Category: Uncategorized

I’ve done some para-typographic work in my day, and have remained over-attentive to matters of type and page design. Thus I choke up with type-design exhilaration at the Typographi.ca Year’s Best Type column. Some of these faces impress the daylights out of me. It would be great, for instance, if Seabury could change from Trajan to the finer, subtler Garda.

As Stephen Coles says in the introductory paragraph, “As public awareness of typography increases, it becomes even more important to use something other than the same old stuff that lingers in your font menu.” There’s no reason a school or a congregation can’t decide on a serif text face, a complementary sans-serif for headings and captions, and a display face for headlines (not that one might not ever deviate from them, but as a house rule for institutional printing). If expense is a concern, why not adopt Lido STF as a visibly distinct alternative to Times Roman? The Ascender Creativity Font Pack will cost only $20, but includes several very fine typefaces that distinguish one’s organization from every other place in the world that just uses the default typefaces that come with their system software. Better yet, hit a benefactor for a specific package.

Today’s the day we celebrate Christmas at our house (it’s within the twelve days of the season, so this is kosher, although I hope no one gives anybody three French hens). Nate had some singing jobs lined up and couldn’t get away; Jennifer still won’t arrive till Saturday, but there’s only so long you can put things off.

Last Saturday, Pippa and Laura and Si decorated our tree, which we have named “Bob” every year for the past eight years or so for reasons too convoluted to elaborate here. This year’s Bob cuts an especially dashing figure, though my photo doesn’t do it justice:

Close examination of the giftage around the tree will reveal something (typically) odd. It turns out that Pippa Margaret decided that we ought not participate in the annual deforestation ritual that requires every gift to be surrounded by paper destined to the torn off and discarded in a matter of moments. She brilliantly connected the problem of gift-concealment with the query I posted last summer concerning what to do with canvas tote bags. As a result, the gifts from local family members to one another have all been wrapped packaged in canvas totes, tied closed with a tag that Pippa prepared.

Yet another stroke of out-of-the-box thinking from your syncopated blogging friends here.

We opted out of much of the holiday spending extravaganza, partly for reasons of conscience, partly for economic reasons, and partly because we’re just not organized enough to plan and list and shop and ship in time for plausibly festive arrival. I hadn’t been inside a Major Retail Establishment except the Apple Store, and the only reason I went there was to make a maintenance purchase that I would have been making anyway.

So when Pippa and I ventured into Target this afternoon to buy a couple of blankets for the coming influx of family, I was astounded — verily flabbergasted — to see the staggering abundance of “poker sets” (including ensembles specifically designed for the currently-popular Texan version of the game). Once upon a time, I especially appreciated card games in general and poker in particular because you didn’t need a “set.” A deck of cards, some pocket change or other small counters, and you had a game. Pippa and I threaded our way between small mountains of packages that included chips, cards, rulebooks, storage devices, probably make-up kits, screwdrivers, sump pumps, and dental appliances.

Our only consolation lay in the fact that evidently a lot of people looked at these overpriced packages and said, “Who needs a ‘set’ to play five-card draw?” and left these boutique poker sets on the shelves.

This evening I went to the printer to print out a simple job for Pippa. The same printer has worked fine for months; we’ve been printing with it, on and off, all fall. For some reason, it began choking on the photos Pippa wanted (although it printed the Google home page perfectly agreeably).

After an hour of increasing blood pressure, I fetched the old printer Si used to use. It doesn’t work (though to be fair, we haven’t even tried it for months).

Bah, humbug!

[Follow-up: I went in to the office and printed the pictures for Pippa there. Since then, I’ve figured out that the problem on this end was a misfiring black ink jet; it didn’t malfunction predictably, but eventuially I noticed that the startling special effects on the color images I printed derived from their not being dark in the appropriate areas. New ink reservoir, all clear.]

I was talking about authenticity* with a friend after church last week, and she advanced the premise that careful, deliberate writing showed a writer’s minimal courtesy to her or his reader. Since I have a reputation to uphold, I suggested that it’s more complicated than that — but I sympathized with her concern that too few writers attend to readers’ uptake.

This shows up in student papers when writers back up their claims with an aggregation of assertions, rather than a productively structured argument. I understand why the distinction might not appear obvious; relatively little public debate observes the difference between assertion and argument (indeed, a great deal of political discourse seems to rest not simply on naked assertion, but on bellicose assertions without even a tenuous basis in common knowledge). Discursive conflict gravitates quickly and fatally to “she said, he said” or “well, that’s my perspective, you have yours,” without acknowledging the possibility that he and she, you and I might have a way of reaching for conclusions to which we both can assent.

Deliberative argument doesn’t guarantee that possibility, nor does it provide some ideal, neutral path toward truth. Still, it’s different from mere assertion — and if we fail to respect that difference, we’re poorer both in intellectual responsibility and in the wiser, more generously consensual relationships that the practice of argument can foster.

To oversimplify: If you want to elicit agreement with your thesis, you should not simply assert claims you suppose to be true (perhaps even self-evidently so), but present your reader with reasons to think that your claims are true, and that they add up to the thesis you propose. Some of your reasons may indeed strike some of your readers as self-evident, but if everything you think were equally self-evident to your reader, you wouldn’t need to persuade her of anything. If your reader disagrees with you about something, we have grounds for suspecting that she doubts a reason that you regard as sound, or that she doesn’t follow a chain of implications that you take as granted. Further, the more a writer takes for granted, the more likely he has overlooked (or deliberately elided) a fallacious inference in his own reasoning. The more carefully you write out your argument, the better you protect yourself from your own fallibility.

I worked through this with a student once, who experienced this as the revelation of a great secret. Once my student caught the idea that one could distinguish “assertion” from “argument” and that one could actually craft a paper toward the goal of persuading a reader to accept a thesis for explicit, sound reasons, my student couldn’t believe that the world had withheld this knowledge thus far. Why hadn’t anyone explained this to her? How could any grown-up get along without this knowledge?

Most people don’t find the distinction as surprising as that. Still, few cultivate the countercultural practice of differentiating assertion from argument. Preserving that distinction won’t resolve all the world’s problems — but it might make a useful step toward ameliorating a few, here and there. And it certainly wouldn’t hurt.

It’s been a tough year for natural disasters. A year ago, hundreds of thousands of people died in the devastating tsunami in South Asia. An October earthquake killed tens of thousands and destroyed the homes of millions more in Kashmir. Hurricane Stan killed thousands in Central America, and in the U.S. Hurricane Katrina killed thousands, despoiled a beloved major city, and wiped out the structures of entire coastal areas.

We haven’t forgotten any of these, but this morning I spent extra time trying to wrangle copies of students’ notes for the classes David Knight took back when he was in seminary here. I followed links he sent earlier this week to an editorial stock-taking and some visual reminders of how Katrina affected a far greater swath of the Gulf Coast than only New Orleans.

If your Christmas can include yet another round of sharing what you have with others who have lost much, you’ll be the richer for it.

If the media incline to the left, why has all the coverage of the transit strike in New York (all that I’ve heard, in other words “mostly NPR and online news sources”) stressed the hardship this strike imposes on commuters, tourists, hoteliers, and merchants, and the unusually-comprehensive pension and health care package that the laborers are striking to maintain? A lefty press would, I’d imagine, lionize the brave workers who have drawn the line at corporate exploitation (billions of dollars of profits, comfy benefits at the top, but a desperate need to cut benefits for the laborers who actually make the transit system run).

A left-inclined press might be baying at the heels of congressmen and White House officials who have fallen afoul a special prosecutor for violations of political procedure rather than for lying about a stupid, tawdry sexual affair. A left-inclined press might try to suppress or rebut, rather than perpetuate and amplify, reports that the press inclines toward the left. Or so I’d think.

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This morning brings yet another complaint about the internet as the ostensible cause of stupidity, inn the name of a greater civility that apparently arises automatically when people communicate face to face. Evidently the author, who admits to having gone to college “way back in the technological stone age (the mid 1990s),” lacks sufficient experience of face-to-face interaction to back up his overripe nostalgia, but he might have stopped to drink a cup of badly-perked academic coffee and thought back on centuries of life in educational institutions before he committed such callow folly to public display.

News flash: The academy has never been the idyllic preserve of systematically undistorted communication after which Steele hankers; academic life involves a perpetual negotiation of generosity and venality, liberality (in its best sense) and reaction, the search for truth and the struggle to control how that search turns out. Very often, academic people behave extremely badly. It didn’t start with the Internet, face to face interaction doesn’t solve the problem, and a great many more academic conflicts and misdemeanors take pace through good ol’ fashioned scheming, manipulation, personal interaction, and offical memo than through web sites.

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But while the subject of Paul Mirecki has come to the surface (Steele refers to Mirecki’s situation as one of his examples), has anyone ever made a less-appealing case for himself? He might have simply, patiently offered a course on Intelligent Design, displayed its characteristics and encouraged students to think through the problems involved in construing it as a scientific theory, while at the same time encouraging students to push as hard as they care to against the mythos of evolution, and everyone involved could have learned a lot. Instead, he revealed a streak of intolerance that should embarrass him, then claimed that KU’s squeezing him out of being department chair constituted a breach of academic freedom. Oh, the pernicious effects of the internet. . . .

Kevin has a neat post about the difference between digital reproduction and physical theft. The overdeveloped world can persistently legislate technological and judicial sanctions to enforce the illusion that the conditions of [re]production have not changed — but since letting digital media function as they do best costs less in hardware, software, and just plain bother, there will always be places in the world (hence, always a place online) where copying will remain free.

In this context, I’m tickled to point to Michael Iafrate’s holiday album, Happy Xmas, X is Here, with downloadable mp3s.

Two of my favorite print artifacts, made easily available courtesy of the Net: Demotivators and Holy Cards. (Thanks for the reminder, Chris.)

When I mourned about the deficiencies of iChat (relative to GoogleTalk’s Jabber protocol), my wonderful readers recommended Adium X. I downnloaded the latest version and it started up smooth as silk.

I had to reset the alert sounds, but everything else works like a charm. I love tabbed chat windows, and the fact that the dock icon tells me whose message just arrived.

One remaining desideratum: a number of my contacts and I enjoyed seeing what’s playing on one another’s iTunes; is there a hack that enables that for Adium? (Not that it would have mattered for the last week or so, since I turn off iTunes when I’m playing Warcraft.)

(Micah recommended this solution.)

Josiah and I elled down to the Cathedral yesterday to celebrate the ordination to the priesthood of my former students Dave, Leigh, and Jane, and my former colleague Horace. It was wonderful to share their moment, and to catch up with alum friends such as Susie and Jane.

Since no one else has blogged this yet, I will note for the record that Bishop Persell opened the service by asking if it were the congregation’s will that these people be ordained bishops — a slip that occasioned exuberant mirth, and inordinate speculation about these clergy’s futures.

It was particularly good to catch up with Horace, who left Seabury very suddenly this fall. He moved to New York with indefinite job prospects, but has landed nicely on his feet at General Theological Seminary in New York. Well, done, sir!

Margaret and Si landed just fine at Midway last night, despite intermittent snow squalls. It would be untrue — or inauthentic? — to suggest that I have devoted all my attention to Margaret since her arrival. I have spent much of the time with her, but a chunk of my afternoon and early evening went to introducing Josiah to World of Warcraft and, unwittingly, getting into a very time-consuming dungeon instance.

Exciting as that underground battle was, the part that prevented my putting the computer down and returning to Margaret’s side was the social element; four other people had set aside a chunk of their afternoons (or mornings, or evenings, or nights — I don’t know where in the world they were located) to accomplish that dungeon along with me. I didn’t want to discountenance the team, or disregard the time they’d invested. A hat tip to the Warcraft designers, for engineering the game to draw so effectively on that sentiment.*

But, it sure is great for Margaret to be back home again. That goofy grin on my face is neither just my usual expression nor some particularly favorable turn of the game’s fortunes — it’s due entirely to my sweetheart’s presence in the very same Zip Code (plus four!) as me.

* By the way, it just occurred to Si and me that the player whom Pippa created and designed looks a lot like Mena Trott, only taller and darker-skinned, dressed in a battle skirt. But since Joi roped us into playing, I suppose that just keeps things all in the family.