Author: AKMA

Anyone who cares about copyright, creativity, and the economics of artists’ self-sustenance should be reading Nina Paley’s webcomic Mimi and Eunice.
 

 

Ray Davis sends us to see Sydney Padua’s graphical representation of the construction of comics (and, as Ray noted, most other conventional stories). Add this to the locker of idea-starters, especially if it’s there to stir up ideas about what a story would be like that deviated from those conventions.
 

As I type, the midwestern US faces an ordinary, garden-variety blizzard: about 15 to 20 inches (40 to 50 centimeters) in a thirty-hour span (on top of a certain amount of snow lying already). Happens every year, sometimes twice or more a year, and although they don’t usually postpone US football games, life goes on as usual. Now, a snowfall of 5 feet or so — while not astounding — might be pretty disruptive.
 
As I type, Glasgow has mostly recovered from its recent ten-day-long snow cataclysm, which involved perhaps a total of 20 cm spread over the ten-day span. Motorists stranded! Trains stalled on the tracks! Housebound desperation! Councils closing public facilities! Someone from the northern US is tempted to mock and fleer at the havoc wrought by so ordinary a snowfall, but that mockery misses the point. It’s not the absolute snowfall that makes for a disruption; it’s snowfall relative to warranted expectations. It wouldn’t make sense for Glasgow, given what Margaret and I have been assured to be its predictably minimal snow accumulations, to keep prepared for a ten-cm snowfall. Ploughs, shovels, mountains of salt and grit — these wouldn’t be used most of the time, and there are urgent public needs that justifiably prevail over precautions for such unlikely events.
 
(“How unlikely?” you may ask. Margaret and I have spent considerable time looking for statistical records relative to annual snowfall rates in Glasgow and Scotland, but we have mostly found records only of the number of days with “snow lying” (on the ground) and lofty-but-firm assurances that although it occasionally snows in Strathclyde, the snow only stays in the higher elevations apart from a day or two a year.)
 
I’m glad Glasgow’s pavements are navigable, and I wish my midwestern friends a swift deliverance from such inconvenience as the blizzard entails. Come on over as soon as you can get ploughed out. Meanwhile, it’s back to the usual wintry weather for us: temperatures just above 0°, cold rain, frosts, and short days and long nights. We’ll let you know when the next sign of the apocalypse comes.

Margaret’s got one. It demonstrates all the characteristics of a classic earache, chief being that the pain prevents her from concentrating or resting. We’ll go to our GP in the morning if it hasn’t gotten better by then. Me, I’ll probably try to catch what sleep I can.

I was ordained to the priesthood twenty-four years ago today, at Christ Church, New Haven. At the time I was still working as chaplain at St Thomas’s Day School on Whitney Ave (Mr Acquavita is still the Head there — hey, Mr. Acquavita!), and second assistant at Christ Church New Haven (under the late Rev. Jerald G. Miner and the Rev. Donnel O’Flynn). Serving as chaplain to the Day School community, and as a colleague to Jerry and Donnel, was a tremendous gift to me in any number of ways. Stressful as that year was — I was taking a full courseload at Yale Divinity while I was working at the two jobs — my colleagues made the stress into something productive. I learned much more than a year’s worth of lessons from them.
 
Since then I’ve helped out with the campus ministry at Duke University (under the late Earl Brill), with the cathedral ministry at St Peter’s in St Petersburg, with miscellaneous services at DaySpring Episcopal Retreat Center, and as interim vicar at St James, Tampa. After we moved from Florida to New Jersey, I served as an assisting priest at Trinity Church, Princeton; from Princeton to Evanston, at St Luke’s Parish.
 
I spent the next two years in Princeton, on leave from Seabury, and in Durham, as visiting professor at Duke. I wasn’t rooted in either place, and I didn’t do much parish work (helped out a little at St Joseph’s in Durham).
 
A little more than a year ago, I moved here to Glasgow. I began helping out at the Cathedral of St Mary and with the Anglican chaplaincy here.
 
When you count in the many miscellaneous venues of ministry — at the schools at which I taught, at tech conferences, in my guild in WoW, at the places I’ve been invited to preach — my time in ordained ministry has involved many places and innumerable people. Everywhere, I found myself falling in love with the dear souls who came to church, who turned to me, in trust and hope. Sometimes good things come of our time together; sometimes bad things have followed. I wish there’d been more, greater good.
 
And Margaret, and our very wonderful family Nate, Si, Pippa, and Jennifer, supported me through it all.
 
I owe all of them so much for the patience with which they’ve borne with me, for the faith with which they’ve trusted me, for the grace we’ve seen together. Thanks, all of you. Thank you so very much. I’ll keep trying, we can keep trying together.
 

I have a severe tab-link-backlog. This is the remedy:
 
• Since we actually live nearer Lochaber than ever before, this would be a possible gift idea, if only we weren’t resistant to the idea of landed nobility.
 
• Elizabeth Drescher rightly assails the “Web makes us stupid” argument from Nicholas Carr (and, by appropriation, Len Sweet)
 
• The Journal of Electronic Publishing tackles the question of the future of University Presses. Speaking of which, in case I didn’t link to it before, here’s Seth Godin speaking to Indie publishers.
 
• Speaking of which, read this summary from Boing Boing, and for the recording-industry/music words substitute “print publishing”/“books” words. We haven’t reached that threshold yet, but we’re getting very near it, and the future will reward those who don’t waste their energies trying to hold back the technological tide.
 
• Speaking of publishing, and modulating to “teaching about writing,” the great Steve Himmer this year received two Pushcart Prize nominations, and he’s looking over the proofs of his forthcoming novel. We knew him way back when!
 
• The Chronicle presents a column on stipulating that students design their papers well, rather than giving them strict formatting guidelines
 
• Reconfiguring Harvard’s library system — I sure hope they’re listening to their own David Weinberger on this
 
• I had most of these Peanuts books when I was a kid, beginning with the very first — many in French, too! It was a great way to brush up my vernacular (rather than schoolroom) French.

Obviously, Principal Anton Muscatelli has been overlooking my active participation in teacher’s-union activities and student demonstrations, and has embraced the open-access ideology I’ve been promulgating all these years. When this announcement came across my email threshold at first, I ignored it — there had to be a catch, since at this point the University is enthralled by the idol of Full Economic Costing. Give anything away? G’wan, you’ve gotta be kidding!
 
But I saw it on Boing Boing, so it must be true: “One of the core missions of the University is the creation, advancement and sharing of knowledge.” I have the feeling that I’m going to be using that line in at least one grant application.
 

The polite way of saying it, “I’m particularly vexed at the University’s cumbersome, intrusive, onerous, and user-hostile network access policies and devices.” If I seem to be offline for the next week (while painters spruce up my office), please understand that I probably am offline.

In honour of the shock and horror that Scotland has experienced with its current blizzard (we have 13 of snow on the ground outside our flat) (that was 13 centimeters, not 13 inches), I dug up a transcript of the Father Guido Sarducci’s monologue from Saturday Night Live wherein he touches on the extremely cold weather in Italy and on his theory of flying saucers. I can’t reproduce his accent (I still hear his voice saying, “Renn Bo is-a her nemm”), but at least the words are pretty much here.

The weather has really been something. It’s been cold all over. When I left Rome yesterday, it was two. The fountains were frozen and everything. And that’s Celsius. It’s all the way down to Celsius. In Naples it was only up to ten, and down in Reggio Calabria, home of the Marconi School of Broadcasting, my alma mater, it was twelve. It was a little warmer in Palermo, sixteen in the Conca d’Oro. Up north in Venice, a cold minus two. In the sister city of Trieste, two, too. Over in Milano, it was one degree. Bologna was three. Skies clear in Bologna tonight. A good night for spotting U.F.O.’s — “oofoes” we call them in Italy.
 
I once saw a UFO near Bologna. I was driving from Assisi on this road here, and it was late at night, and from nowhere there were these two giant white lights and it just zoomed right past me real fast and it just seemed to disappear. It was about ten feet long I would say — real sleek looking — looked a lot like a Corvette. And as soon as it was gone I said to myself, did I see that or not? And you see, that’s what they do to you. They shoot you with something, some kind of ray gun — and it makes you doubt that you saw them. If you think you’ve never seen one, you probably see them all the time.
 
And after what happened to me, I started carrying my camera with me at all times, just to prove to myself that I’m not hallucinating. Was just a few months ago that I spotted one again. I was in Los Angeles at the home of a friend of mine, Rainbow is her name. Fortunately, I had my camera with me. You can’t tell much from the photo, but it was kind of silvery looking. And it was in the air a long time, just kind of hovering there. And Rainbow says “Listen: all the dogs are barking.” And it was true — all the dogs were barking.
 
And then it just kind of very slowly drifted away. I had this blow-up made of the UFO. I know what you’re thinking: you think it’s just the Goodyear blimp. That’s what everybody says. But I did some research and called the Goodyear Blimp people and they told me their nearest blimp was miles away from where I spotted this UFO. And that’s when it dawned on me. Don’t you think that if these aliens are smart enough to get here, they’re smart enough to disguise their spaceships as Goodyear Blimps?
 
Come on — they weren’t born yesterday. They’ve been spying on us like this for years and years. And my research proves that about one out of every five sightings of Goodyear Blimps is actually a flying saucer in disguise. So, don’t take any chances. If you ever see what you think is the Goodyear Blimp, call the police, call the mayor of your town, call the president, even call your senators – you can never tell.

 
Saturday Night Live, February 24, 1979
 

   ‘Some great men… insist that Education should be confined to some particular and narrow end, and should issue in some definite work, which can be weighed and measured. They argue as if every thing, as well as every person, had its price; and that where there has been a great outlay, they have a right to expect a return in kind. This they call making Education and Instruction “useful,” and “Utility” becomes their watchword. With a fundamental principle of this nature, they very naturally go on to ask, what there is to show for the expense of a University; what is the real worth in the market of the article called “a Liberal Education,” on the supposition that it does not teach us definitely how to advance our manufactures, or to improve our lands, or to better our civil economy; or again, if it does not at once make this man a lawyer, that an engineer, and that a surgeon; or at least if it does not lead to discoveries in chemistry, astronomy, geology, magnetism, and science of every kind.’
       Blessed John Henry Newman, The Idea of a University, Discourse 7
 

“When Mary Maudlen fractured the alabaster of nard over the feet of the hero of the Christian cult, the Sir Modred at the dinner-party asked: To what purpose is this waste? But the cult-hero himself said: Let her alone. What she does is for a pre-signification of my death, and wherever my saga is sung in the whole universal world, this sign-making of hers shall be sung also, for a memorial of her. A totally inutile act, but a two-fold anamnesis (that is, a double and efffectual re-calling). First of the hero Himself and then of the mistress of all contemplatives and the tutelary figure of all that belongs to poiesis. The woman from Magdala in her golden hair, wasting her own time and the party funds: an embarrassment if not a scandal. But an act which is of the very essence of all poetry and, by the same token, of any religion worth consideration.”
       David Jones, “Use and Sign,” in The Dying Gaul and Other Writings, London: Faber & Faber, 1978, p. 183.
 

Margaret and I are on tenterhooks this morning! In part, that’s due to Margaret giving a lecture to Doug Gay’s “Political Theology” course; she’s talking to them about “The Church as Polis” in the work of John Howard Yoder, Stan Hauerwas, and Bill Cavanaugh. Since this is a two-hour presentation of the topic that she used to teach as a full-semester course at Loyola, she has no lack of material to discuss with the class. She’s also put together a Prezi presentation that rocks. I’m a Keynote user by disposition, but I steered Margaret to Prezi in the interest of making sure that the presentation could be edited at home on her MacBook and at work on her Dell, would be saved to the cloud so as not to be at risk of unavailability or corruption, and would run directly on the Dell in the classroom in which she’s lecturing. Though it took some banging away for her to get used to the interface and editing tools, the presentation itself is excellent (Prezi could use some refinements on the editing side; Margaret had a few painful frustrations). The class is meeting now as I type; I’m eager to hear at the break how things are going.
 
Then tonight, we’re heading down to the city centre to hear a lecture by Nicholas Lash, a theological hero of mine whom I’ve never met or heard before. I’ll probably bring along the copy of Theology on the Way to Emmaus for him to autograph, the copy that I bought back when I was in Hauerwas’s theology seminar and Lash’s books were not readily available in the US. I’ve read and reread his essays since those days, and I always find them a source of inspiration and provocation. I will, however, not wave a lighter in the air and yell for him to read one of my favourite essays as an encore.