AKMA’s Random Thoughts

Our home is back to two; I just dropped Jennifer and Margaret at the El, on their way to Midway. It doesn’t get easier to say goodbye — even as the home schedule will be more predictable.

A word of advice: Monolingual sounds like a terrific application, but there’s a serious risk that you’ll end up deleting a file upon which some other application depends. Not that I did that.

I’m basking in the delight of holiday bounty — what a fantastic family! — and among the items that recently took up residence among us here, I wanted to point out three particularly neat books. Margaret and I picked up The Timechart History of the World for the family; I wish I could use it in Early Church History, because its simultaneous display of events in nineteenth-century design and typography enchants and illuminates. Of course, it would be great to fine-tune and expand it with a fuller, more precise chronology, but it’s a lovely starting-point.

This summer at the Catholic Biblical Association meeting, I grabbed a copy of Saints: A Visual Guide; it gives capsule introductions to saints who figure prominently in the church’s iconographic tradition (and it catalogues the saints’ principal symbols). Before Christmas, Margaret and I discovered Saints: A Year in Faith and Art, a similar book oriented toward the kalendar. Both these books are visually rich; I particularly relish the latter’s fussy unwillingness to acknowledge the plebian holy cards it uses as illustrations. No, in Saints: A Year in Faith and Art they’re “popular sacred images.” That makes me feel a lot more elegant about the pasteboard pictures I sometimes order from eBay.

The household population is shrinking again. Nate left Saturday; Si left for a week on Sunday (he’ll be back for another two weeks in a while); Mile left yesterday; Jennifer and Margaret leave tomorrow. It’s been an intense interval; eight people make a whole lot more dishes than two, especially when you throw in higher-profile menus and holiday baking. And the emotional wash has drained me.

But hey, jolly, classes are about to resume, I have more administrative responsibility than fall term, and have made little progress on my writing projects (including an essay I’d forgotten I had agreed to). Who has time to be burned out?

Oh, and I’m keeping a cold at bay.

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By the way, Microsoft did not pick up on my obvious Blogarian masculinity to offer me a Vista-equipped laptop. This was a big mistake for them, since I won’t have even a vague acquaintance with Vista otherwise. If Ray Ozzie and Jon Udell want to correct their oversight and send me a Ferrari, I’m easy to find. Just saying. . . .

I received an email notice yesterday that the latest version of Greek morphological/lexical tool Kalós has been released. Kalós does a job one wished one didn’t need, and does it very well: it analyzes forms to give the parsing information (full information for nouns, adjectives, pronouns, and verbs – including participles), with simple glosses.

It’s not perfect; it stumbled over εἶπον / eipon, the first strong aorist form I gave it (it actually stumbled first over εἶπαν / eipan; I was checking for strong aorist forms with weak aorist endings). It knows εἶδον / eidon, though, so I’m not sure why it doesn’t know εἶπον / eipon.

It’s nagware, but I think it’s worth the fee — and if you’re on a straitened student budget, you can just enter the pseudoregistration number repeatedly.

About ten days ago, I pointed to a posting of Derrida’s last words. Margaret called my attention, this morning, to the epigraph to John Caputo’s The Weakness of God:

Mes amis, je vous remercie d’être venus. Je vous remercie pour la chance de votre amitié. Ne pleurez pas: souriez comme je vous aurais souri. Je vous bénis. Je vous aime. Je vous souris, où que je sois.

My friends, I thank you for coming. I thank you for the good fortune of your friendship. Do not cry; smile as I would smile at you. I bless you. I love you. I am smiling at you, wherever I am. (reported and translated by John Caputo, frontispiece)

OK, we can note with snarky appreciation the complexity of rival accounts of which words were Derrida’s last, and we can wonder what difference it makes when this or that constitutes one’s final articulate gestures (as opposed to “very late words, when the final words were ‘No, that hurts a lot’ ”). The two versions of his farewell actually resemble one another quite closely, and both include expressions that bear at least implicitly theological resonances — if they don’t amount to an ultimate confession of faith (in a certain way).

The other morning, when I was unsuccessfully resisting consciousness, I thought back on the two times I’ve seen the new James Bond movie. First reflection: the Chris Cornell theme music has grown on me. The first time I heard it I was unimpressed, but the second time I caught myself humming the theme for days afterward.

But (second reflection) the theme plays on the main character’s self-introduction and the scene in which he has broken into M’s apartment. “Your name is —” Judi Dench cuts him off and admonishes him not to utter her name.

Didn’t we just see her leaving a hearing with Parliamentary leaders who’ve been grilling her about Bond’s misadventure in the Nambutu embassy? What do they call her? Are there any governmental officials in the contemporary world whose names we don’t know?

M’s identity can’t be a secret.
Continue reading “You Know My Name?”

Well, I finally got around to beginning the Beautiful Theology seminar blog. I’m using Blogger for this one, partly for convenience, partly because I was curious to see how Blogger is doing these days. I’ve post the first three frames of Magritte’s “Words and Images” essay; I think we’ll read Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics next (and I’m enjoying Reinventing Comics again, so it’ll be hard to resist covering that too) and then work on some Edward Tufte.

Feel free to drop in and join the conversation. I strongly recommend reading the posts in sequence, from the beginning. (The main blog page is here, and the Atom feed is here, for newsreader users.)

Nate came downstairs this morning and challenged me: “I see that your blog says nothing this morning about the other team running the table against yours at Bible Pictionary last night — contrary to what your t-shirt said.” Well, true. Nate and the younger generation (Si, Laura, Pippa) whupped Margaret, Jennifer, Mile and me in the first round of Pictionary, led by an intense sequence of successful clues drawn by Nate himself. Nate triumphed!

In the second round, maturity and experience prevailed, though the result might have been different if the youngsters had divined the answer to Pippa’s very difficult word:

You can click through to the Flickr page if you want clues and the answer. I thought she did a great job, and if her team had gotten this one, they might well have gone ahead to sweep the doubleheader.

Jennifer and Mile arrived last night, so (for a couple of days) our family is super-sized: Pippa and AKMA, Margaret, Si (with Laura H. around much of the time), and Nate, Jennifer and Mile (the only one missing is Nate’s Laura). The dining room table is full, the bedrooms are overflowing, and schedules are intricate.

As to Christmas loot, I know it’s inappropriate to boast, but yesterday I was one of the elite few who wore an aoudad t-shirt, and today I have an “I’m blogging this” t-shirt on. I’ve been working on a present to send my mom (shhhhh, it’s almost finished, I just have to add the soundtrack). I’m running an errand over at Northwestern’s art library today, and sometime today we’re going to watch a digitized version of Flashfork’s Escape from Margaret’s parents (I’m lobbying to put it on YouTube, but the principals have resisted so far). Jeanne and Gail sent Pippa a Wobbler, which has provided near-constant entertainment.

I didn’t give anyone Fun Home for Christmas, because I had begun to feel like a fanatic about it — but I felt vindicated when Time chose Fun Home as the top book of 2006.

David Weinberger’s post about David Mamet’s plays intrigued me for a variety of reasons: trivially, because I hadn’t noticed that Mamet wrote Ronin (which I evidently liked more than David did) and because I share David’s sense of overexposure to William Macy’s hinder parts. I mean, it’s good that movie directors are beginning to show some gender-inclusivity to their exploitation of nudity, but William Macy as pioneer? (I greatly admire Macy as an actor — just not so much as an object of sexual exploitation. Then again, my horizons in homosexual attraction are extraordinarily narrow, so maybe the set of all lustful-gazers-at-men’s-backsides detects something about Macy that I miss. Probably so.)

The aspect of David’s remarks that interests me more involves the opening comment, “Good lord I’m tired of David Mamet” in the context of David’s other criticisms. I second David’s frustration with the tortured dialogue Mamet imposes on characters who seem otherwise to be normal citizens, though I enjoy the twists and surprises Mamet springs (David’s “mechanisms” parragraph).

As I read along, though, it occurred to me that “tired,” no, “exhausted” captures my primary response to Mamet dramas. And I suspect that Mamet exhausts me because the one theme he hits relentlessly (in his “I’m David Mamet and this is my movie” mode) is duplicity. Once you catch on to Mamet’s fixation on duplicity, you as viewer know that any attention you vest in any of the characters may be turned against you. So you either withhold your emotional response to the film (boring), or go ahead and invest in some characters who then betray you (tiring and frustrating), or keep vigilant attention to who might be lying to whom (exhausting and often self-defeating, since Mamet has made his trademark by devising characters who lie to you in ways you won’t anticipate).

Mamet hits this theme so insistently that I’m inclined to infer that he thinks it’s cosmically significant (as David notes, Mamet assigns his leading character “his existential (= inexplicable) crisis”). Yes, but. Duplicity and betrayal carry their valence of importance not for their own sake, but as corrosive parasites on the more fundamental importance of trust, and of our need to trust one another. Mamet toys with, and aggravates, the American illusion of the self-determining individual by showing us a world divided into exploiters and suckers; his art invites us to escape being a sucker by joining the world of those whose self-awareness and caution would enable them to exploit, if only they weren’t too honorable. Or maybe they only exploit a little bit, because after all, everyone does, except maybe the suckers.

That sort of world horrifies me. My horror may derive from my theology, from my deep aversion to betrayal, from my resistance to binary divisions, from my Victorian sense of honor, or maybe from just being a minimally decent human being (not to overrate myself). Still, I wonder whether David’s weariness connect with his oft-stated enthusiasm for the generosity of the internet, for the intersubjectivity that helps makes us wiser than we would be on our own. Maybe Mamet gives some of us the gift of seeing more clearly how despicable the world would be if Mamet were telling us the truth — and how tremendous is our obligation to work toward sustaining durable, non-manipulative, trusting relationships that may help us, and others, make their way past the ingenious exploiters and those who parasitically romanticize exploitation.

Does anyone think that the record industry’s tactic of repackaging albums with newly-added material signals anything other than short-sighted desperation? Perhaps the idea will come into sharper focus if we peer into an executive’s imagination: “Let’s see, some consumers still reliably buy their recordings on physical media, despite all the drawbacks attendant upon that mode of production and transmission. If fewer and fewer people still buy our product, what shall we do? I know! Render physical-album releases obsolescent even faster! That’ll build the market, increase consumer goodwill, and stave off the digital media revolution!”

Nate and I have talked before about the demise of the “album” as an intelligible unit of artistic expression; doesn’t this development underline and accelerate that decline? What sense does it make for The Artist to say, “Tasty Dog Biscuits belongs together as an integrated song cycle, reflecting our lyrical expression of the superiority of liberal democracy over planned economies,” when six months later the record label rereleases Biscuits with six other tracks, a supplementary video, and two mash-ups and remixes of The Artist’s big hit [single] from the album? Where did the integrated artistic whole go?

We’ve had a lovely relaxing Christmas day (no gifts, for the time being, since Si has been spending the day with Laura’s family), watching Love Actually, A Day At the Races, playing Scrabble (dark horse Nate trounced the family on the strength of a 50- or 60-point word), and generally enjoying ourselves.

But we’d still be fretting and gnashing our teeth if so many people hadn’t answered our plea with copious helpful advice and even several recordings of the service in question. What a great Web! Thanks to everyone who answered the last post, plus Suw too!