Burk's Intellectual Property in the Context of E-Science in the context of international discourse is straight out of Civ Pro and conflicts of laws classes. When discussing the complexities of scientific data-sharing between nations, he recites the daily business of the average rock band manager, who handles conflicts of laws in the hallways of the world's finest music venues. What's protected in Denmark? The name of the band or the recording of their music that night? The name of the song or the first 18 bars? Does it differ if they play a late show in Holland? Yes it does: and the clash of the aspirational/pragmatic is similar as well.
The visage of Metallica running toward the dais to accept their Grammy AND spout economic truisms to drugged audience members in chains and sparkles reminds me of Burk touting the "communalism and reputational" aspects of the genome project: not titans, in this case, but a new world Clash of the Incentives.
Burk's recitation of Merton's theories are akin to Aesop's fables, his reference to the potential "deviancy" where "normative constraints" are missing is the big bad wolf.
What I learned from Burk is what I learned from Judge Bork: the constitution is flexible, our treaties change with each year, and our laws adjust, making the commerce clause as applicable to the pony express as a bullet train.
Thursday, April 15, 2010
Friday, April 9, 2010
academia: the original aggregator
The Maybourn School of Journalism is a schizophrenic place: open one door and the professor lamenting the unfairness of the "death of journalism" promptly prohibits research from any website; walk into a door next to that class and the professor is banning any research from journalism sources.
Some hallway.
The article which inspired our ill-tempered exchange in class last night (when you were asked why our readings were so obtuse I interrupted with "because they are indulgent, self-referential and badly written" and you, in the finest academic tradition, shared with us your intellectual response: "NOT TRUE"). It was another poorly executed example of my failure to describe my disappointment in course names and substance since I entered Maybourn.
That's a personal issue, not an academic one, but I want to make this very clear: while I find your character to be rare and exemplary, your intuitions so decent I marvel at them, your philosophy of education to be nearly poetic, I promise from this date forward to cease any attempt to make sense of your teaching style.
Your response to the young women asking you about the writer was patronizing ("you are reading things by experts in their field, lay people are not expected to understand") and troubling at once: if indeed that is the reason the articles were tough reading, your assignment of them to "laymen" was inappropriate.
There wasn't a single "big word" in any of what you assigned; there were several instances of professional lingo, sometimes defined, sometimes not, but apart from that the writing style in one or two of the pieces was just plain pretentious. Not unusual for average conference fare, where the classic "publish or perish" regime in a tenure-starved academic climate inspires often contrived, redundant "scholarship".
And even if I'm dead wrong, and the concepts being discussed in those several articles WERE so above our heads we shouldn't have been expected to understand, why would you have assigned them to laymen?
In one breath you described how you loved all your students; your demonstration of that regard is to set up a clasroom protocol where we read an article, take a quiz on the article, do a presentation on the article and blog on the article to "prove" to you that we've read it. That kind of affection I would reserve for toddlers about to cross traffic, not young adults who've been writing papers for years, to the individual tunes of professors who each stand by the vanity of their personal protocols as the true "scholarship".
Dr. Moro, I think you've been disrespectful and missed some great learning opportunities for us in your effort to add up points and guide us through writing which "the conferences will lap up". I think you've treated us to "the path I chose to take" rather than share with us the fruit of that path, which is YOUR knowledge, not demonstrations by my classmates of what homework they did or did not do, and in organizing our class around that activity rather than your instruction you have shorted us all.
On that note, I hope to continue a friendship with you once this class if out of our way. In the meantime I will remember your adage that "sometimes what offends you most is most important to learn". I'm aware that in hindsight I might say to myself "ahhhh, that's what he meant": in the meantime I'll just be quiet and will take up no more of the class's time with my frustration, something I'm aware I've done too often already. On to the next post...
Some hallway.
The article which inspired our ill-tempered exchange in class last night (when you were asked why our readings were so obtuse I interrupted with "because they are indulgent, self-referential and badly written" and you, in the finest academic tradition, shared with us your intellectual response: "NOT TRUE"). It was another poorly executed example of my failure to describe my disappointment in course names and substance since I entered Maybourn.
That's a personal issue, not an academic one, but I want to make this very clear: while I find your character to be rare and exemplary, your intuitions so decent I marvel at them, your philosophy of education to be nearly poetic, I promise from this date forward to cease any attempt to make sense of your teaching style.
Your response to the young women asking you about the writer was patronizing ("you are reading things by experts in their field, lay people are not expected to understand") and troubling at once: if indeed that is the reason the articles were tough reading, your assignment of them to "laymen" was inappropriate.
There wasn't a single "big word" in any of what you assigned; there were several instances of professional lingo, sometimes defined, sometimes not, but apart from that the writing style in one or two of the pieces was just plain pretentious. Not unusual for average conference fare, where the classic "publish or perish" regime in a tenure-starved academic climate inspires often contrived, redundant "scholarship".
And even if I'm dead wrong, and the concepts being discussed in those several articles WERE so above our heads we shouldn't have been expected to understand, why would you have assigned them to laymen?
In one breath you described how you loved all your students; your demonstration of that regard is to set up a clasroom protocol where we read an article, take a quiz on the article, do a presentation on the article and blog on the article to "prove" to you that we've read it. That kind of affection I would reserve for toddlers about to cross traffic, not young adults who've been writing papers for years, to the individual tunes of professors who each stand by the vanity of their personal protocols as the true "scholarship".
Dr. Moro, I think you've been disrespectful and missed some great learning opportunities for us in your effort to add up points and guide us through writing which "the conferences will lap up". I think you've treated us to "the path I chose to take" rather than share with us the fruit of that path, which is YOUR knowledge, not demonstrations by my classmates of what homework they did or did not do, and in organizing our class around that activity rather than your instruction you have shorted us all.
On that note, I hope to continue a friendship with you once this class if out of our way. In the meantime I will remember your adage that "sometimes what offends you most is most important to learn". I'm aware that in hindsight I might say to myself "ahhhh, that's what he meant": in the meantime I'll just be quiet and will take up no more of the class's time with my frustration, something I'm aware I've done too often already. On to the next post...
Sunday, March 28, 2010
AHHHhhh: the sound of a grouchy blogger gone hap hap happy: Dan Burk did it. He wrote a great piece, marred only by the number of times i traipsed off to the internet to read more about something to which he'd just referred (texts that behave, mertonian science). Burk raises what for me are currently some of the most fascinating, meaty issues on the internet: value and how we derive it, competition vs. collaboration and which is more productive, and the increasing pre valence of institutional anomie.
I surely hope my occasional lapses into enthusiasm for your assignments garners me some reputational captial. Maybe I'm becoming more idioblastic. Like taking out a license to ensure OPENNESS rather than the far more traditional exclusionary purpose, is it possible this grouchy blogger can still learn something exciting?
Calm down: Benoit-Barne has me hoping that Nikhil agrees with me that my own objet-valise (my never-ending search for an "a") is a boundary object sufficiently ambiguous that he'll just figure "what the hell, just give it to her...". I need a shovel to make it through the rest of this baby. Think I'll dig this ditch offline. Hope SOMEBODY in america is watching basketball....
I surely hope my occasional lapses into enthusiasm for your assignments garners me some reputational captial. Maybe I'm becoming more idioblastic. Like taking out a license to ensure OPENNESS rather than the far more traditional exclusionary purpose, is it possible this grouchy blogger can still learn something exciting?
Calm down: Benoit-Barne has me hoping that Nikhil agrees with me that my own objet-valise (my never-ending search for an "a") is a boundary object sufficiently ambiguous that he'll just figure "what the hell, just give it to her...". I need a shovel to make it through the rest of this baby. Think I'll dig this ditch offline. Hope SOMEBODY in america is watching basketball....
Reading batch#4: more lint in their navels...
The scholars in this batch are slightly livelier than one would expect from a group of people who actually still write out the letters d e r r i d a close enough that it forms that word which still invokes a mad rush for the door of any room in which it is used, but not much.
A happy reader I generally am not with this "crowd" (the lint in their navels scholars who write so as not to perish), though I'm obviously no less arrogant.
That these particular writers have the nerve to discuss the dangers of aggregation must mean that they think none of us have attended their conferences: prior to becoming more familiar with the digitelligencia, i couldn't have imagined a more self-contained, self-referential population than academics-talking-to-each-other-while-out-of-town. that is, when they aren't reading-to-each-other-what-they-just-wrote-for-this-very-occasion (a bedtime story ALREADY peer-reviewed, to boot!).
They have managed to continue to produce content, however distributed; they continue to walk, talk (oh god do they talk) and write without feeling the slice of the digital scalpel which will lobotomize every one of them if the brilliance they just espoused on the dais turns up in bytes...just ask them. What nonsense: narractivity my narrass!
The scholars in this batch are slightly livelier than one would expect from a group of people who actually still write out the letters d e r r i d a close enough that it forms that word which still invokes a mad rush for the door of any room in which it is used, but not much.
A happy reader I generally am not with this "crowd" (the lint in their navels scholars who write so as not to perish), though I'm obviously no less arrogant.
That these particular writers have the nerve to discuss the dangers of aggregation must mean that they think none of us have attended their conferences: prior to becoming more familiar with the digitelligencia, i couldn't have imagined a more self-contained, self-referential population than academics-talking-to-each-other-while-out-of-town. that is, when they aren't reading-to-each-other-what-they-just-wrote-for-this-very-occasion (a bedtime story ALREADY peer-reviewed, to boot!).
They have managed to continue to produce content, however distributed; they continue to walk, talk (oh god do they talk) and write without feeling the slice of the digital scalpel which will lobotomize every one of them if the brilliance they just espoused on the dais turns up in bytes...just ask them. What nonsense: narractivity my narrass!
Saturday, March 27, 2010
McDonnell's "crossing borders" reminded me of my dad's old saying "i feel like columbus' father...". Old cranks talking about how new fangled gittyups were going to change the way folks went 'ta meetin'....just like dusty little towns on the pony express trail used to grouse about what would happen to their hometown once that big old railroad finally got connected.
And then those news towns on the railway got all bustling until uh oh here comes Eishenhower and his new fangled highways: everybody get out your handkerchief, there's bound to be a movie like "Fried Green Tomatoes" on the way, about a dusty little town time forgot after the railroad lost its luster...
Although he promises an analyses of three borders, he barely touches on the temporal (just how fast will this article be forgotten???), then rushes into the whole issue of what will people be like when they don't have to scale a fence to get over to america to get a job...oh, wait, that's what they'll say ONCE AMERICA BUILDS ITS FENCE....in other words, i don't see much reason for Jim to have spent his good time on this piece: unless you're in design and you want to quote one of the Eames, who famously posited that there would be no good design without good problems, i really don't think mr. mcdonnell had very much to say. i think i just did a marvelous job talking about the article as if it had been, after all, worth the time...
Jewitt is another matter: Ushahidi is a GREAT find, and i have no idea how long it would have taken me to find this service on my own. while eyewitness experts have always been the bane of not just courtrooms but ANY room where a good eye view is taken as sacrosanct (and shouldn't be), jewitt doesn't belabor the eyewitness citizen journalist too long before he segues into what's developed AS A RESULT of some of those citizen journalists...the "break and expand" theory at its finest, only not in print. Many at dallas morning news describe the break and expand print theory, where they're more than happy to let twitterers break a story while they develop background to expand it in their paper. Ushahidi is the human equivalent of the print story; on this site whatever has "broken" of world interest is not only expanded, it becomes a site in and of itself, where at any given moment you can check back in to the area/problem you were originally interested in to see how you and others around the world may be changing whatever situation interested you to begin with. This is the instance, perhaps, that the much maligned Mr. McDonnell was looking for: here the temporal DOES play with the spatial...although apparently only at this point in my imagination, as an observer of the Gaza site is up and asking why the team at al-jazeera isn't using the time/spatial view afforded by Google Earth...wonder what he means? That information could be relayed as a new kind of "typography"? And why was Al-Jazeera onto something new when they refererred to Google Earth as a "spatial map"? What is the other kind of map?????
And then those news towns on the railway got all bustling until uh oh here comes Eishenhower and his new fangled highways: everybody get out your handkerchief, there's bound to be a movie like "Fried Green Tomatoes" on the way, about a dusty little town time forgot after the railroad lost its luster...
Although he promises an analyses of three borders, he barely touches on the temporal (just how fast will this article be forgotten???), then rushes into the whole issue of what will people be like when they don't have to scale a fence to get over to america to get a job...oh, wait, that's what they'll say ONCE AMERICA BUILDS ITS FENCE....in other words, i don't see much reason for Jim to have spent his good time on this piece: unless you're in design and you want to quote one of the Eames, who famously posited that there would be no good design without good problems, i really don't think mr. mcdonnell had very much to say. i think i just did a marvelous job talking about the article as if it had been, after all, worth the time...
Jewitt is another matter: Ushahidi is a GREAT find, and i have no idea how long it would have taken me to find this service on my own. while eyewitness experts have always been the bane of not just courtrooms but ANY room where a good eye view is taken as sacrosanct (and shouldn't be), jewitt doesn't belabor the eyewitness citizen journalist too long before he segues into what's developed AS A RESULT of some of those citizen journalists...the "break and expand" theory at its finest, only not in print. Many at dallas morning news describe the break and expand print theory, where they're more than happy to let twitterers break a story while they develop background to expand it in their paper. Ushahidi is the human equivalent of the print story; on this site whatever has "broken" of world interest is not only expanded, it becomes a site in and of itself, where at any given moment you can check back in to the area/problem you were originally interested in to see how you and others around the world may be changing whatever situation interested you to begin with. This is the instance, perhaps, that the much maligned Mr. McDonnell was looking for: here the temporal DOES play with the spatial...although apparently only at this point in my imagination, as an observer of the Gaza site is up and asking why the team at al-jazeera isn't using the time/spatial view afforded by Google Earth...wonder what he means? That information could be relayed as a new kind of "typography"? And why was Al-Jazeera onto something new when they refererred to Google Earth as a "spatial map"? What is the other kind of map?????
Thursday, February 18, 2010
I love clean sheets.
And now I love cascading sheets.
Having an organizing tool like cascading sheets is like having a girl's closet instead of a boy's. A boy is lucky if he HAS a sock drawer: a girl not only has a sock drawer, she may have them color coded.
Cascading Sheets are like that: you may send out hundreds of RSS scouts, but if they all come on back in to the campfire to let you know what they found at once, its as good as not having any information at all.
Those of us studying the results of the stimulus program ran into that problem on the government's site: plenty of info, but no real way to access a refinement of the massive number of numbers and documents flowing into the site.
When you have traffic in that kind of a cluster, you need a way first to route it, then to organize it before it's usable: here come the CSS troops.
With a cascading, visual organizer you can, even with multiple search engines, make uniform the VISUAL organization necessary: fonts, layouts (margins, indentations, etc.) colors....you may have thousands of scouts but when they come back in to report for duty they will be lined up, in appropriate uniforms and easily distinguishable for use.
And now I love cascading sheets.
Having an organizing tool like cascading sheets is like having a girl's closet instead of a boy's. A boy is lucky if he HAS a sock drawer: a girl not only has a sock drawer, she may have them color coded.
Cascading Sheets are like that: you may send out hundreds of RSS scouts, but if they all come on back in to the campfire to let you know what they found at once, its as good as not having any information at all.
Those of us studying the results of the stimulus program ran into that problem on the government's site: plenty of info, but no real way to access a refinement of the massive number of numbers and documents flowing into the site.
When you have traffic in that kind of a cluster, you need a way first to route it, then to organize it before it's usable: here come the CSS troops.
With a cascading, visual organizer you can, even with multiple search engines, make uniform the VISUAL organization necessary: fonts, layouts (margins, indentations, etc.) colors....you may have thousands of scouts but when they come back in to report for duty they will be lined up, in appropriate uniforms and easily distinguishable for use.
Tuesday, February 16, 2010
Assignment the First: Is it true?
Let me begin by quickly noting that I must have something wrong here: my first assignment is a script right out of 8th grade health class; when considering a voice contribution, we should be sure to: 1)think about what we're going to say 2)say it clearly 3)try to keep our subject relaxed 4)if we're standing up, speak with our hands, 5)if we're off camera and this is all audio, use non-verbal qualifiers so as not to interrupt.....
Hard enough to read more than once; then to present, now to.....BLOG about this experience? Can't wait to eat my hat: want so much to hear "Susan, you did the wrong assignment"....please, Nikhil...ooops, never mind, you just emailed me.
I had it right.
Darn it.
Let me begin by quickly noting that I must have something wrong here: my first assignment is a script right out of 8th grade health class; when considering a voice contribution, we should be sure to: 1)think about what we're going to say 2)say it clearly 3)try to keep our subject relaxed 4)if we're standing up, speak with our hands, 5)if we're off camera and this is all audio, use non-verbal qualifiers so as not to interrupt.....
Hard enough to read more than once; then to present, now to.....BLOG about this experience? Can't wait to eat my hat: want so much to hear "Susan, you did the wrong assignment"....please, Nikhil...ooops, never mind, you just emailed me.
I had it right.
Darn it.
Tuesday, February 9, 2010
PowerPoint: "not waving but drowning"?
Power Point presentations, I realize, have an almost immediate and universal effect on me: whether the lights go off or stay on, whether I'm close enough to hear the "whrrrr" or off in the corner, it's always the same. Right when it's evident that I am about to learn something, (generally a very genuinely happy state of expectation) I look up, see the Power Point, and GLAZE OVER, at least mentally: without a mirror I can't tell if tiny little curtains actually fall down over my eyes so that others could see...has Power Point made presentations more understandable, exciting, informative?
And I wonder sometimes: as revolutionary as my computer usage has seemed, how much has it changed my workday or personal chores? Do I spend enough time looking for the password for my bank account, then signing in, that I could have written a check after all? And why are my file cabinets still full?
I got some help with the Power Point from a Mr.Edward Tufte, who basically says PowerPoint, bah, humbug! What he actually says: "...the convenience for the speaker can be costly to both content and audience...these costs result from the cognitive style characteristic of the standard PP presentation: foreshortening of evidence and thought, low spatial resolution, a deeply hierarchical single-path structure as the model for organizing every type of content, breaking up narrative and data into slides and minimal fragments, rapid temporal sequencing of then information rather than focused spatial analysis..."
Mr. Tufte DOES go on, don't you think? What's more glazing...his riff on PP or an actual presentation...and although I knew I hated Power Point, I didn't know it was because my spatial resolution was being short-changed. Spatial resolution could come to the presentation and sit right next to me and I wouldn't recognize it...
Anyway, I'm happy we can "backpack" our way into a major news story (though there may be nothing new under the sun to say, or we may have the same goofy journalist with all the right equipment now able to ask terrible, canned questions with mikes smaller than their brains), and FINALLY, the mob gets to speak, one at a time ("let's go hang him as soon as we log off..."),
but the next time I sit through a PP I swear I'll start to smell mimeograph ink...
Back to the global "wonder": are we making some of the same, eternal mistakes and dressing them up in new clothes so we can all go to the "progress" party? Am I learning...or drowning? (not waving but drowning comes from a very disturbing poem by Stevie Smith).
And I wonder sometimes: as revolutionary as my computer usage has seemed, how much has it changed my workday or personal chores? Do I spend enough time looking for the password for my bank account, then signing in, that I could have written a check after all? And why are my file cabinets still full?
I got some help with the Power Point from a Mr.Edward Tufte, who basically says PowerPoint, bah, humbug! What he actually says: "...the convenience for the speaker can be costly to both content and audience...these costs result from the cognitive style characteristic of the standard PP presentation: foreshortening of evidence and thought, low spatial resolution, a deeply hierarchical single-path structure as the model for organizing every type of content, breaking up narrative and data into slides and minimal fragments, rapid temporal sequencing of then information rather than focused spatial analysis..."
Mr. Tufte DOES go on, don't you think? What's more glazing...his riff on PP or an actual presentation...and although I knew I hated Power Point, I didn't know it was because my spatial resolution was being short-changed. Spatial resolution could come to the presentation and sit right next to me and I wouldn't recognize it...
Anyway, I'm happy we can "backpack" our way into a major news story (though there may be nothing new under the sun to say, or we may have the same goofy journalist with all the right equipment now able to ask terrible, canned questions with mikes smaller than their brains), and FINALLY, the mob gets to speak, one at a time ("let's go hang him as soon as we log off..."),
but the next time I sit through a PP I swear I'll start to smell mimeograph ink...
Back to the global "wonder": are we making some of the same, eternal mistakes and dressing them up in new clothes so we can all go to the "progress" party? Am I learning...or drowning? (not waving but drowning comes from a very disturbing poem by Stevie Smith).
Thursday, February 4, 2010
Reading as much as I do in and about the internet, it's amazing to me that I've allowed so much text to remain a mystery: Mr. Briggs had me making noises in my hotel room several nights ago, excited that FTP now did more than remind me of Mario Andretti.
As a child there were words I was willing to read over, around, whatever it took to keep from going to the dictionary. It's amazing to me that I would have learned to install a hard drive by 1994 but not have had any idea what RSS meant.
So this course will not only unlock several acronyms, but will refresh my wide-open eyes which have succumbed to the occasional squint that comes from not knowing what you're reading but being too lazy to go find out. The damage is not so much the underlying meaning as it is your confidence as a "traveler" in a new world.
Little did I realize to degree to which I had succumbed to the intimidation that results when certain "road signs" (ftp) are meaningless...I was content to feel left out. As capacity in our machines increased, that meant that so did my intimidation; as new "fixes" or aps increased their reliance upon the original acronyms, so did the amount of intimidation.
How silly to have let this go on for as long as I did: like taking a driving test, this course will teach me to parallel park instead of drive around the block eleven times.
Journalism may well have to dust off its own myopia, as it begins to develop ears as well as eyes: the days when newspapers considered "letters to the editor" interactive are over, as reporters with old-style press passes shoulder up to 13 year old bloggers in Milan during fashion week. The "source" of the news event and the audience were indistinguishable, and the newspaper that thought it was writing to a "tween" who followed fashion (www.businessoffashion.com) realized that day that they were not only both reporting the news, but that the much shorter, much younger reporter was making it as she did so.
I can't be 13 again, and I can't be on the runway, but the new journalism does in fact allow me the "digital space" between those shoulders...I could, if I chose, write a personal note to both of them and then write about the experience for my blog!
As a child there were words I was willing to read over, around, whatever it took to keep from going to the dictionary. It's amazing to me that I would have learned to install a hard drive by 1994 but not have had any idea what RSS meant.
So this course will not only unlock several acronyms, but will refresh my wide-open eyes which have succumbed to the occasional squint that comes from not knowing what you're reading but being too lazy to go find out. The damage is not so much the underlying meaning as it is your confidence as a "traveler" in a new world.
Little did I realize to degree to which I had succumbed to the intimidation that results when certain "road signs" (ftp) are meaningless...I was content to feel left out. As capacity in our machines increased, that meant that so did my intimidation; as new "fixes" or aps increased their reliance upon the original acronyms, so did the amount of intimidation.
How silly to have let this go on for as long as I did: like taking a driving test, this course will teach me to parallel park instead of drive around the block eleven times.
Journalism may well have to dust off its own myopia, as it begins to develop ears as well as eyes: the days when newspapers considered "letters to the editor" interactive are over, as reporters with old-style press passes shoulder up to 13 year old bloggers in Milan during fashion week. The "source" of the news event and the audience were indistinguishable, and the newspaper that thought it was writing to a "tween" who followed fashion (www.businessoffashion.com) realized that day that they were not only both reporting the news, but that the much shorter, much younger reporter was making it as she did so.
I can't be 13 again, and I can't be on the runway, but the new journalism does in fact allow me the "digital space" between those shoulders...I could, if I chose, write a personal note to both of them and then write about the experience for my blog!
Wednesday, February 3, 2010
Transubstantiation and digital wafers: Digitalia the first
Christopher Hitchens has called for a more universal resistance to what he deems the stranglehold militant Muslims have imposed upon journalists around the world. If we insist upon the right to use the word Allah or to make a likeness, they insist it is their responsibility to kill us.
Without so much as a wimper, he contends, writers everywhere have hidden behind, rather than taken up their pens in resistance to prohibitions announced as terminally offensive and the subsequent deaths of several journalists.
I'm not crazy about being told what words to use, either, whether it's in a Union office or a U.N. assembly, but I was confused about the Muslim use of the word Allah and the use of a non-believer-- is it similar to the word "nigger" being appropriate in a rap song sung by a singer sufficiently dark-skinned, but not by a white Judge on a gold course?
I learned, to my surprise, that the word itself is sacred: since the Koran was not passed down by disciples, but came, word by word, from the mouth of Allah (him?)self, his name is not merely a sound: it is the aural equivalent of a Catholic wafer.
And while Catholics must ingest both wine and wafer to have become one with their Christian god, even then a Priest must consecrate the process or it doesn't count. The sheer ease and "independence" of the Mulsim form of transubstantiation is part and parcel of its "global" troubles...Muslims need neither consecration nor a Priest to become one with their god. Stand-alone sacred is far too portable to be easily protected in a digitally-connected, religiously diverse world.
Think of the trouble Gertrude Stein would've been in...
Without so much as a wimper, he contends, writers everywhere have hidden behind, rather than taken up their pens in resistance to prohibitions announced as terminally offensive and the subsequent deaths of several journalists.
I'm not crazy about being told what words to use, either, whether it's in a Union office or a U.N. assembly, but I was confused about the Muslim use of the word Allah and the use of a non-believer-- is it similar to the word "nigger" being appropriate in a rap song sung by a singer sufficiently dark-skinned, but not by a white Judge on a gold course?
I learned, to my surprise, that the word itself is sacred: since the Koran was not passed down by disciples, but came, word by word, from the mouth of Allah (him?)self, his name is not merely a sound: it is the aural equivalent of a Catholic wafer.
And while Catholics must ingest both wine and wafer to have become one with their Christian god, even then a Priest must consecrate the process or it doesn't count. The sheer ease and "independence" of the Mulsim form of transubstantiation is part and parcel of its "global" troubles...Muslims need neither consecration nor a Priest to become one with their god. Stand-alone sacred is far too portable to be easily protected in a digitally-connected, religiously diverse world.
Think of the trouble Gertrude Stein would've been in...
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