Akma

It’s registration week for first-years here in Glasgow, and amidst all the ordinary hustle and bustle of academic September, I’m serving s an Adviser of Studies for the College of Arts, so I’m hosting a torrent of eager beginning students (at least one of whom claims to have read my blog — Hallo, Peter!) and helping them select their courses for the year. That leaves less time for finishing the essays I was working on, preparing the courses I’ll be teaching, and blogging.
 
So as to catch up from tabs I left open intending to blog about, though, here’s an item that Boing Boing posted the other day — John Entwistle playing the bass part of the Who’s ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’. On long drives, or even just sitting by the stereo in the dining room, I used to instruct Nate, Si, and Pippa to listen to Who tracks not just for Roger’s vocals or Pete’s notorious power chords and lyrices, but for the hair-raising rhythm section of Keith Moon and John Entwistle (‘Listen to that! Did you hear that? Let me play it again’). About Moon, all that has been said over the years still falls short of capturing just how remarkably he combined unconstrained energy and elegant finesse, furious propulsion and subtle delicacy. He alone would have made almost any band outstanding. When he and Entwistle collaborated at the drums and bass, though, the effect was all the more breath-taking, as Entwistle played a more fluent, more melodic bass than most players’ lead guitar lines — all very much in the background, rarely moving in front of Townshend’s raucous guitar and lightning synthesiser parts. I suppose Entwistle’s ear for brass inflected his bass playing, but when one pays attention to the work that he and Moon together contribute to the Who’s best work, it’s hard to resist the conclusion that (brilliant as Townshend may be, and outstanding a vocalist as Daltrey was) the front men wouldn’t have soared nearly as high without the tremendous work of John Entwistle and Keith Moon.
 
Second, Dean Allen is a mensch. A long time ago, way before Kickstarter, Dean got fed up with his hosting provder, and resolved to start a web hosting service oriented in the first instance to bloggers. He called it Textdrive, and it would include the availability of Textile and Textpattern, his own blogging/formatting systems, and it would be reliable and attentive to users’ needs. He didn’t have the cash to start such a thing, so he invited supporters to pool their money and start him in the business, in exchange for which his service would offer a lifetime of web hosting.The VC 200, as he called them, would fund his start-up, and he would reward them not with fat checks or investment shares, but with exactly what he himself wanted from a web host: service.
 
He succeeded, to the extent that after a while he could sell his company to a bigger company (as one does), and the VC 200 were brought along as customers of Joyent. We were treated pretty well, though it was certainly different from being Dean’s original backers. It felt more as though we were legacy customers, just like any others, though with a more onerous contract. Eventually, a couple of weeks ago, Joyent sent out the message that ‘lifetime’ means ‘until we decide it’s too much bother’, and informed the VC 200 that we were being end-of-lifed (in exchange for one year of cloud-based web services, woo-woo!). Allen’s original supporters gnashed their teeth; Trevor started a Facebook page for the spurned VC 200; Bad Publicity ensued.
 
Then Dean Allen strode out from the wings, assuring all that he would back up his word and keep the VC 200 alive on a rejuvenated Textdrive. This is a person, this is not a company, but he’s a man of his word, and he resolved to take on the burden of supporting those who had helped him get his own venture off the ground. No one wanted something for nothing — they just wanted the promised share in the benefits that accrued to Textdrive, and then Joyent, as a result of their initial investment. Dean stepped up to do the right thing, and as a once and future member of the VC 200, I tip my hat to Dean, and wish him all the best.
 

Last week, as I said, was a bit of a madness — the high-tension, high-stakes visa application wiped out the first bit of the week, and Margaret and I spent the weekend fine-tooth-combing her book manuscript (interrupted by the new Doctor Who episode yesterday night).
 
I keep saving tabs to comment on, from The Last Psychiatrist’s partly-off-target salvo at Harvard’s cheating scandal, to my classmate Larry Lindsey’s (partly) off-target observations on the US financial situation, to anything about the Republican National Convention (but I closed all those tabs in incredulity). But I’m not sure I’ll get to any of those, because tomorrow begins the week that first-years come and register for their classes, and I’ve been prevailed on to serve as Advisor of Studies this year for Theology and Religious Studies. I’m booked wall to wall most days with students coming in at half-hour intervals for me to say soothing things to them while we make sure that they’re taking the mandated 120 credits in three subject areas.
 
Margaret’s book will be really good, and we hope to send it off this week. I have several projects of my own that demand urgent attention, and then there are those first-years. It’s back to respectable clothing on weekdays….
 

Sorry — re-composing our applications to extend our visas. Various sources of advice and legal counsel went awry, so on the last day for submitting the form and being sure it’s on time, I’m scrabling to get it all done. I’m close.
 

In the course of talking through a major grant application, my colleague Jeremy noticed something about me that I hadn’t known:
 

 
I’m not sure that’s the sense of ‘subsistent’ I’d have identified for my usage, but who am I to argue with the OED?
 

I’ve been putting off writing about what’s been on my mind for the past few days, partly because the matter was not (for a while) public knowledge, partly because I just didn’t know what to say, and partly because I don’t relish thinking hard about what’s to come. But since that was what I was thinking about, it was hard to come up with anything else to write about online.
 
So, here we go: as of January, Rich King, Yvonne Sherwood, and Ward Blanton are leaving Glasgow and relocating to the University of Kent. I’m very sad to see them go. Rich has been one of our very closest friends in Glasgow; right from his arrival, he and I have gotten along splendidly, and he and Margaret took to one another when she crossed the ocean. They’ve worked together on manuscripts and job applications,and Rich and Margaret and I have lots of congruent ideas about teaching, scholarship, popular culture, academic labour, politics, and films. He’s an outstanding scholar of Religious Studies — cheers to Kent for recognising him. And everyone loves Rich’s daughter Lila.
 
Yvonne and Ward have been supportive, welcoming, encouraging, and quite brilliant colleagues. Yvonne urged me to apply for this position, and firmly stood up for redressing my situation here vis-a-vis qualifications and academic rank. Ward, whom I didn’t know before I got here, has been a great neighbour, friend, and colleague as well. It’s a profound relief to work among colleagues who don’t think I’m daft, or dangerous, or dull-witted, and even though Yvonne and Ward take our congruent understandings of the BIble and hermeneutics in very different directions from those I do (at a recent meeting, Yvonne asked ‘Biblical theology — who does that anymore?’), I have tons of respect for the intellectual acuity of their research, and likewise I’ve never known them to question the soundness of my work.
 
And losing two professors and a senior lecturer all at once, just months before the REF rosters are finalised, after having already lost two other professors, and not knowing whether anybody else is on the verge of leaving — all of that makes for a disorienting week or so.
 
The good news about the aftermath (‘Our American Cousin really was a very good play, apart from the assassination’) is that it seems likely that we will be permitted at least two hires within the REF window, and probably one of them will be in biblical studies. The senior management has not made any gestures toward breaking up Theology/Religious Studies, and this will provide an occasion for stopping to regroup, reassess, and draw together based on the strengths that we have and that we aim to build toward. We who remain expressed determination to push ahead at our emergency meeting last week, and the school should save enough on salaries in the second half of the year that short-term staffing for course coverage shouldn’t be a problem — though we have yet to get that sorted in detail.
 
Rich and Yvonne and Ward certainly deserve the welcome that Kent wants to show them. I wish them every blessing in their new institutional home.
 
Meanwhile, I have work to do — not just processing the news and figuring out how it affects our students in biblical studies, but writing work, and editing, and planning for my own courses, admin and advising responsibilities, and super-snazzy grant proposals relative to my broad hermeneutical project. Letting go of this news may help loose the energies I need to take in hand all the responsibilities of the next few months, so that when the dust clears we can look around with new colleagues and see more clearly where we’re headed.
 
As the song says, ‘There’s no excuses, my friend — let’s push things forward’.
 

I was perusing the Pitchfork People’s List of the top 200 albums of the past fifteen years, and was interested to see that they’d done a breakdown of some of the data they collected along with votes for readers’ top album choices. The results of the breakdown interested me to varying degrees, but the one element I was most intrigued by was the year of release.
 
If you scroll all the way down to ‘Best Years For Music’ you’ll find that data about which I’m thinking. Clearly the title for the infographic misses the mark; these aren’t ‘best years’ necessarily, but ‘years in which the albums that voters supported came from’. As I would expect, the graph tends to drift upward; the recency effect predicts that more people would vote for albums released closest to the time of the poll (and the effect really kicks in with polls about ‘best guitarist’ and so on, from which one might conclude that hardly anyone ever played the guitar nearly as well as the leader of a band that scored a platinum record last year but will be forgotten next year). Therefore I was impressed that the year 2000 did as well as it did — outpolling any of the years apart from 2007 and 2010, in a close race with 2003).
 
But what would interest me even more would be a comparison of the albums normalised for recency, so that older albums were allotted an incremental boost, and newer albums were weighted less (because of their cognitive advantage over older albums). One could do similar operations relative to music by women (Björk comes in at #51, the first female performer on the list, though collectives such as Broken Social Scene which feature prominent female performers appear as high as #25. Does Arcade Fire count as featuring women prominently?), nationality of voter versus nationality of performer, and so on.
 
If I weren’t already sidetracked from optimal productivity, such a data set could preoccupy me for days on end, and produce results that would positively fascinate me (if no one else).
 

(I’m talking about the online game, not the malfunction in our water heater. That glitch has not changed since yesterday evening when I discovered it.)
 
I logged in to Glitch yesterday on a whim; I stopped paying attention to it about a year ago, when I had reached a point where I was mostly grinding (in the online game sense of ‘performing repetitive tasks for necessary rewards’), and although I understand some reasons for incorporating grinds in online games, that sort of activity was the antihesis of the reason I had been playing Glitch in the beginning (and the hyperantithesis of why I was a regular player of Glitch’s prehistoric grandparent, the Game Neverending).
 
So I logged in and was quite disoriented by what I saw. Even more eerie, though, was that within seconds of my login, Stoot Barfield (the nom de jeu of game designer Stewart Butterfield) popped up beside me and began gently clueing me in to the very very many changes that had been incorporated into the game since last I had visited. Honestly, I can’t recall even the changes I saw in the two hours or so I was logged in. I can say, though, that everything about the newer version struck me as a significant improvement, tending more to encourage whimsy, sharing, and good humour than grinding, cutthroat competition, trollery, and gaming the system.
 
I know many of my friends have dormant accounts with the Glitch beta — if you bothered to look in in the first place, you should probably check back after these revolutionary changes. It’s still in beta (or to be more precise, it’s back in beta after having crept out toward formal completion for a brief interval before the developers decided that they wanted to shuffle the deck once more before opening the doors. That was an intensely wise decision; if the rest of the game has matured as impressively as the dimensions I saw yesterday, Glitch has tons of potential. And if you didn’t get in on the beta earlier, ask around among the players you know. Players have a limited number of invitations they can share with their friends.
 

Yesterday Larry Hurtado from down the road posted his annual ‘applying for admission to a doctoral programme in the UK’ guidance. That reminds me, in turn, to post my annual inivtation to come over and study at Glasgow.
 

Spread the word: I’m settling in here at Glasgow, and have gotten to a point where it would be sensible for me to begin working with PhD students.
 
If you’d like to go on and begin doctoral study of the New Testament, why not give Glasgow a serious thought? (Why not, also, if you want to study OT or theology or whatever? — but my colleagues can start their own blogs.) Glasgow is a terrific city; the University is a darn good one. The School of Critical Studies within which I work includes many fascinating colleagues from the English Language, English Literature, and Scottish Literature fields — including Kei Miller, whom I just met at the Re-Writing the Bible Conference). And Gifford Lectures!
 
I am especially well-suited to supervise work on questions specifically involving my work on hermeneutics and theology, or the Gospel of Matthew or the Epistle of James. I could easily enough stretch to cover other synoptics or the Pauline epistles, too.
 
If you are admitted to Glasgow’s postgraduate research program, you will modulate fairly directly into research and writing for your PhD thesis. I would expect to work closely with you, to ensure the high quality of your work and to ward off any unwelcome surprises when you present your thesis for defence. You would work among a care of very agreeable postgrad neighbours; right now, I believe that most of our students are working with the Centre for Theology, Literature, and the Arts (led by David Jasper). By the way, US students, this means no qualifying exams nor any GREs, and although you will have no required classes in the department (there may be some workshoppy classes to help prepare you for life as a teacher and writer), I will endeavour to make sure that you and your colleagues read well and widely in the course of your preparation. I am not inclined to send you out without confidence that you’re solidly grounded in your field of study.
 
If your readiness for research study is not immediately clear, you may be admitted for a research masters, during which you would demonstrate your academic mettle to the staff who might then admit you to postgraduate study.
 
Lovely city, agreeable institutional setting, wonderful colleagues, straight to work on research — what’s the catch? Well, if you’re from outside the UK (or, in a different way, the EU), you’ll probably have to arrange the financing of your program on your own. We have some aid for overseas students, but not much; don’t be hurt if we don’t have any for you. And of course, this is the worst academic job market in human history, for all qualified scholars at all levels from all institutions.
 
But if you have scholarship aid already, or don’t need to worry about that; if you’d like to study the New Testament (or Literature and the Arts) with me in a nifty locale, give a thought to applying here at Glasgow. And if you’d like to ask me about more details, email me at akm dot adam at gmail dot com.

To Larry’s column and to this invitation, I would only add that you will help your case immeasurably by demonstrating in your communication and application that you know the difference between ‘summarising a lot of previous research’ and ‘constructing a reasoned scholarly argument’. The more clearly you give the impression of someone who knows what she or he is about, who will be working from the start at making a strong case (rather than faltering toward discovering what you might write about), the better your chance of being admitted (and indeed, the better the chance that we can indeed elicit some grant support for you).
 
The University derives a benefit from admitting PG students, and I derive a benefit from supervising — so this invitation is far from disinterested. But you might want to bear it in mind when you consider applying to universities which have restrictive policies about graduate admissions.
 
One more thing — I’m working on a grant proposal which, if granted, would involve support for a graduate student in my area of hermeneutics. That’s trebly contingent, notice: I haven’t finished the grant proposal, and even once I submit it there’s no guarantee it’ll be granted, and if it’s granted there’s no guarantee it would be you — but if you’re interested, feel free to keep in touch.
 

There’s been some teeth-gnashing online about the impending demise of print issues of The Dandy, an extremely long-running print comic here in Scotland. Being a dinosaur myself, and an advocate of comics, I feel a twinge of regret at this news, and it’s made the more poignant by a sympathetic identification I’ve sometimes felt with Jonah (who appeared in The Dandy after a long run in The Dandy’s opposite number, The Beano. (I don’t think I’ve ever been in a reasonably unruly second-hand shop, car boot sale, or other treasury of cast-off wonders, where I haven’t seen a heap of copies of The Beano or The Dandy.)
 
On the other hand, all things must pass, and the proliferation of excellent webcomics demonstrates that comics themselves aren’t in danger — it’s the ‘print, then sell the hard copies’ business model that’s the problem. Without wanting to bore everyone by repeating what has often been said, great material will thrive online or in print — but some ways of organising payment and distribution are no longer functional. We may bemoan the passing of the milk cart (that is, ‘there are no more milk carts’, not ‘what just rolled past us?’), but a different mode of delivery hasn’t eliminated dairy foods.
 

Working on our visa extensions, course planning, writing/editing, reading a thesis, friends visiting. All pretty boring from the digital side of my profile, but that’s life on the physical side.

(Warning: in what follows I will indulge in unseemly, defensive self-promotion. I apologise; I hope that some day I am confident enough that readers have been persuaded by my arguments that I will relax and just let this sort of thing drift past.)
 
It’s always nice when your theoretical claims are backed up by experimental evidence. Well, maybe not always nice, if for instance you were making theoretical projections about global warming’s inevitable devastating effects — but at least you have the privilege of seeing that your warnings weren’t just unsubstantiated raving. But usually, when you say ‘According to my theory, X’ and then someone comes along and shows X on the basis of repeatable experimental data, you derive satisfaction from the confirmation of your insight.
 
So that’s wonderful.
 
There’s a second dimension, though, concerning whether anybody else knows that you made such a theoretical claim, and it’s to that end that I’m leveraging my small readership to call attention to recent casual experimental evidence in support of a claim I’ve been making for years. Specifically, Errol Morris (about whom I’ve enthused other times) has conducted an experiment that shows that the typeface in which people read a written piece affects their sense of the reliability of that writing. His experiment sieved responses to a question about hopefulness, probability, and scientific reliability to see whether the typeface in which the question was set affected responses to the question. The results showed that respondents put least credence in type set in Comic Sans, low confidence in Trebuchet and Helvetica, more confidence in Times Roman, and the most confidence in Baskerville (of the typefaces tested).
 
That’s welcome and reassuring, since I mentioned the relevance of typography to the soundness of academic writing (in that context, writing about New Testament theology) in Making Sense of New Testament Theology, the published version of my dissertation, page 184, note 35: ‘… it is important to remember that the material aspects of a published work (design, typography, printing and binding) are relevant to that work’s aesthetic impression’. I made that point again, specifically with regard to the extent to which typefaces contribute to persuasiveness, in ‘This Is Not a Bible’, published in New Paradigms for Bible Study: The Bible in the Third Millennium, ed. Robert Fowler et al. (Philadelphia: Trinity Press International, 2004) page 11, where instead of Bembo, it cites Centruy Schoolbook, and instead of only Comic Sans it also cites Cooper Black. I make this point more extensively in my ‘Sensing Hermeneutics’ presentation, first given as ‘Seeing Hermeneutics and Difference’, at the SBL Bible in Ancient and Modern Media Section, in November 2003.
 
So there we are. In a strong version of the claim — which I don’t have time to support here, but which is 100% on my research agenda for the next couple of years — the ‘meaning’ of a claim is not separable from its appearance. In the meantime, you who teach can point out to students that Phil Renaud confirmed this phenomenon in the essays he submitted for marks; his essays in Trebuchet averaged a B-, his essays in Times Roman averaged A-, and his essays in Georgia averaged a full A.
 

If anyone wanted to re-live the minutes between the abominable crackling produced by the connections in my microphone at last week’s service at the Cathedral, here’s a link to the video recording of that sermon at the Cathedral website. I promise, no staticky crackling during the sermon.