RBOC - Gray winter day edition

Blogging bullets:

• You may have noticed that I have no blog roll. That's because it was a Blogrolling blog roll, and Blogrolling has ceased to exist. That's a shame, because it was a handy system (though the ads on it in the last year or so of its existence were annoying). But I cut and pasted the blogroll before that happened, and when I get the energy for it, I'll repost an updated version of it.
• I'm thinking of changing to WordPress. Those of you who've made the move, how hard is it to move the archive of the blog? What do you like/dislike about each platform?
• I'm also thinking of claiming my blog as service/outreach when I do my 5 year post-tenure review or when I go up for full professor. Any opinions about that?
• My partner has been known as Bullock on this blog because I named him in our Deadwood-watching phase, during which time he grew a Seth Bullock-style mustache and goatee. But Deadwood is long gone and my man is clean-shaven. Plus, even though "bullock" meant "young bull" in Middle English and that's one of its meanings today, it also can mean a castrated bull, which is not the association I wish to project for my Bullock. (Though it is kind of a funny pairing with Virago.) But it would be confusing to rename him. I'm thinking maybe of just putting a "cast of characters" in the sidebar and explaining the origins of the name. Any other ideas?
• I have been remiss in telling Pastry Pirate fans that she has long been blogging elsewhere. First she was in New Zealand, working and exploring, and now she's working in Antarctica. No, really. I kind of think "Baking in Antarctica" should be the title of the blog, but since it started before her life on the Ice Planet Hoth (as I like to think of it), it's called Stories That Are True.
  
• Hey, cool, I managed to blog more than in 2009. Not exactly an awesome accomplishment, since I was really lame in 2009, but still an improvement. What should I blog about next?
  

Work/Life bullets:

• Our Christmas tree is up, all the Christmas shopping is done, and all but one present is wrapped (because it hasn't arrived yet)! Hooray!
• On Thursday, I wired the deposit for the studio flat in Belsize Park. It's non-refundable, so this makes it official. I'm going to be living, however temporarily, in a flat in London! I've never lived in a flat in London before! Heck, I've never lived in a flat before (American apartments, yes). How cool is that?!
• The one-week rent for the studio flat in Belsize Park (the amount of the deposit) is just over my one-month rent in my awesome two-bedroom Rust Belt Historical District apartment and only about $175 less than our monthly mortgage payment. I'll never be able to live full-time in a big, expensive city again -- I've been too spoiled by the low cost of living here in Rust Belt. But hey, now I can afford 6-week jaunts there! So, I may live in Rust Belt, but I can better afford life in the big city in small doses. This is what I keep telling myself, anyway.
• OMG, my sabbatical is half over!!! Ack!!!
• Something I realized at the various holiday parties this week: asking me "So, how's sabbatical going?" is as crazy-making for me now as "So, how's the dissertation coming?" was for me once upon a time. Also, faculty on sabbatical don't want to talk about work issues. Come on, people, surely we can talk about something else!
• Bullock is grading finals. He just said to me, "It must be Christmas time, because a student just spelled Commerce Clause like Santa Claus."
• Bullock and I are going to BullockLand for the holidays (with Pippi). I spent Turkey Week in Cowtown with my side of the family and starting this year we're alternating where we go for Christmas so that we don't have to do the crazy-making hurryhurryhurry to get to one place and then the next. That makes my going out to LA to visit Virgo Sis and go to the MLA much less stressful (so does going to MLA just to go). Of course, so does being on sabbatical, because otherwise I'd be doing MLA back-to-back with starting our Spring semester.
  
• Speaking of holiday plans, in case I don't blog again before we leave:
  

Not the same "Dr. V"

Just in case you're wondering, I do not write the column "Doin' It With Dr. V" for TheFrisky.com.

Just wanted to make that clear.

I may not be writing frequently here, but...

...I wrote something over here. It's not exactly new content, but it's something.

A blog of interest

Ah summer. A time when I just don't have that much of interest to blog. Sigh.

In the meantime, some of you may remember a certain piratically-inclined dessert and bread making friend of mine who blogged her Cookin' School adventures. Well, she's back to blogging at a blog called Stories That Are True. Only this time she's in New Zealand. It's a long story; I'll let her tell it.

For your distraction and entertainment needs

I've been too caught up in end of the semester madness to blog. Btw, if I could single-handedly get rid of our rolling admissions for our MA program, I would. Who on earth decides on December 15th that maybe they should do an MA in English and that they should definitely start it next month? These are the same people who are asking all of you for letters of recommendation right about now. Oh, and they need it by Christmas, btw.

Anywho, since this madness is keeping me from blogging -- and don't forget the approximately 650 pages of grading I'm doing now -- I thought I'd introduce you to a new blog. It only has two posts so far and they're pretty damn funny. I especially like the top one, "Dude Who Never Comes to Class," in which our writer wonders,

Are you the embodiment of the recurring dream we’ve all had? The one where you completely forget about a class for the entire semester and then somehow realize your horrendous mistake two minutes before the final exam? And you go to the test and have no idea how to answer any of the questions and wake up absolutely panic-stricken. Are you living that dream? If so, that really sucks dude.

It's called Acadammit and you can find it here.

For all *my* internet friends

Amanda French wrote this awesome song for all of her internet friends, and I'm passing it along to all of you as an early holiday gift. Click on the link to go play it and/or download it. Feel free to pass it along to *your* internet friends, since, as she sings, "all my internet friends give things away / They just really like to make stuff even when it doesn't pay."

H/T Michael Bérubé

On a lighter note: Middle English comics!

Hey, did you all know there was a blog that translates newspaper comic strips into Middle English? Well I didn't know until my friend the Funny Playwright (colleague Victoria's husband) forwarded it to me. Get this: it's called "Japes for Owre Tymes." Bahahahaha!

The top post when Funny Playwright forwarded it to me was this one, which actually manages to make Lynn Johnson's "For Better or Worse" funny. I don't know exactly why, but it's a *hoot* in Middle English. And I also dig the blogger's self-description: "I am a bad-tempered English prof who spends far too much time not writing articles about Geoffrey Chaucer. Shame on me." Te-hee!

But part of the reason I found this blog extra funny is completely accidental and idiosyncratic, but a story worth telling. This summer, when I was on the train to Windsor for my adventures in manuscript study, I sat across the aisle from a hodge-podge of 20-something travelers who had to have met in a youth hostel, given that they each came from different North, Central, and South American countries. Plus, they were clearly still in the introductory stages of "what do you do for a living" or "where or you from" conversation. Anyway, once they got the small talk out of the way, they all (or most of them) had a bonding moment over what is apparently THE biggest thing in Latin American television aside from Ugly Betty. You know what it is? It's Dennis the Menace. No, I'm not making this up. Seriously. Dennis the freakin' Menace. That's what they said, anyway. And then they argued whether the movie or tv show came first. I decided not to get involved, partly because I was too confused.

So, back to "Japes for Owre Tymes," after reading the current post, I went back to catch up with earlier ones, which is not too difficult now since the blog is nearly brand new. Anyway, the next most recent one is a Dennis the Menace panel. See, even he's funny in Middle English! Now, go read the comments and you'll see the first one is in Portuguese! Those Brazilian Dennis fans are *everywhere* man! I decided to use Babel Fish to translate what the commenter was saying, because I was curious to see if he was surprised it was a comic that's been around since the '50s. But no, this is what Babel Fish tells me he said:

… denis it is much more show in hq or livened up drawing, the film was not very legal! congratulations for posts and blog! Success!

I'm sure that's a terrible translation. Or maybe it's just spam. But it suggests to me that the Latin American Dennis is an illegal knock-off, which explains why I can't find any info on it on the 'net (though I didn't try very hard).

Anyway, I think "Japes for Owre Tymes" is hilarious, even without random references in Portuguese to the worldwide popularity of that not-at-all-very-menacing scamp Dennis. How can you not like a blog that starts its life with a Middle English version of Mary Worth??

Crankiness

First, the kind of crankiness you might expect: I am vexed, terribly vexed by continued craziness at my institution and by a certain electronic output by some of my colleagues, which has devolved into something from the bad old days of the UseNet. It's embarrassing. I wash my hands of it. I will no longer read or comment on it (in my lame attempts to raise the level of conversation to, uh, actual conversation about the subject of the posts). Oh, and some of you may remember that I held a last minute workshop for the parties involved to help them make it better -- more readable, more useful for their message, more interesting to a wider audience. ONE person showed up. And that person thought that only the registered bloggers could see it, so you can imagine the learning curve I was facing there.

Oy.

Can I just say, for those of you who know what I'm talking about, that there are a lot of fantastic people at my institution among the students, faculty, and staff -- fantastic thinkers and creative artists and teachers and scholars (from students to faculty) and researchers and visionaries and organized minds who keep it all going. But it's always the squeaky wheels who get heard.

In other cranky news, but not my *own* crankiness...

Did you know there are *two* Cranky Professors? Seriously, there's the medieval art historian, The Cranky Professor, whom I already knew. And then there's one in English, too! But she goes by the shortened nom-de-blog of Cranky Prof and blogs at Cranky Epistles. Who knew? Did you?

Why are we all so cranky?

Btw, the word "cranky" has now become completely weird to me. Does that ever happen to you -- that is, you say or write a word over and over and it becomes alien in the process?

PSA

If you're looking for that post about the thing that annoyed me that I was promising to post about, I stupidly posted it over the holiday weekend. It's four posts down, or here. I draw attention to it in case you missed it, and because, these days, a substantive post from me is a rare thing.

UPDATE: Another PSA: Carl at Got Medieval is asking people to sum up the Middle Ages in a list of seven words (or phrases -- some of us are cheating, including me, as "flying buttress" and "trial by jury," both on my list, are more than one word each) in a kind of word-association game. It's fun and informative -- go play!

Blog roll updating

I've finally spent some time updating my blog roll. Since I use Blogrolling and have a "Blogroll It!" button on my browser, it's really easy to add blogs, but I have a tendency not to keep up on cleaning out the defunct and discontinued links.

But while deleting dead links has a kind of satisfaction to it, it's not nearly as fun as adding new ones. So, if you read this blog -- even if you don't comment here -- and you've got a blog of your own and it's not my blog roll, leave me a comment with your URL and I'll add you. Likewise, if you've moved and I haven't found your new blog, or if there's something wrong with the way your blog is listed here, let me know.

Say what? Or, the tiresome tussle of linguistics vs. literature

So. About that blog post that annoyed me...

Way back in the ancient time of June 17, Mark Liberman at Language Log wrote a post in which he said the following:

In fact, in my (admittedly limited) experience, English departments are among the last places on campus where you're likely to find any indication of interest in any form of linguistic analysis whatever.

I'd be very happy to find that I'm wrong about this.

Mark Liberman, you are wrong about this. There, happy?

The problem with Liberman's broad generalization (aside from being a broad generalization -- not usually a persuasive move in argumentative writing), is that he then proceeds to back up his claim with the example of the Yale English department and what he could find on their web site.

OK, before I go further, can I just announce to the world at large that using Yale (or Harvard, or Stanford, or Oberlin, or any other elite school) as a stand-in for academia at large is poor evidence, no matter what the subject of your argument is. American higher education has a plethora of institutional types with an equally diverse set of missions, funding sources, student bodies, faculties, curricula, and organizational structures. And we do not all even aspire to be or model ourselves on the elite private universities and colleges. Heck, institutions like Yale aren't even in the majority of types of institutions in the country, let alone anything like an average model.

But back to the people-in-English-don't-care-about-linguistics thing. I'd reckon that in the majority of 4 year colleges and universities in the country, the linguists are actually IN the English department. Again, Yale is a poor example, because it's elite and wealthy enough to support an entire linguistics department. Oh, and look, Prof. Roberta Frank, renowned Anglo-Saxonist has a dual appointment in Linguistics and in English at Yale. Liberman didn't mention that, for some reason (although a lone medievalist commenter did). But I'll come back to the medieval angle in a minute.

Most places, however, aren't as lucky as Yale to have a well-staffed and independent linguistics department. At my own university, most of the linguists are in my department -- including people who don't necessarily work on specifically *English*-related issues -- and some are in the foreign language department (yes, we just have one -- they're all lumped together). So actually, our English department is either the first or the second place on campus where you'd find people interested in linguistic analysis, depending on where you decided to start your search.

And it's not just the people who are identified as "linguists" and specialists in linguistic fields who are interested in linguistic analysis. Hello! {Raises hand} Medievalist here! I teach Old English and Middle English, both of which are cross-listed with Linguistics, and the students in there are a mix of English majors, linguistics majors, various foreign language majors, and English graduate students. We use the IPA and talk about all sorts of heady linguistic goodness like phonology, morphology, syntax, and the like. And I bet this year's crop in particular will never forget the genitive of time in part because it was a recurring obsession of mine across Old and Middle English, and at the end of the latter, I came into class one day and triumphantly announced that the final scene of No Country For Old Men featured an American example of it. (You should've seen how giddy I was about it.) See, medievalists have always needed a knowledge of and interest in linguistic analysis, and always will, including those of us who are interested in all sorts of other theoretical developments in the field. Are we not part of the English department?

What's more, our English major here at RBU requires an intro to linguistics class. Why is that? Aside from all the good, sound reasons that the study of literature may have something to do with the study of language, many of our English majors are also Education majors, and the state requires language arts and English teachers in the public schools to have had an intro to linguistics class. I bet that's true in a lot of states. Our MA then requires history of the English language, again because we feel that a knowledge of language enhances the study of literature. Cuz, you know, literature is made of language. (I know! Whoda thunk it?!)

But where Liberman's post really, really gets my goat -- or rather, the writing teacher goat in me -- is the way he uses Yale as his example. After noting that "transformational grammar" doesn't appear on their web page, he adds:

also among the missing are phoneme, vowel, consonant, Lakoff, Whorf, "noun phrase", transitive, adverb, iamb, trochee, dactyl, pentameter, hexameter, and metrical.

(To make it clear that Google has actually indexed some text there, post-colonial occurs 22 times.)

Oh for goodness sake. Why would most of those terms appear on the freakin' web page of the department? Take out "Lakoff" and "Whorf" and the remaining words are all terms that have come up in my classes -- including many of my "purely" literature classes -- but they don't appear in any of my course descriptions because they're all too specific. I even have one forthcoming article on historical linguistics issues that involves both prosody and phonology, but none of Liberman's words are in its title.

But the parenthetical claim makes it clear what the real subject of Liberman's complaint is: you English lit people pay too much attention to the post-colonial. Oy. Are we really still fighting the culture wars? Really? Look, you can care about *both* the political forces that shape literature *and* the linguistic ones that do. They are not mutually exclusive. And in terms of the logic, Liberman's complaint is problematic: "post-colonial" is a much bigger category than "adverb." It's also a theoretical approach that would apply to a multitude of literature courses in a way that "hexameter" wouldn't. I bet the verse writing courses that Yale offers (intro and advanced) include discussion of iambs, trochees, etc. And the description of the "Renaissance Lyric" course says it will focus on "poetic forms." I bet meter has something to do with that course, too. (Oh, and if you search "verse" on the site, it comes up 19 times.)

In the comments to Liberman's post, only one medievalist speaks up, as I recall. And one person from a regional comprehensive points out that linguistics is within their English department. And I don't think Liberman responded to either of them.

So as an English department medievalist at a regional comprehensive, who teaches linguistics courses and linguistic issues, I felt I had to pipe up on behalf of my many identities: Hey, what about us?

Wuthering - wha?

Via The Cranky Professor, here's an interpretation of Kate Bush's "Wuthering Heights" that is so very wrong it's *hilarious*. (If you don't know the original, you might want to watch it first -- it's below.)



This is another video posted in part for the Pastry Pirate. Back in college, she and I and another one of our friends had a love-hate relationship with this song. It gave us all the creeps. The Pirate could send shivers down my spine just by chanting in a high-pitched voice, "It's meeeee, Catheeeee, let me in" (especially effective if she was knocking on my dorm room door) or saying she was "soooo cooooold" in chilly weather. Brrrrrr. Creepy.

Now, I'll admit, the Puppini Sisters here are borrowing all their silly gestures straight from Kate Bush, but in the context of Andrews Sisters style close harmony (and those hair nets!) it seems all so much more cheery and full of imitation American can-do spirit (especially on "let me grab your soul"), much less spectral and melodramatic. For your further viewing pleasure, here's Kate's video for the song, with its own quality of camp creepiness and melodrama (not unlike the novel itself, actually):



And now for something completely different, the semaphore version of Wuthering Heights, by Monty Python:



Hmm...There seems to be a similarity of gestures here.

A cranky medievalist

Things are making me cranky today, despite the glorious spring holiday weekend Sunday that we're having. And everything that's making me cranky is doing so because I'm a medievalist. It's making me wish I'd been a modernist after all (once upon a time that's what I thought I wanted to do).

First, there's this article skewering the Medieval Congress at K'zoo, which Dr. Nokes has posted about and partly criticized, rightly. It's probably better that he do so than I, since as you can see from my comments there, the thing gets my hackles up in all sorts of ways that don't bother him.

But as if that weren't enough, I also had a colleague forward the article to me, assuming that I'd *share* her viewpoint -- he thought I'd be one of the people, like the writer, tsk-tsking the use of cultural studies and the papers on excrement. (Clearly he hasn't even looked at my CV -- not even when I was up for tenure??? -- and also doesn't know my love of fart jokes.) And he thought the article was a fair and sympathetic assessment! (As if he'd know. He's never been to the Congress -- he's an Americanist!) It reminds me of how my dad used to always send me clippings of conservative critiques of all the leftists in academia and tell me to be careful or I wouldn't get a job. Apparently, my colleague, like my dad, thinks I'm a conservative. My dad thinks so for complex psychological reasons I don't have time to get into (he also thinks I'm still a practicing Catholic and a virgin, and he doesn't know I live with Bullock). But I think my colleague keeps assuming that I'm a political conservative because, I guess, I study the Middle Ages. Why? Why assume that? Can someone fill me in here? [Edited to add: it's the act of assuming that bugs me most. I'm sure said colleague would be annoyed if someone assumed he was a liberal just because he's an English professor. When smart people assume, it annoys me.]

And *then* I get another e-mail, this time sent to a large list, from another colleague (apparently my colleagues have no lives and spend holiday weekends writing e-mails) in which he attached a letter to an editor defending what we do in the liberal arts. OK, nothing to get cranky about, right? Except that in a moment of misplaced, annoying cutesiness, he referred to scholars at RBU who teach "Olde English." Ack! OLD-E ENGLISH! I do NOT teach Old-E fraking English. Way to denigrate what I do into some cutesy Ren Fest attraction. Not to mention the fact that it's not even grammatically correct in Old or even Middle English. But that's besides the point, since who would give a class title for a serious class in an American university in anything but modern English? Argh! Bullock managed to alleviate my annoyance a little bit though, when he told me I should write to my colleague and tell him to "go to the shoppe and buy a clue." Hee-hee.

But seriously all of this is making me tired of being a medievalist at the moment. I'll recover, I'm sure, but for once it would be nice not to specialize in a period that gets so abused and misunderstood. I should go commiserate with Victoria -- Victorianist are probably second to medievalists in their impatience with the (ab)use of their period by the general public. And I know Will, our Shakespearean, gets sick of Shakespeare being used as a weapon in various fights about the humanities. And if I studied early American, I'd likely get sick of the abuse of the term "puritanical." *Is* there a period of English or American literature that's free from popular misunderstandings?

Blogging-related bleg for advice

OK, so I've volunteered to teach my colleagues how to make their blog into something that people outside of RBU will want to read, but that also discusses what's going on here. I also plan on showing them ways of getting it wider attention and readers. Obviously, nothing's guaranteed, but I have some ideas.

On the writing front, they should talk about the specifics here but with the framework of the larger problems for higher education in general -- especially public education. They won't get readers and links -- especially not from Inside Higher Ed -- unless what they write speaks to a larger audience. And they should mix posts that speak to fellow academics and general audience readers.

On the marketing front, these are the ideas I have: register with technorati; read other blogs and comment on them; send an e-mail to the "Around the Web" editor at IHE when there's a post they might be interested in; register with SiteMeter to see what traffic you are (or aren't) getting; register with a local blog who collects Rust Belt blog links and categorizes them; create a blogroll (which may get the attention of those bloggers checking their links); and....um, what am I missing?

Does anyone have any other ideas?

It's hard to grow a blog audience overnight, I know, but it's worth a try getting some wider audience, I think. And also, once the trustees sign off on my tenure and it's a done deal, I'll link my colleagues' blog here, so eventually they'll have at least one link!

PS -- I've told my colleagues that I have a blog, but I haven't told them which one.

If you're not reading The Rebel Letter...

...you should be. If not for awesome posts like this one, then for a moving personal history post like this one. Plus, she has a cute dog.

But right now, the Rebel Lettriste could use your advice about TT offers that seem too low and how to negotiate. I don't have anything to give her, since I was too naive to know I *could* negotiate.

Another med-ren manuscript web resource

Many of you probably already know about this, but I was just cleaning out my file of stuff from 2007's Kalamazoo conference (yeah, OK, I've been a little disorganized this year), and I ran across a flyer for The Free Library of Philadelphia's Digital Collection of Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts. The home page is here.

I don't know their collection well, but the highlights page is mostly religious and very high-end courtly works, all with illuminations, of course. (That's a topic for a post in and of itself -- the digital bias towards pretty pictures.) But what I found immediately useful was the one-page "Manuscript Basics" introduction -- good for giving students a quickie overview of how a manuscript was made (although, again, with an emphasis on religious texts).

Just thought I'd pass on the info.

Thank you, Pastry Pirate

Not too long ago we thought Thanksgiving at Chez Bullock and Virago would include not only Bullock's family but also my sister Virgo Sis, which posed quite the culinary conundrum for us, since Bullock's sister is a vegan, her daughter is vegetarian, and Virgo Sis has celiac disease, which means she can't eat any gluten (the protein in wheat and barley). Add to that the complication that Bullock really, really likes to bake pies and cakes and, given his druthers, not only uses animal by-products in all his baking (eggs, butter), but also uses lard in his pie crusts. So as far as he was concerned, a gluten-free/vegan desert wasn't possible.

So the Pastry Pirate took pity on us and adopted our needs as her project in her advanced-special-dietary-needs-complicated-high-maintenance-baking class and developed a gluten-free, vegan devil's food cake good enough for a dessert purist like Bullock and sent us the recipe, modified for a home baker and the non-commercial kitchen. Wasn't that cool of her?

The result was really quite yummy -- no surprise there since she got a grade that was mere decimal points away from perfect. (I'm still wondering what lost her the less than 7/10 of a point. And my students think *I'm* an anal-retentive grader!) In the end Virgo Sis decided to visit Cowtown for the holiday instead of Rust Belt, so we didn't need a dessert that was both gluten-free and vegan, and since the Pirate gave us specific instructions of how to do a merely vegan one, that's what we did. It saved us some time scouring the local health food stores for the multiple flour-substitutes we would've had to use, and saved time in the kitchen, too. So we don't know what the full gluten-free/vegan effect was. But I have to say, in the midst of the process we were kind of skeptical of even the merely vegan cake -- in part because we thought maybe our home equipment, despite Bullock's tool addiction, wasn't producing the desired effects, but also in part because a lot of the ingredients and techniques went against Bullock's ingrained habits and experiences. The soy-based products used in it smelled kind of nasty, the flax-seed paste looked like snot (as the Pirate had warned), and the cake batter was a rather Halloween-like pitch black. It reminded me of the black gook that turns into the black Spiderman suit in Spiderman 3. Frankly, it freaked me out.

But the whole ultimately added up to more than the sum of its weird parts and the final creation was full of chocolately goodness and traditional cake consistency. And it was a big hit not only with Vegan Sis and Veggie Niece, but also the non-vegan/non-vegetarian crowd, so much so that Bullock didn't even send all the leftovers home with his sister, but kept some for us.

So thanks, Pastry Pirate!

And happy Thanksgiving Recovery Weekend to everyone!

Medieval news

Sorry for the silence, but here's a few tidbits until I can post again:

• Give a big welcome to Dame Eleanor Hull, and new medievalist blogger. According to her "About" page, "Dame Eleanor Hull was a fifteenth century English woman who served Henry IV's wife, Queen Joan, and translated psalms and commentaries from French to English. Her present incarnation is as a pseudonym for an American woman professor of medieval English literature." Already Dame Hull has written two posts, including one chock full of ideas and information about making quills and using them in the classroom! Huzzah! Welcome Dame Hull!
• I'm going to see Beowulf with about 12 students and their guests this afternoon. I'm so excited! I'll post tonight on the experience.
  

Oh, and btw, this is my 402nd post. Hard to believe.

A smart blog for my churchy friends ('specially the 'piscopals)

I thought I'd introduce you all to and give a big blogospheric welcome to Last Protestant Dinosaur, a blog by the Rev. Jarrett Kerbel. When I finally get around to doing my "Thinking Blogger Award" post, Jarrett's blog is going on my list of award winners. He's got a bit of a John Donne for the blogging age quality to him. He only just started, so there's time to catch up on all of his thoughtful, theological posts. My favorite so far is the one on his problems with the theology of the crucifixion and atonement (though he really needs in the future to avoid using the phrase "imperial Roman church" -- good god, is this 1607 instead of 2007?!). And those of you who are specifically members of the Episcopal church, as he is, may appreciate his musing on the possibility of mainline church survival in this essay.

Anyway, I know a number of you would be interested in Jarrett's blog, and I know Jarrett needs more of an audience and a community and a conversation, so I'm spreading the word (heh). Plus, he's a friend and, despite his occasional use of Reformation-era turns of phrase, he's a truly good man.

Required reading re: graduate school

Horace at To Delight and To Instruct has posted his collection of links about graduate school in a series of posts helpfully organized in stages from 'deciding to go' to 'the job market'. But you can find them all by following this link: Grad Compendium.

When I get a chance, I'm going to make that a permanent link in my sidebar.