AKMA’s Random Thoughts

For some reason, it seems as though more people have been asking me about my thumb over the past couple of months than were asking me for the year and a half before that. As a result, people shake hands with me and then pull back apologetically, and I have a lot of conversations such as this:

“No, I don’t have carpal tunnel syndrome. My thumb is hypermobile in the carpal-metacarpal joint; as I understand it, the joint seems not to hold together well, so the bones shift around in ways that rub generate extra stress and wear. I have early indications of osteoarthritis in that joint, and if I don’t wear my splint the arthritis will probably get worse quicker. It usually doesn’t hurt much, if at all (though sometimes the joint catches and gives me a nasty pain) — it’s worst when I stress the joint by squeezing (as a key) and rotating (as a key) (or as scrubbing dishes, not that it gets me out of doing dishes, alas).”

I bought an off-the-shelf splint the other day, my first that wasn’t specially set for me by the occupational therapist I saw. It’s not ideal; I may want to go back to the OT and get another custom splint. For the time being, though, it helps immobilize the carpal-metacarpal joint, which is what protects the joint, and it doesn’t look too grimly dramatic. And if you read the blog, now you don’t need to ask me about my thumb.

(As soon as I saved this, someone came over to ask, “Do you have carpal tunnel?”)

I don’t read the Chronicle of Higher Education that much, but I miss it even less. Inside Higher Education has been advancing by leaps and jumps since they started this online rival to the Chronicle. Just this week, IHE featured an article on the perils of built-in digital restrictions that sounds an even more ominous note as BlackBoard controls all the major proprietary e-learning applications; ran Alex Golub’s scintillating essay on professors as personal trainers (my advocacy of Dr. Golub’s work has nothing to do with the presence of a clergyman/professor in some of Golub’s now-inaccessible works of fanfic — didn’t anyone archive “My Weekend With Leuschke”? Later: the author function himself directs my attention to 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6); and a report on James Hilton’s recent address to the annual Educause meeting.

Alex’s essay pushes back against the so-called commodification of education, but also against educational discourses that get so student-centered that the main goal of education becomes helping students feel “empowered,” whether they have learned enough that they ought to be empowered or not. Teachers, like personal trainers, need your trust and your willingness actually to put some effort into the endeavor if you want actually to learn something. We who teach need to remember that we can’t simply requisition that trust and that interest level.

Hilton’s essay sounds like a post facto vindication of the kinds of arguments I started making a while ago, in my presentation at the first Garrett Conference on Teaching, Technology, and Cyberspace (earlier, if you count unanswered memos to administrators). More power to him!

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It wasn’t in Inside Higher Ed, but Ron Jeffries pointed to this post contra “postmodernism” by a Yale philosopher, which in turn spawned a Metafilter thread.

And Chris pointed me to a collection of “religious web templates,” which provoke me to observe that if online evangelism hinges on these, we may not have advanced the cause so very much.

Last week, Mark Goodacre’s blog and a letter from Michael Pusateri called my attention to the God Blog Con recently held in Pasadena. I had been vaguely aware that it would be happening, and I checked on the coverage when these worthies prodded me. It’s interesting, looking on from outside, to see what seems to have happened, and how people reacted.

Most of the participants were unfamiliar to me, so I’d have had a lot of meeting and getting-acquainted to do from the start. On the other hand, the topics of many sessions seemed dated to me, or to reflect a different segment of blogging (and theological) culture from that within which I feel most at home. I like conferences, so I’m sure I’d have had a good time, but there’s lots more to be said, more to explore, and further to explore, than the schedule page suggests that this year’s conference said and explored.

My delightful Early Church History class evinced some curiosity the other day about martyrs and relics. In the course of trying to address their interest, I mentioned that in the Catholic tradition, it’s customary to require a primary relic (usually an actual recognizable portion of a saint’s body) for the installation of an altar, and that St. Luke’s had an assortment of relics.

Well, of course, right away they wanted to know what the relics were. I remembered that the high altar enclosed a primary relic of St. Elizabeth Seton (at least, according to parish lore); I knew we had more relics, though, so I asked John Lukens, on whom I rely for all wisdom about our parish. John pointed me to a sealed statement from the Bishop James Montgomery (ninth Episcopal bishop of Chicago), stating that our St. Luke’s altar contained a primary relic of St. Domity, a primary relic of St. Louinian, a primary relic of St. Joachim, and tertiary relics of Sts. Benedict and Teresa.

Now, I would not be inclined to doubt the sealed affirmation of a bishop, but this placard entails several problems. First, I can find no record of the existence of a “St. Domity” or a “St. Louinian,” so the matter of their primary relics seems. . . cloudy. St. Joachim is familiar as the father of the Virgin Mary; that would attenuate the likelihood of a relic of his making its way to Evanston, except perhaps that the Catholic Encyclopedia of 1911 notes that the supposed tomb of Joachim and Anna was discovered in 1889. Perhaps that rediscovery made available relics that had long rested in obscurity.

The tertiary relics — items that had touched a saint or a saint’s relic, as distinct from secondary relics hallowed by close association with a saint — pose no great problem; I reckon that it’s pretty simple to come by tertiary relics even of Benedict and Teresa. I’ll have a lingering fascination, however, with the question of who on earth Sts. Domity and Louinian might have been. (For the time being, I’m imagining pious dowagers in the congregation whom Bp. Montgomery decided were saintly enough for commemoration here.)

I’ve survived the fall meeting of Seabury’s trustees without embarrassing myself by falling asleep at a key moment, and I’ve even sent out my notes on the meeting to my colleagues (thereby fending off my proclivity to fall down on that particular job). I think I have a workable angle on the sermon for tomorrow morning (don’t worry, Jane, it’s a long night). And as I write out the fillips and flourishes (and, to be honest, some of the supporting body copy), iTunes delights me by playing side-by-side Marvin Gaye’s “Mercy Mercy Me,” and Robert Bradley’s “Once Upon a Time,” in which he sings

Once upon a time, when I was in high school
I was in love with you, lady and you treated me so cool.
I was drivin’ a Chevy ’72 had 4 on the floor, girl,
one hundred 20 it would do
I remember Marvin Gaye, singin’,
Let’s Get It On…

And the sermon is coming together; I may even get a decent night’s sleep.

DRMA: Almost Cut My Hair by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young; Once Upon a Time by Robert Bradley’s Blackwater Surprise; Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology) by Marvin Gaye; ; Kiss Me Like You Mean It by the Magnetic Fields; ; Softly and Tenderly by Willie Nelson; ; Where Does The Time Go by Innocence Mission; Up The Wolves by Mountain Goats; Tonk by Duke Ellington; Hammering In My Head by Garbage.

Submitted manuscript, morning-long trustees meeting, afternoon class, advisee appointments and business letters, worked on the sermon, fixed dinner, back to sermon, various family (and canine) responsibilities.

One of the business items I completed today involves the contract for the Winslow Lecture book, which will be credited as four authors — so all four of us have to initial every page of four copies of our contracts, and mail the contracts around to one another, before they make their way back to the publisher. That’s a lot of initialing.

I don’t meant to slight people who live in the Yucatan, but would be all right with me if this hurricane season expired without renewing Tom’s acquaintance with FEMA (you too, e).

Every now and then, someone observes the list of my responsibilities to Seabury, to St. Luke’s, to my family, and to a variety of editors, and they ask how I manage to blog every day, too. The short answer is, sometimes I just can’t. (More later, if I can.)

My daughter is in the back yard playing whiffleball with her nine-pound Bichon Frisé Bea — and she’s heckling her own dog.

Joi and I were chatting this evening about iPod Nanos (“Nanoi”? “Nanim”?), delighting the capacities of this small machine, and gnashing our teeth at the ways that Digital Restriction Management (David Berlind is getting credit for that term lately, but I thought I remembered Doc using it years ago) monkey-wrenches the revolutionary effects that’ll overtake the recording industry eventually, like it or not.

(To illustrate my point: what other industry devotes so significant a proportion of its business energies to preventing you from maximizing your use of the product? Does your bed restrict how long you can sleep on it, or with whom? Does your lawn mower work only on your property? What if you had to pay twice as much for a home appliances that only worked up to your property line, and shut down as soon as they contacted the border of your property? You’d better not move; you’d better have a very clear idea of where your property line begins, and not use your tools too close to that line, just to be sure. And remember, you’re paying extra for the technology that makes these hypothetical tools less useful.)

We were imagining the world I wrote about last month, in which Nani are just a little less expensive. You buy one for your sweetie, and load it up with music — do you really re-purchase every selection all over again, to fill up a 2-gig (you cheapie) iPod, or do you just download songs from your CD and mp3 collections? You have a friend whose musical taste you want to improve — you buy him an iPod and. . . what? $500 worth of bluegrass music he may not like? You know a DJ, an archival-music whiz, or just somebody with whiz-bang taste in music; what makes more sense than that they fill your iPod with files they have right on hand? And I’d bet that the situation only gets hairier, faster, as TV-on-iPod becomes more generally available.

I’m not at all against musicians and filmmakers earning a living — I’m against their intermediaries demanding that technological innovation accommodate carved-in-stone business practices, rather than requiring business practices to accommodate innovation. “Your failed business model is not my problem.” (And now that I notice that Meg has given up the subway-tile design for her blog, I may try my hand at it; I always loved that design.)

I can’t imagine that as iPods grow more affordable, more common, and more capacious, that the music-buying public will remain docile about intrusive restrictions on the simple act of copying a file. There’s tons of profit to be made in other areas, friends, with an extra-big helping for those who get there first.

[Later: By the way, I wanted to tip my hat to Joi for a post earlier in the week, where made a specific point of acknowledging that “[he] knew nothing about Eastern Europe,” then went on to show that he took that as an occasion to start learning. With that one post, Joi provides a powerful illustration of Margaret’s and my convictions about how and when people learn. On the other hand, it looks as though he’s spending most of the time he should be working on his thesis playing “World of Warcraft.” . . .]

Over the weekend, a couple of correspondents pointed me to church-oriented sites. Congregational and Diocesan Development Issues uses a Blogger interface to outline the author’s perspective on Congregational Development. I give high marks for recognizing the value of a blog for web communications; next, the writer needs to let go of the board-room PowerPoint prose style and actually communicate. There’s no better model in Blogaria than PR blogger extraordinaire Jeneane Sessum, whose professional work you can see over at the Content Factor — but notice that the heavyweight names who get invited to address snazzy-sounding conferences with influential presentations don’t write this kind of ponderous jargon on their websites. I wouldn’t be surprised if church clients prefer their consultants to sound like this — disappointed, but not surprised — but this blog sounds like a pitch, not a conversation. (I haven’t read the blog itself closely; I can’t assess the soundness of the cong-dev proposals here, but then it’s not up to me to fight through the marketing-speak.) Oh, and the blog should get a more digestible name, and it wouldn’t hurt for you pay the modicum it would cost to get a domain name and hosting.

Over at Subversive Influence, Brother Maynard gives a useful counterexample of web-based communication. He’s linking to others, and quoting from them. He’s writing in a dialect of English that non-marketers can easily apprehend. Even though his post is quite as long as the posts at Cong and Dio Dev Issues, it’s infinitely more readable. If I wanted advice about sizing up a congregation, I’d turn to Brother Maynard in a heartbeat, but I’d procrastinate a long time (something at which I’m an expert) before I got around to contacting Congregational and Diocesan Development Issues.

Now, the point of Brother Maynard’s post (which I actually read, because it’s clear enough to read) involves a comparison between “The Purpose Driven Life” and Windows. (Why would anyone compare something about which they feel unambiguously positive to Windows? Rick warren has to know that there’s a significant constituency of people who mistrust Microsoft and dislike Windows; even if they’re entirely wrong-headed, does he think he’s gaining rhetorical yardage by comparing his version of the gospel to their least favorite operating system, an OS that they perceive as letting them down,, that they resent for having been forced onto their machines, that they imagine as an impediment to productivity and happiness? It doesn’t matter whether such people grossly undervalue the crystalline perfection that is Windows — just by making the comparison, Warren has stepped on their tows and insulted their mother. No matter how oversensitive their toes or degraded their parents, you don’t win people over that way.

I admit that I’m grouchily unsympathetic to the whole Purpose-Driven Remedy For What Ails You megaplex of books, products, seminars, and coming soon to a desperate impoverished nation far away from the USA, but I’d be much more apt to listen patiently if Rick Warren didn’t take the bold first step of unembarrassedly declaring himself to be out of touch with my interests and perspectives. I have a long way to go toward Getting Things Done, but I’m radically more receptive when exponents of effectiveness show that they have a clue.

I had never seen this before — surprising, given my well-documented interest in highway signs. The selections are limited (it would be great to have the option of adding those helpful Canadian information symbols), but it successfully distracted me for a long haul tonight.