AKMA’s Random Thoughts

I was going to develop a laudatory commentary on Dorothea’s “Blogging and the ‘Social Journal,’ ” but really I don’t have anything substantial to add — except an enthusiastic Amen! from the writing scholar’s side of the analysis.

I very much want to square away the sermon today, so I won’t devote reflection time to my comments on the status of the Anglican Communion, the idea of “reinventing” things and selves, year-end lists of music, or any of the other topics that dangle shiny trinkets in front of my easily-distracted consciousness.

I’ve been challenged to incorporate a variety of allusions (from widely varying contexts) into the sermon. Richard Kieckhefer and I were discussing the extent to which such challenges — allusion, specific rhetorical figures, alphabetical embedding, acrostics, lipograms, other Oulippean devices — can paradoxically make composition easier; since one can’t write just anything, what one must write sometimes comes more easily to the fore. We’ll see whether that’s the way this sermon develops.

(By the way, Mac users, there’s a terrific holiday bargain available at Mac Heist: an array of excellent, useful, enjoyable software for the package price of $49, with a percentage going to charity — can’t beat it with a stick. And now I too have Delicious Library.)

Bonus Sixth Thing: Evidently, I permitted my feet to suffer cold damage at some point — I suspect the days when I was driving a Waterbeds East delivery truck with holes in the floorboards — and parts of my feet are painfully sensitive to cold weather. (By the way, I went to college with Fred, whose site hosts the case study about Waterbeds East, and who preceded my tenure at that retail establishment. Fred, if you’re following a referrer log back to this page, Hi!)

Yesterday, Maggi listed me among those to whom she passed the webquery about “Five Things You Probably Didn’t Know About Me,” and in the message she sent me about the post, she allowed that I might be cranky about such phenomena — but she was very polite about giving me an escape clause, so I’ll respond by not taking advantage of that offer.

(At this point, Margaret rolls her eyes and wonders how much more there is to know about me about which I haven’t already offered too much information online, and with good reason.)

One, echoing Maggi’s fourth point — I too am inordinately prone to vertigo; I have a hard time watching movie scenes involving heights, and I even get edgy playing Warcraft when my character is on a precipice. This affords my offspring frequent opportunities to fleer and jape at me as I cower in my seat at the movie theater, or press myself back against the couch while watching a DVD at home.

Two, I was once a bowler, both in a Sunday family “league” (a dozen or so friends and neighbors who got together every week to roll a few frames) and in the Taylor Allderdice Bowling League (wherein I headed a team whose name I don’t remember, though I recall getting the Captain Kirk Award at the end of the season, for “valiant captain, incompetent crew” because although I maintained the second-highest average in the league, the rest of my team dredged the bottom of the league, and got worse every week, so that even our handicap didn’t help us). And I was second board on the high school chess team one year, second to Dennis Fischman.

Three (I should find something more recent to mention), I started working in computer graphics in 1980 or ’81, with a PDP-11 (I think it was a PDP-11; by the way, I am not in the picture to which I linked, nor did I work with anyone who looked like either of those characters) the size of two phone booths and a custom-built camera the size of another booth.

Four (even more recent), ummm, I have a particularly heightened sensitivity to betrayal of trust — the scene in The Fellowship of the Ring where Bilbo tries to reclaim the Ring from Frodo knots my viscera.

Five, the first car I drove was a rusty white Toyota pick-up truck handed down from my dad in 1978. One particularly snowy day, John Markert and some accomplices not only filled in the cargo area, but went on to bury the entire vehicle in a monumental pyramid of snow. When Michael Cartwright found out that I drove a pick-up truck in college, he said “You were postmodern even back then!” but I’m not sure what he meant by that. Since then I’ve driven a Dodge Colt, a Mazda 626, a Toyota Tercel wagon, a Dodge Grand Caravan, and our present Subaru Outback. Of these, only the Tercel was bought new.

I don’ usually tag other people for this sort of thing, especially if it means extracting from them more personal information than they have already offered the whole online universe and its permanent memory. If, however, you think I might have tagged you if I’d been so inclined, by all means post a list of five and cite me as the person who tagged you. I won’t deny it.
Continue reading “And You Really Didn’t Want to Know”

The Christian Century has dipped an editorial toe into the waters of blogging — and it looks interesting. I’ll keep an eye on them to see what happens when a classical-media theological enterprise drinks the digital Kool-Aid.

It will disappear shortly, but I want someplace on the Web to record the delightful header for this auction at eBay:

1910’S HOLY CARD JOAN OF ARC: GO, LADY OF GOD, GO!

Rah, rah! Sis-boom-bah! Go, Lady of God, Go!

I’m reading through composition paragraphs from students, and ruminating about what they indicate. This year’s final composition assignment asked students to compare their writing process at the beginning of the term with their writing process at the end of the term; I was inviting students to say, in effect, “This was a total waste of time” or “This helped,” and they did. The exercise also provided a medium for checking their writing skills — they knew I expected them to compose an orderly paragraph with smooth transitions, carefully chosen words, active verbs, and minimal Blank Space.

The papers didn’t surprise me much; most students expressed strong resistance to the premise that they should be devoting class time to improving their writing (some of the better writers suggested that it was a waste of their time, some of the weaker writers suggested that it made them frustrated and ruined their love of writing). Some resisted at first, but reluctantly acknowledged that they could see the benefits of observing their written work for the key characteristics that our class emphasized.

As I read over the papers, I note first of all that they show much more attention to the characteristics I highlighted in class; to that extent, the time spent on writing proved worthwhile, right from the start. I do wish, though, that students felt the improvement as a gain, rather than an unwelcome intrusion. I wonder why students resist devoting time to enhancing a fundamental skill that they’ll use through their careers in ministry. Somewhere along the line, some students of all skill levels got the message that they did not need to improve in a particular area, even though they had to be aware that there was plenty of room for improvement. When I introduce several ways of distinguishing ordinary writing from better writing, students seem to resent the knowledge of how their writing could move toward greater clarity, precision, and persuasiveness.

(For the record, I do not impose inflexible ukases; though I discourage passive constructions, I describe particular circumstances that make passives more appropriate, and I always stress that sometimes excellent writers depart from the patterns that generally characterize the best composition. For someone to mount a coherent case against my approach to writing, they would have to assert that writers ought to use words without regard to readers’ expectations about what those words mean; that abrupt transitions and discontinuous structure improve a composition; that unannounced digressions and extraneous information contribute to essays’ quality; that essays should be written with maximal recourse to passive constructions, and that the verb “is” should be preferred to more specific, more active verbs. Again, I give explicit reasons for choosing words carefully, structuring prose smoothly, eschewing BS, and preferring active, vivid constructions — I didn’t cook up a series of edicts disconnected from practical reality, but I demonstrate ways that practical reality shows the better way of constructing an essay with the characteristics I propose.)

A colleague’s research into effective ministry has observed that one prevalent model of ministry upholds a beloved, “pastoral,” “spiritual,” but generally quite ineffective pastoral leader as a norm, even though observers acknowledge that the congregation down the road has shown unusual growth and vitality during the tenure of a leader whose ministry shows very different characteristics. The knockout slide in their presentation lists the ascribed characteristics of clergy who have (in a discrete process) have been identified as “struggling”: they are sensitive, kind, intelligent, demoralized, vague, boring, and ambiguous, where as the “effective” clergy are clear, consistent, quick, collaborative, confident, decisiove, innovative, energetic, “planful” (ugh), and accommodating (PowerPoint presentation by Dreibelbis and Gortner, linked on the page above). Now, there’s plenty of room for debating particulars of the researchers’ study — but I wondered this morning whether I might be running into some students whose ideal of writing bears comparison to the ideal of ministry that the research depicts: they imagine writing to involve sensitivity and kindness, for example, more than clarity and energy.

Just musing.
Continue reading “Musing”

Maybe if I make a list of things I need to do during the break, it’ll help motivate me to get going. So:

• Housecleaning, of course
• Mark Church History papers and assign grades
• Mark Gospel Mission papers and send comments to colleague
• Prepare and preach sermon for Gaudete Sunday
• Referee article for CBQ
• Clear backed-up email
• Write 500-word definition of “postmodern biblical criticism” (ha!)
• Review Richard Hays book
• Review Wayne Meeks book
• Review Jason Byassee book
• Review Stan Hauerwas book
• Finalize preparations for New Testament II course

And, of course, holiday shopping, card mailing, bill paying, fun with Pippa, and having a nice, restful break between terms, since the stretch from January to June might otherwise break my spirit.

OK, enough blogging. Time to start on my list.

The sermon should come together, I think, without onerous strain. I have some pretty clear ideas: I want to incorporate Candide, John the Baptist’s preaching, and the liturgical-scriptural emphasis on rejoicing. On, now, to papers and homiletical prep.

As part of Pippa’s and my home renovation project (more accurately described as “winter cleaning,” or “end-of-term housekeeping”) I broke down and junked two old printers that had let us down in the past year. I had been keeping them around the house on the superstitious premise that if you don’t throw them out right away, it attenuates the guilt of participating in the gross waste of resources that the contemporary printer industry entails.

Which led me to think: isn’t there an opportunity for a company to manufacture printers specifically designed to be reparable, reuseable, and refillable — precisely the attributes that the present instant-obsolescence printer industry resists? Can’t someone on the LazyWeb develop a standard chipset and reservoir design that do a good-enough job for most family and small-office purposes, that can be repaired and refilled rather than replaced? I’d love to buy such a thing, and I’ll bet it would represent a significant savings for most office purposes; maybe someone like the Blackspot Shoe people could make a go of it.

For Mac OS X users, two seasonal presents from the freeware world: Art of Illusion, a 3D rendering editor with impressively sophisticated features; and a new version of VLC Media Player, for playing those files that QuickTime doesn’t recognize. Oh, and a week or so ago, the Participatory Media Foundation released their most recent version of Democracy Player.

And you don’t have to wait two weeks to download them.

(I have not yet tried any of these out, though I’ve never had problems with earlier versions of Democracy player or VLC. Any pernicious consequences for your system are between you and the coders.)

Our family only uses organic free range vegetable broth.

I dislike Scott Simon, and I have very narrowly constricted respect for Sylvester Stallone, but this morning their interview provided a moment that made me laugh aloud.

Simon asked Stallone if there was one more Rocky movie i him, a movie in which Rocky actually (finally) adjusts to civilian life, learns to love running a restaurant, comes to terms with age and mortality. Stallone answers that No, moviegoers want to see Rocky box — Rocky 5 was a flop because Rocky was only coaching in that movie, when the fans want to see him in the ring.

At this point, the two start brainstorming, as though they were pitching a concept to studio eexecs.

“He could fight older guys!”
“In a retirement home!”
“He could beat up grandpas!”

Thanks, guys.