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My terrific daughter arrived home last night from her sojourn in Maine; she had a spectacular time with her aunts, and now I’m delighted that she’s back to help me with the groceries, the dog, the recycling, and all the other complications that I’m liable to lose track of without her.

Jeanne posted a great cast photo from the end of the Angels performance, too:

That’s Si, as Louis, at the extreme left, next to his roommate Simon (who played Joe). I’ll add some pictures of my own later. . . .

I’ve wondered idly, for a while, whether the correct locution for those snatches of aural information was “sound bites” (which I’d always thought it to be) or “sound bytes” (which I’ve seen increasingly frequently). At first, I was sure it must be “bites,” but I realized that my confidence rested solely on that being to form I’d been approving for years — self-justifying prejudice. “Sound byte,” on the other hand, modified “sound” with a definable quantity of information, and an appropriately small one at that, so I reckoned that I ought to let go my predisposition and actually learn something about the subject.

I first checked the Wikipedia which, though fallible, offers a helpful starting point for online inquiry; it favored “soundbite” (one word), without even mentioning “byte” as a possible error. Then I ran into the eggcorn database which takes up exactly my question, and comes down in favor of “bite” over against Lou Marinoff’s sniffed dismissal, “ ‘sound-bite’ is nonsense.” The scale of evidence tips decisively when a commenter notes that the OED cites a public example from 1980 — well before the digital storage of audio information would have made “sound byte” a coherent term.

Parenthetically, the whole phenomenon of “eggcorns” opens a new horizon of linguistic fascination for me….

I’ve known Carl Conrad a long time online, and I sense that he may have said something like this before — but the remarks that jps reports put the finger exactly at a dangerous soft spot of theological education. The vast preponderance of seminarians and divinity students learn Greek in order to decode the hidden message concealed in those ominously different-looking letters (be they Hebrew or Greek), not to learn how to read well the texts written in those languages. Indeed, that sensibility of decoding a cryptogram often carries over into further dimensions of the interpretive task, so that students (and some teachers) suppose that there’s a single hidden “correct answer” to each of our interpretive problems.

It ain’t so, it can’t be so, and in order to recuperate from the delusional hope/need that reading work this way, we have to learn first of all to read rather than to decode. It ought not be too hard; we read most of the texts we encounter and interpret. Unfortunately, years of decoding-thinking (structured into the ways biblical languages are taught and into the ways Scripture is deployed in theological argument) have saturated the imaginations of at least a generation’s prominent theological spokespeople, and any recognition that reading well entails more than decoding risks being shouted down as “relativism” or “postmodernism” (in the derogatory sense).

Deep Weeds has it right: “The basic goal — improved reading aloud — seems to be coming along. More and more, I think I will begin next year’s class with at least 6 hours of mimicry, memorization, and simple commands, before getting into the written language at all.” (I think Randall Buth teaches Greek this way at the Biblical Language Center in Jerusalem, and I expect that Baruch will teach future Greek classes on that basis.) I know that the “decoding” approach to learning Greek has hampered my appreciation of that language over the years, and I wish I hadn’t written my Greek textbook before I came to the full conviction of how pernicious the conventional way of teaching and learning Greek could be. (By the way, read and appreciate Baruch’s acrostic, too.)

Flight from Hartford to Chicago scheduled to board: 6:00 PM EST

Flight from Hartford sto Chicago scheduled to depart: 6:25 PM EST

Flight from Hartford sto Chicago scheduled to arrive: 8:00 PM CST

Actual boarding time: 9:30 PM EST

Actual departure time: 10:20 PM EST

Landed in Chicago: 11:46 PM CST

Arrived at gate: 12:05 CST

Phoned taxi companies to obtain ride: 12:21, 12:34, 12:38, 12:43, 12:53, 12:54 CST

Taxi arrived at O’Hare: 1:15 CST

Arrived at home: 1:39 CST

Messaged Margaret, settled dog down, snacked to calm my stomach, fell into bed: 2:15 CST

Morning Prayer: 8:30 CST

Faculty Meeting 9:00 CST

And so on.

I’m not talking about the Duke game — grrrr — but about the Marlboro College performance of Angels in America. The cast and crew, drawn from a very small college population (Marlboro has around 350 students total), outdid themselves last night — an overpowering performance, of which everyone involved should be very proud.

I had not seen the play before; when it came out, we didn’t have practical access to any performances, and by the time it hit video or DVD I didn’t feel like stirring up the memories of those days (on the rare occasion when the family was willing to watch a Serious Movie); watching this performance really did bring back a suppressed tub of queasy, ominous, tragic feelings. I had the recurrent sense that I knew those guys, and seeing Si as one of them — he played Louis, a particularly troubling character — amplified the sense that these lives were part of my life.

All the actors were great. In contexts that might tend to invite overplaying (undergrad theatre, small campus, hyperdramatic scenario involving sometimes-histrionic characters), every player rang true. The student who played Si’s lover carried the role exceptionally well, and student who played Harper Pitt just amazed me with the subtly of her reading. Si’s roommate Simon played Joe Pitt utterly convincingly, suggesting his pain and ambivalence with nuanced departures from a baseline of stolid impassiveness.

It was hard to see Si play the part of yet another tormented unsympathetic character; someday I’d like to see him in a positive, blithe, heroic role. Knowing him as we do, when we see him portray someone high-strung, and embittered, it’s harder not to see his performance as acting. That being said, at the key moments of the play, I winced at his betrayal of love and integrity. He was great in an unrewarding role, with a terrific cast around him, and the whole night was utterly captivating.

Now, we have to clean up, pack, check out, have brunch with Si, Laura, Jeanne, and Pippa, and then travel back to our respective destinations. And Duke better win the ACC Tournament — I’m just saying.

Travel worked fine yesterday, the ’net finally came live at our hotel, we like Jennifer’s boyfriend (they drove up from NYC to see last night’s performance, which was evidently excellent). Margaret and I love New England; the topography, ecology, demographics, cultural practices, all make sense to us as indigenous, as culturally given. Jeanne and Pippa have driven in from Maine, and we’ll meet them on campus for the play. I’ve taken some pictures already, will take more tonight, and some at tomorrow morning’s group brunch (didn’t think to take any while we were with Jennifer).

Show is tonight at 7:30, opposite the basketball game on whose outcome the struggle of good against evil depends — Si couldn’t persuade Marlboro to reschedule the performance till after Duke had put Carolina away (I hate writing that kind of thing, because it just invites providence to contradict what I’ve written — but this is just the way it has to be, I guess). I’ll boast write about both the play and the game when I find out how they end.

[Later: I shoulda known better; well done, Carolina.]

From all over the country — or at least, “from Maine, North Carolina, Illinois, and Minnesota,” which is pretty good coverage — people are converging on Marlboro, Vermont, to see Josiah Adam in tomorrow night’s performance of Angels in America.

Margaret has shrewdly plotted our trravel paths through Bradley Airport and a hotel in Brattleboro, both of which offer free wifi. Still, the odds suggest a diminished online presence over the weekend. Eventaully, there’ll be pictures and stories.

[Later: Arrived safely, if ravenously. It seems as though Bradley is trying single-handedly to punish United for its recent brush with bankruptcy, but with the diligence of the truly hard-core, I found an open wireless signal.]

Ash Wednesday is not usually a festival of mirth and hilarity, but our service today was a little more solemn even than the usual, as we prayed for Dr. de Villa. Our guest preacher, Fr. Douglas Brown of the Order of the Holy Cross, gave a sermon that fit both the day and our additional observance. We remembered, reflected, prayed, and committed ourselves to a holy Lent.

For myself, the convergence of these circumstances suggested that I make my Lenten discipline a determination to spend time every day in an earnest memento mori; I suspect that some of the burdens I work with would benefit from my sizing them up in perspective to my own mortality: the things that I ought to make sure to have done, and the things no one will mind if I leave behind, obligations to my family and friends, and indifferent matters that no one cares about that much. We’ll see how that works out.

Joey’s dad died yesterday. If you knew him, your heart aches and you miss him; if you didn’t know him, then people you care about miss him so much that it makes you feel bad.

Margaret and I spent bits of the wedding weekend with him, and found him to be every bit the graceful, kind, generous, brilliant, loving man upon whom a guy like Joey might model himself. I’m presiding at Seabury’s Ash Wednesday mass tomorrow, where we will pray for him and remember that we all are dust, and to dust we shall return; yet even at the grave we make our song, “Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia.”

Or “anticipated search terms” or something. I’m filling out the Author Information sheets from Fortress, and one of the things they ask is “Please list ten key words that will assist a customer when searching for your book on a web site. These ten key words should be different than the words found in the title and subtitle of your book” (that is, Faithful Interpretation: Reading the Bible In a Postmodern World). I’m also working on the fifty-word summary of the two hundred pages worth of careful argumentation I’ve put together over the past fifteen years or so of writing.

It’s great that they’re thinking in these terms (though I’d have written “different from the words”). But since the terms “interpretation,” “bible,” and “postmodern” are already there in the title/subtitle combination, I’m having a hard time coming up with ten other possible searches for which Fortress might want to buy ad space. You, dear readers, have slogged through several of the essays as I churned through them, and you know the kinds of thing I’m liable to say; anything come to your minds?

Technorati Tags:
postmoderntheology, hermeneutics, bible, theology

Yes, “on a jet plane” — but there’s no need to sing the song. We had a marvelous visit, and enjoyed keeping track of Pippa’s adventures in Maine, working on common academic interests, and generally sinking our teeth into a weekend together alone. We’ll connect up again next weekend when we go to see Si in Angels in America at Marlboro.

Pointing to Flickr reminds me of the changes in their terms of service. Much as I like the people behind Flickr, I don’t in the least like the direction their application has taken in the past few months. While they justifiably need to protect their service against abuse (it’s not a bandwidth sink for banners or other page design elements, and they have to abide by others’ copyright laws), the ludic t-shirt phase of Flickr has passed, and the serious button-down shirt phase has arrived — pretty soon, Flickr will be wearing a power tie and fancy suit, and its early enthusiasts will have migrated elsewhere. I don’t assent to the premise that “sharing digitized photos” and “sharing other digitized images” constitutes a fundamental distinction in the value of the service (and if it were that important, it would not be overwhelmingly difficult to implement a “photo” on/off switch to guide searches). I don’t agree that Flickr needs to forbid “photos that include frontal nudity, genitalia or anything else that your bathing suit should cover” (that’s what their sensible “this might be offensive” button was meant to deal with). I don’t think that the recipe for enduring business success involves abandoning the spirit that made you popular.

I wish everyone well, and I may keep on using Flickr out of inertia (even though I regularly upload non-photo images, the horror!). But is this what Web 2.0 is about? I don’t think so.

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web2.0, flickr

I used to have three taglines for this blog:

All times are local.
Local times may vary.
Minutes do not expire.

drawn from various advertisements and warnings. Our family loves pondering the metaphysics implied by claims such as these.

Margaret reports that Nate spotted another such line in an advertisement for a Rochester auto merchant: “Central location is minutes from anywhere.”

As opposed to. . . ?

And since I’ve found a spot to bury this information in an unrelated post, I will note here that Fortress has announced the publication for Faithful Interpretation for October. W00t!

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tagging