Tuesday, August 5: Driving with my dad into Atlanta was a strange experience. I hadn’t really spent significant time there in several years. My family lives outside of the city, so I usually have just flown into the airport and then gone on to somewhere else. The intervening years (and particularly the money pumped in by the 1996 Olympics) have really changed the city a great deal.

One of the biggest changes was the completion of the Presidential Expressway, or what they now call the Freedom Parkway. For the entire time that I lived there (1985-1994), the struggle over an easy way to get from downtown to the Carter Center meant that a big chunk of the city was not being developed in any way, although some houses had been torn down and a bit of clearcutting had taken place, and the resulting stasis (and eyesore) felt sort of representative of Atlanta as a whole: on the verge of some big changes, but waiting for something to happen first.

For the Olympics, however, it just wouldn’t do to have this business unfinished, and the new parkway was completed (while I was living in Maryland) with remarkable speed. It’s a nicely landscaped, gently meandering stretch of road with a bike path alongside it and some murals and such along the way. Along with the completion of this project has come the gentrification of the northeast-of-downtown region of the city, and I’m sorry to see the sleazy elegance of Ponce de Leon Avenue be replaced with the kind of generic quality that comes from quick real estate developments. All things change, I suppose.

The Majestic Diner (where I spent many a late night eating grits) is still there, however, and the alterna-hip, ironic strip club Clermont Lounge (where I went once to see a friend’s band perform), and Fellini’s Pizza (where I ate a zillion slices of pizza, and where Chan Marshall apparently used to serve slices before her Cat Power days). But everything is a little bit cleaner, a little bit brighter, and a little bit more upscale. Well, except the Clermont Lounge, as grungy looking as ever from the street, but word is that the Clermont Hotel has been bought and perhaps changes are coming.

One change that was perhaps most startling of all was that the Krispy Kreme on Ponce was either being torn down (no!) or rebuilt. You can get KK donuts in many parts of the country now, of course; hell, you can buy stock, if you like. But, I had always thought that the Ponce location was the Krispy Kreme, the mother ship, the ur-donut shop, the place that started it all. My mom went to this Krispy Kreme when she was in high school. Turns out the company started in North Carolina, but this does not diminish my attachment to this particular location. I hope they are just rebuilding and not replacing.

Hot Donuts Now! Hot Donuts Now! Hot Donuts Now!

*sigh*

Georgia trip continued: On Monday, August 4, my mom dropped me off at my dad’s place in Sharpsbug. He spends a large percentage of his time in other parts of the world, but the house he rents in Sharpsburg is in a nice location, surrounded by trees and a well tended garden. He has a porch that overlooks a very large pond, and it was very peaceful sitting there on Tuesday morning drinking coffee and watching the birds, a lone rabbit, and a family of chipmunks go about their business.

We ran some errands, stocking the kitchen after his long stay in Greece, going to a favorite barber, and at one point my dad was going to buy me a massage at a local spa (I had talked about getting one in preparation for the upcoming semester), but alas, they were all booked up. We also rented the The Quiet American (2002), with Michael Caine and Brendan Fraser. The film, based on Graham Greene’s 1955 novel, provides a chilling portrait of American foreign policy as naÔve and idealistic on the surface, but profoundly amoral and self-interested at the core. It’s a timely reminder, in my opinion. (Also worth a post-9/11 look is 1998’s The Siege, which I watched on cable with my mom. This movie would have been better in the hands of an indie director with a smaller budget and less of a penchant for overuse of a stirring soundtrack, but the screenplay is pretty good.)

There were two points at which I realized that consumer electronics (for those who can afford them) have gotten pretty sophisticated, and you don’t have to be a techical genius (mostly) to use them.

First, at my dad’s gym, the weight machines are all networked to a central computer, located in an ATM-sized kiosk, where you log in before beginning your workout. Then, as you go from machine to machine, you punch in your i.d., and your previous efforts on that machine are presented so you can gauge how much progress you’re making (or not). I was blown away. This is obviously a relatively simple thing to pull off, but I had no idea that someone had actually implemented such a system.

Second, my dad’s car, a late-model Lexus, is a marvel of modern technology. Well, at least it is to me. The highlight is the GPS-enabled computer display mounted in the dashboard. You simply enter the address of your destination, and the computer displays a map of your progress, and also gives you auditory instructions. This was tricky when we drove to Chuck’s place in Atlanta on Tuesday because I was spelling the street incorrectly. Thus, a clash between my way of travelling (“You go by that gas station with the big green sign just after the donut shop and then take a right on the street with all the nice houses.”) and my dad’s car (“Please enter the correct street address”) proved irreconcilable. I won, by the way. It had been probably ten years since I had travelled the route we took to Chuck’s place, and Atlanta has changed a great deal since then, but I was able to recognize enough landmarks to get there. And a cellphone call to Chuck when we were close helped, too.

After being dropped off at Chuck, the Atlanta adventures began…

Earlier today, I learned from a post to SHARP-L by Thomas J. Farrell that Walter Ong has died.

It would be almost impossible to exaggerate Ong’s influence on the study of print culture and of orality & literacy. I first encountered Ong in a grad school seminar, where Orality and Literacy was an assigned text, and I still return to this book when I need a clearly written reminder of the some of the most important issues I’m working through in my own thinking. Ong’s work has not gone unchallenged, of course, and I don’t agree with all of his assertions. However, he contributed a great deal to the groundwork of what many of us do, and any scholar would be lucky to have had a fraction of his influence.

Go take a look at the Walter J. Ong Project at St. Louis University, then follow the Amazon links below to get the bibliographic info on some of his published work.

• Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word
• The Presence of the Word
• Ramus: Method, and the Decay of Dialogue, from the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason
• An Ong Reader: Challenges for Further Inquiry

I haven’t had a chance to blog about the rest of my trip to Georgia last week, which was great, but I did want to mention that while at Emory University, I was able to take a look at a collection of manuscript materials of August Toplady assembled by his early twentieth-century biographer, Thomas Wright. He’s not exactly a household name, but there are at least two things you should know about Toplady. First, he’s the author of a very well-known hymn: “Rock of Ages.” Second, he absolutely hated Methodist founder John Wesley because while Toplady was a Calvinist who believed that only an elect few would make their way into heaven, Wesley was an Arminian who argued, instead, that anyone who merited eternal salvation would receive it.

Toplady edited The Gospel Magazine, one of the Calvinist periodicals that spurred Wesley to start his Arminian Magazine in response.

Toplady died when he was only 38, and according to one anecdote there were rumors circulating as he was dying that he had expressed a desire to reconcile with Wesley. He apparently dragged himself off of his deathbed to come announce from the pulpit himself that he desired nothing of the kind.

Update: I should stop assuming everyone knows what era and country I’m talking about. This all took place in eighteenth-century England.

A short entry tonight. Three anti-Bush bumper stickers I’ve seen in Kansas City in the last few months:

• “Bush is a punkass chump”
• “Any other whore in 2004”
• “If I’d wanted an ex-cokehead for president, I would have voted for David Bowie”