Popular Culturality

The other night, Margaret and I went to see Azkaban; tonight, we’re accompanying Nate (for his birthday present) to Ravinia to see Ben Folds and Rufus Wainwright. It’s an active week, far outshining our usual “watch a DVD” or “walk the dog” evenings.

We thought Azkaban was outstanding, noticeably better wrought than the first two Potters. As so many others have observed, Chris Columbus directed the first two films as though they were children’s movies; Alfonso Cuarón, however, directs this as a suspense movie with children in the lead roles. That captures Rowling’s tone much better — Cuarón’s treatment doesn’t cloy. Everything else responds to that change in approach; even John Williams’s score sounded fresher and more adventursome, and I’m no fan of Williams. The young actors have grown into their roles, and were here given the occasional opportunity to act (whereas before, Rupert Grint was only given occasion to grimace and mug, Cuarón treats the role of Ron Weasley more respectfully — though I look forward to a Potter movie in which Ron doesn’t screw his face up in horror or terror, once). Nate and Si particularly notice that Emma Watson is no longer the little girl she once was. Emma Thompson was a treat, and the new Dumbledore took up leadership of Hogwarts with gravitas and abstraction.

I felt quite moved by the character of Lupin, and thought David Thewlis did a splendid job with the role, taking it in a direction that I hadn’t anticipated from the book. Margaret didn’t see things the way I did, so I’ll broach the possibility here as a question: did anyone else read Lupin’s role as translucent to the situation of a gay teacher forced to resign by intolerant parents? I, at least, read Cuarón and Thewlis as signaling that possibility, and I found the oblique presentation all the more affecting.

As for Folds and Wainwright, Nate has been the household advocate for Ben Folds for a couple of years now, and has won him a loyal following here. Wainwright hasn’t caught my ear yet, but we’ll pay attention and see what he comes up with.

Eloquent Summary

Dave looks back on the weblogs.com events, and concludes that “it's a rare thing when people consider your feelings in how they deal with you” — and I agree with that observation whole-heartedly.

Good News

Dave Winer has published details of a rescue mission for dispossessed weblogs.com blogs, that he and Rogers Cadenhead and Steve Kirks have set up — including 90 days of free hosting, redirects from the old domain to the new (“xxx.buzzword.com”), and lots of clarification about process and terms and expectations. Well done, all around.

As many have praised Dave for providing four years of free hosting for three thousand bloggers, let’s join in thanking Rogers and Steve for their contribution to putting together a spontaneous interim solution.

Quick Add

Jim Davila affirms Mark Goodacre’s apologia for gateway pages; I think the world of both Jim and Mark, so it’s a little vexing that I didn’t make clear enough that I’m not ill-disposed toward them, their blogs, or Mark’s magnificent gateway (one should definitely not infer from the breadth of Mark’s portal that it leads to perdition).

In few words, I’d be pleasantly surprised if we can count on top-notch scholars to devote their all-too-few research and writing hours to maintaining gateway pages. A gateway is only as reliable as its maintainer. Yes, blogs constitute a vital aspect of the metadata ecology. One valuable part of a student’s growth in maturity involves her or his learning to read not just an argument, but the metadata about the argument (and to weigh the metadata, too — nothing simply assumed here). All these things are true, and are firmly grounded in present experience.

If scholars want to be prepared for what has already happened, they’re entirely free to stop at this stage.

If they’re intrigued by what may well be coming down the pike, if they want to orient their scholarly efforts toward the future, they might do well to think beyond the present capacities of academic Blogaria, take a critical look at the affordances latent in present technologies, and consider what next-generation online research might look like. Jim points to Technorati as an example of a great thing that we can use now; my point is exactly that Technorati is a great thing now, that will be even better, in ways we can begin to estimate and prepare for now.

A Day For Leo

Happy Bloomsday, everyone — thinking especially of Tom in his Martello. . . .

Clue Chat

First we picked up the clue phone, then we climbed on the Cluetrain, and then. . . then, we had the opportunity to respond to that Instant Message icon bouncing or blinking or chirping or whatever at us.

In the ongoing wake of the weblogs.com fiasco, best chronicled from David Weinberger’s thread, not much has been left unsaid. )If you aren’t inclined to use Dave’s audio feed of the rationale, by all means consult Jeneane’s transcription.) Yes, it was free, God bless Dave for being so generous for so long; yes, there must have been some way more gracefully to handle this transition.

I first noticed that something was up when I made my daily pilgrimage to tom.weblogs.com, but I didn’t read the page closely; I figured that Tom had sent someone pesos instead of dollars, and that all would be well shortly. When the magnitude of the change sank in — Tom’s Commonplaces would be gone indefinitely, maybe forever (for all I knew) — I was amazed, and began reading more widely and more deeply. I (selfishly) don’t want Tom’s writings to just up and disappear; they’re much too important a part of my blogging years.

If, as the wise man once said, ”On the Web, we are writing ourselves into existence,” then what happens when someone turns off the switch?

One of the resonant points that Cluetrain made involved the extent to which the Web makes relationships possible in new, unfamiliar, powerful, (dangerous) ways. It’s precisely about relationships, not just tools, not just media. Dave built four years of relationships — good business and good neighborliness — and then gambled that goodwill in a single gesture. More than that, he gambled the Web-based-existence of three thousand people who had no say in his decision.

If Dave wanted to shuck off his online dependents, that was his prerogative; he had the power so to do. It doesn’t seem wise, though; it doesn’t enhance Dave’s stature as a father (and trustee) of the weblogging revolution, or increase someone’s motivation to conduct business with him, and it doesn’t seem the sort of thing most people would want done unto them. I wish Dave had tried a gentler route, and seen how much more positive response he’d have gotten.

The Six-Hundred Dollar Man

I’m guessing; I haven’t paid all the bills yet.

I sit here this morning wearing bifocals, about which I have sharply mixed feelings. I am greatly relieved to be able comfortably to read the low-contrast type in Pattern Recognition (for example). No, tremendously relieved. I’m a reader by vocation, and my alienation from various forms of type has been a Major Nuisance for too long. I don’t, however, like the way that bifocals introduce blurriness into my field of vision when I glance outside the designated, designed-in loci for viewing. Glasses are supposed to remove blurriness from my vision, and I object to seeing blurs through the lenses. That’s why I get a new pair, after all.

And I’m not sure about these new frames.

At the same time, I’ve come to the end of my occupational therapy for my thumb. My therapists have said, in essence, “We’ve done our part; there’s no point in coming back.” We’e increased the flexibility in my thumb (good thing) and decreased the pain (good thing), but the swelling hasn’t gone down (odd thing). They’re referring me back to my PCP, for her to decide what to do about the mystery swelling.

Lessons learned (and this is important, listen to the old geezer, kiddies):

• Don’t hyperextend your thumb (that’s sticking the last joint away from the rest of your hand).
• Don’t sublux the middle joint in your thumb. (That’s evidently when the joint pops into a concave configuration.)
• If it hurts, talk to a physician promptly.

The hard part comes when I try to unlearn all the physical habits I’ve developed over years of misusing my thumb. Luckily, relatively few of these involve typing, and I’ve long since stopped using my thumb on the TiBook trackpad (which involved lots of hyperextension and subluxing). On the other hand, turning sticky knobs, opening jars, cutting with a knife, turning keys, and plenty of other everyday activities entailed violating one or both of the physiological taboos about which I’ve just been instructed. (I’ll update if my doctor thinks that the swelling at the bast of my thumb needs attention.)

I Second the Motion

I’m 100% with Dorothea on this. Now I just have to buckle down and fiddle with the CSS. . . .

No Groups Allowed

James saw an unexpected leader before a recent screening of The Day After Tomorrow, and he followed it up with a visit to the UK’s “official film copyright protection body’s” site. There he learned that this group so interprets copyright restrictions as to forbid showing recordings to “a group.” So those of you in large families, line up to the left. Me, I’m just killing time till Margaret’s done, so I can have a turn watching the movie we rented. . . .

Neither of the Above

Ministry being one of the oldest professions, we’ve developed a pretty dusty repertoire of clergy jokes that were probably real side-splitters back when Hillel was arguing with Shammai, and when Paul was traveling around the Mediterranean arguing with everyone. One of these dusty gems runs something like this:

Congregant: Hey, Padre, you’ve got the connections — why don’t you do something about this rain we’e been having?

Priest: Don’t complain to me — I’m in sales, not management.

Ho, ho, ho.

I introduce this evidence, your honors, because I was talking to some people about a job recently, and at several points I found myself at a fork in the conversational road: would I say something that was likely to engender a good impression of my capacity to perform well every function for which one might turn to a priest, or would I acknowledge my limitations, at the possible risk of curtailing the whole shebang? That wheeze about “sales, not management” rang in my head as I temporized for a second, and then I realized that I’m not in either of those departments. I am, oddly enough, in R & D — devoting my efforts to getting at the truth as best I can, whether anyone decides to buy it or not.

That being clarified, I explained that several of the committee’s desiderata were not my strong suit; if they were looking for those qualities as a higher priority than the strengths I could demonstrate, then I was a flawed candidate.

We’ll see what happens later on, but for now I’m relieved that I found my corporate home. And it’s a relief that I’m in neither of the alternatives that the old joke would have assigned me.

Being Pippa’s Father

Last night I clambered into bed, and I perceived something crinkly among the sheets. “That’s odd,“ thinks I, and I reach in front of me to fish it out.

But it won’t easily slide out from the covers, so I reach in to feel the extent of the thing — and it’s huge. Not a complete nincompoop, I suspect that something is afoot, and I begin slowly and carefully to find the edges of this larger-than-newsprint sheet of paper, and to withdraw it from my sleep environment.

Lo and behold, it’s a gigantic paper heart, about as wide as our queen-size bed, on which Pippa has written, “Happy Anniversary, Mom and Dad.” By his point, she had drifted into the room and could hardly stand up for giggling and laughing at our amazement.

This, on the same evening in which Pip saw a sock monkey in a picture, and sat down and made one, on her own, with no instructions, while Margaret and I watched the Guy Ritchie movie Snatch (which we greatly enjoyed). Y’all keep an eye on that girl — she’s a firecracker.

Quiet, Everyone!

Margaret isn’t awake yet. In a while, though, when she does wake up, she’ll get out her iBook and come to this page. When she gets here, everyone jump out and shout, “Happy Anniversary!” because today’s the twenty-second anniversary of the day we married back in Rockport, Massachusetts. We’ve managed our way through a lot in the interval, and there’s a challenging spell just around the corner, but together we can make it through anything.

Wedding

Alice Oswald

From time to time our love is like a sail
and when the sail begins to alternate
from tack to tack, it's like a swallowtail
and when the swallow flies it’s like a coat;
and if the coat is yours, it has a tear
like a wide mouth and when the mouth begins
to draw the wind, it’s like a trumpeter
and when the trumpet blows, it blows like millions....
and this, my love, when millions come and go
beyond the need of us, is like a trick;
and when the trick begins, it's like a toe
tip-toeing on a rope, which is like luck;
and when the luck begins, it's like a wedding,
which is like love, which is like everything.

I delight in telling the World Wide Web and all its habitués how deeply I love her, and how thankful I am for every day Providence affords us. Happy Anniversary, dear!

Like Old Times

It’s not that I’m a cantankerous soul who revels in polemics — I just appreciate the benefit of having smart people look over what I say and press me to think better and harder. So when (quite to my surprise) Mark Goodacre, Stephen Carlson, and Torrey Seland (along with Jim West and Wieland Willker, in Mark’s comments) jumped in with criticisms of my presentation at the Theology and Pedagogy Conference, I felt a rush of delight, somewhat offsetting my chagrin at having missed the valuable points they call to my attention. The discussion reminds of me good old days in Blogaria, when we used to have rollicking arguments about postmodern thought, digital identity, Clay Shirky, and matters of less consequence.

Let me answer Mark’s terminological complaint first. He protests that “links page” doesn’t adequately describe the sort of resource he and his peers produce; he proposes as alternatives “gateways,” “mega sites,” and “super sites.” I don’feel wedded to the term “links pages, so if those who compile pages of links that point to other resources prefer that I use a different term, I’m happy to oblige. Of the improvements that Mark offers, “gateway” sounds like a very agreeable choice (I was looking for a term that characterized the function of the collection, so that “mega site” and “super site” lack the specificity for which I aimed). “Gateway” works well also because gateways admit some and exclude others, and that role harmonizes with my appreciation and criticism of these pages.

Although Mark demurs at my assessment of the bother that goes into maintaining a gateway, I’ll repeat my praise and thanks for his time and effort. Torrey (as he notes) brought the question of labor-intensiveness to the fore, and I resolutely decline to take for granted either the work others have done, or the prospect of what that task will entail for the future. Not all sites update and backcheck their links as admirably as does Mark, though, so that some once-upon-a-time gateways suffer from linkrot and overlook recent additions to the web’s pool of resources. As Mark says, “when I stop enjoying developing the NT Gateway is when I will stop doing it” — but I fear that’s my point, too, since I find the New Testament Gateway quite convenient and valuable, and I recognize that my convenience depends on Mark’s diligence.

Mark enjoys blogging, and sees ways in which blogging contributes to his maintenance of the Gateway; again, quite so! On the other hand, he asks, “Who is to say that in another five years time there will not be a similar boon to the managers of gateway resources, and which we will also think seriously about utilising?” I certainly don’t know enough about the future to rule out the sort of improvement that Mark points to, but neither do I see anything particular on the horizon — other than, perhaps, the developments I describe in search utilities, which would constitute a significant advance in a variety of ways (and not only to scholars). It doesn’t sound as if Mark has something particular in mind, so I’ll concede to him the possibility of a change that neither of us anticipates, but I’ll continue pointing out the benefits of specific changes already in the works.

Mark notes that blogging adds metadata to the pool of information about particular links; I enthusiastically assent, and I suppose that I should have made clearer in the original draft of my presentation that the changes whose advantages I tout derive much of their value from blogging (and much also from gateway pages) — so we have no argument there.

He disputes my point, however, that a gateway page “vests problematic authority in the maintainer of the links page. At this point, I want to hark back to the occasion and purpose of my presentation: a conference on pedagogy. My complaint about authority and gateway pages derives from that particular rhetorical situation. My concern about pedagogy, the emphasis of the paper as a whole, addresses helping students use technology effectively for research. If I simply point students to the New Testament Gateway or Felix Just’s Johannine Literature Guide (and I do specify these resources term after term, without any hesitation relative to the wisdom of the sites’ maintainers), I haven’t advanced my students’ research skills, I haven’t engaged them in the productive work of participating in weighing the merits of different works. Some students have been known to look at a list of “authorized” resources and simply assumed that all were of equal merit, that a source listed on a web page I name must therefore represent an unimpeachably reliable perspective.

A gateway might fairly, I think, be compared to a reserve desk at the library, where someone has selected a subsection of the library’s full collection to provide students with a smaller array of choices, all of them presumably sound. Using works from that reserve shelf involves a lower degree of discernment than does exploring the library’s full collection — it perpetuates the learners’ self-imposed tutelage, from which higher education might be hoped to emancipate them. Moreover, although I can and do rely on Mark and Felix, they aren’t the only people who maintain gateway pages, and not everyone might regard them with as much trust as do I. Add to these limitations the fact that not every gatekeeper’s judgment will harmonize with that of all information-seekers, and I think that the claim that the gatekeeper’s authority is “problematic” (not “bad” or “unreliable,” but problematic) is justified.

I’m getting sidetracked here, though, because my main argument is not that there’s a deep intrinsic flaw in gateway pages so much as that the Web, in its very Webbiness, involves characteristics that make another approach more appropriate and productive. The “link votes-seeded search” proposal I float stands to function quite apart from the bibliographic model that a gateway page instantiates. A search-based model draws on the strength of the Web, and opens the door to discoveries that may have hitherto escaped the attention, or the updating capacities, or the scholarly-ideological net of the gateway maintainer. It displays to a student searcher an open-ended list of possible resources, sorted by the likelihood that their content has earned the respectful attention of commendable scholars. And I emphasize that this resource would indeed be “open” in the sense of “open to non-academics.”

The heart of my proposal, then, is not to deprecate others’ wonderful work, but to point to a way that technologies are developing that adds capacities and benefits beyond those offered by gateway pages. I’ve argued with Felix about this before, and I suppose that I’m now in an ongoing argument with Mark; on this point, though, the future looks to me a great deal more like “refined searching” than “gateway pages.”

One of the Things the Web Is Great For

I like online dictionaries, since much of the information I seek in a dictionary appears only in the heaviest, bulkiest, least portable and convenient sources. I’d long relied on Dictionary.com, but if you have the bandwidth, Webster’s Online tops everything else I’ve seen.

Of course, if you just want the correct spelling or a simple definition, there’s no need to call up all the overhead from Webster’s. Webster’s is for browsing and reveling more than elegant simplicity (though there must be a way of making the output from Webster’s more elegant, without aggravating its bandwidth load).

Brainstorming

(a) I’ve long felt that there was value in a collection of critical reviews of culture focusing on works at least ten years old. How many times, after all, do annual awards go to films, discs, books that seem pallid and faddish a few years later? Why does the literature of reviews have to concentrate on recent works, such that the benefit of seasoned judgment often lies buried under avalanches of instant reviews? So — since I’ve recently come into some server space — I’m thinking about going ahead and starting a blog-like collection of reviews of long-past cultural production.

(b) But what would be a good title (and more urgently, a good un-taken domain name) for such a site? “Retrospection.org” is available; if I wanted “retrospective,” I’d need to register is as a “.ca” domain; “retrospect” is taken across the board. What am I missing?

Rest

Ray Charles died today.

While other performers got snazzier nicknames and more acclaim, I think I’d just as soon listen to the Ray Charles catalogue as that of any of his R&B;/soul colleagues. Maybe today God’s asking, “That second part of ‘What’d I Say,’ with the Heunnhs and the squeaks and moans, where did that come from? And beginning the song with the solos?”

Later: Not Perfection has a great idea: “I feel bad about Ronald Reagan’s passing, but let’s keep perspective. You heard the call for it here first — put Ray Charles on the ten-dollar bill. Can I get an Amen?” (via The Revealer).

Vintage Photos

Well, “vintage 2003,” that is. I decided to try out Blogware’s photo gallery utility, and it worked very well. The photos could use some manipulation, but the gallery works fine.

A New Footnote

I’ll have to take account of this article (found via Boing Boing) in the article I’m working on, but first I hope that my posse will bat it around a little. For instance, David, what do you think of the argument?

Bugs Redux

My Breedster bug seems to have recovered from its two incurable infections. I don’t know what that means, but it makes me a little more hopeful about my thumb. I mean, if a computer simulation of an anthropo-arthropod can recuperate from simultaneous digital diseases, maybe this flesh-and-bones homo sapiens can battle back against thumb deformity. . . .

Anyway, I have an egg again. Go figure.