The Cranky Professor

Leninists of the World Unite! You Have Nothing to Lose But Your Mailing Lists!

You know there's hope for the former Soviet States when there's room in the world for specialized Worker Party Scams! Link from the Communist Party of Great Britain Weekly Worker -- honest!

But then perhaps this is all a great reverse-scam to induce a false sense of security in the bourgeois West?

Hmmmm.

(I found this at Hit and Run, the blog for Reason magazine. I think the name of their journal tells us much of why Libertarians will never win -- calling your journal "Reason" is like calling yourself "a Bright" because you don't believe in musty old non-naturalistic forces.)

An Educated Opinion

Come here for medieval, medievalism, church architecture, ecclesiology, and faculty politics. For an educated opinion about the 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time, go read my friend Shelton's take. What you're getting into if you click is an opinion that begins "...the rest of this list is loaded with egghead rock-critic stuff." Instructive. And I mean that in the technical sense.

A Misty-eyed Time for New Beginnings

Or maybe just the depressing start of another year. You decide.

Ms. Jacobs brings you "Clown College" (and she doesn't mean the one in Sarasota).

Doctor Weevil's at Parent-Teacher night cruising pron sites.

The Invisible Adjunct is looking at Fashion in College Brochures

Professor Drout is talking shop

Professor Miller isn't home yet.

The Old Oligarch is showing regrettable signs of wanting to become a reference librarian instead of a professor. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

Professor Burke seems to be spending time getting ready for class instead of blogging. Procrastinator!

And that Other Damned Medievalist hasn't blogged since early July.

Oh, well.

Me, I've updated my webpages. The syllabus for the Tuesday-Thursday Art 101 survey is already xeroxed. I'm ready to roll!

Smaller, Lighter, Faster

My 12" Powerbook is smaller, lighter, and faster than my 12" iBook. The 17" Powerbook is certainly LIGHTER at an advertised weight 6.8 pounds than these 11 pound 17" behemoths. Remember when "luggable" was "portable"? The review Gizmodo links to says "But unlike the large though still portable [Apple] 7-pound G4, these newer entries—at around 11 pounds—are best thought of as transportable machines to replace a desktop PC."

Luckily I'm not in the market for a 17" screen, so I don't have to decide if that much more weight is worth saving money.

Guess What Email Client We've "Chosen"

Yes, my campus IT folks are compelling us to use Outlook. Of course no one much will use the calendar function (especially no one on committees I'm trying to find a workable schedule for, I'm just sure). It is amusing to the Mac persons that this is happening a week after Sobig.

John Gruber at daringfireball.net has an interesting essay on email, hackers, etc., etc.

What made the Good Times message so annoying wasn’t just that it was a hoax, but that it was such an easily-refuted hoax. Panicked newbies forwarded and re-forwarded the message ad nauseam, but the truth was that not only was there no such thing as the Good Time virus, but that it wasn’t even possible. There was no way for a virus to spread by opening or receiving an email message.

What progress we’ve made in eight years, huh?

The rest is long but interesting. He's covers all the bases. Go read it.

Movies We'd Forgotten We'd Paid Money to See

Confess -- did you see Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band in the theater? I at least had the excuse of having been young. My friend Shelton has no excuse for having rented the DVD, but at least he saves you the pain in his review! Warning - spoilers!

Alright. I Give In.

I am not given to generic distaste for the French or France -- I like the place and the people have never seemed unpleasant to me. Their history explains much of their crankiness (you go from being the most important place in the world to a second grade power between 1810 and 1870 and see what that does to YOUR self-esteem), and I'm all about historical context (which is different from 'root causes').

So I dismissed the "heat deaths caused by family neglect" thing last week. Surely not!

But look at this BBC story. Not only are there lots of unclaimed bodies ("Maybe they don't have relatives - a great-nephew or otherwise - who is interested in a burial," [Paris mayor] Mr Delanoe told the French news channel LCI.) but they are burying them without identifying them!

Compare that to the tissue identification of 9/11 victims.

What's with these people? Was the "rescue" effort so disorganized you don't know what apartment the body came from? Can't do enough research to find the 10,000 empty beds? What happened to the French police?

Information Wants to be Free

The Washington Post has an interesting article this morning about script death -- Why did Egyptian and Mayan hieroglypics and Mesopotamian cuneiform die out?

How Long Did the One Child Policy Last?

This provides a literal example of the "Psychiatric Medicine Works By Oppressing Women." Doping women psychiatric patients and selling them as brides. 70 million bachelors. This does not sound good.

Tone of Voice in Blogging

Even Professor Reynolds has a hard day.

I use emoticons for email -- sometimes that's all I send. I prefer the lo-tech typed version to the wittle picture ones generated by some programs. They are necessary complements to a silent medium to convey tone of voice.

But then there are people who just don't get irony, and there's nothing we or medical science can do for them.

A Bullet to the Brain

Via the irreplacable Evil Conspiracy to Reduce Content that is Powerpoint.

Edward Tufte, who has done too many things to bother listing in an appositive, points out the inherently nasty metaphorical structure of the system:

PowerPoint's pushy style seeks to set up a speaker's dominance over the audience. The speaker, after all, is making power points with bullets to followers. Could any metaphor be worse? Voicemail menu systems? Billboards? Television? Stalin?

Have you ever done the experiment of ordering the transcript of a television show and counting the words? Neither have I, but I'm assured that all the words in a 30 minute television news show would fit above the fold on a single piece of newsprint. Powerpoint is rewarding that style over serious writing.

When I was in an interdisciplinary graduate program we art-historically-inclined sorts referred to using slides (old fashioned kodak slides of art) as "blinding them with science". Hardnosed professors of comparative literature would soften like butter left on the kitchen counter as the lights dimmed. Getting serious feedback on a presentation that involved slides was difficult -- one often got good criticism on the written version several weeks later, but most people seemed too charmed by the pretty pictures to think.

Now of course we used that to our advantage -- but much the same thing happens in a lot of Powerpoint presentations.

Tufte is the last person to denigrate the visual demonstration of information (go look at his website) -- but maybe he's the best person to stand athwart 'progress' shouting 'Stop!'

Oh, Dear

If Gizmodo wasn't enough, somewhere I wandered into Kevin Kelly and his Recommendo (and all his other stuff, too).

A Little Visual Culture Note -- What's up with porch wreaths?

I live in the historic district of the lovely little city of Geneva, NY, where almost every house has a porch wreath.

After I got back from Italy I noticed that many of the front doors in the historic district have a wreath hanging even in mid-summer. Perhaps this has been going on for much longer -- but if so the wreaths were one of those standing-too-close-to-see phenomena.

Some of the wreaths are tasteful pepperberry or eucalyptus pepperberry wreaths, some are artificial flowers. My favorite is a wreath made of dried grape vine (I think), which would be what was passing for "contextual" a few years ago in architecture.

These wreaths seem to have replaced the porch flags so omnipresent a few years ago. Indeed, they are themed in the same way. Have a new baby boy? Have a new baby girl? Go here to buy the appropriate wreath over the internet (always my favorite way to shop).

But why?

Here's my quick guess -- remember, I am a professionally certified art historian and visual critic.

I think it's another 9/11 phenomenon.

After the enormous outburst of American flag display that began 2 years ago the porch flags with kitties or flowers seem shallow. Yes, they're still available, but the google hits for porch flags start with patriotic selections.

The urge to mark the liminal experience with personal "taste" so neatly encouraged by Martha Stewart (yes, yes, jargon, but accurate) is still there but displaced onto a smaller and more intimate object. Genevans are reserving their flag-holders for national symbols.

By the way, wondering about loveliness? Here's the Chamber of Commerce site -- they offer a virtual tour of their little building. Honest. The Historical Society has some nice pictures.

Here's a much more interesting series of photographs by fellow-blogger, former-Genevan, professional designer Patrick Calder.

"Since you aced the SAT, you must know the meaning of HUBRIS!"

Via Professor Reynolds we read at Begging to Differ about a world-class case of senioritis -- 1600 on the SAT but blows off so much of the senior year that UNC has retracted his offer of admission. Said student sues, of course. Being a snarky Dukie the blogger is even LESS sympathetic than he might have been.

For ongoing coverage, see Kimberly Swygert at Number 2 Pencil - edublogger extraordinaire and alumna of the institution in question. She identifies this as "Blair Hornstine With Barbecue." Actually, I identify it that way. But it fits.

Child Geniuses Need Not Apply

That standby of August news, the 13 year old who is ready for college, is being rejected by British universities because his teachers would be unqualified to teach a child.

Adam, from Arlesey, Bedfordshire, was hoping to read biochemistry, but universities say legislation prevents him from studying.

If Adam were to attend university, all of his lecturers would have to be screened to allow them to teach children.

Lovely.

I found this via Mr. Alan Forrester's Elegance Against Ignorance blog.

I am a PROPHET

They're coming for our caffeine! Follow me to Brazil, my people!

For at least ten years I have been telling people to stick up for smokers because caffeine is next. Ah, they have laughed at me, the waitresses with both brown and orange-rimmed carafes.

NOW WE SEE IT!

First they raise the taxes.

Then they identify Second Hand Caffeine Effects*

Next thing you know there will be designated coffee drinking areas outside office buildings.

Listen to this rationalization for opprression:

"The property tax is compulsory, you have to pay it. With the espresso tax, you can choose if you want to pay it. It taxes people who can afford an extra 10 cents. It is benign. It is also sustainable, it will raise the money year after year," Markham said.

Trees are a sustainable resource, not coffee drinkers!

Book me a flight for Rio -- I'm leaving this fascist police state.

*You think I'm exaggerating? I'm sure the same people using waiters and waitresses as part of the 'no smoking in NY restaurants' campaign (there was a billboard on highway 14 out of Geneva until recently touting their rights to a smoke free workplace. Every waitron *I* know smokes.) will soon use the "problem" of carrying two carafes, one caf one decaf, around to blame carpal tunnel on me and my coffee habits.

Oh - and I was alerted to this most recent attack on our rights by Don Jim Tucker, who is cordially invited to flee with us as chaplain to our colony of the caffeinated-English-speakers in Brazil.

Nail. Head. Hit.

The New York Times had an article yesterday about 64 bit processors (and Apple, naturally - the G5 was shipping). Here's what struck me:

Thirty-two bit processors are limited to a theoretical maximum of handling 4 billion bytes of RAM per task. (A byte equals eight bits.) But by the magic of exponential math, a 64-bit processor can theoretically handle 16 quintillion (or 16 billion billion) bytes of RAM. For all current practical purposes, that is an infinite amount.(my emphasis)

Yes, I have a new computer and am installing software. And I'm old enough to remember the first Macintoshes delivered to Rice (Hanszen, 1984) which ran MacWrite. 128K. 1 Floppy. My. Times change.

Weird iTunes Music Store Hits

So I'm poking around on the iTunes Music Store (wirelessly, baby!) and I see an "explicit" note. Now I'm not searching in the Rap section, so I read more closely. Puccini. Turandot, Act III. What? I click for a preview of the "explicit" song -- Nessun dorma! I guess it's labelled for implied sex and violence?

Of course the teaser sentence on Amazon.com for Rebecca promises -- umm -- a little more than Lawrence Olivier and Joan Fontaine deliver: "Rebecca is an ageless, timeless adult movie about a woman who marries a widower but fears she lives in the shadow of her predecessor."

The Current Wave of D.I.Y. Mediocrity

Mr. Lileks informs us that:

The last two days I have been tinkering with Soundtrack, for purposes of review, mind you. This is work. This is a duty. Soundtrack is an Apple program gently teased from the grasp of Final Cut Pro; it lets you, the rank amateur, create your own music for your videos. You get 5 GB (!) of clips - drums, basslines, guitars, etc. Of course you can add your own as well. Just drag and drop, fiddle, tweak. It does for music what the early look-ma-no-HTML web design programs did for the internet, which is to say it puts powerful tools in the hands of the clueless and the style-deprived. I cannot imagine how much bad music is going to come out of this.

Education Reporters - Meet Ms. Supply and Mr. Demand.

Both from the Washington Post. Different bylines.
Demand May Outpace Va. Public Colleges' Growth

Higher Education Exacts Higher Price at State Schools

Yes, budget cuts matter, too -- but economics intervenes as well.

Real Innovation

I have a brand-spanking new 12" Powerbook, but the best new technology in my life is the refrigerator pack cardboard 12-pack of Cokes* designed to fit low shelves. Why didn't someone think of this sooner? There's a 'click to enlarge picture on the link which made me realize that you can put them in doors, too! America! Got to love it.

*I'm the kind of Southerner whose family says things like "What kind of Coke do you want? A Sprite?" and mock people who call it "soda" or "pop;" so even though mainly I'm drinking Diet Dr. Pepper lately, I still call it "a coke."

Need a reason to switch?

Need a reason to switch? What about the imitation of Christ?

Thanks to the invaluable Miss Shaidle at Relapsed Catholic for this!

Nice News For Great Books Folks

Loyal alumnus gives $10 million to St. John's, the Washington Post tells us. The colleges own press release makes it clear the gift is in support of need-based financial aid at both campuses.

Read the whole article and you'll find out that in fact this is a typical story of American fund raising -- the current president of St. John's was a classmate of the donor and the donor is on the board already. Big gifts don't come out of left field -- or seldom. We have to ask for them.

It's also part of why any college or university that doesn't keep a certain number of alumni/ae around in administration or hire a few alumni/ae professors is crazy. Colleges who have an alumnus/a president sometimes make great fundraising strides -- I give you Agnes Scott College in Atlanta as an example. Of course, it helps to have an effective alumna president who's also really good at asking for money!

Covers

Did you know that Todd Rundgren had covered "Two Little Hitlers"? I want it! Or that about 20 people have covered "Alison"? I just found the Covers Project (link is to Elvis Costello, who's on my mind lately). Useful and fact-filled!

Art and Ownership - Michelangelo's David

Opinion Journal today has an opinion piece from James Beck about Michelangelo's David. Beck is one of the great experts on Michelangelo, but he's also a world-class difficult human being with a professional sideline in irritating museum administrators -- ArtWatch International.

Perhaps you read about Beck's opposition to the cleaning/restoration of the Sistine Chapel ceiling? How did you miss it? I'm not going to bother to link the stories -- ArtWatch collects them.

Here's the important sentence from today's opinion piece:

Works like the David belong to the entire world, and their protection requires compromise and justice, not factional politics and internal bickering.

No it doesn't.

What "we" all own is our internal image of the David -- or our reproductions of it (you'd think he'd never read "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction").

What Beck tends to mean by "the world" is "art historians who agree with me."

That's not who owns the David. It really galled him to figure out that the Vatican really does flat out own the Sistine Chapel, and that as a sovereign state the Vatican could enter into a contract with Nippon Television without his signature of approval (for a really silly version of the deal, read Sayonara, Michelangelo: The Sistine Chapel Restored and Repackaged by Waldemar Januszczak).

Lots of extremely serious art historians never confront the meaning of a term we bandy about all the time -- patronage. We all know that "patronage" means the process of paying someone to make something in particular. The suppressed implication is that having delivered the something the artist surrenders rights to the something -- which now belongs to someone else.*

We art historians have the regrettable habit of referring to "my church" or "my painting" (I caught myself doing it last week). If you understand that what James Beck is saying is "I understand this better than anyone so it 'belongs' to me" you understand most of his journalism. His art history is considerably more subtle.

*So far as I'm concerned the Intellectual Property Law intersection with High Art (see the Richard Serra Tilted Arc controversy) was a bad thing for everyone concerned.

Posted by crankyprofessor at 09:35 AM | Comments (4)

Mmmmmm, BETTER Toys

Yay! I'm blogging wirelessly!

Amusing Site Meter Factoids

A Google search on swygert + adjunct + professor lead someone from ets.org to my site. I'm the fourth hit! Hope the reader found the necessary pencil!

Freud? Give Me Drugs -- further.

Not that anyone asked (obviously my readers are more concerned with Pamela Anderson Bombs, which got TWO (2) comments than with psycology/analysis/psychiatry/medication), but . . .

When I said below that I've read "Freud debunkers" I mean that I've read Jeffrey Masson and a bunch of the stuff that came out at about the same time. When The Assault on the Truth came out I was in graduate school taking class after class from Jungo-Freudians or Foucaulty-Sadists and over-60-leather-wearing-biker-profs and needed some bed-time reading amusement about their little belief systems. I also came across Thomas Szasz at about the same time.

What really did Freud in for me, though, was a real historian. Carlo Ginzburg's essay "Freud, the Wolf Man, and the Werewolves" in Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method (the Ginzburg as in The Cheese and the Worms, one of the great books of 20th century history).

Ginzburg makes it clear that Freud didn't have a chance with the Wolfman. He just didn't know enough about Slavic folk material to understand the Wolfman's dreams. Just didn't. Occam's razor time kind of wrong answer.

So, when it comes to neuralgia or hysteria or stress or depression or whatever we're suffering from in this new century, I think I'll try medication WITH my talking therapy.

Symmetry is just a value...

Symmetry is a culturally conditioned value, not a good in itself.

Try to convince a class of 18 year old Americans that medieval buildings (or medieval revival buildings) are not flawed in their asymmetry and you'll understand my life come November every year.

I don't know where they learn this, but they imbibe it early -- symmetry = good, asymmetry = flawed.

Via my friend at Mirabilis.ca I learn about an excavation showing that half-civilized Romano-Britons suffered from the same complex.

Whoops! Was that a little pointed? Actually, the builders could easily have been displaced Mediterraneans deluded by a centuries old tradition of symmetry.

The story (which my friend is linking for its interesting archaeological find of a 4th century baptistery in England, a pretty rare find) tells us that someone built villa A as a typical rich villa (floor mosaics, etc.) and villa B as a shell -- a formal facade in front of barn-space.

If you go to the story previously linked at Mirabilis and click on the reconstruction to enlarge what you see is a plan that offers the promise (vaguely, but it's there) of Palladio and his great villas on the Venetian Terra Firma.

Palladio's villas were almost all working farms. The beautfiul and symmetrical outbuildings were typically farm buildings or barns and only the core block was residential. This link (in German, but with great pictures! Click on 'Computer Modell') shows the Villa Poiana, a classic of the genre. The Villa Rotonda, probably more familiar to Americans because of its associations with Monticello, was an exception -- not a farm but a pleasure house.

Now I don't dislike symmetry, but the tyranny of symmetry (try typing THAT fast without thinking about how to spell either word) is terrible. For instance, what if you don't NEED two matching villas? Do you build it anyway? In Palladio's case, the villas were often left incomplete because the extra wings were unneeded -- or because the family ran out of money.

Symmetry also disturbs the relationship between interior function and exterior representation. For instance, if one decides to make all the windows the SAME size and the SAME distance apart things can get awkward inside.

Oh, well. I'll have this argument with 30 students again soon enough. I should stop bending your ears.

Hmmm.

So. Is this one going to take the first try?

Pardon me, folks, but MT is behaving slightly strangely.

1. type new entry
2. hit save
3. get dumped back to MT login page
4. hit 'back'
5. entry is still there -- hit save
6. see 3.
4. see 4.
5. hit 'rebuild site'
6. rebuild
7. hit 'view site'
8. entry is there twice

VERY odd.

Further: MT seems to work fine from the 12" Powerbook. Dunno.

Stereotypes - Germans and Baywatch.

So I follow a link from Professor Reynolds to a story about some anti-smart-bomb measure. Would you call that a stultifier? Well, the German CEO calls it a

"...Pamela Anderson effect," explains company CEO Armin Papperger, "which simply means that we lure the hostile missile system away from the actual naval target... Just like Pamela Anderson turns a man’s head, our decoys will lure the approaching missile away from the actual target."(first ellipsis mine, second ellipsis on the linked page)

I always thought all those "Germans like Baywatch" jokes were a joke -- now I see they were sociology.

(by the way, is this an argument for gays in the military?)

Mmmm, Toys

Pardon the lack of blogging after my weekend of business -- it's not that the weather has improved, it's that my 12" G4 PowerBook just got here. *happy sigh*

Loot? Souvenirs? Fun first conversation this Fall with dissertation director!

The New Colonialist Class turns out to not be any better about bringing stuff home than old ones. I'd like to be a fly on the wall in his first meeting this fall with his dissertation director. Here's a professional page on Joseph Braude.

Now to be honest I think that cylinder seals are, by and large, pretty and unimportant once published. They also survive in enormous quantity and are exactly the kind of object that make anti-antiquity trade fundamentalists sound very strange (much like Greek and Roman coinage or little clay lamps).

However, these cylinder seals seem to be out of the National Museum (at least according to unnamed 'authorities' in the AP story). You'd think an American consultant/scholar would be more cautious. Then again, maybe you wouldn't. Merely liking to sing Umm Kulthum songs doesn't make you not a postcolonialist exploiter.

("Semi-professional oud player"? Who knew there was enough of a circuit to support the distinction between pick-up amateur coffee shop oud player and professional? Didn't Eve Tushnet used to play the saz?)

California - Give It BACK!

Matt Welch sums up solemnity in politics:

Davis has taken politics seriously his whole life, and Californians will be paying the price for decades to come. The same people lamenting the frivolity of the recall are the ones who shake their heads sadly every time voter turnout decreases another notch.

Former College Presidents

Well, I guess it's better to be under suspicion for fiscal mismanagement than the brother of a mobster on the run.

Though why the President of the disaster known as the University of Tennessee System was getting a total package of $733,550 and the President of the University of Massachusetts was getting $360,000 while the State of Tennessee whines about budget crises I really can't tell you. The University of Tennessee (pace, Prof. Reynolds) is hardly the second best public university in America. I really don't think it's in the top 10* - but then I'm from a Vanderbilt family, anyway.

*I can think of 8 general purpose big state universities just off hand that I'm sure are better in all kinds of rankings: Cal Berkeley, UCLA, Texas, Michigan, North Carolina, Virginia, Illinois, and Minnesota. Cornell's a tad hard to classify - but I'm sure it's better. I'm not sure about USC. This is a stupid list off the top of the head of someone who happens to have a Ph.D. and knows a good bit. Feel free to comment, but please don't shout at me.

Kids These Days! - I'm glad THIS didn't happen to my group

Well, here's a story of something that could have gone wrong and didn't with my term in Rome -- no disastrous romances that I heard about.

Religion By Committee

The Episcopalians in General Convention also . . .overwhelmingly adopted the 20/20 initiative to double church attendance by the year 2020 (scroll down toward the bottom to find it).

The mind boggles. I've typed and deleted three or four different comments, but I think I'll just leave it as is.

Great Chi-Com Headlines

Did you know that news.google.com brought you headlines from the People's Daily? I didn't know they had an English-language web site -- I know I'll be back.

US Troops Risk Alienating Iraqis as They Kill More

Terrified by unabated bombings and grenade attacks, US troops killed seven Iraqis on Friday, risking further alienating the war-affected people.

One of the great links current in the PD's right column (layout, not politics) is commentary on DPRK's Kim Jong Il Elected Member of Parliament. Isn't that amazing, that he won election?

Freud? Give me drugs.

If I ever suspected I was crazy I'd far rather take pills than talk to someone. Maybe it comes from being socialized to drugs by a 30 year antihistamine and decongestant habit or maybe it comes from actually having read both a fair amount of Freud and Freud debunkers. Give me drugs.

Via the 2 Blowhards I found this fine essay at Slate on the literary Freud. The only positive thing I can say about the new series is that perhaps the new translators will actually catch some of the literary merit we're repeatedly told Freud has in German. Me, I only use German for work-related reading, so I wouldn't know -- I'm certain that his literary value in the Authorized Version is practically nil. Mr. Michael Blowhard has a useful comment on the importance of this new series.

Further - oh, not that I object to talking to people. I just mean for years and years and years the way people do in especially bad examples of analysis. Maybe what I really mean is that talking about myself is not something I need to pay for.

Pitiful.

I went to check a link from Prof. O'Connor's Critical Mass about "soaring" Arabic enrollment at Berkeley and elsewhere. Here's the relevant bit from the Daily Californian:

Nearly 100 students enrolled in a record five sections of beginning Arabic last year and almost all completed the two-semester course.

The summer program has also seen a threefold increase in enrollment in the intensive Arabic summer session, jumping from the typical 20 students to 60 this year.

Even the article admits that lots of people don't continue past the first year; though they offer preregistration figures for the 100 level (55 already! golly!) they don't offer the figures for the 200 level.

In the Fall of 2002 Berkeley claimed 23,835 undergraduates and 9,310 graduate students. "Nearly 100" is a pitiful number, even if it is a less pitiful number than before.

No wonder there are so few competent Arabic speakers and readers in America.

Now This is an Unfair Whiskeypalian Stereotype

In Christianity Today the UPI religion editor Uwe Siemon-Netto makes many useful comments (especially on the Lutheran/ECUSA relationship), but falls back on what we know is an unfair and unkind stereotype. But a funny one.

So go bless the gin and tonic and pass it around with finger foods to the folks in front of this new religion's altars.

Progress. Yeah, Right.

Omigosh! I just got a replacement copy for a book that diappeared. The people at U of Toronto Press have changed their cover styles and now I'll never be able to find it! Art of the Byzantine Empire, 312-1453: Sources and Documents. The reason there's no image is that the books used to be bound in a plain, really hideous orange paper. Now it has a bad two color slick cover and they're ashamed of themselves. Should I shelve it with the other "sources and documents" books where it will stand out? Or put it with Byzantine?

Anglicans -- Bzzz?

In the first comment below Sam asks, "What the hell are you saying???"

I'm not sure why the 3 question marks -- is he appalled or confused?

First -- I am not impugning the Christianity of any Episcopalians. I am impugning any claim to 'Catholicity' of anyone remaining in communion with them.

Second -- I am asserting that the current difficulties of the ECUSA are no more important to the Roman Catholic Church than that of any other group of about 2.7 million members (see Adherents.com), other than the sentimental connection that some former members of that church feel.

The activities of the ECUSA used to be important to the Catholic Church because some people thought there were chances of union. That is no longer a possibility for the ECUSA, though some people still carry a torch for other 'branches' of that communion.

You see, Sam, the great hope of 19th and early 20th century ecumenism was large scale church reunion. Some of that went on. One of the lingering hopes in the late 20th century were different kinds of accords and rapprochments that included the Anglicans with the Orthodox and the Roman and other Catholics. That idea used to founder on the large remainder of the Anglicans who were more capital-p Protestant than small-c Catholic.

What I'm saying below is that I think there's no relationship between the ECUSA problems and the RC Church in America, other than that we're both in America. The ECUSA is no more relevant to anything Catholic than, say, the Moravians. They are not and have not been for a very long time similar in theology or church practice to what we think of as groups worth negotiating for union.

They have been ordaining divorced and remarried men for some time (I can't find a date). They have been ordaining divorced and remarried bishops, and from that point of view Robinson is no great departure.

The ECUSA is a small group in America. They are incredibly fragmented. I'm praying for 'em, but unlike some Catholic bloggers I see no particularly urgency in preparing for vast numbers of new entries into the Roman Catholic Church.

That's what I thought I was saying, Sam.

Anglicans. Bzzzzz - game over.

Alright. Let's be blunt. The gay bishop thing is only the latest 'last straw' -- it has been impossible to do more than pretend that the Anglican Communion is small-c Catholic for some time. Now we'll see what sort of communion it is.

Before the ordination of non-celibate homosexuals as priests and then bishops there was the ordination of women as priests and then bishops. However, before the ordination of women there was the ordination of remarried men as bishops.

Remember that big chunks of the Episcopal Church used to be serious Bible-believers, and there's better scripture for husband of one wife than there is for clerical celibacy (1 Timothy 3, Titus 1).

If the Roman Catholic Church has the organizational nerve to condemn evil all over the place (other than, I am sad to say, the Arab-speaking dictatorships) we can pray that they will do a simple thing -- explicitly maintain ecumenical talks ONLY with the (possibly majority) Southern Hemisphere Anglicans.

Is Advanced Placement a Good Thing? The Washington Post Actually Considers the Question

Jay Mathews of the Washington Post has an interesting story on AP courses based on conversations with an excellent teacher.

I want to share Shaffer's story of how he came to hate the expansion of AP so much that he quit his job at Thomas Stone High School in Waldorf, Md., before I get into the broader significance of his experience and his views for the future of AP, which, as far as I can tell after 20 years of watching it closely, has done more to improve U.S. high schools than any other program during that period.

Shaffer thinks they should be courses for the bright (A students). Mathews thinks they should be used as pressure to improve schools. AP offerings are also used as a metric of excellence (and Mathews is partially to blame for that).

Oh, well. Excellence loses, as usual, in favor of credentialism. The courses are no longer being taught as 'replacement for college material' and instead as a sign that a school is 'challenging'. Mathews is fair about reporting Shaffer's experience, though.

Well, I do own a device with this OS....

I have never posted one of these, but the results are all too apt:

Which OS are You?

Of course, I actually live in Mac 9.2 and 10.2 (I can't update the school machine until they go to the trouble of buying a site license for word processing software), but I do own a Handspring. And I am a nice fellow and very useful. So there.

I found this via Mr. Zimran Ahmed at Winterspeak, which I found by clicking on a previously untested link on Miss McArdle's blogroll. You'd think I would've already come across the quiz via Zorak the Embittered Mantis (Mrs. Oligarch) since she's queen of the web-quiz.

By the way, in case you're wondering why I only blogged about entertainment news yesterday, it's because I was finally being neighborly and meeting Dr. Weevil.

Bob Hope

Agenda Bender puts Mr. Hitchens and Mr. Sullivan to rights over Bob Hope -- you have to watch the movies! And, as usual, you have to read M. Bender for the headlines.

(Oh, and I keep meaning to reveal my categorizations. I'm filing this under "Signs of the Apocalypse" because I have wondered if Bob Hope wasn't the disciple Our Lord said could tarry until he came.)

What I Read This Week. Well, some of it.

I paid a visit to the library yesterday morning and turned in another book from the list on the left (and, of course, checked out three more). Here's why I read the book and what I thought about it.

Edward Shorter, A History of Women's Bodies.

Sometimes I pick up an academic book and realize that I've waded into an old argument. This book's backstory* may be as interesting as its contents but it's not really my thing.

I'm working desultorily on a piece on some 9th century mosaics in churches in Rome dedicated to virgin martyrs. I've gotten curious about family structure in the 3rd century-6th centuries and in the 9th century (I'd really like to know how things had changed and, idly, if anyone in 9th century Rome had enough historical awareness to realize it**); I'm primarily interested in virginity, marriage, and celibate marriage (hence the Peter Brown book over on the left) but I'm also interested in some of the non-religious reasons for celibacy -- hence women's health.

Shorter's book is modern history with occasional glances back at early modernity (what we used to call the "renaissance" before we got with the up-to-the-minute periodization), but much of it is still useful for my task. Childbirth was miserable, though there have always been palliatives. Menstruation -- well, let's just say that I'm glad that I'm dealing in the earlier period with a culture that put a high value on bathing. Women's Complaints -- yikes!

Shorter has piles of figures to prove to his satisfaction (and mine, more or less -- I'm no demographer) that women only started outliving men in the 19th and 20th centuries. He goes so far as to say that there would have been no first women's movement without modern medicine, that women were indeed physically unequal to men -- weaker, less healthy, and shorter-lived. Without modern medicine (especially reliable surgery and, eventually, sulfa drugs) women were worse off.

This is no big surprise for me because what medievalists (even those of us who aren't demographically inclined) have known for some time from population studies of graveyards. Medieval nobles really did stand out in a crowd -- they would have been taller, stronger, and faster than the poor; the difference was almost entirely nutritional, according to the post-WWII physical anthropologists.

So, all in all, a useful book for me to read.

*Shorter lights into a number of notable feminists, professional historians and otherwise. His least favorite group are women who believe that somehow wicked male doctors suppressed good and wise midwives and their natural and less painful methods of childbirth. Trust me -- nasty footnotes. **Scholars are forever discovering the beginnings of historical awareness, just as they posit the development of the individual or consciousness in historical times too. Most irritating. The basic approach is to find a text that illustrates the author's awareness of the classical past as long gone and to say "Oh, NOW we have an historical consciousness, because I can't find anyone in the previous decade saying this!" Things are much more complicated than this. Sometimes people like to use the habit of dressing past historical characters (like Biblical ones) in contemporary dress as a sign that the artists were not 'historically conscious'. Well, the education and intelligence of artists aside often enough the use of contemporary dress is a way of making the lessons of the past relevant to modern viewers. We know that's true for the Baroque period (note the odd disjunction between some people in Bible clothes and some people in 16th century clothes in Caravaggio), a time when every scholar who plays this game is willing to admit the existence of an historical consciousness. For reasons that have never been entirely clear to me it's harder for lots of scholars to believe it's true for other periods.

Modernity, Niceness, and Political Symbolic Action

Charles Krauthammer explains why the bodies of Uday and Qusay Hussein had to be publically displayed and, indeed, how nice we were about it -- no further mutilation and no dancing crowds. I was interested to read that there's nothing in the Geneva Conventions prohibiting the display of dead enemies.

The earliest piece of art-with-writing-on-it I teach every fall is the Palette of Narmer. This is a small slab of stone carved on the front and back with naturalistic and symbolic representations of the Pharaoh Narmer (his name is spelled out in hieroglypics on the top of each side -- an awl plus a catfish) defeating enemies, and one of the scenes is probably the literal defeat of the king of Lower Egypt. Check the link -- lots of images.

In other words, I agree with Krauthammer that when you kill a king you'd better display his body -- otherwise he enters legend as one of those characters who can return.