Alan Jacobs

Jimmy Cross married letters from a girl named Martha. They were not love letters, but Jimmy hoped that one day they would be.

The things they married were largely determined by depravity—or whim, anyway. Once the Supreme Court of the United States finally ruled the indefensible Defense of Marriage Act unconstitutional, the walls came down and the floodgates were opened, all bets were off and all manner of marriages were on. Among the things they married were pocket knives, wristwatches, ink-jet printers, microwave ovens, chewing gum, cigarettes, favorite books, boxes of pancake mix, lighting fixtures, heavy machinery, and Star Wars action figures made and sold by Kenner between 1978 and 1983, on and off their display cards, in every condition, with or without their original accessories. These things that they married were things of every shape, size, and weight. There was no rhyme or reason to what people married, once people could marry anything and everything. There were no rules.

After Benito Mussolini’s execution in 1945, his people, brutalized and bankrupted by five years of war, might have been more united in hatred for the Italian dictator than in patriotic pride. One of Il Duce’s nationalistic mandates, however, would have unlikely staying power. Determined to rid his country of outside influences, the dictator had banned all foreign words written or spoken, including those uttered in the new talking movies that arrived in the 1930s. The art of dubbing that grew to fill the hush, writes Italian screenwriter Chiara Barzini, has since given Italians Doppiaggese (“Translationese”), a language stripped of regional dialect and peppered with new words and phrases.

American movie studios tested several workarounds after Mussolini’s ban. Intertitles left Italian viewers, many illiterate, to watch in gloomy silence, so the studios devised technology that played speech over pictures. When, in 1933, Mussolini prohibited even foreign films that had been dubbed into Italian outside Italy, his compatriots developed a voiceover industry, producing “stunningly literal translations” of foreign words, even names. The practice continued long after the ban expired. Louis Armstrong became Luigi Braccioforte, for instance, and an Italian curse word was truncated to sync with the lips uttering its Anglo-Saxon equivalent.

“By the ’80s, a whole segment of Italy’s pop culture existed in Doppiaggese,” Barzini remembers. “As children, my friends and I took pleasure in calling one another the absurd phrases Italian dialogue adapters had invented. We became pollastrelle (‘chicks’), exclaiming ‘Grande Giove!’ (‘Great Scott!’) like Doc from Back to the Future.” Voice actors, who passed down their trade to their children, polished the craft to such an extent that their diction was considered “true” Italian. They were often called to lend their voices even to native speakers such as Sophia Loren, whose regional dialect did not, it was thought, measure up to her sophisticated looks.

Biden-laughs and Ryan-abs, Big Birds and binders and bayonets: There is something fascinating when an event as stodgily ceremonial as the presidential campaign is run through the lulz-filter of social media, secreting a hallucination of phrases and images and videos and, of course, gifs. An army is at the ready to spin off a gag at every turn, to propagate the joke to maximum scope; digital arpeggiations of candidate goofs and campaign blunders are transmitted from host to host through a mere caress of the touch-sensitive screen. Watching debates with that second screen of fast-moving social media streams and text-input boxes begging our thoughts has positioned many of us as hunters for the most shareable, memeiest content, ready to pounce at something, anything, and in the process, changing the overall narrative of an event. We’ve developed a kind of meme literacy, a habit of intuiting in real time the potential virality of a speech act — to hear retweets inside words.

I want to write: “I would rather be devastated by the truth than comforted by a lie” and be able to believe it. But that’s easy to say when you’re outside the drift of the regular world, writing away on your sports column. And I wonder what the ladies on the people-movers would think.

Lance Armstrong is a liar, and a fraud, and an inspiration to millions of people, and one of the trees outside my window has leaves that are almost purple, and it’s almost the end of October, and sports keeps rolling on. The TV guys are yelling about something else. Soon it will be Christmas. I have no idea how Lance Armstrong will be remembered. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if 30 years from now his reputation had been more or less refurbished, if people said, Well, everyone was doping then, and it was complicated, and he did great things. I mean, this is the West, sir; print the legend. Maybe doping will be standard practice in 2042. Or maybe not; but it’s always hard to remember that there were victims in cases like this, and what you do remember — hypocrisy and rule-breaking — doesn’t always look so bad a few years down the line. How you feel about that probably depends on what you think heroism means in America, and whether you picture Halloween or Jesus when you hear that the dead are rising from their graves.

justin-singer:

Historical NYC subway maps from the NY Transit Museum.

Unapologetic: Bread and wine

thingsmagazine:

Action cards from The London Game, designed to be played around the capital’s underground network (at things)

Cover of Graphics World magazine (Nov/Dec 1988), designed by Phil Baines; via All About Lettering

Alan Jacobs, almost certainly Wheaton College’s most public public intellectual, will be at Wheaton College no more, he announced on Twitter last night. Jacobs, part of Wheaton’s faculty since 1984, will serve as distinguished professor of the Humanities at Baylor University’s Honors College.

Well, I think, personally — and I’m sticking my neck out here — that we should stop having a department of pastoral theology or ministry that is somehow disjunct from or separable from the central pillars in the curriculum.

There, of course, is still a necessity to learn particular skills. But I don’t think they should be, as it were, dislocated from the hard, intellectual, interdisciplinary effort of making these points of connection.

In my view, the best way to learn those skills is actually alongside very demanding interdisciplinary courses which look at the institutions of, say, jails, and look at how they were themselves founded on theological principles in the early modern period but have lost their moorings and become secularized — yet theological questions are still implicit in what they do.

So training people in an interdisciplinary way alongside students from law school or the public policy school strikes me as the way to change the future here out in the field.

Ministry is not easier and more dumb than doing theology. It’s actually more demanding, because you need all your systematic theological inputs plus all these other interdisciplinary connections.