Month: July 2007

We rolled into Princeton this afternoon, and have been semi-unpacking and unwinding and getting ready for a lovely evening with friends. All is well.

They’re shifting to a peer-reviewed, online publishing, print-on-demand model. It can be done; it will be done.

We had not assumed that Harrisburg would be a site of excitement and intrigue, but we were partly wrong. It turns out that three or four young women who behave as though they’re rehearsing for a future appearance on “Girls Gone Wild” occupied the room next to ours last night, making it clear that such old-fashioned concepts as “quiet” and “sleep” no longer apply in the thrilling epoch of twenty-first century Harrisburg. At least, at the Red Roof.

Thanks to these vivacious culture mavens, Margaret and I have plumbed the banal shallows of the Nickelback oeuvre, since the girls phoned one of their mothers, shouting instructions to Google the lyrics of a song they were referring to as “Pants Around Your Feet.” This was made more complicated by (a) the girls’ inebriation, (b) the mom’s apparent incapacity to spell “Google,” (c) the fact that the title of the song in question is “Figured You Out,” and (d) the girls’ proclivity for drowning one another out. Several gentle cues went unheeded, but sometime after midnight these ladies could no longer remain conscious. Margaret and I have been resisting the temptation to incite Beatrice into a yipping fit outside their door this morning, though I can think of no more perfect complement to a hangover.

We have a relatively short drive into Princeton this morning, but we may be changing our plans to stay over with friends tonight; we may need to get into the townhouse early, or to find some other place to lodge. Ah, the sweet mysteries of unexpected developments!

Safely ensconced in Harrisburg. Only drawback (consistent with experience in Ann Arbor) involves the complications of having a dog with us — we can’t just leave her at the motel lest she whine and fuss, but we can’t take her in to restaurants either. Apart from that, travel has been fine. Margaret and I talked over course syllabi she might put together, episodes of “Lost,” and sundry other topics.

Beatrice woke us up early. The coffee machine is out of order. We’re leaving for Harrisburg, assuming the car still works.

The other day I suggested that Homeland Security might better be administered by people who actually know what they’re doing; today, celebrating Doc Searls’s birthday, I suggest we might prosper if someone who knows what he’s doing, someone with a level head and a charitable heart even when people are giving him a hard time, someone who has forgotten more about radio than most anyone at the FCC has ever learned, someone who has an articulate and well-reasoned approach to the relation of media to public service — if someone, in short, like Doc Searls was in charge at the FCC.

I wouldn’t wish to stick him with that responsibility — but then, being Doc, he might just take it up anyway out of his love for the media, his respect for people’s imaginative uses of public spectrum, and his pride in a country that has should have the wisdom to trust its citizens to exercise their ingenuity on behalf of the general welfare.

Happy Brithday, Doc. Thanks for the gifts you’ve given your friends.

We’re taking a restful Sunday, visiting with Nate and exploring Ann Arbor. We had a late breakfast at the Cloverleaf Restaurant, then wandered around the University of Michigan campus. We watched the re-re-edited Return of the Jedi, complaining about all the revisionist changes George Lucas made — culminating in the soundtrack change at the end (A very young Pippa used to delight us by singing along, “Halle-lu-ke-lah! Boop-boop!”) and the substitution of Hayden Christenson for David Prowse in the Jedi Ghost Alumni Association sequence.

Tonight we bid Nate goodbye, and tomorrow morning we roll out for Harrisburg. All is well.

Arrived in Ann Arbor safely and more-or-less comfortably; amazingly so, considering how much we’ve crammed into the car. Dinner with Nate, watching a little TV, and then early to bed.

The BBC has stuck with its weirdly wrong-headed decision to take the media projects that the UK’s public has paid for, and lock them behind Microsoft’s Wall of Inaccessibility (in patent defiance of the BBC’s own mission). One could devise so very many ways to offer the citizens of the UK free use of their audio and video archives, and even some ways to access to people who seem to be in the correct territory — but ceding control to Microsoft has to be the least defensible. At least Euan and Tom don’t have to take the heat for this disaster, which will cost Britain money, productivity, and the joy (and prestige) that open access would have afforded millions.

We have more closing-out to do this morning than I had hoped, but today’s the day we head out to Ann Arbor. Heaven consenting, I’ll check in from our motel later in the day.

Today we’ll tackle my office, extracting books that I’ll need and clearing a space for my successor Raj to occupy. We’ll make sure everything fits into the car, get some rest, square away our directions from Nate, have a festive good-bye dinner with Si and Laura, and get a good night’s sleep.

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At least, that was our plan before Mr Josiah’s persistent cold took a turn for the bronchial worse. Now we’ll try to shoehorn our packing-like activity into the first part of the day, take Si to the physician in the early afternoon, and think through some contingency plans in case we’d be ill-advised (no pun intended) to leave him behind in precarious health.

Jordon pointed his shiny new WordPress blog to Dan Wetzel’s column at Yahoo Sports, where he asks the vital question, “There’s no excuse for dog fighting, but why doesn’t everyone get even remotely as outraged about all the pro athletes who simply beat on women? That’s practically an every week crime.”

A few years ago — well, to be candid, many years ago — Phil gave me a copy of David Antin’s book tuning as a summer reading present. I don’t remember what weird circumstances directed his attention to it, but I’ve loved tuning from first reading (which was delayed for a while because I was put off by Antin’s ad hoc punctuation and typography). I’ve pushed it on friends, and assigned it to a PhD seminar on hermeneutics.

I glimpsed my copy of tuning the other day as we were packing up, and it reminded me of how richly provocative I found Antin’s work. So I dug up some links, made an entry, and blogged him.

I hear the expectation that not-for-profit endeavors have some prospect for sustaining their existence (if not exactly a “business plan,” at least a responsible budgetary path), and I understand that especially when we hear of mismanaged charities and institutions we heighten our sense that generous donations not underwrite high livers and wastrels.

At the same time: I remain aggrieved that this rhetoric rules out from the start projects for which there is an explicable absence of market support, which nonetheless stand to benefit a wide public. The report on “University Publishing in a Digital Age” (via Inside Higher Education) provides a case in point; there’s a strong case, I would argue, that disseminating scholarly discourse can’t be a break-even proposition any more than (for instance) the public library system can support itself.

Yesterday I finished the lectionary columns and solicited some reader comments; today I’ll make some edits and send them off. We finished the upstairs bedrooms — the ones we’re vacating — though we need to pack up the clothes in suitcases and get them out of the way, so that the cleaners can come in at midday and dust, polish, vacuum all the surfaces that we can make available to them.

Because of our family’s circumstances this week, I’ve been thinking a lot about my ownership of so many books. I’d be very happy, I thought, to share my books with my circle of friends, many of whom now have duplicates of books that I own, and who’d be inclined to be interested in most of the books I have that they don’t (and vice versa). Sadly, we mostly live in widely-distributed locales, and none of us can afford to buy a building to house a collection any place. (My fantasy of being endowed with an informal compound with tons of dry shelf space and dorms and sheds for guests to sleep and write in seems further from realization than ever.)

These thoughts were flitting about my mind when I read Scott McLemee’s column about culling book collections in this week’s Inside Higher Education. I don’t buy nearly as many books as I used to, and the trend is downward, but we still have an enormous theological (and philosophy/literary theory) library. I wish there were a way of maintaining ready access to books that I’ve paid for, while relocating them to another site, one where others could benefit from the library as well.
Continue reading “Deaccessioning”

Not “ticks,” as I saw in another online source this morning (later: either Josh Marshall corrected this, or perhaps I misread it the first time through), though verbal ticks would be annoying too – perhaps burrowing under your cognitive skin and sucking out your creativity, infecting you with chronic cliché syndrome?

As I pound out my last Evanstonian paragraphs of the summer, I catch myself repeatedly resorting to formulaic constructions that vex me much (friends who’ve worked with me in the Writing Group will recognize these old nemeses coming back to besiege me): First, the “One of the. . . is. . .” construction, a prevalent but weak way of characterizing a specific item or quality from a range of other possibilities (“One of my most common tics is the ‘one of. . . is’ tic”); second, the negation-affirmation tic (“It is not X but Y,” boy does that one possess my writerly soul); and third, the paired-term tic (“fiercely and persistently,” “oppression and steadfastness,” blah blah blah). I will probably leave many of them in, from lack of time to edit them all out – but how annoying to observe myself yield to their power over me!

We hope to close out the bedroom today; we have at least one trip to the Salvation Army planned, and some other errand-type things. Cleaners come in tomorrow.

[Later: Ha! Finished drafting Set One of lectionary helps!]

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Bruce Schneier points to an article on airline security by David Mackett, the president of the Airline Pilots Security Alliance. Why are our security czars an array of duplicitous cronies, and not competent, qualified experts? Are we safer with Michael “I think with my intestines” Chertoff and Heckuva Job Brownie than we would be with Schneier and Mackett?

We made some headway on the bedroom yesterday, but we need to push hard today as well. Bea gets a trip to the vet and a haircut today. I should try to grind out the last of my lectionary helps for assignment #1 (I have two more sets of lectionary helps to produce in the next few weeks).

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Yesterday Si and I were talking about the article in the NY Times Magazine (registration required) Prince’s clueful approach to making a living in the digital media environment. Si kept focusing on Prince’s megamillions; I certainly respect his (Prince’s, not Si’s) capacity to generate massive revenues, but since arguments about digital handcuffs on music recordings typically try to represent themselves as a favor for the smaller-scale artist, I promoted the cause of Michelle Shocked (warning: involuntary music track for site, sorry), who has been making her way as a recording and performing musician in the digital environment, without a record label owning her, for a number of years. Like Prince, she rebelled against a restrictive contract; like Prince, she protested that she was in effect a slave (she sued Mercury Records under California statutes against involuntary servitude, and entitled her 1996 album with Fiachna O’Braonain “Artists Make Lousy Slaves”); like Prince, she won her free agency; but unlike Prince, she’s not a purple-obsessed multimillionaire. She’s making modest records and terrific concert appearances, selling music online (albeit with fierce, sharing-hostile monitory notes), and doing okay for herself. Her new album comes out in September, and I’m sure to buy a download.

The industrial mediators of music distribution have enthralled the populace with their glamourous promise of wealth and notoriety, but that lottery-hit windfall comes only to a tiny proportion of the musicians from whose energies and creativity the industry profits. If we’re looking for proof that musicians can manage just fine in the digital environment, let‘s look not only at Prince, but at Michelle Shocked, too.

Fascinating notes from Earthgoat relative to the cultural differences between the Netherlands and the U.S. (thanks for the pointer, Dave!).