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May 31, 2007
Prize For Cluefulness
Top honors go to Concordia Seminary, for getting there first with the most. When Apple announced iTunes University, Micah tipped me off that Concordia already had copious course material ready to offer online for prospective students and anyone else who wants to learn about systematic theology, Greek, the weekly Bible readings, and various other topics. It’s great to see institutions putting the Disseminary model into practice, even if it turns out that I couldn’t be part of it.
But there’s still room to go. First, the Missouri Synod Lutherans leave a wide swath of the theological landscape open for technological evangelism. And although Concordia has hit some valuable, highly pertinent high points, it’s not as though their whole curriculum is online. I would advise an institution to keep their clips shorter; five to ten minutes will produce more digestible units without locking viewers into a time slot that demands more continuous attention. And of course, I’m not on the whole Missouri Synod Lutheran wavelength theologically. But a very impressive showing overall, Concordia — well done!
[Later: Also checking out Thomas Sheehan’s course at Stanford on the Historical Jesus. Sheehan’s not someone I would think to rely on for such a course; his syllabus notes Paula Fredriksen’s book From Jesus to Christ, but not her more a propos Jesus of Nazareth King of the Jews; the other authors I would not have drawn on for such a course.]
Chris says:
Dear Fr Adam,
I was delighted to see you award the cluefulness prize to one of our seminaries. On the other hand, I was crushed that you wrote "of course, I’m not on the whole Missouri Synod Lutheran wavelength theologically."
I know I shouldn't be surprised by that, and I'm certainly on the high-Church fringe of the LCMS myself. All the same, I have to ask: what part of the Book of Concord do you object to?
Chris Jones
[Thanks for your kind words, and for the patience with which you inquire (rather than denouncing). Actually, I wrote imprecisely; I disagree over women's ordination and lgb sexuality, but I doubt these are covered by the Book of Concord. I'm not aware of a particular topic on which I dissent from the Book of Concord; I probably read the analysis of justification with different emphasis, but it could well be within the bounds of warranted LCMS assent. I support monastic life; I don't know if confessional Lutherans are still bound to resist monasticism. I'm not anti-Roman, so the most vigorous denunciations of the papacy go beyond my dissent from Roman Catholic teaching. I'm against the gnesio-Lutherans.
So I guess I’m much closer to a high-church LCMS theology than I sounded when I incautiously wrote that. I’ll put the accent on “whole wavelength” now — but the technical terms and the histories of these arguments make me cautious about expansive claims of personal concord with the Book of Concord.]
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May 30, 2007
In My End Is. . .
I taught the last session of New Testament 1 this morning; I’m through with classes till September 2008, hard as that is to imagine. We worked on apocalyptic literature, specifically the Revelation to John — a fitting topic for the final session.
But even as I was closing the books for the 2006-07 academic year, my attention came to the website of the “Arian Catholic Church,” evidently a contemporary resuscitation of Arian christology dressed up as an authentic ancient tradition. The site doesn’t say anything about where they’ve been between the Council of Constantinople and, say, last year — nor who ordained whom to serve as clergy (there’s a coy reference to “three Bishops sympathetic to the Arian Catholicism” having consecrated their new Archbishop of York. Mmmm hmmm. And their site repeats the groundless proposition that “at least 300 Holy scriptures were burned by the Roman Catholic church at the behest of Emperor Constantine during the fourth Century and much of the detailed history of Jesus’ life has been lost” and proposes that “there is powerful evidence that he spent time in Britain.” Right, got it.
On my last teaching day of the year, I’m thrown back on my Early Church History class.
Oh well; for the positive side (for a Latin learner and liturgical conservative), it looks as though Benedict XVI will permit more general use of the Latin Mass.
Posted by AKMA at 02:18 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Market Opportunity
(A) The power brick for my computer gets very warm.
(B) My coffee cup cools off fairly rapidly.
Why hasn’t someone built a cupwarmer into a power brick? Or made an adapter that somehow channels the heat energy escaping from your brick to warm your coffee cup?
Patent pending.
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May 29, 2007
Free Is Better
Hat tip to Árni : a very simple guide to prominent Open Source alternatives for users of Mac OS X.
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May 28, 2007
Pentecost Leftovers
Michael has posted an exquisite series of photos at his Flickr area, celebrating Lily’s first Communion - she’s growing so fast! It seems like ages since we saw her.
Yesterday we sang a hymn by Michael Hewlett that describes the Holy Spirit’s action apart from the people of Israel and the church:
His the truth behind the wisdoms
Which as yet know not the Lord
which struck me as an impressively nuanced way of making the theological point that divine truth can be known (albeit perhaps obscurely) apart from committed faith - especially impressive since Hewlett managed to say it in rhymed lyric.
That, in turn, reminded me of my favorite little-known Isaac Watts hymn verse, a Lesser Meter doxology:
Glory to God the TrinityNext time I’m in charge of a liturgy, I’ll try to work that one in.
Whose name has mysteries unknown;
In essence One, in person Three;
A social nature, yet alone
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Whew!
Mustering my tattered energies, I put together a very short contribution to a project in which Blogaria’s own Mark Goodacre is involved: a textbook on methods of New Testament interpretation, with examples of each approach. My assignment was to describe “the history and theory of Theological interpretations of the New Testament” – in 700-800 words. The brevity was, of course, an attraction and an impediment at the same time. I managed to say most of what I wanted to, but goodness gracious, what gross oversimplification!
Now, to finish grading, produce three overdue lectionary essays, three overdue book reviews, and close out the academic year. (Mini-essay after the jump)
Although contemporary readers evidently feel the need for a method for theological interpretation of the New Testament, ancient readers managed comfortably without any such theoretical superstructure. The first centuries of interpreters – and many since that time – perceived no great discontinuity between biblical narrative and exhortation and their own situations in life. That discontinuity emerged at the convergence of several cultural and ecclesiastical forces: conflicts that splintered the Western church, and the ideological power of modernity, to name two prominent such influences. The modern model for theological interpretation dominated theological hermeneutics of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; though many interpreters remain convinced that modern tenets should continue to determine legitimate interpretation of the Bible, an increasing constituency of scholars has imagined an approach to theology and Scripture that does not stand or fall with strictly modern premises.
The earliest Christian interpreters were, of course, reading and theologizing on a Bible that comprised the Old Testament books, gradually supplemented (and in some circumstances “supplanted”) by gospels, apostolic letters, and apocalypses. They brought to their interpretations of the nascent New Testament the same figurative imagination with which they recognized the Old Testament precedents for Jesus’ ministry and the apostles’ vision of an expansive communion of Gentiles and Jews. As they clarified the doctrinal exposition of Jesus’ identity, or the Trinity, of the Spirit and the church, they deployed a richly allusive, typological, figurative understanding of God’s ways and God’s communication to humanity in Scripture (both Old and New).
The church’s conflicts over doctrine gradually elicited a body of theory concerning interpretation. In response to questions about what makes some interpretations sounder than others, theologians began to articulate a critical practice of theological interpretation; the best-known of these early hermeneutical works is Augustine’s On Christian Doctrine. Subsequent theologians developed a variety of approaches to exegetical theology. The well-known quadriga that differentiated literal, allegorical (doctrinal), tropological (ethical), and anagogical (eschatological) senses of Scripture, did not so much mandate four different meanings for each passage as it described four sets of criteria within which one might develop interpretations. From late antiquity through medieval interpretation, readers dwelt comfortably with a bounded variety of interpretations. They saw this diversity as a sign of God’s abundant grace operating through the imaginations of authors and interpreters, as long as the interpretations upheld the church’s teaching.
The Reformation and the culture of modernity disrupted this situation in several ways. The divisions that set European Christians against one another heightened the urgency that biblical interpretations did not just fit soundly within the limits of a bounded plurality of acceptable readings, but that they were correct in a way that excluded alternative readings. The Reformers’ antipathy to interpretive variety strengthened their insistence that the Bible yielded a single, clear, simple sense (although this rarely helped resolve any interpretive conundrums). With the Reformation, an insistence on the singularity and plainness of meaning did not diminish the proliferation of interpretive alternatives but intensified the stakes of disagreements among interpreters.
Modernity made the temporal quality of “progress” a self-evident element in the ways that European cultures imagined their relation to the past, making plausible the assumption that a historical gap separates us from our biblical forebears. A modern interpreter needs to ascertain what a text meant, and subsequently to devise an application of the archaic meaning to contemporary life, or to insist that some meanings escape cultural specificity (while others remain captive to their contexts of origin). Likewise, modern premises warrant interpreters’ confidence that interpretations from the past fatally lack the legitimation of up-to-date scholarship. Especially where modernity and the Reformation converge, biblical interpreters face the daunting challenge of determining the single historical sense of a passage that in some way informs radically different (modern) cultural circumstances.
While many scholars continue to refine and enhance modern approaches to theological interpretation, others propose promising alternative paths. The scholars who sponsor these alternatives typically allow greater latitude for diversity in interpretation (comparable to the bounded plurality of pre-Reformation interpretive practice). They expand the scope of their hermeneutical imagination beyond modernity’s strict historicism, pursuing the theological interpretation of Scripture as a properly (and unabashedly) theological endeavor. Their interpretations embrace doctrinal and ethical concerns alongside questions of dates and historical background. Such scholars see the discourses of drama, the visual arts, literature, and music (among others) as models of fields where critical evaluation and imaginative expression inform one another. Theological interpreters can take up a comparable practice of representing the faith of biblical antecedents afresh, accountable to criticism on historical and theological, aesthetic, or ethical grounds. Thus imagined, the theological interpretation of Scripture finds strands of continuity with generations of previous interpreters from the earliest to the most modern.
Further Reading:
A. K. M. Adam, Faithful Interpretation. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2006.
A. K. M. Adam, Stephen Fowl, Kevin Vanhoozer, and Francis Watson. Reading Scripture With the Church. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2006.
Markus Bockmuehl, Seeing the Word: Refocusing New Testament Study. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2006.
Ellen F. Davis and Richard B Hays, The Art of Reading Scripture. Eerdmans, 2003.
Stephen Fowl, Engaging Scripture. Blackwell, 2000.
Kevin J. Vanhoozer, ed. Dictionary for Theological Interpretation of the Bible. Baker Academic, 2006.
Posted by AKMA at 01:34 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 27, 2007
Pentecost 2007
St. Luke’s celebrated a wonderful Feast of the Pentecost, whereat we welcomed a couple of beautiful new souls to the Body of Christ.
And Lily made her first Communion. Yay, Lily!
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May 26, 2007
Gentle Suggestion (Or Opportunity to Relieve My Ignorance)
I was running through my group of Pippa’s images on Flickr, taking advantage of the option for flagging images as “Art/Illus” (as distinct from photographs, the originating premise of Flickr — a distinction that aroused some controversy). In the course of adding the “Art” flag where appropriate, I spotted a number of images that people had requested for particular Flickr groups. (This has happened to me, too; I stopped joining them after I joined “Bunny Lovers,” no I’m not kidding, so they could share the photo. But really, do I want to belong to a group called “Bunny Lovers”? I do not.)
Why can’t I share Pippa’s Lloyd Dobler poster with the “Johnny Everywhere” group without joining the group? I don’t mind if they look at it; I just am not that fascinated with pictures of people pretending to be John Cusack. Why can’t I share Pip’s sketch of the Nativity with the “creche” group without joining?
By the way, speaking of Pippa, she got her hair cut for the first time ever yesterday (I mean, cut as opposed to trimmed). I’ll try to elicit a picture of her as soon as I can.
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May 25, 2007
JSTOR – And Retrieve
Tom has contributed a lovely investigation of JSTOR, its presence in Google’s search results, its firewalls, and its future. I’ve been following with interest as Tom earlier alluded to this exploration; what was he getting at? The conversation with Bruce Heterick unveils what had been shrouded.
JSTOR’s practices arise from a weird series of contingencies. Where once a robber-baron-cum-philanthropist would fund public libraries so that everyone had open access to knowledge, now foundations fund an operation that prevents access to information — though first it tantalizes the excluded inquirer with crumbs of the essays they may not consult. Because print constitutes so expensive a medium for academic journals, and because digital media emerged after the point where the tenure system and the post-baby-boom surge of grad students produced the current proliferation of minor journals and monograph series (made necessary in order to produce extrinsic credentials for the tenure-eligible academic scholar, or to burnish the credentials of the tenure-holder), print publication has become a watermark of genuine achievement. Even though more readers would benefit more from more useful digital publications, many academics quail at the thought of disseminating their work online. Likewise, the costly structure of printed professional journals – heightened by the cost of production, distribution, and archiving – necessitates limiting access to these.
Were I not loath to compare my friend to a former B-movie actor, I might wish that Tom exhorted his interlocutor, “Mr. Heterick, tear down these firewalls!”
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May 24, 2007
Hoopy
It turns out that tomorrow is Towel Day, a memorial to author and geek icon Douglas Adams. That’s a neat coincidence, because on my note cards of topics to bring up in discussing Christopher Hitchens and so on, I had noted that Hitchens seems to be audtioning for the role of Oolong Coluphid in reality’s unfolding production of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
If you’re going to be an atheist — and I don’t doubt that you have a long list of good reasons, I’ve heard most of them, please trust me on this — you might as well take Douglas Adams for your model rather than the bombastic assassins of honest discourse. When Hitchens informs Prof. Glaude that the Princeton professor has been speaking “white noise,” I recognized a great deal more than what CH seems to have thought he was saying; Hitchen’s incapacity to make sense of Glaude’s points was very white indeed, and arrogant, and peevish.
Why not rather be gentle, funny, self-deprecating, and endearing? I don’t have anything particular against atheists, but I have developed a pronounced antipathy to Christopher Hitchens and his apologists. Tomorrow, I’ll raise a towel to Douglas Adams, with respectful disagreement.
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May 23, 2007
Agenbite of Inwit
The Chris Lydon interview appears here, now.
As my head rested on the pillow last night I remembered an ill-considered (more to the point: unconsidered) expression. I gave a very harsh description of Alasdair MacIntyre’s writing style, an opprobrious description that a humbler and more thoughtful interviewee would have avoided. I assume Prof. MacIntyre has better things to do than listen to me on the radio, but if he was slacking last night and hears of this, I tender a heartfelt and embarrassed apology.
In my defense, Chris Lydon was rushing the interview at that point, and I was grasping at straws, trying to come up with authors whom I would recommend to the particular audience he seems to have attracted. I wanted to indicate my respect for MacIntyre, but to caution the radio audience that several orders of magnitude of readability separate his books from, let’s say, anything Christopher Hitchens has published. I was thinking particularly of Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, a particularly convincing-but-very-dense book. Sadly, that’s not what I said.
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May 22, 2007
Aftermath
I can’t say with a high degree of confidence — I wasn’t listening, I was talking — but I think the conversation on Open Source went OK. Chris seemed pleased, Allen and I got along well and complemented one another. I didn’t have the chance to say a lot that I’d have wanted to, but I also don’t remember having said anything egregiously stupid.
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Briar Patch, But I'm No Rabbit
I’ve been trading emails and phone calls with the good folks at Open Source Radio today — I mean, they’re probably all good, but I’ve been in touch with Chris Lydon and David Miller — about me appearing on a follow-up segment to their show last night with Christopher Hitchens. I’ve said “yes,” foolishly no doubt.
I’ll sit down with Margaret to figure out what I really want to say about what’s so wrong with Hitchens’ representation of faith, to figure out what that’s worth saying I can squeeze into intelligible one- or two-sentence sallies. In the meantime, I have a ton of tasks and errands to move around my desk while I muse about what to say on the radio.
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May 21, 2007
Taking Advantage of Obsolescence
I gather that Adobe has consigned Freehand, the drawing program that they acquired when they absorbed Macromedia into their graphics empire, in favor of Adobe-originated Illustrator. I preferred Freehand to Illustrator, so this comes as a disappointment to me (and a constituency of other Freehand users, to judge from the response on the Net.
The quick-witted entrepreneurs at Freeverse Software (motto: “We’re not just Burning Monkeys any more”) have jumped at the opportunity. Reasoning that Freehand appealed to non-Illustrator users because of its more intuitively-useable interface, Freeverse has announced that for the next week or so, anyone who buys their drawing application Lineform from Freeverse can enter the word "Freehand" in the promotional/coupon code box on the order form, for a $30 discount. I haven’t pushed hard on Lineform, but my initial impressions are positive; it’s not an all-purpose vector graphics Swiss Army knife that also microwaves your ramen noodles, but it looks like a highly-founctional vector drawing program at an optimal level of complexity for casual users.
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May 20, 2007
Looking Forward
Among the things I’d call to my colleagues’ attention (if I were ever accorded the prerogative of programming a faculty event), I’d surely want to include Sir Ken Robinson’s talk at TED (link by way of Jeremy and, earlier, Jordon). Earlier Jordon had pointed to Richard Baraniuk’s talk about online education (thought I had linked to it, but I can’t find such a reference) — that’s another I’d show. But then, no one’s asking.
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Confirmed Roomer
Philippa Grace was confirmed yesterday, by the Bishop of Chicago (“the XI Bishop of Chicago,” as they say). She’s been studying up — taking this as seriously as she takes everything — and preparing, shoe-shopping and meeting with her sponsor. It was a big, impressive service, and (I think) the confirmations of Pippa and our friend Käthe were the highlights of the morning. The sermon — well, better to say nothing at all. The music was lovely, the Lord was praised, and I had a chance to catch up with Jim McGee, whose son Derek was also being confirmed. OK, add “Derek” to the highlights above, though I don’t know him; Jim’s word is good by me.
Anyway, chalk up another sacrament for the family, and a lovely day all around.
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May 19, 2007
The Power of YouTube
The family has been watching Emily’s YouTube videos “Code Monkey” and “Don’t Make Me Dance” over and over; she’s terrific, and we’re rooting for her to land a professional gig. We want to see more.
For all the reasonable arguments against The Long Tail and other internet “boosterism,” the fact remains that it would have been exceptionally difficult, if possible, for Emily to have produced those videos, for her to have distributed them widely if she had made them, and for people like an academic theologian in Evanston to have encountered them — apart from technologies that depend on or have been catalyzed by the Internet. And — and this drives me batty with impatience, makes me want to grab people by the lapels and shake them — this constitutes evidence of something pertinent to the future of church and theological academy. Somebody, listen!
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May 18, 2007
Four Thirty
Margaret’s plane lands in an hour or so. Have I said that I’m proud of her and I’m intensely eagerly awaiting her return?
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Disruptive Change. . . In A Good Way
This afternoon, Pippa and I will roll down to Midway Airport to pick up Josiah and Margaret. Si will be home for the summer; Margaret is coming home for good, after having been based in Durham for three years.
That’s a pretty weird experience for a married person. Most of the time, once people marry, they live together pretty regularly. Margaret and I set up separate homes almost three years ago so she could study for her theology doctorate at Duke; at this point she’s got her dissertation proposal mostly hammered out, she’s through with her course work. She’s going from strength to strength, and I couldn’t be prouder of her.
Now she’s saying goodbye to friends who have loved and supported her through three complicated years — people who are her friends, who know her for herself. That has been wonderful for her, and it’s very hard to tear up those roots and move back to Evanston (in this way, it’ll be especially good that we’re spending next year in Princeton).
Meanwhile, Pippa and I have learned to manage all right as a two-person family. We have ups and downs — I’m more comfortable with freezer food, Pippa vigorously insists that we cook real entrees, for just one example — but the rhythm has worked out okay. In moments of triumph, I exult that in three years of transition in a young girl’s life, I did not totally mess up as a single parent! Woohoo!
So much great stuff has happened that we’ve managed to keep the edge off the loneliness and frustration of living in different time zones. Now we won’t have that to keep at bay; we can hug, Margaret can rest her head on my shoulder, we can actually help one another with daily life. And we can get back to the marvelous gift of being married, together, finally!
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May 17, 2007
What Cleanliness Is Really Next To
Thinking in the shower this morning — really, why don’t I just spend the whole day there? it’s when I arrive at most of my best ideas — it occurred to me to summarize my area of scholarly interest as “systems of expression and inference.” That touches on the way that articulating and uptake constitute complementary aspects of the same process: we speak/write as “I want David to understand this when I address him, so I’ll say that, which seems most likely to evoke the reaction I want,” and we hear/read as “I’d most likely have chosen those words to evoke that reaction.” The expression and inference are systemically related, and no single “law of meaning” governs all such systems. They interact and deflect one another such that one can never fully isolate a natural sign or a conventional signifier and assert a single determinate meaning for it.
Thus assertions about reading “literally,” whether in favor or against, always operate by excluding pertinent contextual data; there’s no “literally” there. (Fred Clark has been pursuing this topic with his characteristic exquisite patience here and here.) Words never arrive at our attention without some accent or inflection, and if we devised a way to transmit them “neutrally,” that very “neutrality” would communicate some metatextual data, in the way that people frequently infer a great deal from a “robotic” voice. Words in a book signify differently from words spray-painted on a wall; words spoken in a flat, unmodulated tone signify differently from words whispered into one’s ear or shouted enthusiastically. But there’s no acontextual venue for words, so even the OED constitutes a context for meaning that affects interpretation (start, for instance, from its Englishness).
Anyway, the shower ended, so I have to go get grubby and shower again to figure out what comes next. But that phrase, “systems of expression and inference,” I want to save and return to.
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May 16, 2007
Perking
I’m mulling over what I’d want to say in an essay on digital technology and religion, for an intro textbook on religious studies. “What?” I hear you say, “You have four other essays to finish, plus book reviews, before you get to the religion and technology essay!”
Very true, but (a) procrastination often finds its most helpful allies in obligations from the more distant future, and (b) I’m just mulling it over, not writing it. And those other essays are mostly short. And. . . well, I cannot tell a lie and say that three are mostly done. I'm working on them.
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Countdown
Margaret comes home day after tomorrow; last day of classes in two weeks.
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May 15, 2007
Job Related Stress
I beg faithful readers’ patience as I marshal my attention and energies toward matters pertaining to work life here at Seabury. On the positive side, Margaret will be home on Friday (!) and graduation comes in two and a half weeks.
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May 13, 2007
What’s Going On, Where It’s At
Doc points us to various links relative to the “Countries, Cultures, Communication: Digital Innovation at UCLA” colloqium. It sounds like a brain-jolting treat, especially the keynote by Willard McCarty that Doc cites (PDF, and accompanying PowerPoint slides; I sure wish they made it available as web-native media).
Granted that PDF makes Dorothea’s hackles hack, note how much better use McCarty makes of that format than does the U.K. College of Preachers’ “What Did You Make Of Your Sermon?”. My eyes still hurt from looking at that.
[Side note, evidence that my work as a parent is nearing completion: This afternoon, Pippa on her own initiative picked out and put on the CD player the family’s copy of Who’s Next, and even turned it up a little. This conveys a strong sense of accomplishment, and delights me (of course), but also makes me feel rather old.]
Daryl says:
OK, while I have held you in high regard for some time... having read your blog for the last number of years... trying to keep up with much of your thinking... now I know the Adam family puts things to rights... I am moved to comment.
My eldest, at 11 years, has taken to my Midnight Oil collection and listens to Bach organ works regularly, but I long for the day when he winds up Who's Next. I can't expect he will have the musical epiphany I had the first time I heard "Won't get fooled again" on my little clock radio, but I hope he can be suitably moved.
I expect your next writing to be on parenting. Faithful Interpretation, indeed.
Good show AKMA.
darryl
Darryl Neustaedter Barg
Director of Media Ministries
Mennonite Church Manitoba
[Thanks, Daryl! Later in the same day, she put on Let It Bleed — so my joy, as Scripture saith, was fulfilled. In subsequent days she’s been playing Beggar’s Banquet and Greetings From Asbury Park. And she has all along been an ardent listener to Motown.
I first “discovered” popular music when I changed the station on the old Emerson portable that my dad handed down to me away from a Pirates game on KDKA, and I heard some wonderful, marvelous, intoxicating music. I didn’t learn for a month or six weeks that I was listening to the wrong station, WAMO, the soul station. I gave in to peer pressure and tuned in KQV, the pop station, and started listening to both, but I’ll always remember the feeling of having discovered something for myself, thrilling and wondrous, and it rocked!]
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May 11, 2007
Two Links
One, to the fine Flâneur clip from YouTube; the other, to the report of the excavation of King Herod’s Tomb by Ehud Netzer. What, you say you didn’t hear about this archaeological find on CNN, with Hollywood sponsors and best-selling authors claiming that it changes everything about human existence? Right. That’s the point. An academically reputable, serious excavation with warranted claims relative to historically-plausible finds doesn’t need hype; and hype doesn’t make a dodgy find with tenuous claims on historical probability into a world-changing watershed moment.
Posted by AKMA at 10:52 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
One Week
It’ll be one week till Margaret comes home, for good. If that doesn’t seem strange to you, you probably haven’t lived apart from your loved one for a long time; I’m having a very difficult time thinking through the idea that we aren’t going to be staying together solely by email and rare visits, that we will in fact be living together, constantly, as we had for the twenty-two years before this. Like, every day.
After wringing the book review out this week, I now have to cook up three short exegetical lectionary pieces. That, and referee an essay.
It should be a sedentary day, after Pippa and I biked and walked all over Evanston to show the visiting Jeanniecool the highlights of our town. The intrepid Jeannie had traveled all the way to Chicago to visit her cousin, took a bus to the Red Line of the El, got lost, waited for a train that wasn’t going to run for another few hours, got onto a train that would get her to the right junction to change for the Purple Line, waited for the right train, caught the right train, waited at Howard for the Purple Line train, and ended up arriving for coffee at the Brothers K a couple hours later than any of us had expected. That required a change of plan, so Pippa and I walked her up to Blind Faith for lunch, and then we ambled around Evanston on a quest for camera batteries. Good exercise, delightful company, and further proof — as though attentive observers needed more — that the Internet is what brings us together.
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May 10, 2007
Gratz, Jav! LOLrogue
John Pederson (“Javert” in We Know) gave a terrific presentation yesterday at the WiscNet Future Technologies Conference — I’m hoping that he posts some notes at his blog (sadly, no recording of the presentation itself). Because he adverted to his use of LOLcats in the presentation, I spent a certain amount of time online yesterday exploring lolcat culture, with occasionally delightful, frequently painful, and generally illuminating results.
This morning, as if on cue, Boing Boing pointed to an analytical history of Lolcats from the Axis of LOLcat-dom, I Can Has Cheezburger?. McRaney covers many of the bases, and comments pick up some loose ends (such as the O RLY? owl). Still, I was left wishing for a little more intense wit in treating a topic that engages four or five of my favorite discourses (language, visual communication, humor, technology, dissemination); I was hoping for something more like Anil Dash’s account (that predates McRaney’s by a couple of weeks). I had been hoping that Language Log would pick up Anil’s cue, “The fact that we can tell no cat would talk like this shows that kitty pidgin is actually quite consistent,” but instead Mark Liberman notes the possibility, then changes the subject (albeit to Wodehouse).
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White Man In Lambeth Palais
This doesn’t really have anything to do with Rowan Williams — I was just listening to the Clash when I started typing, and the title wrote itself. There’s some way to make a connection between the song by the Clash, the conflict in the Anglican Communion, and some of the exasperating conversations about race in America that I’ve been sucked into recently, but it isn’t coming together yet. So I’m using the title now, and maybe coming up with the blog post later.
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May 09, 2007
Two Delights And A Hmmmmm
Yesterday Boing Boing pointed to a trailer that promotes a Spinal Tap reunion for Al Gore’s “Live Earth” concert benefit. I took delight in seeing the where-are-they-now segment of the clip, and seeing the band try to negotiate an elementary count-in, but sadly, the Live Earth site and the trailer are crawling with Microsoft proprietary gimmicks. I would have hoped Al “Keynote” Gore would oversee a sustainable-web organization.
I got over that disappointment, and was gathering my wits — OK, my “wit” — OK, half of it — when I observed Boing Boing’s plug for the Stephen Fry talking alarm clock. Pippa loves Jeeves and Wooster, but she already has an alarm clock; now I’m trying to think of someone else to whom I can rationalize giving this delightful implement. Bonus: you don’t need to buy the clock to hear many of the alarms. The clock’s manufacturer has cleverly offered the world the first few messages free, for anyone to download. Their website could use a useability makeover too, so I could point to the downloads page, but if you go to the main page and click on the Downloads button, you’ll have access to such gems as, “The rising and shining cannot be postponed indefinitely. Though shining isn’t compulsory in this intractable world, the rising eventually is.”
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May 08, 2007
Very Welcome Return
I don’t care if he were only blogging about mending socks (don’t worry — he’s not, he says he’ll concentrate on “photography, the cinema, and (indirectly) the Japanese language” but I’ll bet he would evaluate dish cleaning implements or men’s fragrances if the topics crossed his mind); Jonathon’s back, and it feels great to hear his voice again.
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Neil Alexander on Liturgy and Formation
The Seabury liturgical corps — faculty and ordained staff — had a thought-provoking all-day meeting with the Rt. Rev. Dr. Neil Alexander yesterday, on the topic of the role of seminary worship in community life. Bp. Alexander proposed a number of ways of looking at the question; perhaps most helpful, and the fairest to take away into a public venue, was a typology of ways that theological schools frame their worship life.
He first suggested a monastic model, where the emphasis falls on the worship itself, according to a consistent usage that is less oriented toward the casual visitor (of whom there usually aren’t that many anyway) or the wide range of possible modes of liturgical expression than on learning well a particular liturgical dialect.
Second, he described a pedagogical model, where the emphasis falls more on learning about worship than on the worship itself. The pedagogical model will trade off depth of familiarity in favor of breadth of exposure. The pedagogical model will be difficult for visitors to join in also, though for a different reason; whereas the monastic model involves expectations and patterns that a newcomer doesn’t share, the pedagogical model entails a certain lack of predictable expectations altogether.
Third, Bp. Alexander presented the model of school as parish, as a peculiar sort of parish — but one where the emphasis falls on replicating the experience that students bring from the parish life that led them to seminary, and on preparing them specifically for the sort of worship that they would lead in parishes after graduating. This model probably provides the most ease-of-entry for a visitor to the seminary worship.
Fourth, he identified creative worship, the function of which is to exercise the student’s liturgical imagination apart from the constraints of past or future expectation. Although this frequently entails disorientation for visitors, that disorientation is shared with the local community, since the liturgical moment is novel for every participant.
There’s no typology without ideology, of course; Bp. Alexander seemed to favor the first two models (he had operated with the first as chapel director at General Theological Seminary, and the second as professor of liturgics at Sewanee), and it seemed to me that he favored the first (though he emphasized that both models have strengths and weaknesses).
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May 07, 2007
Everything Is Stromateis
Amazon found a copy of that new book everyone is talking about. When I told Pippa the package was a book by David Weinberger, she asked, “Is it called The Lottery, Vol. 2?” She examined the cover carefully, and murmured her approval, noting especially the “daring dot.” I’m eager to read it, especially after Shelley made some very intriguing ripostes to David’s argument (and David has blogged back, in a way that reminds me of the good ol’ days of blogging, rendering my heart warm and my brain soft).
This is Reading Week at Seabury, which might mislead you into thinking that I’ll have time to, ahem, read David’s book very soon. If I can finish off the overdue book review that’s haunting me, and clear some back emails, run some errands, and so on, I may get to it — or I might short-change one of those obligations to get to it right away — but I’m eager to get a squint at it soon.
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Eleven and Twenty-Five
Eleven days till Margaret comes home — for good! — and twenty-five days till graduation. That’s what I’m concentrating on.
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May 06, 2007
Weary Sunday
Tired, distracted, between Adult Ed at Wilmette and Evensong at St Luke’s.
Oh, wait — this isn’t Twitter. . . .
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May 05, 2007
Away
Just listening to Bob Mondello’s review and the short sound clips from “Away From Her,” I don’t know if I’ll be able to watch it. I have a very sensitive spot relative to “betrayal,” which evokes some of my strongest feelings of outrage and sympathy — but the movie’s depiction of a separation that arises not even from betrayal but from Lethe, from forgetting — that sounds too heart-wrenching for me to watch.
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Nonsense and Insensibility
A few weeks ago, on consecutive days I heard observations that irked me intensely. On one hand, I overheard someone talking about a storm “that would surely have destroyed the ship” if it hadn’t reached harbor; on the other hand, Clive James said, “The author of Jane Austen's novels couldn't possibly look like this, or they would be very different novels.” (Watch my veins bulge.)
Biblical scholars talk this way all the time, as though we, they, can arrive at reliable judgments about what can or cannot possibly have happened, about what surely would have happened. To take these items one at a time: in a story about improbable escapes (the context for the characterization), saying that a particular storm “would surely have sunk” a particular ship entails a weird incoherence. On one hand, the story narrates the remarkable adventures and extraordinary resilience of the boat in question; on the other hand, it asks us to assent that a storm that did not in fact affect the boat in question would have destroyed a boat that (in the course of several preceding paragraphs) had already survived several terrible typhoons. What makes this dramatic storm different from the three or four previous ones? If the previous escapes were so amazing, why might not the ship have escaped this last one too? If the last storm were notably more severe than the previous ones, might the narrator not have given us fair notice that these were just middling storms, and that the worst is yet to come? (But that wouldn’t work out, since the boat was in safe harbor for the last storm, so it didn’t survive that one; it needs the dramatic hype of “surely would have” in order to heighten the excitement surrounding “arriving in port,” a not-so-dramatic event on its own.)
That’s all relatively mild, and I’m only mildly piqued about that example — but it plays the same game of retrognostication that Clive James parlays into a prominent appearance on NPR. Foolish me! All along I thought that Jane Austen was a brilliant, imaginative novelist — whose male characters as well as her (plain) female characters conveyed subtle understanding of various sorts of people. Presumably, she could see into the character of a tormented nobleman, a humble, intelligent woman of moderate circumstance, ardent suitors, affable fathers and devoted mothers, but not attractive women — because, after all, we know that she wasn’t attractive, couldn’t have been attractive; an attractive person couldn’t be the author of Sense and Sensibility. Pshaw! Poppycock! Fustian and twaddle!
The world would be a significantly better place if we extirpated misplaced certainty about what we know concerning matters of which we have insufficient evidence. We have no way of knowing whether the resilience and seamanship that kept a ship afloat through a serious of serious storms would have seen that boat through the last one; we have no way of knowing from Austen’s literary oeuvre whether she was beautiful or homely. In each case we can fairly say that “we would be surprised if X” or “ Y would probably have happened.” Why sacrifice honesty and intellectual integrity in favor of pompously inflated claims about knowledge of the past and possibility?
[Later: Unforeseen pertinent connection, care of Dorothea: Race, fiction, chacters, racism (don’t be put off if you feel as though you fell into the middle of someone else’s conversation; you did, but it’s worth mulling over and figuring out.]
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May 04, 2007
Songs That Elate You
The other day, new mom Laura was scolding me for listening to the Cure while I was fretting about housecleaning. “Listening to the Cure is not going to make you feel like you can get your house packed up!!” (It was the repeated exclamation point that got my attention.)
Rather, she admonished me, I should be getting into that sabbatical spirit by listening to, for instance, “Joy To the World” by Three Dog Night. When I recovered my muscle control from the involuntary shudders that suggestion provoked, we struck up a conversation about songsd that played the role opposite to last weekend’s “songs that make us cry” — — what songs lift our spirits, elate us, kindle joy and delight under even the bleakest circumstances?
Laura nominated “Joy To the World” as the happiest song ever, but I was very, very quick to deflect the discussion to a different trajectory. We agreed that the songs of which we were thinking had to be brightly positive without being saccharine, delightful without being stupid (or being stupid so cleverly that the stupidity counted as part of the charm), not “hanging on admirably in the face of bleak despair” but exhilarating, encouraging, joyous music. What qualifies?
Laura thought of “Twist and Shout,” and I nominated “Johnny B Goode.” Laura noted that the Stray Cats tried for this but missed by being too ironic, which made me think of boogie-woogie and good old R & B — Louis Jordan style. Buddy Holly also approximates what we were after.
Then we hit the motherlode: Funk. Parliament/Funkadelic — “Tear the Roof Off the Sucker” and “One Nation Under a Groove,” for intance, or Sly and the Family Stone and Stevie Wonder.
(Since at this point we were touching on sacred music — Motown and Atlantic soul — I will not call public attention to the possibility that one of us mentioned musical theater, including such suggestions as “Ding Dong the Witch is Dead.”)
Laura chimed in with Joan Armatrading, commending “Bottom to the Top,” while I cheered for “Back to the Night.” The accordion connection reminded Laura appositely of Beausoleil, and I flashed ahead to the various recordings of the Finn Brothers (they’re brilliant at “poignant” — cf. “Don’t Dream It’s Over” or “History Never Repeats” — but they’ve got a sense of whimsy and exuberance that predominate on other tracks. We agreed on Billy Bragg’s Buoyant moments (Laura chose “A New England,” I chose “Greetings to the New Brunette”) and that tapped delight with Kirsty MacColl (say, “Mambo De La Luna” or the whimsical ̶There’s a Guy Down At the Chip Shop Swears He’s Elvis,” but also “Golden Heart,” “Us Amazonians,” and “In These Shoes”).
"Golden Heart" makes me happy, but not in this riotous way.
Then: Talking Heads. Say no more.
That settled things; our work here was done.
Since transcribing our chat and posting this, several other favorites came to mind. Plastique Bertrand’s “Ça Plane Pour Moi,” for one, and various items from Magnetic Fields’s 69 Love Songs: “Electric Guitar,” “The Luckiest Guy On the Lower East Side,” “Kiss Me Like You Mean It.” More as they come to me.
Derek rejoins:
What blasphemy is this!?!
You can't tell me that a combo of "Fascination Street", "Hot Hot Hot", "Mr. Pink-Eye", "Meathook", "Plastic Passion", "Do the Hansa", "Wrong Number",and "One Hundred Years" couldn't get you off to a heck of a start. And that's without getting into obscure stuff and covers!
Bryan said:
“Hey Man (Now You're Really Living)” by the Eels seems to work for my two little boys!
Cheers,
Bryan
Margaret adds,
“Tubthumping” [by Chumbawamba]
and some Rolling Stones
[My sweetheart is a Stones advocate of long standing, and I admire them a lot myself, but I have a hard time thinking of a Rolling Stones cut that makes me smile and picks me up the way that, say, Dexy’s Midnight Runners’ “Come on Eileen” or BNL’s “One Week” does — without argument relative to the overall merits of the compositions. Maybe “Shine a Light.”
“Tubthumping” is a funny case, since I take it partly as an ironic deprecation of the indomitable spirit of its drunken protagonists, but whether the Chumbas intended it or not, I do hear a winning persistence in the singer’s affirmation. Thanks, honey!]
The Young Fogey proposes,
Carlos Santana's first hit, his cover of Michael Babatunde Olatunji's 'Jingo'. I think he played it at Woodstock.
The young fogey
[Early Santana provides a number of elative singles — “Oye Como Va” works for me, too. Well played!]
I just remembered: “Thunder,” by Prince — played as loud as you can bear to hear it.
Some topics just don’t go away. Margaret compiles a further lengthy list:
Asleep at the Wheel, “Boogie Back to Texas”
Ben Harper, “Steal my Kisses”
The Buggles, “Video Killed the Radio Star”
The Housemartins “Get Up Off Our Knees”
Joan Jett, “Crimson and Clover”
The La’s (and Sixpence NTR and the Trash Can Sinatras), “There She Goes”
Commander Cody, “Beat Me Daddy (Eight to the Bar” and “Smoke Smoke Smoke”
John Prine, “Illegal Smile” and “Dear Abby” [I add, “Ain’t Hurting No One”]
Pet Shop Boys, “Go West”
Plastic Bertrand, “Ça plane pour moi”
Camper Van Beethoven, “Where the Hell Is Bill” [Excellent!]
Ben Folds, “There's Always Someone Cooler than You”
R.E.M., “Stand” and “It’s The End Of The World”
The Romantics, “What I Like About You”
The Rolling Stones [and I add the Temptations], “Ain’t Too Proud to Beg”
Shocking Blue, “Venus”
BNL, “One Week”
The Traveling Wilburys, “Wilbury Twist”
and the Velvet Underground makes her smile, too [The Modern Lovers’ “Velvet Underground” makes me smile]
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May 03, 2007
Pope Declares “St. Miscellaneous Day”
Well, not quite, but I’m encouraging everything short of a papal decree to celebrate the official release of David Weinberger’s Everything Is Miscellaneous, the book he’s been talking to us about in bits and pieces for a couple of years, now. I can’t wait to see it — Cory Doctorow’s review on Boing Boing spots a handful of reasons to hear, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest his explanations of ways that the internet changes our relationship to what we think we know. Cheers, David! I’m looking forward to seeing it.
On a related note, Steve Moramarco of the Abe Lincoln Story shot me an email to call attention to the video for our family favorite, “I Don’t Need A Bag.” In a subtle irony, the site also promotes ALS totes emblazoned with the slogan, “I Don’t Need A Bag,” which (first) raises the question, “Then why are you carrying one around?” and (second) constitutes something of a performative contradiction, since our family already has so many totes that we do not, under any circumstances, need another such affordance (even with a snazzy slogan on it). But check out the video and when the new album comes out, let’s see about supporting them.
Bowie says,
Hi Akma,
i was going to post this on your blog... but it looks like your
comments don't work. But, I wanted to let you know that David says
Hi!
I saw his presentation tonight at the NY Public Library of Science,
Industry and Business. It was brilliant, funny, and ... a little
random, in that wonderful way that web connections tend to be. Bob
Carlton told me about the Cluetrain Manifesto
the first time we met, recommended Small Pieces Loosely Joined last
year (which I've since recommended to many people, including a
boyfriend of one of my high school friends, who also came to tonight's
talk...random?), and emailed me from the Left Coast about the talk
tonight, fifteen blocks away from where I work. I introduced myself
afterwards as the Web Content Editor of the Episcopal Church website
(and got him to sign my book), and he asked me if I knew AKMA?! Well,
I'm not sure that we've ever met, but I know you by blog and
reputation and now randomly know that we're both super psyched to read
Weinberger's new book.
Final miscellaneous tid bit: in a Best Contemporary Theology Meme I
blogged last January, Weinberger's Small Pieces was on my list.
Blessings, Bowie
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Stars and Signification
It should come as no surprise that someone who loves popular music, semiotics, and digital media would have a fascination with the five-star “rating” system built into iTunes. I blogged about this more than a year ago, and in the intervening period I’ve had to reassess this minimalist six-category taxonomy of selections.
At the time I wrote, I was thinking of the stars mostly (not absolutely) as a way of describing my evaluation of a particular item. That worked pretty well for me, for a while, but it doesn’t adequately address two problems. First, I have a large array of selections that I just don’t know very well; friends send me a CD, or a music blog rhapsodizes about a new band, and these get added to my list without my having a strong basis for identifying them as one thing rather than another. I had been assigning them two stars (which in my former system meant “Baseline: good enough to enjoy, but not outstanding,” but that mixes songs I may never have heard with songs that I positively think are good (on the basis of repeated listening).
That touches on the second problem: iTunes’s intelligent shuffling can use the “star” rating as one of its criteria, which makes the stars very useful for categorizing the likelihood that I’ll want to hear X or Y any given day. Much as I enjoy learning about new performers and performances, though, sometimes I want to listen to “baseline” selections that I already know to be OK, rather than hearing three or four unfamiliar numbers followed by one that I know and appreciate, then two more unknowns. Assigning unknown selections two stars mixes known and unfamiliar in a way that helpfully mingles familiar with unfamiliar music when I’m casually listening to whatever comes up, but that thwarts my efforts to construct playlists to accommodate days I want to hear only familiar material (unless I inflate “known OK” to three stars).
I could assign “zero stars” to unknown material, but the category of zero stars serves very helpfully for items that I don’t want ever to appear on a music playlist — say, Chris Lydon interviewing Elaine Scarry or something. I think, then, that I’ll choose either to work toward identifying unfamiliar/uncertain material as one star, and then obliging myself to listen to my one-star playlist in order to get acquainted with them; or leaving two stars as my category for unfamiliar material, and limiting my range of stars for music I know well to three, four, or five.
But that’s all too much thinking about something that doesn’t matter much, and I have work to do.
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May 02, 2007
Blasphemy and U2
A couple of weeks ago — an it really have been that long? that recent? — Seabury celebrated a communion service in a context defined by the music (and politics) of U2. This is, in essence, a great idea — and I say this in large part because I had it, ages ago, but never did anything about it. No, but really, it makes a certain sense for people to worship God with songs with which they actually feel comfortable, which they love, which they understand to express their own deep feelings about God.
After the service, someone stopped me to ask what I thought, and while I hesitated I was told, “I figured that an Anglo-Catholic like you wouldn’t like it.” Errrr — it’s not my churchmanship that was hesitating. I can easily cope with diverse modes of worship, and I can compliment praise music and folky-casual liturgy when they’re offered with integrity and excellence. (That doesn’t mean I understand why anyone would worhsip that way just that I’m capable of appreciating excellence in casual-praise worship.) I wasn’t hesitating because of my liturgical theology, I was hesitating because I like U2.
The service involved playing songs by U2 over the Garrett Seminary chapel’s amplification system, which for the first few selections involved painful equalization that grossly overemphasized the high end and midrange (Adam might as well have been sitting out those selections). After the EQ hit a more balanced range, the other main problem with this programming choice became clear. It just plain feels weird to sing along to recorded music, especially so when a moderate proportion of the congregation doesn’t know the music as well as you do and are trying to follow the lyrics on the overhead projection screen. I will sing along enthusiastically in the car, or while I’m washing dishes, or walking, or just listening to the stereo — and sometimes I’ll sing along at live performances, though I prefer hearing the actual performers. But a large gathering of people singing along to recorded music just gave me the creeps.
The PowerPoint slides exemplified the un-subtle literal representation school of illustrating music. Love = people holding hands, poverty = starving African child, and so on. Bono doesn’t usually hit the heights of lyrical nuance; he more often falls within the bounds of the excellent-conventional use of language, and there’s nothign wrong with that. But when those lyrics re juxtaposed with [attempts at] direct illustration, the combination draws the whole matter closer to cliche. Which again makes it harder to sing along.
The best aspect of the whole evening came when the music button person played a version of the Sursum Corda that seems to have been edited together from instrumental portions of U2 compositions — I couldn’t identify any specific source, because the editing and the match of melody to words worked so well that it conveyed the impression of actually having been composed for the purpose. That I could sing to.
For the rest, I’d rather have sung along to Garrett’s house band performing the music, or have listened (not sung) to recordings of U2. I’d rather have heard the music through a clearer, more well-balanced sound mix. I would have liked to have sung “Gloria” in a eucharistic setting, but maybe Latin is the one language that’s absolutely forbidden. But none of the above criticism derives from my being a fussy Anglo-Catholic. If anything, I’m a fussy U2 admirer, and that particular service did not (I think) make the strongest possible case for their liturgical pertinence.
Dylan (inventor of U2charist) and I had an extensive chat, during which she observed that the first U2charist she arranged had a regular band performing live, in preference to using recordings.
Beth advises me that the Sursum Corda and Benedictus Qui Venit were composed and recorded specifically for the service, for which boatloads of props go out to the gentleman who executed them. Sounded as though it could have been from the U2 catalogue, and was actually singable; three cheers!
Peter adds:
> But a large gathering of people singing along to recorded music just gave me the creeps.
Amen! We had a U2charist at St. James' Leesburg VA. It was fun,
well attended, and really odd. Odd because this is a congregation
accustomed to singing to live organ music, and also odd for me
because Bono's voice is in the stratosphere pitch-wise, and even
a fake tenor like me simply cannot match those G's and A's. Taking
it down an octave seems artificial; the music is really meant as a
solo. The experience gave me a new appreciation for 4-part harmony,
where anybody who can match pitch can sing *with* the song.
Peter
[the music is really meant as a solo — I was meaning to comment on that too; arrangements intended for a single voice simply don’t carry over directly to congregational singing, which adds a further element to the bizarreness of the sing-along-to-this-CD-player ambiance. Good catch, Peter.]
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May 01, 2007
We Need Help
We have to whip our household into shape as soon as possible. None of us is a housekeeper (our obsessions and compulsions lie elsewhere), but we need to clear our house to a lend-able condition very promptly, ideally as much as possible within the next two weeks. That will not include me — I have way too much to do even to think about house-cleaning — so I need to find someone discreet, patient, gentle, but determined, resolute, and positively disposed toward clearing out years of clutter and bringing tidiness where my disorderly temperament has permitted a tropical rainforest of paper, unused implements, outgrown clothes and books, and the impedimenta of generations, locations, clever ideas, good intentions, and flat-out laziness and depression.
Looking forward to what comes after, but not what lies between.
Jane said:
After the work we did in your office a few years ago, I almost feel as though I'm letting you down, not being there to help with this. . .
Good luck!
Johanna and Micah both recommended the Flyady website, specifically the pages on moving and crisis cleaning.
These look quite helpful, although they miss the point that I very much want not to do it myself. I’ve been saving up, I can pay someone to do a sizable share of the work, and I that’s what I’d like. On the other hand, since no obvious candidate has come forward (Jane lives too far away, as does kindly reader Carl).
We’ll see what ensues. Thanks for the encouragement and suggestions, friends.
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