Archive for September, 2007
First Draft Done
Posted by Michael Livingston in Academics on September 29th, 2007
Well, it’s 12:15 in the morning and I’ve just finished the first draft of the paper I’m presenting at Wofford College next week. For all my haste in writing it, I’m pretty pleased with the results so far. It ain’t bad, though I do need to trim it down quite a bit: my oral delivery of 16 full pages would far exceed my allotted 20 minutes.
The heart of the paper is my theory that two late-medieval poems, The Siege of Jerusalem and The Alliterative Morte Arthure, are both ring compositions, having extremely complex chiastic structures behind them. Instead of having narratives reliant on a sequential order in which events are tied largely through chronology — A-B-C-D-E, in other words — these poems have narratives that are additionally reliant on a pattern of reflection in which later events sequentially parallel earlier events — A-B-C-B’-A’. In a “normal” narrative the climax of the action is at the end (event “E”), whereas in a ring composition the climax is in the center (event “C”). Pretty cool, eh?
Just to be clever, I decided my paper, too, should be a ring composition. Yes, I’m that kind of person. No, I don’t think anyone will notice.
Madden NFL 08
Posted by Michael Livingston in Homelife on September 28th, 2007
I’d like to say that I haven’t posted for a few days because I’ve been writing the paper that I have to present at an academic conference in a week. I’d like to say that, because of these days of silence, the paper is done.
Instead it’s hardly begun. And it’s John Madden’s fault.
I bought Madden NFL 08 for the Wii some weeks ago, but I only started playing it in earnest a short while ago. And I’ve been hooked. I took this years Broncos (may the football gods look kindly upon them at Indy) and set myself up as coach and GM. We ran the board in our first season in existence (this season) and took the Super Bowl.
I haven’t wrote a jot or tittle on that paper as a result (though that’ll change tonight).
There are some curious quirks to the video game. I’ve gone through my first off-season draft now, and I’m finding that it severely penalizes rookies once they join the team — their “Awareness” score is tanked. While there’s certainly a “learning curve” at the pro level, it seems a little too steep in this regard. There was also some strangeness in the trading system. As the best team in the NFL I was scheduled to pick last in every round, yet I found more than one team willing to swap first round picks with me one-for-one. So instead of picking 32nd, I could move up to, say, 8th or something. That’s just nonsense. And as a result of the “grading down” of young players I was able to convince the Detroit Lions to trade Calvin Johnson, a very young wide receiver who may well turn out to be one of the best to ever play the game, for a second round draft pick. That’s just wrong.
On the plus side, my virtual Jay Cutler now has the option, on any given play, to just chuck the pigskin deep, knowing that more often than not either Calvin or Javon Walker will make the grab. ‘Tis nice.
But I do need to start that paper…
My First Digital Music Player
Posted by Michael Livingston in Uncategorized on September 25th, 2007
It came yesterday. A Sony NW-S203F Sports Walkman. It’s pretty nifty, though I’m having a difficult time imagining how much time people must spend getting songs on and off these things.
The good: The player is designed for exercise. It can adjust the music being played to your running/walking pace (there’s a pedometer in it), it can keep track of calories burned, distance gone, etc., and it came with a nifty armband holder to keep it out of the way. All that’s grand.
The bad: The instructions suck. No surprise there, really. Companies would do well to hire, say, an English major or two just to look over their instructions. And it took me about an hour to get the thing to stop saying “Memory Error” and let me do something. There’s a click ring for sealing the USB port, and if it isn’t in the right position, the player be dead — not a word of this is in the instructions or online manual.
The huh?: I enjoy visiting Sean Michael Ragan’s website every now and then. He has an ongoing interest in minimalist, low-impact living, as well as a great many other things to do with design. Of interest to me at this moment is his listing of “design gaffes”: power window buttons on a car door that don’t “map” naturally to function, cell phones that play a jingle when you mute them (and folks wonder why I hate cell phones and only own a “for-emergencies” pay as you go model), DVD menus that are difficult to navigate, incoherent instructions, edible legos, and that sort of thing.
This player, I daresay, falls into the same category. It has this nifty armband thing to strap the player to your left upperarm during exercising. I know it’s meant for my left arm because all the pictures have it thus, and the headphones are clearly designed to push the wire lead toward the left shoulder (the extension to the right ear is longer than that going to the left). All well and good, except that if you do put it on your left arm it is upside down from your perspective. The readout, the buttons, the logo… everything is upside down, best readable from the position of someone looking at the exerciser, rather than the exerciser him or herself.
Most folks I know are not quite so vain as to employ someone to run alongside them with a full-length mirror, so I can’t imagine what the designers were thinking. Odds are, they simply weren’t.
A Medievalist’s Life: The Pelagian Heresy
Posted by Michael Livingston in Academics on September 22nd, 2007
So I’m working today on The Middle English Metrical Paraphrase of the Old Testament. In particular, I’m writing explanatory notes to the Book of Job, which is perhaps the most fascinating and difficult book of the Bible. (For any inclined to reinvestigate the text, I could hardly suggest a better entry than Harold Bloom’s recent book, Where Shall Wisdom Be Found? — it’s superb.)
Anyway, the Paraphrase-poet does some interesting things with Job. The series of debates between Job and his three “friends” — Zophar, Bildad, and Eliphaz, for instance, doesn’t so much paraphrase the text of the Bible as the theology of the Middle Ages. There’s a loose connection between the two, but it is quite strained at times.
For example, the Paraphrase‘s Job’s refers to Judgment Day and Christ at one point. Textually, we would expect this passage to be a paraphrase of Job’s first response to Bildad (Job 9-10) but it is, instead, more closely related to Job 19. I write in a note:
Job’s reference to Judgment Day here is perhaps surprising given Western associations between this subject and Christian theology, especially as it is derived from the misunderstood Book of the Apocalypse (Revelation). Yet, as Daniel 12:1–3 shows, the doctrine of resurrection and judgment does have some roots in late Jewish thought (for discussion of the history, see Segal’s Life After Death). Beginning with Clement of Rome, Christian exegetes have also pointed to Job 19:25–27 as a reference to Christian understandings of life after death (thus, e.g., Augustine, City of God 22.29), seeing in these “difficult, probably textually corrupt, verses” (NOAB, p. 645) a “locus classicus of the doctrine of resurrection” (Zink, “Impatient Job,” p. 147). By the later Middle Ages, this connection was generally considered factual, no doubt largely due to Jerome’s Christologically-influenced translation of the lines in the Vulgate. Thus “Domesday” also appears in Pety Job; see especially line 255.
Pretty straight-forward exegetical material, this. Not so simple, however, is the appearance, in one of Zophar’s speeches, of the following (lines 14629-34):
For in this werld werkes none so wele
that wott wheder his werke be wroyght
Unto his sorow or to his sele.
For, when the soth is all up soyght,
Of gud werke God dose ylk dele.
Bot He yt werke, the werke is noyght.[For in this world no one manages so well
that he might know whether his deeds be done
Unto his sorrow or his happiness.
For, when the truth is all made clear,
Good works are done in every part by God.
Unless He works them, the works mean nothing.]
I love theology. This sent me scrambling through texts to write the following:
Zophar’s point, one that does not explicitly appear in Job, is one of deep theological import: whether or not humans can “effect” grace — whether they are capable of doing good without God actually doing the good for them. The question came to a forefront in the early fifth century, as a result of the teachings of the Briton monk Pelagius, who “could not accept that human beings were so corrupted at birth that they could not help sinning” (Bell, Cloud, p. 144). This position brought Pelagius into conflict with Augustine, who believed that the Fall left mankind inherently “fallen, damned, doomed, condemned. At birth we are simply ‘one lump of sin’ and because we are so totally, so helplessly corrupted, we can no more do good of our own power than a blind man can see” (p. 147). Pelagianism was condemned in the West, partly due to Augustine’s reputation, but the issue continued to fester for centuries, requiring repeated condemnations. Thomas Bradwardine, for example, felt it was necessary to write a full treatise denouncing the belief in fourteenth-century England (De causa Dei contra Pelagium et de virtute causarum). As we see here, the Paraphrase-poet is in keeping with the orthodox position.
Yes, this is what I’m doing on a beautiful Saturday afternoon in Charleston.
Fighting the Future … and Losing
Posted by Michael Livingston in Uncategorized on September 21st, 2007
I don’t own an mp3 player of any kind.
That’s right. No iPod. No Zune. No nothin’. I don’t own one, and I ain’t been sorry. Just about every time I see some kid zoning out with buds in his ears I think of the “seashells” in Fahrenheit 451. Here Guy Montag, Bradbury’s hero fireman, describes the two in his wife’s ears:
The little mosquito-delicate dancing hum in the air, the electrical murmur of a hidden wasp snug in its special pink warm nest. The music was almost loud enough so he could follow the tune.
Without turning on the light he imagined how this room would look. His wife stretched on the bed, uncovered and cold, like a body displayed on the lid of the tomb, her eyes fixed in the ceiling by invisible threads of steel, immovable. And in her ears the little Seashells, the thimble radios tamped tight, and an electronic ocean of sound, of music and talk and music and talk coming in, coming in on the shore of her unsleeping mind. The room was indeed empty. Every night the waves came in and bore her off on their great tides of sound, floating her, wide-eyed, toward morning. There had been no night in the last two years that Mildred had not swum that sea, had not gladly gone down in it for the third time.
What writing. What prescience. That was 1953. It could be tomorrow.
Ah, but my immunity to the revolution ends soon. I’d been planning to get into some regular running this fall, but I’ve been hampered by a toe broken when — two days before I went to Launch Pad — one of the long thick steel bars of my Stage 3 roof rack fell on it (I was stupidly wearing Tevas) and sent it through all measures of color and size. I think it’s just about healed now, thankfully.
The time off from the exercise, however, has given me some cause to ruminate on how much I might enjoy it more with one of these newfangled music machines. So I ordered me a discontinued Sony, and it shipped today. It’ll arrive next week, by which time I hope to be finished stretching for my first run in far too many months.
I Lived on the Moon
Posted by Michael Livingston in Homelife on September 19th, 2007
This song, by Kwoon, has been in my mind the past few days — perhaps due to Jim’s passing. The video is extraordinary:
The lyrics, which are difficult to understand in the video (perhaps because the band is French):
Dear little lad,
Here’s the story of my life.
I lived on the moon:
grey flying snakes along
the mountains of destiny while
the three tailed monkeys
were drawing the stars.
Light from the Sun and I
hide myself on the dark side, alone.
I’ve run so far
to find my way,
then I dream again … alone.Dear little boy,
Listen to the voices of your soul
to show you the way
of silence and peace.
Follow your thoughts and fly,
choosing all the things that you desire:
giant waves, fireflies …
Your dreams will be your only shell,
your secrets, your hiding place, my son.
Don’t let them try
to crush your brain.
You’ll go far, my son.
Reflections on Robert Jordan
Posted by Michael Livingston in Fiction, Homelife on September 17th, 2007
James O. Rigney, Jr., who wrote most of his books under the name Robert Jordan, died at around 2:45pm yesterday.
The passing of any artist is tragic, but Jim’s loss is particularly so: only 58, he was still very much in the prime of his authorial life. His great epic Fantasy series THE WHEEL OF TIME was at last coming to a much-anticipated close, and his mind was no doubt already swirling with the promise of more unwritten dreams to come. For the millions of his loyal readers who would have followed this dragon to any creative end, his loss is difficult to accept.
The most popular Fantasy writer since Tolkien, Jim’s work undoubtedly revitalized the genre and had an impact that cannot be overestimated. Indeed, I think we cannot yet contemplate his full impact on fiction: only the turning of the wheel of time will reveal the fruits born when the seeds sown of his imagination take root in the fertile minds of writers to come. If all Fantasy writers walk in the shadow of Tolkien, we walk, too, in the company of Jordan.
I first communicated with Jim less than a year ago, when I wrote him a letter expressing my desire to establish a much overdue literary award in his honor here at The Citadel. Jim was a proud graduate of this institution, a fact that had no small influence on my decision to come here. As I explained in a letter to him:
I cannot pass up the opportunity to observe that I would never have accepted this professorship without you. As a high school freshman in Albuquerque, New Mexico, I bought THE EYE OF THE WORLD just after its 1990 release and was instantly hooked. A would-be speculative fiction writer myself, I was elated to find someone whose talents I could so admire. THE GREAT HUNT at last contained a tantalizing “About the Author” blurb, and it was there that I first heard of The Citadel, a place of such apparent mystery and mystique that it was the sole bit of biographical information to make it to the back flap of THE DRAGON REBORN and subsequent volumes.
While I chose not to attend this institution as an undergraduate, the name of The Citadel stuck with me — fostered, of course, by my continued reading of your work — and when the opportunity of a professorship here arrived, I couldn’t pass up the chance to see what this mythical place was like. Once arrived, I fell in love. So thank you for bringing me here!
Gratefully, Jim humbly agreed to my award proposal, and The Citadel is now proud to honor one student a year with the Robert Jordan / James O. Rigney, Jr. Award for Creative Writing.
We had several correspondences over the past year — entering into a fascinating debate over the definition of speculative fiction at one point — and this past spring I had the opportunity at last to meet him in person. Though in poor health, he was nevertheless warm and funny, passionate and giving. I have here on my desk a photo of him, a dashing black hat on his head, talking to me and some cadets; looking at it I cannot help but smile at the way that we are, all of us, riveted on what he is saying. If my memory serves, the moment captured is his declaration that writing Lan, a deeply impressive character in the WHEEL OF TIME series, was easy: “Lan is simply the man I always wished I could be,” he said. Though I knew him for far too short a time, I do not think Jim gave himself the credit he deserved.
Looking at the photo I see, too, Jim’s beloved wife, Harriet, smiling in her own gracious strength. I hope that I am not alone in turning my mind from mourning to thoughts and prayers for her during this difficult time.
The Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend. Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth comes again. In one Age, called the Third Age by some, an Age yet to come, an Age long past, a wind rose in the Mountains of Mist. The wind was not the beginning. There are neither beginnings nor endings to the turning of the Wheel of time. But it was a beginning.”
Obvious Connection I Never Made
Posted by Michael Livingston in Homelife on September 16th, 2007
From an article by the Washington Post’s Mary Jordan (via the Denver Post) about the rising numbers of people in the world who are moving away from religion and term themselves non-believers of one kind or another:
Many analysts trace the rise of what some are calling the “nonreligious movement” to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
The sight of religious fanatics killing 3,000 people caused many to begin questioning – and rejecting – all religion.
I had suspected that the West was undergoing this kind of transformation, but I’d never bothered to search out facts on the matter. And I can’t imagine why, but I never thought to pin my suspicions on 9/11 as a turning point. It’s obvious when you think about it.
Unfortunately, I think, Jordan later commits a grievous error of logic when, in an apparently let’s-be-politically-correct move, she accuses atheists of equal extremism:
The majority of nonbelievers say they are speaking out only because of religious fanatics. But some atheists are also extreme and want, for example, people to blot out the words “In God We Trust” from every dollar bill they carry.
Let me get this straight. Many people in this country (not all of them atheists, by the way) want us to return to the original motto of our nation, “E Pluribus Unum” — a motto (“out of many, one”) that precisely encapsulates the melting pot of America, the very democratic pluralism that America claims again and again to stand for. And this movement, which has claimed no lives, made no threats, and proclaimed no truth beyond a historical awareness of facts*, is to be set alongside the deaths of 3,000 people on 9/11 (and other acts of Islamist terrorism), the many deaths and injuries attributed to the bombings of Eric Robert Rudolph (and other acts of Christian terrorism), and any other number of the countless barbaric perpetrations of [insert religion here] terrorism?
Seriously, Ms. Jordan?
I am not, myself, an atheist, but I do think it is worth noting the lack of humanist terrorists in the world. I mean, can you name an atheist suicide bomber? I can’t. A war conducted in the name of disbelief? I can’t. I bet she can’t either.
As for that motto on our current currency, I hold (as I often do) with the Bull Moose, Teddy Roosevelt (via here):
My own feeling in the matter is due to my very firm conviction that to put such a motto on coins, or to use it in any kindred manner, not only does no good but does positive harm, and is in effect irreverence, which comes dangerously close to sacrilege … it seems to me eminently unwise to cheapen such a motto by use on coins, just as it would be to cheapen it by use on postage stamps, or in advertisements
*Anyone curious about the facts surrounding the vision of our Founding Fathers (for the most part Deists, not Christians) on this church-state issue would be well-advised to check out this excellent discussion of the Great Seal of the United States of America.
