The wonderful Journal of Oz; academic publishing rackets

When you put it like this:

Maybe the solution is for faculty to work with their universities to find ways to support a scholarly society without the condition being the restriction of research availability. There is enough money in the system to be creative about this, but not so long as our scholarly societies are extracting it from our libraries and giving it to for profit publishers

It seems obvious that somehow some publishers have managed to capture a goldmine and managed the hegemonic trick of persuading people that this is the natural state of affairs, as it was in the beginning, is now and evermore shall be.

Disintemediation is the logic once the hegemony has been revealed: the publishers really are the telephone sanitisers of Douglas Adams' Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy. They offer no real service that could not be done just as well by the collective that is the scholars themselves. Peer-reviewed blogs make as much sense. Crowd sourcing the crit might even do so; the reputation of reviewers would become the imprimatur. The title of the publication is an alibi.

In effect, peer review is the imprimatur, already, all on its own: the fact is just hidden behind the curtain of the wonderful Journal of Oz. What you've got is a bunch of people who already know something about the matter in hand and so can offer a credible opinion on the worthwhileness of the ideas and research. All you need to do is bring that together. A journal isn't necessary for that; it is merely a shorthand, a proxy for the expertise and reputations of the scholars concerned. It's a shorthand produced by the economics of paper publishing in the past and is now sponging off the reputation and historical legacy.

The sleight of hand is the psycho-historical fact that probably most of these scholars at some point have measured their self-worth as scholars by being invited to be part of the journal's vetting and barring procedures. They feel a debt of gratitude to what they think has 'made' them. And then they have 'forgotten' that they themselves -over time- are actually what props up the rep of the journal.
The journal really is otiose.
It has merely managed to inveigle it's way into the charmed cycle by virtue of controlling a disposable part of the publishing process (which too few have noticed is disposable, or are scared to notice).
The emperor has no clothes. However the lad has been paid to keep schtumm.

All it needs is a bunch of scholars with a good bunch of rep to set up a collective and to publish electronically with whatever copyright license they see fit (I would assume some kind of Creative Commons would be appropriate) and Robert is ones niece's father.

Disintermediation would be complete.
Apologies to those put out of work in publishing paper copies, but most of them could presumably find other jobs in academic or publishing or curating posts enabled by the funding freed up from university libraries not having to pay huge fees to unnecessary journals.
I shed no tears for the fat cat owners who've been riding this gravy train: I assume their offshore accounts should tide them over.

Not that kind of “living in the past”… | Savage Minds:

Hugo: Scorsese does Jeunet

I don't recall seeing this advertised in cinemas, but last week I watched it on DVD. I was enchanted. There's lots of things to like from my perspective. First most of the actors are using British English. Second Scorsese seems to have decided that 1930's Paris-setting is best rendered by using the kind of palette of colour and inventory of props that Jeunet would. At points even the soundtrack evokes Amelie. Since I love both the palette and soundscape of Amelie and also the polished, steampunky clockwork and machinery (which you'll also see in productions such as Dr Who, Mic Macs (also Jeunet), the latest The Time Machine and so on). So, for me, a delicious sensory experience.

The fact that the chief protagonists are children means that there is an innocence about the main plot and yet the fact that adults are important players means that there is not a dearth of more mature interests represented. I also like the fact that, as one of my sons put it, there are no real 'baddies' in the film. By the end we have grown to understand the adults who seem to be the most obstructive, scary and unsympathetic at the start (except, perhaps, for Hugo's uncle, who actually features very little in the main plotlines). I like the way, then, that the film eschews the simple goodies and baddies plots and tells a children's story (?) with an acknowledgement that people are both 'good' and 'bad' in terms of motives and actions. I'd love it if we had more plotting like that.

Of course the take-home message could be that 'bad' is ultimately about being mistaken, under-informed or damaged. And I'd actually want to affirm that to a great extent; all too often we come at things the other way round. But sometimes we need to have room for malevolence and culpable in/action. However, this would be a minor quibble in a lovely, fantastical, film with a heart-warming set of plot lines.

It's also a must for those who love silent film, but I won't spoil it for those who haven't seen.

Tax -the fees for participating in society

My more regular readers will find this somewhat familiar: I almost felt like the author must have read a previous blog post or two (like this or this one and even perhaps this one and for a bit of a wider perspective try this) of mine:

Taxes allow the chancellor to fund an infrastructure from which every citizen, rich or poor, benefits. This includes the shoppers at Topshop, owned by Philip Green. Green avoids paying huge sums of tax in Britain by registering his company in the name of his Monaco-based wife, Tina. The government seemed relaxed about those arrangements when they invited Green to advise on how to cut public spending. The message sent out was: it's acceptable to avoid paying taxes in Britain, even when you live here and benefit from the legal, physical and cultural infrastructure that those taxes support.

Indeed I have favoured the idea of thinking of taxes as a kind of subscription: if you want access to the markets and labour and capital of our society, you participate and contribute appropriately and don't try to rip us off. We should call time on freeloading TNC's and their execs who don't stand their round in society.

As the article goes on to say (with emphasis placed by myself):

Google, employing 33,000 around the world, demonstrated even more clearly that this is "a golden age for capital". In the first three months of this year it made a $3bn profit. Google can domicile its profits not in each country in which it trades but wherever, in more than 100 territories, the taxes are least onerous. These arrangements are in place at the same time as many multinationals are shedding proper care of employees in regard to health, pensions and employment rights – leaving governments and taxpayers to pick up the bill. That is morally, economically and socially wrong.

Tax: share the burden fairly or anger will grow | Observer editorial | Comment is free | The Observer

Book Spine Poems

Here's one I made earlier ...

 Unfortunately for you, I need to work on the lighting. So the poem goes:
In the Beginning
Chaos
Complexity
Emergence
The Collapse of Chaos
The Cosmic Dance
The Becoming
The Web of Life
The Way the World is
God's book of works

There are other examples here:
2012 Book Spine Poem Gallery | 100 Scope Notes
 I particularly like this one:

I'm starting to wonder whether this could be fun for liturgy too ...

Art and the flow of spacetime

I have long enjoyed and admired Andy Goldsworthy's art. These are examp0les directly picking up the link from Andy's site (and are copyright to him, hence I've merely linked through to them not copied them). Here's one:

Or this: 

 You'll perhaps pick up form these that Andy's work involves natural materials and these are, in variying degrees, ephemeral. The presentation of the art is to a public is lrgely through the photographs as the 'original' tends to gain entropy and returns to the flow of energy and matter that we call nature. Here's somethoing of what Andy says of his work.

I have become aware of raw nature is in a state of change and how that change is the key to understanding. I want my art to be sensitive and alert to changes in material, season and weather. ... All forms are to be found in nature, and there are many qualities within any material. By exploring them I hope to understand the whole. My work needs to include the loose and disordered within the nature of material as well as the tight and regular.

See Andy Goldsworthy - Philosophy. It's also worth checking out here

I recently was given a book token as a thank you present. I used it to buy an Andy Goldsworthy book (Time). It has got me thinking about all sorts of things developing further some of my theological thinking about art in the purposes of God. I think i feel a meditation coming on. In this case about order, chaos and the artistic endeavour where some of Andy's methodology helps to appreciate a particular theological approach drawn from Genesis 1 and possibly drawing on a key (for me) insight from Vanstone's Love's Endeavour, Love's Expense. I've not time to develop it at the moment but hopefully in the next month or two, there will be time.

Also look at the images here.

Hot 'Crescent' buns upset some Christians in RSA

 This is one of theose stories where there is a tem[tation to say, with Marge Simpson; "There are so many things wrong with that, I don't know where to begin."

A retailer in South Africa has had to remove the Muslim food certification symbol of a crescent from the packaging on some of its hot cross buns after conservative Christians complained.

Is it worse that the retailer removed the symbol or that those Christians complained? The latter seems a bit 'precious'. Personally I'd be delighted to know 'my' hot cross buns would be halal and even kosher (unlikely, I suspect) it seems to me it'd represent a step forward in interfaith relations. I'd have been more expectant of seeing something about Muslims objecting that a halal council had approved something with a cross on it and strong associations with the crucifixion which most Muslims have traditionally denied (based on what I believe to be a misreading of the Qur'an). In other circumstances I could see these Christians celebrating that the 'gospel' was being sybolically proclaimed to Muslims. Looks like the 'fan' /'tribally-religious' instinct won out in this case; it's funny how some people seem to look for excuses to be offended. And to interpret it as 'turning their backs on Christians', well, words fail me. Part of me wants to say 'grow up'. And to Woolies, who gave in: if you give in to this now you'll be at it for ever...
Hot Crescent Buns Upset Christians in South Africa | The Jakarta Globe: