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October 31, 2007

10 - 20 - 30

Tim thinks that by tagging me to identify where I was ten, twenty, and thirty years ago, he’ll gain some interesting context to support the reminiscences he’s seen here; I fear that my answers will strike someone with as varied and exotic a life as Tim’s as distinctly dull. Let’s see:

10 years ago, I was teaching here at Princeton Theological Seminary. Back then, my hair was much monger — well down my back, in a pony tail — but really, that’s about it. Margaret hadn’t begun her graduate studies; Nate, Si and Pip were all still at home; Jennifer and Juliet were probably both living with us (Jennifer’s coming to visit later this week); I was looking for a job, since my position at Princeton was non-tenurable. We loved Princeton back then, the town and the seminary students and my colleagues.

20 years ago, I was making the transition from my masters studies at Yale Divinity to my doctoral work at Duke. We had to leave Margartet’s beloved dog Pearl behind us (no dogs allowed in the only apartment we could track down); Nate was two, and Si was not yet a year old. I had served as day school chaplain at St. Thomas’s Day School (preaching every morning to a group that includes junior kindergardeners through sixth grade and their teachers puts a lot of mileage on, fast) and as Assisting Priest at Christ Church, New Haven; at Duke, I helped Earl Brill with the campus ministry, but mostly concentrated on my studies (I had a three-year grant, and needed to be employed full-time when it expired, so feed the family).

30 years ago, I was a college junior at Bowdoin. Now there are some stories to tell about my junior year! For the purposes of summary and discretion, let us simply indicate that I had experienced some heartbreak, some other sorts of stressful turbulence, I had started carrying around a coffee cup with me everywhere and filling it when empty, and — this will surprise you — more or less stopped eating and sleeping. I realized that I needed to cut out the caffeine, and after a couple of weeks could resume a more healthy regimen. I also had the disturbing realization, through a medical ethics class, that although I could win an argument on either side of a contested point, I didn’t really have any coherent principles to shape my sense of which position was right.

The next year, I met Margaret.

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October 30, 2007

From Ago

I did not sample a madeleine in tea yesterday, but I revisited a longtime friend whom Blogaria knows as Will Smama. We met in the fall of 1990, when she took one of the first classes I taught at Eckerd College. I was underprepared for beginning my life of teaching, as I’d been furiously typing away at my dissertation, but WS put up with me anyway; she majored in Religion, and took several more courses from me. She was a friend to Nate and Si when they were cute and little (this warrants, I think, a link to the classic Halloween picture that attracts a lot of search engine traffic this time of year — Si on the left, Nate on the right, and their friends in the middle).

OK, enough of that. After WS graduated from Eckerd and I went to teach at Princeton Theological Seminary, she was called to ministry in the Presbyterian Church, so she came to study again where I was teaching. Now that I’m back in Princeton for sabbatical, and she’s on vacation from her congregation, we met up at the sand pit in Marquand Park.

Although I enjoyed the chance to catch up, to talk through the various transitions and turbulences and lessons and delights in our lives, the very best part of the visit was the chance to meet Will. He truly is, as they say, all that.

Thanks so much for stopping by, WS, and for introducing me to Will. Thanks for long-lasting friendship and a loveliness in life that you’ve given now to Will, that you’ve shared with a blessed congregation, and that touches your many, many friends.

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Clarification and Emphasis

I’m reading a book just now that makes the repeated claim that the New Testament itself, the plain sense of the text, requires assent from its readers — and that provokes me to refine the point I was making yesterday. I don’t want to assert that any reader who picks up the New Testament and reads it “competently” confronts the challenge to accept it or reject it, with ultimate salvific implications. Rather, I would argue that for someone (like me) who recognizes the gospels to speak divine truth, a reader who appreciates the Bible but does not participate in the life to which we understand them to point has forgone the opportunity to share the fullest resonances, insights, possibilities, and truth. I expect that an uncommitted historian of the ancient Mediterranean could say that someone such as I who has already given his profoundest allegiance to the New Testament misses out on the fullest understanding of Mithraic, Gnostic, even non-religious Hellenistic texts, and they would be right.

The point isn’t to construct a binary opposition between True Believers and Woebegone Doubters, or to set up the biblical text as self-determined Salvationometer. The point is that sympathy inescapably inflects understanding, and someone who withholds full sympathy (for whatever reasons, I’m not judging the reasons in question) holds back from the opportunity of fuller apprehension.

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October 29, 2007

Told Them So

“Cardinal Urges Religious to Get Blogging” (thanks to Jeneane for the heads-up). In my “technology and religion” article, I addressed enither the ignorance that leads Cardinal Ruini to say, “I don’t understand the Internet, but especially young religious ought to enter blogs and correct the opinions of the youth” nor the “cult of professionals” rhetoric that Andrew Keen and (now, thx David) Donnacha Delong spout. I’m not inclined to revise the article so extensively as to engage those angles, but I’m kicking myself (gently) for leaving them out.

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Dave catches me!

AKMA,

I'm having a minor attack of cognitive dissonance here! :^)

In "Commitment, Ambiguity, and Reading Scripture," you seem to be arguing for the "cult of professionals," and correctly so, in my opinion; yet you seem to dismiss the same with with disdain here (Told Them So). Am I missing something? (I know none of the "cool kids" like Andrew Keen, because he harshes everyone's buzz, but really, he has a valid point though he is perhaps not its best advocate.)

You do write beautifully, though. I really, really liked the Commitment… post. And I've read, briefly, your technology and religion post. I thought it was well done, but I was disappointed that you didn't seem to want to tackle "technology as religion," which is something that troubles me these days.

Anyway, just wanted to pass that along.

Have a great day! Hope you've recovered from your canine care-giver's fatigue!

Dave

[Hi, Dave! Yes, we rested up yesterday and are feeling fresh as daisies today. The dogs really were charming, in their way — we just weren’t fully prepared for “their way,” and Margaret’s a very light sleeper, and even I have a hard time going back to sleep after a lovable pug launches himself at my head in the wee hours of the morning.

I could defend my apparent inconsistency as an instance of normative dissonance, and it’s been a while since someone used “harsh [their] buzz” so Dave has captatio'ed my benevolentiae. But if there is any consistency there, it rests in my advocacy of an environment where demonstrable excellence has the opportunity to make itself known — apart from constraints imposed unilaterally by experts (“do it my way or we won’t publish”), and apart from the empty noise that drowns out edifying signals. I associate Keen with the “Shut up, amateur” school (when did he become an expert on expertise, anyway? What qualifies him?); I know from experience many of the “I have a theory” advocates who skip the annoying intermediary steps of “getting acquainted with the relevant literature.” Under the best circumstances, the Web provides a venue for sound thinking to make itself visible apart from expert editorial approval, but often enough the circumstances are non-optimal. A number (not “all”) of the biblical-studies pages of the Wikipedia illustrate the power of a vigorous, determined autodidact to suppress well-grounded countervailing scholarly perspective.

Enh — away with the experts and hobby-horse riders! I’m still an advocate of the best of the Web. But thanks very much, Dave, for your compliment to my writing and for keeping me accountable for propounding a coherent version of my spiel, which accountability I hope I’ve begun to make good on.]

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Commitment, Ambiguity, and Reading Scripture

I’m working on my paper for the annual Society of Anglican and Lutheran Theologians meeting, and for inspiration combing my back catalogue of quotations — my Commonplace Book. There I found the following quotation:

Liberals believe that facts (of history, justice, science) are independent of the knower, and that it is the knower’s obligation to approach the task of knowing with as few preconceptions as possible so that the understanding he finally achieves is impersonal rather than a reflection of his antecedently held views and preferences; one must come to any situation calling for a decision (about what to think or what to say or what to do) with an open mind, a mind prepared to jettison its most cherished convictions should the evidence tell against them. Liberals believe that evidence lies about in the world waiting to be gathered and then arranged in patterns it itself suggests. Liberals believe that if we are sufficiently careful in our gathering of evidence (careful, that is, to keep ourselves and our desires out of the process) the truth will finally emerge in a form everyone (whose mind is open) will acknowledge. Liberals believe that when the truth is to be determined, the meaning (political, moral, legal) of an action, the previous history of the actor—whether he has in the past been a good or bad man—is largely irrelevant and that we should look only to the shape of the present circumstances when assessing him. And because liberals believe in all of the above, they believe in the efficacy of procedures—scientific, parliamentary, judicial—designed to protect us from the overhasty judgments we make when we allow our commitments and allegiances to blind us. Liberals believe that the most important of these procedures is the machinery of rationality, of those laws of logic attached to no agenda or vision, but sufficiently general in their scope as to provide a normative perspective from the vantage point of which any agenda or vision can be assessed and, if necessary, corrected. Liberals believe that communication and persuasion take place (or should take place) in the context of that rationality and that it is possible to bring anyone—except, perhaps, the mentally impaired—to a clear understanding, so long as he or she is willing to set aside or bracket all biases and preconceptions.*

Juxtapose this account of liberal reason with the overwhelming mandate from conservatives and liberals alike that biblical interpretations be resolved by appeal to a discernible meaning inherent in The Text, that any rational, well-informed reader can excavate. To the contrary, some truth offers itself only to the scientist whose heart is already attuned to it; in order to recognize the truth in poetry, one needs some prior initiation to the world of indirection, figure, allusion, rhythm, harmony. Some truth offers itself only to a seeker who has learned to cherish the regularities of number, the elegance of economical proof, the unwavering dogmas imposed by probability, the transcultural good news that a common language with common axioms can crack open sealed crypts of creation and yield cures, forecasts, remedies, and explanations. But the truth avails always to interested parties.

This, I think, touches on the conflict over Scripture and bunk: not that an uncommitted reader can’t ever arrive at a true interpretation of Scripture, so much as that a committed reader stands to apprehend vastly more richly the common language, the rhymes, the dogmas, the figures that will not have registered on the awareness of the uncommitted reader. And that in an ultimate mode of reading, interpretations that do not conclude in committed practice partake of rejection of the truth. To hark back to Milton’s anti-liberalism, the condition of setting aside and bracketing all preconceptions itself entails a spiritual impediment to recognizing the truth.

As a reader of the comments from which this conversation emerged will note, I resist the dichotomy between “intelligible” and “unintelligible” that fuels much of the controversy. First, my observation of interpretation suggests that “intelligibility” always involves degrees of intelligibility, never complete transparency or utter opacity. Second, I doubt that even a judge much more humble and saintly than I, can or should issue ukases about who can and can not perceive the truth; as Milton would have pointed out, anyone who bears the effects of sin (that is, “all of us”) must say with the Apostle, “I have no word from the Lord on this,” must reckon her- or himself to be one of the field-working servants rather than the harvesting angels who can separate wheat from tares. “Such a man as this rejoices in everything; he does not make himself a judge of the servants of God, nor of any rational creature; nay, he rejoices in every condition and every type that he sees, saying, ‘Thanks be to Thee, eternal Father, that Thou hast many mansions in Thy House.’ And he rejoices more in the different kinds of men that he sees than he would do in seeing them all walk in the same way, for so he sees the greatness of God's goodness more manifest. He joys in everything, and gets from it the fragrance of roses. And even as to a thing which he may expressly see to be sin, he does not pose as a judge, but regards it rather with holy true compassion, saying, ‘To-day it is thy turn, and to-morrow mine, unless it be for divine grace which preserves me’ ” (Catherine of Siena). Such a reader may decline the invitation to share at the table that nourishes faith, but it would be an odd thing if the spiritual joy-in-diversity that Catherine celebrates didn’t normally involve participating in the faith it celebrates — odd, if that eucharistic nourishing weren’t generally concomitant with interpretive flourishing.

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* It’s from Edward Oakes’s review of How Milton Works by Stanley Fish, quoting Fish himself in this paragraph.

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October 28, 2007

That's Good News

Congratulations to Princeton Seminary, who have committed to a digital library initiative and have now arranged for a new XML content server for their digital collection. I had lunch with Nicole a month or so ago, and we enjoyed a great, wide-ranging conversation about knowledge, information, users, and libraries — if she’s excited about this step, I tend to suppose it’s a promising move for PTS.

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Ngognog Ngogn

We are not at church. We volunteered to dogsit for some Princeton friends of ours, before we fully apprehended he consequences of that offer — namely, that the pug for whom we were caring is accustomed to sleeping with his owners, indeed, to burrowing into the bedclothes adjacent to them. And snoring. Add to that Beatrice’s pangs of dispriz’d love, such that she could not control her whines and moans nor keep herself from snapping and growling at the indigenous pug. And an aging Westie, who keeps her own counsel and nips at anyone who presumes to propose an alternative (based on human sensibilities). All of this made for two sleep- and comfort-deprived adults, one of whom is now lying abed while the other attends to Bea’s needs, in anticipation of swapping off in a while.

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October 27, 2007

Judeans In the New Testament

I’ve been gratified to observe a small flurry of activity on the web recently, supporting a proposal I first made a long time ago: that we stand better to understand the New Testament and the history and politics surrounding it if we read the Greek word Ioudaios as “Judean” rather than “Jew.” A while ago, Bruce Malina, John Pilch, and Philip Esler (in separate publications) advanced this position on social-scientific grounds. Frederick Danker indicated that “Judean” best defined Ioudaios in his revision of the Bauer Lexicon. Back when I put it forward (first in a seminar paper at YDS in 1986, then in print in Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha 14 (1996) 15-21 and in the Greek textbook I wrote), I made the case on a more general semantic/historical/cultural basis. Since then, in reading the New Testament, my tentative hypothesis has been confirmed over and over again — the narratives just make more sense if you shift the focus of attention from the Jews to the Judeans.

At this point, it’s vital that I stress that I'm not saying “There were no Jews in the New Testament” as though there were only Aryans, or no one practiced the faith and laws handed down from the judges and prophets through the priests and rabbis. Indeed, part of the strength of the Judeans proposal lies in the fact that it appropriately subsumes Jesus and his bunch under the same cultural umbrella as their Pharisaic and Essene and Sadducee neighbors. They were all adherents of the Torah and Temple; some were Judeans strictu sensu, some were Galileans, some were Nabateans or Idumaeans, and outsiders such as Romans didn’t bother to make nice distinctions among them. The goal isn’t to produce a Judenrein Gospel, but to make clear that Jesus and his buddies weren’t an exception in the theological-cultural milieu of citizens with whom they lived, worked, and argued.

About a year ago, Loren Rosson revived the question in his blog to which Carl Conrad assented on the B-Greek mailing list). Since then, John Elliott has published a pertinent article in the Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus, which Rosson summarizes in a separate post — and A.-J. Levine has published a fervent riposte to advocates of first-century Judeans. A flurry of blogged responses to Rosson ensued. And now, Phil Harland points to an article by Steve Mason in Journal for the Study of Judaism.

As the testimonies stack up, we should pause before concluding to note (a) that none of the “Judean” proposals involves deprecating anything about the religion, ethnic identity, practices, literature, integrity, or any other aspect of the cultural life of Judaism — indeed, many proponents of “Judean” demonstrate a consistent interest in promoting appreciation of the lives, beliefs, and practices with which we’re concerned; (b) the arguments they’ve advanced all rest on pretty uncontroversial premises, save Esler’s argument that we are obligated to show our respect for ancient forebears by characterizing them in accordance with their self-identification (and even that is not an outlandish claim, albeit controverted); (c) antiquity did not draw the strong distinction between state, ethnicity, and religion that 20th-century liberal democracies do, so that an ancient observer will justifiably assume that a “Judean” worships the god of the Judeans, owes loyalty to a Judean head of state, and is descended from (or adopted into) the Judean ethnic group; (d) a great many texts of the New Testament, as well as other ancient sources concerned with the people of Israel, make more sense if the retrospective term “Jew” is not used; (e) one particular benefit of that usage entails clarifying the conflict in John’s Gospel as a dispute among regional factions (Judeans vs. Galileans) rather than rivalry between “Jews” and “Christians.”

I do not suppose (as Harland does) that Mason’s article closes the question. I do hope that this groundswell of exegetical energy banishes glib dismissals (one eminent Neutestamentler is reputed to have said, “That’s just political correctness”) and forces the issue out into the open terrain where we can muster contending arguments. The longer I live with the conclusion that Ioudaios should be understood as “Judean,” the sounder it seems to me.

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October 26, 2007

Getting Used To

The newest version of Quicksilver has changed the user interface, such that when I launch it and begin typing, I hesitate for a second — not recognizing what I see on the screen. Of course, Quicksilver interprets that pause as my changing my mind about what I want the application to do, so it redirects its target to a different file. Sigh.

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What He Said, Part Two

The much-[unfairly]-maligned Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams interrogates Richard Dawkins’ version of the “Atheists Rule!” meme in an address transcribed here. And at the risk of self-promotion, I ought to remind readers that David Weinberger expressed his qualms about Dawkins a year ago.

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October 25, 2007

Technology and Religion?

I was going to comment retrospectively on Tom’s post about the Bible and “proper” understanding, but Paul and Tom and Phil far outdid anything I’d be able to cobble together.

So instead, I’ll summarize the article about technology and religion that I sent in to my editor.

In the opening paragraphs, I try to sketch the extent to which technology permeates contemporary culture. While one can imagine a hermit who eschews all fabricated advantages, or a bleeding-edge early adopter who embraces all technologies without hesitation, the vast preponderance of religious adherents fall into a middle area that accepts some technologies and rejects others, very often without careful analysis.

I then begin by proposing a very rough characterization of religious faith that repudiates the material world in favor of the spirit, and religious faith that endorses the material world as an expression of the human spirit. Such a convenient taxonomy might shed some light on religious attitudes toward technology, but it occludes mediating positions or religious perspectives that construe technology in itself as indifferent, but concentrate on its effects on believers.

I call attention to technology’s propensity to foreground its advantages and to suppress its costs. The capacity to drive across town to obtain a take-out pizza constitutes a delicious benefit of automotive transportation, but that benefit occludes the chain of dependency, pollution, and exploitation that produce and sustain the car. While advocates of technology can concentrate on the vast advantages that technological devices bestow, religious thinkers will want to keep a steadfast eye on all the labor, spoliation, waste, and pollution on which technologies depend.

Moreover, technologies insinuate themselves into their users’ lives so as to constitute aspects of their own identity. A musician senses the familiar instrument to be an extension of her or his own self; a driver does not simply operate a car, but feels with it (and responds to its traumas and triumphs as though they involved the driver’s own self. Indeed, sometimes technological devices become appendages of their users (glasses, for an external example, or a pacemaker for a life-sustaining internal device).

As technology shades into personal identity, though, we encounter the perplexing zone where organic identity and technological identity become difficult to parse. A copious literature explores the zone where “robots” and humans interact in ways that call into question the artificiality of the android and the humanity of the biological person.

(Here I note in passing a point I owe to Chris Locke — that especially in the field of “artificial intelligence," technology comes with the hereditary influence of its progenitors in the military-industrial complex, and the apple rarely falls far from the tree.)

The conundrum of technological humanity, the cyborg, often evokes the suspicion that the technological aspect of something (or someone) is not real. I’ve been asked more than once if certain of my friends are “real friends” or “online friends.” But no matter how you slice it, online interactions involve reality in some way or another; they are actual interactions, not hallucinations or fantasies.

We need to take seriously the religious significance of technology (and the technological dimensions of religious life) in part because the two have always been intertwined — from Stonehenge to temples. St Paul relied on the virtual presence made possible by letters to communicate with far-flung congregations; the buildings and appliances that serve religious purposes may involve digital technology as well as mechanical technology.

If machines can approximate humanness, and digital reality remains nonetheless real, though, what shall we say about technological spirituality? I take several paragraphs to explore the meaning of “religious behavior” in a digital online environment. Can toons pray? Can toons participate effectually in religious ritual? What criteria apply to the legitimacy of spiritual interactions online? Can one really be married in an online ceremony? (Are the toons involved married, but not their users?)

In a section that sends long roots back to my earliest arguments with David Weinberger, I insist that the internet doesn’t constitute a place — but (showing, I hope, a respectful appreciation of what he’s taught me since then) I underscore that the two-dimensional non-spatial nexus is not like any other two-dimensional entity with which we’re acquainted. Our near-instant access to the limitless extent of the expanding Web, and the fact that the Web interacts with time very differently from the ways that conventional spaces do, enrich the online environment with (non-literal) depth that three-dimensional spaces lack. The difference of the digital world approaches constituting the “sufficiently advanced” condition that Arthur C Clarke equates with “magic”; and since comparativists have long submitted that magic and religion are formally indistinguishable, we may fairly suggest that the Web offers users a magical, religious environment.

So to sum up, it is with good reason that people say both “God is in the details” and “the Devil is in the details.” Either way, it’s the details of technology that pertain to religious evaluation (and the details of religious particularity that will determine the status of technologies). As religions have struggled with whether to permit musical instruments, electrical lights, or other technological affordances, they will gradually come to terms with digital technology, in ways that vary according to the technology and the religion involved.

(Here’s a full PDF of the essay draft as submitted.)

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October 24, 2007

Deity and Delusion

I suppose there are theologians I respect more than Nicholas Lash, but there aren’t very many. So when I noticed that he had responded to The God Delusion in New Blackfriars, and that his response was among the free offerings in that otherwise walled-off journal, I turned to it with delight and great satisfaction. “A deplorable book,” indeed.

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October 23, 2007

Buncha Stuff, Weary

I was offline all day yesterday at the Advisory Board meeting for Affirming Anglican Catholicism. We’ve had some setbacks recently, so the meeting was itself sobering and tiring; I got up early to get to Manhattan, and the meeting took place in the sausage factory (which I find a spiritually wearying place). I don’t have much to say about that, beyond my grateful astonishment at the sumptuous hospitality I was shown. Margaret picked me up in Princeton Junction at 11:30, and I still feel worn out.

Tom asks some apposite questions over at his place, but I don’t have the concentration to answer right now.

Bob pointed to Sarah Milstein’s “Make Life More Like Games” (and Mary interjected a very helpful note too), which mentions Serios, whose economic model for email struck a chord for me. If an organization’s internal communications — requests for action, fulfillments, and so on — were marked in a way that indicated how much was being asked, and how much was being offered, one might learn an awful lot about workflow. Who asks a disproportionate amount from coworkers? Who asks little but provides much? How does a worker’s input/output vary depending on the kind of task? All very provocative and interesting. Next time someone asks me to prepare a memo or an evaluation, I want them to say “Please devote fifteen minutes to. . . .”

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October 21, 2007

Plainly Interpreting

There's an argument over at Kendall's place occasioned by an essay from Scott Carson concerning the [alleged] plain meaning of texts. I intervened once, but I think I’ll keep out hereafter; William Witt, who’s promoting the “plain meaning,” says that texts are inherently intelligible, that “inherent intelligibility is in the text” to be ignored or revealed. I’m on record as vociferously opposing the notion of subsistent meaning that he seems heavily invested in. If “intelligibility” is a property inherent in texts, I am curious to know (a) where it’s located, (b) who gets to determine which texts are intelligible and which aren’t, and (c) who determines which “revelations” of inherent intelligibility are sound and which are actually just “ignoring” the inherent meaning. I’ll leave it at that for now.

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Lucky Day

My extremely capable daughter has been making a name for herself in a field that I didn’t even know was a field, namely, “poultry portraiture.” Her most recent foray into this enterprise came after we invited longtime friends John and Hilary over for dinner when we first got to Princeton, and they watched delightedly as we showed off some of Pippa’s work. When they saw her depictions of other chickens, they — recidivist poultry keepers — both realized instantly that Pippa had to come meet Lucky, their new rooster.

They commissioned Pippa to paint a portrait of Lucky (whose life story merits a whole separate post), and Pippa began a series of studies for the commission. First she got acquainted with the rooster, then took a series of photos of him. She looked over the alternative images, and chose several candidates. She printed them out, cropped, edited, and re-selected, finally arriving at one particular image. Then she cut out the “Lucky” part of the image with an Xacto knife and traced the image onto a legal pad. After that, she executed a freehand version of the image on plain paper and — having satisfied herself that she was ready — got out the canvas and paints, and set to work.

Margaret and I were instantly captivated; we spent the last week regretting that this was a commission and would have to leave us. Yesterday we brought the painting, veiled, to Hilary and John’s house to introduce them to it.

They loved the painting as much as we did, and Hilary rushed to compare the painting to the subject. Lucky himself showed no interest whatever in the glorious representation of his handsome profile (he’s a very self-effacing rooster).

It was a wonderful afternoon, a splendid luncheon with delicious dessert of apple crisp made of fresh apples from Terhune Orchards, all presided over by Hilary and John’s latest acquisition.

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October 20, 2007

What He Said, Sorta

Bob Carlton names a serious problem — though I’d argue that the problem isn’t “postmodern preaching” so much as “mediocre preaching.” Modernity itself conceived and gave birth to the meaning-impaired mode of preaching that Bob has had enough of; if someone preaches in the unconvicted manner that Bob finds appalling, it’s not Derrida’s or Foucault’s or Lyotard’s fault.

People sometimes jeer at exemplary postmodern theorists, suggesting that since they cared about prison reform or the exploitation of labor or the persistent inequities associated with religious or racial or gender difference, then somehow their commitment falsifies an alleged postmodern tenet that “everything’s OK, nothing makes a difference.” (Not accusing Bob, here, by the way.) That sort of pseudo-refutation belies a tendentious reading of postmodernism that you can’t answer because it’s already decided that its postmodern object isn’t worth studying thoughtfully.) Most of the postmodern theorists I can think of adopt passionately hortatory rhetoric when you hew close to the topics about which they care most. Those simply aren’t the topics that other people have decided in advance that they should care about, or the ways that other people have decided they should care.

A long time ago, when I taught a senior honors seminar that involved postmodern theory, one of my students interrupted me toward the end of the semester and asked, “So are you telling us that postmodernism means that you’re accountable for everything you say and do, all the time?” That seemed pretty apposite for the course, for the time — and it seems apposite for Bob’s homiletical desiderata, especially when you consider that the preacher dares to stand up in the assembly of God and angels, saints triumphant and saints militant, to speak a Word of the gospel.

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October 19, 2007

Morning After

“Oooh, and my ears are still ringing. . . .”

I don’t think I’ve ever been to a concert where the crowd was so loud. I’ve never been to so smoke-free a concert. I hadn’t been to Madison Square Garden before — I imagined it to be much bigger, much more spacious. I think my ears may have turned a corner somewhere; the fine high-frequency sounds (violin, piano) lacked definition in a way that I doubt the sound people would have tolerated. A crowd full of people cheering “Bru-u-u-uce” sounds more like a herd of lowing cattle than like an exhilarated throng of fans. Has anyone else noticed that Bruce Springsteen doesn’t cuss?

OK, I got all that out of the way. The Springsteen set was spectacular. From the moment the band hit the stage, they rocked harder than anything I’ve seen before (except maybe the previous Springsteen concert, but we were all twenty-five years younger then). I was astounded at the job Springsteen did; his performance catalyzed a constellation of ideas I’ve had about “performing” for a while, ideas I’ll allow to gestate a few days longer, but as Margaret appositely observed on the way home, the set was unrelenting. The E Street Band plays compelling ensemble rock'n'roll, without sacrificing intensity to the expansivenes of the band (which was a big band, a big sound, when we saw them back in '81; now they’ve added Nils Lofgren and Patti Sciafa on guitar and Soozie Tyrell on violin, and sometimes Tyrell picks up a guitar herself, making a total of five guitars plus Garry Tallent on bass). Multiple guitars sometimes makes for a ponderous sound kludge, but the band’s experience with one another and the sound team’s production work channeled the aural density into oceanic force.

I love the E STreet Band, but I especially appreciate the background players. I keep an eye on Danny Federici and Garry Tallent while the projection screens emphasize Bruce (of course), the guitarists, Clarence, Max and Prof. Roy Bittan. They display a professionalism that belies the sterility the term is frequently deployed to convey; contrariwise, they give everything, just right, and support the ensemble sound with grace and reticence.

Springsteen was in terrific form. I had only two cavils: One, very short, involved a verse (perhaps from “Reason to Believe”?) when he sang into an overdriven microphone, giving the impression that he was using a dispatcher’s mike — it sounded incongruous for the song, though it might have been effective in a different setting. Two, I thought he rushed the delivery of some key lines (in “Candy’s Room,” “Jungleland,” “Born to Run”). I wonder whether he’s not trying to wrest control of the lines away from a crowd that wants to shout them along with him — but whatever the reason, I’d argue that Springsteen’s artistry relies heavily on timing, such that letting the lyric run ahead of the beat undercuts the whole. I felt the hurried delivery attenuated the conviction that carries so much of his compositions. (Margaret didn’t notice that, so take my criticism with a grain of salt.)

He took on a very tough job, trying to keep a wildly enthusiastic crowd on board for the somber political message of the songs from Magic. How do you cheer wildly at the end of “Devil’s Arcade,” even if Springsteen delivered it with heart-wrenching intensity? And some in the crowd had no patience for Springsteen’s explicit politicking, shouting, “Just sing the songs.” Though I’m on Bruce’s side here, I wonder whether he might not do better taking the heckler’s advice — “Magic” and “Last to Die” sound more convincing to me than most of Bruce’s (heartfelt) excoriations of the last six years. But Bruce just wins; the songs from Magic work better, Margaret and I agreed, on stage than on the record (and I notice that the AMG review tends to concur (“[the] careful construction. . . tends to keep the music from reaching full flight”).

Highlights? Goodness! Well, hearing “Night” right after “Radio Nowhere” caught up whatever hadn’t already been captivated. “Reason to Believe” worked admirably as a with the blues-rock setting the band gave it — the lead-in sounded uncannily like “Spirit In The Sky,” a song I’d love to hear Springsteen and the band cover). Asking “Are there any lovers out there tongiht?” (he obviously knew Maragret and I had come to the show), he sang “Tougher Than the Rest” with Patti. He dedicated his performance of “Meeting Across the River” to Peter Boyle, whose birthday it would have been, noting that Boyle always loved the tension of hope and failure in the song. Springsteen sang it accompanied only by Tallent on upright bass and Bittan on piano, and it soared, and (in accordance with cosmic laws of necessity) segued into a tremendous performance of “Jungleland.” The band had buckets of fun with “You Can Look (But You Better Not Touch),” including winning byplay among Bruce and Steve and Clarence.

And yes, he brought out “Thundercrack” in the encores. Bruce explained, “This was our show-stopper, back when. . . there was no one at the show. We used to play this at Max’s Kansas City. We played there with Bob Marley and the Wailers — it seated 150, and there were some empty seats!” The song gave Federici a chance to step out at the beginning, gave everyone a chance to rock out in one of Springsteen’s classic episodic compositions, and thrilled me from toes to scalp. The band segued into the inevitable “Born to Run,” then, and “Dancing In the Dark” (on cue, Steve did The Monkey with the audience seated behind the stage). Then Bruce brought the Sessions Band out to play “American Land,” with supertitled sing-along lyrics on the projection screens.

What a night! Thanks so much, Jennifer, for the tickets. And thanks, Bruce, for the hard work and brilliance that you put into everything.

Posted by AKMA at 10:14 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

October 18, 2007

Print, News, and Net

John sent me a message asking what I thought about Hal Crowther’s elegy to print journalism, presumably in light of my advocacy of digital media. Without taking the full time that Crowther’s bittersweet column deserves, I’d make a couple of points in response. First, Crowther correctly identifies the problem as to a great extent a financial problem; under cultural conditions when newspapers were expected to serve the public interest mare than to serve as profit centers, they produced more excellent work. When bloodless speculators see a newspaper as capital waiting to be disagglomerated for profit over the cost of the whole enterprise, you’re going to depress the quality of the news that the papers produce. That’s not the Web’s fault; if the citizenry demanded high-quality news reporting, they could demand legislation that protected newspapers.

Crowther shows some attentiveness to media transitions as an ordinary aspect of culture, but still falls back on “internet as cesspools of [bad] amateurs” rhetoric of, for instance, Andrew Keen. If we grant that things are as bad as he says — and that’s not at all clear; print media are not as uniformly excellent as his nostalgia makes them, nor are online media as uniformly unreliable — but even if things are bad, may we allow that digital media have only had a few years to coalesce the business models that will support excellence in news reporting. And established media haven’t exactly been helping shape the financial future of news reporting by their resolute resistance to inhabiting online communication on the terms of the medium. Combine their square-peg-round-hole approach to digital media with the vultures’ chainsaw profiteering, and Crowther has ample reason to regret times past.

All of that, however, doesn’t mean that online media somehow prevent good news reporting. If no one model has come to the fore as a basis for a future reliable, unbiased [!], disinterested venue for online reporting, it’s not because no one is trying, or the medium makes good reporting impossible.

Posted by AKMA at 11:16 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Another Wesch!

Thanks to David, I just encountered yet another brilliant Michael Wesch visualization (someone's going to string these together one of these days and make a captivating illustration of the techno-cultural moment) — this one illustrating David’s point that everything is miscellaneous.

Posted by AKMA at 09:37 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

October 17, 2007

Stepping Back

I think I’m going to step out and change from Moveable Type to Blogger. If I had the time and energy, I’d rather use WordPress and host the engine as well as the pages — but the lesson of my last few years running MT has been that if I don’t feel determined enough to maintain it, I shouldn’t install it. I’ve been sticking with MT through the comment-spam phase and the subsequent no-commentts phase, but I’d like to get back to welcoming comments. I ran Blogger for the Beautiful Theology blog, and am comfortable with it; I am not wild about captchas, but the corporate heft of Blogger/Google provides the capacity for disability-aware alternatives to the visual captchas. I wanted to investigate making a simple question-and-answer challenge for my MT comments page — my page is low-profile enough that there’s no percentage in devoting brainpower or computer cycles to defeating something as simple as “What is AKMA’s last name?” or “What kind of thoughts is this blog named after?” But I never got around to it, and the prospect of upgrading MT has been daunting me for months now.

Using Blogger will solve about twelve problems at once. I think that’s enough to overcome my residual personal loyalty to Ben and Mena. I’m still very fond of them, but I’m no longer in MT’s core constituency.

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Whoa! You might think I had said I was about to buy a PC!

Am entertaining second thoughts, impelled by urgent feedback from trusted friends.

Posted by AKMA at 11:08 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Cat and Girl Gets It

From Cat and Girl: “The second-rate Valhalla of mediocrity in quantity.”

Posted by AKMA at 09:33 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Tell It, Zack

Zack Exley, on religious women in rural Missouri:

Just imagine if you heard one day about an international community of women that’s been operating continuously and supporting itself for more than 170 years. Imagine that you heard that these women vow to serve others as their primary vocation for the rest of their lives, and that they choose to live together in spiritual as well as practical community for the whole span of their lives. Wouldn’t that be an amazing thing to hear about? Well, that’s what this community is.

. . . As I was going to sleep, thinking about that, I felt terrified of a world without these beautiful and powerful international communities.

Posted by AKMA at 08:49 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Next Generation

From Bob Carlton, this follow-up video by Michael (“The Machine Is Us/ing Us”) Wesch; and from Stephen Downes, a slide presentation of “Web 2.0” using Web 2.0 tools. Change is happening, and it will overtake our institutions willy-nilly. I’m inclined to argue that by paying attention and getting involved, they’re more likely to experience that change as productive and invigorating, whereas by ignoring and resisting change , they’ll experience it as threatening and destructive.

Posted by AKMA at 08:48 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

October 16, 2007

Yes Yes Yes

I’m getting cautious about Google’s monolithic standing in tech innovation/leverage, but Patrick MacDonald has the right idea (hat tip to Jenny, who pulls out the dead-on quotation from Anil Dash: “If YouTube has created something fantastic, and it required copyright violation to do so, then copyright law should be changed to make it legal. Laws are ours, people — they’re not carved on stone tablets“). I would so love to be in on that.

Posted by AKMA at 09:39 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Grind?

Seems as though everyone is pointing to the Chronicle’s [pseudonymous] dyspeptic denunciation of graduate students, about which I feel a wave of indignation amplified by the twinge of sympathy I feel for Prof. Gradgrind. Let me explain.

First, Gradgrind’s stunning narcissism disgusts me. If her students discover that their fascination with [subject area] doesn’t warrant devoting themselves to teaching careers, Gradgrind should be relieved for them. They’ve attained a state of self-awareness and self-differentiation that surpasses Gradgrind’s. Gradgrind, in turn, needs seriously to re-evaluate her proclivity to vest her identity in her students’ replication of her choices and her career path.

Academia isn’t the only field that benefits from the fruit of advanced study. If her students are flourishing in non-academic vocations, Gradgrind should commend them with pride — not denounce them as deceivers. People who know me well can imagine my “barely contained fury” expression and tone as I type this.

Second, academia displays and perpetuates numerous deeply-embedded pathologies, such that sensible, intelligent, critical thinkers have plenty of reason to hesitate before committing themselves to teaching in higher education. Among the drawbacks are having to work with people such as Gradgrind and the careerist clones of whom she’s presumably proud.

I appreciate New Kid’s candor (and follow-up here) about the ways she (or he) was a difficult grad student for her advisor. I don’t hear her hitting the same points that Gradgrind did, though, and New Kid sounds a great deal more sympathetic to me.

Higher education involves coaching students through stages of erudition and critical thinking with which they’re less well acquainted than are their teachers. Under the circumstances, they’ll make mistakes and miss points as they try out new ideas and practices. That’s not a sign that they’re deceivers or incompetents, it’s a sign that they’re learners. Some among these students will perceive their misstep and self-correct; some will listen attentively (and critically, I hope) and adjust their efforts accordingly; some will refuse to acknowledge that their work could possibly have been improved; some will recognize their work‘s weakness, but will decline to extend themselves to improve it. My own work with students has been hindered by their encounters with Gradgrinds who imperiously imposed arbitrary standards (frequently reflective of Gg’s own specialization and inadequacies) and by Prof. Feelgoods who gushed about how marvelous their students are (without providing critical perspective on their “growing edges”). Gradgrinds and Feelgoods drive me batty, because I devote vast energies toward providing students with feedback that gives specific explanations of where their work could be improved, how improved, and why that’s an improvement — but how are students to distinguish my feedback from the capricious narcissism or the inflated encomiums?

Learning involves acquiring the capacity to make pertinent distinctions; Gradgrinds and Feelgoods obscure those distinctions, making students’ job all the more difficult, so that their failures “justify” Gradgrind’s self-absorbed scapegoatery. When students who want to learn can rely on teachers who devote their efforts to helping students learn, together they can attain great things. When students and teachers withhold their efforts, or offer false affirmations (whether “This work is publlishable!” or “I see what you mean, Professor”), or concern themselves solely with what benefits themselves, the sound pursuit of shared learning suffers.

Posted by AKMA at 09:13 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

October 15, 2007

NYC Man

Beginning Thursday, I have a series of obligations in New York in relatively rapid succession (after having not been in New York for ages). Thursday, we’re heading in for the Springsteen concert; then a week from today I have a meeting with the board of Affirming Anglican Catholicism; then in a couple of weeks, we’re going to a party there (Margaret’s opportunity to meet Joi).

I’ll comment on Anglican stuff another time.

As far as my going to a Manhattan party for cool people, I expect we’ll have a good time, but the decision concerning what I should wear will combine considerable anticipatory stress with inevitable futility. A pouchy, homely, middle-aged guy with no fashion sense will look dowdy no matter what.

That leaves the Springsteen concert, about which I’m feeling more excited than I expected to. I’ve been following closely the reports on the setlists page, thrilled that “Thundercrack” has been a predictable element of the encore, studying the unfamiliar material so I’ll be primed to enjoy it when the time comes. Evidently he’s drawing heavily on Born to Run this tour, which makes my job easier; he’s been playing “Night,” “She’s the One,” “Born to Run,” “Incident on 57th St,” and even “Jungleland” at some stops (not “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out,” which Pippa always calls “Devil In The Freezer,” her favorite mondegreen). But wait! Last night in Ontario, Bruce invited members of the Arcade Fire onstage to play his “State Trooper” (a song Pippa likes) and their “Keep the Car Running,” both in place of “Thundercrack.” Now, I admire the Arcade Fire and I appreciate local-color spontaneity in a concert set, but I’d be pained to miss the song I’ve waited ages to hear live.

So if you can’t get hold of me in Princeton these days, try New York City.

Posted by AKMA at 09:52 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

October 14, 2007

AKMA At Bible Disco

In a moment of weakness, I agreed to talk on an Irish radio program called “Talking History.” They were looking for a Bible scholar to go with Prof. Helena Sheehan from the School of Communications, Dublin City University (I’m told she was once a religious, now an atheist) and Dr Brendan Purcell from University College Dublin; I asked whether there weren’t abundant Bible scholars right there in Ireland, but they didn’t answer the question. Maybe it’s my quaint American accent. I figure that if I do enough radio appearances, it increases the chance that I’ll get good at it someday, but in anticipation it feels as though I’m doomed to the eternal repetition of the futile.

I was disconcerted to learn that the station referred to the our talk as a “disco,” which I gather is a “discussion” (much as “convo” is “conversation”). The topics that have been proposed rest at a pretty basic level ("Bible: Who wrote it and where did it come from ie ….Was in inspired by the Holy Spirit or did it come from a range of Authors who were writing for multiple audiences?" "Status of the Bible today: Should it be viewed as mythology ie Greek or Celtic Civilization etc"). We’ll see how well I manage to address my disco partners, the presenter, the audience, and my own sense of impending predictable missing-the-point. (The show won’t be broadcast till December, I think, so for the time being you’ll just have to take my word on how it goes.)

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Well, that was odd. Somewhere at the studio end, an electronic sound source was beeping continually, as though there were an open line (we know it wasn’t on my end, ’cos they called both the landline that runs to Princeton and my cell that’s directed through Chicago). They couldn’t track down the beeping today’s taping, so they’ll figure it out during the week and call me for a later interview that they’ll edit in.

Oh, and they added David Edgar to the lineup; I wish I could hear the other participants’ contributions so as to respond more precisely to the matters they raise, but I doubt that’ll be possible. More details as the story develops.

Posted by AKMA at 09:23 AM

October 13, 2007

Strong Finish

I saw this via a link from Denise; I was thinking it just mildly amusing part way in, but it pcked up toward the end. And my favorite part of all is the wildly enthusiastic standing ovation.

Posted by AKMA at 03:56 PM

October 12, 2007

One Headache Not Enough

Margaret has taken Eric Van Lustbader’s The Testament out of the library in order to brief me on the latest claimant to the Dan Brown Award for Disproportionate Literary Success. In this deplorable travesty — which, like Brown’s tripe, claims to be based on historical research — Lustbader proposes that the two opposed secret societies (one a Gnostic Franciscan group whose goal is universal democracy — yes you heard that right, “Gnostics for Democracy”) and the other a military Order in favor of fascistic dictatorships (paradigmatically,. the Pope), these two factions operate in what they call the “Voire Dei” which supposedly means “the truth of God.” Is there any language of which this is an intelligible claim? “Voire” is evidently an Old French word for “truth,” which has migrated to modern usage in the legal expression “voir dire,” so I take it that we’re supposed to recognize the Latin form “Dei” and go along with this macaronic pseudotheological term? (Quick check: Google does not reveal any other use of the phrase “Voire Dei” than Lustbader’s novel. I guess that’s because, you know, it’s an über-secret.) Sheesh. . .

Posted by AKMA at 07:32 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

October 11, 2007

Second Helping

Fred Sanders brings the TheoLOLgians up into the medieval period. In so doing, he illustrates the confusion surrounding the identity of Pseudo-Dionysius (his picture associates the theologian with St Denis of France, as did many before Abelard began unravelling the differences between Pseudo-Dionysius and Denis, and Dionysius the Areopagite -- don’t make that mistake(not that Fred is confused, but he accurately represents Pseudo-Dionysius as the object of confusion)!), but my favorite is the Heloise and Abelard “Invisible Bible.”

Posted by AKMA at 01:43 PM

Post-X Euphoria

Yesterday I finished the draft of my chapter on technology and religion. I’ll print it out for Margaret to scour, and will send it to a couple of people if they’re interested, but it’s essentially done. That feels good.

I still have some book reviews and presentation transcripts backlogged, some letters to write, and I’m about to sign and send in a book contract (in my defense, it’s about preaching, a topic I’ve been interested in writing explicitly about for a long time) for the book after next. But with the tech/religion chapter out of the way, I begin to feel as though I’m really on sabbatical, and can think and write. For instance, I’m going to just sit and read and think today — no formal writing.

Good stuff.

Posted by AKMA at 09:36 AM

October 10, 2007

And In A Breaking Development

After I pointed to Fred Sanders’ TheoLOLgians, Shelley linked me up with the LOLcat Bible, the LOLcat Bible wiki, and a Metafilter thread discussing the whole LOL-Christian phenomenon. I wonder if I’ll have occasion to draw on the LOLcat Gospel of Matthew when I write my book. . . .

Posted by AKMA at 08:55 AM

Education, LMS, and Online Worlds

The advances marked by EduSim and OpenSim impress me a lot, but I’m still vexed that people have invested so much energy into building “lessons” and “education” into these online domains.

The longer I homeschool and the more I interact with online technology, the more firm my conviction grows that formal teaching is part of the problem, not part of the answer. Sure, some people learn well from assembly-line containerized pasteurized homogenized educational products — but the world in general is better served by people learning to learn apart from the intrusion of the infrastructure of units, credits, lockstep progression, and “managed” learning (as in “learning [or ‘Lesson’] Management Systems” such as BlackBoard). LMS-world takes as its implicit norm the students who have no distinct excitement about any aspect of learning, so must be coaxed through the educational process as cattle through an abbatoir. Instead, we might set as our exemplary student an Edison or a Volta, and then oriented our educational resources to appealing to that aspect (and capacity) of a learner’s curiosity that most nearly approximates the discoverer’s ceaseless hunger to learn.

The environment for education has always favored interest-based learning, but online technology amplifies the extent to which everyone is an explorer, an inventor, a discoverer. If we could only learn to develop resources that make graduated complexity possible, and then get out of the way, we’d be offering ourselves and our students a much greater gift.

Posted by AKMA at 08:23 AM

October 09, 2007

HEZ IN UR LBRRY

Leave it to Fred Sanders to compile a canonical display of theoLOLgians.

Posted by AKMA at 01:26 PM

Matter of Taste

A year or so ago, our friend John was ragging me about my iTunes library. I was scrolling along, looking for songs he might enjoy, when we got to the middle of the B’s.

Blind Alfred Reed
Blind Blake
Blind Boy Fuller
Blind Joe Reynolds
Blind Joe Taggart
Blind Lemon Jefferson
Blind Mamie Forehand
Blind Roosevelt Graves
Blind Will Dukes
Blind Willie Davis
Blind Willie Johnson
Blind Willie McTell

John already knew I love the blues, but thereafter he brought up my preference for blind musicians (or, at least, musicians nicknamed “Blind”) several times.

Posted by AKMA at 07:35 AM

October 08, 2007

Happy Thanksgiving Day

To Canadian friends — and if you felt like expanding the border southward, I for one would welcome our new Canadian overlords.

Posted by AKMA at 03:29 PM

Anticipation

Jennifer gave Margaret and me tickets to see Bruce Springsteen as our 25th anniversary present, and the excitement is beginning to get to me. We’ll see the show in New York on Thursday the 18th, I think. I haven’t seen him live 1980 or so, when Margaret and Matt O’Riley and I saw the show in Cleveland. I’ve been scouting the set lists for the shows he’s played so far, and to my intense delight he’s been playing “Thundercrack” among the encores — I can hardly wait. I’m not staking my enjoyment of the evening on any particular song, but I take it as a good sign that he’s harking back to his very earliest material for this tour. Thank you, Jennifer!

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By the way, the type design for the Magic album sure looks a lot like Hatch Show Print typography to me. If Hatch didn’t design it, the designer must’ve had that look in mind.

Posted by AKMA at 09:08 AM

October 07, 2007

A Culinary Gift

The other day, Margaret was in North Carolina and Pippa was at a choir supper, so I faced the prospect of feeding myself. That’s usually OK with me; though others turn up their noses at the makeshift dinners I patch together, I really don’t mind eating my way through several plastic bags of leftovers, making a sandwich out of stuff I’m not sure when we ate the first time, finishing off with some chips and cheese, or instant soup, or some other makeshift. But the other night, I had no need to resort to such frugal extremes: in fact, on top of the refrigerator rested a Meal, Ready-to-Eat, courtesy of my friend the Air Force Captain. (He assured me that he bought it fair and square, this is not the beginning of some devastating scandal that’ll cost him his rank and bring down the administration in disgrace. We can always hope, though. About the administration, not him.)

I was surprised at how much the main MRE sack contained. When you spread out the entree, side dishes, condiments, serving items, and the self-cooking over substitute, the whole thing covered most of the countertop.

The first step was to prepare the main course, a veggie burger in barbeque sauce.

This involved sliding the burger envelope into a plastic bag that has a chemical water-activated quick-heating element in it.

First, you tear the heating bag open:

and slide the foil-wrapped burger into the heating bag

Pour water into the bag, such that the water level reaches between the two line on the bag. Do not overfill!

(I was very proud to have nailed the water level part of the recipe.) Then let the chemical pouch slide down into the water and fold the top of the heating bag over. Slide them together into the box from which you extracted them, for a minute or two. Then pull ’em out and let them cook on their own. Note: be sure to leave the heating bag on a slight incline, or the water will leak out and Bad Things Will Happen. (You don’t want to ask.)

That’s really all there is to the cooking side of the endeavor. The rest comprises extracting ingredients from storage bags. for instance, there’s the condiment bag:

Time to make the Carbohydrate Electrolyte Powdered Beverage. (Doesn’t it just set your mouth a-watering to hear me say that?) Just tear open the bag, pour in some water after it’s been fully purified and the residue has settled out; squeeze the top of the bag closed and shake it up.

Yummy! Now, to get the bun ready — or to be precise, the “Wheat Snack Bread.” In separate bags, the Armed Froces provide two thingummyjiggers that vaguely resembled slices of bread, or hamburgers buns, or soggy Ritz crackers.

Meanwhile, the smell from the heating bag was getting intensely acrid; no visible change in the cooking department, though.

Time to slice open the main course:

Well, that burger and sauce actually look pretty good

Notice that the potato sticks are much more accurately denominated “potato twigs” or “potato stick fragments,” but they were tasty enough.

And there’s my dinner. If you set aside the smell of the heating chemical, and the proportions of the potato sticks, and the texture of the Wheat Snack Slices, it all worked out pretty well. The instant Carbohydrate Electrolyte Beverage reminded me of Gatorade; the burger was tastier than many vegetarian items I’ve eaten; and best of all, there was no risk that someone would try to blow me to smithereens — whether insurgent or mercenary.

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Mark adds:

It may come as a shock but some, myself included, actually liked the wheat bread. Down at training this summer (from whence came AKMA's MRE as well) I had the non-vegetable burger, and found it rather tasty on the two slabs, er, slices of bread. Of course at the time all we had were MREs, so perhaps hunger helped. I didn't even bother heating my burger, but that is an essential part of the MRE experience. You haven't lived until you've heated food in a plastic pouch just by adding water! That thing gets HOT, doesn't it? Part of what comes from the heating process is hydrogen, by the way. Hope you weren't toying with the matches while heading the veggie burger. ;)

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Micah notes:

I have also enjoyed the cooking of a vegetarian MRE. (Not that it's a contest or anything, but my benefactor was a Major!) Anyhow, you forgot to show the picture of how when you heat the food you are supposed to lean it "against a rock or something." Second-best military instruction ever. (Only thing that beats it is the clear marking on the business end of a claymore land-mine "FRONT TOWARDS ENEMY.")

Posted by AKMA at 01:19 PM

Grrrr

I put a fair amount of effort into a long-ish blogpost yesterday, but I lost it due to my stupid Keychain problems. I'll try to reconstruct it this afternoon.

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I did what I should've done a couple days ago: I went to my user Library folder, found the folder at ~/Library/Keychains, deleted the folder, and cut loose. Now I have to re-enter all the passwords I had stored, but my system is astoundingly more stable.

Posted by AKMA at 12:54 PM

October 05, 2007

Crockus Update

Language Log has obtained a presentation slide from the inventor of the Crockus. Spoiler: it’s bogus.

Posted by AKMA at 05:57 PM | Comments (0)

October 04, 2007

Having Trouble

My Adium upgrade seems to have hosed my Keychain file. Headaches ensue.

Posted by AKMA at 11:27 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Stockpiled Stromateis

• I have enjoyed Stephen Fry’s work in various contexts; it’s now my delight to enjoy reading his blog., and not only because he slags “Dan Whatsit” and his “preposterously awful” book The Leonardo Code. And now I know many things not to say if I ever meet Stephen Fry. His paragraph, far down the column, on receiving compliments is highly pertinent; I am very maladroit at accepting compliments, and I have been trying to manage better when people say kind things about me.
• A link in Fry’s blog sent me to the bibliography of Dornford Yates, which informs me about quite-possibly delightful novels and a series of exquisite cover designs.
• I’m gearing up to write something about the Anglican brouhaha, but my higher faculties are unwaveringly fixed on finishing the technology article (which is coming around slowly but nicely, if I do say so myself). In the meantime, I appreciated Jason Byassee’s article in the Century, and the group blog over at Covenant.
• Posts at (and linking to) Dan Wallace on “Pauline Scatology” and Tall Skinny Kiwi on Bad Language have generated interesting conversation.
• Resources: Biblical Studies Bulletin 43 quotes something I wrote about Dan Whatsis as their “quote of the month” for March (yes, I’m slow): “The staggering popular phenomenon of Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code testifies to the level of success that academic interpretive authority brings to bear on egregiously misleading interpretive claims: none at all.” I didn’t remember saying that, and it’s surely an overstatement, but I’ll stand by it as a bit of rhetoric.
• I have a stored-up photo blog about a once-in-my-lifetime culinary experience, but I don’t have time to post it right now.

Posted by AKMA at 11:19 AM | Comments (0)

October 02, 2007

Open vs. Secure

I wish Apple made the iPhone an open platform as much as the next person, but if they’re going to try to put lipstick on the pig of a closed platform, why don’t they just argue that they’re making the iPhone theft-proof? If the thief can’t swap out the SIM to enable another account to use the same unit, ta stolen iPhone becomes useless as a phone (or else the thieves/purchasers will give themselves away by using someone else’s phone number).

Posted by AKMA at 11:32 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

First Prince, Now Radiohead

Mark wonders what I think about Radiohead’s new album, In Rainbows — not the recording itself, but the business model: “Self-released w/out a label! Discbox which includes vinyl! Downloadable for... whatever you want to pay! Interesting...”

Very much so — and it confirms the kinds of claim that many people have been making for a long time. You prosper in the digital environment by giving away what the internet makes easy and by charging for what the internet doesn’t facilitate (personal appearances, physical artifacts like packaging, clothing, books, and so on). It’s that simple, but some people and some corporate entities want to force the internet to conform to the properties and characteristics of a pre-digital environment. In the long run, they’ll be as successful as the dinosaurs who commanded mammals to respond the the ice age by voluntary mass extinction. Now, if you’ll pardon me, our car is running low on gas, so I have to go to the leather goods store to get a new buggy-whip.

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Whoops, Metalepsis sent me a notice pointing to Radiohead, too (my mail client identified his message as spam, which it assuredly was not. Sorry to have missed you, M.)

Posted by AKMA at 10:22 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

October 01, 2007

MAKE: Clothing Modding, Chapter XXX

Pippa regards her store-bought or hand-me-down clothing as raw material, subject to refinement and enhancement if the means present themselves. Over the past few days, she’s been hard at work on the Duke hoodie that Margaret and I gave her:

When I first took her to Michaels, the local crafts franchise, I ran into Pippa in one of the aisles; she was grinning like a lovesick sophomore, and she beamed at me: “I’ve found my people.” Yes, she has, and we love watching her and her work.

Posted by AKMA at 05:26 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack