Author: AKMA

I’ll bet you’ve never attended a Canadian dissertation defense at which dooce was chair of the committee and Keanu Reeves served as a special guest outside examiner! Well, in a dream from which I just woke up, I did — so there!

I got to the defense a little early. It was held at Heather’s house, and she was showing me around. The house was set on pronounced hill, so it had a view of the neighborhood, which was flooded at the time (surprisingly so; Heather hadn’t noticed how the water level had risen in the recent rains, but two-story houses at the base of the hill were under water). Heather, of course, praise Jon’s judgment for selecting so marvelous a house.

The defense started, and it was actually more like a critics’ get-together. The dissertator had evidently prepared an art project as her thesis, and everyone (a very well-attended defense, perhaps because of the guest star, but I saw some of my former colleagues from the biblical faculty of Princeton Seminary there, too) was milling around, waiting for someone to speak first.

At first, people asked some tentative questions, but Keanu was evidently worked up about something, and I nudged him to speak his piece. He asked the dissertator, with a tone of desperation, “Did you really mean just to say, ‘A – O; A – O; A, A, A, A, O, O, O, O’? Wasn’t there something more you could have done?” That caused a flurry of tut-tutting and disavowal of any involvement with the project. As people embarrassedly drifted out, Reeves went on to praise the dissertator’s earlier work — there was a painting that I had myself seen, a sort of Andy Warhol paint-over-photo with some crayon outlining, that everyone had thought sensational. Reeves was beseeching her to say why she had gone from a marvelous, subtle painting (you’ll have to take my word on that) to a videotape of two people saying “A – A – A” and “O – O – O.”

When the hors d’oeuvres ran out, I headed back to my office, a rather more spacious habitation than my present phone booth, and was settling down to ignore some work when a clump of attendees, knocked at my door. I invited them in, and a stream of black-turtlenecked hip critics flowed in, occupying every available seat and a bunk above a file cabinet (that is a very cool idea, by the way, and I may look into having a bunk bed over my files cabinets if I move — I could use a place to nap). I didn’t know all these people very well, so there were lengthy futile introductions, and just as we were getting around to discussing the dissertation defense we’d just seen, along with a project for indexing the works of Bob Newhart, somebody began deliberately scooping out the grounds from my coffee maker and spilling them on the floor. It turns out that this guest (who was the one lying on my bunk) was not one of the dissertation critics, but was just a wanderer who had stumbled in, drunk. I dragged him off the bunk, so that he landed in the midst of the grounds.

At that, I woke up, and felt the imperative urgency to record the weirdest dream I’ve had in ages.

In the next few days, the new Seabury web page will go live. It’s not finished — Connie and Micah and I want to fiddle with it in various ways — but within a day or so, it’ll be close enough, and the lovely thing about designing with CSS is that we can do the fiddling in situ.

The home page is dead; vive l’acceuil!

At the end of each term, or each Adult Ed gig, the odds favor the likelihood of somebody coming up to me and asking, “Can you recommend any commentaries on that?” Add that to the number of times I try to whip up a starting bibliography on a given text for my New Testament classes, and you get a relatively strong case for my building up a repository of my recommendations relative to secondary literature on the New Testament.

So this morning I started a blog whose entries will all be topics in the field of New Testament studies, the contents of which will be bibliographic suggestions along with casual evaluations of the works in question. This way, I’ll be able to leave it open for comments (so that visitors can make helpful suggestions) and hyperlink to online resources. This overlaps, to some extent, with Mark’s wonderful work on the NT Gateway — though with a bloggy difference, since over the long run my pages aim not for comprehensiveness, but for partiality. The NT Resources page will run under Moveable Type, but I won’t be treating it as a daily-update site. I’ll flesh out and edit entries as I see fit, and probably won’t multiply entries once I cover the canonical books and some pretty obvious thematic headings.

I’m starting with the Epistles, as I’m teaching through them this term. I’ll put up a page for each unit as I encounter them, but I won’t have the time to put together a rich overview of the literature right away. The advantage of using a CMS for this work, though, is that I’ll be able to return to each topic as I have time, or as I run into a work that particularly impresses me.

In this way, I’m putting my time and energy where my mouth and pen are. If (as I submitted) the future lies with seeded-search rather than a filtered-links/gateway approach to online research, then it behooves me to post my biblical scholarship links; indeed, if I get up the energy (in other words, when I have something more important to do, for which this provides a congenial distraction), I may even code in vote links.

There’s definitely a way in which one could read this gesture as my bowing to the value of the gateway; if it were important for me to differentiate these pages from (say) Mark’s, I suppose that I’d say that mine aims less toward comprehensiveness, more toward critical evaluation. Of course, if one stops browsing at my page and treats it as a last word on biblical scholarship, then mine would certainly constitute a throttle to knowledge; I prefer to think of it as Google- (or Technorati-)fodder. . . .

When trying to simplify a complex [bureaucratic] system, any change that does not result in an obvious quantum of simplification amounts to further complication — or, more concisely, “any attempted simplification short of a quantum change is always a complication.”

I’m happy enough with the spreadsheet functions in AppleWorks as it stands, but it’ll be hard to resist buying iWorks, just for the Pages function (I’m a sucker for word processors; what can I say?).

Still, it would be a vast improvement if Pages could read and write an XML-based format, especially Office Document format.

For the record, the various devices that the rumor sites identify sound terrific and all, but the one MacRumor of consequence to my life would involve a resuscitated AppleWorks. That antique program is hardly useable these days; a snappy new version, Cocoa-fied, would be good news indeed.

On the other hand, if Tom is on the right track about the headless media center, a new version of AppleWorks might look pretty pallid in no time flat. Apple should hire Tom straightaway — but then, they shouldn’t have fired Kevin, so obviously I’m on a very different wavelength from their employment priorities.

I’m a late adopter when it comes to last.fm — due mainly to problems working out what my password was (does the last.fm play appropriately with Safari? Might that be the problem?), but I finally got the password straightened out, and the possibilities of that project look terrific. I’m always to eager to learn about new artists whose work I’ll like, but I’m slow to try out music. The “profile” radio function should be exceptionally helpful in that regard.

Here, though, I see the usefulness of something I’ve never used much for my own iTunes purposes. The “profile” sorting would be more powerful, wouldn’t it, if it could read my ratings of the selections I play? I mean, I play plenty of tunes that aren’t my very favorite (and I don’t bother marking them as such, since I know which ones I like and don’t) — but the profile engine might benefit from knowing that I play Flaming Lips because I think they’re great, but I play Wu-Tang Clan because I’m trying to refine my hip-hop sensibilities, and am not perfectly ready to make a commitment to identifying them with my profile. I could tag “Suddenly Everything Has Changed” with five stars, “7th Chamber” as two (or no tag at all), and my profile would more accurately reflect my taste (until I realize that Eric is right, and mark Wu-Tang with five stars, too).

This morning, life at chez AKMA returned to normal. We had a visit from Juliet for the weekend, which was great (we hadn’t had a visit with Juliet for ages); we planned the service of blessing for her wedding, and caught up on her life and ours. Her visit was particularly welcome with Beatrice, who appreciated Juliet’s constant [favorable] comparison of her with her fiancé’s mother’s bichon.

Juliet’s visit didn’t overlap with Jennifer’s, but Jennifer’s sojourn here was delightful, too (and longer than Juliet’s!). After having lived with Jennifer and Juliet for years, it’s oddly beautiful for them to pop up into our daily rhythm again, and in almost exactly the same ways as ever. It’s exciting keeping up with Jennifer’s new flickr account; I wonder if Juliet would use flickr? Hmmm, perhaps a wedding present. . . .

Most importantly (to me, he said selfishly), Margaret returned to Durham this morning. She has an exhilarating array of courses for her second semester, but it’ll take some concentration for me to focus on her accomplishments and intellectual opportunities, and to bracket my missing her. I’ll see her again in February — time to begin counting down the days again.

Here’s some more throat-clearing about marriage, before I get to the more difficult task of saying something useful about this controverted topic.

The discourses of marriage, it occurs to me, have clouded the topic by latching onto the notion of “marriage” as “the zone of licit sexual activity.” I’m trying to figure out what it would look like to think about marriage apart from sex. I’m trying this not because I don’t think sex is important — I do, emphatically, think it signifies with near-unique importance — but just that importance engenders an interference pattern when it’s brought into close proximity to the importance of understanding what’s what about marriage. I may be better able to figure out what I think, and why, if I attain some clarity by deliberating about them each in relative isolation.

So, for instance, I’m not sure how one could possibly object to two people devoting themselves to shared lives, mutual care, lifelong exclusive spiritual intimacy, whatever the sexes of the couple so united in loving harmony. Fred and Wilhelm (or Frieda and Violet) feel a homo-erotic attraction, that might complicate their ascetical harmonious partnership, but it’s nonetheless admirable, isn’t it?
Continue reading “More About Marriage”

Today David Weinberger blogs about the Web as a medium (which makes sense to me) and about the Web as a world. We’ve talked about this kind of topic before, so I’m nostalgically excited; maybe we’ll get into a jolly online donnybrook about it with acerbic interjections from other quarters.

The difficulty with that prospect lies in the fact that I agree with him, that it does make sense to talk about the Web as world — though as he and I both know, I maintain firmly that it’s a non-spatial world, hence unlike anything we humans have explored before. In that sense, it’s not a “world,” because spatiality constitutes an essential characteristic of every other world we’ve encountered. The hyperlinked “world” of the Web is thus radically different as well as also “world”-like; the Web may thereby teach us more about what inhabiting a world means, in ways that we hadn’t hitherto imagined.

That’s what excites me most of all: we don’t already know what we’re doing, we don’t already know how our adventures online will turn out. That’s a setting in which we can do some serious learning!

I was thinking this morning during the sermon (nothing against our rector’s sermon — she’s batting 1.000 in the Sundays I’ve attended), thinking about marriage. Marriage was on my mind partly because I’ve been working with Juliet about the blessing of her marriage, and partly because I was remembering a discussion with Micah about the sacramental character of marriage. The thoughts I rehearsed fall short, I’m sure, of originality, but I haven’t heard them recently in the din about who might be allowed to marry whom, so I thought I’d write them down here instead of catching up on my email as I really ought.

So first, I recalled that in church we call this sacramental rite “Christian Marriage” — a recognition that marriage exists in a variety of modes, of which Christian marriage is only one. That’s a no-brainer, in a certain sense; Christians didn’t invent marriage, nor did the Christian kind of marriage instantly displace every other basis for marriage once it was introduced. (Indeed, one could well argue that there’s no one thing rightly identified “Christian marriage,” in the empirical sense that Christian groups define that state differently — but that would be a distraction, especially since I’m about to make a point relative to the divine institution of the rite.)

Quick, now: I’m not arguing that marriage is whatever you make it.
Continue reading “Let Me Not Admit Impediments”

Someone has collected links to 300 downloadable TrueType fonts* that the site-owner describes as essential. I wouldn’t go that far, and I have qualms about the inclusion of some Bitstream fonts (identifiable by the “BT” marker at the end of the font name), but I thought some readers would like a pointer to the site anyway.

The 300 includes a number of Nick Curtis’s designs (Mac users note that despite the restrictive warning, PC TrueType fonts should work under OS X); I’d just as soon go collect his all at once. Typefaces from the Apostrophic Type Lab appear here. I download most of Manfred Klein’s typefaces on his Sunday site updates — though by now he’s produced so many fonts that I can’t imagine being able to browse among them to choose one to use. Dieter Steffmann no longer makes fonts, but he has left a sumptuous treasure of type for other users. Paul Lloyd has resumed type design, and he’s contributing to the Blackletter collection and the Piratical collection. Harold Lohner offers some of his monthly updates for free download, too.

Not every one of these fonts attains the very highest standards (especially for kerning), but if one’s concern is for free typefaces, these are my favorite sources.

*I’m giving up the struggle to use words strictly by reserving “typeface” for the design of a particular character set and “font” for a complete set of a given size of a typeface. That just seems irrelevant at this point — so “font” and “typeface” have become functionally synonymous.