Month: May 2009

The organizers of the Duke Conference on Archaeology, Politics, and the Media alerted us that the audio portions of the conference have been posted at both the ASOR website and the Duke channel at iTunes University (as I type, only four of the presentations have been posted there). While you might think that an audio feed of my talk must have preserved the best part of my remarks (omitting the unprepossessing appearance of the speaker), I was dismayed by what I heard when I checked on the recording of my response.
 
You see, Mark Goodacre — to whose presentation I was responding — has long been an advocate of semi-extemporaneous presentation. He argues that papers read aloud at conferences drone and bore, and his favored presentation style (with skeletal notes, or note cards) preserves a desirable degree of spontaneity (by the way, Mark, the changeover from your NT Gateway blog to your current blog has borked a great many links; it’s a shame that Logos couldn’t have preserved your old pages, or devised a forwarding script). I thought that, in keeping with Mark’s suggestion, I would follow his example in this case. (I may also note that my decision was not unaffected by the fact that Mark didn’t finish his talk until a couple of days before the conference.) Hey, why not aim at spontaneity?
 
Well, the audio explains why: when I try to speak extemporaneously, I ummm and uhhhh with distracting, disappointing frequency. I know that about myself, and that’s one of the reasons I ordinarily rely on a manuscript for scholarly communication or preaching. So this recording of my digital presence will reveal my proclivity extemporaneously, spontaneously, to hem and haw — but it will help ensure that in the future, I stick with my well-composed, deliberate rhetoric, and minimize the ummms.

The other day, Si IM’ed me to make sure I had seen the day’s PvP comic strip, in which Brent Siena fulminates at businesses’ poor choice of typefaces. Si was teasing me, since I get itchy about poor type design, but then he went on to sympathize with Brent, and make some critical observations of his own on type. The apple seems not to have fallen far from the tree.
 
This afternoon, Pippa needed trip to a local mall in order to find the right pair of shoes. While she went into fine-discernment mode and scoured the mall for the right footwear, I stopped by the smoothie booth to obtain a cold, fruity beverage.
 

 
I asked the congenial young man at the booth why some of the offerings use italics, while others used upright type. He explained, “Well, each one has different ingredients.”
“Right,” I agreed, “but in some of the smoothies those ingredients are listed in italics; does that mean something different about them?”
“Yes, for instance that first one has strawberry, banana, and pineapple in it.”
“Right, I understand that, I can read — never mind, no big deal.”
“No, sir, what do you mean?”
“OK, you see how some of those letters are kinda slanty? And some of the other letters are straight up and down? Does that mean the slanty words are different in some way, or are they all the same?”
“Wow! I never noticed that! Look at that! That’s real attention to detail, that you noticed that!”
I ordered the Maui. It tasted good, and when the server spotted me later on in the afternoon, he asked how I liked it. “Terrific,” I said, “Thanks a lot.”

I’ve finalized two job applications in the last two days, an exercise which is almost as challenging to the beleaguered sense of one’s own worth as is the necessity of finding places to store our possessions and to couch-surf while we await good news about our future. With those two preoccupations running neck and neck toward the finish line of despair, who needs global warming to worry about?
 
But interrupting the breakneck pace of rival anxieties come two lovely bits of encouragement. In the first instance, the ever-gracious Michael Bérubé points back to this page in discussing his plans for the pre-valedictory (read: long, usually kinda boring, though Michael will surely constitute an exception to that rule) speech — Michael, I too have considered and rejected the idea of a sunscreen reference. There’s probably a Borgesian way to interpret our silence as a deafening endorsement of skin care. But I bask in the reflected glory of Michael’s ruminations, and I underscore to Si the shout-out he received from the commencement speaker.
 
Then Brooke pointed out that “online universities.com” has identified this very blog as 1% of the “100 Awesome Blogs By Some of the World’s Smartest People.” (Link to http://www.onlineuniversities.com/blog/2009/05/100-awesome-blogs-by-some-of-the-worlds-smartest-people/ removed at their request.) That just flat-out stuns me; obviously the list-compiler doesn’t get around much, or he or she would have picked one of the Official Biblioblogs (if they wanted to name a biblical scholar), or one of the Beliefnet blogs such as Scot McKnight’s or Tony Jones’s. But in my current state of nonchalant desperation, I’ll very gladly receive such acclaim as comes my way.

Rob Letchford, bless his soul, exemplifies the kind of individual dtermination that will evenetually break through the conceptual logjam at the intersection of technology and education. He has already developed a site replete with the writings of and information about Cyprian of Carthage; now he’s soliciting participants for a grass-roots effort to hand-code a machine-readable transcription of Marcus Jastrow‘s [Aramaic] Dictionary of the Targumim, the Talmud Babli and Yerushalmi, and the Midrashic Literature. This is the sort of enterprise that a cadre of graduate students would do well to take up (not because grad students are a less caste of academic labor, but because this effort would combine their academic contribution with learning that furthers their own interests). Again I say, if some institution were to take up the cause (and associate their name with it), they’d be furthering their mission, their name, and the broader cause of teaching and learning.
 
And if such an endeavor became a model for collaborative work in the field of education and technology….

I’m reluctantly giving up the notion of composing a short valediction to be rapped, rather than orated:
 
I’m not spitting rhymes just to show my hipness
I’m here to valedict you — can I get a witness?
And so on….
 
Plus, working on my lectionary essaylets.

I noticed the no-longer-new Indigo Girls CD this morning when I was buying Margaret her New York Times at Whole Foods, and I figured I might buy the album from Amazon this afternoon. When I went to the “buy this album” button, Amazon insisted that I download their special downloading utility despite the fact that I already have the most up-to-date version of that same utility installed on my laptop — the same ^%$#^%$ utility that I had to download last time I wanted to buy an album from them, and that was the same downloader that I had to download the time before.
 
Plus, Amazon sells the recent Bob Dylan album for $9.99, but each of the individual tracks costs only $0.99. Correct me if I’m wrong, but it looks as though they want to charge you an extra nine cents just for the convenience of buying the whole album.
 
I’ll tell you if I like the Indigo Girls album, but for the time being it’s getting off to an irritated start.

Trevor is taking to the social networks on behalf of his friend Tim, who patches together a living from a variety of sources, one if which is blogging for The Mennonite. The Mennonite decided to lay him off to save some money; Tim has turned it around, by seeking instead to raise ad revenue for the paper by encouraging people to subscribe to the weekly email digest from The Mennonite.
 
Now, one on hand, I fully understand anybody’s not wanting to ask for more impersonal email of any sort; keeping myself at Inbox = 0 is a constant battle for me. But for some whimsical reason, I’m even more sympathetic to someone whose livelihood is threatened in this Great Recession. I’m going to the link whereat one can subscribe to the weekly newsletter.

I expect to finish a job application today (I did most of it yesterday), a rather intricate online application with terms that seem to have originated from the Legal department rather than the Intelligible Discourse department. When I’m applying for a handful of jobs in the fall (prime time for academic job hunting), popping an inquiry into the mail isn’t so big a deal; but when I have only six weeks of employment left, and it’s barren time for academic job-hunting, each application exacts a particularly high cost in stress and energy.
 
I stayed up late to watch the end of The Barchester Chronicles. Now more than ever, I’m a sucker for a good happy ending.
 
Pippa and I talked about Mother’s Day earlier this week, and we decided that that holiday always falls closer to the middle of the month. We therefore concluded that we had ten days to tihnk of ways to honor our (grand)mother(s). As the kids on the internet say, “FAIL.” We’re thinking improvisationally.
 
Clyppan looks interesting; I frequently find that I have more than one item to cut-and-paste at a time. I’m a registered iClip user, but I’ll probably test-drive the freeware Clyppan to compare.
 
The New York Times reports — shocked, shocked! — that people tend to overestimate their own probity. When papers and psychologist assert this, it evidently counts as “news.” When theologians assert it, we’re accused of guilt-mongering. (To be fair, we do not always emphasize the finding that the stronger the profession of sanctity, the greater likelihood that the subject will fall short — although that also seems to be a function of plain math as much as empirical or spiritual insight.)

If someone were inclined to alleviate the stress around here, I would not register an objection.

It’s all coming down the road — if only some school or some foundation wanted to get there first, with the most impact and the benefit of seeing how the pieces fit together! Yesterday’s pointer to the Eagleton lectures begins to hint at the value of distributing video (with the classy “Yale” imprint in the upper left corner) as a promotion for the intellectual discourse of your institution; today, Tom points to the Antiquary’s Shoebox, where Bill Thayer collects and digitizes articles of interest that have drifted into the public domain. A staggering proportion of humanity’s most important written works are out-of-copyright; as more and more of that legacy makes its way into the indexable, printable, open-access web, it will intensify pressure to put the remaining copyrighted material online in useful form.
 
Now, let’s say you’re the dean or president of an academic venture, and your institution began entering, marking-up, formatting, and promoting an online library of academically-important sources. Let’s say that your school puts its faculty online in short-span audio/video spots that address topical problems in digestible segments. In the process of producing these materials, of course, your students and faculty learn better the ins and outs of the texts that they’re working with (as Thayer notes, Qui scribit, bis legit: “One who writes, reads twice”). Let’s say that your students can expect open access to much of their learning materials, written and audio and video; and let’s say that your faculty and your institutional name are bouncing around the Web as the font of this treasury of learning. Doesn’t that sound like a big competitive advantage for your institution as you scrabble to attract students (and grants, and faculty)?
 
These are the faster horses of technology as it interacts with the academy. Every penny you invest in technologies that perpetuate the familiar patterns of classroom/library instruction depreciates the minute it’s spent. Every penny you invest in the technological transformation of the academy along lines that match best-use cases of various technologies (including, especially, the seminar room and the book) will redound to your advantage multiple times.
 
On the other hand, no one ever got fired for signing up for another year’s subscription to BlackBoard, and being an advocate for a transformative approach to technology and academy hasn’t helped me land a job. Maybe the future does indeed lie with encumbering teachers, students, writers, readers, researchers, and a generally-interested public with systemic limitations in order to preserve the economic and pedagogical superstructure of the late nineteenth to mid-twentieth century academy.

Beginning with Stanley. If I made a list of the people who have enthused about Terry Eagleton’s pushback against “Ditchkins,” the roster would include such an array of odd bedfellows as would amply populate a madcap smash hit Broadway musical about ivy-draped campus life.
 
I haven’t read the book, I’ve just watched the movies (1, 2, 3, 4, also available for free through Yale’s iTunes University channel). Eagleton presents a witty, pointed, welcome riposte to the latest generation of self-congratulatory cultured despisers of Christian faith. Eagleton doesn’t ascend to the heights of theological sophistication, but he doesn’t claim to — and that’s part of the point, since he can with relatively little effort show that “Ditchkins” hasn’t debunked anything other than a pallid simulacrum of the God to whom the broad, ancient Christian tradition has turned in faith and hope. In the name of intellectual honesty and rationality, “Ditchkins” unstuffs a straw adversary (largely of their own making).
 
I’ll confess to a degree of envy at this upwelling of media attention when Eagleton says stuff that I was trying to get at in my own responses to the tawdry new atheism. The “right answer” for which Chris Lydon was looking on Radio Open Source would have been William James or Ralph Waldo Emerson, not Thomas Aquinas or Augustine, but I was trying to get at the same sorts of point that Eagleton makes in these Terry Lectures. He wins for fluency, cleverness, and the clarity that a solo performance affords.
 
But hey, when Chris Locke and Richard Hays send me links to the same column, that’s an auspicious event. It’s all the more intensely intriguing since I first read both Eagleton’s Literary Theory and Stanley Fish’s Is There A Text In This Class? in Richard’s seminar on literary theory and biblical interpretation at Yale Div back in the early eighties. Ah, the halcyon days of youth, when no one (I think) would have imagined that the trajectories either of Fish’s postmodern Miltonism or of Eagleton’s post-Catholic Marxist criticism would lead to this convergent endorsement of hearty, full-blooded Christian theological reasoning.

Perhaps the academic year, with the distraction attendant on its various obligations, helpfully kept our minds off what-all will happen over the next few months. The greater leisure of the last couple of days, however, has brought a wave of stress and anxiety as we look ahead to graduation, wedding, packing, relocating, finding a new place to live (and where?), working out a way of living up to Interlochen’s financial expectations of us, and maybe one of us even getting a job.
 
One thing at a time: I have lectionary reflections to write and a valediction to compose. That’s two, I can count, but if I alternate between them I may make some headway on both.

I turned in my grades this afternoon; although I haven’t returned everyone’s papers, I’m pretty much done with my contractual responsibilities at Duke. I want to thank all the people who made this possible, etc.
 
I really have had a great time here; I’ll miss Durham and Duke a lot. I recommend Duke highly to any potential seminary student.
 
So my afternoon turned on a dime from reading and marking papers and ruminating about grades to thinking about the three lectionary reflections and the one valediction that I have to compose in the next ten days. The lectionary reflections should be pretty do-able without much strain, but I’ve been mulling over the valediction between thoughts.* It occurred to me that maybe it would be a good thing to coordinate the valediction with the commencement address, so I just shot a note off to the commencement speaker, Michael Bérubé (!). Myself, I think it’s swell that Marlboro arranged to bring in so distinguished an opening act before my closing remarks. In one of my fantasy worlds, Bérubé and Marlboro President Ellen McCulloch-Lovell will hear about Margaret’s and my vocational pickle and call up their high-powered academic friends and set us up with jobs — yes, it’s absurd, but that’s why they call it “fantasy.”
 
Anyway, Duke Divinity confirmed my positive expectations, and gave me lots to think about… after I write three lectionary essays and a valedictory address. (A very short one — no need to fear, Marlboro seniors.)
 
 
* “Between thoughts” — once upon a time, when we were living in Durham during my doctoral course work, the usual suspects had gathered at our apartment to watch a Duke basketball game. About two-thirds of the way into the game, one player passed the ball to another, who didn’t react in time to prevent the ball from hitting him in the head. The announcer helpfully explained, “Looks like that one caught him between two thoughts,” a characterization that Margaret and I have used ever since.

Annie Lennox’s “Into the West” segues into Aesop Rock, “None Shall Pass.”

In honor of May Day, I’ve been explaining the Labor Theory of Value and exploitation to Pippa.