Month: January 2021

Today I extended my streak running streak to thirteen days (running in the snow, which is no big deal for my friends in the northern US or Canada, but which borders on madness, madness I tell you, in England). Later in the day I finished off an editing project (with invaluable feedback from my generous friend Tristan Franklinos), which I have uploaded to the Internet Archive. It’s a Loeb-like study text of Lucian’s On Sacrifices, which may be of some interest to anybody who enjoys ancient literature, and may be of use if you study or teach in the area of Religious Studies. Have one on me!

Late last year I tweeted a comparison of US politics to the novel Seven Days in May. If we start with the Georgia election, I make this the end of Seven Days in January, Day Two (USA time). We’ll see how the next five days go.

On an unrelated note, my streak running streak is at twelve.

Job well done, Georgia, if by an uncomfortably narrow margin. I know it would have been a wider margin without the voter-suppression activities that the stte government has pursued for the past few years.

Now that Mitch McConnell is no longer absolute monarch of the Senate, here are some developments I’d like to see:

• National legislation to inhibit gerrymandering and encourage coherent, contiguous, compact voting districts, as part of a renewed Voting Rights Act;
• Gradual expansion of Medicare toward an eventual Medicare for All programme;
• Whatever it takes — Constitutional amendment, Enlarging the Supreme Court — to reverse Citizens United;
• Rapid demilitarisation of police forces;
• Monumental investment in education, beginning from elementary level, prioritising high-poverty districts;
• Abolition of private prisons, as part of a thorough-going decarceralisation initiative, examining first of all the racial inequity in sentencing patterns;
• Annual gradual adjustment pf progressive income tax rates until they approximate Nixon-Ford era tax rates;
• Reinstate nuclear weapons bans, demilitarisation of space, and slash defence spending;
• Figure out some way to fix the Supreme Court and the nomination/confirmation process. Ask Larry Lessig.

Last of all, let us in the rest of the world not hear about insane US politics so that we can go about fixing our own problems without the stress of knowing that the nation with a massive military and a history of interventionist reactivity isn’t being run by tantrum-prone narcissists.

I just caught myself letting a day slip past without having blogged. That will not do!

Over the weekend I saw an article on ‘streak running’, which I first thought referred to nakedness. It develops, if your frame of reference matches mine, that it has become a thing to run on consecutive days. This revelation set me back a pace or two, since (as M. Jourdain might have said if he took up aerobic exercise) I have been streak running for almost a year, without knowing it! I have to admit that my streaks have been interrupted often enough, by weather or holidays; but as a default, I wake up between 5:00 and 6:00, go out and run for a mile and a half, then cool off, say my morning prayers, and have a cup of coffee before showering and going to Mass, when Mass is available.

I do not run naked.

For this morning’s entry, I’ll just flag up (again, sorry) my article in Horizons in Biblical Theology, wherein I make the connection that links Claude Shannon’s information theory (a very good thing), Roman Jakobson’s redeployment of it (a questionable thing), and the way it has become an ossified set piece in the conventional discourse about the singularity and discoverability of meaning (a very bad thing). As Shannon himself says, ‘Our fellow scientists in many different fields, attracted by the fanfare and by the new avenues opened to scientific analysis, are using these ideas in their own problems. Applications are being made to biology, psychology, linguistics, fundamental physics, economics, the theory of organization, and many others…. The subject of information theory has certainly been sold, if not oversold.’ Don’t buy it!

Over the holiday I took a lead from Fr Robin’s recommendation and read the Abbé Henri Huvelin’s Some Spiritual Guides of the Seventeenth Century; it was so captivating that I then cleaned it up (editorially — no need of censorship) and posted my fresh edition to the Internet Archive.

You can download it from here, and you can find Abbé Huvelin’s graduation picture at the École Normale from the Archive as well. Some Spiritual Guides narrates the backstories of its subjects, including the startling rumours about theb Abbé de Rancé and his encounter with Madame de Montbazon’s severed head.

Yes, a momentary pause turned into months-long silence. This, however, is a start, and I will try to keep the blog going daily for Hilary Term.