averyfineline

And a happy new year, dear readers. As we celebrate our 8th holiday season together, it’s probably not a bad time to reflect on the generosity and loyalty that so many of you have shown, not to me so much (’cause that’s not necessary or expected) but to the idea and practice of a more […]

One of the reasons for my silence around here lately has been preparation for and travel to this year’s American Academy of Religion conference. Later this morning I’ll be presenting a paper that reflects on my experience in the digital world of southern gospel music. As always when my work turns in these self-reflexive directions, […]

Thanks for all the happy blogbirthday wishes on Avery’s facebook page yesterday. This little experiment in southern gospel in the etherspaces turned seven yesterday.
A wise man has noted that, “Generally speaking, blogging is like shouting into a hurricane: it might make you feel better, but hardly anyone hears you and it rarely has any […]

The iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch users will notice that when you open the home page, you will now (or should, at least) see a prompt that will ask you if want to add a shortcut icon for this site to your home screen.
I had asked the interns to look into this option while I […]

So a while back I think mentioned that I was a writing short piece on how to listen to southern gospel. It was for the alumni magazine at the university where I teach (and the how-to column is a standard feature that’s shopped around to various faculty). Anyway, the article is out in the current […]

Over the years, there have been, as far as I can tell, some pretty ridiculous stories circulating out there about me. I’ve heard the one about my sanity having been addled by brain cancer, and then the one about my sanity having been addled by AIDS. There’s the one about my having moved to Florida […]

Some of you may have seen a post of this title pop up in your RSS feed a few days ago but then not be anywhere in sight when you tried to click through. That’s because I tried to succumb to peer pressure and sync this site with Avery’s twitter and facebook pages and thought […]

Later this morning I’ll be giving a talk by that title at the NEA Higher Education conference (don’t worry, the confessions aren’t forced or coerced at all; in fact, they’re treating me magnificently, and this year the conference is in Portland, OR, which is officially my new favorite city). The presentation is about the convergence […]

Longtime reader AG writes to Ask Avery:

I wanted to let you know how much I’ve enjoyed reading your blog.  As you know I’ve been reading it since you started it several years ago.  I’ve laughed at some of the posts, gone out and bought cds as a result of some of the posts […]

I’ll be away for a few days so here’s your chance to take the place over, though lately I have the feeling I’m just being allowed the illusion of control and the inmates are really running the asylum. No matter, now may be a good time to do a bit of housekeeping.
David Bruce Murray is […]

So my ISP tells me that the the Wordpress PHP script on my index file is apparently causing excess CPU usage (I’ve been quarantined to a special server, evidently). I know next to nothing about these issues, so I’m wondering if any savvier technical minds out there than mine have some theories. Could it be […]

So way back when, when I was futzing around endlessly with setting up the site, and then again when I was working to migrate the original hand-rolled avfl to wordpress, I remember crossing a few different discussions of how to get your website’s icon to appear in the URL bar at the top of the […]

At some point, running a site with comments threads means you have to have an unavoidable discussion about sockpuppets. Sockpuppeteering, for the uninitiated, is the practice of posting comments in a thread under multiple IDs. I’ve gotten the feeling lately, especially in some of the EHSSQ threads, that there may be a few sockpuppets in […]

I’m back, though perhaps not as robustly as just before the holidays. I’ll be posting a few things in the next day or so that I had going before the Christmas shut-down. After that, all bets are off until the first crazy days of the new semester are over.

Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, Shalom, and Bon Nuit. I’ll see you in the new year.

I get this kind of mail alot (from Gerry, in this case):
Avery, if you’re so talented, why don’t you go play in a group? If you were that great, you would still be playing, n’est-ce pas?
Well, ok. I don’t get a lot of French interrogatives, but the gist of this is a pretty common complaint […]

1. Why doesn’t someone start a blog/website devoted SOLELY to rounding up non-sg press and media coverage of sg and then blast that roundup in to a daily feed that people (like me) could subscribe to? Yes, if you know what you’re doing Google and other search tools will do this for you, but I […]

Martin Roth (what happened to your permalinks, Martin?) notes that the avfl mailbox has been bouncing back emails saying the box is full. That was technically true till this morning when I remembered not only to empty the main box but also the so-called spam assassin box that was clogging things up. Should be ok […]

Just a quick note to explain that I’m going to start trying more consciously to write less cleverish or quippy titles and be more topical, mostly as a way to try to boost the circulation of my ideas and your feedback around the rest of the world wide web via Google. This article in this […]

It’s official. The incoming avfl spam is out of control. I put a whole new division of interns on the problem but, getting what you pay for and all, that really didn’t seem to help much. The executive summary reads something like this: managing four different email accounts and moderating comments means that several different […]

Some real-world obligations and changes have kept away from avfl for a while and may for a bit longer, but I thought it would be ok to note that avfl passed its second anniversary this month. This is probably a good time to thank you for your energetic and enthusiastic response to this site - […]

I have to spend some time traveling this week and I’ve just filled up my iPod with new material. Here’s what I’m listening to:

Second Mile’s latest
The Lesters new album
Mike Bowling Group’s new recording
Kenny Bishop’s self-titled

Not sure when I’ll work up some responses to what I hear, but there it is, for what it’s worth. What […]

Obviously the new avfl format is up and going. By necessity it will be a phased roll out: the archives are only beginning to be migrated from the old pages and URLs, so expect those to be spotty. The old search page and archives will remain open during the migration.
Some new features and other stuff […]

Thanks for your patience the last few days as I’ve tried out some new options for the site. And thanks for your feedback. Comments are running 2-1 in favor of the old (that is “current”) way. Literally. Two people wrote to say they liked the old way. One to say blogger ain’t bad. I know […]

It’s very unscientific, but the top 20 search strings (or key words and phrases people use to get to my site from internet search engines) has always been my own private way of keeping a finger on […]