Checking In, Checking Out

I very much want to square away the sermon today, so I won’t devote reflection time to my comments on the status of the Anglican Communion, the idea of “reinventing” things and selves, year-end lists of music, or any of the other topics that dangle shiny trinkets in front of my easily-distracted consciousness.

I’ve been challenged to incorporate a variety of allusions (from widely varying contexts) into the sermon. Richard Kieckhefer and I were discussing the extent to which such challenges — allusion, specific rhetorical figures, alphabetical embedding, acrostics, lipograms, other Oulippean devices — can paradoxically make composition easier; since one can’t write just anything, what one must write sometimes comes more easily to the fore. We’ll see whether that’s the way this sermon develops.

(By the way, Mac users, there’s a terrific holiday bargain available at Mac Heist: an array of excellent, useful, enjoyable software for the package price of $49, with a percentage going to charity — can’t beat it with a stick. And now I too have Delicious Library.)

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