There are a lot of people in the world who are hard on TV, but I’m not one of them.  I love television, and I tend to think that in the past 10 years or so the medium has been used to present art to rival feature length motion pictures.  I also think that television is an excellent and intriguing barometer for a given culture.  Plus it’s lots of fun .

Anyways, all of this to say that we had a long conversation about great TV shows that culminated in our attempts to pick our All Time, Desert Island, Top Five Television Programs.  Here’s my list, with justifications, and a few honorable mentions.

1.  The Wire.  This is the best television program ever made.  It is powerful, demanding, perfectly executed, and totally engrossing.  Each of its five seasons progresses like a well-crafted novel, with each episode serving as a chapter.  There are no freebies for the viewer here.  If you can’t follow, the producers aren’t going to help you keep up.  The Wire also has some of the best characters I’ve ever seen on the small screen.  McNulty, the darkly flawed homicide detective whom you love, but very often want to punch in the face.  Bubbles, who’s story arc exemplifies redemption as it really is (in this world at least)…difficult, painful, incomplete, and heart-breakingly beautiful.  Marlo, the coldest, cruelest, and perhaps the most starkly real of all The Wire’s cast.  Finally, The Wire deals with many of the themes you find in other programs (drugs, crime, justice/injustice, politics, morality, race, etc), but the difference is, this is probably the only show where these themes are presented as systemic issues.  Crime is related to poverty, which is related to politics, which is related to economics, which is related to race, which is related to justice, which is related to morality, which is related to…and so forth.

2.  The West Wing.  Before watching The Wire, The West Wing would have easily been #1.  Now I see it as a kind of naive idealism to offset The Wire’s stark realism.  The West Wing is about the world as it should be.  It is hopeful, heartwarming, and very funny.  Of course it is also, in a way, entirely false.  Or perhaps “fabricated” is better.  Nobody talks the way the WW characters talk…hell, nobody acts the way they act.  But the world would probably be a better place if they did.

3. Buffy the Vampire Slayer.  Buffy is pure gold.  It’s funny, action packed, cheesy, ridiculous, and (most importantly) entirely self-conscious.  Usually “self-conscious” is something I’d say to disparage a film or TV show, as a way of suggesting that the writers and director were sitting in the room with you while you watched their show, constantly elbowing you in the ribs saying “get it?  get it?  wasn’t that great?”  But that’s not how I feel when I watch Buffy.  When I watch Buffy I feel like Joss Whedon (the creative mind behind the show) is sitting in the room with me, wearing an ironic smirk, and laughing at all the parts I laugh at.  Buffy is also on the list because of the way that it combines unadulterated, b-level, vampire-camp with serious themes and great artistry.  The following episodes are exemplars: Hush, The Body, Once More With Feeling.  Also, it’s funny as hell.

4. Doctor Who.  When I was a kid, round about eight years old, every Saturday night my dad and I would make popcorn with butter and salt, and then sit down and watch Doctor Who on the CBC.  This was re-runs of the old series mind you.  The doctor I knew best was the Fourth Doctor, played by Tom Baker, with his long scarf and love for jelly babies.  But dad and I had this ritual for years, so I also knew the fifth and sixth Doctors, and we even got the occasional re-run from the time of the first and second Doctors, which were shot in B&W.  I suppose that I could go on about how foundational Doctor Who is as both a British cultural icon and one of the great forerunners to modern science-fiction.  I could say something about how the late, great Douglas Adams was a writer for the show for a little while.  But I don’t really need to do I?  I used to stay up late on Saturdays, and watch Doctor Who while eating popcorn with my dad out of our red Tupperware bowl.  That’s why it’s on the list.

5. Modern Family.  This was a tough spot, and several of the honorable mentions almost made the cut, but I decided in the end that Modern Family deserves a spot.  Why?  Because it’s funny.  Actually it’s not just funny, it’s funnier.  Think of something funny.  Modern Family is funnier than that.

Honorable mentions: Lost, Rome, Arrested Development, Big Love, Battlestar Gallactica (the new series).

As much as this is all very happy and exciting news, the acceptance of these two particular papers in the same week has caused me to reflect on a rather odd tension in my academic work.  The first paper, the one that’s being published in a book of essays, is an analysis of the historiography of the Animal Apocalypse of 1 Enoch (title: “(Re)Visionary History: Historiography and Religious Identity in the Animal Apocalypse“).**  It’s a pretty standard biblical studies paper.  It’s methodologically eclectic, but mostly focuses on literary, historical, and sociological concerns.  The second paper is being published in the Journal of Theological Interpretation and is about the hermeneutics of allegorical interpretation…it’s kind of an apologetic for interpreting according to the spiritual sense, though in a weirdish way.  It’s a really hard paper to describe in a couple of sentences (title: “Scripture as Semiotic: Theological Interpretation and the Multiple Senses of Scripture”).***

These two papers are almost polar opposite in approach and intent, and this is pretty representative of a lot of my academic writing thus far.  I do work that’s focused on literary and sociological (especially sociolinguistic) analyses of ancient literature (especially HB/OT, but also broader 2nd Temple era stuff), and I do work that tries to engage the Bible as Christian Scripture, including questions about canon and theological hermeneutics.  Here’s the thing…I’m not really all that sure how these things fit together.  I have a deep suspicion that they do.  I think about it mostly in terms of different levels of abstraction.  But, I also know that at least some (maybe lots? or even most?) of the biblical studies guild sees these as two opposed and incompatible kinds of work.  Some people argue that biblical studies is meant to be a secular endeavor focused on history, literature, and sociology (and related concerns), and other people argue that biblical studies is meant to be a theological activity performed for the community of faith.  These get presented as polar opposites.  Maybe they are polar opposites.

If they are polar opposites then I think I’m going to have to get used to the tension between these two poles, because I’m not really willing to stop doing either kind of writing.

*The CV thing is important because I’m in the process of applying to a couple of biblical studies positions, so getting to add two lines to the “Accepted for Publication” line is happy news.

**The book began as last year’s Canadian Society of Biblical Studies session on ancient Israelite historiography.  The final product will include the essays from the session, and several invited papers.  The title is Prophets and Prophecy in Ancient Israelite Historiography.  Should be out in the next year, and I think will be well worth a look.

**Ironically both the collection of essays and the journal are published by a single publishing house: Eisenbrauns.  Maybe I’m not the only one feeling the tension here.

A few years later I was working at a small church in rural Manitoba, and we were planning a trip down to an orphanage in Mexico.  We were going for about a week, and we would be spending a significant portion of that time building two new houses for the people there.  While I was talking to my senior pastor it came out that I used to work at a place that built pre-fabricated houses, and that I spent almost a year building roof trusses.  He asked me if I would be able to help out designing or building the roof system for the houses we were going to be building.  The answer, as anybody who has ever worked on a factory floor could guess, was “no.”  I could swing a hammer, I could run the pneumatic press, and I could read the set of directions provided by the drafters and engineers.  Given a bunch of wood and a saw I was lost.

I’ve recently started reading an awful lot of Roland Boer’s work, and tonight I began reading his Political Grace.  In the Introduction he discusses the question of what he refers to as “Taylorization,” which is basically the assembly-line process for manufacturing that Henry Ford perfected and popularized (Boer xviii).  Boer challenges the notion that stark lines can be drawn between things like theology and economics and philosophy and whatnot, as well as the idea that one or another of these can be used to explain all of the rest (economics as an explanation for religion, or religion as an explanation for politics, etc).  With regard to Calvin he writes, “[my] study of Calvin leads me to suggest that we need to drop this harmful approach and realize that such a Taylorization is a fiction” (xviii).

He is, of course, utterly correct.  We do not need more line laborers in the great factory of academia.  We don’t need more thinkers with skills and mindsets analagous to my truss-building expertise.  We need something else.  We need synthetic, integrative thinkers.  We need people who’s thinking is more analagous to my father’s truss-building skills.  You see, my dad is a carpenter of the first order.  When he wanted to build an extension onto the back of his garage so that he’d have a dedicated workshop, he didn’t go to Nu-Fab to buy pre-fabricated trusses.  Instead he taught himself to use AutoCAD, then taught himself to design some simple 5/12 pitch trusses, then he built from scratch the jigs and set-ups required, and then he made his own trusses.  And you know what?  They were better than the trusses I made.

My dad is a synthetic builder.  I want to be a synthetic thinker and writer.  So screw Taylorization…let’s start exploring how our thoughts about God and reality and government and social relationships and capital and everything else overlap and inform each other, and then move on from there.

1. Sleep

2. Sleep

3. Hang out with my wife (I always do this, but more so I mean)

4. Watch TV

5. Work on German

As any doctoral student knows, work doesn’t really stop over the Christmas break, but the character of it changes enough that I still find it relaxing.  My plan over the break is to read a lot of German, and to tweak my article on the Animal Apocalypse into a more publishable state.

I hope 2009 is winding down well for you, particularly my readers who are also doing schoolish kinds of things and are consequently feeling a little pinched right now.  But, as I’ve just said, I’m not done yet, so I’d better get back at it.

The presentations that I saw at SBL that were poor were not poor due to mediocre research or specious reasoning.  In fact very few of the presentations I saw suffered from plain old crappy scholarship.  Instead they suffered from problems related to register.*  In some cases this was unavoidable.  This isn’t because those presentations were bad.  The problem was a breakdown between Field and Mode.

Briefly, Field is an SFL term used to describe “the nature of the social activity…the kind of acts being carried out and their goal(s)” (Hasan, Language, Context, and Text, 56).  In the case of the presentations I’m thinking of, the kinds of acts being carried out were just too much for the Mode, or the way in which they were being carried out.  Mode is essentially concerned with the way language itself is being used in communication, including the idea of Channel (phonic or graphic) and Medium (Spoken or Written) (Hasan, 57-59).  The semantic content and rhetorical drive of these presentations were too heavy for a phonic channel (something spoken aloud).  The latter could not bear the weight of the former.  The weight of the information that was brought to bear simply overrode what was possible for the social situation of an oral presentation.  It was like watching a hippo sit on a folding chair.

The other kind of breakdown that I saw was related less to a conflict between Field and Mode, and more to a conflict between two sub-categories of Mode.  As I just indicated, Hasan differentiates between Channel (phonic/graphic) and Medium (spoken/written).  At first this seems redundant, as it seems that a phonic Channel should always have a spoken Medium.  But she uses this distinction to illustrate that some kinds of communication involve splitting this expected pairing.  Think of a personal letter (Hasan, 59), where the Medium is words written on paper, but the Channel is much more like phonic communication, like speaking aloud in a conversational tone.  One is writing, to borrow Hasan’s term, “as-if” one were speaking.

That as-if is very important, particularly for oral presentations.  What happened in many of the SBL presentations I attended is that the presenter wrote a scholarly paper, and then when presenting it, spoke as-if he or she were still writing a scholarly paper.  Spoken Medium but Graphic Channel.  This is backwards.  One can split the expected Channel-Medium pairing, but it has to happen in the other direction.  Thus one would write the presentation as-if it were an oral presentation meant to be heard by the audience and not a paper meant to be read by the audience.  There is no need to dumb things down to do this.  All that is required is that one writes as one would speak in, for instance, a classroom setting.  Use the first person personal pronoun (for shame!), use contractions (sir, I protest!), even the occasional colloquialism isn’t out of the question (the very idea!).  What you present at a conference can’t possibly be a full paper in any case, as there simply isn’t the time (average journal articles being 25-30ish pages).  It is only sensible, then, to try to line up your Channel with what will have the maximal communicative effect for your audience.

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* Yes, I know I talk about linguistic register a lot.  In case you haven’t cottoned on yet, it’s part of my dissertation research…in theory at least.