Month: March 2010

• Cheers to the Lib Dems, for standing up to Labour and the Tories over the blighted Digital Economy Bill (that’s so unpopular the corporate-beholden front-benchers won’t permit open debate by the people’s elected representatives); perhaps the Lib Dems can prick the conscience of the Parliament (but I’m not holding my breath).
 
• On a related note, Stephanie Booth blogs about the relation of performance (writing, acting, music-making) and digital publication (hat tip, Suw). Listen: I have wanted to be in a rock band since the early sixties, and at no point was I motivated by money. I have wanted to play baseball for the Baltimore Orioles, with no concern for the salary. I have written and edited a number of books, and the return on the number of the hours of my life that went into those efforts is probably well below minimum wage. We do these things for other reasons — most of us, anyway.
    So if John Darnielle were to call me up and ask me to tour Europe with him as a back-up vocalist, I wouldn’t ask how much I’d be paid. If the Orioles called me and said they needed a no-field, no-hit, slow-running outfielder, I’d be telling them my uniform size. And others who are better musicians and outfielders than I am would be even more likely to take the stage, or field, or whatever.
    Even if no one paid performers anything at all — absolute zero payment — music, sport, and writing wouldn’t stop. So when people start talking in apocalyptic terms about the disappearance of all your favourite performers in whatever field of endeavour, you can reasonably just stop listening to them. They’re scaremongering, not reasoning.
    What has happened in the past, what is happening around us right now, what will happen again and again in the future, is that the ways people reward and encourage various human endeavours change. The responsible way forward at this moment involves taking change seriously, and seeing how to work with it. If you are unwilling to float along with the flow of the current, at least seek out a backwater in which to stagnate; don’t try to dam up the river (especially now that the waters are flooding at an ever-increasing rate).
    
• And from cartel-ised digital culture to cartel-ised educational culture, Michael Feldstein has a fine column on Anya Kamenetz and the Open Education Movement. Change is coming for education, too, and it involves using digital technologies in ways that may look like “piracy.” But MIT and Yale can afford to offer courses on the internet, because they function not solely as dispensers of teaching, but also as accreditors of learning — and since their attestation is very highly valued, they can give away the teaching and still charge for the degree. Once this model takes root and more clearly constitutes an integral part of the role of academies, it will engender knock-on effects that will change the academies themselves in dramatic ways. But the academies aren’t going away any time soon — no, sirree.

• Pippa and I spent a sweet afternoon relaxing chez our friends Vicky and Margaret (thanks, Vicky and Margaret!)
 
• The weather was rotten, so we cancelled our planned day trip to Edinburgh in favour of a trip to the Kelvingrove, where Pippa saw a wild haggis
 

 
• I threw my back out, lifting a heavy book at an oblique angle (my back’s better this morning)
 
• Nate shot me a version of the Exsultet, my familiarity with which I’m renewing this morning in preparation for the Easter Vigil
 
• Pippa traveled all the way to Glasgow and saw a painting of her Pa Moose in the Hunterian Art Gallery
 
• Doug pointed me to this brilliant Sarah Coakley superhero theological comic (golly, do I wish I could draw like that), and brought Pippa and me over to his house for a splendid dinner visit with his family (Thanks, Doug!)
 
• Pippa took two pictures of me that instantly vaulted to being my favourites; I wish I needed to send someone photos of me, so that I could use these
 

 

 
• Today’s Pippa’s last day in Glasgow till August; don’t know what we’ll do yet (how can we top the acquisition of her fluorescent orange hat?)
 

 
• Pippa saw the fox in front of our flat!
 

Let’s suppose, for just a minute, that the Duke men’s basketball team lost to Baylor last night. Imagine the sports headlines: “Duke washes out again,” “Blue Devils can’t win the big ones,” “K is for Kaput.” I have read so many stories that note that “Duke hasn’t been to the Final Four since 2004,” that it’s time for a deep breath and some perspective.
 
Let’s start with that last point. “Since 2004,” — all of five tournaments — twelve teams have made it to the Final Four. So if shame and ignominy befall teams that fall short of that mark, there’s a lot of ignominy going around the men’s college hoops world. If we were to apply the “hasn’t been to the Final Four since…” tag to each team, only a dozen teams would be able to boast nearly as recent a trip to the finals as Duke has.
 
What has Duke done during that miserable, disappointing interval? They made it to the NCAA tournament every year (where they were first seeds twice, second seeds twice), compiled a 139-34 won-loss record, and won two ACC tournaments. They were eliminated from the NCAA tournament earlier than their seeding would predict each year — that’s true, and no Duke fan wanted those early exits. But to suggest that a team with that record of achievement was somehow in a slump overlooks the unlikelihood that you could find more than five teams to equal Duke’s success (I’m thinking of UNC and UCLA; no other programs showed comparably consistent accomplishment, as far as I can recall, but I don’t pay as close attention as I did once upon a time). Again, we’re setting the bar of success awfully high at that point.
 
Now, someone will say, “But Duke expects more,” and that’s also true — true because, by and large, Duke has established a record of consistent success to which very few programs in history can be compared, and has done so in a highly competitive conference. To that extent, one might say that for the past five years, Duke has “underachieved.” Even that, however, misses crucial points about the postseason tournament. To start with, practically every team that makes the tournament has lost at least one game to a lesser adversary. It happens during the season; there’s no reason it won’t happen during the tournament. Only one highly-regarded team in the nation wins its last six games, whereas most teams lose at least one game out of six in their regular schedule (and all the more so if one factors out the games against mismatched opponents). In the past five tournaments, Duke lost its one game earlier than its partisans would have liked; but everyone — fans and adversaries alike — should balance being disappointed with a program over a relatively short run (on one hand) with regarding the extremely rare record of achievement over a longer run.
 
So, we did in fact win yesterday, against a very impressive Baylor team (and against a tough Purdue team on Friday); but that’s not so very much more outstanding an accomplishment than the past five years have racked up, nor is it fair to treat those past five years as a let-down. An off stretch for Duke would the highlight of many programs’ history. If we win one or two games next weekend, it’ll be great, and I’ll be proud. But I won’t be much more proud than I am of a team that’s show astonishingly strong performances year over year for more than twenty-five years.

Up Front: The following is solely word-of-mouth, not a binding commitment or an assured fact.
 
Word has reached my ears that the University of Glasgow staff in the area of Theology and Religious Studies will have a scholarship to offer, including a stipend plus housing plus all fees paid, for a Dissenter (possibly a dissenting minister, I’m not sure) — no Anglicans nor Presbyterians need apply, but we think the various flavours of (Ana)Baptist, Quakers, presumably Congregationalists, would meet the requirement. For background, read up on the remarkable Dr Daniel Williams, who stipulated that a bursary from his Trust be used on behalf of a Dissenting postgraduate student at our fair University (one of the few where Dissenters were allowed to study back in the day).
 
From what I hear, the stipend and accommodations will be generous, and if I do say so myself, the teaching staff are top-notch. Ahem — especially if you’re interested in biblical studies. Ahem, koff koff.
 
Please spread the word! Interested parties should, I suspect, contact not only us at Glasgow, but also Dr David Wykes at Dr Williams’s Trust.

The other day Nate asked me if I liked Phoenix, and I had to admit that although I have some of their cuts in my iTunes library, I don’t recall any in particular. I’ve accumulated so many tracks, and some I know so well and love so much that I want to hear them frequently, that it’s hard to make time to listen with focal awareness to new recordings. (Nate pointed me to the Phoenix website for a free d/l of one of their live gigs, so, you might like that, too. I haven’t been able to get through to the download, but I expect I’ll enjoy it when I do.)
 
One of the benefits of having an oceanic iTunes library on permanent shuffle, though, is that sometimes I hear a song that I don’t remember having heard before, with no recollection how or whence I acquired it. That’s the real joy of my style of listening, and I wanted to share with you this morning’s “Where’d that come from?” moment. This goes out to my sweetheart far away in the States —
 

Sarah Harmer, “I Am Aglow”
 

I’ll be teaching a “New Testament Ethics” course next year. I plan to assign Richard Hays’s Moral Vision, Frank Matera’s NT Ethics, Wayne Meeks’s Origins of Christian Morality, Richard Burridge’s Imitating Jesus, and. . . one more book. My ideal choice would be a feminist analysis of the ethos of the New Testament, not concentrating on sexual behaviour (but not avoiding it, either). Most of my Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza books are in storage in the USA, so I can’t just hop over to the shelf and choose among them. Nominations?

About two weeks ago, maybe a few days more, my friend and former student the Very Rev. Hope Tinsley Benko (I didn’t know they`’d made you a canon! How excellent!) directed my attention to a link to a series of articles in Slate. She remembered my diligent attention to signs and visual communication, and she thought (quite correctly) that this series would interest me.
 
(Digression: Few things touch a teacher as much as people remembering what they tried hard to teach. I’m so very moved that some of that stuff stuck with Hope, and that she recalled me when she read the Slate article — thanks, Hope!)
 
The whole series is fine and informative, and I implore church leaders to think through their own efforts at communication with the mind of a designer of wayfinding signs. (I have an idle dream of a church conference session in which everyone brings the most recent bulletin from their Sunday worship, and we go over the many ways that they succeed (or not) in helping worshippers make their way through the liturgy. I can say that from my present position because I know my cathedral boss is very attentive to those matters.)
 
While we’re on the subject, I should note that Glasgow does very well at wayfinding signs (at least, in the medium-posh neighbourhood around the University). Here are a few I photographed on my way to church last Sunday (in the “extended” version, in case someone doesn’t want to load all the photos):
Continue reading “Signs”

Happy Ada Lovelace Day, everyone!
 
(Before I get to business, I want to remind everyone how proud and happy I am that my friend Suw is the one who kicked ALD into gear, and who thus may be instrumental in promoting the cultural memory of an admirable figure from the early days of our technological revolution. Props to Suw! Huzzah!)
 
This year, I’m reminding the world that “advanced technology” is always advanced relative to something else — so I’m honouring a couple of medieval saints, Catherine of Siena and Clare of Assisi.
 

(photo from Fergal OP’s Flickr stream, CC licensed)

 
Catherine stands out in cultural history (and especially in church history) as a self-determining woman at a time when self-determination was not only difficult, but subject to risk of prosecution; despite her comprehensive fidelity to the church and its well-being, Catherine was interrogated for suspicion of heresy.
 
I nominate Catherine on Ada Lovelace Day because she exemplifies the resolute determination to use every medium, every technology available to her to work for the changes she recognised to be necessary. Catherine traveled extensively, and when she wasn’t traveling she wrote letters — technologies that may seem tediously obvious to 21st-century observers, but which, in the 14th century, demonstrated Catherine’s atypical boldness and ingenuity. And indeed, her persistence in lobbying for the return of the papacy to Rome, and her continuing influence in spiritual theology, show the value of her venturesome interventions.
 
As the child of a prosperous family, she had access to money and opportunities that her poorer neighbours couldn’t share; but Catherine lived austerely, and drew on her family’s wealth principally to share it with the needy (it’s not clear that she herself could write, but she seems to have been able to read). One can readily imagine Catherine in another age as a prolific blogger and tweeter (although she would not have owned her own computer).
 
So a digital cheer to St Catherine on Ada Lovelace Day! And St Clare — well, she’s patron of telecommunications, because of her apparent capacity to see things at prodigious distance. So cheers for Clare, too!
 

Arts and Letters Daily linked to a story about A. J. Ayer’s last year of life, including an experience of being clinically dead for four minutes. I’m not usually one for these “notorious atheist changes mind” stories — let atheists (especially deceased atheists) have their dignity, won’t you? — but I was struck by his wife’s comment relative to the eleven months between Ayer’s episode of asphyxia and his final demise:
 

 
I would submit that there’s a lesson in that for everyone, regardless of your faith (or lack thereof).
 

 
My paternal family takes a lot of guff from (non-Scottish) outsiders because so many of us had, as forename or middle name, the honourable Scots moniker “Geikie.” (My dad and grandfather number among the proud Adam “Geikie”s.) This is just to remind people that this family name radiates with the glow of generations of Geikies. Including a geologist who ended up on a trading card — how cool is that?

This morning as I was vesting for the 10:30 mass, I noticed that the shoulder of my alb was wearing through. Now, you well may roll your eyes, because you know that I haven’t bought any new vestments since I was ordained. But even more than that, this is an alb the my father-in-law handed down to me — so it had been in use since the 60’s, perhaps even the 50’s.
 
The servers were talking with me about a local tailor, but the linen has worn pretty thin all over. I think that it would be like trying to refurbish the One-Hoss Shay. I’ve put “poke around on vestment company websites” onto my to-do list.

St Patrick’s Day seems to be no big deal here in Scotland — not a surprise, really, but interesting that the presumable cultural/ecclesiastical differences actually do play out. I have seen hardly any more green today than I do any other day, and I haven’t seen any prominent public promotions (at pubs, say, or stores).
 
On the other hand, you have to give Patrick credit for attracting unto himself a great theme song. I like it through and through, but perhaps especially the verse
 
     I bind unto myself the power
     Of the great love of cherubim;
     The sweet ‘Well done’ in judgment hour,
     The service of the seraphim,
     Confessors’ faith, Apostles’ word,
     The Patriarchs’ prayers, the prophets’ scrolls,
     All good deeds done unto the Lord
     And purity of virgin souls.
 
Y’all come around our city next 13 January, and we’ll try to come up with a theme song for St Mungo to which we all can sing along.

Sometime this summer, I anticipate putting together some comics-based study guides for my students — things such as “What should I write an essay about?”, “How do I get my bibliography right?”, “I dunno where to find research sources”, “What makes some research sources good and some sources un-good?”, “How should I put my essay together?”, and so on.
 
Since I can’t draw a lick (or a human face, for that matter), I’m relying on artificial means for populating these comics. I’ve made a pixellated “Diesel Sweeties”-style image of myself, for a start. But it’s not all about me; I need more toons to include in the effort. (Of course, in a perfect world, a real comics artist would want to collaborate on this, but we know that this world falls far short of perfection).
 
So this is my offer: make a toon version of yourself (or someone else, for all I care), or even draw-and-scan a picture of yourself, and send it to me (at my gmail.com address, akm.adam@ ). I’ll drop it into my “Useful for comics” folder with your name on it. When I do get around to making the comic, I’ll select some of my friends to appear in the instructional comics. Make sure nothing therein is covered by copyright, please! I’ll acknowledge and thank everyone who appears in a particular comic, unless you prefer to remain anonymous.
 
Important Caveat: This may entail your toon’s asking questions, or raising objections, or venturing opinions that the real you wouldn’t. While I will try to maintain character as well as I know your character, these will nonetheless be works of fiction, so I’m not at fault if your toon turns out to be dumber than you, more impious or holier than you, or in some other way an inaccurate representation of you. Don’t participate if you don’t trust me.
 
Here are some online sites that offer character-creation possibilities. If you want to recommend some other, just put it in the comments.
 
• Simpsons Avatar Creator (via the Simpsons movie site)
 
• Mad Men character creator
 
• South Park avatar creator
• New York Zoos and Aquarium Build Your Wild Self (with furry options)
 
• The Famous Historic Mini-mizer Lego character creator
 
• Manga avatar creator
 
• Suitable-for-Mii avatar editor
 
• “Portrait Illustration Maker”
 
• BeFunky online photo modification
 
• BitStrips character creator
 
This could be your big break!
 

Just a couple of weeks after House featured an episode about a blogger who sought the wisdom of the crowd to help diagnose her extraordinary affliction, a nonfictional internet leader — the brilliant Jonathan Zittrain — came down with mysterious symptoms that his doctors were unable to diagnose. Carefully, guardedly, with the cooperation of his doctors, Zittrain let out on the Net a description of his circumstances and symptoms, and in a matter of hours, his online consultants had tracked down an obscure article that seemed to identify his own health problems.
 
Now, Zittrain takes pains to underscore his doctors’ excellence, and the fact that they were zeroing in on the same diagnosis on the basis of extensive testing (unlike the testing on House, which the doctors themselves perform and which yields results in minutes). But still — that internet is some amazing stuff.

 
These moments come less often, these days, but I still get a thrill every now and then, to be actually living in a place where I recognise the names from novels and songs and light opera.

I didn’t think I wanted, or would ever want, to get a version of Rock Band, but this note from Jonathan Coulton makes the whole enterprise sound a lot more entertaining than just “learn how to mime fourteen songs according to certain (arbitrary) rules.” Not only do I like the sound of getting a much wider range of music into the system, but I also suspect that this indicates the kind of network that makes possible a great many more innovative, exciting possibilities.

I suppose I have to admit it. Last night was Rose’s birthday party — her first thirtieth birthday — and I wanted to be a good colleague, socialize, see the gang, and all. But as the time to leave for the party arrived, I realized that I had to check the email Rose sent me again to find the address. Alas, Rose had sent her mail to me at my U of G email address, and the mail server was down; I couldn’t retrieve the message from the server. After hitting “Reload” repeatedly, just in case, and looking in several files where I knew it wouldn’t be, I determined that it was time to take action. I knew the street she lived on, so I could just go and wait till someone I knew headed in.
 
By now I was about a half-hour late, so I look around and, at the last minute, thought I’d check my calendar to see if I had copied the address to it. Ah! I had, and I could have saved fifteen or twenty minutes by just checking there immediately. I grabbed the bottle I was taking and sprinted out the door. In fact, I jogged or sprinted much of the way over to Rose’s (and David’s; he does live there, too). I drew up at their street, and began looking up and down for their number. I sprinted out so fast that I forgot to take my phone with me. Oh, well.
 
As it turns out, their street has both odd and even numbers on the same side for the first block (the other side of the street has no street-address entrances). I headed down to the next block, and since one side of the street is occupied by a block-filling school building, I figured that the numbers would all go down the same side on this block too. But (as John Belushi said), No-o-o-o-o-o-o.There were no odd numbers in that block at all, despite the fact that I thought Rose’s house was an odd number that belonged smack in the middle of the sequence for this block. And I doubted that Rose lived in the high school.
 
I was staring intently at the doors and numbers, thinking that perhaps Rose occupies an entryway like Platform 9 3/4 Kings Cross Station. Was there a tiny crack between these two houses, where her number should be? Maybe I scrambled the numbers, and it would be in the higher-number block I just passed?
 
As I was trying to guess the magic words to reveal Rose’s doorway, I was passed by a familiar-looking couple who were also holding wine bottles. I kept an eye on them as they walked past me (to the higher numbers, where I had just been), but it looked to me as though they were lost, too. I approached them — “Sorry, but are you looking for Rose and David’s flat, too?” And it was Laura and Tom whom we had met at a party at Ben and Richard’s flat in January, and yes, they were looking too. To my great relief, Laura remembered the number as the same as what I had thought.
 
After a while, we drifted down the hill, to the block that would have lower numbers than Roses’s, and sure enough, their flat was in the block beyond where the other side’s numbers had already passed it (if you see what I mean).
 
Once having gotten there, I had a delightful evening, sipped a wee bit of wine, fended off whisky, and headed home at a quite reasonable hour so that I’d be well-rested for church this morning. As I passed through the revelers in Ashton Lane and strode steadily up to the entry of my building, I reached in my pocket and pulled out — my office keys. I had locked myself out of my own apartment. I spent about twenty minutes standing around the front door, hoping that someone would come in and I could at least look reproachfully at my door to see whether guilt would make it admit me. This tactic was foiled, however, by the fact that no one was coming in or going out (the residents of my building keep very sensible hours). I didn’t want to buzz anyone and wake them up, especially since I didn’t have the key to my flat’s door, so I just stood outside and looked glum.
 
After not too much glum-looking, I reasoned that a warm, indoor office chair with internet access beat a chilly concrete offline front step any time, so I walked back to my office and stumbled up the steps to my pedagogical aerie. There I checked in with Margaret, and looked around for the appurtenances that would make the night more restful than trying to sleep on a bed of nails. In the end, I rotated among sleeping sitting up with my feet on a chair, sleeping sitting down with my head in my arms on my table, and sleeping sitting down with my head on a pillow borrowed from the kitchen-lounge. Woke up about 5:30, fit to. . . go back asleep. Unfortunately, that was not to be.
 
I took some time to wake up and have a cup of tea , then struck out for church; I went to the early service so that (a) my slept-in clothes wouldn’t be noticed by as many people, and (b) I could get back to the flat to wait for any locksmith I might call after church, and greet him cheerily.
 
Kelvin, bless him, showed me a neighbourhood locksmith near the cathedral, but his shop was closed for Sunday. Kelvin spotted another locksmith in the Yellow Pages, but it turned out that he, too, observed the Lord’s Day (or was sleeping off a hangover, or preparing for watching Six Nations rugby all day, or something). Eventually I tracked down a locksmith in my neighbourhood, but his son — who was supposed to be manning the mobile — wasn’t picking up when I called. I tried for a couple of hours, then two and a half, and finally got through to him at about 12:30 — met him at the flat at about 1:15, and have been snug inside since then, but too awake to nap, too groggy to be productive or useful.
 
Tomorrow I set off for Durham to talk with their biblical students about postmodernity, the underdetermination of meaning, and the problems with trying to use the term “literal.” I will sleep a lot before I leave.

• Scott McCloud pointed to the very ingenious music video by Hold Your Horses for their single “70 Million.” He likewise pointed to a Spanish post that identifies all the references. Relative to both of these, I thought that he appositely observed that the video can have its effect even if you don’t recognise each visual reference, that the power of a certain tacit recognition works its effect apart from conscious awareness — but wither he changed the post, or I misremembered it. Either way, it’s what I think about (visual, verbal, auditory, gustatory) allusion, whether McCloud does or not.
 
• Grace Baptist College has proudly declared that it will no longer teach its Bible students to read the Bible i the original languages. Not only is there no need, since God has provided the King James Version, but “[w]e believe Greek study has been and will continue to be the downfall of Protestant Fundamentalism.” I entirely support their conclusion, and if they want to take steps to prevent that — including not encouraging their students to read the Bible in any language other than Jacobean English — then bless their hearts, they should go right ahead.
 
• I do still expect someday to comment on polyamory, but this may be all the argument you need to the effect that polyamory is wrong.
 
• I know I have more backed-up tabs awaiting being blogged, but they must be on my browser at work. I am sure they are quite urgent, and I feel very strongly about them — whatever they are.

I compiled the slide presentation for tomorrow; I’m much happier with it as a slide presentation than I was with it as a lecture-plus-handout. (I think that the slide presentation may have boosted the seminar’s receptivity to my talk at the Theology, Literature, and the Arts gathering a couple of weeks ago, too.) Anyway, now I have to get my sleep, make my way to Ediburgh/Waverly, Leuchars, and then St Andrews, give the presentation, and stumble back here in time to wake up Friday and give my lecture on 1 Peter. Will blog about the day once I return.

I’m going over to St Andrew’s on Thursday to try to undermine the foundations of Western Civilisation (as usual) with my presentation on “René Magritte, Krazy Kat, and Biblical Hermeneutics.” I’m coming off a couple of warmly-received presentations (one was exceptionally encouraging, thank you all very much), but my stuff is sufficiently counter-intuitive for most people in my field that I don’t take anything for granted. I’m going over “Krazy Kat” to try to disarm the most prominent possible stumbling-blocks, and to make explicit some of the more helpful-positive dimensions of the project. I think I’ll be able to give it (for the first time ever) as a slide presentation, which will enhance it considerably; the colour images from Magritte, the photographs of George Herriman, the capacity to enlarge and focus on single frames from the Krazy Kat comics all stand to strengthen my case. This (first point) is an argument that really does derive much of its force from non-verbal argumentation. That shouldn’t be surprising, it doesn’t surprise me, but I don’t assume that peers in my field will receive non-verbal rhetoric as positively.
 
Second point: I have found my exposition of how we communicate in the absence of subsistent meaning to make particularly specific use of the phenomenon of expressive/inferential miscarriage; sometimes our ventures in expression miscarry, and sometimes our interpretations do. But (and many of you will already be jumping on this, honest, I’m aware, it’s what I’m about to ask about) the verb and noun in question carry such monumental resonance for people who have experienced the loss of a pregnancy — especially, of course, women who have themselves been through that heartbreak — that this distinctively useful word-pair brings with it very powerful negative coloration.
 
When I lectured this morning on the aftermath of the Pauline tradition — a chapter that Bart Ehrman (boldly) entitles “Does the Tradition Miscarry?” — I avoided the use of the verb by substituting the wordier (and less precise) phrase, “go off the rails.” That provides an adequate alternative in this particular context, but I don’t think it works as well for a mismatch in expression and apprehension of meaning. So if you will grant me, for just these few moments, the premise that the word(s) that I really want are precisely the words that I ought not use, can you, dear readers, provide an alternative that gets as close as possible to “miscarry” without invoking that very tender, painful experience?
 
The semi-official answers include “fail,” “misfire,” “fall through,” “go astray,” “go wrong,” “founder” — but none of these sounds right to me. Some lack a functional noun form (“the going-wrong of an interpretation”?), and others don’t convey the sense of a venture begun with promise and particular intentions, which arrives at a different, unplanned, undesired conclusion. Now, even if no other word would function as well in that dimension of my rhetoric, I still don’t want to deploy an unwelcome (if precisely apposite) word; I just don’t see what would be my best alternative. So I’m probing that wound as I put together the slide show and mark the transition cues.