An Ideal Setup Can Help with Research

Here is a not-so-popular addage: "Good administration is no guarantee for success, but bad administration can certainly stiffle it" (a Max Lee quotable). This is true of business, profane or holy, and it is true for academics who are plugging forward on their research projects. I have longed to find the perfect computer screen setup for writing. I finally saved enough dough to put it together this past week. Here is a photo of it: 

My Research Computer Setup: Left Screen: MS Word Doc of a chapter I'm working on
Right Screen: Top is Plato's Theaetetus from the HathiTrust Digital Library and
Bottom has the Greek morphology engine on the Perseus Project website

I used two 22-inch Dell flat screen's (refurbished price $140 each) and rotated them to portrait mode, set the display to extended screen so that the two monitors act as a single screen together, got a used docking station ($20) for my North Park issued Dell Latitude E5440 laptop (free as long as I keep teaching at the seminary), found an old keyboard, and voilà! The perfect setup. 
    Because the screens are rotated to portrait mode, on the left one, I can get a full page view of whatever part of the monograph I'm working on (more like 1 1/2 pages) at 150% zoom. I don't have to squint anymore at my 14 in. (X 10 in.) display on my dinky laptop which only allows me to see less than 1/2 a page at a given moment. To my right, I can keep the top window open on whatever electronic document I'm working in (i.e., the photo above has Plato's Theaetetus on screen, courtesy of the HathiTrust Digital Library) and on the bottom right window, I can keep a web browser open (i.e., the photo has the Greek morphology engine on the Perseus Project website). Of course, the most important item on the desk for any researcher, an absolute must, is a cup of java to keep the blood pumping.
   I just thought I would share this setup since the scholarly world sometimes seems so solitary and we academics, professors and students alike, need to help each other out with whatever productivity hints we can share. 
   FYI, I received the idea for the above setup from a post by James Warren, Reader at Cambridge University, whose kenodoxia blog I follow. In his post, James (with whom I enjoyed a very helpful conversation one day in 2010 when I stole away from my post-doctoral studies at Durham University to visit Cambridge) showed a two-screen setup as he was compiling the indices for his now published book The Pleasures of Reason (2014). When I saw his post, it gave me the inspiration for the above desktop arrangement. But I had to save for a few months before I could buy what I needed. Cheers!

Posting on the Blog Randomly and Infrequently until Summer 2016

Well, I hate to do this, but I'm already missing too many self-imposed deadlines for a few books projects. So I'm going to take a break from blogging so I can jump-start my own research. Every now and then, I will post random musings on Pauline scholarship, or make announcements concerning the Intertextuality in the New Testament Section I co-chair at the Society of Biblical Literature. I might also blog on my post-doctoral studies at the École biblique et archéologique française de Jérusalem this coming April.
     But I'm just going to free myself from my regularly weekly posting schedule and resume it at the start of Summer 2016. It's been so crazy busy lately, I have not even made my way to watch the movie Risen yet, which I'm eager to see (and perhaps post a review later?)
     In the meanwhile, here's a Dilbert cartoon reflecting my own frustrations over the writing enterprise: 

Illustration Credit by Dilbert.com ©2015

On the Road at Cornell University

I don't mean to stay away from blogging but I'm in New York right now, putting on my father's cap, supporting my oldest son as he explores the Cornell University campus. It's a very nice day today, and I'm enjoying my time out here at the Kungfu Tea cafe (there's one in Chicago Chinatown, and we were delighted to find one in the Collegetown area of Ithaca!) while Zach is meeting Cornell students and exploring the campus on his own before I catch up with him later.
   Also, Zach has his own literary blog "Montag's Musings" and one of his poems not only received the 2015 Special Rutledge Award but it was published in Summer/Fall 2015 issue of the Great Lakes Review, a professional writers' journal. Way to go Zach! Zach will be posting a draft version of the winning poem "Berwyn Battles" later on his blog.

Great Lakes Review, Volume 6 (SumSpr 2015)
where Zach's "Berwyn Battles" is published
(see pages 172-75)

    After our college trip is over, I'll probably post on my choices for the upcoming SBL-AAR annual meeting in Atlanta this November. Many fantastic sessions coming up, and I'm looking forward to catching up with mentors, colleagues, and friends there. Blessings! MJL

   Postscript 11/12/15: Zach just posted on his poem at Montag's Musings (here). 

The Craft of Writing Well and Changing My Mind about the King James Bible (well, sort of...)

In a past life, back as a college student at the University of California, Berkeley (go Bears!), I spent my morning hours at Cafe Strada, sipping my latte with marshmellow-thick foam, and read, read, read. I was an English major and stayed one until graduation. So I always have an eye out on how literature might possibly intersect with anything I do as a New Testament scholar and theological educator.
    So, I discovered from Alan Jacobs the following testimony from debut writer Sarah Perry (author of the favorably reviewed After Me Comes the Flood) on how her Christian upbringing and commitment to the classics (including the King James Version of the Bible) made her a better writer. 

Here is a link to the guardian article by
 Sarah Perry on how the KJV and the classics made her a better writer

What caught my eye was her playful snub at modern works (I'm thinking: Hunger Games, Divergent, The Maze Runner, and all the dystopian novels that my teenage sons currently like to read) because the writing, style, prose and poetry of Brontë, Austen, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Bunyan and a host of others were just so much better. After mentioning how she memorized Tennyson and kept Sherlock Holmes beside her pillow, she has these poignant remarks on the elegance and lyric prose of the King James translation:

• Above all – committed to memory, read aloud at mealtimes and prettily framed on the dining-room wall – was the King James Bible. It was as constant as the air, and felt just as necessary, and I think I know its cadences as well as my own voice. The effect on my writing has been profound, and inescapable: I soaked it all up, and now I'm wringing it out. My obsession with rhythm and beauty comes, I'm sure, from memorising the King James Bible's peerless prose, and having grown up in the shade of sin and the light of redemption I suppose it's no surprise that my debut novel After Me Comes the Flood has been called uncanny, sinister, strange (though I never intended to write that way – it's just how my eyes were put in)...

In an earlier day, when I first starting teaching my Greek exegesis class, I used to criticize the KJV for its reliance on an inferior manuscript tradition (Textus Receptus) which made the dubious longer ending of Mark 16 part of its text, or the longer confession of the Ethiopian eunuch a part of the Acts 8 narrative.
   Though I have not changed my mind about the text-critical problems of the KJV, I do agree with Sarah Perry wholeheartedly about the beauty and literary elegance of the King James Bible. We ain't writing half as good as the team of English translators of the KJV (pardon my slang). Though the KJV reflects bad Greek (manuscripts), it is excellent English. One only has to read the Psalms in KJV and compare it to the modern translations of the NIV, ESV or NRSV, and while the latter reads like prose, the former sails in the winds of poetry.
   And for the parents out there, this article is greater ammunition to get your kids to read and read well. I had my youngest son read this commentary by Perry. Now he's reading Orwell's 1984 and Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 to see how the current fad of dystopian novels was fathered by an earlier and greater generation of writers. Ad Fontes!