Changing

Well, I'm not going to be a PhD student in the fall after all. Got the letter this morning.

Still reeling a little bit, so I've been off-balance all day. It's shocking how hard it is to teach a class when teaching has suddenly become little more than a way to pay the bills until May.

I went to the graduate student meeting after my classes were done, although now I wonder why I went. Suddenly, I don't really want to be involved too much with these people who are going on further into academics. I don't want to hear about committees and new hires. I just want to get a job and move on with my life.

I'm wondering a lot of things: what went wrong with my application, where I'll be in six months, how I'll find a job with a master's in English, for crying out loud, and how I'm going to manage not teaching for the rest of my life.

Two things remain stable: I am faulty, and I am forgiven. God help me if I lose sight of those facts.

It sure is a good thing that racism isn't a problem anymore...

... because if it were, then a lot of people would probably be hugely offended by a "Martin Luther King, Jr. Party" thrown by students at a Texas college where white kids dressed up in Aunt Jemima garb, T-shirts that say "I love chicken," and other stereotypical attire.

And of course they used the "my best friend's black" argument. Why wouldn't they?

Update: If that whetted your appetite for more, also check out a similar bash thrown by law students at U. Conn.

On Problems With ID Rhetoric

Note from the LuapHacim, 11/14/2012: The views expressed in this post do not necessarily reflect my current beliefs and convictions. Even if they do, I would almost certainly express them in different words today. Time changes people, and I am not exempt. Nonetheless, because of its historical value, I will not modify or remove this post. It tells you (and me) something important about where I've been. Read on at your own peril.

I'm not as rabidly opposed to -- or supportive of -- the Intelligent Design movement as some of my friends are. In fact, my interest in it has been mostly an academic one, because I'm fascinated with how the group has managed to re-brand creationism for a more post-modern society. I think the world was intelligently designed, but I don't think that can be proven by empirical means, and I don't think my making a fuss about it will change anyone's mind on the matter. Besides, molecular biology (the only field with anything like valid ID scientists in it) isn't my bag, so I can't evaluate their claims very well anyway.

What I can evaluate is the language that they use in support of their agenda, and, quite frankly, it amuses me. A lot. For instance, the infamous Bananas: An Atheist's Worst Nightmare video, starring former child star Kirk Cameron and the Australian founder of the Institute for Creation Research, Ken Ham. It does an excellent job of mocking itself, so I'm not going to say anything more about that.

I would, however, like to comment on this video that someone from my church sent me a link to, claiming that it was "as fantastic as the story it tells."

It's essentially a version -- in a painful form of doggerel -- of the old Watchmaker analogy. Since cells are complex, the argument goes, there must be something that made them complex. A few lines jumped out at me as especially interesting:

"cells of all shapes like blobs filled with fluff" -- Yes, this is how the writer, Dave Hawkins, describes living matter. I guess that's what happens when you're forced to rhyme with "stuff." He is, of course, setting up a strawman so he can later tell us that although it looks simple, it is actually irreduceably complex.

"The marvels we see with a microscope's stare / make a watch look so simple, we dare not compare!" -- The writer correctly observes that these two classes of things (watches and cells) are incomparable ... but then he goes on to ignore this fact: "A cell and its wonders amaze all who see, / And a cell, like a watch, by chance cannot be!" He's glossing over the most important objection to his argument: a cell is not a watch. A cell is a biological entity, and it thus will behave in a way that is quite different from a manmade object like a watch.

One more poke before I let the horse die: "He's the masterful 'watchmaker,' Lord over all!" There was a time when Bible-believing Christians had very significant reasons for avoiding the "watchmaker" epithet for God. They left that for heathens like Ben Franklin. :-)

What am I trying to prove? Nothing. I'm just amused.

The Ruin

This is one of my favorite Old English poems. This version is from S.A.J. Bradley's Anglo-Saxon Poetry, which is a great little book that contains prose translations of nearly all of the extant poetry in the Old English corpus.

The ellipses in the poem represent spots that are illegible because of damage that the manuscript sustained in a fire. So, in a way, the text itself is also something of a ruin.

The Ruin

Wondrously ornate is the stone of this wall, shattered by fate; the precincts of the city have crumbled and the work of giants is rotting away.

There are tumbled roofs, towers in ruins, high towers rime-frosted, rime on limy mortar, storm-shielding tiling scarred, scored and collapsed, undermined by age. An earthy grasp holds the lordly builders, decayed and gone, the cruel grip of the ground, while a hundred generations of humanity have passed away. Often has this wall, hoary with lichen, stained with red, lasted out one kingdom after another, left upstanding under storms: lofty and broad, it fell. Still the rampart, hewn by men, crumbles away... they were joined together... cruelly sharpened... shone... skilful work ancient structure... a ring with encrustations of soil prompted the mind and drew forth a swift idea. Ingenious in the making of chains, the bold-minded man amazingly bound together the ribs of the wall with cables.

There were bright city buildings, many bathhouses, a wealth of lofty gables, much clamour of the multitude, many a mead-hall filled with human revelry until mighty Fate changed that. Far and wide men fell dead: days of pestilence came and death destroyed the whole mass of those renowned swordsmen. Their fortress became waste places; the city rotted away: those who should repair it, the multitudes, were fallen to the ground. For that reason these courts are collapsing and the wide red roof of vaulted beams is shedding its tiles. The site is fallen into ruin, reduced to heaps, where once many a man blithe of mood and bright with gold, clothed in splendours, proud and flown with wine, gleamed in his war-trappings, and gazed upon treasure, on silver, on chased gems, on wealth, on property, on the precious stone and on this bright citadel of the broad kingdom; and the stone courts were standing and the stream warmly spouted its ample surge and a wall embraced all in its bright bosom
where the baths were, hot at its heart. That was convenient. Then they let pour... the warm streams across the grey stone... until the round pool hotly... where the baths were. Then is... It is a fitting thing how the... city...

School Has Started

Classes began on Friday, and I'm already far behind. I guess that means it's a good thing that the battery in my Camry died so that I couldn't go to an English department reception tonight. Work for me, yessirree. :-)

The robot class seems to be going well, but we're not in the actual SF yet (I had them read parts of Frankenstein and the Golem legend for today). Comp II is all right, I guess. I get really annoyed by a couple of the kids in there. It's tough to love as I would like to be loved, but I reckon I ought to anyway.

Meanwhile, I've got a bunch of other stuff going on, too:

* Master's exam reading (the exam's in March or April, probably)
* Work at my morning job (about 3 hours/day)
* Old English (Beowulf, actually)
* Linguistics and 2nd Language Acquisition (class hasn't started yet; it's Tu/Th)
* Starting on an editing project for a couple mass comm. professors' book
* Being a hubby
* Trying to follow Jesus more closely