Author: AKMA
Two Of Note
While I gnaw my fingernails watching Duke’s men’s basketball team in overtime, I’ll point to two posts of interest.
The first comes from Blambot Fonts, the home of more professional-quality comics type designs than you can shake a stick at (many of which they give away for free). Nate Piekos lays out the conventions of comics discourse and punctuation in a single concise page. It’s a prescriptivist piece, as it were, and more adventuresome souls will demur at Piekos’s rules, but transgressive artists need something to transgress, and Piekos supplies the rules to transgress. I’ll add this over at Beautiful Theology, too, to keep that a link tank for my hermeneu-semiotico-theological topics. (Hat tip, Language Log.)
Then, for the techno-visionary follow-up to Thursday’s talk at Duke, I’ll commend Jo Guldi’s post on the digital future of scholarly journals. Tom polemicizes against the ivory barbed wire that the custodians of scholarly knowledge deploy to maintain their intellectual property; Guldi provides a fulsome account of what might happen if scholarly journals construed their mission as dissemination, rather than taxidermy.
Whew, Duke won. It was ugly, but as my late father used to say, “They’re all line drives in the scorebook.”
Differences
Today’s presentation at the Div School went very well, I thought; some of the group resisted the very notion of churches engaging with digital technology, and others expressed cautious interest in what that would entail. Roger Loyd was there, whom I knew to expect to be on top of the sorts of issues I care about. Jo Wells, who invited me, of course knew roughly where I was headed. Several students from my classes came, and knew that I wasn’t a dangerous madman, so they listened and participated helpfully.
I don’t expect, any more, that much will come of any particular presentation I give. It did seem, though, as if the people there recognized the possible value of a critical embrace of digital technology — even if that brings disorienting transformative change along with it.
Coincidentally, the proofs for my interview in WE magazine (which also supplied the title — “Spirits In A Digital World” — for the talk I gave) came by email today.
Flaws With “Flaws”
Alex Golub’s recent essay in Inside Higher Education came at an interesting time, since I’m giving a talk about technology and ministry to Duke Divinity students tomorrow. Alex speaks with the authority of a digitally-indigenated academic, not just a “sky is falling” oldster peeking between the slats of the digital blinds; if he has something to say about problems with Facebook, I take him seriously.
Nonetheless, I harbor reservations about Alex‘s critique. He correctly notes that Facebook positions itself as a mediating portal that insulates users from the full-scale Internet, which neither of us likes (“mediating,” that is, not “the Internet”). He resists the forced binary option of “friend”/“not-friend”; again, that makes sense to me. With the money FB generates, you’d think they might be able to devise a sliding scale from “contact” or “acquaintance” to “soulmate,” with concomitantly varying degrees of self-revelation. I affirm Alex’s objections here.
He also has reservations about friending his students, and he worries about the relation of academic power to his Facebook presence. If, as he proposes, one envisions Facebook as a device for “blog[ging] safely about the antics of your adorable cat or the incredible evil of your department chair without either of them finding out unless you add them to your friends list.” But both these concerns sound a dissonant note for someone as keenly attuned to the different chromatic scale of online interaction as is Alex.
The problem arises only to the extent that one invests in the notion that Facebook should be the sort of safe haven for feline antics and departmental griping that Alex posits. That drawback depends on people’s supposing that FB (or any other technology) obviates the need for discretion and discernment about what you say to whom. So long as one doesn’t succumb to that supposition, Alex’s main Facebook “flaw” falls flat. He alleges that “[Facebook] claims to offer privacy but only magnifies dilemmas of publicity,” and that “It offers us a world in which we do not have to stand up and be counted” — but again, Faceboook hasn’t reached out and waterboarded me into talking trash about my department chair. If I friend my department chair (and as an untenured itinerant, I don’t even have one of those any more), I don’t say anything I wouldn’t want her to hear. Not a Facebook flaw, a rule of etiquette.
I friend people I regard as friends (or people whom friends have specifically urged me to friend), not strangers or people that people think I might like. I say things that I would say in front of anyone on my friends list, or anyone I’d be likely to friend. I don’t reveal personalia that would interfere with my pedagogical or clerical vocations. And I probably make mistakes, but that’s because I’m a fallible critter, not because Facebook made me do it.
Thus, when people whom I like and trust asked me to cite 25 random things about myself, I selected peculiarities that anyone might easily elicit from me if we were conversing casually. I do not participate in truth-or-dare revelations about affections or erotic intimacy (I recall one that asked questions about one’s “favorite body parts” to observe on others; I really do not need anyone to be wondering whether I’m especially intent on what they’re saying, or I’m indulging fantasies about aural sex). (No, that’s not an actual disclosure of an attraction to ears, it’s just a joke.) I friend students, colleagues, publishers, parishioners — and I watch my tongue, as the Epistle of James saith:
the tongue is a small member, yet it boasts of great exploits. How great a forest is set ablaze by a small fire! And the tongue is a fire. The tongue is placed among our members as a world of iniquity; it stains the whole body, sets on fire the cycle of nature, and is itself set on fire by hell. For every species of beast and bird, of reptile and sea creature, can be tamed and has been tamed by the human species, but no one can tame the tongue–a restless evil, full of deadly poison. With it we bless the Lord and Father, and with it we curse those who are made in the likeness of God. From the same mouth come blessing and cursing. My brothers and sisters, this ought not to be so.
This is one of my favorite paragraphs in Scripture, partly because it has such bizarre clauses (what in heaven’s name does he mean by “the cycle of nature”?), partly because it’s very true — and partly because it comes as an amplification of James’s advice, Let not many become teachers, because we will bear judgment for both our errors and those we transmit to others. Teachers (and clergy) may use Facebook as a venue for online conversation, but Facebook’s friend/not option doesn’t render James’s wisdom passé.
Well, Maybe
I’m still available, in case Singularity University needs even one academic humanist on its faculty.
Phooey
I am quietly cursing Frank Spors for having the section glued into the fountain pens he imported, “so that the user will not ‘be so apt to take it apart, twist the ink container (sac) all out of shape and then finally blame the pen.’ ” I’ve been at it for twenty minutes with a hair dryer (not straight through — alternating with gentle twisting), and the section isn’t budging.
For You
The Steelers were my dad’s team, from way back in the forties. Dad grew up around Cleveland, then Detroit, but he was a true black-and-gold Steelers fan. He took me to Steelers games back when they were hapless mediocrities; Terry Bradshaw’s rookie season, I think, he took me to see the Steelers lose to the Colts (my team) at Pitt Stadium.
Tomorrow I’ll break out the Steelers coffee mug he gave me a couple of years ago. Not that I care so much about football, these days — but I miss my dad.
Visual Aids
Here are photos of the pens I worked on yesterday. I have another on the table; I’ll probably have at it with polish tonight as Margaret and I catch up on LOST.
This is the Sheaffer Balance. The crack runs slong the bottom edge of the lower photo.
This is the no-name red pen. No crack, but you can see the pronounced distinction between the two halves of the barrel. Still, it’s a pretty thing, and (as I said) it writes nicely. I want to work on my pen photography (though I know enough from long-ago involvement with commercial photography tyo know that I don’t want to make a huge production out of it).
I also took photos last week when it actually snowed in Durham; here are a couple from that batch.
Satisfaction And Frustration
Among my many minor competencies, we may now number fountain pen repair and restoration, as long as we emphasize the “minor” part of the phrase. This afternoon I disassembled a smallish Sheaffer; it looks like a small version of an Balance, though not a Lifetime model (no white dot). It’s 4 5/8″ when capped, a lever filler with beautiful carmine pearlescent stripes, and a #5 Feathertouch nib.
The ink sac was the only real problem with this; I extracted the hardened remnants of the sac that had been installed, carefully scraped off the glued-on residue on the section, and attached a new sac. I polished and buffed, buffed and polished, and the renovated pen is quite a beauty. Sadly, it turned out to have a hairline crack from the lip of the cap well up toward the top of the cap. I’ll see about having a more skilled restorer have a crack at it. The pen writes smoothly; the nib doesn’t flex noticeably, but it’s a steady, firm writer.
In the same mail, I received another red celluloid (no-name) pen, but this one defies my every effort to unlock. It doesn’t have a lever; the barrel is bisected rather clumsily, as though it were supposed to unscrew (further down than I’d expect for a blind cap). The section won’t yet let go, and the nib likewise resists my gentle ministrations. Pippa claims that it’s an undercover ballpoint, but I think it’s just a handsome cheapie that hasn’t yet yielded its secrets. I’d give it a soak, but I’m slightly worried about the celluloid. On the other hand, if I can’t get the pen working, the celluloid will remain a secondary issue.
[An hour later: Patience and heat (wet heat in this case, after I tried dry heat for a long while) paid off; the upper portion of the barrel eventually twisted off, revealing a plastic piston. When I finally freed up the piston, it drew and expelled water satisfactorily, and now has proven its mettle as a firm writer.]
The World Needs To Know
After months of sporadic switching among newsreaders, bookmark-browsing, and general digital restlessness, I’ve started using Google Reader to keep up-to-date on the blogs I care about. I haven’t moved everything from my bookmarks over there, but my first impressions are favorable.
Two Ways
The same page at Inside Higher Education reports on one hand that a number of New England institutions are “are pushing ahead with searches or even adding searches, viewing this as a perfect time to attract faculty talent” (go! go! add searches in New Testament and theology!), and on the other hand that the American History Association saw job searches in their field decline by almost 25% this year (booo! boooo! — unless you’re using that faculty line to hire someone in theology or New Testament!).
No, no new prospects on the job front here.
Brain On Narrative
What happens when a biblical scholar influenced by both linguistics and by the narrative theology of Frei and Hauerwas encounters an enthusiastic Boing Boing endorsement of neuroscientific research that suggests that our brains simulate the action we read about in narrative? Well, for one thing, he waits to see what the neuroscience critics over at Language Log say about it; but if it passes muster, some form of this article will probably make its way onto the reading list for my biblical theology class, alongside Fast Company’s flyover of Gary Klein’s decision-making research.