AKMA’s Random Thoughts

I was listening to Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Pippa’s covering all the Harry Potter books in the run-up to Saturday’s book release) when I smiled to hear McGonagall’s remark, “If it were not for the fact that I never speak ill of my colleagues. . . .” I can imagine that if I were a colleague of Trelawney’s, I too might be hard-pressed not to breach the collegiality about which I care deeply.

Michael Bérubé is planning to devote a series of blogposts to explaining why intellectually-active people ought to be acquainted with what’s gone on in “theory” over the past few decades, and if the whole series lives up to the clarity of his first entry, this’ll be a memorable contribution. I wish I had had the leeway to write as conversationally as he does when I put together my book on postmodern thought, but the editors very stiffly removed almost everything that resembled informal diction. Only by my utter intransigence did the book retain the traces of relaxed exposition that it does.

(I wrote this before Michael stopped by to correct my confusion about his current base of academic operations; annoyingly, I had noticed my mistake when I went to his site to read this very post, but then I forgot to correct myself.)

David’s recent blogging about zoological taxonomies reminded me of a favorite book of mine, now beautifully reproduced online — the Aberdeen Bestiary.

Where else can you find the valuable knowledge that “when [the beaver] knows that a hunter is pursuing it, it bites off its testicles and throws them in the hunter’s face and, taking flight, escapes. But if, once again, another hunter is in pursuit, the beaver rears up and displays its sexual organs. When the hunter sees that it lacks testicles, he leaves it alone.”? Or that the deadly basilisk (Harry Potter to the contrary notwithstanding) measures only 6 inches long, with white stripes? (Not my favorite illustrations of hoopoes, though.)

Dr. Weinberger, I hope you address the relation of this taxonomic (indeed, “folksonomic”) masterpiece to the internet, along with your reflections on its more famous heirs.

I stopped writing last night at about 12:15, came back and went to sleep. I woke up this morning, had a half-cup of coffee, and set to rewriting the ending. I wrapped up the rewrite in the sacristy at about 9:45, and the service started up at 10:00, right on time. I think the sermon went all right. I’ll tuck it into the extended section, and when St. Luke’s posts the MP3, I’ll link to it here.

The version I post here will differ in some details from the PDF that I’m sending off to St. Luke’s office, and will differ from the MP3 version, too. Is there a text in this sermon?
Continue reading “Sermon Report”

Now, both Micah and David have pointed to a relatively foolish article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, the point of which is that academic job-seekers shouldn’t blog. Why? Well, if a search committee sees your blog and doesn’t like what they see, they might not hire you. They will fear that you’d tell a reading public about what their institution is really like. They prefer to hire someone about whom they know less, on the assumption that the bits they don’t know about will all be agreeable and impressive.

The fatuities and fallacies therein defy enumeration. To take it from the top, the article assumes that a job-seeker should want a job so desperately that she or he would want to be hired by a department that wouldn’t choose her or him if they knew the truth. It assumes that if they don’t know you’re a blogger when they hire you, you won’t embarrass them at any point in the future (and that if you’ve blogged soundly and discreetly for years, you’re more apt to spill tawdry details than someone who hasn’t established a track record for public discretion). It assumes that blogs constitute a unique mode of public communication — so that a disgruntled blogger poses more of a decorum risk than would a disgruntled academic novelist.

The article puts the search committee in a bad light, since it demonstrates that they made unsatisfactory choices for finalists. The problems among these candidates weren’t the blogs per se, but with character flaws that came into focus through the blog (or, in one case, apart from the blog — though the columnist seems to count the blog against that candidate anyway!). Does the pseudonymous columnist think that Duke wouldn’t have hired Mark Goodacre if they’d known? that George Mason wouldn’t have hired Dorothea if they’d known? Maybe Penn [State] can find a way to dump Michael Bérubé; what an embarrassment he must be!

The article says a very great deal more about the competence and insight of the author and the search committee than it says about blogging.

The other day I was pestering Stewart about when Flickr would incorporate e-postcard capability; I imagined a “Send as Postcard” button right there beside the “Blog This” button. Stewart suggesteed that they’d been holding off on this function so as not to overburden their servers, but that it might come soon.

What I didn’t anticipate was that somebody else would use the Flickr API to send Creative Commons-licensed photos as postcards — but that’s just what Delivr has done (link via Tom Coates). Ultra-cool! I’ve already sent a Pippa-postcard. . . .

Until the day that nobody ever reads another Left Behind novel (except, perhaps, as an exercise in historico-literary curiosity), one cannot link often enough to Fred “Slacktivist” Clark’s painstaking dissection of exactly what makes these The Worst Books Ever Written.

Right now, if you Google “left behind,” Slacktivist comes in behind a number of the LaHaye/Jenkins franchise moneymakers and the federal government’s underfunded education initiative. If we all link to his Left Behind category archive, maybe we can push him to an above-the-fold PageRank, so that searchers can see the antidote on the same screen as the theological, literary poison.

Having a hard time with the sermon. That is all.

[Later: One of the side benefits of being stuck for a sermon has entailed a rush of good ideas for my Ekklesia Project talk. The sermon, however, is still resisting. I’m considering the possibilities of homiletical Pictionary for tomorrow morning. . . .]

Margaret and I enjoyed meeting Philip Blond a few years back at the annual theologians’ meeting — but we hadn’t heard or seen much from him since. I was interested to see that he and a friend of his have a column up in the International Herald Tribune on “how the West gets religion wrong.” I’d wish for more precision, less punch, at a few points — but it’s worth reading and considering, anyway.

Last week, I received emails out of the blue from a high school friend (with whom I don’t think I’d communicated since we left for our colleges) and a former student. (Hi, Rob! Hi, Vito!) Now I’m trying to track down a couple of former students, whose wedding sermon had mysteriously vanished from my digital archives. This afternoon, as I was straightening up the study for a visit from Nate, I found the missing wedding sermon, and want to pass it along to my friends. I’ll post it here in the extended portion of the post, sans names, while I try to pull together the shards of a sermon for St. Luke’s this Sunday.

Now Micah’s just checking in as he and Laura make their way languorously to California.

So this Web thing — it’s really great for sociality. I worry that people who don’t get thoroughly involved with the Web will become isolated, cut off from the people around them.
Continue reading “Bless the Web”

Does anyone in the U.S.A. need another tote bag?

I think we could solve a great many problems by the creative re-purposing of the cornucopia of tote bags that we’ve received at various conferences over the years since the conference tote bag has become a de rigeur tschochke. Maybe the irrepressible imagination of Gary Turner can devise appealing uses for these otherwise redundant vessels. (Yes, we can start by taking them shopping with us, and not using so many hydrocarbons and paper products — but I’m thinking even beyond that important possibility.)

I tend not to pay much attention to my blogroll; I use my bookmarks more for navigation, and my newsreader for a sense of what’s going on at the moment. So the blogroll falls dusty, while I merrily navigate by other means to sites I enjoy.

But then I need to play catch-up, and with the recent arrival of Raisin and Laurel, I needed to add Debra and the Archer along with our newer neighbors to my blogroll to keep up with Seaburian bloggers (I think I’ve got ’em all, now, don’t I?). Welcome to Blogaria, and I hope you find it as refreshing and encouraging a community as I have.

[Later: Whoops! I had a lingering feeling that I had left out whose blog had been an immediate provocation to update. Sorry, Brooke — Seabury alum, former student, current colleague!]

[A few minutes later: Gentle Jane reminded me that I had also left off Mark and Todd, among my own academic progeny, and Emily, who graduated a year or two before I arrived at Seabury. This sort of embarrassing development illustrates my utter detachment from my blogroll, since I knew well enough where to find them.]