Month: July 2008

This summer I’ve remembered, in various places, some of the gifts my Dad gave me. When both of Margaret’s Tevas spontaneously fell apart, I recalled his reading “The Deacon’s Masterpiece” to me. When the Carter Family came up on the iPod, I remembered his playing the ukelele and singing “Worried Man Blues.” Then later on, a radio show (perhaps American Routes, perhaps Back Porch Music) played another song he used to sing. It wasn’t “The Fox Went Out On A Chilly Night,” but it was something like that.
 
As I was clearing up my work table at the townhouse, I uncovered a Christmas card Dad sent us. He won’t send any more, but we’ll be receiving gifts from him as long as I hear and remember.

We closed up the Princeton townhouse this morning, said goodbye to Jennifer (who headed back to NYC), said goodbye to Clare (who handed down to Margaret her [Clare’s] grandfather’s doctoral robes from Duke), and rolled out for a leisurely trip to Framingham. As we pulled into the Red Roof, I had a flashback — “We’ve been here before!” — but I got over it, and we’ll probably take it pretty easy for the rest of the evening. So far, so safe.

Tomorrow we move away from Princeton for the second time. More about our travels when we get connectivity.

Just mostly offline. Jennifer’s here, we’re meeting Princeton friends to say goodbye, we’re struggling with the need to clean out the townhouse (and not making headway as fast as we’d like). All will be well.

Safe, but without connectivity.

We’re leeching wifi from our friends — here are some pictures I wanted to send along:
 

 
Bea was wiggling so furiously that there was no chance of getting a clear image in the hospital lobby.
 
The Bulls game last night was a satisfying win for the home team. It was my first trip to the new Durham Bulls Athletic Park — the replacement for the Durham Athletic Park made famous in Bull Durham. At one game, the outfield Bull prop did its routine, eyes flashing red and steam shooting from its snout, and scared the living daylights out of a young Nate Adam. Last night, a new simulacrum of the old Bull (itself added just for the film) scared the bejeebers out of our friend Luke Musser — in keeping with an honorable tradition, now.
 

 
Oh, and we have reached the conclusion that I have plantar fasciitis in my left foot (a physician friend concurs) — explaining the persistent pain in my heel. It’s unpleasant, but it’s not as bad as some of the alternatives I imagined.

Our new home is in the heart of Durham; it’s urban-without-skyscrapers, in a city that’s part of a high-tech triad of municipalities, adjacent to a university campus that has a long-standing cordial relation to Apple. Our AT&T coverage map shows us in the middle of the “best” signal strength, and they even submit that this neighborhood benefits from 3G service. We are perplexed to discover, then, that our cell phones report “No Service.” That’s none — not even the faint cup-and-thread signal that we usually got in a rural area of Princeton.
 
As we read further, it turns out that the coverage map is not meant actually to reflect the map “may include areas served by unaffiliated carriers, and may depict their licensed area rather than an approximation of their coverage [my emphasis]. Actual coverage area may differ substantially from map graphics [my emphasis, again], and coverage may be affected by such things as terrain, weather, foliage, buildings and other construction, signal strength, customer equipment and other factors.” Well, I knew that architectural features and terrain matter, but this house rests out in the open, not folded into the valleys that hide outer Princeton from cell towers. And since architecture does matter, we tried our phones down the road at Clay and Sarah’s house, and we got no signal there, either.
 
Last trip to Durham, I don’t remember having been shut out, so this may be a transitory effect. We hope. But getting no signal at all from our contracted carrier would make this a very large headache.

Got up early, saw Jennifer to the Dinky, drove drove drove to Durham, arrived at about 4:30, reveling in a visit with Sarah and Luke and Anna.
 
Our AT&T mobile phone coverage in Durham is atrocious.
 
These are the headlines; full coverage later.

Not content with relocating from Evanston to Durham, Margaret and I are now (with Jennifer’s generous assistance) getting set to relocate from Princeton to Durham, too. We’ve gotten much of the Princeton-stuff into the rental van, and we’ll make this move sometime tomorrow.
 
Of course, that’s not the end of the story; we’ll stop back in Princeton for a few days next week, and we have to go to Maine to fetch our young one — but every stage gets us a little closer to done.
 
We did bring Beatrice back from the animal hospital last night. You”d never guess from her behavior that anything was wrong at all. The vets suggested that they emetic got the gum out of her system fast enough, but I just think she’s got a streak of supernatural durability in her: Beatrice, the Rasputin of Bichon Frisés.

Keeping a clear email inbox is much more challenging when you only have a few hours of connectivity per day.
 
On a more humorous note, the topic of olive oil has provoked many tired jokes, but I still think that someone in the McCaffrey’s sign-making department must have seen this grocery sale as an opportunity to invite a new twist on the clichés:
 

Our writing and packing plans went a little awry yesterday as Beatrice nosed her way into Jennifer’s purse, and found a package of Orbit gum (up till now, the official chewing gum of the gum-chewers in our family). Bea scoffed down seven to ten chunks of gum before we noticed and stopped her, but since Orbit is sweetened with Xylitol, we had to take Bea to the New Jersey equivalent of Animal 911 (yes, this is the same dog that ate two blocks of Mexican drinking chocolate almost exactly two years ago).
 
Xylitol evidently can throw a dog’s blood sugar off, so we raced the hour to our nearest all-night emergency room, and Dr. Motley induced her to regurgitate the gum, we called the Animal Poison Control Center, and left Bea at the clinic overnight. ( The staff at VSDS were all very helpful, solicitous, and professional — we recommend them highly, though we would prefer that you not need their help.)
 
This morning, the doc reported that her blood sugar is all right, and they just need to keep her another twelve hours to check her blood for signs of liver damage. This is all very good news, and though we’re vexed that Bea persists in eating stuff that’ll kill her, we rejoice that she seems to be recovering satisfactorily, and we’ll probably have her home tonight.

The developers and e-scribes at Logos Bible software have been very hard at work. A few days ago, Kent Hendricks called my attention to a Logos-compatible version of Migne’s Patrologia in preparation; in looking into that, I noticed that they have an alpha version of their software available for Mac OS X; and now, they’ve begun working on a digital version of the works of Francis J. Hall. This is all very good news.
 
Since they’ve not produced a Mac-friendly version to this point, I’m not conversant with Logos products. They have a strong positive reputation among the scholars I know, but I can’t speak to the software from first-hand experience. I will note, though, that all of these are rather pricey — not unfairly so relative to the labor that Logos has put into producing them, and their integration into a system that affords digital access to many other works should be applauded — but I don’t have that money, and if I did I’d probably expand and upgrade my Accordance software holdings.
 
The cost of Logos packages brings to mind another e-book phenomenon, the proliferation of books available in iPhone-friendly formats. Most of the reviews express something short of wild enthusiasm; the tables of contents aren’t always complete, or the searching capacity is (allegedly) unsatisfactory. One of the problems seems to be that the present organization of the App Store requires that a software offering be an “application,” not a readable file. Surely it’s more efficient for Apple or a third party to offer a straightforward PDF reader than to make each individual text file include its own tagging, searching, hyperlinking apparatus. Second, though, the interests of writers and readers are both best served if a simple, non-specific publishing format could make transferable enhanced-text files readable on iPhones and other pocketable devices. (I know the App Store offers several ebook readers; I haven’t detected one that permits easy construction of one’s own “book” files, or that doesn’t elicit testimony decrying various important bugs).
 
In other words, good as the Logos project and the ebook section of the App Store may be, they’re still interposed between the actual capacities of digital publishing and a future in which author/publishers can readily produce well-formatted independent books, zines, tracts, comics, or what you will. I remain convinced that such a future lies near at hand — an adept developer who can marshal the iPhone SDK to produce a portable version of Preview, for instance, might provide all the impetus that future needs to leap over the obstacles that today’s mediators impose.
 
(I don’t say anything about the Kindle here. It’s because I don’t know enough to comment productively. I’m sympathetic to Mark Pilgrim’s concise skepticism, but also to the positive responses of bloggers like Shelley and David whose judgment I trust. I’ve asked Amazon if they might lend me a review unit, since I’ll be giving a presentation on this topic in September and I’d be sure to discuss the Kindle at that symposium if I had the chance to fiddle with one. But I haven’t heard back from them; I suspect that they, understandably, don’t account me sufficiently buzzworthy to let me test-drive their device. If Kindle users have feedback that would illumine my murky perspective, please don’t hold back!)

A few days ago, Margaret and I indulged in a trip to the movies to see Wanted (couldn’t they have come up with a name more congruent with the movie?) — which bears some relevance to my post from a couple of days ago, and to David’s generous response thereunto. Really!
 
First, I should respond to some friends who asked what we thought about the movie. I appreciated James McEvoy’s performance, and the first portion of the film successfully elicited my interest in McEvoy’s character and his prospects. The dénouement, however, lapsed toward (very well-executed) conventional action-film resolutions. It illustrates the Matrix quandary of adrenalin movies: it’s a lot easier to come up with a come up with an ingenious conceit for an exciting movie than it is to bring such an innovative premise to an equally convincing closure (or a satisfying lack-of-closure). It’s as though McEvoy’s Wesley Gibson evolves from a pallid, doughy Anyman into a vibrant, powerful, ultraviolent Anysuperman.
 
And if it makes any sense to ask this question of a movie whose leading attraction is Angelina Jolie as a character named “Fox,” what’s with the absence of women in the world of this movie? Gibson has a girlfriend (who’s having an affair, enacted on-screen at least twice, with Gibson’s “best friend”) and Jolie reminds us of what we enjoyed watching in the Tomb Raider movies, but all the other active figures in this world are male (and the girlfriend is obviously throw-away character) (one hesitates to call her “one-dimensional,” since her three-dimensionality helps explain her presence in the script). It’s all especially odd since the film justifies some plot developments with mumbo-jumbo about genetics, but doesn’t (to my recollection) mention Gibson’s mother at all.
 
But to the “fallacy of examples” point: at a pivotal moment in the plot, Wesley questions the murderous raison d’être of the organization he was training to join. My sympathies surged; would the movie actually grapple with the ethics of vigilantism? No such luck. In response, Fox recounts a “one that got away” anecdote that presumably justifies the assassins’ Hollywood justice.
 
In the context of reasoning from examples, Fox’s story exemplifies all the dangers to which David and Ethan (and I) point. At this stage of the movie, Gibson adduces the laudable moral principle that it just ain’t right to go around killing people outside a public system of judicial discernment, and he senses that an innocent person might be killed, or that killing the guilty might not be adequately morally commendable. However vigorously some of us can insist that he was right so to do, the movie — and the cultural impulses to which it appeals — assert the contrary anecdotal ethic that vigilante assassination effects justice and averts innocent suffering, because Jolie/Fox presumes that if a particular malefactor has been killed on schedule, he would not have killed her father before her eyes. But this justification by example occludes other possibilities: the Bad Guys might have sent a different (even more brutal!) killer, or the Good Guy assassin might have himself killed an innocent, or Good Guy might not have been as good as he is supposed to have been, nor Bad Guy as bad, or any of a skillion other possible outcomes. Nope, the only solution would have been for Good Guy to kill Bad Guy on schedule.
 
I suspect that the cogency of anecdotal reasoning (for Kristol and for Angelina Jolie and for Ronald Reagan and for various cultures and discourses) still prevents my identifying it as a fallacy except from within a cultural discourse that identifies specific shortcomings of reasoning from examples. There’s still a wisdom to be apprehended about narrative, examples, anecdotes, and valid reasoning (as Lyotard suggests in Postmodern Condition and various other writings on justice).
 
Apart from that, (a) curving bullets’ trajectories was cool, and (b) a movie riddled with this many bullet wounds still shouldn’t have so many holes in it.

• Happy Birthday, Nelson Mandela!
• I’m working (in a certain sense, resembling “every now and then I entertain a random thought about”) on a presentation on technology, copyright, community, and theology, and in conjunction with the technology-and-copyright part of the presentation, I find this article from the Globe interesting (and predictable).
• Jos Buivenga has issued an upgrade to professional-quality free typeface Fertigo.
• Oh, I know! I had wanted to comment on David Weinberger’s and Ethan Zuckerman’s observations about the Kristof “Donate a Goat” article. David calls it the Fallacy of Examples”; I’m not sure I want to name it a fallacy, since if we read the story as an example, there’s nothing fallacious about it. It’s a narrative about a case. The problem arises when we base our general reasoning about charity, for instance, on one narrative example (and Ethan is quite right about this). At the same time, we ought to be cautious about the complexities of rhetorics of valid persuasion. I’ve always been strongly oriented toward [Western] logic (as a youngster, I was an early adopter of Wff ’N Proof); I reveled in the logic courses of my college philosophy major. But “logic” (including judgments about what constitutes a fallacy) functions differently in different cultural discourses. For some audiences, narrative examples constitute a sort of proof that trumps statistics, syllogisms, and mathematical probability. While I’m not ready to say “Anecdotal evidence is for this-or-that culture the equivalent of logical inference for Western culture,” my hesitancy can’t be separated from my immersion in the dominant discourses of Western culture.
  It’s a hairy problem that we oughtn’t try to dismiss with throat-clearing, hand-waving, and loud assertions that the kind of logical rhetoric I endorse is universal, self-evident, and compulsory.
  At the recent Ekklesia Project gathering, Victor Hinojosa made strong distinctions between the white rhetoric of statistics and analysis that constituted one stream of his talk about racial segregation in church congregations, and the Latino rhetoric of examples and anecdotes that constituted another stream. Victor is no anti-intellectual, nor a reckless postmodernist; we can’t just write him off as a sensational-faddist. The hard work involves negotiating the links, the overlaps, the influences, the priorities, and the forces by which divergent rhetorics effect their flavor of persuasion. I suspect that these negotiations may require that logical types such as I back away fro calling anecdotal rhetorics “fallacious.”

When I started my Facebook account, I followed the general directions pretty cooperatively. That means that when they asked for my first name, I gave it. I anticipated that there would be a later chance to enter a different nickname or username. Alas, my expectation misled me.
 
So Facebook has known me as “Andrew K M Adam” all along. That’s true enough, because it’s a fine name and all; it’s just that I never use that full name in either formal or casual settings (only for legal purposes).
 
I recently started trying to induce Facebook to accept one of the names that I use in public. I asked it first to list “A K M” as my first name, so that I would show up as “A K M [no middle initial] Adam.” Their system didn’t like that, and I was not surprised, so I tried again: “A [middle initials] K M Adam.” That one failed, too; evidently “A” isn’t a long enough first name? ”AKMA [no middle initial] Adam.” That one’s unacceptable, too; it has too many upper-case letters. I suppose I could get “Akma Adam” past their censors, but that doesn’t communicate a connection to the writer/teacher “A K M Adam” as I would want it to.
 
I understand Facebook not wanting every hysterical teen putting their name in all-caps — but one might wish there were some reasonable accommodation for somebody to be identified by initials.

Happy Bastille Day from Princeton, where Margaret and I pulled in last evening. We didn’t unpack in Durham — just oversaw the unloading — so the relocation process is far from complete. But we’re knocking off a bit at a time, and last week was a very big bit. (In the last ten days or so, we took a ferry and drove to Boston on Friday the 4th, drove to Princeton on Saturday and to Durham on Sunday, flew to Chicago and took the El to Depaul on Monday, drove the 26-footer to Indianapolis on Wednesday, to Johnson City on Thursday, and to Durham on Friday, and drove from Durham to Princeton yesterday. That’s not even counting Margaret’s heroic work cleaning and organizing, or our participation in the Ekklesia Project.
 
So we’re taking the Quatorze Juillet off. Today is all relaxation, as much as we want.

We’re both running on fumes, in the midst of our crazy-quilt travel-and-move summer. On top of that, Margaret’s just feeling plain weird, coming back to Durham after having left for a year. I’m feeling waves of intense emotion as I realize that although I’m still uneasy about finding work for next year, and though we’ll still have to move again next summer, I no longer have any of the frustrations that had weighed on me back at Seabury.
 
This dawned on me as I was wondering why it felt so intensely good to return the U-Haul today. It’s not just that being responsible for the Big Green Dinosaur was stressful, nor that driving the thing wore us out — I suspect that the U-Haul contract was the last obligatory connection I had with Evanston.
 
So I still have worries about my future employment, but I don’t have residual anxieties, annoyances, disappointments, burdens from my situation at Seabury. Every twenty minutes or so, a wave of release shudders through my body, I sigh, and I let go a handful of past problems.

The unloading crew arrived right on time this morning (on the early side, which turned out to be a good thing since hauling book boxes in high heat is non-fun). The neighbors are divinitarian types; one will be entering Duke Divinity, one will be working at an in-town ministry center. The unloaders toted everything that had been on the U-Haul into the new home, filling it tight with packaged possessions. Margaret and I returned the U-Haul (no extra charges, hurray!) and got the air conditioning in the Subaru recharged in anticipation of a toasty drive back to Princeton tomorrow. Then we rewarded ourselves with an exciting, but morally problematic, suspense movie, Wanted.
 
I’ll post an “after” picture later this afternoon, when we put the last few boxes from the car into the house. we’re tired, relieved, full of popcorn, and gearing up for our next adventure.

 
There!

Midafternoon, Margaret and I pulled into a parking lot down the street from our new abode, thereby officially ending the “odyssey” phase of this epic relocation. We picked up the keys, and tomorrow morning the unloaders come to stuff our belongings into the new house.
 

 
It’s nice and light, air conditioned and burglar-alarmed, snug and freshly painted, and we won’t put anything into the basement since that’s practically an indoor swamp.
 
Tonight we’re taking our friend Anna out for dinner, then spending the evening not doing things. In fact, I foresee a lot of not doing things in the short-term future, limited mostly by the necessity of driving back to Princeton to pick up Beatrice.

Will check back in when we can.