Month: June 2005

Once upon a time, when our family lived in New Haven (and listened regularly to the radio news on WCBS), my two-year-old son Nate, infant Si, and beloved spouse Margaret collaborated to obtain a Father’s Day cake for me. Not just any cake, mind you, but an official Tom Carvel ice cream cake, of the sort that Carvel sold as “a whale of a cake — for a whale of a Dad.” (The Carvel’s site reveals that this design bears the name, “Fudgie the Whale.” Whatever.)

This afternoon, Pippa proudly brought up from the basement a cake she had frosted for me, to bring back fond memories of that long, long-ago Father’s Day before she was even a glimmer in anyone’s eye:

Thanks Pippa, Si,and Nate, and thanks to Margaret, who (as the greatest Mom ever) always shows me how to be a better Dad. . . .

Later: One of the benefits of the Net comes when helpful readers join in to correct mistaken claims. For instance, no sooner had Margaret read this post than she assured me that I was off by a year, that the cake in question had been given me when Nate was 1, and we were preparing to move from our home in the basement of the Berkeley Center at Yale Divinity School to our housing in downtown New Haven. She messaged me, “You had just finished your M.Div., after a very difficult semester in which you had had mono. Then, at the end of the semester, in the post-school let-down period, in addition to recovering from mono, you developed terrific back problems. You were stuck on the bed, where I set Nate with you, briefly, to go out and purchase a cake. I was in a state! Getting out of the parking lot of the Carvel store with the cake, I backed up into somebody’s new truck. I made no mark on the truck, but the guy was massively upset and angry, since it was brand new.”

Pippa, however, recalled the photos of the event and (though she was not even there! and notice what a great job she did in reproducing the original cake!) showed that Nate himself was only a few months old on the Father’s Day in question — thus, my first as a father. So the cake in question was not a Fudgie, and was given when Nate wasn’t even one year old. It was still a whale of a cake, from Carvel Ice Cream, and I’m still thankful that Margaret went to such lengths to obtain it for me.

Found the wooden lion we were looking for. . . .

Ignatius of Antioch led the Christians of one of the largest cities in the Empire. We first meet him, though, after he’s already been arrested. An impressive guard seems to have escorted him to Rome; he refers to himself as “being bound amidst ten leopards, even a company of soldiers, who only wax worse when they are kindly treated.” On his way, he wrote a number of letters that have survived the centuries — to the Ephesians, the Magnesians, the Trallians, the Romans, the Philadelphians, the Smyrnaeans, and one to Bishop Polycarp of Smyrna. Tradition (and decent probability) indicate that he was executed in Rome, apparently being fed to lions.

(The execution scene is yet to come, and I’ll probably work up a frame or two of doctrinal illustrations.)

Yesterday Pippa and I assembled the elements for an Ignatius of Antioch sequence in the Lego-Church-history endeavor. We’ll shoot a frame or two today, if the lighting favors us. We’re stuck, for now, on the “lion” part — the piece to which madame l. pointed in a comment looks like a Duplo, the double- or triple-size Lego gateway toy for toddlers. While it would certainly be able to devour Ignatius, we would have to wonder why it didn’t go ahead and eat the whole Coliseum. I ordered a Lego “tiger,” which I expect I can touch up in Photoshop, but it won’t arrive for a week or so. Pippa remembers a wooden lion somewhere in the basement, and we may resort to that.

But we’re set to go with Ignatius’s trip to Rome under guard, and Ignatius as letter-writer. I expect to illustrate a couple of points of doctrine on which Ignatius touches, too. Maybe today, maybe tomorrow.

We hustled back to Evanston so that we could catch our beloved friend Jon Walters passing through town with his foster son Mangala (from Sri Lanka). Jon and Margaret went through college together; now Jon is professor of Religion and Asian Studies at Whitman College, spending loads of time in Sri Lanka, whence he brought a foster son to spend some time in the U.S.

Jon and Mangala spent the afternoon and evening with us, renewing their friendship with Si from the days when Si visited Sri Lanka, and with us from the good ol’ days at Bowdoin. Just wonderful to see Jon again, to meet Mangala, and for Si and Mangala to connect up. . . .

I often try to avoid “everyone’s doing it” internet chains, but since Frank challenged me to name my six favorite songs, I’ll bite (I have a complex rationalization for why I’d participate in this one, but not others — but I can’t imagine that you’re interested).

Six favorites. That’s tough, given the sheer quantity of tune-age that’s flowed around me over the past skillion years. I have to pick something by Bruce Springsteen, so in a semi-arbitrary pick from among equally beloved selections, I’ll call “Badlands.” I have to pick something from the soul singles that first beguiled me into listening to AM radio; I thought I could pick something by the Supremes, or Gladys Knight and the Pips, to get an early start on gender balance, but for honesty’s sake I think I have to go off the Motown label to name Ray Charles’s “What’d I Say.” That’s not one of the songs that hooked me on the radio, but it’s a classic. I’m calling a dead heat for post-Beatles John Lennon’s “Instant Karma” and George Harrison’s “My Sweet Lord,” both powerful songs that came to me at an impressionable time (count only as one). I owe Elvis Costello a pick; his Imperial Bedroom and King of America are my favorite albums of his, but the one song I put forward will be “Man Out of Time.” The Who: “Pure and Easy.” Michelle Shocked, “Holy Spirit,” from the Victoria Williams tribute album. There, that’s six (sort of).

That leaves out too much: the Indigo Girls, “Power of Two” (coming out ahead because all of Rites of Passage weighs so equally); the Pogues’ “Fairytale of New York”; Bob Dylan, goodness gracious, uh,“Tangled Up in Blue” (or “Buckets of Rain”); Billy Bragg, “Waiting For the Great Leap Forward”; Kirsty Maccoll, “Walking Down Madison” (though since her death, “Soho Square” resonates especially sadly); Rev. F. C. Barnes and Rev. Janice Brown, “Rough Side of the Mountain”; I eliminated Charles Mingus’s “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat” as not a “song” in the sense of the assignment; likewise Philip Glass’s “Koyanisqaatsi.” Of course, U2’s “Gloria.” The Kinks — hmmm, “Misfits”? Joni Mitchell, “Hejira”? The Jam, “That’s Entertainment” (the version from the album release, not the demo that often appears on greatest-hits compilations). The Stones: I think I’ll nominate “Can’t You Hear Me Knocking,” since it draws on a variety of their strengths, but my first Stones song back in the day was “Jumping Jack Flash.” Talking Heads, “The Great Curve.”

And there’s so much more. Ask me again.

Our airport shuttle was late, and we ran into some flight delays, but we’re back home safe with Pippa and Bea (Si won’t be home from work till later in the evening). We already miss Toronto.

Yesterday we kept pretty busy; Margaret had a short nap, but I was using that time to sort and upload pictures to Flickr, and didn’t want to take time to blog. Even yesterday afternoon, we felt the end of our vacation creeping up on us.

Sunday, though, we made our first stop the Allan Gardens, a conservatory a few blocks east of our hotel. We had a hard time getting into the conservatory; it turns out that bits of it are closed, and the doors that are open to the general public are hard to locate, and there’s hardly any signage (Margaret and I are willing to consult — at very reasonable rates — with any institution that wants to spruce up its signage, because we’re so weary of laboring to decipher unintelligible signs, or negotiate the total absence of signs). Once we got in and clarified the permissible boundaries with a cheerful painter, though, we relished exploring the garden’s displays of beautiful flora. Margaret noted that plant life suggests not so much an evolutionary theory of intelligent design as of whimsical design, pointing to the “Old Man of the Andes” cactus and the transgressive excess of some of the orchids.

From Allan Gardens we headed northwest to the Royal Ontario Museum, partly on Michael’s recommendation, and partly because I had seen posters advertising the exhibition of “Leonardo, Michelangelo, and the Renaissance in Florence.” Unfortunately, through a bewilderingly complex chain of confusions and associations, I had mistaken the venue for the Florentine exhibition, which (as you can see perfectly well if you clicked on the link) is the National Gallery in Ottawa — rather further than we’d intended to walk.

Fortunately, the parts of the ROM that weren’t substituting for a non-present exhibition of Florentine painting more than made up for that absence. The “Feathered Dinosaurs” exhibit (the link leads to the San Diego Natural History Museum’s site; the Royal Ontario hasn’t devoted much web-savvy to publicizing this exhibit) presented tons of information and conundrums about saurid and avian evolution, all of which tickled Margaret and me. We don’t resist evolution, nor sponsor any of the theologically-motivated rivals, but we do take a fascinated interest in the rhetoric of factuality, conjecture, error, and polemics in controverted scientific topics. We’d have bought a book and some tawdry promotional gear from the exhibit, but the only available book was too expensive and too technical for our target readership. ROM seems not to understand the commercial power of a fascinating exhibit (and anything involving dinosaurs).

The ROM also has a handsome Art Deco room, some beguiling medieval representations of the Madonna and Child, and the prospect of a tremendous addition when the Michael Lee-Chin Crystal (designed by Daniel Liebeskind) is finished (walk-through movies here).

We found a late lunch, Margaret and I each took a nap, we headed out for dinner, came back to the hotel (ascertaining that Si’s first day at his first job went very smoothly), and reluctantly yielded to the inevitability that we had to sleep some before our last morning of Toronto vacation.

That’s now. And believe me, we’ve had a spectacular time, and we’re going to remember these days vividly, and we’ll miss the delightful time we had here. Now, though, off to breakfast and packing. . . .

“Twenty-three” is not a number of legend, not an intensely symbolic number or a quantity hallowed by fathomless association. Nonetheless, I’m feeling pretty proud about our twenty-third anniversary today, and am very excited to be having such a marvelous time spending it in a relaxing, refreshing, satisfying way.

We started out yesterday with a quick expedition to the north of our hotel, a few blocks east and a few blocks west. During this stroll we encountered again the mysterious phenomenon of Toronto’s “Look Point” signs which, to a visiting pedestrian, mean less than nothing.

Margaret and I may not be globetrotting cosmopolitans on the scale of, say, Joi Ito, but neither are we are provincial rubes, and we spend a lot of time contemplating problems of signification and information design. We studied this sign and its environment for a long spell, but could make nothing of it. We pushed the button on the street pole, but nothing happened that seemed to us to call for looking or pointing. (We subsequently learned from our native informants that back in the day, Torontonians would approach certain marked crosswalks and extend their arm and finger as a way of communicating to drivers that “I’m crossing this street, and if you run me over you’re in a heap of trouble.” I withhold comment on whether one might more easily prevent such accidents by, for instance, simply putting a red light or stop sign at the crosswalk, or using the globally-popular “zebra crossing” design — but for the rest of the day, we played it safe by pointing at something every time we crossed a street, lest some loophole-hunting driver feel free to regard us as fair game. Evidently the custom has died out, with the introduction of flashing yellow lights and with an influx of new citizens who do not understand the customs of antiquity, but who wants to take a chance that some crazed driver might be a stickler for traffic laws?)

We proceeded from our morning stroll out to The Beaches, a neighborhood where at least one distinguished PR flack can be found. On our way, we noted the rigorous safety precautions taken by the Toronto Transit Commission, and admired the lettering in the subway stations (which has been fontified by Quadrat, available from MyFonts). We were greeted by Charlie, whom we had long waited to meet, and Ruairi, whose advent in this world was so breathlessly anticipated by all the readers of Blogsprogs (by the way, for those keeping score, since we saw Cameron two summers ago in London, we have now met two of the blogsprogs, and need only to track down Sawyer to complete our blog-relative duties)— and were fêted with a delicious snack that the O’Connor Clarkes had made specially in our honor. Eventually, Lily returned from a party and shared with us her very-impressive sixth birthday,

and all took a wonderful long walk from chez O’Connor Clarke to a ravine park. that leads to a cozy small business area. Beyond the businesses lies another park, though — this one, a beachfront park, to which we repaired for a glimpse of Lake Ontario (we waved to Nate and Liz in Rochester). The beach offered a chance for a generous meander down the boardwalk, complete with a stop for stone-skipping, and at the end of a wonderful afternoon with Leona, Michael, and the younger generation, we hurried east on Queen Street to catch a streetcar back to our hotel, where we were to meet Joey for dinner.

Joey led us through one of Toronto’s Chinatown neighborhoods, past the Ontario College of Art and Design (where we had the opportunity to evaluate the Sharp Centre from ground level), to Queens West, where we ate a scrumptious vegan dinner at Fressen. Joey thought that we might want to go to one of our subsequent dinners at Kalendar, Toronto’s best restaurant for a first date (he took Wendy there, so who can doubt that evaluation?), so we proceeded north and east to Little Italy to identify Kalendar’s location.

Then we wandered further east on College till we decided it was time to return to The Big Chill for dessert and music criticism. For some reason, Margaret and I had gotten tired by midnight or thereabouts, so Joey showed us back to the Metropolitan, where we collapsed in happy exhaustion, full and footweary and intensely thankful for our marvelous friends.

Today is the actual exact anniversary of our wedding, twenty-three years ago, and we’ve mostly just slept and brunched (and now, “blogged”). We never dreamed our lives together would be anything vaguely like they have been, and I feel a wee bit mystified at how I’ve managed to sustain my own part in so complex and demanding an occupation as “husband and father”; luck and persistence will carry one a long way, I suppose. But this afternoon, while my sweetheart dozes and our children look after one another, and our friends return to their already-busy enterprises, I sit down to write that there has been no gift more overwhelmingly wonderful than the affection and trust and support and love and encouragement that Margaret has offered me for twenty-three years of joyous marriage (and nigh onto four years of patient waiting for the wedding!) — graces that have been reflected and intensified by the shared gifts of Nate and Si and Pippa, of Juliet and Jennifer, so many lovely relatives and friends, near and far. What a glorious thing you all have done, helping us make it so far, so sweetly! Thank, you, thank you, with tears in my eyes and an irrepressible joy in my heart, to all of you — and especially, today, to the most wonderful love anyone might ever hope to share life with, my dearest Margaret.

I’m not sure this will make its way into the notes of the essay I’m just finishing up, but this interview between Mark Derv and Erik Davis overflows with provocative notions that I’ll want to follow up later.

A Thai dinner on Queen West, a deep sleep, and now off to begin our morning. Photos later.

We’ve arrived, safe, in our now-wireless Toronto hotel room. Someone very important is napping, and I’m just istting around, listening to iTunes or surfing, reading, whatever. It’s lovely.

Last fall, Adam posted a quotation from Pseudo-Dionysius’s Letter 6, “To Sosipater, Against Polemics” (did you find that by way of Prof. Rorem?); Maggi Dawn posted the same quotation (here, from the CCEL’s text version; the conversion of Pseudo-Dionysius’s Works seems not to have reached the “Letters” part of the volume):

LETTER VI. To Sopatros, Priest.

Do not imagine this a victory, holy Sopatros, to have denounced a devotion, or an opinion, which apparently is not good. For neither — even if you should have convicted it accurately — are the (teachings) of Sopatros consequently good. For it is possible, both that you and others, whilst occupied in many things that are false and apparent, should overlook the true, which is One and hidden. For neither, if anything is not red, is it therefore white, nor if something is not a horse, is it necessarily a man. But thus will you do, if you follow my advice, you will cease indeed to speak against others, but will so speak on behalf of truth, that every thing said is altogether unquestionable.

Well said, Denys.

This evening I finally handed in my last set of grades for the year, and put exams and papers in people’s mailboxes. It’s been a real burn-out year, and I have a ton of tasks pending for the summer — but this weekend we’ll steal away to Toronto, get recharged, and come back full of vigor to tackle the mandatory accomplishments for the summer.

Back when I taught at Princeton Theological Seminary, the Presbyterians were devoting a lot of energy to sexuality issues, in a way similar to the present tensions in the Episcopal Church. Numerous congregations and presbyteries summoned PTS faculty to address them about the problem, and often enough they had to settle for one “conservative” Presbyterian and one “liberal” Anglican (though there’s another post in me about “why I am not a liberal” — that’ll have to wait).

At these events, I went out of my way to stress a couple of points apart from the merits of the particular arguments we were about to represent. First, I pointed out that we were deliberating not simply about vote-counting in some local or regional or national judicatory; we were seeking God’s will for humanity, for which deliberative discernment we would be judged by the Truth. As such, pettiness and caviling must play no role in our colloquium. After all, Jesus warned that we who indulge in name-calling would be accounted as murderers! If my arguments hold (living) water, then my less receptive colleagues would be found to be setting stumbling-blocks before the little ones who believe in Jesus; and if my arguments miscarry, I (in turn) am found to be releasing one of the commandments that Jesus instructed us to teach and obey.

Second, I invited the congregation to ponder the significance of the unhappy burden of division that beset us. I hoped not to be commended by God at the cost of their condemnation, and I promised always to pray that we not be separated at the last day. I asked that they likewise pray for me, that my error be forgiven me on the basis of their intercession (should I, in fact, be found in error).

I’ve tried to stick with that path as long as I’ve been a small-scale public persona in this turmoil. If I’m wrong, I’m ready to be accounted least in the kingdom; and I pray, and I ask prayers, that the mercy that prevails over judgment will embrace both re-asserters and re-assessors.

A number of times over the past few months, Margaret has pointed out to me the value of blogs as ready-to-assign case studies for psychiatry textbooks. After all, the blogger is writing speaking as though on the couch; the material is out in the open, often covered by Creative Commons or fair-use copyright permission. And the examples you could find: grandiosity, paranoia, narcissism. . . . Sometimes it seems as though a blogger is decompensating right before your eyes.

Why dress up a textbook with “Patient Y” and “Client X” when you can just point readers to a URI?

At Trevor’s invitation (prodding), I signed up for eMusic’s “50-free-download” offer and I began to explore their offerings. Unfortunately, I find that most of the music in which I might be interested, I’ve already bought; and much of the rest doesn’t appear in their repertoire. I’ll probably fill out my Sleater-Kinney collection, and maybe download more Rainer Maria (in honor of Trevor, who gave me one of their disks) — but they don’t offer a complete enough selection to keep me interested once I use up my freebies.

Later: I’ve culled a couple of my favorite Baroque numbers by Henry VIII (not just because he instigated the English Reformation) — but songs for which I’ve been searching high and low in the reputable corners of the online music world (including Freda Payne’s “Band of Gold,” for heavne’s sake, but also Tom Robinson’s “1967 (Seems So Long Ago)” from the Secret Policeman’s Ball album, and various other test case albums and singles) just don’t show up.

Later still: Audioscrobbler thinks I’ll like Yo La Tengo, so I’ll test-drive eMusic with I Can Hear The Heart Beating As One.

Judging from the response I’ve gotten, people are eager that I get on with the early-church-history Lego series; well, so am I. As soon as I mop up my grading work, I’ll get back to it. Right nhow I’m thinking about ignatius, though the problem of building a Lego lion for the martyrdom scene challenges me. Maybe I’ll put a shark in the scene as a substitute, and hope that people will understand; or maybe I’ll just find a toy lion lying around and put that in the scene.

Anyway, this is a high priority for me — after grading and our honeymoonette in Accordion City.

Alex Ross’s article in the New Yorker (via Tom Coates) about the ways that sound reproduction technologies have affected listening, performance, and composition, makes points that support many of my arguments about technology and semiotics. I’m too spaced-out to track all the occasions I shouted “Yes!” while I was reading the article, but the whole essay treats sound not as a given, independent of the means by which it’s (re)produced, but as a contextual phenomenon. That seems just right to me, and I’m pleased that this sort of thinking is getting play in an uptown journal such as the New Yorker.

At the sametime, boing boing reports that David Byrne is surveying the same article. He adds (among other things) that the ubiquity of music now makes more evident that extent to which the meaning of a musical selection has contextual determination.

What then becomes valuable in many cases is what music means to people — beyond the actual recording. Part of this meaning is in the song (or whatever) — and not necessarily in the specific recording of it. What it expresses, how it moves people, the worldview and ethos it embodies. Many of these qualities can be in the composition and exist apart from the recording and interpretation of that composition. People like “The Rite Of Spring” but are not everyone is super fussy about which recording they are hearing. Well, some are, but you get my point.

The other part of what music means is embodied in the singer, the band or the composer. It’s not even in the music and can’t be recorded, at some of it can’t. For some of this music the actual musical and lyrical content is almost irrelevant. For some pieces of music what it’s about is the relationship, the connection to, the singer, with their style, attitude, behavior, beliefs and looks more so than with the music, which is more or less relegated in this case to being the soundtrack to the lifestyle and philosophy. At best the music and everything else surrounding it — the videos, the gossip, the reputation, present a common front, a gesamtkunstwerk type piece that embodies what matters to a person.

Most listeners — energetically encouraged by the recorded music industry — haven’t moved their expectations and assumptions from the world of music objects (records, tapes, CDs) to a world in which music constitutes one part o the information flux that surrounds us. Overall, though, I think that inertia, lobbying, and lawsuits can’t hold off this transition more than a very short interval. The sooner musicians and the rest of us move into our new habitat, the sooner we can figure out just how to reward creative expression without restricting access to (increasingly irrelevant) physical media for it. And the last on in’s stuck with a failed business model.

I ought to have figured this out by now — Margaret always shakes her head knowingly this time of year — but at the end of a school year, my whole life shakes to bits for a few days. I often come down with a bad cold; this year, as several other years, I’ve had back problems; my concentration span dwindles from “marginal” to “non-existent”; I get sleepy at about 8 PM; and in short, my body and spirit foreclose on the credit accounts by which I’ve been managing energy and accomplishment. And every year, I’m surprised.

I did grade a few papers today, and I took part in a meeting about church history instruction, but plenty of other tasks just fell by the wayside as I stared blankly into space.