Of course, because it’s changing, I no longer see the edges of my picture of Margaret all the time, so there’s something to be said in favor of stability, too.
Such has not turned out to be the case. The problems derive at least to some extent from our server configuration, and not at all from an unwillingness on Ben Trott’s part to help out. He’s already spent ages supporting the installation, and I don’t want to bother him asking for more of his time. But things aren’t working, everyone’s looking at me as though I was caught pouring maple syrup into the seminary server, and I’m ready to beg for help. If someone wants to walk me through creating a new blog, I’d be most appreciative (IM would make an ideal medium).
Forewarning: it looks to me as though one big problem involves permissions on the server, which (although I have admin access and have tried to change from this end using Fetch) seem to be unchangeable.
Now it’s a chat, not an interview with a (presumably) prepared host, and it was conducted under the auspices of Christian Scientists (who almost certainly look on the topic differently from the way I do)—but it was still frustrating to encounter a pronounced discontinuity between this lengthy conversation and so many of the dimensions of the topic that I’d have wanted to hear about.
I’m excited to see so intensely capable a person take command of the multivariate phenomenon of a tech conference; I wish I could go to watch Halley stomp all the potential glitches (just as I wish I could go to the Digital ID conference in Denver, where so very many other people from our online diaspora will be going, but there’s just no way on earth I can both attend the conference and pay the grocery bills).
My advice to any attendees: don’t stand between Halley and a problem.
People often talk about blogging and professionalism: whether one ought to be paid for blogging, who deserves to be paid for blogging, whether pay would corrupt the moral purity of amateur bloggers, and so on. Much of the “should” discourse overlooks certain probabilities and comparisons.
People will eventually be paid for blogging. Evidently Andrew Sullivan already makes good money from his blog (I don’t know, I avoid it on principle—not the “money” principle, but the “self-congratulatory prig” principle), and sooner or later widely-read bloggers such as Instapundit (see above, the “warblogger” principle) will be accepting benefits for product placements, or outright endorsements. Would that affect the amateur purity of their blogs? Do they have any left to affect?
Let’s take a different, more interesting case. Wood s lot (“Two years, still no apostrophe”) offers readers a fabulous resource, more rich and stimulating information than I can possibly read in a day. It must take Mark ages to find, read, excerpt, prepare, and post all that he does, and no one pays him a cent. Would it harm Mark’s soul if some foundation were to send him a new computer (preferably, of course, a Macintosh), or a check to help him pay for repairs, or even a check to go into his bank account and there do whatever his heart desires? Well, it might harm him; we can never know the consequences of our intended beneficence. But the odds seem pretty long to me, and to be honest I wish it were Mark who were in the position to decide, rather than volunteer guardians of purity.
Maybe Mark would tend to favor the kind of clippings that his benefactor favors (“Archer Daniels Midland, bringing you all the most fascinating blogs that defend genetic manipulation of crops”), but I doubt it. Maybe Mark would be too busy revelling in his newfound wealth to keep his blog up to date, but that would be uncharacteristic and self-defeating. Maybe it wouldn’t change his blog a whole lot, but would help him feel as though someone who liked his work wanted his life to be a bit more comfortable.
For my two cents worth (that’s two cents Canadian, so it won’t cost me much from the US), if there are any bloggers whom someone should support for their work, the list begins with Mark.
These meetings used to run from 10 to 3, with an early getaway on the second day; now they’re 9 to 4, and I may be late for dinner tomorrow. This is perhaps one way in which modern business models penetrate church life: a proliferation of Dilbertian meetings, at which I used to play the role of Asok, but am modulating to Wally.
Between his landing at O’Hare (followed by a cab ride into town with a garrulous Mauretanian driver named Mohammed) and his dinner appointment, Chris and we talked over drinks and a plate of appetizers so tiny that they could only have been served at an Extremely Elegant bar. Conversation ranged from pharmaceutical regimes to therapists to partners to children to work to other bloggers to, and this is really important, the extent to which we all hold each other together. A splendid time was had by, at least, us.
is now majoring in Music Theory at Eastman School of Music. . . .
Dar Williams, “Playing to the Firmament”
Way back in the old days, I spent some time haggling with wise and ardent online friends about pseudonymity, identity, and integrity (this link goes to a post that collects a lot of other links, from which a visitor may sample what everyone else was thinking). One point that numerous friends made, repeatedly, was that pseudonymity allowed them to say freely what they wanted to write about their jobs, neighborhoods, families, and so on. In response, I maintained that I understood the exigencies of speaking in public, but that “speaking freely” and adopting a pseudnym were not so much correlated as antithetical: a pseudonym permits one to let out exactly what one feels one can’t speak freely under one’s own name.
I’m revisiting that debate this morning in response to Mike Golby’s invitation to take up his cause in a conflict between his family and his blog. Evidently some of Mike’s relatives objected strenuously to the candor and breadth with which Mike recounts the daily history of his extraordinary marriage and admirable life. While many of Mike’s readers see in the blog a soul-searing narrative of life’s struggle against hostile circumstance, these relatives of Mike’s saw a blot on the escutcheon, an admission of frailties apparently otherwise unknown to the name of Golby (or “Smythe” or whatever; I’m assuming the objections come from Golbys because it would take extra energy to associate Mike with relatives of a different name, whereas any Golby I meet will now elicit from me the query, “Are you related to the great Mike Golby?”). Mike asked that his friends stand up for free speech and candid blogging, and after allowing a couple of days for my thoughts to settle (and for others to have better ideas first), I’m answering his invitation—half way.
Like Jonathon, I demur at the suggestion that Mike’s “right to free speech” warrants our support and intervention. I’m amenable to free speech, by all means, but (again, as Jonathon points out) the heart of the matter here concerns not Mike’s rights, but his practice of honesty (well, allowing for some occasional exaggeration). Where convention dictates that people pretend that the domestic relations of every family are jolly, cheery, polite, affectionate, sober, chaste, responsible, and commendable in every respect, Mike reminded us that few families actually live out that sentimental myth (Jonathon was right about “sentimentality,” too).
Worse still, Mike’s writing admitted that his own family departed from the sentimental ideal. That admission infuriated some members of the family, participants in the sentimental illusion.
I admire your writing, Mike, and I admire your love for your family; above all, I’m awed by your truth-telling (and when I chacterize your writing as “truth-telling” I readily admit the likelihood that some of what you tell involves a different sort of freedom, the freedom to get at the truth in non-straightforward ways). One part of freedom and candor involves what one chooses to tell, what one tells without deliberately deciding to, what one has to tell come what may (here I’m quite on board with Dorothea)—then living with what happens next. Where some of us (myself included) try to exercise careful selectivity about our topics and the names we mention, Mike shows us bone and ligament, trusting the cleansing effect of air and light, but that’s too much visibility for some.
So where Jonathon urges you to stand fast as an artist, Mike, I counsel you to do what truth obliges you to do. Not in the name of “rights,” those malleable implements of political convenience and inconvenience, but in the name of life.
“Life is sad | life is a bust | All ya can do is do what you must | You do what you must do and ya do it well. . . .”
Bob Dylan, “Buckets of Rain” DRMA: "Playing to the Firmament" by Dar Williams; "Hey Joe" by Jimi Hendrix; "Lovesick Blues" by Leon Redbone; "Head" by Kirsty MacColl; "Come Ye Disconsolate" by the Dixie Hummingbirds; "Working Class Hero" by John Lennon; "I Believe (When I Fall in Love With You)" by Stevie Wonder; "One Nation Under a Groove" by George Clinton.
Monday, September 16, 2002
( 10:24 PM )
Okay, Here Are Mine
When Elke’s ahem, busy, she’s reading, and she invited us to peruse her shelf—except that I hade to squint and flop my head back and forth to puzzle out what these books’ titles were. Some were pretty obvious, others less so; some were in German (which, conveniently, I read about well enough to make out book titles, not to converse), and that means that in accordance with International Inconvenience Protocols, the titles of books printed in the USA have to be printed in a direction opposite to the direction used on other nations’ books, perhaps to confuse The Enemy. Anyway, I mused that it would be kind of Elke to share with the rest of us just what those titles were. So she did.
I have to admit, I still can’t tell which are Gulliver’s Travels and Alice in Wonderland, and I pride myself on my spine-reading capacity (cultivated over years of sidelong glances at acquaintances’ bookshelves and, all the more tricky, record collections). The books and records that one chooses to own, or especially to put out where people might find them, reveal an awful lot about one’s character, and I haven’t hesitated to seek out that revelation.
Anyway, up in our bathroom now (not the general bathroom downstairs, but the bath adjacent to out bedroom) are a Lives of the Saints, a compilation of urban legends, a book about 1001 Facts About Natural Disasters (or something like that—I’ll correct it later), a book about Baudrillard, and a book of quotations from the early theologians. One or two crossword puzzles that Margaret hasn’t finished yet make their way to the rest room awaiting completion. But despite the recent spate of photos on this site, we will not be broadcasting an image of our book array (an ungainly stack of books rising from the floor).
[Okay—here’s the corrected, full list of our bathroom reading, beginnning from the top of the stack:
The Avenel Dictionary of Saints, Donald Attwater
Jean Baudrillard: The Defence of the Real, Rex Butler
Alligators in the Sewer (urban legends), Thomas Craughwell
1001 Answers to Questions About Earthquakes, Avalanches, Floods and Other Natural Disasters, Barbara Tufty
The Westminster Dictionary of Christian Theology
A Dictionary of Early Christian Beliefs
Christian Theology: An Introduction, Alister McGrath
The Mac Bathroom Reader (I have to give that back to Josiah)
Understanding Modern Theology vol. 1, Jeffrey Hopper
Hmmmm. . . .]
Then this morning, I went out to Christ Church in Winnetka to help with a healing service, and Jim McGee read the lesson.
Did someone ever suggest that blogging might put a crimp in your social life?
the entirety of your experience resides within a faith that seems as if it must, to be true to itself, refrain from a vain descrying of signs of divine reality in sensory things and then making all of us feel rotten, unelect, or suspicious of your sanity when we don’t “see” them too. I'm not making this very clear, but I think I'm talking about authenticity. (I also relate this to my interest in allegory. I instinctively mistrust anyone marketing belief based on evidences of miraculous intent. I don’t from some policy mistrust belief in the miraculous per se.)
On the other hand, people jump far too quickly to the pole of making “doubt” a badge of honor, as though only intellectually moribund people actually drink the Kool-Aid that theologians teach. I’ve heard sermons (really, more than one, though I’m still astonished by it) that suggest that “Jesus was a heretic, so we all ought to be heretics, too.” So many problems beset that line of talk that it’s hard to know where to begin purging them, but we can at least allow that there’s something dodgy about the church lobbying against faith. (I’ll parse some of the other specific incoherencies another day, if I’m bored.)
If you’re not a believer who just says, “Of course, there can’t be any question, questioning is a sign of weakness or sin, I ansolutely believe absolutely everything my favorite pastor/teacher/evangelist assures me that the Bible means” (on one hand) or a haughty skeptic who disbelieves everything the Pope thinks, just on principle, then what’s left?
For me, what’s left is a daily effort to respect the actuality of suffering, the improbability of this whole “faith” matter, and the inevitability of my allying myself with the saints, loved ones, teachers, and friends who have shown me Truth. Though not all of them profess Christian faith, and some explicitly disavow it, I have from their insight and wisdom better understood what it is that I can’t help believing, the exquisitely (invisibly?) subtle plot line that weaves the multifarious melodies of the world I observe into a peculiar, idiosyncratic, syncopated, sublimely harmonious non-fictional novel in which we all are characters. They have bound me to the Truth they have taught me, ardently as I sometimes wish I could escape, unlikely as it all looks. They have made me a faithful man against all the odds, and against my own (one-time) deliberate intention, and against the currents that draw me away toward the satisfactions of a life lived without the conundrums that my faith continually raises.
Against these, and toward a joyous affirmation that whatever I have misunderstood or stated poorly, however I have fumbled or fallen short, whomever I have wronged, my cracked pot jumbled full of goodness and foolishness, aspirations to holiness and addictions to self-indulgence, my smallness cannot diminish the grace and constancy by which the Truth makes the most of what I offer, and brings me along despite myself to share in a peace which passes human understanding.
DRMA: "Monkey Business" by Bonnie Raitt; "There's A God Somewhere" by Dorothy Love Coates; "Shake It Up" by the Cars; "Old Time Religion" by Staple Singers; "In Memory Of Elizabeth Reed" by the Allman Brothers Band; " Zydeco Gris Gris" by Beausoleil; "Like Clockwork" by the Boomtown Rats; "One in a Million" by the Pet Shop Boys; "New Madrid" by Uncle Tupelo.
He seems like a nice guy.
Has he written any books?
Would he come speak to us?
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