Mary Brown at work again...

A quiet day at home with some useful tidying and re-organizing, and some overdue writing projects out of the way, a book review, and a letter.

Slept a bit later than usual, which felt good; said Morning Prayer, read for recreation for a bit, then got up to a porridge breakfast and some kitchen work. Listened to the Gabrieli Consort, singing the Praetorius Christmettein the background.

So, not everything accomplished that I hoped for, but eliminated some clutter and consolidated some resources, and passed the time pleasantly.

Interested in the PBS series on Martin Luther, some new perspectives on that history.

Picked up a link to a NY Timescolumn by Sam Anderson: "What I really Want is Someone Rolling Around in the Text." Anderson is chiefly concerned with the technological possibility that e-readers of various sorts will soon allow us to make marginal notes, underline, and scribble, and comment on "the text" in a way comparable to our practise with the printed word on paper in bound codices. More, that we shall be able to share our "marginalia" instantaneously...

But what intrigues me is the overlap, kind of a Venn diagram arrangement, between what Anderson says over his shoulder about reading as a dialogue both with other readers and with the text, and with what Mary Beard wrote very recently in the same publication about the "future of the Classics" -- she goes so far as to suggest that classical study has always been, essentially, the conversation among those who read the texts -- including those who WROTE the texts.

And that makes me think again about my "personal hermeneutic". I am most at east with a kind of reader-response approach to the text: "what is happening in and to us as we read and hear these words in this order?" but my recent reading suggests more ramifications to this process.

and that redounds to preaching as well, of course. No end to it.