requires grows from, develops, nourishes, articulates, and extends the very energies that contribute to vital parish life. A web site should be all about communication, quite public communication. A good site helps a congregation with an overview of what’s going on. It provides visitors with a sense of what kinds of people and interests they’re likely to meet. Whether you make available recorded selections from your music life or not, you can signal a lot that your visitor may care about by how you characterize a parish’s music life.

More reasons: An easily-constructed, frequently-updated web site expresses, generates, reflects, and encourages a conversational sense of what the congregation is about. A living congregation partakes of many of the characteristics of a good, long, satisfying conversation; why not permit those positive characteristics to show online?

I haven’t used the word “rural” yet — but I think all these apply to rural churches at least as much as (if not more than) suburban or urban churches. The need for deliberate information-spreading increases as the likelihood that you’ll spontaneously bump into another parishioner (or potential newcomer) on the street.

I’ll think of more reasons when I’ve had a good night’s sleep, and when I read the comments. Till then, that’s at least a start for my in-laws. Tomorrow I’ll try to look at my friend Holly’s church website and see whether I have anything useful to say about it. Goodnight, now!

Yes

Oliver Willis on the Bush administration’s eagerness to pin the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on Iraq:

To use an analogy: it is as if you're playing one-on-one with Michael Jordan, and MJ says "I am probably going to dunk on you". You then proceed to be dunked on, and your answer is "I bet Scottie Pippen did this!"

And then blaming the teammate who was yelling at you to guard MJ, maybe even foul him, for not covering your man. . . .

Let’s Start Something

Anyone feel like recording a chapter of Lawrence Lessig’s new book?

The license pretty clearly indicates that, so long as we’re not making a commercial venture of it, we can make a recording of (“perform”) the text. There are a Preface, Introduction, fifteen chapters, a conclusion and an afterword. If you’re willing to contribute an MP3 recording of a chapter (ideally, hosting it on your own server — but I’ll bet we can gird up the Disseminary to host chapters for you, if you can host it yourself — drop us a comment and let us know which chapters you’ll take. Heck, we could have duelling chapters; which version of chapter 5 do you like, Accordion Guy’s or Jenny the Shifted Librarian’s? (Disclaimer: I just typed their names in there. They haven’t offered or anything. Yet.) (Another disclaimer: When I went to Jenny’s just now to get her link, I saw that she had the same idea — and we didn’t even talk about it Wednesday night!)

If we all chip in, the effort will be minimal and the benefits great.

Later:

Here’s what we have so far:

Among those who have volunteered and specified chapters that they’ll try, we have:

Preface: Kevin Marks, available here

Introduction: Raph Levien, available here

Intro to the “Piracy” section (thanks for noticing this!): Chris Farmer, available here

Chapter 1: Doug Kaye (download it here already! And it’s terrific), George’s version here (I’m glad they took this chapter; I’m not ready to try to pronounce doujinshi.)

Chapter 2: Victoria and A. J. Wright available here

Chapter 3: Victoria and A. J. Wright Now available here.

Chapter 4: Eric Rice (may be able to help with hosting), Adam Brault available here

Chapter with Governess and Bodice-Ripping: Halley (I want to hear this)

Chapter 5: AKMA (done — here it is, hefty at 15.67 Mb; anyone should feel free to compress it if you see a way to)

Chapter 6: Les Hall, Guan Yang (available here), and Adam Brault (available here)

Chapter 7: Michael Shook (probably can’t host) Available here.

Chapter 8: Suw Charman available here

Chapter 9: Tara now available here, Chuck Welch

Chapter 10: Giles Hoover

Chapter 11: Neel (can probably host it), Dave Winer (available now, here!)

Chapter 12: Dave Winer, available here

Chapter 13: Jeneane Sesssum

Chapter 14: Ted Fletcher

Conclusion: Enoch Choi, available here

Afterword: Linda and George, available here

Notes (ahem!): techt

Executive Summary: Halley “Executive” Suitt (no, it’s pronounced to rhyme with “root,” not “bleat”

Graphic: David Weinberger

I’ll read an unclaimed chapter as soon as I have a chance to get over to my office; there’s not much chance of enough quiet to read a chapter here.

Can anyone recommend downloadable recording software? I’m set on my TiBook nusing AudioRecorder; what about Windows users? Dave says the sound recorder app that comes with Windows XP only records sixty seconds at a time. [Whoops! Dave found and recommends PolderbitS for Windows, so we’ll have him on board as soon as his neighbor shuts down the lawn mower. Lawn mower? There’s something to mow already?]

Now, here’s a question for Jenny or Liz (or from a different direction, for Adam) — how should we frame the ID3 tags? I suppose the “album” should be Free Culture. The Track Name should follow the designations in the text (such as, “Chapter 1: Creators”). Is the Artist the reader, or Lawrence Lessig? If the Artist is Lessig, does the reader go into “comments”? Or shall we put both into the Artist tag (such as “Lawrence Lessig and Halley Suitt”)? Might as well do it right from the outset.

Doug suggests the settings he used: “Encoded as 48kbps mono MP3 using a licensed encoder.”

Today Lessig, tomorrow Doctorow.

Night Out

I figured that everyone else would have filled megabytes of bandwidth with jolly pictures of boisterous, enthusiastic bloggers at Ben Pao yesterday evening. I figured that by the time I got around to blogging about it, everyone would already know. That’s what It thought; but I was wrong again. Sure, John mentions it, but no full account of the conversational free-for-all has yet appeared.

So I was wrong about everyone else, and I’m not the guy to supply what is lacking. I did arrive early, in time to spend fifteen minutes or so at the bar with Rick, Buzz, Jim, Erik, Barry Bayer, and John. Then at dinner, I sat in the same corner of the table almost the whole dinner, in between Jenny and Jim (with Jack on the yonder side of Jim).

I had a very helpful conversation with Jenny about my upcoming keynote at the Theology and Pedagogy in Cyberspace conference. I’m working on an argument that the changing information environment leaves most theological teachers persistently losing ground to circumstances that obstruct or deflect their attempts to engage new technologies productively. (That reminds me that I owe my mother-in-law a post about why even small rural churches should have websites, and what they should do, but I won’t get to that tonight. Sorry, Pat! I’ll try tomorrow.)

Case in point: almost all scholars who now conduct theological research online learned the craft of research in a physical environment. I describe some of the research strategies I used as a seminarian, some of the cues I looked for when seeking reliable information. Very few of those strategies transfer effectively to online research. But now many of my students conduct a great proportion of their research online; how shall we help shape their research initiatives, and how shall we learn from them how we might better teach (and conduct our own research)?

I mentioned to Jenny my seeded-search idea (middle of the linked post), and she suggested some helpful follow-ups, and put RSS into my mind as another tool I might invoke in the discussion.

Then Buzz came over and cleared Jim McGee out of his chair, and we talked a long time about David, Doc, PopTech, ActiveWords, Central Florida, and Pentecostal theology. Then he cleared me out so he could talk with Jenny; I fell into conversations with Jack and Rick, mostly, the rest of the way. Rick wants me to read the new Greg Iles book, and I agreed to add it to my list (but I didn’t tell Rick how long the list was).

Before Jim took Jack and me home, I had a chance to talk with Ernie, and even begin a polite argument about pseudonymity, before Jim dragged me home.

People were taking pictures and comparing Treos all through dinner; I’m surprised that no photos have showed up online yet. I did manage to get copies of several shots that Jenny attempted with her (flash-less) Treo:

That’s me, on the right, taking a bite of the delicious garlic tofu in that lower picture.

You Can’t Steal This Book

Lawrence Lessig’s new book, Free Culture, is available for free download under a Creative Commons license. Lessig encourages readers to “redistribute, copy, or otherwise reuse/remix this book provided that you do so for non-commercial purposes and credit Professor Lessig” — so if you feel the temptation to whip up a dance remix of this powerful critique of copyright culture, Lessig will be right there with you.

[It looks as though the Future of Ideas giveaway is still on as of today. If you don’t already have a copy, this is your chance to get one by making a donation to Creative Commons; if you do have a copy, you can get an autographed copy, or gifts for friends.]

A Little Bit of Meaning

The dumb movie ran late, we spent some time admiring Pippa’s most recent work of art (a full swinging-kitchen-door mural, both sides of the door), and now I don’t have the minutes of awakeness left to produce a fully-realized post on meaning. But to avoid putting it off for another day, I’ll begin what I wanted to say.

A couple of quick responses, first off. I think Dave and I just use the word “accountable” differently. I’m open to the likelihood that Dave has a case that his is righter, but I like my usage, it serves my purposes well, except when it nettles Dave. On this question of usage, I’ll offer politely to disagree with Dave.

The second quick response actually gets at the start of my fuller observations. When I say that if my two initial premises hold (that signifying is ubiquitous and uncontrollable), then my third (that there’s no ethic intrinsic to signifying) follows from them, I don’t mean that expression and interpretation are ethically neutral. No way (as the Apostle Paul would say)! Rather, I mean that the ethical status of our signifying practices derives not from a hypothetical nature of signification, but from other discursive regimes. One could well envision and uphold an Aristotelian ethics of signifying, or a Christian ethics of signifying (starting, perhaps, with the Epistle of James), or a liberal-democratic or an aesthetic ethics of signifying, but none of these would plausibly make a case that their ethic derives simply from the nature of signification.

In order to make an intrinsic ethic of signification work, one would have to be able to account for the vast and persistent domain of signifcation-slippage — to resolve, in other words, the perennial problems of intention, ambiguity, and misunderstanding. So far as my years and perception have enabled me to tell — and that’s not a universal boundary, so I await evidence that has thus far escaped me — the so-called “problem cases” of non-deliberate, ambiguous, and misapprehended signification constitute not a rare aberration, but a tremendous proportion of the cases of signification. I expect that a theory of signifying worth supporting would have a word to say about those cases.

Now, I will close my eyes. Goodnight.

Quiet in the Faculty Meeting

Alex IM’d me in the middle of a suspense movie (sorry I didn’t respond right away, Alex) to alert me that Invisible Adjunct has hung up her blog.

It’s tough to express how this news makes me sad; she showed the grace and clarity and integrity that call together all who have a sense for the issues she voiced, building a community of support and comfort for those working under comparably inhumane situations, and never permitting us who have been her comfortably full-timed colleagues the indulgence of slack consciences. That, as I recall, is the work of a prophet; and I will do what I can to ensure that the resonances of IA’s voice aren’t drowned out once the Faculty Senate resumes its monthly squabbling about who gets the parking spaces.

Antipathetic Magic

I hereby complain to the universe that somebody seems to have made off with my treasured autographed copy of The Genesis of Secrecy, Frank Kermode’s brilliant reading of the Gospel of Mark as a paradigmatic instance of narrative’s capacity to conceal as much as it reveals. You lend books to people you trust, and this is what happens.

(Now, allow me to observe that the above is an offical public complaint about others’ behavior relative to me — thus, I expect to find out in a matter of moments, that I am myself the one who mislaid the book, thus humiliating me for blaming others. That is, in fact, why I’m complaining about it publicly in the first place. OK, book, olly olly income free!)

[I was right; no one had borrowed Kermode, but he was resting on the bottom shelf of a bookshelf that had inadvertently been concealed by boxes in an effort to spruce up the basement. I withdraw my accusation, I repent in sackcloth and ashes, and I bask now in the joy of reading this exquisite critical exercise. Now, how can I choose only one chapter for my students to read?]

When I Said “Really,” What I Meant Was. . . .

Today was consumed by high-gear wrap-up from last term, a lightning strike to the Amtrak station in the heart of Chicago to pick up Margaret, and syllabus-prep for tomorrow’s new class. Here’s a question for you: what do you call a professor who, teaching a course for the umpty-umpth time, revamps the whole class yet again?

Don’t tell me your answer.

So I think about all those topics and what I need to say relative to them, but I haven’t had a minute free to write out what I’ve been thinking (much less, to write it out carefully). Not only have I not blogged substantively today, although if I keep going at this rate my repudiation of today’s blogging will count as a substantive blog, but I haven’t even read any blogs today. No, that’s not true, somehow I got pointed toward Dooce’s accounts of childbirth and lactation (and this one), which reminded Margaret and me of our experiences in these areas, only we didn’t experience them in such delicious prose.

I will try to get to the “meaning” stuff tomorrow.

Really, I Do

I had planned a blog about meaning, accountability, comments, and ethics. But my non-stop Sunday and the cold I haven’t yet beaten (phooey to you, Halley) caught up with me and I’m scarcely able to keep my eyes open long enough to excuse myself. . . .

Blogalgia

I have caught a nasty cold. It’s not worse than most people’s colds, but I catch colds relatively rarely, so I’m unduly cranky about it. It reminds me of the beginning of Kant’s “The Conflict of the Faculties,” wherein Kant complains that sometimes he gets a feeling of intellectual congestion like a stuffed nose of the brain, such that his mind can’t produce clear thought (I expected I’d be able to find a text of “The Conflict” online, but I can’t, not even in German, which makes me even grouchier, and I’m feeling too run-down to ransack the basement to find the copy I have somewhere in a box, so you’ll have to make do with a beclouded vague recollection of Kant’s analogy rather than a quotation.)

My beloved Margaret is in Rochester for 36 hours (and on Amtrak for, oh, another 30 hours, unless she’s lucky) to observe Nate in several performance opportunities. I’d have gone with her, except my last “Passion” gig for now is scheduled for tomorrow; it’s just as well I wasn’t with her on the train, as night train travel gets uncomfortable and un-sleep-able enough, but a coughing, snuffling, restless, ill-tempered lout (which I would have been) next to you will make the trip all the more miserable. That’s the upside for her, but for me it means that the sweetheart who coddles me in my affliction is away for a few days.

I have a pile of final exams to grade, which my wonderful students hand-wrote in bluebooks, some of them with handwriting so fine that it’s hard for my headachey eyes to focus on it. (One of my worries about grading involves the extent to which my temperament at the moment of evaluation might affect the grade I assign; will I show especially harsh judgment this afternoon?)

I have to prep for tomorrow’s “Passion According to John” hour.

Some aspects of my work situation have been especially irksome this week.

Si’s bandmates booted him out of the as-yet-unnamed group, destining themselves to a collective future of mediocrity and futility.

Did I admit that I’m feeling impatient and grouchy?

So y’all are just as well off that I’m not trying to be topical or profound just now. Maybe when my head clears, my revivified brain will have an interesting thought, but right now, I doubt it.

Blogitude

I could’ve blogged today — I want to get back to Gerry and Dave and the Tutor — but I just didn’t feel like it. Gave my Northwestern students their final exam; they were cheerful and sweet, not at all grumpy or whiny. I’ll miss them.

Tomorrow I’ll grade as many exams from that class as I can bear to, put Margaret on the train (to see Nate), and, oh, I don’t know, maybe I’ll really blog.

“Arrrrr, Elron!”

Margaret and I had a dinner date last night, wherein one of the topics of discussion was “Where do we fit on the Tom Coates typology?”

Margaret decided that she is probably a ninja dwarf of a somewhat elven sort; I, on the other hand, felt more like a ninja elf, though a rather task-oriented elf, and a little on the piratical side for a ninja. I’m not acquainted with any of the people in Tom’s upper-right-hand quadrant, but I suppose I’d fit in close to Dan Hon or Lance Arthur.

Walking home, we encountered a panhandler who pretended to be selling Streetwise, the local newspaper for homeless vendors. We paid for our copy, but the vendor suggested that we think of it as a “donation” and let him keep his last copy of the paper (which we did).

As we wandered along toward home, we turned to one and I noted sadly, “He’s not supposed to do that,” to which Margaret responded, “I know; do you think we’re saying that because we’re ninjas?”

(Nate adds, “I guess I’m a ninja,” and I’d say he’s toward the middle of dwarf and elf (not surprisingly, given his ancestry.)

LazyWeb

So OK, who’s going to be first with a utility that permits webcam users to blue-screen out their surroundings and paste in a jpeg of the user’s choice as a background?

I look forward to iSight messaging with people from in front of St. Paul’s (perhaps with Gary and Fiona approaching in the background), or from the interior of Christ Church, Oxford, or in front of a group of technorati from BloggerCon or DigID World. . . .

Less Random Semi-Thoughts

One of the wonderful gifts from blogging comes when your friends offer you the benefit of their wisdom (sometimes under the guise of saying what they thought you already knew). Tom, for instance, called into question “the part about ‘we’ being somehow distinct from the realm of signification, the way we are distinct from wildfires and other natural forces.”Tom goes on to wonder to what extent we’re distinct from “signification” on one hand and “forces of nature” on the other. Great, great! There are (of course) rough-hewn ways to make those distinctions work, just as there are rough-hewn (and finely-polished) ways to make “intention” work as a criterion, and so on. But Tom’s on the right path, the one that leads to trouble: the rhetoric of obvious distinction represses all the problematic complications that might arise if we looked to closely at the supposed dividing lines.

So, after learning this from Tom, what should I say? Perhaps best to say that when we broach the topic of signifying, we enter a discourse where the recursive character of our expressions and their topics play havoc with the rules. It marks a space where brutal discursive exploitation and radical semiotic trust and intimacy come into play — one reason poets seem to know this terrain so much better than most philosophers.

David nudges me relative to my suggesting (in David’s words) “that there’s no ‘real’ signification that we can authoritatively unearth. Our simple model of communication (inner thought expressed in outer signs) misrepresents the actual situation.” Then, he wonders, should we not be held accountable for the effects of our deliberate significations? (Let’s talk about defining “signifies” as “projects meaning,” but not tonight, okay?)

Sure thing — I am, as Si would have said last year and I don’t know what he’s saying this year instead, all about accountability. Indeed, absent a durable principle of intentionality as the criterion for “real” meaning, I think accountability is all we have left — not only for our deliberate sginficiations, but our inadvertent ones, too. That feels intuitively unfair; the “I didn’t mean to” defense has a long and deeply-embedded history in our social fabric. I’ll venture to suggest, though, that once we admit that intention doesn’t serve us reliably in most such respects, that it’s a necessary placeholder for an unspecifiable factor (and yes, I read Anscombe, which is partly what made me this way), then invoking the unreliable placeholder to exculpate or incriminate runs the risk of compounding the imprecise with the undeterminable. At the end of all our conversations (verbal or gestural or digital), we come to accountability: do we step up and acknowledge that we’re implicated in the various networks of ramifications that flow from our signifying practice, or do we retreat, cover our hinder parts, and endeavor to immunize ourselves from our infiliation in webs we did not make or choose. (I vote for accountability, then, rather than self-justification.) So then, the radical fluidity of signification doesn’t excuse us from responsibility; rather, it radicalizes our responsibility, requiring that we acknowledge the full extent of our participation in the economy of signs, and asking whether we then stand by the meanings we’ve participated in constructing and affirming, or whether we deny our selves.

Chris (in an email) asks, “How does what you're saying differ from what I imagine to be the First Step of a 12-step program for New Age Nihilists: ‘Came to believe I was powerless over the fact that shit happens’ ”?

I suppose that my point converges with this Twelve-Step program — but the myth of control so pervades the discourses within which I spend most of my time and energy working, that it’s worth reminding myself (and innocent bystanders) how tenuous that myth turns out to be. Indeed, often enough it’s tremendously destructive, as people cling to a dysfunctional “control” for fear of a chaos that they posit as the alternative. All the while they wreak havoc for which they don’t feel accountable, since they’re doing it in the name of fending off chaos. But that chaos may not be the only alternative, or may be only a phase thourgh which a different order is passing, or some other possibility that the fear-driven controller can’t see. Let it go, let it go. (Here I hear resonances of Eric’s shower-inspired ruminations that I want to take up tomorrow, after a night’s sleep, ’cause his post makes me want to think in a different direction. He’s way off base about that “brilliant” stuff, though.)

Chris doesn’t ask about the correlation between “signification” and the Higher Power about which twelve-step programs speak (and the God about whom theologians speak). Short answer: it’s far from being adventitious, but I want vigorously to avoid equating the two (three) or suggesting that one is a less-refined version of another. Maybe I’ll have something sensible to add to that tomorrow, in between grading final exams and other errands. In the meantime, thanks for making me think more, and harder.

Classic and Free

Anyone with an interest in fine digital type on a low budget must rush over to Igino Marini’s digital type page and download his collection of digital recreations of the Oxford Fell typefaces. He’s licensing them for free, provided that you keep him apprised of how you’re using his work. The faces are full, with abundant ligatures, ornaments, and special characters, and the pirce can’t be beat.

Especially churches and other not-for-profits who anticipate someday, under some circumstances, needing a sturdy, authentic, affordable period typeface should download these and keep them on hand. I can’t wait to set something in them, myself. . . .

Last In Line

Everyone’s already seen “The Gospel of Debbie” by now, but for the one person who might not have seen it yet — here it is.

Good Things

Today I had a good panel discussion about The Passion, with Rabbi Deborah Newman Kamin of Am Yisrael Synagogue and Pastor Robert Atkins of Trinity United Methodist Church at Trinity UMC in Wilmette; a good conversation about the Lukan Passion Narrative over at Christ Church, Winnetka.

So Duke lost; from everything I heart, it was a good game, and if Duke couldn’t put Maryland away with a five-point lead an under two minutes to play, then three cheers to Maryland for hanging tough and winning the hard way. Duke still got a #1 seed in the South Regional.

I had a good iSight-enabled iChat with Dave “Formerly ‘Time’s Shadow,’ now ‘Groundhog Day’ ” Rogers; he’s great fun to talk with (I wouldn’t mention to him, though, that occasionally his head goes a little blurry and his face turns all pixellated; he might be sensitive about that).

The best good thing of all, though, was seeing Josiah play Rev. Parris in The Crucible last night. I’m not a kind enough soul to cut amateur theater a lot of slack; I derive no great pleasure from seeing haphazard, awkward, sloppy theatrical productions, and “cuteness” or youth or being-related-to-one-of-the-actors does not alchemically change mediocre theater to wonderful, worthwhile theater. I’m a grouch on this subject, and I’m willing to admit it.

But last night’s production of The Crucible blew me away. Si and his colleagues did a terrific job on some complex and improbable material. It’s a shame they couldn’t extend the run, because more people ought to have had the opportunity to see them (and they ought to have had an even fuller benefit for all their hard work). I’m awfully proud of Si, and glad that he was surrounded by a tremendous ensemble.

Semi-Random Thoughts

— Everything signifies.

— Significance is not controllable.

— There’s no ethic intrinsic to signifying.

What am I getting at? Nothing original, but matters that I sometimes wish were more prominent in conversations and interactions around us, day by day. Chalk it up to too much thinking about theory lately.

So first of all, I’m proposing that signifying, meaning-making, semiosis, goes on all around, all the time. What you wear signifies, what you say signifies, how you walk signifies, where you live signifies — we’re saturated with signifying, and to keep our sanity we damp most of it down as “meaningless,” but that’s a gesture of force. Nothing is either quite meaningless or quite meaningful, but anything (word, gesture) may be found especially meaningful (or not), depending.

Second, not surprisingly, given what I just proposed, signifying always escapes our capacity to control. We often make to control signifying under the rule of intention (“I didn’t intend to offend you, so it’s not my responsibility if you’re hurt by what I did.”). The rule of intention has long been known to lead to Hell, though, and no other mode of policing signification has proved more effective. If I wear an orange jacket through the wrong neighborhood on St. Patrick’s Day, that’ll signify, whether I intend it to or not, and the significance may be enforced with sanctions that pay no respect to refined arguments about the nature of human intention, or the legitimacy of reader-oriented interpretation.

Hard as people try to build dikes on the river of meaning, to shore up those barriers with all sorts of reinforcement, still significance pours over the retaining walls and floods our homes and fields.

Third, if we can’t control it, and if it’s going on all the time all around us anyway, the notion that there might be an implied ethic to signification, such that if we only truly understood signification we would understand the right way to understand, runs into fatal incoherency. Is there an ethic of gravity? of air? of cosmic rays? There’s just no percentage in trying to draw out the hidden truth of signifying, in order to extract the Right Answer by which we can assess all efforts at signifying, or all inferred significations. We have no more control over signifying than we do over wildfires in the West, or the paths of hurricanes in the East. Signifying isn’t a force of nature; at the same time, it so outstrips our capacities to predict and control that we are not less helpless before the tides of signifying than we are helpless when an undertow draws us away from shore, tires us, and eventually pulls us under the water.