My friend (and cousin-in-law) Dave Schwartz asked a very interesting question on his blog yesterday morning: what does it mean to own a book? He describes his experience of recently purchasing physical copies of three books he already owned in e-book form, and wonders what that says about him, and in a broader sense what that says about digital vs. physical media.

Personally, digital property still feels ephemeral to me. While I love the fact that I can own whole seasons of my favorite TV shows (for example) without having thick cases devouring inch after inch of my precious bookshelf space, at the same time, I can’t see them, I can’t hold them, I can’t really know that I have them: ultimately I have to believe in them. It becomes almost a matter of faith, and trust as well: faith in an unseen world of zeros and ones that somehow coalesce consistently into the sights and sounds and words that we have paid for, and trust that a glitch, a hiccup, or dust mote is not going to wipe out all that unseen digital property in the blink of an eye.

And that leap of faith trust and in the reliability of digital property is a hard one to make, and far harder (for many people) when it comes to books than to music and visual entertainments. Why? Because our relationship to books is inherently a more physical one, at least it always has been since people started reading to themselves back in late antiquity. (Augustine comments in Book VI of Confessions how bizarre it was that his mentor Ambrose would sit by himself and read silently, rather than aloud as everyone else did: “When he read his eyes would travel across the pages and his mind would explore the sense, but his voice and tongue were silent.” Of course, reading aloud helped back when there were no spaces between words.) We carry books with us, we curl up with them, we smash creeping things with them, we amass long shelves full of them, we press treasured mementos in them. They are for many of us touchstones milestones along life’s journey, sometimes even monuments to the achievement of tackling and conquering a particularly daunting text.

And now that is changing. The presentation of texts to be read is migrating to ever-improving digital devices that allow us to carry copious amounts of reading material about with us in our purses and man-bags. I cannot see this as a bad thing, but at a deep level it is still a difficult development to adjust to. It is one thing to embrace the ease and convenience this shift offers, but it is another to compensate for the unconscious expectations of what it means to hold a book, to own a book, to possess a book. We’ll get used to it in time: we’re good at that.

Another aspect that has made studying at this particular juncture interesting is the feeling of being at the verge of a technological revolution. Now, we are only talking revolutionary in our specific context: the technology is question is often years or even decades old. But my class seems to be at the bleeding edge, at least at this school, of wedding the ancient tradition of ecclesiastical law with the tools of the digital age.

My first year of canon law studies, two of my classmates had iPads with them in class. That number is doubled this year. That first year we were given (and were billed for) printed notes for each course, most around two hundred pages each, one more than four hundred pages. This year we received all course notes in .pdf format via email. Our youngest professor used the long-available Blackboard intranet site for our course this semester. Our discussions of praxis frequently turn to the future rôle of video-conferencing services such as Skype in the tribunal of the twenty-first century.

And yet the resources available to us electronically are still quite sparse. The Code of Canon Law itself is not officially available in a digital format, but many of us make use of a series of .pdf text files that are floating around of the various core Codes in both Latin and English. (More detail in a future post on how I have labored long to make this text useful to me in my studies in my own peculiar way.) Of the small number of academic journals devoted to canon law in English, only one is readily available in full page scan .pdf through the library. (Our faculty’s own journal is also available electronically through the library resources, but in unformatted plain text.) I have not made any serious survey of what other books might be for sale as legitimate e-books, not yet finding myself in that market, but I believe the number of titles would be fairly brief.

And the conversation in the ether is quite limited right now, as well. Friends in other disciplines have any number of favorite websites and blogs that they can frequent for news and opinions in their respective disciplines. But canonists have not yet flocked to the Internet to build their own small soapboxes. Perhaps this is a good thing in many ways, but for a person who has always endeavored to do his thinking in full view (however embarrassing the result), the lack of dozens of blogs to link to was deeply discouraging to me.

I keep reminding myself that I am not called — let alone able — to correct this deficiency on my own, but the trend toward hubris is persistent. And I also need to remember that I am not actually alone out there: just among my class of sixteen, at least three others have started blogs of their own, all focused more-or-less on canonical themes. And there are a small number of very reputable and well-established canonists with a long-standing web presence. These solid entries are not to be discounted, and if pressed I would ultimately side with quality over quantity. But I would still like to see more in my saved “#canonlaw” Twitter feed than Dr. Edward Peters’s infrequent posts and retweets of the same.

So what? What is the point of all this blather? I guess just to position myself, for myself, regarding what I am about as a new canonist in this digital era. I don’t need to change the world with my words (fortunately). But I want to be a consistent presence on the Web, both in long form, in the sharing of conversation-sparking quotes and news items, and in whatever it is I use Twitter for. I hope that some will find my efforts not just worth reading, but worth responding to, commenting upon, or even countering. At the end of the day, I am an excited young practitioner of an ancient discipline, and I want to start to be part of the conversation.

I have nothing against awards ceremonies per se, and while I know rather little about the film industry aside from what is common pop-culture knowledge (which feels like knowing a great deal, given the centrality of that industry, but I am sure those of my friends who actually work in the field can reassure me of how little I truly know about the internal workings of their craft), I would absolutely agree that the efforts of the many many talented people involved at all stages of the filmic art form deserve to be recognized and lauded by their peers.

However, I do not think that said event of (self-)congratulations needs and/or deserves to be a breaking-news, live-tweeted, world-stopping cultural event. This has nothing to do with the lavish excess of such events (which some might deem scandalous, but I am done being scandalized as a general rule). Nor do I intend to cast aspersions on anyone who finds such spectacles enjoyable and entertaining on their own merits, precisely as entertaining spectacles: if you dig that, then keep on digging it. Instead, I take issue with the degree to which such riveting attention to the Oscars (and the several other awards shows that the same industry cycles through every year) tempts film-viewers — individually and collectively — to abdicate responsibility for their own appreciative faculties for the films they see.

I love film as an art form. The concatenation of the actor’s craft, the expressive impact of the visual arts, and the infinite emotional palette of music into a unified art of visual storytelling that is far more than a sum of its components, is something I have happily spent probably thousands of hours enjoying already at this point in my life. (As a more-or-less direct result of my transition to my rôle of husband and father, I have not seen anywhere near all the films I wish I had in the past decade or so — I’ve kept a list, obviously — and I should probably get started on my list for this decade pretty soon, too, before I lose track.) I know which films I enjoy (for various reasons), which I feel are particularly amazing, which might even deserve to be called important. But I do not know one reason why the bestowal of an award of any kind upon any film I see should have any relevance to my relationship to that film as an individual work of art. Just as when I read a book or a poem, or look at a painting or a photograph, or even eat a burger and drink a glass of ale, I am the only critic in that moment. My taste is the only arbiter whose judgment is of any interest to me as I consume, in whatever sense is relevant, the experience I am facing.

So it saddens me, I guess, more than anything else, when people make such a point of seeing the five (or now ten) films nominated for best picture, or later, when I hear someone say “Oh, I didn’t really like that one, but it won Best Picture, so…” So what? Yes, your taste may well be crap, as indeed mine may be, but it is mine, and I generally stand by it, gilded trophies be damned. For a long period in my life I watched David Fincher’s Se7en about once a week, and even now would never think of parting with my DVD copy, but I couldn’t tell you to save my life whether it won any awards or not. I am pretty sure Titanic did, yet I struggle to imagine a scenario where I would willingly sit through that particular film again.

So, yes, if you love to watch the dresses come down the red carpet with celebrities inside them, then pop another bottle of whatever and sit back: tonight is your night. But if you love to watch movies, if you delight in the immersive experience of film, please do yourself the simple courtesy of honoring what you think is good, great, and legendary, and not worry whether it matches up with the awards list from this or any other season.

Lent is coming again this week. I say ‘again’ because it seems like we just had it a year ago, and I didn’t get around to writing a jot about it then, despite a serious knot of thoughts on the matter and multiple attempts to compose them. Fall down, get up again, right?

This year I am more inclined than ever before to approach Ash Wednesday as a New Year’s surrogate: this is the time I want to tackle some of the (many) things about me that I know need to change. And a lot of that change is going to involve this new notebook I am already daring to mar with line after line of scrawling words in Pelikan 4001 Königsblau ink.

What shape will my Lenten ambition take? Certainly a return to the most elemental activity for a writer — writing — and with it a renewed effort to shift my inertia from consuming stuff to making stuff. There are a few facets to this, the explication of which I will attempt to drag out over the next few days, but this time I feel, more than ever before, that I am attempting something simultaneously challenging and achievable: a sustainable move away from indolence (and the resultant self-loathing) toward a life of diligent self-expression in my chosen medium. Will it work? We’ll all have to stay tuned to find out.

I don’t want to fault anyone for getting their yuks where they can find them: laughter is a healthy and indispensable part of a balanced life, and anyone who knows me knows I crack up at (almost literally) the drop of a hat. But, boy, I just find the thing anything but funny. I can tell it is supposed to be funny; the intent at humor is unmistakable. But in version after version that pops up in my news feed I cannot see past the thrown together nature of these paste-ups, the evident haste with which the captions were composed, and the leaden plonk of the punch line, if it can even be called that. And the over-the-moon enthusiasm that people seem to respond to these with only adds a further layer of bafflement and irascibility to my own reaction.

Ultimately, I suspect, the ire that this meme’s explosion has aroused in me is projection on my part: I’m making this cycle of triteness the whipping boy for a very real rage that has almost nothing to do with it. What am I really angry about? My failure to make things. So while yes, I sincerely think most of these things are crap, and unfunny, uncreative crap at that, I am painfully aware of how I am spending my own precious time — looking at these things and getting pissy about them. And deep down in my murky depths I am already seething because day after day, month after month, nearing year after year, I am not making anything of my own, crappy or otherwise. I have become sunk deep in a rut of consuming for far too long, and my diet (to belabor the metaphor) has been far from healthy to boot. I have been unable to push myself to find the motivation to climb off my backside and get scribbling. I guess there is only one way to fix that:

I need to climb off my backside and get scribbling.

But there is a downside to this. I spend so much time and, yes, energy detailing an electronic map of past contacts and relationships (and, to be fair, maintaining a good many current ones) that I have had even less practice than usual of late in doing the thing I suck the worst at: meeting people I want to meet. This was a problem all those years I thought girls might be interesting, and now it is a problem when I think established professionals in my chosen field might be both interesting and important to know.

Earlier this week, I had one the most significant networking opportunities of my entire life just happen to me, and I completely blew it. If we are going to go sports analogy at this point in the post (and I think we should), then I was the batter tapping his bat on the corner of the plate and adjusting his, um, uniform while a ninety-three-mile-an-hour fastball blows past him. All he can do is stare stupidly and think, “Why didn’t I have my bat up so I could take a swing at that?”

To make matters worse (and to belabor the image) this was a total softball, too. It was not as if I had to suck up enough gumption to sidle up to a luminary at a crowded cocktail gathering and introduce myself like a desperate pick-up artist at closing time. No, I was sitting in the office of one of my professors, working with him on a project for which he hand-picked me to assist him, when there was a knock on the door and in walked the professional canonist who, beyond all others, I have most wished I could meet someday. She is one of the only authors still writing on a topic that I find of the utmost interest, and to have such a person standing suddenly in front of me was understandably discombobulating.

When introduced, I did manage to say, with proper emphasis, “Yes, I know the name,” but then I left it there. It would have been perfectly acceptable for me to continue, simply and sincerely: “I am very interested in the topic of ____, and have read all your articles on the subject.” How hard would that have been?

I know very well that I am not anything remotely like a natural schmoozer. And I am sure I never will be. But there are limits to what I can tolerate of myself. Mine is not a very large discipline. While I am at school it is not unheard of — clearly — for a rock-star canonist to walk without fanfare into whatever room I happen to be in, at any moment. I want to be ready next time, and this week’s encounter emphasized for me the truth that no amount of noodling about with my LinkedIn profile is going to help me put out a hand and introduce myself to a real live human person. I am going to have to be able to do that myself, and it shames me that I have forgotten that.

Then dad’s voice rang out across the silent yard.

“If you want to see this baby born, you better get in here now!”

Oh, things were happening fast! We wallowed across the snowy yard, tumbled into the house, and—no doubt leaving our winter clothes is a tangle heap in the porch—we quietly piled into Mom and Dad’s tiny bedroom which was today the birth room. And it was not long at all before a tiny new sister slid into the morning light and into our lives.

We had a special bond (I think) all the years I was still home. There are a great many pictures of the grinning teenage Me with an equally-grinning wee sister in my arms: “My two ends” our mother always called us fondly. I walked her to sleep for her naps, often to the soundtrack of the boisterous Russian classical music I was so fond of in those days, or the jaunty Beatles songs I was just then discovering (or The King’s Singers’ covers thereof). One of her first words was “Help!” to request the song of the same name.

And then off I went to college, and I never came back. Not to stay, anyway. She has grown up a great deal since then. Her experience of being a homeschooled teenager has been very different from mine, probably inevitably. She is a very talented musician and dancer, although I have almost no firsthand knowledge of her impressive performative virtuosity, since my adult life has kept me largely far away in recent years from the exciting events back at my family seat. I have missed out.

And now she is eighteen, getting ready to leave the house herself very soon, just as I did back when she was just mastering the ability to form whole sentences. Dance through life with confidence, Littlest Sis. You will be awesome.

Yesterday’s epiphany du jour was this: I have too many blogs. Now, I realize that everyone reading this already knew that, and have known that with great clarity for a long long time. And I knew it, too, at a certain level. What I did not do was admit it, to myself or anyone else. I was deeply committed to the notion that I needed to keep certain spheres of interest quarantined from each other in my sprawling online presence. The end result was a huge tangle of redundancy on multiple systems that resulted in almost complete cessation of any actual writing and posting—the activity that was purportedly the whole point of these shenanigans.

I had spent a considerable amount of energy this summer trying to map out the distinct spheres and ‘brands’ of my two main personae: the creative writer and the canonist. These two modes, each a very important portion of my integral self, could not, I had long decided, be allowed to intermingle. This was less about me as the writer and more about my imagined audience(s): I could not imagine most of the readers of my sassy Floating Egg prose wanting to even see my researched analyses of canonical topics, nor did I think the churchy souls at whom I was aiming my Prairie Canonist work would take well to the often-irreverent random humor I have so long delighted in here.

I cannot comment on whether these fears were groundless or not: the subsequent paralysis of my written output rendered the point moot. There were no readers to object one way or the other, since I was giving no portion of my intended audience anything to read. I was no longer a writer, it seemed, but merely a blog collector.

And so it was yesterday, as I opened my project folio to the attempt I had made this summer to make sense of this dualism, that I said: Enough. I am the person I am, I have the assorted (and at times seemingly-conflicting) interests that I have, and I write what I write. There was simply no legitimate reason for me at this stage to attempt to juggle so many different organs for my own work, especially when doing so was ensuring that I was producing no work anyway. And besides all that, were my varied writings really as incompatible as I had convinced myself they must be? Probably not.

And so I am in the midst of an overhaul of my online landscape, this time focused on pruning back rather than breaking ever more ground for future hypothetical cultivation. The first stage I am focusing on is the main one: this blog. Given the extensive history of The Floating Egg as a fundamental part of my personal brand, there was no question in my mind that this site was not going to go away. Instead, my efforts as A Prairie Canonist have been ported over here. I am keeping the two modes distinct (for now) by means of contributor names. Of course, being that I have plunged into this quite impulsively (surprise!) I am building the aircraft in flight, so the look and feel of the site will be in flux for a (hopefully) short time while I shake things out and work out the kinks of my new conception of what I am about here.

But then—for realsies this time—I am going to write some words, and then let you read them (with the least possible effort on your part). And then we’ll go from there.

Staring back, no matter how long I stare at it.

Waiting, without the slightest hint or notion of either patience or impatience. Merely waiting to receive any words, any words at all, that are placed upon it.

But no words are placed, day after day, week after week, month after month.

The page stays blank.

I keep staring.