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January 31, 2007

Mad About Teaching

Margaret points me to The Story’s interview with Rafe Esquith, superstar teacher in the LA public school system. I haven’t heard this particular show, but he’s making the rounds on public radio these days, supporting his book Teach Like Your Hair’s On Fire; I’ve heard him on one or two of these, and he struck me as the genuine article (or at least a reasonable facsimile thereof).

I’d say more, but I have to get ready for Terry Bowers’s ordination to the diaconate.

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January 30, 2007

On-the-Cuff Calculations

I was interested to read that one reason that Mr. Bush’s War has taken relatively few mortalities in the U.S. Armed Forces involved the significant improvements in military medical treatment. If what Dr. Blimes reports is sound, the ratio of injuries to deaths in the Iraq War reaches 16:1 (cut to 8:1 if one only counts combat injuries, as the Pentagon would prefer that Blimes and others do). By way of comparison, the story in Inside Higher Ed sets the ratio for Vietnam at 2.8:1 and for World War II at 1.6:1.

So let’s do some rough-and-ready figuring. Last time I checked, the Pentagon has acknowledged 3,072 U.S. military deaths. During the same time, the Pentagon acknowledges 22,834 soldiers wounded; under the Vietnam standard for wounds-to-deaths ratio, that would correspond to 8,155 combat deaths, more than five thousand more than have actually died. That’s using a pretty narrow accounting of wounds and deaths, too.

To the extent that news reporting foregrounds U.S. military combat deaths only as a measure of the mortal costs of Bush’s War, tghey actually attenuate the war’s unpopularity. If we heard more about what we might call Vietnam-equivalent deaths (8,155 and counting) or — to avoid relying on hypotheticals — the actual numbers of seriously wounded soldiers, and the effect of their wounds on families, how popular would we estimate the plan to escalate the war to be?

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Mark says:

Another statistic I'd like to hear more about is mental and emotional injuries. It can be easier to come back and hold down a civilian job when you've lost an arm than it is if you're having trouble reentering society because of mental trauma.

Without wanting to calibrate the relative scales of suffering, I’d second your interest in the psychological/spiritual casualties of the war. NPr has been covering this recently, reporting on Pentagon officials’ apparent callousness toward soldiers with mental illness.

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January 29, 2007

On Behalf of the Ox

Today was a full day for me, with committee work in the morning, then preaching and mass, then a course planning meeting over lunch, then the NT II field trip to the library. I was a little stressed out about the sermon, as it falls into the category of “things I wish I had more time to work out,” but the service went fine.

Margaret left today (or rather, she’s waiting to take off at Midway as I type). A two-day visit doesn’t accomplish everything a longer stay might, but it beats another five weeks of separation.

Every scribe who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven is like the master of a household who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old.

In the name of God Almighty, the Holy Trinity on high — Amen.

Yes, but when this householder brings out the new and old things, what does she do with them? I trust that we heirs of the Anglican tradition can agree that the new and old were not ordained of Christ simply to be gazed upon or carried about, but that we should duly use them. (For the benefit of those who haven’t yet studied their Reformation church history, that’s the way that the Church of England’s Articles of Religion characterize the proper role of the sacraments.) We should duly use the new and the old, and the question of what counts as “duly using” can’t be resolved in advance by a particular rubric or canon, not by a text from Scripture or a codicil in the Seabury Customary (not even in Ritual Notes). Our manner of duly using new and old in our life together depends on the capacity to discern what befits our common life, what strengthens, what conserves, and what glorifies God.

It does us no good to try to suppress the new; newness, as the gospel stories remind us, is a gift from God and a defining characteristic of Jesus’ effective presence. He brings a new teaching, with authority; he offers new wine in new wineskins; he brings us into unity with God through a new covenant; and these number only a few of the new blessings made known to us in Jesus. Newness surprises the church, disrupts the church, infuses and invigorates the church, but newness never departs from the church. In that sense, the hymn text gets things quite wrong when it suggests that the church is beset by change, as though change were an unwelcome imposition upon Jesus’ disciples. Contrariwise, the church of God in every age embraces change, insofar as those changes bespeak the Spirit’s salutary activity.

We embrace the Spirit’s life-giving renewal of the church, as the gift of new life does not annihilate the old, nor annul it, but brings the old and familiar to us afresh. The householder brings out new things along with old; that which seems unnervingly daring today may look horribly staid a few years hence, and that which seemed unendurably ancient may have preserved for us vitally important resources for our adapting along with the church. When Thomas re-introduced Aristotelian philosophy to the church, rival theologians attacked him as a dangerous radical; this morning, he may seem to you more like a fusty old stick-in-the-mud. Neither of these perspectives pays fitting attention to the care with which Thomas interwove Scripture and doctrine, philosophy and spirituality, into a banner that boldly announces the glory of God, the integrity of creation, the Spirit’s wisdom and the saving grace of Jesus Christ our Lord.

That integration of old and new comes to visual expression in the image of the “Triumph of St. Thomas.” In a typical version of this image, Francesco Traini represents Thomas receiving messages from apostles and evangelists, from Plato and Aristotle, directly from Jesus! — and he reflects that wisdom from the pages of the book he displays in his lap, transmitting that to the multitudes who gather at his feet. And as a matter of interest, the text he displays reads is not (as in our window) the Summa Theologica, “Veritatem mediabitur guttur meum, et labia mea detestabuntur impium”: “My mouth will speak truth, and impiety is detestable to my lips” — he quotes from Proverbs 8:7.

In this illustration, the new is the old, the old is made new. That, sisters and brothers, is who Jesus is — Wisdom begotten, Truth proceeding from the Father, and the image of the invisible God. And here at the table, here in our classrooms, we grow into that image, deepening our capacity to receive from of old and to transmit what is new, receiving adoption as children of God while we grow up into the full stature of that Christ. Duly using old and new treasures, discerning the role of our inheritance and our innovation, we immerse ourselves in Wisdom’s radiance, welcoming God’s glory in our lives, and showing it forth transformed as particular intimations of the One True Wisdom.

Amen

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January 28, 2007

Proud Day

Often enough, Pippa delights us by her imaginative participation on family life — such as the day she manufactured a black cloth moustache:

This morning, she delighted us by affirming her conscientious participation in the life of the congregation, serving in the office of Junior Chorister. She indulged us by permitting Richard Kieckhefer to take some pictures of her with the choirmaster Jonathan Scarozza, Margaret, and me after the service.

Lest it not be utterly clear, we’re awfully proud of her.

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Breathe Deeply, Too

Margaret’s here for her last visit before her exams (at Duke they’re “preliminary exams,” other places “comprehensive exams,” either way “the last essay exams she’s likely ever to take, and for that matter she hasn’t taken any in years beforehand”). We’re attuned to the very high probability that she’ll pass with flying colors, but the stakes and the contingencies amply warrant a degree of anxiety, which we’re working on strategies for disarming.

Speaking very strictly for myself, I was always much more impressed by exams that demonstrated articulate familiarity with a topic than those that tried to replicate the content of a research paper (more or less successfully). I envision being stuck in an elevator with a doctoral candidate and some other scholar, and expecting that the doctoral student wil sound as though she knows her business. In an elevator, you don’t need a full bibliography; you need a good perspective on things. So explaining and articulating are two attainable and impressive goals.

The other point we’re coaching her on involves remembering that her committee will involve at least one person who’s relatively ignorant about each area she’s covering. If she writes the exam to explain that topic to the least-well-informed reader, she can then use the oral to demonstrate her more nuanced apprehension of the topic.

By keeping the “clear explanation to the less-well-informed” function in view, we hope to fend off the sorts of tension and brain-lock that would entail the most evident problem for her exams. Of course, every institution (and every committee and department) varies, so our strategy won’t apply equally well to all dissertators (who themselves vary; Margaret, for instance, simply can’t do the “take a practice exam” approach).

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January 27, 2007

Preaching: Don't Kite Checks

(Foreword: I frequently think of advice about preaching when I hear sermons that instantiate counter-examples of the principle I’m propounding, and since I blog among people with whom I also worship, I end up not blogging what I thought, so as not to be perceived as criticizing this or that particular sermon or preacher. Last week’s sermon at St. Luke’s bore no relation to the following jeremiad.)

My students can hardly have sat through a whole term of one of my classes without having heard me insist, at some point, “Don’t write checks you can’t cash.” I’m not solely offering sound financial advice (though evidently clergy need a reminder about this one from time to time), I’m trying to help students with their preaching by prodding them to acknowledge the difference between “things I can claim on the strength of my own study and research” and “something I read in a book” or, sadder still, “what clergy, as experts, know.”

You can’t really blame students and clergy for eliding these categories. The church wants people who graduate from seminary to be able to speak with authority on theological topics, on the Bible (weekly in sermons), on all sorts of things; at the same time, the church offers few incentives to study and think critically, and tends to reward people who can speak with glib confidence about what “scholars have concluded” or whatever bosh they want. Not every seminary can offer a curriculum that guides its graduates toward comfortably critical assessment of theological topics. Under the circumstances, compliant tempers will tend to assert the truth of what they learned in an introductory class, or in the latest book they read, or in the interview they heard on “Fresh Air” or “Speaking of Faith” the other day.

The problem arises when claims that preachers may have apprehended only partially, or which may not have been well-founded in the first place, or which were widely-held at one point but which have fallen into scholarly disfavor, are presented as solid facts (in sermons, study groups, and so on). I’m not referring here to partisan disagreements, though these will intensify the problem; I’m talking about circumstances where a preacher asserts something with a surety incommensurate with what she or he can back up critically-evaluated knowledge. Someone with a conservative view of the authorship of Colossians can expound that text in a way that communicates both the confidence that Paul wrote the letter and the awareness of some of the problems with that claim. Someone who just knows that Paul wrote Colossians risks not only being wrong, but being willfully wrong for bad reasons that he or she opted not to deal with.

All of this goes double — more than double, square it or cube it — for “he must have been thinking” or “feeling” points. Look, I’ve spent nearly thirty years in very close communion with Margaret, and only rarely would I venture to state firmly what she “must have been thinking,” and even then I’d frequently be subject to error. Telling a congregation what Moses or Judith (yes, I know, “when was the last time you heard a sermon on Judith?”) or Jesus or Paul must have been thinking almost always means displacing some of the preacher’s fantasies onto some alleged historical figure. Not good historiography, not good homiletics, and not good for anyone's soul.

If there’s some novel (or traditional) idea that tickles your homiletical fancy, but you don’t have the time or inclination to examine it for soundness, please think twice about preaching it as true. There are lots of ways to qualify claims without waffling; careful use of words such as “if,” careful restriction of your claims to warrantable assertions (“I was taught in seminary that. . . .” or “I’m intrigued by the possibility that. . .” or some such conditional rhetoric will begin to do that work. More to the point, cultivate the humility that will allow you to stand before a congregation without posing as a greater authority figure than you can back up with real scholarship. Say what you mean, speaking from something you know, and people will hear a difference, the saints will affirm your wisdom, and you’ll be building up the truth. Insofar as it’s been given em to know the truth, that is.

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January 26, 2007

Count It All Loss

I hereby endorse the Chris Locke weight loss program. Pippa’s been after me about my waistline for a few weeks now (yeah, Joi too) — this would be the least I can do.

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January 25, 2007

Revolution?

LHB points to a Stylus “Top Ten Beatles Songs for Lapsed Beatles Fans” list, reminding me that no matter how compromised they may look in jaded retrospect, those very few years of productive creativity effected incalculable changes in the pop music world. Since Nate is studying popular music with a musicologist who specializes on the Beatles, I wonder how this list sounds to him (to anyone, for that matter).

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Headway

I’e been wrestling with the question of how to frame the “postmodern Christians” essay (and Margaret rightly reminds me to be skeptical about claims pertaining to “the postmodern age,” as though Euro-American and global cultures had unambiguously and necessarily modulated to a different era with fundamentally different conditions for thought and practice). For a while I worked with the tentative title, “ ‘How Will This Be?’ — Possibility, Compulsion, and Postmodern Christians,” the force of which aimed at Mary’s response to the Annunciation as neither a facile affirmation nor a dubious refusal, but an expression of interested, patient, inquiry. I wanted to develop that as a paradigm for “postmodern” Christians’ faith: neither asserting as flat propositions the truths of faith, nor jettisoning them as incredible fabulations, but persisting with them despite their apparent impossibility.

But the alternative title “ ‘The Way’ Out of No Way” wouldn’t let go of my imagination. That title points me toward Lyotard’s “The Strength of the Weak” article, as I said yesterday, toward pursuing Christian faith as a way rather than a science. Such a way does not repudiate knowing, study, critical reflection, or truth-claims, but it affirms them in a context inseparable from a practice of discipleship — charity, patience, service, and fidelity. I think that converges with the other essay-notion’s attention to disarming forced binary choices, as well. We’ll see what happens next.

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January 24, 2007

Mark Your Calendars

Nate will make his academic-conference debut this spring at the 2007 Great Lakes Chapter Annual Conference of the College Music Society, the music-theory professional organization. Working title is “Deck of Trick Chords: Tonal Analysis and Chromatic Substitutions in the Songs Of Elliott Smith,” and if you ask politely he may be signing autographs after the presentation. At moments like this, Pippa canonically rushes up to me, saying “Deflate! Deflate!” but I’m awfully proud of my kids anyway.

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What I Was Thinking

Of late, I’ve been suppressing awareness of my obligation to write an article with an uncomfortably close deadline. I was invited to write an article about “living as a Christian in a postmodern world,” and I have 3500 words to expound my response. As usual, I have a small mountain of partial ideas, but have not yet discerned the connecting principle that will transform my random thoughts into an orderly argument.

Among the notions with which I’m likely to play will be the rhetoric of compulsion relative to cultural interpretations of Christianity (the ways people tend to say, “Well, you can’t X Y Z in a postmodern world,” or “In a postmodern world, one must J K L. . . ”); the question of possibility, in conjunction with Michel de Certeau’s marvelous article “How is Christianity Thinkable Today?”; the question of Christianity and power, in conjunction with Jean-François Lyotard’s “The Strength of the Weak”; or something else. A catchy title might transform the whole project, if such a thing occurs to me.

Expect updates.

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Steve “Used To Be ‘One Piot Meal’ Now Is ‘tawny grammar’ Himmer says:

Wasn't "You Can't XYZ In A Postmodern World" the title of a Tom Lehrer song?

I could be wrong about that, but good luck proving it in a postmodern world.

-Steve

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January 23, 2007

Case In Point

Since I am a committed, long-term fan of Elvis Costello (so much so that I can still say that after his series of unfortunate collaborations), let me point to him as a perpetrator of bad rhyme.

In the Oscar-nominated “Scarlet Tide” (you’ll have to scroll down to get to it), he writes,

Man goes beyond his own decision
Gets caught up in the mechanism
Of swindlers who act like kings
And brokers who break everything
The dark of night was swiftly fading
Close to the dawn of the day
Why would I want him
Just to lose him again

That makes me wince every time I hear it — not just because “decision” and “mechanism” don’t rhyme, but because of the aggravating circumstances. First, Costello is a demonstrably ingenious writer — we know he can do much, much better. Second, this song presents itself as a weighty meditation on humanity, love, and destiny; the more seriously I’m supposed to take the song, the less slack I’m willing to cut the composition. Third, both arrangements that I’ve heard — one from the Cold Mountain film soundtrack, performed by Alison Kraus, and one from Costello’s own album The Delivery Man — bring the lyrics clearly, distinctly to the aural foreground.

If the Ramones mixed a barely-audible “decision”/“mechanism” pair with their over-amplified guitars in a raucous amphetamine-fueled bop through high school romance at Coney Island, I’d be inclined to smile at the absurdity of it, or perhaps roll my eyes (now I’m trying to imagine the Kings of Leon playing “Scarlet Tide”). If it came up in a song from the vernacular tradition that employs high-flown vocabulary for self-consciously elevated effects, I might even admire it. When the song is presented with contextual cues that bespeak deliberate artiness, that couple flat-out clunks, and drags the rest of the song downward with it. EC is a hero of mine, and I like a lot about this song, but that rhyme kills the thing.

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January 21, 2007

And It Don't Even Got To Rhine

Cracked magazine and, in response, Rolling Stone have published lists of the worst rhymes in pop music history. This is one of the subjects on which I am culpably curmudeonly (if you throw in “violations of meter,” I’ll be sent up the river for a long stretch). In fact, Josiah and I were kvetching about a non-rhyme rhyme (I don’t recall which song) just yesterday morning, as we were getting ready to mail him back to Vermont. Bad rhyming pushes my buttons hard.

At the same time, when I survey the lists in question, I respond with my usual “it’s more complicated than that.” The quality of rhymes shouldn’t be segregated from questions of genre and diction in general. If I wre to try to rhye the name of the former representative from California Robert Dornin with “mournin’ ’ it would probably sound artificial; if the President of the United States (who has developed an easy comfort with dropping his g’s) were so to do, it would sound consistent and fittin’. In the folk genre, rhyme should be more tolerant of elasticity. In more self-consciously ambitious lyrics, the rhyme should likewise aim at artfulness and ingenuity. Cracked cites Bob Dylan as author of the worst rhymes in pop music for “You have many contacts / Among the lumberjacks / To get you facts . . .” in “Ballad of a Thin Man.” While not wanting to let him off the hook entirely, I’d argue that naming this the worst rhyme in pop music history neglects the somewhat hallucinatory, evocative rhetoric that Dylan demonstrably adopts through his catalogue. Few Dylan songs — if any — escape the charge of outlandish imagery, and sometimes those outlandish images involve rhyming words.

Josiah anticipates writing a senior project about the relation of song lyrics to poetry; maybe he has something to say about this subject. . . .

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Ralph said:

Pretty good list from Cracked. I recall a long ago Doonesbury, back in the 80s, maybe, where Jimmy Thudpucker is talking with Bob Dylan, asking where his incredible lyrics came from, and the latter says something like "Man, I was only trying to make it rhyme!"

Best regards,
Ralph Hitchens

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January 20, 2007

Making a Comic

This fall, Scott McCloud published his thorough, theoretically-inflected Making Comics. As a simpler, more “popular”-level exposition of comics production, we can now refer to Lynn “For Better or For Worse” Johnston’s “The Making of a Comic Strip.”

Yes, that does remind me to get back to Beautiful Theology.

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January 19, 2007

Mashing, Crossing, and So On

Today I saw, and enjoyed, the paired interviews of Bill O’Reilly and Stephen Colbert (thanks, David!). So I was in the frame of mind to contemplate such exercises when Pippa and Josiah and I were walking down the streets discussing the forthcoming Harry Potter book.

Pippa proposed that Harry Potter might wash up on the shores of the island where the castaway Baudelaire orphans learned the trust backstory for their misadventures. In a flash, Josiah and I were envisioning other elements of the Potter/Baudelaire mash-up. VFD vs. the Order of the Phoenix! Imagine Voldemort trying to cast a spell with Sunny Baudelaire chomping on his ankle (which probably has a mysterious tattoo on it)! Meanwhile, Hagrid throws Count Olaf to the pen of blast-ended skroots. . . and so on.

Further reflection led us to observe that of the pair of trios, the Baudelaires had it all over the Potters. But that’s not fair to Hermione, who manages her role with grace and resourcefulness — the true contrast sets Ron and Harry over against Klaus. Let’s face it, Klaus has it all over his intemperate wizard colleagues.

Si has the last word: “The Baudelaires are totally unschooled.” Harry and his posse act like regular schoolkids; the Baudelaires, like unschoolkids.

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January 18, 2007

In Lieu of Substance

* Margaret pointed me to the Chord Hat video

* Micah pointed me to the “Le Grand Content” video as an example of visual communication of data. . . in a way. . .

* I was reminiscing about the rediscovery of the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker the other day (OK, so I’m peculiar when it comes to day-dreaming nostalgia) and a chain of links led me to this fascinating paper by Jan Swart (sorry, it’s posted in PDF only). Swart argues that scholarly certainty that the ivorybill had become extinct suppressed evidence that the ivorybill was being sighted more or less regularly during the half century it was reputed to be extinct. Now, I don’t know how the ornithological guild has received Swart’s paper, but even if it’s only partly sound, he’s exposing a vitally important riposte to the empiricists’ insistence that they deal in facts and observations not subject to “social construction.” Evidently, to some extent (am I qualifying this enough?), scientists knew that the ivorybill had to be extinct, so they explained away reports that it had been sighted.

Sure, there are absolutely “facts” that subsist apart from human “construction.” It’s never clear to me, however, how we can tell when we’re dealing with one of those or one of the more elusive kind. Last I checked, facts don’t come with consumer safety tags that specify whether this is the indisputable, immutable, eternal truth, or a considered conclusion for which I should trust the pertinent experts, or what.

* There’ll always be an England. In the controversy over contestants’ repellent treatment of Big Brother adversary Shilpa Shetty, the Telegraph contributes the characterization of her squabbling rivals as “has-been pop star Jo ‘S Club 7’ O’Meara, wannabe model Danielle Lloyd, and has-been wannabe Jade Goody” (it was even better in NPR’s more concise formulation, “a has-been pop star, a wannabe model, and a has-been wannabe”).

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January 16, 2007

Definition

OK, this is what I have:

Postmodern biblical criticism includes a disparate array of interpretive strategies that share few characteristics other than their deliberate departure from the presuppositions of modern biblical criticism. Where modern biblical criticism strives for objectivity, one school of postmodern critics exercises their distinctive subjectivity with flair. Where modern biblical criticism eschews explicitly political interests, most postmodern interpreters acknowledge an inevitable political component to their work; many, in fact, pursue their interpretations with deliberate attention to advancing social equality, cultural diversity, and resistance to heterosexual privilege. Where modern biblical interpreters emphasize their adherence to rigorous methodological standards, postmodern interpreters emphasize the role of imagination in even the most narrowly historicist interpretations. In these and innumerable other ways, readers have propounded criteria of rigor and soundness that depart from the norms that characterize modern biblical interpretation.

For example, modern biblical interpretation tends to treat linguistic communication as optimally transparent to meaning -- as though ambiguity and misunderstanding were regrettable, evitable miscarriages of expression. On that basis, biblical texts presumably equal a meaning that the modern interpreter simply restates in local languages, in contemporary terms. Such a model neglects the extent to which even the most scrupulously direct prose engenders varied interpretations (as the history of biblical interpretation amply illustrates). Linguistic expression does not evoke ambiguity as an accidental byproduct of shoddy composition, but as a necessary condition of linguistic communication. Jacques Derrida identified this phenomenon as "play," as the semiotic slack requisite for effective communication. Biblical interpreters have seized on the discrepancy between the modern repression of ambiguity (on one hand) and the postmodern attention to linguistic pliancy (on the other) to foreground counterintuitive readings, to flout conventional wisdom. Such startling readings -- however much they distress those who place their faith in modernity -- rest not solely on outrageous whimsy; they articulate the latent possibilities that linguistic expression always permits.

The modern inclination to stress distinct, definite meaning at the cost of interpretive difference thus involves a determination to authorize some sorts of criticism and to exclude others. Modern interpreters defend this as a condition of rational communication: if we do not mean one thing rather than another, they suppose that it would be impossible ever to misunderstand. The willed refusal to acknowledge alternatives to modern standards of legitimacy, however, reveals a political impulse to this professedly disinterested mode of discourse. Indeed, modern interpreters who simply identify their own approach with value-neutral, rational, scientific inquiry reinforce Jean-François Lyotard’s accusation that enlightened modernity exercises a paradoxically coercive intellectual regime, “the institution of will into reason.” Postmodern interpreters typically challenge modern interpreters’ claim that their hermeneutical axioms constitute the scholarly conclusions of non-partisan reason; as male white European and North American scholars dominate the guild of biblical criticism, their social location cannot escape affecting these scholars’ interpretive reasoning. Postmodern interpreters may make their own social location the explicit criterion for their interpretive judgment; they may show the ways that dominant-class interpreters use their institutional and social power to reinforce their own interests; they may deliberately read the Bible against the grain of the dominant patterns of scholarship in order to articulate an alternative vision of biblical meaning that better coheres with the interests of women, of interpreters from a wider global community, of readers whose dissident understanding of Scripture has been suppressed in the name of cultural homogeneity.

These examples show some directions that a postmodern temper may take in biblical scholarship. Since postmodernity characterizes biblical interpretation not as a regulative method but as a sensibility, one can not set boundaries for postmodern interpretations (though one can argue the justification of applying the characterization "postmodern" to particular readings). For just this reason, postmodern biblical criticsm will probably not constitute itself at distinct interpretive practice so much as it will influence the ways that particular interpreters approach their work. Some critics will continue unaffected; others will pursue familiar methods with a different inflection; a smaller group will depart markedly from modern critical expectations.

You’ll notice that it doesn’t have a proper conclusion, and it’s already too many words. I’m hoping that if I’aid anything dreadfully off-trarget, or if someone senses an inchoate wrap-up sentence that will free me to send this off to its publisher, you will let me know. Until then, I’ll count on letting the definition incubate, and will move on to my next assignment.

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Demotivation

I don’t have the time to search the Demotivators site to see whether they’ve already gotten there, but in a chat with a friend this morning I envisioned a new poster for them. Imagine a stirring nautical scene in the North Atlantic, with the blazon:

Ha!

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Highwayman's Comeuppance

Micah points me to this story about the enclosure of the open broadband spaces.

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January 15, 2007

One Of Them

Some days, you just don’t care to blog.

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January 14, 2007

Getting There

Most important, Pippa last night just got up and made a big tray of fudge brownies — no prompting, nothing, just a chocolate treat for herself and surprise for her dad. She amazes me every day.

Now, I know professional writers will say that 500 words is not so much; I say the same when I have to compose one of Seabury’s five-minute homilies (I preach at about 100 words per minute). Still, I’ve “defined” topics in the field of postmodernism so very often that yet another short definition of the subject comes as a particular point of stress. What shall I say that I haven’t already said? How shall I say the same old things in a different way? Nonetheless, I’m hammering it out, and I’m determined to finish a draft of the definition here by bedtime tonight. We shall see.

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January 13, 2007

Ninety-Nine and a Half Won't Do

Dorothy Love Coates sang it about God’s expectation that we offer our whole selves, but Pippa expects that a discount outlet offer more than fifty percent off. She noticed that a local outlet was offering a special sale on men’s blazers — my black blazers have been looking pretty shabby lately, even the ones I got new — so Pippa prodded me to go with her to look in. We made a couple of stops, the second of which brought us to one of those “please please please relieve us off the merchandise we ill-consideredly overstocked before the holidays” sales. Pippa’s eyes lit up: “Eighty percent!”

We did well. We had a lovely time together (in the non-shopping sense, although finding bargains always puts my frugal daughter in a better mood). I won’t look quite so threadbare when I stand in front of my classes. These are good things.

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Jane says:

The question then becomes.. what did you do with the pretty shabby blazer(s) that you wont' be wearing to class anymore? They do not, my beloved packrat friend, need to be taking up room in your closet...

Love,
Jane

You know me too well. I will steel myself to take corrective action.

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Beth said:

Thanks, Jane! You beat me to it.

Beth

That’s not fair; now you’re ganging up!

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January 12, 2007

Never More Beautiful

No, thank you, Kevin Kling.

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January 11, 2007

Grrrrr

OK, I said I wasn’t going to devote more energy searching for the Ray Charles appearance on Saturday Night Live, since the relevant parties were energetically preventing me from showing it to Pippa. I was wrong, though; it occurred to me, in my preparations for tomorrow morning’s class, that the “Young Caucasians” sketch would get at the precise topic I’m concerned with. So I renewed my efforts to track down those five minutes of performance.

It turns out that the Saturday Night people have repackaged various segments from their archives in a haphazard, unsystematic way. It’s exceptionally difficult to determine which of the repackages include which sketch or performance. It seems likely from the metadata, though, that the Young Caucasians appear on the first disk of the 25 Years of Music compilation. After extensive phone-calling and basement searching, though (I remembered that somewhere we have an audiocassette of that segment, which I could have played as a substitute, if only I’d been able to find it), it turns out that that item can’t be obtained in Evanston on short notice. Grrrr.

(Found it. I think this meets the requirements for demonstrating wat a stubborn cuss I am; we won’t calculate how many pages of Google search results I combed through to reach this. Also submitted for your consideration: “Hit the Road, Jack” and three performances of “What’d I Say?”)

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Micah said:

Excellent! I love this sketch more and more every time I see it. Thanks for finding it for us. And in case there is anyone left in America that hasn’t heard Jonathan Coulton’s version of “Baby Got Back...” check it out.

To which I can only respond: Dude, you must know better than to argue with Laura!

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Trevor says:

dude, knowing you would search for this i spent some time while watching t.v. searching for it myself. I spent about 30 minutes looking. i'm pretty good at finding things. you are better; but this still took at least 2 hours! imagine if you hadn't found it!!

I would have withered up and died at my terminal, screening the 234.813rd screen of Google results for “Young Caucasians.”

Posted by AKMA at 02:24 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Convergence

I was pushing the sash of the window back up yesterday, and the windowshade fell down squarely on the bridge of my nose. I now have an angry red bruise on my nose, and it hurts. I’m just saying.

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Now, to the point. This week has drawn together a variety of my interests. I’ll be talking to our Gospel Mission class tomorrow morning about Krazy Kat, I think — we need to talk about culture, purity, contamination, and authenticity, and George Herriman may provide an entree to my efforts to queer the concepts of purity and authenticity.

I was talking to Josiah about the topic last night over dinner, and he pointed me to Scott Kurtz’s recent plea to Bill Amend (“rhymes with ‘Raymond,’ ” Pippa sternly admonished us several times). I reciprocated by pointing him to the speech by Bill Watterson to which Kurtz alludes at the beginning of his post. (And as I type, the Bonzo Dog Doodah Band is playing “Mickey’ Son and Daughter” in the background — it’s that kind of day).

Meanwhile, the most recent issue of the Society of Biblical Literature’s imaginatively-named Forum (to which there’s evidently no distinctive entry-page or archive, alas) features two short essays on the Bible and comics. Greg Garrett writes about allusions to biblical myths in superhero comics, and G. Andrew Tooze cites instances in which a Bible appears in superhero comics. I’m delighted that they’re bringing these topics to scholarly attention, although both tend strongly toward the “Look! There it is!” genre. Of course, there’s a ton more to be said about this general phenomenon; we could start by discussing comics other than superheroes (both articles not only omit mention of other sorts of comics, but treat the superhero subgenre as though it were a privileged representative of the medium — a highly problematic gesture not only for what it neglects, but also for its tendency to play to dismissive observers’inclination to write off comics as a playground for adolescent power fantasies). We should likewise go beyond exercises in Bible-spotting toward a more adventurous analysis of what’s going on when [superhero] comics show us a Bible, or invoke a biblical trope.

All of this is progress, though. People are beginning to think provocative things in public, even in the field of biblical scholarship. Guild disciplinarian Ignatzes may lob bricks at us, but krazy interpreters have begun to claim some off-center discursive terrain from which to renew interpretations with strange fire.

Posted by AKMA at 12:43 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

January 07, 2007

More on Digital Distribution

When power meets resistance, the step that seems most logical, or obvious, or necessary usually entails amplifying the coercive force that power can bring against the resistance. History suggests that this tactic doesn’t succeed well enough to justify its status as “necessary,” or “obvious,” or even “logical.”

I’m not thinking about Iraq, or Star Wars (the plot of the film; in a sense, I am talking about the film as an entity), or Lord of the Rings (ditto); this afternoon, I’m thinking about the recording distribution companies’ escalation of their battle against technology. Recently, the RIAA launched a mind-bogglingly high-stakes lawsuit against allofmp3.com, a Russian enterprise that takes advantage of Russian laws to distribute digital music recordings at a cost vastly lower than that required by (for instance) the iTunes Store. As best I understand it — and I’m likely to be missing important elements — Russian law treats the transmission of music recordings over the Net as equivalent to the transmission of music recordings by radio waves; hence, for the equivalent of a customary licensing fee of a few cents, a Russian “broadcaster” can legally “transmit” a digital version of “Stardust” to your hard drive. Allofmp3.com then charges its subscribers on a per-megabyte scale, so that a lower-quality copy of “Oops, I Did It Again” might cost about fifteen cents (though one could order a higher-quality copy — higher quality of encoding, that is, not an improvement on the music — for proportionately more).

OK, let’s bracket the arguments over whether the peculiar circumstances of the music-performance industry between the invention of the Edison cylinder and the Napster revolution constitute an eternal model of how the financial arrangements for rewarding artists and distributers must be organized. Let’s note several pertinent facts.

First, Allofmp3.com seems to be wildly successful. Moreover, it’s success hasn’t cost RIAA companies a penny in direct costs — so that (speaking rough equivalences) if the RIAA had offered the same recordings under the same terms as its Russian counterpart, it could have collected all the profits that Allofmp3 has garnered. The RIAA is doing fundamentally the same thing as Allofmp3, but Allofmp3 is doing it for less money, and in a way that responds better to customers’ interests (more flexible recording options, with no intrusive DRM). Yes, there would be server and bandwidth costs, but Allofmp3 faces those costs, too. Yes, there would be issues with how much one pays performers, but that’s always a problem for the music recording industry. My point is that if the RIAA companies offered the same service that Allofmp3 has offered, they would have stood to make a lot of money that they have lost. (Imagine how much business they’d have done if Allofmp3 weren’t less well-known, operating in a country whose security environment makes credit-card transactions a risky proposition.) Note that people are going out of their way to pay for an insecure-but-currently-legal alternative to simply downloading music without paying from the numerous file-sharing networks.

Second, they could have done so for a long time. Allofmp3 started in 2000, according to the Times. Instead, the titans of industry have tried to hold this different business model at bay, and now are trying to quash it in favor of a business model that’s more expensive, less convenient, less flexible, and less suited to the medium in which the business is taking place. It’s as though an early recording company required that one buy a ticket to listen to a record, or sit still in a special auditorium-style seat to an entire unit of music — or as though CDs weren’t allowed to hold more recordings than an LP would, and the recording must be interrupted halfway through.

Third, there’s no earthly reason for restricting this mode of transmission to music recordings. Movies, audiobooks, ebooks, all sorts of media could very simply be sold on the Allofmp3 model. Allofmp3 importantly proves that a significant proportion of possible customers would prefer to buy a recording (at a fair price) than acquire it illegally, and if the Allofmp3 model were legitimized, we have every reason to expect that sales would boom.

Fourth, all of the music enforcers’ energies (and legal expenses) will not stop, but only complicate and redirect users’ interest in obtaining recorded works at a time, a rate, a price, and in a form that they have chosen. The vast sums that the RIAA has spent on fighting file-sharing have only slowed the growth of file-sharing; they have not diminished it, and certainly have not brought it to a stop.

“But what about the artists?” The sole effective bastion behind which the RIAA rallies even modest public support involves the premise that their model alone provides for the well-being of hard-working musicians. By riposte, one might note that the RIAA is the last place one should look for conscientious concern for performers’ well being. Apart from ad industriam challenges, though, we have to un-bracket the question of how we know what constitutes a fair reward for performers’ efforts. To this, we can most forcefully respond that we can’t know in advance how the Allofmp3 model will affect compensation for performers. We can, however, note that internet buzz (fueled by file-sharing) contributes to thriving live-music performance scenes around the world. We can note that Allofmp3 apparently does pay the transmission-licensing fee, the same as if it were a radio station, so artists stand to benefit directly from sales at that rate. We can note that digital distribution at a very low cost increases the likelihood that particular selections will be bought, rather than downloaded from a file-sharing network or ripped from a physical copy of the recording. We can note that music distributers can continue the practice of offering “enhanced” packages, to encourage customers to buy the physical products as well as their digital counterparts. And we can note that as music performers were paid before the advent of recorded music, so we have every reason to expect that they will continue to be paid after the heyday of the LP model of recording sales.

The RIAA, however, would rather fight the future than cooperate with it.

Posted by AKMA at 02:17 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Training Loaf

Last night Pippa made pita sandwiches for us. We had to shop for groceries to prepare for the feast, and we chose a brand of pitas with which we were hitherto unfamiliar. As she chopped vegetables, crumbled feta, mixed herbs, and toasted pitas, I heard her say, “Hunh!” I inquired as to the cause of her bemusement, and she said, “This must be special pita for seminarians.”

“Why, honey?”

“Because it’s perforated down the middle, to make it easier for them to practice breaking the bread.”

Posted by AKMA at 12:37 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

January 06, 2007

What's Wrong

Let me illustrate one aspect of the problem with the current hysteria over DRM.

Tonight Pippa was telling me about Dreamgirls, which she saw with Jennifer and Mile over the break. She commented on the incident in which white artists cover [awkwardly] the Dreamgirls’ hit record, and I pointed out the SNL sketch in which the “Young Caucasians” cover Ray Charles’s “What’d I say” (“What Did I Say!?”in the Young Caucasians’ version). I pulled the laptop over to track it down on YouTube or Google video, or even for pay on the iTunes music store. NBC has successfully kept the sketch off the free channels, and hasn’t released it on iTunes.

I’m not supposing that Pippa and I had any kind of right to find that clip if we want to; I wonder, though, whether anyone profits from making us wait to see the sketch. Frankly, I’m not about to pursue that clip any further; I’d have bought it (or the show it appeared in) at a reasonable price if NBC offered it, and if it were available on one of the free services and I’d shown it to Pippa, when she enjoyed it, we might have made it a priority to buy the episode some other time. Because it’s not available, no one makes an easy dollar from Pippa and me. That just doesn’t make sense to me.

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January 05, 2007

Score!

Heather sent me the following link to a Fantasy Church League, awarding points for various features of Sunday morning worship. There’s no percentage in fussing over the details of allotting points — but I can’t resist.

For instance, the “Number of Bible translations used in the sermon:” category rewards using one translation at a 10-to-1 advantage over using two to four translations; what’s with that? I’m inclined to question homiletical moves that make explicit reference to technical details of interpretation, but if a preacher uses a couple different translations, why should she lose 9 points?

The scorebook awards “1 point for each word provided in the original language (1 Bonus point if pronounced correctly)” — but make sure not to offer a different translation?

“Referring to ‘The Message’ as a translation: -100 points” Well, I can’t argue with that one.

Such categories as “Ratio of hymns to contemporary songs” and above all “Decisions” seem heavily biased toward evangelical Protestant congregations; that fits the stipulation that players choose from “2 Baptist churches, 2 Presbyterian churches, 2 Charismatic churches, 1 non-denominational church and 1 flex church (any denomination)” suggests that they don’t reckon Anglo-Catholics (or [non-charismatic] Roman Catholics, Methodists, Orthodox, Lutherans, or Congregationalists) have much of a chance. On a typical Sunday, though, St. Luke’s would get 3 points for sermon length, 10 points for sticking with one translation, 2 points for offering an audio download (it wouldn’t take much effort to make it a podcast), -30 for leftover bulletins (at a guess), 5 points for the number of hymns, 2 for a single instrument, no points for the hymn/contemporary ratio (no contemporary songs), -10 for announcements. That’s -18, on the negative strength of my leftover-bulletin estimate and the ineradicable practice of making announcements in the middle of the service. But Jeannette never calls Jesus “dude” or “buddy” (that would be -50 each time), wears a Hawai'ian shirt while preaching (-50), or moans “Mmmmm, thank you, Jesus” (-2 each time). If we allow for denominational bias — say, throw in extra points for our incense, or the healing altar at the side — and we’d do pretty well.

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