AKMA’s Random Thoughts

The family has been watching Emily’s YouTube videos “Code Monkey” and “Don’t Make Me Dance” over and over; she’s terrific, and we’re rooting for her to land a professional gig. We want to see more.

For all the reasonable arguments against The Long Tail and other internet “boosterism,” the fact remains that it would have been exceptionally difficult, if possible, for Emily to have produced those videos, for her to have distributed them widely if she had made them, and for people like an academic theologian in Evanston to have encountered them — apart from technologies that depend on or have been catalyzed by the Internet. And — and this drives me batty with impatience, makes me want to grab people by the lapels and shake them — this constitutes evidence of something pertinent to the future of church and theological academy. Somebody, listen!

Margaret’s plane lands in an hour or so. Have I said that I’m proud of her and I’m intensely eagerly awaiting her return?

This afternoon, Pippa and I will roll down to Midway Airport to pick up Josiah and Margaret. Si will be home for the summer; Margaret is coming home for good, after having been based in Durham for three years.

That’s a pretty weird experience for a married person. Most of the time, once people marry, they live together pretty regularly. Margaret and I set up separate homes almost three years ago so she could study for her theology doctorate at Duke; at this point she’s got her dissertation proposal mostly hammered out, she’s through with her course work. She’s going from strength to strength, and I couldn’t be prouder of her.

Now she’s saying goodbye to friends who have loved and supported her through three complicated years — people who are her friends, who know her for herself. That has been wonderful for her, and it’s very hard to tear up those roots and move back to Evanston (in this way, it’ll be especially good that we’re spending next year in Princeton).

Meanwhile, Pippa and I have learned to manage all right as a two-person family. We have ups and downs — I’m more comfortable with freezer food, Pippa vigorously insists that we cook real entrees, for just one example — but the rhythm has worked out okay. In moments of triumph, I exult that in three years of transition in a young girl’s life, I did not totally mess up as a single parent! Woohoo!

So much great stuff has happened that we’ve managed to keep the edge off the loneliness and frustration of living in different time zones. Now we won’t have that to keep at bay; we can hug, Margaret can rest her head on my shoulder, we can actually help one another with daily life. And we can get back to the marvelous gift of being married, together, finally!

Thinking in the shower this morning — really, why don’t I just spend the whole day there? it’s when I arrive at most of my best ideas — it occurred to me to summarize my area of scholarly interest as “systems of expression and inference.” That touches on the way that articulating and uptake constitute complementary aspects of the same process: we speak/write as “I want David to understand this when I address him, so I’ll say that, which seems most likely to evoke the reaction I want,” and we hear/read as “I’d most likely have chosen those words to evoke that reaction.” The expression and inference are systemically related, and no single “law of meaning” governs all such systems. They interact and deflect one another such that one can never fully isolate a natural sign or a conventional signifier and assert a single determinate meaning for it.

Thus assertions about reading “literally,” whether in favor or against, always operate by excluding pertinent contextual data; there’s no “literally” there. (Fred Clark has been pursuing this topic with his characteristic exquisite patience here and here.) Words never arrive at our attention without some accent or inflection, and if we devised a way to transmit them “neutrally,” that very “neutrality” would communicate some metatextual data, in the way that people frequently infer a great deal from a “robotic” voice. Words in a book signify differently from words spray-painted on a wall; words spoken in a flat, unmodulated tone signify differently from words whispered into one’s ear or shouted enthusiastically. But there’s no acontextual venue for words, so even the OED constitutes a context for meaning that affects interpretation (start, for instance, from its Englishness).

Anyway, the shower ended, so I have to go get grubby and shower again to figure out what comes next. But that phrase, “systems of expression and inference,” I want to save and return to.

I’m mulling over what I’d want to say in an essay on digital technology and religion, for an intro textbook on religious studies. “What?” I hear you say, “You have four other essays to finish, plus book reviews, before you get to the religion and technology essay!”

Very true, but (a) procrastination often finds its most helpful allies in obligations from the more distant future, and (b) I’m just mulling it over, not writing it. And those other essays are mostly short. And. . . well, I cannot tell a lie and say that three are mostly done. I’m working on them.

Margaret comes home day after tomorrow; last day of classes in two weeks.

I beg faithful readers’ patience as I marshal my attention and energies toward matters pertaining to work life here at Seabury. On the positive side, Margaret will be home on Friday (!) and graduation comes in two and a half weeks.

Doc points us to various links relative to the “Countries, Cultures, Communication: Digital Innovation at UCLA” colloqium. It sounds like a brain-jolting treat, especially the keynote by Willard McCarty that Doc cites (PDF, and accompanying PowerPoint slides; I sure wish they made it available as web-native media).

Granted that PDF makes Dorothea’s hackles hack, note how much better use McCarty makes of that format than does the U.K. College of Preachers’ “What Did You Make Of Your Sermon?”. My eyes still hurt from looking at that.

[Side note, evidence that my work as a parent is nearing completion: This afternoon, Pippa on her own initiative picked out and put on the CD player the family’s copy of Who’s Next, and even turned it up a little. This conveys a strong sense of accomplishment, and delights me (of course), but also makes me feel rather old.]
Continue reading “What’s Going On, Where It’s At”

One, to the fine Flâneur clip from YouTube; the other, to the report of the excavation of King Herod’s Tomb by Ehud Netzer. What, you say you didn’t hear about this archaeological find on CNN, with Hollywood sponsors and best-selling authors claiming that it changes everything about human existence? Right. That’s the point. An academically reputable, serious excavation with warranted claims relative to historically-plausible finds doesn’t need hype; and hype doesn’t make a dodgy find with tenuous claims on historical probability into a world-changing watershed moment.

It’ll be one week till Margaret comes home, for good. If that doesn’t seem strange to you, you probably haven’t lived apart from your loved one for a long time; I’m having a very difficult time thinking through the idea that we aren’t going to be staying together solely by email and rare visits, that we will in fact be living together, constantly, as we had for the twenty-two years before this. Like, every day.

After wringing the book review out this week, I now have to cook up three short exegetical lectionary pieces. That, and referee an essay.

It should be a sedentary day, after Pippa and I biked and walked all over Evanston to show the visiting Jeanniecool the highlights of our town. The intrepid Jeannie had traveled all the way to Chicago to visit her cousin, took a bus to the Red Line of the El, got lost, waited for a train that wasn’t going to run for another few hours, got onto a train that would get her to the right junction to change for the Purple Line, waited for the right train, caught the right train, waited at Howard for the Purple Line train, and ended up arriving for coffee at the Brothers K a couple hours later than any of us had expected. That required a change of plan, so Pippa and I walked her up to Blind Faith for lunch, and then we ambled around Evanston on a quest for camera batteries. Good exercise, delightful company, and further proof — as though attentive observers needed more — that the Internet is what brings us together.

John Pederson (“Javert” in We Know) gave a terrific presentation yesterday at the WiscNet Future Technologies Conference — I’m hoping that he posts some notes at his blog (sadly, no recording of the presentation itself). Because he adverted to his use of LOLcats in the presentation, I spent a certain amount of time online yesterday exploring lolcat culture, with occasionally delightful, frequently painful, and generally illuminating results.

This morning, as if on cue, Boing Boing pointed to an analytical history of Lolcats from the Axis of LOLcat-dom, I Can Has Cheezburger?. McRaney covers many of the bases, and comments pick up some loose ends (such as the O RLY? owl). Still, I was left wishing for a little more intense wit in treating a topic that engages four or five of my favorite discourses (language, visual communication, humor, technology, dissemination); I was hoping for something more like Anil Dash’s account (that predates McRaney’s by a couple of weeks). I had been hoping that Language Log would pick up Anil’s cue, “The fact that we can tell no cat would talk like this shows that kitty pidgin is actually quite consistent,” but instead Mark Liberman notes the possibility, then changes the subject (albeit to Wodehouse).

This doesn’t really have anything to do with Rowan Williams — I was just listening to the Clash when I started typing, and the title wrote itself. There’s some way to make a connection between the song by the Clash, the conflict in the Anglican Communion, and some of the exasperating conversations about race in America that I’ve been sucked into recently, but it isn’t coming together yet. So I’m using the title now, and maybe coming up with the blog post later.