« June 2007 | Main | August 2007 »
July 31, 2007
Phase Three: Complete
We rolled into Princeton this afternoon, and have been semi-unpacking and unwinding and getting ready for a lovely evening with friends. All is well.
Posted by AKMA at 03:05 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Rice Univ. Press Has A Clue
They’re shifting to a peer-reviewed, online publishing, print-on-demand model. It can be done; it will be done.
Posted by AKMA at 09:34 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Phase Three: Unexpected
We had not assumed that Harrisburg would be a site of excitement and intrigue, but we were partly wrong. It turns out that three or four young women who behave as though they’re rehearsing for a future appearance on “Girls Gone Wild” occupied the room next to ours last night, making it clear that such old-fashioned concepts as “quiet” and “sleep” no longer apply in the thrilling epoch of twenty-first century Harrisburg. At least, at the Red Roof.
Thanks to these vivacious culture mavens, Margaret and I have plumbed the banal shallows of the Nickelback oeuvre, since the girls phoned one of their mothers, shouting instructions to Google the lyrics of a song they were referring to as “Pants Around Your Feet.” This was made more complicated by (a) the girls’ inebriation, (b) the mom’s apparent incapacity to spell “Google,” (c) the fact that the title of the song in question is “Figured You Out,” and (d) the girls’ proclivity for drowning one another out. Several gentle cues went unheeded, but sometime after midnight these ladies could no longer remain conscious. Margaret and I have been resisting the temptation to incite Beatrice into a yipping fit outside their door this morning, though I can think of no more perfect complement to a hangover.
We have a relatively short drive into Princeton this morning, but we may be changing our plans to stay over with friends tonight; we may need to get into the townhouse early, or to find some other place to lodge. Ah, the sweet mysteries of unexpected developments!
Posted by AKMA at 07:57 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
July 30, 2007
Phase Two: Complete
Safely ensconced in Harrisburg. Only drawback (consistent with experience in Ann Arbor) involves the complications of having a dog with us — we can’t just leave her at the motel lest she whine and fuss, but we can’t take her in to restaurants either. Apart from that, travel has been fine. Margaret and I talked over course syllabi she might put together, episodes of “Lost,” and sundry other topics.
Posted by AKMA at 03:54 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Phase Two: Incipit
Beatrice woke us up early. The coffee machine is out of order. We’re leaving for Harrisburg, assuming the car still works.
Posted by AKMA at 05:09 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
July 29, 2007
Happy Birthday, Doc!
The other day I suggested that Homeland Security might better be administered by people who actually know what they’re doing; today, celebrating Doc Searls’s birthday, I suggest we might prosper if someone who knows what he’s doing, someone with a level head and a charitable heart even when people are giving him a hard time, someone who has forgotten more about radio than most anyone at the FCC has ever learned, someone who has an articulate and well-reasoned approach to the relation of media to public service — if someone, in short, like Doc Searls was in charge at the FCC.
I wouldn’t wish to stick him with that responsibility — but then, being Doc, he might just take it up anyway out of his love for the media, his respect for people’s imaginative uses of public spectrum, and his pride in a country that has should have the wisdom to trust its citizens to exercise their ingenuity on behalf of the general welfare.
Happy Brithday, Doc. Thanks for the gifts you’ve given your friends.
Posted by AKMA at 09:18 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Phase One Point Five
We’re taking a restful Sunday, visiting with Nate and exploring Ann Arbor. We had a late breakfast at the Cloverleaf Restaurant, then wandered around the University of Michigan campus. We watched the re-re-edited Return of the Jedi, complaining about all the revisionist changes George Lucas made — culminating in the soundtrack change at the end (A very young Pippa used to delight us by singing along, “Halle-lu-ke-lah! Boop-boop!”) and the substitution of Hayden Christenson for David Prowse in the Jedi Ghost Alumni Association sequence.
Tonight we bid Nate goodbye, and tomorrow morning we roll out for Harrisburg. All is well.
Posted by AKMA at 03:49 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
July 28, 2007
Phase One: Mission Accomplished
Arrived in Ann Arbor safely and more-or-less comfortably; amazingly so, considering how much we’ve crammed into the car. Dinner with Nate, watching a little TV, and then early to bed.
Posted by AKMA at 08:22 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
No BBC 4 Me
The BBC has stuck with its weirdly wrong-headed decision to take the media projects that the UK’s public has paid for, and lock them behind Microsoft’s Wall of Inaccessibility (in patent defiance of the BBC’s own mission). One could devise so very many ways to offer the citizens of the UK free use of their audio and video archives, and even some ways to access to people who seem to be in the correct territory — but ceding control to Microsoft has to be the least defensible. At least Euan and Tom don’t have to take the heat for this disaster, which will cost Britain money, productivity, and the joy (and prestige) that open access would have afforded millions.
Posted by AKMA at 08:56 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Zero!
We have more closing-out to do this morning than I had hoped, but today’s the day we head out to Ann Arbor. Heaven consenting, I’ll check in from our motel later in the day.
Posted by AKMA at 07:34 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
July 27, 2007
One!
Today we’ll tackle my office, extracting books that I’ll need and clearing a space for my successor Raj to occupy. We’ll make sure everything fits into the car, get some rest, square away our directions from Nate, have a festive good-bye dinner with Si and Laura, and get a good night's sleep.
At least, that was our plan before Mr Josiah’s persistent cold took a turn for the bronchial worse. Now we’ll try to shoehorn our packing-like activity into the first part of the day, take Si to the physician in the early afternoon, and think through some contingency plans in case we’d be ill-advised (no pun intended) to leave him behind in precarious health.
Posted by AKMA at 09:31 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Say Amen Someone!
Jordon pointed his shiny new WordPress blog to Dan Wetzel’s column at Yahoo Sports, where he asks the vital question, “There's no excuse for dog fighting, but why doesn't everyone get even remotely as outraged about all the pro athletes who simply beat on women? That's practically an every week crime.”
Posted by AKMA at 08:58 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Random Footnote
A few years ago — well, to be candid, many years ago — Phil gave me a copy of David Antin’s book tuning as a summer reading present. I don’t remember what weird circumstances directed his attention to it, but I’ve loved tuning from first reading (which was delayed for a while because I was put off by Antin’s ad hoc punctuation and typography). I’ve pushed it on friends, and assigned it to a PhD seminar on hermeneutics.
I glimpsed my copy of tuning the other day as we were packing up, and it reminded me of how richly provocative I found Antin’s work. So I dug up some links, made an entry, and blogged him.
Posted by AKMA at 03:52 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
July 26, 2007
Self-Sustaining and Good For the Public
I hear the expectation that not-for-profit endeavors have some prospect for sustaining their existence (if not exactly a “business plan,” at least a responsible budgetary path), and I understand that especially when we hear of mismanaged charities and institutions we heighten our sense that generous donations not underwrite high livers and wastrels.
At the same time: I remain aggrieved that this rhetoric rules out from the start projects for which there is an explicable absence of market support, which nonetheless stand to benefit a wide public. The report on “University Publishing in a Digital Age” (via Inside Higher Education) provides a case in point; there’s a strong case, I would argue, that disseminating scholarly discourse can’t be a break-even proposition any more than (for instance) the public library system can support itself.
Posted by AKMA at 09:14 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Two
Yesterday I finished the lectionary columns and solicited some reader comments; today I’ll make some edits and send them off. We finished the upstairs bedrooms — the ones we’re vacating — though we need to pack up the clothes in suitcases and get them out of the way, so that the cleaners can come in at midday and dust, polish, vacuum all the surfaces that we can make available to them.
Posted by AKMA at 08:54 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Deaccessioning
Because of our family’s circumstances this week, I’ve been thinking a lot about my ownership of so many books. I’d be very happy, I thought, to share my books with my circle of friends, many of whom now have duplicates of books that I own, and who’d be inclined to be interested in most of the books I have that they don’t (and vice versa). Sadly, we mostly live in widely-distributed locales, and none of us can afford to buy a building to house a collection any place. (My fantasy of being endowed with an informal compound with tons of dry shelf space and dorms and sheds for guests to sleep and write in seems further from realization than ever.)
These thoughts were flitting about my mind when I read Scott McLemee’s column about culling book collections in this week’s Inside Higher Education. I don’t buy nearly as many books as I used to, and the trend is downward, but we still have an enormous theological (and philosophy/literary theory) library. I wish there were a way of maintaining ready access to books that I’ve paid for, while relocating them to another site, one where others could benefit from the library as well.
Matthew said:
A random comment from a random reader and random St. Luke's member...
"I wish there were a way of maintaining ready access to books that I’ve paid for, while relocating them to another site, one where others could benefit from the library as well."
Be careful what you wish for. My grandfather felt the same way, and found a site that would take them (it may have helped that most of the ordained staff were former students and advisees of his...)
http://www.philadelphiacathedral.org/content/blogcategory/107/98/
In 1996, I helped move the first load of books up three flights of stairs. After they were all in the library, it took about a year to get them in order and on the shelves. Then everyone realized the space wasn't large enough, so all the books went back into boxes, down three flights of stairs, and into another building. Ten years latter, they've finally finished adding LoC numbers to the book spines, putting them in order on the shelves, and entering them into a computer database. While I'm sure he didn't think it would be a small project, I'm also pretty sure he didn't think it would take more than a decade to get the library running.
[Dude, if I were confident I’d be located in Philadelphia near the cathedral, I’d be all over that — and it looks like there are lacunae in biblical studies. . . .]
Posted by AKMA at 08:51 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
July 25, 2007
Verbal Tics
Not “ticks,” as I saw in another online source this morning (later: either Josh Marshall corrected this, or perhaps I misread it the first time through), though verbal ticks would be annoying too – perhaps burrowing under your cognitive skin and sucking out your creativity, infecting you with chronic cliché syndrome?
As I pound out my last Evanstonian paragraphs of the summer, I catch myself repeatedly resorting to formulaic constructions that vex me much (friends who’ve worked with me in the Writing Group will recognize these old nemeses coming back to besiege me): First, the “One of the. . . is. . .” construction, a prevalent but weak way of characterizing a specific item or quality from a range of other possibilities (“One of my most common tics is the ‘one of. . . is’ tic”); second, the negation-affirmation tic (“It is not X but Y,” boy does that one possess my writerly soul); and third, the paired-term tic (“fiercely and persistently,” “oppression and steadfastness,” blah blah blah). I will probably leave many of them in, from lack of time to edit them all out – but how annoying to observe myself yield to their power over me!
Posted by AKMA at 10:51 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Three
We hope to close out the bedroom today; we have at least one trip to the Salvation Army planned, and some other errand-type things. Cleaners come in tomorrow.
[Later: Ha! Finished drafting Set One of lectionary helps!]
Bruce Schneier points to an article on airline security by David Mackett, the president of the Airline Pilots Security Alliance. Why are our security czars an array of duplicitous cronies, and not competent, qualified experts? Are we safer with Michael “I think with my intestines” Chertoff and Heckuva Job Brownie than we would be with Schneier and Mackett?
Posted by AKMA at 09:36 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
July 24, 2007
Four
We made some headway on the bedroom yesterday, but we need to push hard today as well. Bea gets a trip to the vet and a haircut today. I should try to grind out the last of my lectionary helps for assignment #1 (I have two more sets of lectionary helps to produce in the next few weeks).
Yesterday Si and I were talking about the article in the NY Times Magazine (registration required) Prince’s clueful approach to making a living in the digital media environment. Si kept focusing on Prince’s megamillions; I certainly respect his (Prince’s, not Si’s) capacity to generate massive revenues, but since arguments about digital handcuffs on music recordings typically try to represent themselves as a favor for the smaller-scale artist, I promoted the cause of Michelle Shocked (warning: involuntary music track for site, sorry), who has been making her way as a recording and performing musician in the digital environment, without a record label owning her, for a number of years. Like Prince, she rebelled against a restrictive contract; like Prince, she protested that she was in effect a slave (she sued Mercury Records under California statutes against involuntary servitude, and entitled her 1996 album with Fiachna O’Braonain “Artists Make Lousy Slaves”); like Prince, she won her free agency; but unlike Prince, she’s not a purple-obsessed multimillionaire. She’s making modest records and terrific concert appearances, selling music online (albeit with fierce, sharing-hostile monitory notes), and doing okay for herself. Her new album comes out in September, and I’m sure to buy a download.
The industrial mediators of music distribution have enthralled the populace with their glamourous promise of wealth and notoriety, but that lottery-hit windfall comes only to a tiny proportion of the musicians from whose energies and creativity the industry profits. If we’re looking for proof that musicians can manage just fine in the digital environment, let‘s look not only at Prince, but at Michelle Shocked, too.
Posted by AKMA at 09:50 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
July 23, 2007
Western Civilization
Fascinating notes from Earthgoat relative to the cultural differences between the Netherlands and the U.S. (thanks for the pointer, Dave!).
Posted by AKMA at 03:44 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Five To Go
We’ve got five days left here. Margaret has finished, pretty much, with Pippa’s room and the guest room; we mostly just need to pack up our bedroom and the bits of my office that I’ll be leaving for my sub. I’m making some progress on the lectionary articles I owe (resisting any temptation for cutesy topical allusions to Harry Potter). Bea has vet and grooming appointments. We have cleaners coming in on Thursday. Saturday we set out to connect with Nate in Ann Arbor, and a whole huge year-long adventure begins.
I’m not quite as queasy-stressed-out as I was last week; Margaret has shouldered a massive accomplishment in packing/storing to get us to this point. And Saturday is in sight.
Posted by AKMA at 10:24 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
July 22, 2007
Accio, Deathly Hallows!
I’ve taken my turn for reading the Deathly Hallows, and I suspect I enjoyed it every bit as much as Si did. Rowling included some vexatious bits of teenage contention again, but she didn’t allow that to dominate the story (and in its own way, it advanced the plot somewhat). We’re criticizing Harry Potter in the midst of its cultural currency — always a dangerous gesture, as a retrospective glance at media “of the Year” awards will reveal — but I anticipate that Harry will stand up as a durable contribution to its literary neighbors.
Posted by AKMA at 10:39 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
July 21, 2007
Information Ecologies: Yes, I Hope
Brent Graber directs my attention to Information Ecologies (excerpted at First Monday). When I have time, I want to look it over; it sounds very promising.
Posted by AKMA at 01:57 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Misgeography
Jeneane really feels like packing up someone else’s stuff (and selling some on eBay).
Margaret and I feel nauseous about packing and decluttering our stuff before we go to Princeton.
Why does she live there when we live here?
[Speaking of Jeneane, last night Margaret and I had a difficult time sleeping because Beatrice kept whining and yipping in response to a mysterious thumping sound we heard in the night. Jeneane theorizes that it was the hamster-essence of Marshmallow, making its way to Hamster Heaven, intimidating our seven-year-old Bichon Frisé puppy.]
Posted by AKMA at 01:22 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Zizek Krispies, Too
Language Log revives a “Breakfast Theory,” a wonderful cartoon from the eighties (remember them) by Jeff Reid, that Steve Lawler sent me when it was first published.
Posted by AKMA at 12:37 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Acid Test
Si read all night, only just emerged from his room to get up and eat, and he beams with approval about Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. I’m next in line to touch the numinous book.
Posted by AKMA at 11:55 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
July 20, 2007
Makes Sense to Me
Five.sentenc.es, explained by Mike Davidson.
Posted by AKMA at 01:49 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Miscellaneous Is Terrific
I started reading David Weinberger’s Everything Is Miscellaneous late, partly because it took me a while to get around to obtaining a copy (Margaret bought one in North Carolina before me) and partly because it’s taking me some time to get the knack of “reading books” again after the school year. I had read the early reviews, both the enthusiastic and the critical, and I wanted to respect the critical reviews even as I also wanted to admire the work of someone I regard as a very dear friend (DISCLAIMER: To my grateful astonishment, I discovered that David refers to me as his friend on page 211 of Everything. Margaret said, “You didn’t look for yourself in the index? You always do that!” which is embarassingly true, but since I didn’t expect to appear in this book, I had not peeked.)
David’s argument will be familiar to anyone who reads his blog regularly. On his account, the transition to a world in which we store information digitally rather than physically effects a “third order of information.” He says, “In the first order of order, we organize things themselves” (17-18). We order our environment by locating objects in predictable, meaningful places. The second order of order creates further objects that refer to first-order objects: we call many of these things “catalogues,” even though a library’s card catalog differs from the innumerable catalogs of merchandise that arrive in my mail every day. They do not physically set the objects to which they refer in order; they constitute an order of representation, which points to the physical objects. Weinberger’s pivotal point here involves the fact that these representations themselves remain physical entities, limited by the necessity of locating these representations in space. One could, solely in theory, generate a catalogue in which every item was connected by a catalog entry to every possible association by which one might want to look it up — but even proposing such a thing provokes the realization that the scope of such a project would be impossibly vast. The second order to which David adverts remains constrained by its physical limitations.
The book goes on to celebrate what David calls the third order of order, the digital environment in which catalogs can function apart from the limitations of spatial organization. The all-encompassing catalog for Lands End merchandise would be infinitely thick (though the postal service would still offer an absurdly low mailing rate to subsidize mail-order companies) because Jeneane and I think differently about clothing, luggage, linen, shoes, and so on (DISCLAIMER: I don’t actually know if Jeneane buys anything from Lands End, or if we think differently about their merchandise, but it’s a likely guess that we do). But in David’s third order, Lands End doesn’t need to produce a single ultimate catalog to accommodate Jeneane and me; instead, they could produce a digital catalogue that presents Jeneane and me with different representations of their merchandise that fit our respective different interests. Freed from the constraints of physicality, “order” can remain miscellaneous at the back-end as software presents us with infinite different personalized “orders” when Jeneane and I consult it.
That’s the heart of David’s argument, if I understand it correctly; most of the book illustrates this principle, amplifies its ramifications, and endorses its implied metaphysics, and I agree with David ninety-five percent or so. I’ve put a lot of energy into pushing the theological and pedagogical angles of this point, that the non-spatial character of digital interaction changes the environment in ways that most authority figures in those fields haven’t begun to deal with (but also, to be fair, in ways that the self-promoting hucksters of change mostly misrepresent). David does a beautiful job of highlighting the difference of digital information with vivid, convincing, provocative examples. Everything Is Miscellaneous should help undermine the pompous ukases of the media authorities who run around like the character in the Homecoming Parade sequence at the end of Animal House who shouts, “Remain calm! All is well!” (take, for instance, David’s recent point-counterpoint appearances with Andrew Keen).
David embellishes his argument with a terrific hip-pocket history of ideas about taxonomy. He explains the metaphysical backstories that inform claims about the “natural” way of parcelling out information, and disarms them with insight, wit, and actual counterexamples. This element of the book delighted me, but I expect that some readers will resist the possibility that the joints at which we endeavor to carve our world are as miscellaneous as David shows them to be. Tom takes this up and launches it into the orbital shell of brilliance by comparing David’s thoughts in this chapter with Benjamin’s observations on tradition and the collector.
I’m not sure about the other 5%, though. As others have pointed out before me, digital data is still spatial in several senses (otherwise I’d be able to carry around infinite data on my laptop computer), and that does make a difference in the scaling of data. It’s a difference that’s insignificant relative to card catalogs or retail merchandise displays, certainly, but we shouldn’t overlook the real spatiality of data in our excitement about the difference digital storage makes. I’m not convinced, either, that this is a different “order of order”; I’m inclined to think that the order of order is the same — that is, it’s still “a representation of information about objects,” just as a card in a library catalog, or an entry in a Lands End circular — but it’s a different dimension of that order, or a different regime of that order. Maybe that’s hair-splitting, but I have a hunch that it’s related to the “spatiality” reservation, and to protests that David isn’t really describing anything very new. More metadata, even a lot more metadata, is still metadata.
[As a side issue, in connection with reading David’s book, I’ve been messing around with the Wikipedia lately, and it’s heightening my mixed feelings about that source. In my own area of specialized knowledge, the Wikipedia is heavily shaped by partisanship, and it’s hard to see how it will move away from its current condition toward the ideal of a neutral point of view. At least, I don’t have the energy — nor do I presume to volunteer others to supply the energy — to push back against ardent partisans. In relatively uncontroversial areas, or areas where I know the background terrain pretty well, I will continue to use the Wikipedia as a first source for general information, but I’ve become somewhat disillusioned about Wikipedia’s prospects overall.]
In short, Everything Is Miscellaneous fittingly heralds a dramatic change in the ways David‘s readers now encounter information, and even more so in the ways that they will shortly encounter it. For those who want to understand that transition better, and those who want the help of a lucid, engaging, convincing expositor, Everything Is Miscellaneous provides a unique touchstone. Once we grant a couple of David’s premises, we can get into further arguments about his conclusions — but that signals what an extremely valuable waypoint David has published.
David responded:
Thank you, Akma, for the thoughtful review, and especially for the way you honor difference. As always.
The division into three orders is, of course, merely a convenience for thought. So, there's a strong sense in which an argument about exactly where to draw the line (if there is a line to draw) could become a self-referential self-parody. Nevertheless, I do want to maintain that the moving of info into the connected digital world is not merely more of the old, or even more of the old faster. It's a truly significant change. And you've anticipated what I'm about to say. It does have to do with the spatiality of data.
First to acknowledge the limit you point out: Yes, we are not in the limitless world of connection yet. And yet...we are rapidly putting our info devices online, which means they have (slow or fast, easy or hard) access to the wide world of the Net. We're connecting it all up. But put that aside for the moment.
The difference between what we have had and what we are giving ourselves erases the formal boundary between data and metadata. We certainly will continue to attach metadata to data, and as far as that goes, yes, we'll be attaching more than we could when we had to fit it on a label or a card, and that's not all that different. But there are real differences. I'd point to two:
First, in the connected world, even the new labels and cards are linked into the big mess we call the Web. So, the metadata for the online book (let's say) may give the pub date, but because it's on the Web, you can find a whole bunch of other stuff via that date. All of that other stuff -- i.e., the Web -- now can serve as metadata for the online book. The explicit metadata leads to data that can act as metadata (let us find and understand the original book) even though it wasn't intended to and may never have heard of the book.
Second, in the new world, objects themselves are metadata, if we use them that way. The book is online, not just its metadata (well, some books are online, and I assume that will be the norm within just a few handfuls of years...I hope). The content is metadata. The content of the book the original book points to in a footnote is metadata. The ability to link, traverse, find, navigate, relate, coordinate, contextualize and get distracted is something new enough to be worth calling new. IMO.
In closing, you'd better agree with me or you're not my friend any more. That's how it works, right?
Love and peace,
David W.
Posted by AKMA at 10:40 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Ekklesia Roundup
Charlie Pardue has begun posting downloadable audio of the Ekklesia Project Gathering sessions, beginning with the day that Margaret and I led worship (Sharon Huey preached a terrific sermon, which the audio appropriately foregrounds). Phil Kenneson’s description of the Project should be a priority-one download for anyone interested in this group. If you know my laugh, you’ll probably hear me in the background.
[Later: It occurs to me to note that my friends who know of my allergy to “praise music” will be struck by the incongruity of my participation in the services at Ekklesia. In order to preserve my grumpy reputation, I’ll simply re-emphasize that excellence makes a difference, and David Butzu has an excellent sense for liturgy and music. I’m not about to change my listening patterns, or alter the repertoire on which I’d voluntarily draw for services I plan, but I admire David and his liturgical-musical leadership. So there.]
Posted by AKMA at 09:05 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
July 19, 2007
By Title
Sloodle (via Stephen Downes) and the Open Library (via David) look fantastic.
Posted by AKMA at 07:06 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Regrouping
The aftermath of Ekklesia leaves us physically and spiritually exhausted; though we need to lean into the project of moving to Princeton, today Margaret and I will be concentrating on several errands and restoring our vigor for relocating in fewer than two weeks’ time.
Posted by AKMA at 08:47 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
July 18, 2007
Imaginary Philippians
Mark Lau Branson led a very helpful workshop on the role of narrative in shaping congregational identity. I was pleased and encouraged that he set appreciative inquiry at the foreground of his presentation; he pointed out that churches’ strategic planning frequently reifies and institutionalizes exactly the problems that they set out to solve. Mark drew on Paul’s thanksgiving sections as a case in point of starting congregational change. Some of you can imagine my surprised delight when he espoused the vital importance of enriching the gospel imaginary in the local congregation. He refers to this aspect of congregational life as “Interpretive Leadership” which
creates an environment and provides resources for a community of interpreters who converse about God, texts, context, and congregation. The fruit of interpretive leadership is in the truthfulness, adequacy and ownership of meanings. Often most available in narratives and metaphors, interpretive resources lead to discernment and imagination.
Mark exhorted us to observe the social imaginaries on which our communities draw, and to draw our congregations into an understanding of ways that the Gospel offers a different vision of what might be possible.
Before and after Mark’s session, we heard Steve Fowl expound the Letter to the Philippians in ways that connect very vividly with the lectures I give in New Testament class, and that resonate with some of my arguments about the imitatio ethic. Steve gave a tremendous, convincing account of what Paul was up to in that letter, to unanimous enthusiasm.
The Ekklesia Project annually refreshes my affection for the church; the admirable people who navigate from intentional communities, from ordinary churches, from faculty offices, from independent churches, to this family reunion charm and awe me every year.
Posted by AKMA at 07:22 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
July 17, 2007
From the 19th Century
A hat tip (with gratitude for the generous compliment) to Jason for the link to Andy, and to return their favor a reminder from Newman:
It is in point to notice also the structure and style of Scripture, a structure so unsystematic and various, and a style so figurative and indirect, that no one would presume at first sight to say what is in it and what is not. It cannot, as it were, be mapped, or its contents catalogued; but after all our diligence, to the end of our lives and to the end of the Church, it must be an unexplored and unsubdued land, with heights and valleys, forests and streams, on the right and left of our path and close about us, full of concealed wonders and choice treasures.
John Henry Cardinal Newman, in An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, chapter 2, §1.14 (page 71 of the Longmans, Green edition of 1909).
Now, appreciative as I am of Andy’s passion and Jason’s approval, I would propose that studying the Bible constitutes one of the very healthy ways of learning how better to inhabit it. To hark back to my comparison to the practice of medicine, I would not want a doctor who knew only the correct conclusions and treatments about which she had read in books, especially when those books are gestures in the literature of controversy; “why I’m right and she’s wrong” doesn’t bring out the best, most responsible thought from any of us. But a humbled Bible study — aware that (as Andy says) the point of the Bible is not to enable us to defeat our doctrinal adversaries, but to build up faith — stands richly to strengthen devotion and discipleship.
Posted by AKMA at 08:00 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
July 16, 2007
Another Year
For the next few days, we'll be at the Ekklesia Project Gathering; I'll try to take notes, though I'm terrible at that.
Pippa is off with her aunts, at a theater camp during the day, tending chickens in her off hours.
Si is working and spending free hours with Laura.
We’ll be in touch.
This year, in one of my New Testament lectures I referred to having learned “The Happy Wanderer” in elementary school — an experience that certain students of my generation seconded — and when I sang it for the class, our younger colleagues were dumbstruck that anyone ever thought it was a plausible idea to make that song part of a curriculum.
Evidently JP and I have something in common.
Posted by AKMA at 08:47 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Faceoff
Lately Dave, David, Doc, and Maggi (and I’m sure, many others) have all lamented some of the oddities of Facebook (and danah has posted a trenchant class-structure analysis). In the age of folksonomies, why can't Facebook offer a starting set of obvious relationships, and allow users to create their own tags for others? I'm still stumped that I can’t have "married" be my relationship with Margaret, and my students and I have to go through contortions to indicate that I was their seminary teacher; if you turned the power of tagging loose on Facebook relationships, you could clean this up in a flash.
Nate showed me how to be married to Margaret in Facebook — not in the “how do you know her” dialogue, but in the “married” status entry. But since Margaret didn’t have a Facebook entry when I made my page, that wasn’t in any way obvious; once she made a page, I added her as a “friend” (I hope I’m not overstating things in that regard), but I couldn’t identify her as my spouse in that process.
Posted by AKMA at 08:39 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
July 15, 2007
More What If. . . ?
I realize there’s a spirit of non-competitiveness afoot in the churches, and I understand the commendable side to that — but what if we took knowing something about our faith seriously enough to conduct something such as Quiz Bowls on topics of pertinence to theological education?
What if theological institutions felt at least a superficial obligation to demonstrate their capacity to stir up theological literacy adequate for participating in such an endeavor? But I suppose the answer is that the present climate of non-compeitition has fostered a nigh-ideal state in which all share equally in the spiritual gift of understanding.
Dylan rebutted:
There's a spirit of non-competitiveness afoot in the churches? You've got to be kidding. Haven't you heard priests at diocesan conventions comparing ASA figures? And I'm sure you've noticed all the complaints about how seminary education doesn't prepare priests "for the real world," and the move to add requirements in fields such as "leadership training" to the canons.
There is indeed a notion floating about that because understanding biblical texts is important and different people have different kinds of levels of training and different kinds and degrees of intellectual capacity and interest, therefore understanding biblical texts does not really require training or intellectual enterprise. However, I suspect a dynamic more active in the lack of emphasis we see on hard work and training in scriptural interpretation is not so much the product of an idea that spiritual gifts are distributed to all equally as it is of the quintessentially American idea that success is both equivalent to profitability and the ultimate measure of God's blessing. A pastor who can "grow the congregation" numerically and financially or at least do better than her or his peers' congregations in those two measures clearly knows everything s/he needs to know, or that is desirable for a pastor to know.
Blessings,
Dylan
[Well, I’ve certainly encountered a lot of non-competitiveness in certain regards. Clergy don’t usually talk to me about congregation size, but they do talk about the relative lackof necessity that they or seminarians attain more than just rudimentary theological. historical, or scriptural knowledge. Much more important, they assert, are small office management and leadership and accounting.
I firmly acknowledge that these represent valuable capacities, and would be happy for all our clergy to develop expertise at them. I don’t see these as taking precedence over knowing what they’re doing and saying theologically, any more than it’s acceptable for a physician to substitute office management skills for anatomy, or to cultivate a thriving practice by applying maleficent but popular treatments.
I don’t think we disagree, and I concede that I may hear more about “not competing,” and observe less competitive number-touting, in my seminary environment than I might if I were based primarily in a parish.]
Posted by AKMA at 07:34 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
July 14, 2007
Empirical Test
Stephen Downes asks the right question: Would Canadians swap their health-care system for ours? No. And I’ll tell you what — that’s not because single-payer advocates are pouring millions of dollars into pressure advertising.
Jenny was blogging the 2007 Games, Society, and Learning Conference (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8). I envy her and everyone else who has a rationale for being there; that’s an area into which I’d love to extend my involvement. These papers look terrific —the ones I agree with, I’d want to follow up on, and the ones I disagree with, I’d want to learn from the speaker about the grounds for disagreement.
Raph Levien has reached a stable point in the development of Museum, the Bruce Rogers typeface Centaur, and has released it under the SIL Open Font license, for which many users will thank him. In a more nearly perfect world, the faces would have complete alphabets.
Posted by AKMA at 10:02 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
July 13, 2007
Sesame Fright
I don’t recall any of our kids being frightened by Sesame Street, but Nate was absolutely petrified by Reader Rabbit.
Posted by AKMA at 05:16 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Ten Thumbs Up
The five of us (Margaret, Pippa, Si, Laura and I) went to see Harry Potter on opening night (not at 12:01 “opening morning” — we can’t stay awake that late). We had heard the polarized reviews that described Order of the Phoenix as the best of the series, or as a sign of the series’ exhaustion. I was uneasy; the book had struck me as largely stage-setting for the big climax in Half-Blood Prince and Deadly Hallows; the plot hadn’t left much of an impression on me when I read it. That suggested that the movie might be flat, since several of the directors have relied on a break-neck rush from one event to another to their dramatic conclusions; without a propulsive plot, though, we might encounter characters who stand around being puzzled or over-emoting (I’m looking at you, Ron). Add the fact that Margaret hadn’t read the book, and so couldn’t count on background knowledge to fill in the gaps left by the transition from mammoth book to two-hour movie, and the possible booby-traps gave cause to take the nay-sayers seriously.
On the contrary — all five of us were delighted with this entry. The director steers away from the somewhat murky plot, emphasizing instead the character development and thematic points. The adolescents spend very little time pouting and fuming (thank you, thank you, please remember how much this strengthened the movie when you direct the next one!). Harry and Hermione have grown into exceptionally good-looking young actors, and Phoenix gives them room to work. Even Harry’s sense of isolation — which in some of the movies would have occasioned frequent tantrums — is here subordinated to the struggle between Voldemort and Harry, between suspicious self-centered isolation and trusting, loving mutuality. Dumblebore’s decisions show frustrating lack of insight into Harry’s needs as a teenager (especially as an extraordinary teen), and educational policies of the Ministry of Magic (under both Dumbledore and Umbridge; you can’t dump the blame on her) seem bizarrely dangerous. Still, those perplexities don’t overshadow the satisfaction of seeing the films hero-children emerge as effectual agents with initiative. And the paring-away of Quidditch, Hogsmeade, and so on all served the laudable purpose of keeping attention on the protagonists’ progress toward maturity and reliance on one another.
Margaret thought the battle sequence at the end was too confusing and cluttered. I suppose so, though it caught me up into an uncertainty that intensified the excitement of the special effects.
I give Order of the Phoenix high marks. It’s not Citizen Kane, but it ranks with Prisoner of Azkaban as my favorites in the series so far. Not surprisingly, my main suggestion would be— more Lupin! I hope Rowling draws on his character more generously for the final volume, especially as Sirius Black and Dumbledore are now offstage.
We’re arranging to buy Deathly Hallows from a local bookseller, without the loss-leader discounting that the megachains will offer. I’ll have to wait my turn to read it, but I’ll be exceptionally eager to see what Rowling has up her sleeve. Well done, all around!
Johanna said:
I totally agree! I saw the movie yesterday and loved it for the very reasons you state so well!
Johanna
Posted by AKMA at 12:27 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
July 12, 2007
Unwarranted Pride
I had nothing to do with it, so there’s no basis for me to bask in their glory, but I nonetheless take pride in my alma mater Bowdoin College’s triumph in the international 4-legged soccer tournament Robocup. (Back when I went to Bowdoin, I hacked the campus mainframe version of STRTRK, first to replace the various galactic locations in the array with place names from campus, then to eliminate the annoying flaw in the game architecture that squandered energy by firing phasers at Klingons that were hiding behind planets. In those days, hacking was made simpler by the fact that security consisted to a large extent to “no one knows how to do that,” “nobody would try that,” or “no one knows where we put it.”)
Posted by AKMA at 10:43 AM | Comments (0)
Best Typefaces of 2006
The online type-design community that gathers around Typophile and Typographi.ca just announced their favorite fonts of last year (yes, it’s July, there were technical complications). Of the faces they cite, my favorite has to be Fabiol; I’m a sucker for Venetian Renaissance type. (Plus, anything from the Font Bureau. I want the job of composing their type specimen copy.)
One might think that after five hundred years of typography and more than a decade of the democratization of digital typeface design, that relatively little room remains for creativity in legibly, gracefully representing the Latin alphabet. These designers demonstrate how false that inference would be.
Chris said:
I wanted to comment on your most recent fonts post that while many of the fonts are very nice, many of them are also deficient in their range of diacritical marks. Some of them would make beautiful, quasi-distinctive body text for my syllabi or Keynote presentations or handouts, but they don't support a wide enough range of diacriticals for me to accurately transliterate Hebrew or other Semitic languages. :-(
Chris
Posted by AKMA at 09:15 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Star Star
I can’t wait to hear what Bruce Schneier has to say about the FBI’s new “system to assess risk.” (A German report here, which quotes Schneier as saying something like, “These programs are based on the dangerous myth that terrorists fit a particular profile, and we can pick them out of a crowd if we only put all people into it.” ) It would be great to see an internationally-prominent body adopting the principle that you can’t out-anticipate terrorists, but you can uphold an open, respectful, resilient civil order.
Posted by AKMA at 08:46 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
July 11, 2007
Use a Copyright Source Fairly Today
I’m not sure who established Fair Use Day, but as the corrosion of equity and common sense continue to tip the balance of copyright benefits toward corporate publishers (not artists, writers, and creators, and certainly not readers, viewers, and listeners), exercise your prerogative to quote, parody, criticize, or educate using copyrighted works. Use it or lose it!
Posted by AKMA at 11:51 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
July 10, 2007
Cluephone Ringing Off the Hook
Courtesy of Doc and Nate:
First, JP “I’m cool for more reasons than just my collaboration with Chris Locke” Rangaswami, the grand slam analysis of Prince’s decision to give away copies of his CD to residents of the UK:
Prince understands how he makes money, what’s scarce and what’s abundant about it. Digital downloads are abundant. Concert appearances are scarce. He makes money because of his CDs and not with them [this emphasis c/o AKMA].Then, via Nate (the unlinkable), the latest news from Canadian band Stars:A word of caution. Some people are just not comfortable with abundance economics, so they try to create artificial scarcities as they go along. Second nature to them, I guess. . . .
You cannot bundle abundance with scarcity, it’s like trying to implement region coding of the air that you breathe. But then some people will try anything.
On September 25th, Arts&Crafts will release Stars' fourth studio album, In Our Bedroom After War. . . .Traditional music business practice says we are to begin sending out copies of this album now. We give advance copies to print publications in hopes of securing features that coincide with our September date. We meet with radio stations in hopes of securing airplay. etc, etc.
Inevitably someone will leak the album.
Throughout this process, the most important people in this value chain, the fans, are given only two options - wait until September 25th to legally purchase the new album or choose from a variety of sources and download the album for free, at any time.
We hope you'll choose to support the band, and choose to pay for their album. However we don't think it's fair you should have to wait until September 25th to do so.
We believe that the line between the media and the public is now completely grey.
What is the difference between a writer for a big glossy music magazine and a student writing about their favourite bands on their blog? What differentiates a commercial radio station from someone adding a song to their lastfm channel? or their myspace page?As such, we are making the new Stars album available for legal download today, four days after it's completion. The CD and double vinyl versions of the album will still be released on our official release date, September 25th. We hope you will continue to support music retailers should a physical album in all it's packaged glory be your choice of format.
It's our hope that given a clear, legal alternative to downloading music for free, you will choose to support the creators.
We hope you enjoy it as much as we do.
Sincerely,
Stars and Arts&Crafts
If only they realized that it’s not the dollars-from-bits that they’re selling; it’s the packaging (for the physical artifact) and the performances (at live venues). But Rangaswami’s, and Prince’s, understanding of how this digital economy works will prevail in the long run. And if you want to buy the Stars album now, you can go here now; me, I’ll wait to hear how it sounds before I rush to buy. At least Arts & Crafts doesn’t DRM-cripple their digital versions.
Posted by AKMA at 12:13 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Busy Signal
Trying to work on some lectionary essays while also getting ready to decamp for Princeton, and pondering the possibility of using Inform 7 for educational games in New Testament studies (thanks for the distraction pointer, Steve!).
Posted by AKMA at 08:54 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
July 09, 2007
For Now
I was about to buckle down and write a real review of Everything is Miscellaneous — among the other things I’ve spent the last month on the verge of buckling down to write — when yesterday, David Weinberger offered a wonderful reflection on age, death, John Lennon, and our intertwingled lives.
On a very much lighter note, the Simpsons avatar maker does its magic even more impressively than the Lego Mini-mizer did.
Posted by AKMA at 06:50 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
July 08, 2007
Laminar Liturgy
Before I go to church, so that I don’t give the impression that I’m thinking about any particular service:
The point of worship is worship. The point of taking pains about liturgy — well, I can think of several. One point involves trying to say what we mean, liturgically, rather than our services just mumbling. (Despite my sympathy for the Motu Proprio permitting wider use of the Tridentine Mass, I admit that this gesture may convey both an imprecise retrograde nostalgia and, more importantly, the revival of gravely problematic liturgical antisemitism.)
The other point I had in mind involved the action of worship, when clumsiness and confusion call attention to the goings-on as something other than fluent praise of God. Turbulence distracts; coordination facilitates. (Yes, it’s possible to make an idol of hyperprecise liturgical fussiness; on the whole, I observe a great many more situations in which careless confusion is shrugged off as inconsequential than I observe situations in which fastidiousness interferes with worship. That fits a more general U.S. ideology of casualness, and of theological topics not mattering much.)
Posted by AKMA at 09:38 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
So Many Hooks
I find that my students work better on questions of ethics when you supply them with concrete case studies — so when I read the first bit of this story about Pete Doherty, I immediately thought about it as an example relative to questions of truth-telling and fidelity. But the more you linger with it, the more ethical plot lines come to the fore (especially as you read on to the end of the piece). You could devote an entire semester to teaching the ethics of this narrative.
Posted by AKMA at 09:22 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
July 07, 2007
Pondering
Granted that word-for-word matching isn’t the cardinal characteristic of good translation, wouldn’t it be fair to translate dipsychos as “half-hearted”? It gets at the sense of divided sentiments better in colloquial English than does “double-minded,” which sounds more like multiple personality disorder to me.
Pascale suggests, “of two minds”; that gets at the sense of the expression, but it sounds cumbersome to me in the context of the Epistle of James.
Carl said:
Dear Sir,
I wholeheartedly empathize with your quandary on what to do with dipsychos. While taking an exegesis class on James (under the supervision of Dr. Bill Baker), we as a class wrestled with how to nuance this seemingly un-nuanceable term. Since then, however, I have spent a fair amount of time bathing myself with the wisdom literature of the ANE. I did this because of the commonly accepted association between James and wisdom writings. As a result of that, I found that it might be best to see dipsychos within a wisdom context. This approach seems beneficial, to me, because of where the term emerges in James: the contrast is being made between those who truly seek wisdom (1.5-6b) and those who do not (1.6c-7).
The notion of a "double" mind is right at home in wisdom literature--without conjuring up psychological chaos. For one to be of "one" mind is to be in harmony with the created order, which is already understood to have a non-chaotic ontology. Thus, the individual who is of one mind could be seen as a microcosm of the harmonious universe. Therefore, for one to be "double-minded" is to be not only out of synch with oneself; it is also to be out of synch with the entire created order. As a result of this, the individual is thereby unable to operate (effectively and consistently) in a manner that is in keeping with how things should be; for they are constantly at war, again, not only with themselves but also with the cosmos--or the creator of both. (This internal division may also play into the Jewish notion of the yezer hara [S. Schechter; P. Davids]).
These are just some of my random thoughts on the subject--take them for what they're worth. :-) I hope they make some sense. If not, please do not hesitate to ask. I hope you have a wonderful rest of your weekend. I look forward to reading more of your posts.
Kind regards,
-Carl S. Sweatman
MA--NT Research Student
Cincinnati Bible Seminary
Graduate Assistant to Dr. Tom Thatcher
[My hesitation with “double-minded” involves whether that expression most effectively communicates dipsychos to a casual listener, one who probably would never say “double-minded” if not reading a Bible translation aloud. We who read the Greek are liable to register too literal a transition from the Greek that we see to a English equivalents, where “half-hearted” immediately signals an attitude where ostensive commitment is undermined by another, different allegiance. Or that’s how it seems to me.]
Posted by AKMA at 12:06 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Just Wondering
If a 4Gb iPhone costs $500 with phone technology in its guts, how much would a unit cost without the phone innards? A wide-screen, wifi-enabled, web-browsing, email-checking, video-watching, touch-screen-interfacing iPod (and gateway device to the phone version)? Cause it sounds to me as though they’d sell a zillion of them.
Posted by AKMA at 09:30 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
July 06, 2007
Two Stops
Yesterday’s activities included two special destinations. First, we dropped Josiah and Laura off at Midway Airport for their trip to visit Laura’s folks at their summer home; since we were in the neighborhood, we took Pippa to Springfield-in-Chicago, the local
where we gawked at the remade convenience store and chuckled at the clever Simpsons allusions. We will not rest from our critiques of consumer culture — but if you’re going to run a franchised convenience store, you might as well do it with self-deprecating wit. Jeneane swears our package of Krusty-Os will be valuable someday if we keep it unopened; I’m unconvinced that the cost of storing and reselling the cereal will be surpassed by what anyone would pay for it. On the other hand, I haven’t opened the box yet.
After obtaining a sour watermelon Squishee for PIppa and some marginally-nutritious snacks, we turned north to take Pip to the Art Institute, where Margaret and I had gone a few weeks ago. We proceeded first to a gallery in the Asian collection to which Laura had called our attention. Then Pippa led us to a photography exhibition that she wanted to see. I admired the photography treatments of Koto Ezawa (would Flickr consider that a photograph? Remember when that was a hot topic?), but Margaret and I were knocked out by the photos of Sarah Hobbs and Angela Strassheim.
Then we took a very quick stroll through the European paintings before we ran out of energy.
A splendid time is guaranteed for all.
Posted by AKMA at 09:22 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
July 05, 2007
By Request
Aretê Krista pointed my attention to the Karaoke Cowboy tape by the late Slim the Drifter, and I’ve been listening to it appreciatively. There’s so very much recorded music flooding our environment — I wonder how the music bloggers manage to listen to anything more than once, just at the level of raw time-consumption; I’ve always been a constant-listener, but at this point I’ve ripped and downloaded megabytes of recordings that I haven’t yet listened to — there’s so much to hear that one can understand how some worthy efforts get lost in the swirl.
If you have a soft spot for Bakersfield country-rock, head over to Jeff’s place and listen to Slim. (And thanks, Jeff, for so generously including me among the “usual suspects” Tom, Ray, Mark — someday I’ll have to start thinking again.)
Posted by AKMA at 01:48 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Memo
If you want graphical ornaments for a page layout, head over to Briar Press’s Cuts & Caps section. These are EPS files, not typefaces or jpgs, but most of the page layout apps I know of — in deed, most contemporary word processors — handle EPS.
Posted by AKMA at 10:25 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
July 04, 2007
What Dreams May Come
I keep a fortune-cookie slip in my wallet. It reads, “Your dream will come true when you least expect it.” Let’s bracket, for the moment, the question of whether there’s any sane reason to take fortune-cookie slips seriously; we know there isn’t, and we know that we do anyway.
What’s the effect of being told that my dream will come true when I least expect it? Doesn’t that instigate a pattern of expectation that itself militates against dream-realization? Or does it mean that a second-tier dream comes true instead, because I was too attentively expecting the unexpected realization of the most prominent dream?
I’ve got a small assortment of dreams any one of which would be an ecstatic delight. One of them was eliminated in the past couple of days; I guess I mistakenly thought too seriously about it.
I suppose it is with dreams as with zazen, that in order to attain, you must banish consciousness of wanting-to-attain. So I’ll try to relinquish my dreams — and not simply so that I might attain one unexpected one, but so that I may appreciate more fully the dream-come-true that is my marvelous family, my fantastic dear wife, and the tremendous network of lovely friends into whose lives I’ve been woven.
The Young Fogey says:
I keep a fortune-cookie slip in my wallet. It reads, “Your dream will come true when you least expect it.” Let’s bracket, for the moment, the question of whether there’s any sane reason to take fortune-cookie slips seriously; we know there isn’t, and we know that we do anyway.
Mine is in the plastic window of the wallet with a paper icon of Our Lady of Perpetual Help and says, 'Resist what others perceive of as your destiny'.
Not the same note of Christian and Zen detachment as your post but in its own way just as liberating.
The young fogey
Posted by AKMA at 10:30 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
What Film Is This?
Last night Margaret and I spontaneously went to see Ocean’s Thirteen after dinner. We enjoyed it, though I’d have appreciated slightly more intensity to the concluding twists. I like just sitting around watching George Clooney, Brad Pitt, and their friends look stylish and ingenious.
On our way out, Margaret wondered what the movie was for which the long line had been snaking around the theater. “Why, the Transformers movie,” I answered. “No!” “Yup.”
Margaret had no idea just how deeply the Transformers reach into the dreams and nostalgia of their audience. I have only a faint appreciation for this, having fallen in with a Transformers fanboy online a couple of years ago. We spent the rest of our walk home coaching Margaret through her jaw-dropped amazement that anyone, much less a sizable crowd of mixed generations, races, and genders, would be willing to sit through a movie about cars that change into superhero robots — much less, that they’d line up for hours to see the first showing. She’s still researching Transformania this morning.
Posted by AKMA at 10:27 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
July 03, 2007
Be My Guest
Anyone out there interested in beta-testing Skitch (requires Mac 10.4.6 or later)? It certainly looks like an interesting alternative approach to photo treatment and sharing to Flickr; high emphasis on client-side editing and annotation, without server-side interaction. Intriguingly different strengths, though.
Posted by AKMA at 12:18 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Simultaneous Tennis
I used to play chess, long ago (as Dennis Fischman, my teammate, reminded me last winter!), in which endeavor one of the celebrated events is the “simultaneous exhibition.” A strong chess player can examine and understand games well enough to play on numerous simultaneously (one by one, to be exact). I have enough difficulty playing at all that I would never dream of trying that — my main accomplishment since high school has been beating Nate and Si while playing blindfolded (to their amazement, and my own surprise).
I started working through my email inbox this morning at about nine o’clock, and am just now modulating to other productive modes of labor, and I haven't even answered all the mail I got. This feels less like a simultaneous chess match than like playing tennis simultaneously on several courts at once.
Posted by AKMA at 11:25 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
July 02, 2007
Further Faces
I haven’t checked to see if Font Sugar has these, but the faces that Jos Buivenga makes available at exljbris would make admirable candidates for the sans-family or serif-family faces for your collection. (If only Tallys were expanded to a complete family. . . .)
Posted by AKMA at 02:15 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Telling The Difference
During my morning stroll through bookmarks, blogrolls, and RSS streams, I came to this set of pictures of a 7-Eleven redecorated to match the Kwik-E-Mart from The Simpsons TV series (in preparation for the movie, I suppose). (Link via Jason.)
I post the link here because of the comments on this picture. “Gotsomeideas” says, “It would have been easy for them to screw up this promotion and make it unfunny, but from what I can tell from the pictures, they actually did a good job.” Bananatree responds, “Attention to detail is awesome.” Exactly. Most anyone who has watched a few minutes of The Simpsons could throw a few jokey signs into a convenience store and sit back; that would have met the Flickr commenters’ expectations of a wooden corporation lamely miming the brilliant cultural currents from which it’s hoping to draw cachet. That’s the self-appointed “funny” guy in the company repeating jokes from The Simpsons by the water cooler: thanks, I’d rather watch the show. Instead, the 7-Eleven people opted to pay attention to detail, to go with the painstaking composition that infuses such manic humor into The Simpsons — and people could tell. It makes a difference.
Now, let’s ask the embarrassing question. which is your church more like: the office funny guy repeating something that someone once thought was amusing, or the brilliantly subtle, detailed creation of a physical-world Kwik-E-Mart?
Much of the time, my rants about attention to detail and communicating carefully and responsibly and deliberately, are drowned out by a culture of casualness, spontaneity, free-wheelin’ yada yada yada. Hey, spontaneity and relaxation and freedom are good things, I approve of them. But attention to detail — by people who know what they’re doing — makes a difference, and viewers, visitors, congregants can tell (even if they can’t articulate the difference it makes). I didn’t see Diana Butler Bass when she passed through town (she was here only in father-daughter time), but it sounded as though she was saying similar things: that congregations grow not because you belong to the Single Correct Side of a theo-ideological schism, but because you realize that the work of living as a congregation, as a Body, requires care and attention to detail. People can tell the difference.
Posted by AKMA at 11:40 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
July 01, 2007
Made to Stick
Margaret bought me a copy of Made to Stick for Christmas, and since I’m only just warming up to the odd pursuit known as “reading” over the last week or so, I finished reading it a couple of days before I left for Pittsburgh. The book devotes itself to several moderately obvious premises (the authors show charming diffidence about the novelty of their insights), and the manifestly non-obvious implications thereof. Why, ask the authors, if the characteristics of “sticky” ideas are so obvious, do not more people generate more sticky ideas? (And likewise why do so many ideas turn out to be non-sticky, if not altogether repellent?)
The short answer: notions that are simple, unexpected, concrete, credible, emotionally charged, and narrative in structure have a greater likelihood of sticking. This is easy enough to say, easy to illustrate, but much more tricky to put into effect; the Heaths devote the book to showing their analysis in practice, and the book merits attention (whether as a library take-out or a purchase) for its careful attention to the ways of stickiness. Despite the book’s casual logic of causality and its breezy rhetoric — which I’m quite content to ascribe to their expectation of reaching a mass audience — the Heaths make plausible points from which most people who traffic in ideas stand to learn.
One of the villains in their piece is the “curse of knowledge,” the extent to which greater depth of knowledge in a particular area blinds the know-er to what seems strikingly clear to a less-informed observer. One familiar example is the software application that performs a zillion different functions via commands and click sequences so obscure as to be quite useless. Some developer(s) presumably said, “All you do is invoke this menu with that key combination, find the check box, alt-click the check box, then highlight the selection and right-click-and-drag the selection” whereas a naive observer would say, “I can’t figure that out, I’ll never use it.” Combine the curse of knowledge with the [disputed] Dunning-Kruger effect, and you set in motion a typhoon of sticky-less-ness.
The Heaths gave me a lot to think about. The field of biblical studies fits very typically into those areas where the curse of knowledge effects a barrier between practitioners and their ostensible clients. We have to teach our students not solely “stuff about the Bible,” but also “why we would think about the Bible in these counter-intuitive ways.” The curse of knowledge has also played a role in selecting who enters the field of biblical studies; those of us with temperaments suited to our arcane modes of reasoning feel more comfortable reading and evaluating biblical scholars’ arguments, and we perpetuate those sorts of argument when we enter the field. That’s not because we’re uniquely brilliant, or have discovered the One True Path to Biblical Veracity, but because we do it more or less the way our forebears did. (By the same token, our knowledge is still very valuable knowledge; it’s just a mode of knowledge that particular sorts of people have worked out over generations, and it’s neither exhaustive nor exclusive.)
When I return to teaching, I want to have taken some time to think through (for instance) things that my students already know, that the practices of biblical interpretation resemble. I anticipate introducing interpretive problems and axioms more as a narrative about how readers of the Bible puzzled over things, and how they’ve resolved their puzzlements, than as conclusive “facts” about the New Testament.
Made to Stick also provoked me to wonder whether, alongside the curse of knowledge, there might be a “curse of authority.” This latter “curse” operates on those whom it affects by preying on their (actual) situation as decision-makers, truth-determiners, or authority-bearers, who eventually will have to arrive at plans, conclusions, and policies. The accursed authority figure supposes that since authority is vested in him, his perspective on a situation has to determine the course of action — without testing that perspective against, perhaps, the circumstances of the world around him. Un-sticky ideas might well develop from policy-makers whose authority exceeds their imagination.
In any case, I’d recommend Made To Stick firmly — as a library read at the very least. Once we get over the conclusion that the authors aren’t saying anything so very novel, and attend to the preponderance of evidence that most people’s ideas depart from the Heaths’ advice, we stand to benefit from their insight into how much we have to learn.
Posted by AKMA at 12:05 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack