Month: May 2006

I’ve pasted the preface in its current condition into the extended portion of this entry. I wish I’d gotten to this point sooner, so that I could have improved it in conversation with the sophisticated and critical readers who bother to read this weblog, but such wit as I can marshal under the best of circumstances abandoned me over the last few stress-filled weeks. My publishers may indulge a few last-minute changes, if you spot errors or infelicities that can be remedied with relatively little bother — but for the most part, this is what we end up with, for better or worse.

Now, on to Saturday’s sermon and Sunday’s da Vinci Code presentation. I can tell you this much: I will be near-comatose through the all-day faculty meeting we have on Monday.

Anyway, this is where it’s at so far. I’ll keep updating the version in the “extended” entry till it’s finally done.
Continue reading “Where It’s At”

Margaret’s helping, but I’m not making enough progress; concerned note from editor today. My brain, however, is intractably stuck; I have no publishable ideas. Will advise when further along.

I should be scribbling away on my preface-essay (and Saturday’s sermon), so for now, I’ll offer mostly just these links:

Zoe Williams of the Guardian explains, “No, it’s not ironic.”

The falcons are back in Evanston.

Elvis Costello’s list of 500 essential albums — I’m chuffed to observe how consistently his taste matches mine, though I’m not patient and well-informed enough to know and appreciate the full jazz and “classical” repertoires he cites.

This will be handy for some people who use YouTube and Google Video, where I spent some time watching old-school music videos yesterday.

Oh, and we went to see that movie yesterday; it was better, we thought, than the book — though still intensely problematic in numerous ways.

The church gets lots of advice about what it ought to be like, how it ought to change. Sometimes this advice actually helps clarify a problem, or brings to light a problem where the church hadn’t perceived anything wrong. Much of the time, though, these suggestions come from who have problems of their own to work out, who project them onto the church and tell us how to make the world better by conforming to their expectations.

Somewhere between “helpful” and “neurotic” lies the terrain on which people (very often church people) insist that the church’s leadership should immerse itself more fully in popular culture. On this suggestion, I wish to register a forceful dissent.

I may be kvetching because I’ve become a cantankerous old codger (thereby attaining a lifetime ambition), but I pretend to myself that I have plausible reasons for objecting. For instance, I don’t believe in “popular culture,” at least not as a definable field from which the church is significantly absent. Popular culture manifestly includes both The da Vinci Code and Left Behind, Bill O’Reilly and Jon Stewart, The Simpsons and 50 Cent and Prairie Home Companion and Keith Urban. I have a hard time believing that the blanket term “popular culture” does much productive work in identifying all these, especially in conjunction with the notion that church people neglect all of them.

When I hear this suggestion, context often suggests two more precise implications for the proposal. The less laudable reduces to the complaint that “the church doesn’t pay enough attention to the kind of popular culture I like.” So a homilist may scold me for not being sufficiently in touch with popular culture because I don’t watch TV or attend many movies — although I listen to rock’n’roll constantly, and spend recreational hours playing online games.

The more responsible version of the complaint entails (though I’ve never not usually heard this point made explicitly) that the church’s engagement with popular culture rarely escapes a stupefying aye-or-nay binarism. For a while, I heard abundant sermons about The Lion King, none of which raised the theologically- and culturally-critical questions that the movie raised. Instead, as best I recall (and I did try to suppress these memories), they drew facile comparisons between the characters in the movie with characters in the gospels, and noted with facile satisfaction the similarity of the young lion’s spiritual journey to Jesus’ (or ours).

If the church were a more congenial ecology for learning and critical reflection, the “popular culture” topos might bring to the surface more interesting issues: what shall we say about earnest disciples of Jesus who enjoy listening to songs with persistently misogynistic themes, or how we should negotiate the complications of Christian involvement with technology. If you’re just going to bash or endorse an ill-defined glob of under-examined cultural phenomena, though, I’d rather turn my iPod on or go play Warcraft.

(Later: I edited my remarks above to reflect that fact that I have indeed encountered people who work critically at the convergence and divergence of the church with popular culture — I just wasn’t thinking of them as the focal subjects of my crankiness at the time. Mary and Dylan come to mind as people who don’t just trade in glib binary alternatives, and Mary nominates Kathy Tanner and I invoke the Archbishop of Canterbury. As I acknowledge in my comment below, I had in mind a string of tedious sermons and sententious columns, rather than the diligent analysis characteristic of scholars such as Mary. My bad.)

The ether has enveloped and consumed the post on which Steve proclaimed his antipathy to pants (the closest I can come to finding it is Krista’s post alluding to it and this post of Steve’s that evokes a conversation on the topic), but just as Steve regretfully marks the passing of summer by noting the first day of fall on which he’s compelled to wear trousers, so I (more congenially disposed toward long pants) mark the dawn of summer by announcing that today, for the first time, I’ve put on my comfortable cargo shorts.

Isn’t all change “exact change”? How would you get hold of an “approximately thirty cents” piece? And if someone handed you one, how would you make change? “Let’s see: roughly sixty-five cents minus thirty-four cents makes just about thirty-one cents. Sorry — I have a somewhere-around-seventy-nine cent piece, but all I have for small change is exact amounts.”

Brought to you by the “recently spent thirty hours driving, many of them on toll roads” department.

Margaret and I agree that when we read something such as this, we wish we could invest in the futures market on writers. We feel utterly certain that Steve will catch the attention of an alert agent or publisher, and that he’ll sell an ample share of books — if only we could get in on the ground floor!

It’s not that the end of the academic year looms ominously over me just now — the end will be a much-needed respite. But between now and then lies a gauntlet of exams, papers, meetings, interviews, writing, editing, and miscellaneous other obligations.

I’ll write about the da Vinci Code movie as soon as I see it, preparatory to a series of church talks about the subject. I’ll post the preface to my book as soon as that is written. I’ll get around to lots of things I’ve been putting off; but for now, I really really need the break that will come when the end-of-year faculty meeting closes on June 5 (even though I have two three more committee meetings later in the week, and will have to submit grades right around then). (OK, so maybe the target date is a little later in June. Sigh.)

Well, he really did graduate!

We had a great time — Nate found terrific restaurants for us both dinners we spent in Rochester (we ate at Veneto on Saturday evening, at King of Siam on the way home), and introduced us to sundry professors, friends, and Laura.

If I were to go into detail about the weekend, I would just maunder on boastfully about my terrific son, so I’ll allow you to take that as read. Further evidence in my Flickr gallery.

So although we spent twenty-four of the last thirty hours folded up into the car driving to and from Rochester, we feel wonderful, proud, and excited about Nate’s prospects in the University of Michigan’s Ph.D. program in music theory. Hats off!

Graduation at 11:00; I hope to post some pictures later today or tomorrow.

Arrived safely. Nate chuffed that David wished him mazel tov.

And Liz isn’t in town — what a disappointment!

We’re setting out for Rochester this afternoon, to play the part of admiring family at Nate’s graduation. Right now we’re busy getting into our roles; should we be the young, cool parents (“I thought she was your sister, Nate!” or the overinvested, embarrassingly loud family, or the some other variation on the theme? We have thirteen hours in the car to figure that out.

But we’re not sure how much connectivity we can count on away from home, so although there’ll be pictures at the end of the process, there may not be much bloggage. And of course (rolls eyes) the comments will be wearisomely clogged with junk when I get back.

Chris Locke points out that Amazon’s Search Inside feature now points to an “Online Reader” comparable to Adobe Reader. Very interesting. . . .

I don’t know when on earth I’ll have time, or whether I can put it off till after classes, but I promise all would-be or would-have-been commenters that I will upgrade to the current version of Moveable Type (with canned-meat prevention features) as soon as I can back up and get someone to hold my hand. And if MT doesn’t keep unwelcome comments at bay, then I’ll move over to WordPress — but the on-going waves of comment pollution must be stopped one way or another.

OK, following up my perplexity of Saturday, I am now examining the pertinent section of Revolution in Poetic Language (conveniently excerpted in The Kristeva Reader).

It looks to me as though Kristeva may indeed be using these terms in a way that accords with what I want to do with them. It wouldn’t be a big problem if she weren’t, so long as I take care not to misrepresent my approach as a direct inheritor of Kristeva — more (in a cinematic gesture) “inspired by a distinction that Julia Kristeva develops.” Still, I think the similarity is close enough that I’m reassured that I’m not indulging in headstrong disregard of what heavier lifters have proposed already.

Kristeva construes phenotext as “language that serves to communicate” — “it is a structure.” “[I]t obeys rules of communication and presupposes a subject of enunciation and an addressee” (all these quotations from p. 121 of the Reader). Kristeva’s phenotext entails questions of competence, of adherence to convention.

Her genotext derives from the inchoate processes of instinctual drives, of extrinsic constraints (of society, corporeality, formation), and from the “matrices of enunciation,” the patterns of expression that give sense to particular instances of expression: she nominated literary genres, “psychic structures,” and various modes of participation in communication, as examples. She associates “drives” with “phonematic devices (such as the accumulation and repetition of phonemes or rhyme) and melodic devices (such as intonation or rhythm), in the way semantic and categorial fields are set out in syntactic and logical features, or in the economy of mimesis (fantasy, the deferment of denotation, narrative, etc.)” (Reader, 120). Her genotext constitutes “language’s underlying foundation.”

Without pursuing further, then, the ways that Kristeva handles these categories differently from me, I’m at ease with re-employing them to suit the specific way they can help me articulate the hermeneutical point I want to make. Whew!
 

My heart’s beloved has come home, not for the weekend, not for a study week, but for the whole summer. This entails a joy and a relief beyond compare!

On the other hand, when we live apart for long stretches, our sleep patterns diverge. I, for instance, tend to wake up early and listen to the radio as I doze toward daytime wakefulness. Margaret sleeps later than I, and can’t have the radio on. She, on the other hand, is accustomed to listening to WUNC’s broadcast of the BBC World Service as she drifts to sleep, but WBEZ plays jazz for its late-night programming. I flop around the bed more when it’s big and empty.

Adjusting will be worth it.

Kevin referred me to this Very Short Guide to Christianity for people who are, as the author says, “confused and frightened.”

It’s quite imaginative and funny, and it takes a brave contrarian to assert that Blondie’s cover of “The Tide is High” was better than John Holt’s original version — but I think Holyoffice is onto something there.

My mother always makes a point that “Mother’s Day” is a bogus holiday, a commercial institution designed to further the interests of greeting-card companies and florists, and I want to behave as would a dutiful and respectful son, so I won’t contradict her.

So perhaps tomorrow, or the day after, or some spontaneous moment, I will offer a thanksgiving for my mom, and for Margaret’s mother, and for Margaret herself (she’s actually coming home for the summer tomorrow! W00t!). And after church, I’ll probably make some phone calls. But no greeting cards.

Thanks, Mom!

It’s not a secret that I’m delighted with holy cards, the index-card sized illustrations of religious figures and themes. I favor the Belgian style known as “neo-Gothic” or “goldprint,” published notably by the Société Saint Augustin, or the German Beuron Art-Deco style (definitely not the gauzy pastel style popular in the U.S.A. and southern Europe — this site includes examples of various styles with source information), and I prefer images of various saints to scenes from the life of Jesus. So I was tickled when Margaret pointed out to me that BoingBoing covered the holy card phenomenon yesterday, linking to an article in the LA Times and to the Wikipedia.

For a survey of what’s out there, survey the eBay pages dedicated to holy cards. You can probably skip the entries that offer multiple cards (you won’t be able to get a good sense of the card design), but after a few minutes of skimming you’ll get the knack of spotting the real gems. That’s where I found the card of Cyril and Methodius for my Slavophile father-in-law (Hi, Dick!).

As I worked on my preface, I’m struggling over what to do with the distinction that I thought I understood) between genotext and phenotext. Not surprisingly, it turns out to be a more complicated theoretical point than I had understood at first; the rush of illumination that came with my apprehension of what I thought the distinction implied beclouded the exact nuances Kristeva applied to these terms. Kristeva’s interest in semiotics, seminalysis, draws much more heavily on Lacanian psychological discourses than I care to (“genotext as the unconscious of language, phenotext as the conscious”). Barthes, through whose “The Grain of the Voice” I came to the genotext/phenotext distinction in the first place, says of a musical expression,

the pheno-song. . . covers all the phenomena, all the features which belong to the structure of the language being sung, the rules of the genre, the coded form of the melisma, the composer’s idiolect, the style of the interpretation: in short, everything in the performance which is in service of communication, representation, expression, everything which it is customary to talk about, which forms the tissue of cultural values (the matter of acknowledged tastes, of fashions, of critical commentaries), which takes its bearing directly on the ideological alibis of a period (‘subjectivity’, ‘expressivity’, ‘dramaticism’, ‘personality’ of the artist). The geno-song is the volume of the singing and speaking voice, the space where significations germinate from within language and its very materiality’; it forms a signifying play having nothing to do with communication, representation (of feelings), expression; it is that apex (or that depth) of production where the melody really works at the language — not at what it says, but the voluptuousness of it sounds-signifiers, of its letters — where melody explores how the language works and identifies with that work. It is, in a very simple word but which must be taken seriously, the diction of the language. (“The Grain of the Voice,” 182-183, from Image – Music Text)

In a rush of excitement, I took Barthes to be proposing that the pheno-song was the structure, the script, the staves and lyrics and textual apparatus of the song — but that doesn’t seem to gibe with what he writes here. Similarly, I understood the geno-song to comprise the un-specifiable performative aspects of the text (which I inferred from his reference earlier on p. 182 to “the materiality of the body, speaking its mother tongue” and his subsequent comments on two performers, Fischer-Dieskau’s irreproachably exact instantiation of the phenosong, contrasted with Panzera’s reaching beyond the “expressive reduction operated by a whole culture against the poem and its melody,” p. 184).

This all comes up because yesterday I remembered a wonderful example of (what I had taken to be) the distinction between genotext and phenotext, Eric Idle’s brilliant “Gibberish” sketch from the first episode of the Rutland Weekend Television series (aired May 12, 1975, according to one source, though the Wikipedia biographical entry for Idle asserts that the program aired only from 1973 to 1974; Idle reprised the sketch, unsatisfactorily, with Dan Akroyd on Saturday Night Live on April 23, 1977). The sketch involves Eric Idle and Henry Woolf conversing as talk-show host and guest; though they use perfectly intelligible words interspersed with conventional phrases (“Good evening and welcome,” “I see,” “drawn two, lost three”), their repartee makes no sense: “Rapidly piddlepot strumming Hanover peace pudding mouse rumpling cuddly corridor cabinets?” The actors read their lines, however, with the comfortable intonation of conventional interview dialogue. On the imprecise understanding of genotext and phenotext I had worked up before resuming research toward my preface, this sketch demonstrates the divergence of the [meaningless] genotext, the unintelligible sequence of ordinary words, from phenotext, the pattern of emphasis and pitch, the embodied communicative satisfaction of the participants. But after having re-read Kristeva and Barthes, now I’m mostly just confused.

Or, more precisely, I don’t assent to what Kristeva (and Barthes) evidently wanted to do with these terms, and trying to puzzle out the most satisfactory account of her usage and the relation of her theory to mine, all gives me a headache. And I need to write out what I’m thinking in the next week.

By the way, I’m quite confident that the transcription I link above misses several words. Their “rabbit and and futfutfooey jugs” should be “rabbit and ratatouille jugs”;