Month: March 2009

A student emailed me yesterday to note that somehow — in the blurb department of Baylor UP (for whom I commended my mentor and absent colleague Richard Hays’s recent book) or at Amazon — my identity was contorted so as to represent me as “A. K. M. Adamb” who teaches at Bowdoin College. Contrariwise, I lack the distinguishing “b” that marks the notorious Adamb clan from the lowlands of Fredonia, whose wayward scion Alexander Kermit Montogmery Adamb teaches in the Political Honesty department at Bowdoin. I will alert Baylor of their mix-up forthwith.

I woke up in the middle of the night and had a hard time falling asleep because I couldn’t call to mind the official typographic name for the “@” symbol.
 
As it turns out, that’s because there isn’t an official fancy typographical name like “ampersand” or “guillemot” for it. It’s just called the “commercial at” in Unicode, and the Wikipedia article appears under the heading “At Sign.” On the other hand, the symbol is also used to abbreviate the Spanish and Portuguese unit of weight, the arroba (which was the name I was sleepily grasping for).

I’m fine-tuning my notes for a lecture to Duke Divinity’s NT Intro class tomorrow morning, and while I was prepping, spring training seems to have started. When was that?
 
Larry Lessig blasts John Conyers’ dreadful “Fair Copyright in Research Works Act,” whose intent is to prevent the National Institutes of Health from stipulating that the researchers who receive public funding must make their research freely available to… the public that paid for it. Rusty Reno has a harsh, but not groundless, critique of mainstream biblical scholarship in First Things.
 
I got a job rejection phone call today, but it was as kind and encouraging an example of such notice as I’ve ever heard of.

You may have heard recently about Lady Greenfield’s presentation to the House of Lords, in which she argues that digital technology infantilizes us (“[T]he mid-21st century mind might almost be infantilised, characterised by short attention spans, sensationalism, inability to empathise and a shaky sense of identity”) and causes autism (about 12:45 into the interview). In response, somebody who actually knows something about social media, and who has helped compile a report based on evidence — I speak of course about the brilliant danah boyd — rather than on assumptions, post hoc ergo propter hoc inferences, and portentous warnings for which Lady Greenfield explicitly disavows evidence (at about 13 minutes into the Guardian interview), has offered a sigh of dismay in response. And danah’s sigh comprises a more reasonable, articulate description of the state of affairs than does Lady Greenfield’s more extensive exposition. Mark Liberman at Language Log discusses Lady Greenfield’s unfortunate nonsense-mongering, too.
 
On the other hand, Lady Greenfield is a baroness and a neuroscientist, so even when she invokes bugbears for which she offers no evidence, she gets media coverage; whereas when the MacArthur Report gives a reasoned, fact-based description of how things are — well, how proinently did your news sources cover the MacArthur Report?

So, I went to download the new U2 album from Amazon, for their (one-day?) special price of $3.99. The Amazon site asked me to download their special proprietary downloader, but I already had it, in an up-to-date version. So I started their downloader up, made sure it was current, and re-started the buy-this-album process. Again, Amazon saiid I had to download their downloader (while their downloader was already running on my laptop).
 
Gritting my teeth, I downloaded the application that I already had, mounted the disk image, and started the installer. The installer paused to tell me that in order to install the Amazon Downloader, I had to quit the Amazon Downloader that was already running. Only then would Amazon permit me to install the (duplicate) downloader and download the music files.
 
This exemplifies one of the problems that accompany the industrial determination to perpetuate physical-media constraints in the setting of infinite reproducibility. Irritations such as this will eventually wear away the ideological necessity of perpetuating those limitations, but why on earth might we not pick up the clue phone, embrace the oncoming changes, and learn now what frustrating experience will eventually teach us about the different media economy, without all the counterproductive intermediary resistance and the concomitant squandered time and resources?
 
(I like the word “concomitant.”)

Alex questioned the practice of friending your students on Facebook, but I relish the opportunity to see a status report and comment that go as follows (names pseudonymized):

Willibrord: 9/10… why is the last page always the hardest one to write?
Wilgefortis: thats because normally we run out of things to make up by page 5

I will remember this exchange fondly as long as I teach.

Like many people of my vintage, I’ve developed the habit of drawing on (and repeating) a repertoire of slogans as shorthand expressions of points for which I can give a fuller account if an unwitting victim asks for one. For example, I often tell preachers, “Don’t write checks you can’t cover,” by which I mean that preachers oughtn’t make assertions about what a word really means, or what people used to to back in ancient times, or what Jesus was thinking at a particular moment, unless you can make a responsible case that you’re correct. (“I learn it from a book” is not a responsible case, nor is “My teacher told me.”)
 
I spent yesterday writing promissory notes for presentations at the November Society of Biblical Literature meeting (assuming I can get time off from whatever job I have). The Synoptic Gospels section will have a panel of papers on “Reading Gospels for Character Formation,” for which I’ll contribute a paper on my hermeneutical angle on scholarship and formation. The CTRF@SBL will host a session on theology and popular music, for which I’m preparing a paper on the rationale for holding such a session (to be followed by several much more interesting papers).
 
Now, all I have to do is produce the intellectual currency that will back up those notes when they come due. I wonder if President Obama will send me a few million dollars for a bailout.