Month: October 2008

Last week, Pippa and I put a fair amount of time into car shopping, calling around, test driving, even a little passive haggling, and we finally bought a 2006 Toyota Corolla LE, in deep red. Pippa ruled out the beige Corolla, and the White Corolla was an ’07 with more miles on it at a higher price, so the red one looked good to us. It’s covered by an extensive warranty, and it comes with the enthusiasm so many friends and readers here expressed for Toyotas.
 
My early assessment of it notes the difference in weight (and momentum) from our ’96 Subaru Legacy Outback; the Corolla really feels much lighter on the road. The engine is clearly fresher, and although no one will mistake it for a muscle car, it does fine for itself. Pippa immediately asked about the possibility of getting an iPod input installed, and that seems agreeable to me. The Corolla is smaller, and I’m a wee bit nervous about what that will entail when we make our first road trip — our family carries a lot of stuff — but so far it feels good. And honestly — when I went to the Subaru to start it up to deliver it as a trade-in, the car wouldn’t budge. That’s a sign, my friends; I’m deeply relieved that the dealer still accepted it, even sent a truck to tow it out. The moribund Subaru served us well for six years or so, and although it cost us an arm and a leg in repairs during the last year, it’s out of our hands now. The big catch comes when we try to find the new car in a parking lot.

I’m having a great time at Duke, but today I had to send in applications for three jobs that would pick me up for next year. It’s a difficult process under the best of circumstances, and when there are so few openings (with surely very many applicants) it’s all the more daunting. Margaret may be able to teach another year at Loyola, so we wouldn’t be in desperarte straits — I’d just rather be done with this phase of life.

I know I have an All Souls Day sermon kicking around my hard drive somewhere, but I can’t figure out where, which is a nuisance since I’m preaching an All Souls Day Mass next Monday morning.

One of the benefits of having two professors in the family comes when we read to one another from the answers on the exams we give. For instance: this morning I learned about the story from Luke’s Gospel in which the disciples doubt that Jesus has really come back from death — so they reach out and touch his beard.

Margaret and I were musing, this morning, about great events of the past — Pearl Harbor (for our parents’ generation), the Cuban Missile Crisis and JFK’s assassination for ours — and the extent to which we were aware of them at the time (I myself was quite unaware of Pearl Harbor). Our conversation wandered thence to the assassinations of 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert Kennedy.
 
While thinking about Dr. King and his televised presence (sometimes I think I’m the only Episcopal clergyman over 50 who doesn’t claim to have marched beside Dr. King), I realized that as much as I admired him, as much as I was startled by his death, I was all the more captivated by Shirley Chisholm. Partly because of the nature of television coverage (favoring elected officials) and partly because I had gotten older, in her 1972 run for the presidency, and Barbara Jordan in her role as a member of the House Judiciary Committee that indicted Nixon, were the figures whose presence still vividly stir my admiration.

I don’t know what Apple University is either, but if they’re looking for faculty, I know a biblical scholar-cum-technologist/semiotician/Mac loyalist who’s casting about for a job…

Pippa and I went to the Toyota and Hyundai dealerships today, where we spent most of our time looking at a 2006 Corolla (on one hand) and a 2009/08 Aspect (on the other). We may go look around at some other lots, too, but we should come to a decision before too long. Advice is welcome.

Pippa wants to know if there’s a term for the rhetorical device of establishing a rhyme scheme, then departing from it by substituting a non-rhyming synonym (or related word) for a word that would complete the rhyme scheme? Something such as,

No blogger’s benigner
Than Berkeley’s Dave Winer.
But women distress him
(Especially J. Sessum,
And sometimes Liz Lawley
And quite often, Shelley).
As fall days grow dimmer
I turn to Steve Himmer.
My troubles seem fainter
When I read Frank Paynter.
No courtier or pageboy
Is Chris Locke (the Rageboy).
While wise, kind Doc Searls
Offers wisdom in oysters.

Apologies for the doggerel, and for not including several friends whose names didn’t provoke immediate candidates for rhyming (or would have disrupted the meter).
 
But back to the point — is there a name for that? I couldn’t think of one.

It seems pretty clear, at this point, that no one will offer me an administrative position; I’ve been turned down for an embarrassingly large number of such positions. In cover letters and interviews, I typically underscore the vital importance of strengthening faculty and student morale with gestures that could be as small as (well-designed) small giveaways or gratulatory recognition. Since it looks as though I won’t have the opportunity to implement such programs, I’ll just tip my tam to Elena Kagan of Harvard Law School. Nay-sayers will scoff that it’s easy to build morale when you’re working for Harvard — and I’m confident they’re partly right — but showing pride and gratitude with small gestures would go an awfully long way even at a less sumptuously-endowed institution, and in the imaginary institution of which I’m a dean or president, I’d be all over that premise.
 
I’d also clear my email. Which I’ll get back to, now.

It turns out that if you let your email inbox slide for a few days, all those messages to which you need to respond accumulate and multiply. After months of keeping my inbox around three items, I’ve ballooned to twenty twenty-four, so this morning I’m going to have to crack down on it.

Yesterday Graeme pointed meScientific American, to an article entitled, “Never Say Die: Why We Can’t Imagine Death.” The article sticks strictly to scientific explanations, and ignores the possibility that some non-scientific accounts might actually be well-grounded; that’s OK, it’s what we pay scientists to do. If someone asks me about death and existence, I won’t talk about MRIs or evolutionary psychology.
 
The article does the valuable work of directing our attention to death with unyielding unsentimentality, in contrast to cultural cues that favor denying, trivializing, or romanticizing death. At the risk of saying more than I know, I would affirm forcefully that everyone should take time for a more [painfully] unsentimental consideration of death and dying, if only to counteract the stifling concealment by which the powerful, profitable enterprises endeavor to assure us that if we just consume enough, we will live forever (or that we need not think about death as long as we’re accumulating material goods, or that death only happens to other kinds of people). Whatever conclusions you may come to, death will surely be among them.

When visiting with the Bishop of Missouri and with Ralph, my current employment situation came up. I acknowledged the far-reaching uncertainty that characterizes Margaret’s and my future, and noted that for career academics, a one year contract is a mixed blessing: all the anxiety of unemployment, with none of the leisure.

When I read reports such as this one, I always transpose its terms into the key of the educational and ecclesiastical organizations I inhabit — and I typically recognize a great deal of wisdom. Of course, they’re true enough of their world of origin. (I worry about the title of this one, though: “A Priest, a Minister, and a Rabbi Maxim: People lacking imagination, skepticism, and a sense of humor should not work in the security field.” Are they suggesting that priests lack imagination?) As soon as I saw the Cluetrain webpage, I edited a copy to fit the seminary-education system, and gave it to the dean.
 
And remember Radiohead’s “Pay What You Like” model for In Rainbows? And do you remember a big fuss shortly thereafter, when word got out that (shock! horror!) many people downloaded the album and didn’t pay for it? I had the impression, perhaps misplaced, that many people figured that showed the inadequacy of net-native distribution. There’s one problem, though: Radiohead sold very many more copies of In Rainbows than their previous albums. “Warner Chappell’s Head of Business Affairs Jane Dyball will reveal that the digital publishing income from the first licence (for the Radiohead pay what you want site) alone dwarfed all the band’s previous digital publishing income and made a ‘material difference’ to Warner Chappell UK’s digital income.”
 
“Piracy is killing music, except where it’s making money for musicians hand over fist.” Not as dramatic a slogan, but truer. And that’s not even counting the savings on legal fees, since Radiohead/Warner won’t be suing music fans for downloading this one. No one could have foreseen this — except people who did, and said so, five or ten years ago.
 
And finally, good news on the ubiquitous wireless front.

Compare David’s encounter with Cardboard Obama with McCain’s. Even David’s startling smile outpoints McCain’s “Say Cheese” grinmace.

Trevor sent me an email with this photo in it,
 

to which I add, “Please do not use double primes (inch marks) for quotation marks.”
 
And Kate sent me a pointer to this receipt:
 

 
You may think that Kate is not the first person you’d imagine queueing up to buy a Jesuit, but I think that’s part of what makes her so interesting. (The explanation is in the comments.) As a Dominican spirit, I admire her investment but will decline to partake.

I noticed yesterday that the Rev. Arnold Conrad of Davenport, Iowa, began a rally for McCain with prayer (good so far). Pastor Conrad, however, urged God to bring about a McCain victory — not because he supports all the evangelically correct causes, but because people of other faiths are praying for Obama, and it would be bad for (the Christian) God’s reputation if they could think their prayers availed.
 
To make matters worse, it sounds as though Pastor Conrad thinks “Hindu” is the name of a deity: “Millions of people around this world praying to their god—whether it’s Hindu, Buddha, Allah….” I’ll cut him some slack on Buddha, but it heightens the already-celestial ludicrousness of this intercession when he incorporates “Hindu” into that sequence.
 
Let’s see: two Christians are running for President, and God should favor one over the other because non-Christians favor the second. That makes the prayers of those non-Christians pretty powerful; think what might happen if the non-Christians of the world should get together and pray for world peace. Or, one supposes, cataclysmic war, since then God would have to bring about peace to spite them.
 
But wait — the McCain campaign issued a statement about the incident. They did not say, “Sorry, that was a foolish idea” or “We understand that Hindu is not a god,” but they did say, “Questions about the religious background of the candidates only serve to distract from the real questions….” But clueless Pastor Conrad hadn’t said anything about Obama’s faith (or McCain’s), at least not in the CNN story. The McCain spinmeisters had to use the opportunity to talk about religion as an occasion to imply that Obama himself was non-Christian.
 
Well, it looks as though this will take care of itself in the next few weeks. A couple of days ago, Palin indicated that McCain would end “abuses of power” in Washington, thereby ruling out a role for her in national government; and yesterday, McCain held one of those town hall meetings he so favors, but he left before the question-and-answer period that he himself had promised when he began talking.

The House of Lords, God love them, defeated a proposal to extend to six weeks the state’s power arbitrarily to detain suspects:

The amendment [to eliminate extended detainment] was put forward by Lord Dear, a former West Midlands chief constable, who told peers: “This attempt to appear tough on terrorism is a shabby charade which is unworthy of a democratic.
“This legislation is fatally flawed, is ill thought through and is unnecessary. Perhaps worst of all, it seeks to further erode the fundamental legal and civil rights that have been the pride of this country for centuries.”

John Bull has a lesson to teach Uncle Sam. In the U.S., you can even call that kind of provision “unconstitutional.”

Happy Thanksgiving for our neighbors to the North!