Month: May 2010

A month ago, I posted this on Facebook — but there’s no obvious or convenient way to search your Facebook history, so after copious backward time-traveling, I recovered it and will post it here, easily searchable to me and the world:

At the end of the day, we live in a world with good food and people we can love and that’s in the ‘win’ column. And it’s a big enough win that no matter how horrible things get, even on a day when I can’t say that I really even believe that, I know it’s true.
      — John Darnielle in The Life Of The World To Come (the movie)

And now, back to writing the article about Darnielle.

 

Without copyright, no one would design new fashions, since (after all) fashion designs can quite legally be reproduced, remixed, borrowed, altered, sampled, and abused as one wishes. This explains why there are no fashion designers any more.
 

 
Someone is saying, “Will the videos never cease?” Probably, but not today.

This morning (Eastern Daylight Time) Margaret called my attention to a venture that our friend Linda McDonough is starting up: Just Right Academy, a school specially ordered for the needs of intense children. Simply reading the blog on the main page, or the “About Us” or FAQs, moves me deeply. Linda has been there and cares about helping kids (and their parents and — to be frank — the schools that don’t have the resources or wisdom to help these kids) so much that she’s staking a big piece of her life on making JRA fly.
 
Linda is one of the good ones, and we’re proud to know her. So when I got a glimpse of what she’s up to, I wanted to call everyone’s attention to her and to JRA. If any of you can do anything to help her out, it would be a first-order mitzvah — whether that’s legal help, in-kind donations, benefaction, publicity, or whatever. You know who you are.
 
She’s doing a brave thing, and she’s doing it out of love for kids. Isn’t that just about the greatest possible reason to do something? Bless you, Linda!

I’m low on energy, and such energy as I can muster has to go toward finishing the article on which I’m trying to work (between naps and distractions). We can talk about why I dropped off a shelf of comfort and good health into exhausted paralysis when Margaret left Scotland another time, but for now, since I don’t really have the resources to compose a jazzy, worthwhile blog on my own, I’ll point to another clip that’s floating around the Net these days. This one concerns the Bechdel Test (named after Alison Bechdel, author of Fun Home and the long-running comic Dykes to Watch Out For, though the comic to which I linked above credits Liz Wallace, so maybe it should be called the Wallace-Bechdel Test).
 

 
As the presenter notes, this doesn’t even begin to address explicitly feminist issues; a movie could pass the test if two detectives’ girlfriends simply said, “Where’d this rain come from?” “I dunno, it was supposed to be sunny.” Further, since the overwhelming preponderance of Hollywood movies don’t pass even this minimalist test, a movie that takes women seriously enough to — you know — give them roles is more likely to be perceived and dismissed as a “chick flick” or as an angry feminist movie.
 
Did I mention that I’m pleased to be teaching Fun Home next year?
 
OK, off to gulp coffee and write.

I’m still resting up today, but I’ll point to two video clips that turned up in my browsing. First, courtesy of Michael Berube, this NSFWoP (Not Safe For Work or Parents) clip bemoaning the plight of the student who takes up work that touches on continental philosophy:
 

 
Then, Ryan North tweeted about his appearance in this clip about webcomics:
 

 
And the scintillating Hugh McGuire has a nice piece up at O’Reilly about Book Oven and the good folks at Simon Fraser University who put together a way to use WordPress as a book-preparation process manager.
 
Oh, and Duke Divinity’s “Leadership” webmag just ran a publicity notice on Stanley Hauerwas’s autobiography in which the author quotes Stanley as saying, “I seem to live assuming that my capacity for friendship is without limit . . . I have no reason to deny it is a tricky business to have so many friends, but it is a business that I believe lies at the heart of what it means to be a Christian.” I like the sound of that.

For the first time in four hundred years, Scotland has families of beavers thriving in the wild.
 

 
As for me, I feel achey and tired, as though I were coming down with something. That, of course, cannot be true; so I’ll gather my [half] wit and bear down on writing soon.

Virgin Media swears that our connection is fine, that my landlord hasn’t forgotten to pay the bill, that as far as they can tell, everything is hunky-dory. That leaves the router, so I’ve been filling up browser tabs with support advice for D-Link ADSL2+ modem-routers.
 
In the meantime, Margaret and I are sitting at a cafe, I’m uploading a boatload of pictures, pointing to apposite PhD Comics pages, and enjoying the warm, (mostly) sunny Glasgow weather. I’m counting on getting the connection fixed this afternoon.

Virgin Media has stranded us.

Off to a two-day retreat with the Doctrine Committee with the Scottish Episcopal Church. You might imagine something such as the scene from Woody Allen’s Bananas, when Esposito assumes power in San Marcos and begins explaining his vision of the new way of life in the small country: “From this day on, the official language of San Marcos will be Swedish. Silence! In addition to that, all citizens will be required to change their underwear every half-hour. Underwear will be worn on the outside so we can check. Furthermore, all children under 16 years old are now… 16 years old!”
 
But instead, we’ll just be talking over the details of our booklet on the Incarnation, and answering some questions sent us from the Bishops.

I’m not quite as worried about Facebook and privacy as are many of the eminent digital celebrities who’ve been deleting their accounts. Yes, Facebook is using its success and its confusing privacy interface to bulldoze users into revealing more than they might otherwise choose, but I’m pretty cautious about what I reveal online. I think I’m content with the current status of my privacy settings.
 
On the other hand, even as people are howling about Facebook privacy issues, people keep asking me to friend them without giving me any reason to trust them with the information I’m keeping safe. That’s a trajectory for information-reaping and email-harvesting that has nothing to do with Facebook’s settings, and everything to do with the social conventions that have come to prevail in these interactions. I’ve set up Facebook to reveal most of my information mostly just to friends and family, but there’s no point in that restriction if I accept as friends every Sal, Dot, and Hermione who asks to be my friend, regardless of whether I know anything about them. As it is, I may be vulnerable to some subtle friend-of-friend inquisitions.
 
So one more time: I will not friend you if you ask and I don’t recognise your name as someone I do know and trust. If you’re a stranger to me and you still want to friend me, use the message box that Facebook offers you to explain why I should friend you. Even then I may not accept your request — nothing personal, but I don’t owe anyone that information, and I’m not manic about accumulating high numbers of friends. If all I know about you is that you’re friends with a large number of Episcopalians I know, or emergent-church people I know, or biblical scholars I know, or any other constituencies I know, and if you don’t give me a compelling reason to accept your friend invitation, I won’t do it.
 
Excuse me now; I’m going to delete a bunch of friend requests.

Joi Ito appears in a recent video clip from The Economist, focusing on Joi’s work with Creative Commons. Preach it, Joi!
 

 

Night before last, I dreamt that I was at a party — a relatively calm, grown-up party — and hey, it was very cool, Dooce was there! And before you know it, Marlo (who had developed the capacity to walk upright) scooted into a gap between two structures, a passage so narrow that I couldn’t run after her to catch her lest she get lost. But Dooce came up and I was able to point to where you could see Marlo silhouetted, prancing around at the far end of the passage.
 
The dream ended then, while I was trying to figure out whether it was more wonderful to have met Dooce or more disappointing that I’m no longer as skinny as I once was.

• Peter Serafinowicz explains why he downloads files illegally, even ones in which he has a financial interest. There are too many good bites to single one out, but Serafinowicz makes it clear that only a mad person will think that you can make a business plan out of charging people for an inconvenient, limited, hard-to-use approach to a problem that can be solved conveniently, flexibly, simply, for free.
 
• Margaret and Pippa will be applying for visas this summer, which reminds me of this article from Cracked magazine.
 
• I automatically doubt any approach that presumes to solve too many problems all at once, but understanding Bowen’s family-system theory has helped me recognise salient pitfalls and possibilities in any number of settings. Yes, people can misapply it or use it for everything under the sun (usually with a knowing, self-congratulatory smile), but it has accurately characterised a great many social-institutional situations I’ve had to deal with.
 
• The estimable Tom Matrullo pointed my attention to this intriguing story about Islamic life in Glasgow. Two of my favorite establishments — the Bay Tree Café and the Curry Leaf restaurant — are halal; our Religious Studies program at the University is very strong in Islam; and we have a number of Islamic students, a good number of whom hail from from EU countries. Hey, and now the UK has a Muslim cabinet minister (Baroness Sayeeda Warsi).

This morning, I thought I saw a pair of chickadees out the kitchen window — but on investigation, it turns out they must have been, ahem, Great Tits.

This morning, in about two hours, Margaret should finally touch down in Glasgow for her last visit before relocating here in late July. In honour of her arrival, and the past nine months of living apart, and of the past six years (most of which we’ve spent in separate locations), here’s a link to Rene Engström’s new webcomic with her partner Rasmus Gran, “So Far Apart.” For each post, Rene and Rasmus present a sequence depicting the passage of time from each’s perspective. Only one episode up at this point, but I can identify.

Vili Lehdonvirta presents another argument for the approach I took in the chapter I wrote on “Technology and Religion.” I haven’t read all the way through it yet, but I’m quite sympathetic to an argument that the “real”/“virtual” dichotomy persistently misleads us.
 
Plus, the BBC reports that a tawny owl somewhere in Britain has adopted two mandarin ducklings. Since I have a special fondness for owls and mandarin ducks, I’ll post a link as soon as one turns up.

The University of Nottingham has put together Bibledex, a series of brief introductions to the books of the Bible, available through a dedicated page and also a YouTube channel. This is a magnificent step forward in practically every right way, and I fully expect to use these clips in my teaching.
 
“Practically every way?” I hear you ask; “How could it have been better?”
 
Well, for starters, the videographer seems to have retained copyright control over the clips. For an educational project, I would wish that the production be distributed under one of a variety of Creative Commons licenses. They’re not a perfect firewall against unwelcome exploitation, as Doc has reminded us more than once — but at this stage in the very awkward transition to a digitally-robust economy, it’s a benefit to cause of education (among other ideals) if educational resources are made available with an eye to the future, and that’s part of what CC licenses are about. That, and actually making more resources available to more people. And since constructive learning is the most effective and durable sort of learning, allowing people to remix the Bibledex videos would encourage learning every bit as much as, or more than, merely allowing people to watch them. (PS — make the clips easily downloadable, rather than requiring people to resort to one or another hacked solution.)
 
Second, and these hereafter will be “next step” suggestions more than cavils about the present implementation, I would encourage Bibledex to solicit supplementary clips to round out the picture they’re giving. Not everyone will sympathise with the angles that Nottingham’s commentators give, but Nottingham benefits if the place to go for alternative takes on the Bible remains Nottingham’s own page. So if someone at Harvard feels like producing a “No, they’re wrong” video, fine, distribute it. If someone at Aberdeen wants to make a “And another thing” video, again, look for it at Nottingham’s own site. The more the merrier, and the better for Nottingham’s standing in the digital educational economy.
 
Third, encourage people to produce other-media complements to this project. A Bibledex textbook (open-source, of course) would be a natural outgrowth of the project. Charts and illustrations, bibliographies and reviews, and handsomely-produced digital editions of as many relevant texts as they can compile and mark up. Give teachers and learners more stuff with which to explore, analyse, get interested and active, and all under a banner raised by the University of Nottingham. Sounds like it’s win, win, win to me.
 

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Now, the unwelcome start. It turns out that Margaret’s transatlantic flight was cancelled, not because of marauding ash clouds, but because of good old-fashioned bad weather. She would have been rebooked for Monday — losing five days of visit and the cost of lodging, attendant transportation complications, and so on — but decided simply to buy a whole new ticket to fly out today, arriving tomorrow. It’s all quite stressful, and neither of us needed these additional concerns on top of having been apart for eight weeks or so, and not seeing one another again till the end of July, and Margaret having closed out the Baltimore chapter of her life, and her having to redistribute, store, give away, and ship our possessions from the Durham garage where Clay and Sarah have been so patiently tolerating them. Sorry for complaining; lots of people have more dire problems. These are ours, though, and they’re rather irksome.

As it turns out, my colleague from Com Lit was captivated by Fun Home when I showed it to her, so I’m on her list to give three lectures next spring in the Level One course “Woman as Hero.” (This makes about the tenth copy of Fun Home I’ve sold for Alison Bechdel, plus all that we’ll sell as required reading for a 140-student course.)
 
We tentatively decided that I’d give lectures on (1) the unfolding of identity, foregrounding Alison as the detective/analyst/explorer of what the family had suppressed; (2) fathers and daughters, on the way Alison’s identity and her father’s diverge, converge, conflict, and generally complicate one another; and (3) on how Alison changes from young girl to the authorial voice that narrates the tragi-graphic-autobiography. It’ll be boatloads of fun, especially since I have months before I actually have to give the lectures!

Wunderkammer online magazine has posted an interview — with video clips — of Stanley Hauerwas, who was my theology professor during my doctoral work, and who is working with Margaret on her dissertation. The interview marks the publication of Stanley’s autobiography, Hannah’s Child. Many of us think it’s a pretty peculiar thing for Stanley to do, writing an autobiography; but his long-time insistence on the importance of narrative for identity perhaps sheds light on the rationale.
 
The interview doesn’t reveal startling or unexpected aspects of Stan’s persona, but it certainly sounds like him. Stanley talks a lot, speaks freely and directly, and the things he says sometimes benefit from the added context and nuancing of his more developed writings. Still it would be impossible to overstate the scope of his influence on Margaret and me, both directly through his roles as teacher and adviser, and (especially) indirectly, through the sorts of readings toward which he steered us, and through his attentive appreciation of our own work. Most of all, a gift beyond compare, he has entwined our lives with a company of the best friends a soul could ask for.
 
Not everyone likes Stan, not everyone agrees with him, and heaven knows his best students frequently depart markedly from what he himself argues (though truth obliges me to note that he has had students who treated his doctrines with oracular authority). But I can’t think of more than one or two scholars for whom I have greater combination of fondness and respect; he puts the pieces of his identity together brilliantly, and (especially to his credit) he tries not to insulate himself from criticism of his faults. Someday I’ll probably get around to reading his autobiography, but for now I don’t feel as though I need to — it’s been kneaded into me.

I make no pretense of being a pundit relative to politics, but it does tickle me when part of my UK election proposal comes true. First, Labour did very poorly (check!); second, Tories have the most votes (check!); third and fourth, Gordon Brown constitutes a liability for Labour and resigns (check! check!). Now, if only Labour sees the value of not putting their fingerprints on the PM’s office for the next few months. . . .
 
BBC, I’m at home, waiting for my clip-on mike!
 
(Meanwhile, would pols and commentators please stop misusing the word “majority”? I’ve heard that word abused repeatedly for the past five days.)