Wednesday, March 27, 2019
Cool statistic
I did this in my head, so don't take it to the bank, but just looking at the monthly numbers archived posts here at NewGathering, it seems there have been over 600 posts. Many of them have been excellent, and nearly all of them have been thought-provoking. Not bad for a small community set up in haste when dotCommonweal suddenly was dropped down the memory hole. I want to express my gratitude to David, Gene, Jack and the others who had the commitment and passion to see that our old community had a place to meet. I'm grateful to all of you, including whatever lurkers are hanging out there. Thank you. And may God continue to bless this place.
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Our thanks should all go to Margaret O'Brien Steinfels, a former editor of Commonweal, who writes frequently in those pages and who once blogged at now-deceased dotCommonweal (have you all noticed that byline?) whose idea this was.
ReplyDeleteI have the entire transcript of that last day when we discussed the impending death; my computing background told me all the comments would disappear with the old blog.
Secondly our thanks should go to David. I thought it would take months to get together a blog.
Third, my thanks go to Gene who had my e-mail address and included me in the discussions about the new blog.
My notion of civic duty has been to contribute a comment a day and a post a week. I have probably not been doing that as much recently because of other commitments, but I am glad others have been keeping things going.
I'm grateful for the posts, comments and presence of everyone else here. I'm also grateful for a venue that tolerates my frustrated rants.
ReplyDeleteGee, Stanley, I was about to say that myself. I was surprised to see that we've been talking like this for two years. I know y'all a lot better now. Nice company.
ReplyDeleteAt least one media outlet in the U.S. is working right! Bravo.
ReplyDeleteDoes God bless "places" in cyberspace (the opposite of which, a young reader in my online book group tells me, is " meatspace," ugh)?
ReplyDeleteI am reminded of this prayer spoken by our Anglican priest before the sermon. I should try to follow it more on here:
Lord, may the words of our mouths and the meditations of our hearts be always acceptable in Your sight.
If that were the standard, where would I be? Do you ever have the sense that, at times, the mouth is directly connected to the typing fingers while the brain is doing something else?
DeleteMeatspace is ugly!
"Meatspace"? That's a new one for me. Yeah, ugh!
DeleteAnd ditto your last sentence.
"Ditto your last sentence", I meant Jean's last sentence.
DeleteCould meatspace be the wisdom of SpellCheck, which caused my local newspaper to report that someone did not "quantify" for a job?
DeleteOf course, editors are expensive, and some engineer convinced publishers that algorithms can do the job just as well and not leave coffee stains on the desk.
What was the algorithm trying to say?
DeleteWhen I do a post here, it takes me at least five rounds of revisions/rewrites before I feel like it's something I'm ok with having my name associated with. (Which I do after it's been posted - I draft most of my posts at night, when I have time, but I do my best thinking in the morning - amazing how awful something looks the next morning.)
DeleteI'd love to have an editor - it would save me a boatload of time on this blog!
I draft my homilies in Microsoft Word. Office is a good deal more aggressive than the Blogspot editor (which just points out spelling errors, as far as I can tell). Office will tell me when I'm adding in extraneous words and it catches grammatical errors (not all of which I agree with). It probably improves my writing marginally. I generally don't need spellcheck to tell me when I've made a typo, but I do appreciate that it, unlike I, knows which words end in "-ant" and which end in "-ent".
In college, I think I was at the peak of my writing ability, as I had to write critiques of novels. I had to write about philosophical and theological subjects. Then my career started and it was technical writing, briefings and proposals. I adopted the proper passive third person for technical reports. "The laser pulse energy was adjusted to 0.15 Joules". That wasn't too bad, but the proposal writing in governmentese definitely ruined me for life. Then came communications in viewgraphs. Viewgraphs are just big bumper stickers. I was finished at that point.
DeleteGrading freshman comp papers erodes your own writing skills ... or drives you insane, though the larger problems with student writing are not at the sentence-level. It is depressing how many of them were unable to make a clear assertion and then support it with credible evidence. The ones who care do make progress. So there's that.
DeletePer Stanley, past writing jobs: All those years writing editorials at Commonweal and editing those of others exacerbated /intensified what now looks like one of my major character defects: spot the problem, and start an argument; pick your best case and drive it into a tree; consider the opposite, find its strongest points and refute them! Oy!!!
DeleteStanley, "passive third person for technical reports". Yes, several decades of that didn't do wonders for my writing style.
DeleteMargaret, That was St. Thomas Aquinas's method of doing philosophy, wasn't it? (Bob Hoyt had a lot of that.)
DeleteIn case you were serious, the reporter tried to say he person didn't "qualify" for the job. No telling what he typed, but the algorithm turned it into "quantify." (Maybe the algorithm thought it took a big man to do the job.)
Maybe that' why Bob Hoyt and I got on. Plus, we agreed about 66 percent of the time.
DeleteFirst: Thanks to everyone who participates here, and to Margaret for suggesting it, and especially to David for taking the initiative and getting it up and running. I miss dotCommonweal, and the posts and comments of those who contributed there but don't contribute here; but it's also true that the quality of the conversations here is very high.
ReplyDeleteSecond: Tom responded to Margaret, saying "That was St. Thomas Aquinas's method of doing philosophy, wasn't it?" That reminded me of something I saw on a website called Pastoral Quotient:
"Thomas was particularly skilled at the scholastic method of theology for his time. Before arguing a position, a question would be raised, followed immediately by an array of objections to the answer Thomas favored – a “devil’s advocate” approach, if you will. Thomas would pose these objections with great clarity and even apparent sympathy. It was said that he often summarized the arguments of his opponents better than they did... Thomas honored his intellectual 'enemies' by hearing and studying their arguments carefully, then responding intelligently."
I've only dabbled in Aquinas, and that only a little bit. But a couple of times I've tried to write things according to his method which Gene describes here - and it's very, very difficult. I end up persuading myself that my views were wrong and the objections are right.
DeleteIt's hard to think clearly.