Outta Here

For the Record

• Jews have suffered a distinctively persistent and pervasive sort of obloquy and persecution (often, especially, at the hands of Christians).
  

• I am against war, terrorism, violence, harassment, and assassination (including character assassination)
  

• I am for the truth
  

• I think I can trust that no one's surprised when I add that the truth is complex
  

• I enjoy changing my mind, when someone gives me a good reason to

The End. . . Or Just the Beginning?

And as Scott McCloud has argued at length, the web provides a fabulous setting for comics. Comics as a literary gesture go back to cave paintings--one can make the case that comics are the most enduring form of literature humankind has produced.

My academic interest in comics derives, in fact, (a) from the web's capacity to put anyone in a position to publish her or his own comic--and such endeavors are indeed thriving online (as Get Your War On illustrates), and (b) from their association with a fascinating chapter in the history of biblical interpretation and the material conditions of publishing, the period in which "Pauper's Bibles" were the equivalent of runaway bestsellers in late medieval Europe. The Pauper's Bibles were something like the Classic Comics version of the Bible, or stained glass windows that you can carry around with you--illustrated summaries of what's important. These come together at a radically-different technological moment, but a moment that promises much for the conversations that constitute biblical interpretation. Permalink -Main Page-
      ( 9:15 AM )  

Nostalgie de la boo

There Goes the Surprise

A moment of biographical digression: as one of my companions and I observed in email yesterday, a sizable proportion of the U Blog faculty are exiles from the sacred precincts of physical-world academia, and so far as I know, Jeff Ward and I are the only active practitioners on the roll. This is not an accident, and indeed has provoked in me certain musings about my own vocation (if the online friends whom I so respect and in whose electronic presence I bask are themselves not quite at home in the institutional academy, what am I doing there?).

Though we so far lack a mission statement--and in certain respects, I regard this as a circumstance of divine providence--insofar as U Blog has a raison d'être beyond mere whimsy and conviviality, it derives from a sense that we are (as Prof. Salo demonstrates) all teaching one another, that our capacity to teach and to learn doesn't derive from our accreditation from terrestrial agencies or our plunking down outrageous tuition checks. Not only are we already going portal to portal, we are doing so without any particular agenda other than to relish the joys of our interactions. The far-flung constellation that constitutes the wall-less, gateless, towerless, ivyless University of Blogaria shines the more brightly for our mutual association in a loosely-joined web of passions, concerns, convictions (some of us seem to be recidivists!), and respect--for one another and for those souls with whom we have not yet crossed links, and those spheres about which we don't yet know. The heart of U Blog lies in receiving patiently and giving freely.

Oh, dear!

I will read all this more closely tomorrow morning, when the dishes are done (Jonathan will sympathize) and I've had enough sleep attentively to pore over Dorothea's literally painstaking labors and our friends' interested contributions, I will read and learn, read and learn. But again, many, many thanks to you all.

Kool-Aid, CSS, Tables

Since I never had an ideological investment in HTML tables, I don't have any discomfort in switching over to CSS. But don't think that just because I'll be moving the site to a CSS base, I accept any binary division in the world between CSS people and tables-people. Permalink -Main Page-
      ( 11:37 AM )  

University of Blogaria Appointments

Now, since the Happy Tutor has been raising vast sums for this useless endeavor, and since we occupy a conceptual campus without boundaries and with infinite resources, I'm wondering if Jenny will accept a position as the Borges Prof. of Shifted Library Science, together with oversight of the Library of Babel? Permalink -Main Page-
      ( 10:54 AM )  

Binary and non-, Mike and Me

I'm not quite so comfortable with Mike's rumination that "In my experience, I have found that all people have some set of issues which they pretty much see as black and white." I mean, I don't doubt his experience; I too have met very many people who regard very many issues as simple pro-or-con matters. Such an outlook provides the staple food of US political and media culture. Does anyone not know a lot of such people? On the other hand, I wonder whether that proves anything noteworthy. Wouldn't we prefer to enter into a complex world with more people who acknowledged that the world was complex, as opposed to having to deal with more people who deny it? I shudder at the propect of dealing with even more interlocutors who flat-out know that there are two kinds of people in the world, or that if you're not in favor of the policies that (fill in the name of your favorite columnist or political figure here) favors, you are (fill in your favorite discussion-ending dismissive insult here: "hopelessly naive," "coopted by the power structure," "a fascist," "an anarchist," blah blah blah).

This doesn't entail an irresponsibly Laputian out-of-touchness. Instead, it implies the firmest grasp of reality I can understand: matching complicated thinking to complicated problems. Of course, there comes a time when one must take action; but I hope that our actions derive from deliberation that marks and respects the complexities of the situations we deal with, rather than reducing them (as I suggest in this series of posts) to binary alternatives.
Permalink -Main Page-