Nonsense and Insensibility

A few weeks ago, on consecutive days I heard observations that irked me intensely. On one hand, I overheard someone talking about a storm “that would surely have destroyed the ship” if it hadn’t reached harbor; on the other hand, Clive James said, “The author of Jane Austen’s novels couldn’t possibly look like this, or they would be very different novels.” (Watch my veins bulge.)

Biblical scholars talk this way all the time, as though we, they, can arrive at reliable judgments about what can or cannot possibly have happened, about what surely would have happened. To take these items one at a time: in a story about improbable escapes (the context for the characterization), saying that a particular storm “would surely have sunk” a particular ship entails a weird incoherence. On one hand, the story narrates the remarkable adventures and extraordinary resilience of the boat in question; on the other hand, it asks us to assent that a storm that did not in fact affect the boat in question would have destroyed a boat that (in the course of several preceding paragraphs) had already survived several terrible typhoons. What makes this dramatic storm different from the three or four previous ones? If the previous escapes were so amazing, why might not the ship have escaped this last one too? If the last storm were notably more severe than the previous ones, might the narrator not have given us fair notice that these were just middling storms, and that the worst is yet to come? (But that wouldn’t work out, since the boat was in safe harbor for the last storm, so it didn’t survive that one; it needs the dramatic hype of “surely would have” in order to heighten the excitement surrounding “arriving in port,” a not-so-dramatic event on its own.)

That’s all relatively mild, and I’m only mildly piqued about that example — but it plays the same game of retrognostication that Clive James parlays into a prominent appearance on NPR. Foolish me! All along I thought that Jane Austen was a brilliant, imaginative novelist — whose male characters as well as her (plain) female characters conveyed subtle understanding of various sorts of people. Presumably, she could see into the character of a tormented nobleman, a humble, intelligent woman of moderate circumstance, ardent suitors, affable fathers and devoted mothers, but not attractive women — because, after all, we know that she wasn’t attractive, couldn’t have been attractive; an attractive person couldn’t be the author of Sense and Sensibility. Pshaw! Poppycock! Fustian and twaddle!

The world would be a significantly better place if we extirpated misplaced certainty about what we know concerning matters of which we have insufficient evidence. We have no way of knowing whether the resilience and seamanship that kept a ship afloat through a serious of serious storms would have seen that boat through the last one; we have no way of knowing from Austen’s literary oeuvre whether she was beautiful or homely. In each case we can fairly say that “we would be surprised if X” or “ Y would probably have happened.” Why sacrifice honesty and intellectual integrity in favor of pompously inflated claims about knowledge of the past and possibility?

[Later: Unforeseen pertinent connection, care of Dorothea: Race, fiction, chacters, racism (don’t be put off if you feel as though you fell into the middle of someone else’s conversation; you did, but it’s worth mulling over and figuring out.]

Songs That Elate You

The other day, new mom Laura was scolding me for listening to the Cure while I was fretting about housecleaning. “Listening to the Cure is not going to make you feel like you can get your house packed up!!” (It was the repeated exclamation point that got my attention.)

Rather, she admonished me, I should be getting into that sabbatical spirit by listening to, for instance, “Joy To the World” by Three Dog Night. When I recovered my muscle control from the involuntary shudders that suggestion provoked, we struck up a conversation about songsd that played the role opposite to last weekend’s “songs that make us cry” — — what songs lift our spirits, elate us, kindle joy and delight under even the bleakest circumstances?

Laura nominated “Joy To the World” as the happiest song ever, but I was very, very quick to deflect the discussion to a different trajectory. We agreed that the songs of which we were thinking had to be brightly positive without being saccharine, delightful without being stupid (or being stupid so cleverly that the stupidity counted as part of the charm), not “hanging on admirably in the face of bleak despair” but exhilarating, encouraging, joyous music. What qualifies?

Laura thought of “Twist and Shout,” and I nominated “Johnny B Goode.” Laura noted that the Stray Cats tried for this but missed by being too ironic, which made me think of boogie-woogie and good old R & B — Louis Jordan style. Buddy Holly also approximates what we were after.

Then we hit the motherlode: Funk. Parliament/Funkadelic — “Tear the Roof Off the Sucker” and “One Nation Under a Groove,” for intance, or Sly and the Family Stone and Stevie Wonder.

(Since at this point we were touching on sacred music — Motown and Atlantic soul — I will not call public attention to the possibility that one of us mentioned musical theater, including such suggestions as “Ding Dong the Witch is Dead.”)

Laura chimed in with Joan Armatrading, commending “Bottom to the Top,” while I cheered for “Back to the Night.” The accordion connection reminded Laura appositely of Beausoleil, and I flashed ahead to the various recordings of the Finn Brothers (they’re brilliant at “poignant” — cf. “Don’t Dream It’s Over” or “History Never Repeats” — but they’ve got a sense of whimsy and exuberance that predominate on other tracks. We agreed on Billy Bragg’s Buoyant moments (Laura chose “A New England,” I chose “Greetings to the New Brunette”) and that tapped delight with Kirsty MacColl (say, “Mambo De La Luna” or the whimsical ̶There’s a Guy Down At the Chip Shop Swears He’s Elvis,” but also “Golden Heart,” “Us Amazonians,” and “In These Shoes”).
“Golden Heart” makes me happy, but not in this riotous way.

Then: Talking Heads. Say no more.
That settled things; our work here was done.


Since transcribing our chat and posting this, several other favorites came to mind. Plastique Bertrand’s “Ça Plane Pour Moi,” for one, and various items from Magnetic Fields’s 69 Love Songs: “Electric Guitar,” “The Luckiest Guy On the Lower East Side,” “Kiss Me Like You Mean It.” More as they come to me.

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Pope Declares “St. Miscellaneous Day”

Well, not quite, but I’m encouraging everything short of a papal decree to celebrate the official release of David Weinberger’s Everything Is Miscellaneous, the book he’s been talking to us about in bits and pieces for a couple of years, now. I can’t wait to see it — Cory Doctorow’s review on Boing Boing spots a handful of reasons to hear, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest his explanations of ways that the internet changes our relationship to what we think we know. Cheers, David! I’m looking forward to seeing it.


On a related note, Steve Moramarco of the Abe Lincoln Story shot me an email to call attention to the video for our family favorite, “I Don’t Need A Bag.” In a subtle irony, the site also promotes ALS totes emblazoned with the slogan, “I Don’t Need A Bag,” which (first) raises the question, “Then why are you carrying one around?” and (second) constitutes something of a performative contradiction, since our family already has so many totes that we do not, under any circumstances, need another such affordance (even with a snazzy slogan on it). But check out the video and when the new album comes out, let’s see about supporting them.

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Stars and Signification

It should come as no surprise that someone who loves popular music, semiotics, and digital media would have a fascination with the five-star “rating” system built into iTunes. I blogged about this more than a year ago, and in the intervening period I’ve had to reassess this minimalist six-category taxonomy of selections.

At the time I wrote, I was thinking of the stars mostly (not absolutely) as a way of describing my evaluation of a particular item. That worked pretty well for me, for a while, but it doesn’t adequately address two problems. First, I have a large array of selections that I just don’t know very well; friends send me a CD, or a music blog rhapsodizes about a new band, and these get added to my list without my having a strong basis for identifying them as one thing rather than another. I had been assigning them two stars (which in my former system meant “Baseline: good enough to enjoy, but not outstanding,” but that mixes songs I may never have heard with songs that I positively think are good (on the basis of repeated listening).

That touches on the second problem: iTunes’s intelligent shuffling can use the “star” rating as one of its criteria, which makes the stars very useful for categorizing the likelihood that I’ll want to hear X or Y any given day. Much as I enjoy learning about new performers and performances, though, sometimes I want to listen to “baseline” selections that I already know to be OK, rather than hearing three or four unfamiliar numbers followed by one that I know and appreciate, then two more unknowns. Assigning unknown selections two stars mixes known and unfamiliar in a way that helpfully mingles familiar with unfamiliar music when I’m casually listening to whatever comes up, but that thwarts my efforts to construct playlists to accommodate days I want to hear only familiar material (unless I inflate “known OK” to three stars).

I could assign “zero stars” to unknown material, but the category of zero stars serves very helpfully for items that I don’t want ever to appear on a music playlist — say, Chris Lydon interviewing Elaine Scarry or something. I think, then, that I’ll choose either to work toward identifying unfamiliar/uncertain material as one star, and then obliging myself to listen to my one-star playlist in order to get acquainted with them; or leaving two stars as my category for unfamiliar material, and limiting my range of stars for music I know well to three, four, or five.

But that’s all too much thinking about something that doesn’t matter much, and I have work to do.

Blasphemy and U2

A couple of weeks ago — can it really have been that long? that recent? — Seabury celebrated a communion service in a context defined by the music (and politics) of U2. This is, in essence, a great idea — and I say this in large part because I had it, ages ago, but never did anything about it. No, but really, it makes a certain sense for people to worship God with songs with which they actually feel comfortable, which they love, which they understand to express their own deep feelings about God.

After the service, someone stopped me to ask what I thought, and while I hesitated I was told, “I figured that an Anglo-Catholic like you wouldn’t like it.” Errrr — it’s not my churchmanship that was hesitating. I can easily cope with diverse modes of worship, and I can compliment praise music and folky-casual liturgy when they’re offered with integrity and excellence. (That doesn’t mean I understand why anyone would worship that way just that I’m capable of appreciating excellence in casual-praise worship.) I wasn’t hesitating because of my liturgical theology, I was hesitating because I like U2.

The service involved playing songs by U2 over the Garrett Seminary chapel’s amplification system, which for the first few selections involved painful equalization that grossly overemphasized the high end and midrange (Adam might as well have been sitting out those selections). After the EQ hit a more balanced range, the other main problem with this programming choice became clear. It just plain feels weird to sing along to recorded music, especially so when a moderate proportion of the congregation doesn’t know the music as well as you do and are trying to follow the lyrics on the overhead projection screen. I will sing along enthusiastically in the car, or while I’m washing dishes, or walking, or just listening to the stereo — and sometimes I’ll sing along at live performances, though I prefer hearing the actual performers. But a large gathering of people singing along to recorded music just gave me the creeps.

The PowerPoint slides exemplified the un-subtle literal representation school of illustrating music. Love = people holding hands, poverty = starving African child, and so on. Bono doesn’t usually hit the heights of lyrical nuance; he more often falls within the bounds of the excellent-conventional use of language, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But when those lyrics are juxtaposed with [attempts at] direct illustration, the combination draws the whole matter closer to cliche. Which again makes it harder to sing along.

The best aspect of the whole evening came when the music button person played a version of the Sursum Corda that seems to have been edited together from instrumental portions of U2 compositions — I couldn’t identify any specific source, because the editing and the match of melody to words worked so well that it conveyed the impression of actually having been composed for the purpose. That I could sing to.

For the rest, I’d rather have sung along to Garrett’s house band performing the music, or have listened (not sung) to recordings of U2. I’d rather have heard the music through a clearer, more well-balanced sound mix. I would have liked to have sung “Gloria” in a eucharistic setting, but maybe Latin is the one language that’s absolutely forbidden. But none of the above criticism derives from my being a fussy Anglo-Catholic. If anything, I’m a fussy U2 admirer, and that particular service did not (I think) make the strongest possible case for their liturgical pertinence.
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We Need Help

We have to whip our household into shape as soon as possible. None of us is a housekeeper (our obsessions and compulsions lie elsewhere), but we need to clear our house to a lend-able condition very promptly, ideally as much as possible within the next two weeks. That will not include me — I have way too much to do even to think about house-cleaning — so I need to find someone discreet, patient, gentle, but determined, resolute, and positively disposed toward clearing out years of clutter and bringing tidiness where my disorderly temperament has permitted a tropical rainforest of paper, unused implements, outgrown clothes and books, and the impedimenta of generations, locations, clever ideas, good intentions, and flat-out laziness and depression.

Looking forward to what comes after, but not what lies between.
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Encore!

Just a week after Joel Green gave a guardedly appreciative review of Faithful Interpretation in the Review of Biblical Literature, he reviews Reading Scripture With the Church this week and gives it, also, a favorable mark (he’s ambivalent about one of the essays, but positive about the other three, including mine).

The review inclines more to summary than to analysis (as is customary for multi-authored works), but Joel gives a lovely one-sentence characterization of my “Poaching On Zion” essay: “Knowing the Bible well and studying it faithfully and steadily in community, [Adam] writes, we encounter and embody the ways of God.” That sounds pretty fair to me; I’d want to expand on it, but then I wrote a whole essay, and another book, that provide some of what that single sentence simplifies.
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Pippa Update

I haven’t enthused about Pippa in a day or two, so it’s about time for me to display more reasons for admiring my daughter. So, for instance, the other day she was plotting my lexical demise over the Scrabble board — this is what I’m up against.

Scrabble Shark

Frequent readers know her to have a rich imagination for design; yesterday she went to a party for an employee of Target department stores, for which she modified a hand-me-down dress (and her socks) with the Target emblem. I gather that she was a hit.

Target Costume Party

What readers may not have noticed that she frequently cooks dinner for us; not content simply to defrost some Boca burgers (which would be plenty good for me), she pores over cookbooks to find practical, inexpensive, appealing entrees. The other day I had a late-afternoon meeting when she would have an early choir rehearsal, so she cooked dinner while I was conferring with colleagues. I came home to see the note below:

Instructions

(“Cool kids” alludes to a running joke between us. If one forgets to turn off the oven or a stovetop burner, the other will say, “Cool kids turn off the burner.”)

Honest, It’s Allergy

Spring has arrived in Evanston for good and sure, so the bags under my eyes have expanded like collapsible luggage coming home from a long vacation. And I’m liable to be wiping my eyes constantly, as the itching and weeping kick into high gear. I suspect the culprit is the cottonwoods that surround our house like a federal SWAT team around a hostage-taker’s hideout. So although the school year has worn me out and various strains vex me, if you see me crying, it’s really just the pollen. I think.

Either that, or I’ve just listened to one of the songs in the recent AV Club column about “songs that make us cry.” I’m notoriously sentimental about songs (and to some extent, about movies); Margaret and Pippa roll their eyes when they hear my voice catch during hymns or when I’m singing along to the stereo. The AV Club column hits many songs that have that effect on me, whether because they actually evoke sadness or (contrariwise) a particularly profound note of joy.

The eighteen they name in the column actually aren’t that moving bei mir (I admire “Veronica,” but it doesn’t make me cry — that I remember). The comments, which I haven’t worked all the way through, do highlight a number of weepers. “Dry Your Eyes,” by the Streets, was one that jumped out early. Sufjan Stevens’s “Casimir Pulaski Day”; Bruce Springsteen has performed a number of touching songs, including “Rosalita,” “Thunder Road,” “Prove It All Night,” and more. The commenters foreground “Makes No Difference” and “Tears of Rage” by the Band. The Pogues and Kirsty MacColl, “Fairytale of New York.”

What would I add? Laurie Anderson, “Strange Angels,” definitely. Tom Robinson, “1967 (so Long Ago)” (the version from the Secret Policeman’s Ball album). Among the numerous Bob Dylan songs one might nominate, “Buckets of Rain” does it for me. Billy Bragg, “Must I Paint You a Picture?” I can’t even listen to Billie Holiday sing “Strange Fruit,” though I make myself from time to time. I mentioned Belle and Sebastian a few days ago; “She’s Losing It” strikes a very poignant chord with me, and Dar Williams scores with both “As Cool As I Am” and “What Do You Hear In These Sounds?” (though again, her work offers an embarrassment of riches). The “Cry No More” setting that Emma Thompson sings in Branagh’s Much Ado About Nothing. Charles Mingus’s version of “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat.” If I have to pick one performance by John Cash, it’s “Down There By the Train.” And sappy a sentimentalist as it makes me, “Naked As We Came” by Iron and Wine, and “First Day of My Life” by Bright Eyes.

One that no one else would name for a moment is not even a song; it’s the theme music from the Albert Campion series on the PBS Mystery! program. I was chatting with Nate about it earlier this week; it’s an exquisite miniature, combining a cheery Edwardian setting with a bittersweet counter, beautifully arranged.


I’ve heard Counting Crows’s “Hard Candy” a few times lately, and it’s impressed me more each time. It doesn’t make me cry, but it puts together the elements of high-impact rock in a remarkable composition. Again, bei mir.

Generations of Pancakes

As I observed here before, we have a (lapsed) family tradition of Dad making pancakes on Saturdays for breakfast. Back in antiquity, when the boys were very young, I’d put their initials on the pancake (reversed, so that when the pancake came off the griddle it would be right way ’round). One notorious morning, Nate asked me to write the Lord’s Prayer on his pancake; I think I got as far as “Our Father,” but I’m not sure.

This morning Philippa came downstairs and asked me to make pancakes. I assented, mixed the batter, started flipping cakes, and she followed up: “Would it be too weird to put granola in my pancake?” Well, no, I’m aware that many pancake houses offer granola pancakes on their menus, so I agreed to make her one. “Not only is it not weird, but at lots of places you can get chocolate chip pancakes.” Her eyes lit up. “We have chocolate chips!” (I should note for the historical record that this is the spiritually earnest young woman who gave up not only chocolate, but all sweets for Lent this year.) Sure, OK, her second pancake had chocolate chips in it.

“What’s next?” I should have known better than to ask.

“On my next pancake, I want you to write the Nicene Creed —

in ketchup.”

Tiding Over

Today’s a wall-to-wall class, mass, and meeting day; Seabury is honoring Newland Smith with a lecture by Dwight Hopkins, with a dinner to which I forgot to make reservations, and general evening festivities.

I flared out about ten days ago, and will be staggering from appointment to obligation to meeting to tutorial, trying to avoid any egregiously outrageous forgetfulness. When today’s laudations all wind down, I’ll collapse in a heap and try to sleep late tomorrow morning; the blogathon over Rowan Williams has me pooped out.

Blink of an Eye

Before I was fully awake this morning — that is, after Morning Prayer and one cup of coffee — I discovered that David had blogged back at me about my blogback of him blogging back at me about Rowan Williams. (I typed “Roman” Williams, just now; I don’t think that Means Something, though.)

David’s rebuttal hits several points. First, he maintains, the “people-hood” of Israel derives from fictive consanguinity (when I say “fictive,” I don’t mean “fictitious,” but “setting aside for a moment questions of DNA and history, narrated into reality”), not “being called into existence by Scripture,” as the Archbishop of Canterbury suggests. I readily grant most of that premise; the constitution of Israel as a people is prior to its reception of the Torah chronologically, and probably logically also — to an extent. If I understand correctly (and my understanding of Judaism has more to do with academic reading and growing up a goy in a Jewish neighborhood than actual real live knowledge), there’s at least some sense in which descent from this people is correlated to receiving the Torah. By that I don’t mean that if you don’t keep the Torah you aren’t Jewish, but that as a collective, the people of Israel practice Torah-observance as an expression of their peoplehood. It’s not, as David takes Williams to mean, a matter of believing and adhering to a membership list, but would Israel (the people, not the state) be recognizably &#8220:Israel” if no one bothered with the Torah any more? I’d be surprised if one couldn’t find a fair number of Jewish intellectuals who maintained that Torah-onservance was a cardinal expression of Judaic identity. But I’m probably missing something here, in my turn.

By the way, one way of construing the discussion that puts David quite in the right is to compared the Judaic recognition of “righteous Gentiles” with Karl Rahner’s doctrine (to which a number of Christians hold, explicitly or implicitly) that admirable people who have not assented to the Gospel count as “anonymous Christians.” While I disagree with Rahner’s position, I see that it makes a certain kind of Christian sense that would not work relative to Judaism. Rahner’s position extends Christianity to envelope all righteous people; the recognition of righteous Gentiles acknowledges that even though these agents are not in any way Jewish, they’ve attained noteworthy rectitude. If that’s David’s drift, then I agree.

Then David suggests, “Akma’s interpretation makes Williams’ lecture right for Jews but at the expense of obscuring an important difference between the two religions…a difference that comes down to the difference between being a people and being a community.” Again, I see his point — up to an extent. Part of what we’re doing, I think is pushing, pulling, tugging, and having a coffee break to talk over just where to draw the distinction he’s talking about.

But so that no one can accuse me of being conciliatory, I have to ask David for a shade more clarity on his observation that “all too often, in my experience and opinion, Christians assume too much continuity with Judaism.” Here are the ways I agree: (a) as is so often the case with dominant cultures, Christians tend to assume that everyone is really just like us down deep; (b) Christians show an unnerving proclivity to lay claim to what is characteristically Jewish, whether as casual tourists racking up “broad-minded” chips to lay to their credit later (“Hey, some of my best friends. . .”); (c) in a more specific extension of (a) above, Christians tend to regard Judaic differences from Christianity as being divergent (or “malformed”) versions of what Christianity already is — rather than allowing that Judaism might be, like, you know, different (and Christianity might not have the prerogative to define itself as a universal norm of religious identity and practice). I cringe when Christians play at simulated Judaism. But I too insist on “continuity with Judaism” — in the sense that Christians can’t possibly understand who they are in a more than casual sense unless they’ve subjected their imagination to thinking about the Gospel in a world where there are no “Christians,” but only various sorts of Jews (and those Gentiles over there). Christianity becomes different from its origins, and Judaism has become different from what Judaism would have been like in the days the Temple was standing, and they’ve become very, very different from one another, not least because of all the blood on Christian hands. But I’ll insist, firmly but (I hope) humbly, that a Christianity without some mode of continuity to Judaism is a grave spiritual mistake.

And about Rowan Williams — I think that he’s one of the smartest Christians on earth, very concerned about an appropriate relationship among Jews and Gentiles (that’s one reason he’s explicitly attentive to the writings of Peter Ochs); I’m willing to trust that he’s very cautious about supersessionism, colonial Christianity, or disrespect to Jews.
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