« May 2005 | Main | July 2005 »

June 30, 2005

New Installment (Installation?)

Posted by AKMA at 01:30 PM | Comments (0)

Meme Too

I avoid many of the pass-along-quiz memes, partly because they can sometimes probe to the point of inappropriate self-disclosure for a priest/professor. (You don’t want to know, and even if you did, I shouldn’t tell you some of those answers.) But since Danya noticed that I hadn’t played in this one, and tagged me for the “books” meme — and since few things are more appropriate than my disclosing my reading habits, I’ll take her up on it.

Number of books I own: You’ve got to be kidding. I’d guess several thousand; five? ten? Jane and Beth have first-hand experience with the office collection, but there are eight or nine bookshelves at home over and above the books at the workplace.

Last book I read: The last book I finished was Lemony Snicket: The Unauthorized Autobiography (I read through all the “Unfortunate Events” books in a fit of catching-up-with-Pippa before the new Harry Potter).

Last purchased: The Reformation: A History, by Diarmaid MacCullough; The Westminster Handbook of Patristic Theology, edited by John Anthony McGuckin; The Westminster Handbook to Origen, edited by John Anthony McGuckin. All three look terrific; I’m impressed with MacCullough’s ability to keep the countless elements of political, theological, cultural, geographic, even medical history in play while keeping the exposition readable, critical, and convincing. I’ll be recommending McGuckin for my Early Church History class next fall.

Books that mean a lot to me: As others have done, so I exclude sacred texts (stretching that to include the Book of Common Prayer).

The Complete Pelican Shakespeare I used to memorize passages from Shakespeare on my way to and from high school, a mile-and-a-half walk or so, learning about meter, diction, English history, love, death, honor, and truth.

Ulysses, by James Joyce. “Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead. . . .” Joyce breathed new life into the love of words I assimilated in my youth.

The Pleasures of Philosophy, by Will Durant. I doubt I would assent to most of what Durant advocates, but when I picked this up in a used-book store, I had little notion of how a world might make sense, or how philosophy could be beautiful.

The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, by Laurence Sterne. So rich and lovely , it makes me cry.

Nigger, by Dick Gregory. Two generations now know of Dick Gregory — if they know him at all — as a vaguely comic health huckster. This book broke my nose, it changed the way I look, the way I move in the world. I have not by any means gotten where I need to be; but almost forty years ago, I picked it up because I guessed I ought to, and Dick Gregory knocked a little truth into me.

Discipline and Punish, by Michel Foucault; The Postmodern Condition, by Jean-François Lyotard; Writing and Difference, by Jacques Derrida. I had not a clue, not the faintest notion, that the uncanny cosmos I always suspected of subsisting behind the façade of predictable, conventional everyday life could find words and point toward what may be thought where words fail you.

The Chosen, by Chaim Potok. I read a mountain of modern Jewish literature in the early seventies; this had the lovely effect of training me to recognize and cherish the possibility that people might care so much about God as to allow it to alter their behavior, without triggering the sense that I might be one of those people. (After all, I knew I wasn’t Jewish.) This illustrates God’s irrepressible sense of irony and loving mirth at the follies of human life.

Crossing to Safety, by Wallace Stegner. My life is in this novel, somewhere; I hope it’s in the parts that move my admiration, and I fear it’s in the parts that touch my pity.

It would be best for me to cite a book by a woman (I certainly love Austen, I admire Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, but these didn’t mark me as forcefully as the others). It would be best for me to cite a book from somewhere outside the West (I learned a grat deal from Nurbaksh’s In the Tavern of Ruin, from the Tao te-Ching, from Shusako Endo’s Silence; but I wouldn’t be telling the truth about myself if I claimed that these influenced me, shaped me to the same extent as the preceding works).

Probably others too, that I’ll add here or in the comments.

Since I’m late to this party, I won’t pick anyone in particular to come next — but if no one has asked you yet, and you’re feeling a little piqued, consider this an invitation to take up the meme.

Posted by AKMA at 10:37 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

June 29, 2005

Their Yahoo

I started playing with My Web 2.0 beta the other day, pretty soon after Caterina announced it on the Flickr blog.

It made a weak first impression on me, because — can you imagine! — someone else already had the nickname “AKMA.” That kinda dampens my whole interest in the thing. But I went along (I’m “rev_akma” there), searched a little, then saw something shiny, and wandered off to pursue it.

Today I went back to flesh out “my community,” but it turns out to be a cumbersome process, largely dependent on contacts from Yahoo Messenger, Yahoo Address Book, and Microsoft Outlook, none of which I use. Extra bother to generate yet another social network? Not yet worth the bother, and surely don’t want to spam my friends.

The magic of the Flickrfolk is strong, so I’m sure that something groovy is happening there. It’s just not yet happening in a way that leaps up and grabs me by the throat, like the neatness of the Game Neverending and Flickr.

Posted by AKMA at 08:18 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Page? Work?

I was writing about a website earlier today, and needed to use a word that indicated the individual chunks of textual goodness thereon. I wasn’t talking about whole pages — more about the stuff on the pages. I wasn’t talking only about words, either; you know I’m very concerned about the role of images in communication, too. The obvious word for the stuff about which I’m talking, in the business context, would be “content,” but Doc has scolded us often enough about using the word “content,” and even if I were inclined to defy Doc, “content” refers more to the aggregate of a bunch of the subjects about which I’m thinking.

Are they “works”? Sounds grandiose. Are they “pages”? That’s close, but not it exactly; it’s not the page-i-ness I’m trying to convey. If they were all one genre, I could say “short stories” or “villanelles” or “mash-ups.” But I’m trying to point to miscellaneous compositions, expressions, in diverse media, each hosted at a page address but not really identical to the page itself.

You know, a. . . . [fill in the blank].

Posted by AKMA at 05:12 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

Hat Tip to Doc

Trust Doc Searls to know more than most of the rest of us will ever dream that there is to know about FM radio. In a long, intricate explanation of FM signal strength, Doc unveils the clue to getting those low-power FM transmitters-for-your-portable-music device to work: “Make the antenna longer by adding a headphone extention cord: female at one end and male at the other. Put it between your audio player (iPod, Archos or whatever) and your transmitter. Stretch it out. The signal increase is remarkable.” Dave Winer attests, “It works.” Si has one of those gadgets; we’ll test it and see, but this sounds intensely helpful.

Posted by AKMA at 04:43 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 28, 2005

Next?

So, yesterday I finished off the final version of the Winslow-lecture essay (thanks for helpful feedback from David, Ellen, and Phil); I need to write my response to the other essays, and a short preface to the whole collection.

On July 10, I’m preaching at St. Luke’s (they usually tape Sunday sermons, to this time Jeneane may get her wish).

In three weeks, I give a presentation to the Ekklesia Project on how the commandments that pertain specifically to the divine-human interaction (Confession of faith in the one God, prohibition of idols, keeping hallowed God's name) relate to our current churchly and missional situation, especially — though not solely — in today’s North America. (I don’t know whether to weep or to thank Washington for providing in recent days such juicy tidbits for criticism: “ ‘[I]t’s important that we venerate the national symbol of our country,’ said Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah.”)

Then, about ten days later, I have a presentation to the Catholic Biblical Association; that’ll draw on my Winslow essay and on a previous article, but I need to mash-up the pieces and apply some new fillips on the synthesized whole. I’ll prepare this with an eye toward my presentation on doctrine and exegesis for the fall SBL meeting.

All the while, I should be hammering out my James commentary faster than I’ve been doing. Throw in some course prep, Disseminary upkeep and oversight, and family responsibilities; that’s the rest of my summer. But it’s good to have gotten one element squared away.

Posted by AKMA at 11:24 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

June 27, 2005

I Lied To A PhD Student

(No, not really, Cameron.)

Posted by AKMA at 09:14 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

She Rolls Her Eyes

The other night, I had a dream about Pippa’s art. When my recollection of the dream comes into focus, I had gone to a gallery where a prestigious juried exhibition was about to open. I brought one of Pippa’s works — in the dream it was a shallow cabinet that she had painted and decorated — to show it to the various volunteers, ushers, and other interested parties standing around before the opening. All were enthusiastically impressed, and one of the young, black-clad art-student types urged me to get her involved with some outstanding art instruction program, “because it’s already happening right there” (pointing at the painted cabinet). Eventually, I headed for the door so as not to intrude on the formal opening festivities, but as I was leaving, one of the curators touched my arm and told me, “If you can leave that with us, we will find a place for it in the exhibition.”

That’s when I woke up. Pippa, when later informed of this auspicious dream, grimaced and rolled her eyes.

Posted by AKMA at 05:27 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

This Is Cool

Someone wrote a script to search Flickr for the most recent photos posted that correspond to his most-recently-played audio tracks — with results that look like this. Someday features like this will be almost standard on blog-like pages; it calls to mind Marc Canter’s digital lifestyle aggregator in action.

Posted by AKMA at 11:36 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 26, 2005

Why I Am Not A Liberal

I’ve suggested a number of times that I’m not a liberal; I’m uncomfortable with the ways bedfellows get parceled out by the superficial horse-race-consciousness of theological partisanship (“And it’s Gay Bishop by a nose!”). A while back, I offered to spell out why I don’t fit with the faction to which I’m usually assigned; “I’m not a liberal, because. . .”

In what follows, I’ll be using the term “liberal” in a conversational way, not as a technical term in political theory, or U.S. electoral politics, or even in technical theology. Many people would be inclined to call me a liberal because I believe that the Church’s wisest way forward includes admitting lesbian and gay people to sanctified intimate relationships, and to the highest roles of church leadership; it’s that sense of the word “liberal” that does not fit.

• First, I don’t construe faith or theology as a discourse supplementary to the real, genuine, scientific accounts of truth. After science, philosophy, history, sociology, and psychology have sated themselves at the table of knowledge — theology does not come in late to gnaw on the problems that other discourses either can’t or don’t care to resolve.
  I’m not against scientific inquiry — I just confess the faith that the saints know something about the world that one doesn’t learn apart from life in the church. The gospel is not dispensable in deliberation about truth. When somebody begins talking about “what we all know now” (based on X or Y non-theological master discourse), I realize that they are talking about a “we” that operates with presuppositions I just don’t share.


• Second, I do not accept the premise that change and novelty are good in and of themselves. The church is a body that includes generations past as well as its present participants — and it must bear in mind its responsibility to generations yet unborn. Those of us active in the church this year constitute a relatively insignificant proportion of the church’s life, and it behooves us to show respect for the saints who have bequeathed this endeavor to us by not casually shucking off the life and teachings they have died to uphold, and by not impetuously imposing our will as a norm for future saints. We frame decisions in ways that show the maximal respect for all our forebears and all our children. Though the church can err, that’s not the same thing as the “liberal” notion that “up till this moment everything was a barbaric kludge, and now we’ve finally understood things right.” I affirm the need always to be ready to reassess the church’s teaching (especially on matters about which the church has never before undertaken comprehensive deliberation); I deny that the church needs to play the modern game of continual (illusory) self-reinvention.


• Third, my humanism is always conditioned by my theocentricity. Human beings are pretty cool, and our capacities extend beyond anyone’s imagination — but Protagoras to the contrary notwithstanding, we are not the measure of all things.


• So, fourth, God is not there to make us feel better or to affirm us as we are. We confess that we will be transformed in ways we neither control nor anticipate in advance. That implies that our selves bear witness to God’s truth not by the extent to which a hypothetical account of God assures us satisfactorily of our own goodness; rather, we bear witness to God’s truth by allowing that we will be changed apart from our desires (our desires themselves will be changed). If we can stipulate in advance what God must be willing to do, how God must relate to us in order to win our approval, we are no longer talking about God or faith as I understand them.
• Fifth: doubt, idiosyncracy, questioning, and freedom of choice all come after confession of faith and affirmation of trust in the wisdom of the saints. All too often, people treat doubt, skepticism, and questioning as though they were intrinsically virtuous; the romantic appeal of the fearless doubter will sell a lot of books, win a lot of votes, rack up big points in the people-pleasing business. I am not an Aufklärer, an Enlightenment thinker; I am a priest and theologian, a servant of a truth that did not originate with me. Yes, emphatically, I can and must question the church when I think it in error; but if my inclination to consider the church in error becomes a full-time occupation, I am probably worshipping a very different deity, one who looks an awfully lot like. . . me.
• Sixth, catholicity (the shared character of theological conviction) and unity matter more than individuality and unique authenticity. Yes, we’re all different (“I’m not”) — but our difference always contributes to a greater whole. An individuality that impairs our capacity to share, to sustain a lived connection with our neighbors, diminishes our humanity; those who celebrate their individuality by reveling in alienation misconstrue the meaning of being human. Yes, large numbers can exercise tyrannical short-sightedness and bigotry. Yes, the church shows some of that behavior. Bigotry constitutes a problem, though, not because all differences are beautiful, but because bigotry elevates locally-preferred grounds for association and connection to unduly general authority.

So, am I a liberal? If so, the term shows so much elasticity as to lack useful meaning except as a term of opprobrium. I may be wrong, I may be deluded, I may be many things — but I don’t understand how I can plausibly be labeled a liberal.

Posted by AKMA at 10:59 PM | Comments (9) | TrackBack

Nottingham

I’ve been asked what I think about the Anglican Consultative Council’s decision to suspend the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church of Canada until the next Lambeth Meeting (gathering of bishops) in 2008. There’s not much for me to say, because things played out pretty much as I’d have anticipated. I was surprised, in fact, that the vote to suspend was as close as it turned out to be.

The Episcopal Church compiled a respectable case for its having reflected long and diligently about topics pertaining to sexuality. I’d have wished it a little more thorough, with some different points of emphasis, but my colleagues did a strong job of making a case for the Episcopal Church’s stand. At the same time, a large part of that good case involved demonstrating that the Episcopal Church has been arguing (internally) about sexuality for forty years, while the consistent point of the Windsor Report and the Primates (and now the ACC) has been that the Episcopal Church has made decisions that affect other provinces without the consultation and shared deliberation that might render such decisions intelligible to those others. Sure, we’ve been talking to ourselves for forty years, but we haven’t been taking sufficient part in inter-provincial theological reasoning. Our strong report doesn’t really affect that claim, and indeed the more forceful a case we make that we’ve really worked on this a long time and resolved many of the glitches, the less excusable our relative reticence in global discussion.

Did we try? I don’t know — but as we constantly ask other provinces to listen to us, to the voices of the lesbian and gay sisters and brothers whose lives and ministries we uphold, we owe it to all concerned also to listen to our unconvinced sisters and brothers around the world who firmly maintain that we haven’t listened well enough to them.

It looks to me as though the Consultative Council reluctantly made a decision that the Episcopal Church can’t get along by being brash or headstrong — even if it may be right. I do not estimate that Lambeth 2008 will be markedly more favorably disposed toward tolerating the North American churches’ decisions regarding sexuality. We have three years to find out, however, and to figure out what it’ll mean if the Lambeth bishops finalize what the Windsor Report, the Primates, and the Consultative Council have begun.

Posted by AKMA at 09:57 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

June 25, 2005

History, Cartoons, and Legos

I’ve been working on the historical narrative, layout, navigation, and framing for the whole project; I set up a Flickr account to house Disseminary-related images (distinct from my personal account, which makes sense, really). from now on, I’ll upload Disseminary pictures to the specific Flickr site.

So, at this point I have both images and narration for the first few frames of the history, the portion on first-century Judaism. I lack a bridging frame that illustrates the ambiguity and fluidity of “Christian”-“Judaic” identity in the first- and second-century. From that, I’ll modulate to the story of Ignatius. I need a couple of doctrinal pictures (which I probably won’t make headway on this weekend, with god-daughters visiting and a general backlog of work to be done), then the execution scene. Margaret and I went to the movies yesterday, and when shopping for snacks we came across a Pez Lion that’ll join the wooden Noah’s-Ark lion for the martyrdom of Ignatius. From Ignatius, then, I’ll modulate to Polycarp, and from Polycarp to Justin Martyr (for whom I’m envisioning some good learning-from-philosophers scenes). Then Irenaeus, Clement of Alexandria and Origen, Tertullian, Perpetua and Felicitas. . . .

But the point is that I have an intro-entry page, now, with continuous links through first-century Judaism, and a path forward into the early Christian figures I’ve been working on. Not yet what Amy asked for, but it’s on its way.

Posted by AKMA at 03:28 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 24, 2005

Music and Money

At a certain point, it only bores and annoys people if you repeat the same things over and over (unless you’re a “pundit,” in which case people eagerly expect you to repeat yourself ad infinitum) — so I’ve resisted the temptation to hammer away at the recording-packaging-and-distribution industry’s ludicrously wrong-headed approach to the digital music transition.

This morning, though, I stumbled over to the P2Pnet blog’s application of economic analysis to the digital distribution of music files. Essentially, the author argues that an honor-system of payments would probably generate ample remuneration to encourage artists and recording. I’m not entirely convinced, but in a comment, the redoubtable Julian Bond suggests what seems to me the overwhelmingly superior suggestion: “Adopt the AllofMp3 model, pack it with every audio track ever recorded and then sell the tracks at the equivalent of 10c each for 192K VBR. In other words, get rid of the bits that annoy about iTMS et al (DRM, limited catalogue, low quality) and then see what price the market will bear and how much price elasticity there is.”

Case in point: the other day, Nate asked me about Ben Harper. I commended his work highly, and wanted to point out a couple of particular tracks. Now, because of DRM nuisances and high cost, I’m not about to download those tracks from iTunes Music Store — but if I could just pull them down from a legit online source for about a quarter per track, I would without a moment’s hesitation just buy the tracks for him and send them along. I wouldn’t be tempted to send him tracks that I’ve already bought. The “right thing” of buying each file is so easy, at that price point, that the benefit of clean files, full metadata, legitimate file ownership, etc., make buying a preferable alternative to unauthorized downloading.

I’m just saying. And I’m still trying to turn up copies of Tom Robinson’s “1967,” and of Jools Holland and the Millionaires’ first album, from whatever source.

Posted by AKMA at 10:46 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

No Snowman Just Falcons

For the second year, a family of peregrine falcons has nested at the top of one of the brick columns of the Evanston Public Library. The library staff has set up a FalconCam that uploads a picture of the nest every two minutes during daylight library hours. We’ve become falcon junkies; Margaret and I trade messages several times a day, noting exciting developments, checking for the adult birds’ presence, observing the personalities of the fledglings. . . .

Posted by AKMA at 09:29 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

June 23, 2005

A Bit of Toronto

My sweetheart gave me a Father’s Day gift of the Toronto Subway typeface that we had admired so much, and I — in delighted gratitude, and as a reminder of the glorious time we had in Accordion City, the home of the Flackster PR excellence — redesigned my banner.

I had meant to complete my “why I am not a liberal (theologian)” entry and perhaps even comment on the goings-on in Nottingham (ably cartooned by Dave Walker), but life intervened.

Posted by AKMA at 10:45 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

June 22, 2005

“Desecration” Again

Today, the House passed the following proposed amendment to the Constitution: “The Congress shall have power to prohibit the physical desecration of the flag of the United States.” Now, the word “desecration” has no force unless something is “sacred” beforehand, and since so many elected officials make public protestations of their ardent Christian faith, we can safely assume that they led the resistance to defining any symbol of national identity as “sacred” — can’t we?

I may be extra sensitive about the issue, since I’m going to give a presentation on the first three commandments in a few weeks — but if those commandments mean anything, don’t they absolutely and unequivocally forbid their adherents from elevating anything or anyone other than God to the status of “sacred”?

Posted by AKMA at 04:19 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

June 21, 2005

James and Jacob

Old co-conspirator Dwight Peterson pursued the “James”/“Jacob” question more diligently than I, with some intriguing results. First, the translation “James” seems to have prevailed from the time of Tyndale and Wycliffe. Second, even the languages that don’t supply a starkly different form for the New Testament author tend to differentiate the Old Testament patriarch in some way: German “Jakob” OT, “Jakobus” NT; the Vulgate, “Iacob” OT, “Iacobus” NT. Likewise, he notes that the French Bible Jerusalem in his collection identifies the OT figure as “Jacob,” while the NT figure is “Jacques.” And of course, the New Testament and the Septuagint apply the name Ιακωβ (undeclined) to the patriarch (and to Jesus’ grandfather), but Ιακωβος (the declinable form) to all the companions of Jesus who go by this name.

Quite intriguing. It clearly makes no vast difference in most ways — an apostle by any other name would remain in the New Testament canon, even if the letter may be pseudepigraphical — but it suggests a lot about the role that presuppositions play in biblical interpretation. Even scholars who wear their non-theological identity proudly collaborate with the linguistic proclivity to mark a sharp rupture between the “Christian” James and the “Jewish” Jacob.

Posted by AKMA at 12:51 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

Today’s Episode

Last night, Pippa shifted into concentrated-idea mode, and presented Margaret and me with the cartoon above. She wanted us to guess the caption; I don’t recall whether Margaret had a guess, but mine was way off the mark. In case your eyesight is as frail as mine, the correct caption is “I see the gas prices have affected you, too.”

Posted by AKMA at 12:27 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 20, 2005

Back to James

I have two — well, make that four or five — big assignments looming, one of which returns me to the Epistle of James to spruce up and flesh out the commentary on which I’ve been working. Last summer, I mentioned the oddity that English translations render the putative author’s name “James” rather than the more apposite “Jacob”; Now that I’m at home with my commentaries, I observe that few scholars do more than note that “James” stands in for the Greek form (actually, one of two attested Greek forms) — much less reflect on the appropriateness of rendering that name as “James.” The problem wouldn’t arise, of course, in a German context where both the apostle and the patriarch are identified as “Jakobus.” Is the solution to the mystery as simple as the power of custom (in English) reinforced by conformity to German-language standards?

Posted by AKMA at 01:25 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

June 19, 2005

Words’ Roots

Tom is right — the Etymonline site provides a fantastic resource. I especially appreciate the caveat on the main page: “Etymologies are not definitions; they're explanations of what our words meant and how they sounded 600 or 2,000 years ago.” For some reason, theological (and perhaps especially homiletical) discourses show a lamentable proclivity toward the etymological fallacy. . . .

Posted by AKMA at 04:01 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Where’s Tom?

Once upon a time, when our family lived in New Haven (and listened regularly to the radio news on WCBS), my two-year-old son Nate, infant Si, and beloved spouse Margaret collaborated to obtain a Father’s Day cake for me. Not just any cake, mind you, but an official Tom Carvel ice cream cake, of the sort that Carvel sold as “a whale of a cake — for a whale of a Dad.” (The Carvel’s site reveals that this design bears the name, “Fudgie the Whale.” Whatever.)

This afternoon, Pippa proudly brought up from the basement a cake she had frosted for me, to bring back fond memories of that long, long-ago Father’s Day before she was even a glimmer in anyone’s eye:

Thanks Pippa, Si,and Nate, and thanks to Margaret, who (as the greatest Mom ever) always shows me how to be a better Dad. . . .

Later: One of the benefits of the Net comes when helpful readers join in to correct mistaken claims. For instance, no sooner had Margaret read this post than she assured me that I was off by a year, that the cake in question had been given me when Nate was 1, and we were preparing to move from our home in the basement of the Berkeley Center at Yale Divinity School to our housing in downtown New Haven. She messaged me, “You had just finished your M.Div., after a very difficult semester in which you had had mono. Then, at the end of the semester, in the post-school let-down period, in addition to recovering from mono, you developed terrific back problems. You were stuck on the bed, where I set Nate with you, briefly, to go out and purchase a cake. I was in a state! Getting out of the parking lot of the Carvel store with the cake, I backed up into somebody’s new truck. I made no mark on the truck, but the guy was massively upset and angry, since it was brand new.”

Pippa, however, recalled the photos of the event and (though she was not even there! and notice what a great job she did in reproducing the original cake!) showed that Nate himself was only a few months old on the Father’s Day in question — thus, my first as a father. So the cake in question was not a Fudgie, and was given when Nate wasn’t even one year old. It was still a whale of a cake, from Carvel Ice Cream, and I’m still thankful that Margaret went to such lengths to obtain it for me.

Posted by AKMA at 12:39 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

June 17, 2005

Aha!

Found the wooden lion we were looking for. . . .

Posted by AKMA at 09:27 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

June 16, 2005

Ten Hostile Leopards

Ignatius of Antioch led the Christians of one of the largest cities in the Empire. We first meet him, though, after he’s already been arrested. An impressive guard seems to have escorted him to Rome; he refers to himself as “being bound amidst ten leopards, even a company of soldiers, who only wax worse when they are kindly treated.” On his way, he wrote a number of letters that have survived the centuries — to the Ephesians, the Magnesians, the Trallians, the Romans, the Philadelphians, the Smyrnaeans, and one to Bishop Polycarp of Smyrna. Tradition (and decent probability) indicate that he was executed in Rome, apparently being fed to lions.

(The execution scene is yet to come, and I’ll probably work up a frame or two of doctrinal illustrations.)

Posted by AKMA at 04:35 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Next?

Yesterday Pippa and I assembled the elements for an Ignatius of Antioch sequence in the Lego-Church-history endeavor. We’ll shoot a frame or two today, if the lighting favors us. We’re stuck, for now, on the “lion” part — the piece to which madame l. pointed in a comment looks like a Duplo, the double- or triple-size Lego gateway toy for toddlers. While it would certainly be able to devour Ignatius, we would have to wonder why it didn’t go ahead and eat the whole Coliseum. I ordered a Lego “tiger,” which I expect I can touch up in Photoshop, but it won’t arrive for a week or so. Pippa remembers a wooden lion somewhere in the basement, and we may resort to that.

But we’re set to go with Ignatius’s trip to Rome under guard, and Ignatius as letter-writer. I expect to illustrate a couple of points of doctrine on which Ignatius touches, too. Maybe today, maybe tomorrow.

Posted by AKMA at 07:03 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 15, 2005

From Way Out of Town

We hustled back to Evanston so that we could catch our beloved friend Jon Walters passing through town with his foster son Mangala (from Sri Lanka). Jon and Margaret went through college together; now Jon is professor of Religion and Asian Studies at Whitman College, spending loads of time in Sri Lanka, whence he brought a foster son to spend some time in the U.S.

Jon and Mangala spent the afternoon and evening with us, renewing their friendship with Si from the days when Si visited Sri Lanka, and with us from the good ol’ days at Bowdoin. Just wonderful to see Jon again, to meet Mangala, and for Si and Mangala to connect up. . . .

Posted by AKMA at 09:13 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

June 14, 2005

Meme Acceptance

I often try to avoid “everyone’s doing it” internet chains, but since Frank challenged me to name my six favorite songs, I’ll bite (I have a complex rationalization for why I’d participate in this one, but not others — but I can’t imagine that you’re interested).

Six favorites. That’s tough, given the sheer quantity of tune-age that’s flowed around me over the past skillion years. I have to pick something by Bruce Springsteen, so in a semi-arbitrary pick from among equally beloved selections, I’ll call “Badlands.” I have to pick something from the soul singles that first beguiled me into listening to AM radio; I thought I could pick something by the Supremes, or Gladys Knight and the Pips, to get an early start on gender balance, but for honesty’s sake I think I have to go off the Motown label to name Ray Charles’s “What’d I Say.” That’s not one of the songs that hooked me on the radio, but it’s a classic. I’m calling a dead heat for post-Beatles John Lennon’s “Instant Karma” and George Harrison’s “My Sweet Lord,” both powerful songs that came to me at an impressionable time (count only as one). I owe Elvis Costello a pick; his Imperial Bedroom and King of America are my favorite albums of his, but the one song I put forward will be “Man Out of Time.” The Who: “Pure and Easy.” Michelle Shocked, “Holy Spirit,” from the Victoria Williams tribute album. There, that’s six (sort of).

That leaves out too much: the Indigo Girls, “Power of Two” (coming out ahead because all of Rites of Passage weighs so equally); the Pogues’ “Fairytale of New York”; Bob Dylan, goodness gracious, uh,“Tangled Up in Blue” (or “Buckets of Rain”); Billy Bragg, “Waiting For the Great Leap Forward”; Kirsty Maccoll, “Walking Down Madison” (though since her death, “Soho Square” resonates especially sadly); Rev. F. C. Barnes and Rev. Janice Brown, “Rough Side of the Mountain”; I eliminated Charles Mingus’s “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat” as not a “song” in the sense of the assignment; likewise Philip Glass’s “Koyanisqaatsi.” Of course, U2’s “Gloria.” The Kinks — hmmm, “Misfits”? Joni Mitchell, “Hejira”? The Jam, “That’s Entertainment” (the version from the album release, not the demo that often appears on greatest-hits compilations). The Stones: I think I’ll nominate “Can’t You Hear Me Knocking,” since it draws on a variety of their strengths, but my first Stones song back in the day was “Jumping Jack Flash.” Talking Heads, “The Great Curve.”

And there’s so much more. Ask me again.

Posted by AKMA at 09:46 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Home Again, Home Again

Our airport shuttle was late, and we ran into some flight delays, but we’re back home safe with Pippa and Bea (Si won’t be home from work till later in the evening). We already miss Toronto.

Posted by AKMA at 05:16 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

So Long

Yesterday we kept pretty busy; Margaret had a short nap, but I was using that time to sort and upload pictures to Flickr, and didn’t want to take time to blog. Even yesterday afternoon, we felt the end of our vacation creeping up on us.

Sunday, though, we made our first stop the Allan Gardens, a conservatory a few blocks east of our hotel. We had a hard time getting into the conservatory; it turns out that bits of it are closed, and the doors that are open to the general public are hard to locate, and there’s hardly any signage (Margaret and I are willing to consult — at very reasonable rates — with any institution that wants to spruce up its signage, because we’re so weary of laboring to decipher unintelligible signs, or negotiate the total absence of signs). Once we got in and clarified the permissible boundaries with a cheerful painter, though, we relished exploring the garden’s displays of beautiful flora. Margaret noted that plant life suggests not so much an evolutionary theory of intelligent design as of whimsical design, pointing to the “Old Man of the Andes” cactus and the transgressive excess of some of the orchids.

From Allan Gardens we headed northwest to the Royal Ontario Museum, partly on Michael’s recommendation, and partly because I had seen posters advertising the exhibition of “Leonardo, Michelangelo, and the Renaissance in Florence.” Unfortunately, through a bewilderingly complex chain of confusions and associations, I had mistaken the venue for the Florentine exhibition, which (as you can see perfectly well if you clicked on the link) is the National Gallery in Ottawa — rather further than we’d intended to walk.

Fortunately, the parts of the ROM that weren’t substituting for a non-present exhibition of Florentine painting more than made up for that absence. The “Feathered Dinosaurs” exhibit (the link leads to the San Diego Natural History Museum’s site; the Royal Ontario hasn’t devoted much web-savvy to publicizing this exhibit) presented tons of information and conundrums about saurid and avian evolution, all of which tickled Margaret and me. We don’t resist evolution, nor sponsor any of the theologically-motivated rivals, but we do take a fascinated interest in the rhetoric of factuality, conjecture, error, and polemics in controverted scientific topics. We’d have bought a book and some tawdry promotional gear from the exhibit, but the only available book was too expensive and too technical for our target readership. ROM seems not to understand the commercial power of a fascinating exhibit (and anything involving dinosaurs).

The ROM also has a handsome Art Deco room, some beguiling medieval representations of the Madonna and Child, and the prospect of a tremendous addition when the Michael Lee-Chin Crystal (designed by Daniel Liebeskind) is finished (walk-through movies here).

We found a late lunch, Margaret and I each took a nap, we headed out for dinner, came back to the hotel (ascertaining that Si’s first day at his first job went very smoothly), and reluctantly yielded to the inevitability that we had to sleep some before our last morning of Toronto vacation.

That’s now. And believe me, we’ve had a spectacular time, and we’re going to remember these days vividly, and we’ll miss the delightful time we had here. Now, though, off to breakfast and packing. . . .

Posted by AKMA at 06:55 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

June 12, 2005

Twenty-Three

“Twenty-three” is not a number of legend, not an intensely symbolic number or a quantity hallowed by fathomless association. Nonetheless, I’m feeling pretty proud about our twenty-third anniversary today, and am very excited to be having such a marvelous time spending it in a relaxing, refreshing, satisfying way.

We started out yesterday with a quick expedition to the north of our hotel, a few blocks east and a few blocks west. During this stroll we encountered again the mysterious phenomenon of Toronto’s “Look Point” signs which, to a visiting pedestrian, mean less than nothing.

Margaret and I may not be globetrotting cosmopolitans on the scale of, say, Joi Ito, but neither are we are provincial rubes, and we spend a lot of time contemplating problems of signification and information design. We studied this sign and its environment for a long spell, but could make nothing of it. We pushed the button on the street pole, but nothing happened that seemed to us to call for looking or pointing. (We subsequently learned from our native informants that back in the day, Torontonians would approach certain marked crosswalks and extend their arm and finger as a way of communicating to drivers that “I’m crossing this street, and if you run me over you’re in a heap of trouble.” I withhold comment on whether one might more easily prevent such accidents by, for instance, simply putting a red light or stop sign at the crosswalk, or using the globally-popular “zebra crossing” design — but for the rest of the day, we played it safe by pointing at something every time we crossed a street, lest some loophole-hunting driver feel free to regard us as fair game. Evidently the custom has died out, with the introduction of flashing yellow lights and with an influx of new citizens who do not understand the customs of antiquity, but who wants to take a chance that some crazed driver might be a stickler for traffic laws?)

We proceeded from our morning stroll out to The Beaches, a neighborhood where at least one distinguished PR flack can be found. On our way, we noted the rigorous safety precautions taken by the Toronto Transit Commission, and admired the lettering in the subway stations (which has been fontified by Quadrat, available from MyFonts). We were greeted by Charlie, whom we had long waited to meet, and Ruairi, whose advent in this world was so breathlessly anticipated by all the readers of Blogsprogs (by the way, for those keeping score, since we saw Cameron two summers ago in London, we have now met two of the blogsprogs, and need only to track down Sawyer to complete our blog-relative duties)— and were fêted with a delicious snack that the O’Connor Clarkes had made specially in our honor. Eventually, Lily returned from a party and shared with us her very-impressive sixth birthday,

and all took a wonderful long walk from chez O’Connor Clarke to a ravine park. that leads to a cozy small business area. Beyond the businesses lies another park, though — this one, a beachfront park, to which we repaired for a glimpse of Lake Ontario (we waved to Nate and Liz in Rochester). The beach offered a chance for a generous meander down the boardwalk, complete with a stop for stone-skipping, and at the end of a wonderful afternoon with Leona, Michael, and the younger generation, we hurried east on Queen Street to catch a streetcar back to our hotel, where we were to meet Joey for dinner.

Joey led us through one of Toronto’s Chinatown neighborhoods, past the Ontario College of Art and Design (where we had the opportunity to evaluate the Sharp Centre from ground level), to Queens West, where we ate a scrumptious vegan dinner at Fressen. Joey thought that we might want to go to one of our subsequent dinners at Kalendar, Toronto’s best restaurant for a first date (he took Wendy there, so who can doubt that evaluation?), so we proceeded north and east to Little Italy to identify Kalendar’s location.

Then we wandered further east on College till we decided it was time to return to The Big Chill for dessert and music criticism. For some reason, Margaret and I had gotten tired by midnight or thereabouts, so Joey showed us back to the Metropolitan, where we collapsed in happy exhaustion, full and footweary and intensely thankful for our marvelous friends.

Today is the actual exact anniversary of our wedding, twenty-three years ago, and we’ve mostly just slept and brunched (and now, “blogged”). We never dreamed our lives together would be anything vaguely like they have been, and I feel a wee bit mystified at how I’ve managed to sustain my own part in so complex and demanding an occupation as “husband and father”; luck and persistence will carry one a long way, I suppose. But this afternoon, while my sweetheart dozes and our children look after one another, and our friends return to their already-busy enterprises, I sit down to write that there has been no gift more overwhelmingly wonderful than the affection and trust and support and love and encouragement that Margaret has offered me for twenty-three years of joyous marriage (and nigh onto four years of patient waiting for the wedding!) — graces that have been reflected and intensified by the shared gifts of Nate and Si and Pippa, of Juliet and Jennifer, so many lovely relatives and friends, near and far. What a glorious thing you all have done, helping us make it so far, so sweetly! Thank, you, thank you, with tears in my eyes and an irrepressible joy in my heart, to all of you — and especially, today, to the most wonderful love anyone might ever hope to share life with, my dearest Margaret.

Posted by AKMA at 01:56 PM | Comments (12) | TrackBack

June 11, 2005

Take a Note

I’m not sure this will make its way into the notes of the essay I’m just finishing up, but this interview between Mark Derv and Erik Davis overflows with provocative notions that I’ll want to follow up later.

Posted by AKMA at 10:56 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack