Ahh . . . I see that Matt Elliott has created a caste system in order to (presumably) guilt us into updating more.
Eh, caste system seems inexact -- no, it's definitely incorrect.
What we've got here is Matt's Divine Comedy, of sorts, with "Update Regularly" in Paradise, "Wild Hairs" in Purgatory, and we lazy "MIAs" in the raging Inferno: the fifth circle of Hell, to be precise, reserved for the slothful who are forever trapped beneath the Styx.
But who will be my Beatrice, drawing my vision forever upward despite my torment? Matt? Mike Cope? David Hutchens? Greg Taylor?
I suppose I'm stuck here forever with Mandy, Baron, and Quiara. Hopefully I'll be able to redeem myself in the summer months, when I am not helping 137 teenagers try to move on to high school English; updating and maintaining a website was so much easier when I was unemployed . . .
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Mark this date in your calendars: August 22, 2005. That date marks the first meeting of Contemporary American Poetry, which is my first class at Georgia State University.
Oh, did I mention I was accepted into the English Ph.D. program there?
WAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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I'm still trying to formulate a theory of everything. Remember TOEs? Back in the halcyon days of physical chemistry and modern classical (an oxymoron, apologies) physics, some knucklehead stated that all that could be known about the physical world would soon be known, and a number of "theories of everything" abounded to explain every known phenomenon.
Unfortunately for the theory, quantum mechanics developed. With QM came all of the vagaries of chaos theory and its problematic relationship with probability; pretty soon physicists everywhere discovered that they didn't quite know what they knew, or some such.
That's about where I am, in my ongoing struggle/discourse with faith and truth.
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TOE Fragments:
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Whatever happened to value?
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Plato versus Aristotle: The nature of truth, it seems to me, comes down to a dogfight between Plato and Aristotle . . . is there a Platonic objective truth, outside the particulars, or does truth hang upon the particulars with Aristotelian subjectivity?
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The best description I have ever heard of the solipsistic hell of pure existentialism is delivered in an exchange between Doc Holliday and Wyatt Earp in the new Western classic Tombstone:
Doc Holliday -- A man like Ringo has got a great big hole, right in the middle of himself. And he can never steal enough, or kill enough, or inflict enough pain to ever fill it.
Wyatt Earp -- What does he want?
Doc Holliday -- Revenge.
Wyatt Earp -- For what?
Doc Holliday -- Bein' born.
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Reading Mere Christianity for the first time shocked me when C. S. Lewis, apologist supreme, gave this reason for believing: the human conscience.
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Don't you think the human mind looks for patterns more than anything else? Pattern recognition: it's the basis for so many of the writing techniques I teach. We teach students to write and think in parallel structures because these structures reassure us that the author knows what she or he is doing, even aside from the content delivered by them. Until I first taught eighth grade English, I didn't really appreciate Marshall McLuhan's idea that "the medium is the message." Wasn't it T. S. Eliot who said (and I paraphrase, badly) that "meaning" in modern poetry served only to divert a reader's attention, just like a burglar gives meat to a watchdog? The structure's often the thing.
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Apophenia.
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the ease of chaos yet
an old yearning for guidance
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Conversation with Gary Crane, GACS world history teacher, about modern critical theory:
Me: Yeah, Gary, but I'm probably more formalist than anything else.
Gary: I don't follow you. What's that mean?
Me: Formalist, the New Critics. Tennessee, Vanderbilt, 1920s. Robert Penn Warren, Cleanth Brooks, Donald Davidson. You know, symbolism? The Formalists held that works of literature were complete texts no matter how they came into existence, and they should be studied as such. One text can be directly compared to another, and texts exist to be "decoded" in order to find placement in the canon. Really, the text is a sort of -- uh -- almost -holy- artifact, and you study it instead of its author. Each work is complete unto itself, regardless of who wrote it and his or her literary reputation.
Gary: But you said this differs from modern theories . . . how?
Me: In a simple nutshell, modern theory depends upon the reader and what they bring to the work. It doesn't matter authorial intent, or even codes hidden in the text . . . well, you can see codes, but there's no definitive meaning behind the code. What matters is how the individual reader sees those codes. Heraclitus, ya see? You can't step into the same river twice, and no two readers actually read the same book because the book depends on the reader's analysis. It's subjectivity versus objectivity, right?
Gary: But you've still got the same text.
Me: A-ha! But some modern critics would argue "no, no you don't."
Gary: In history we don't really have these arguments, because no one can argue that something actually happened. Something happened, all right, your interpretation can differ, but you can't argue that *something* happened.
Me: Sure you can.
Gary: No, you can't. Take Pearl Harbor, for example. No one can argue that it happened, that the Japanese attacked on December 7, 1941.
Me: Gimmie fifteen or twenty years, let everyone die who eyewitnessed the event, and I'll make you a great argument. Especially if the evidence is fragmentary.
Gary: But that's not history. Something happened! You can't argue that it didn't happen just because . . . shoot. The Holocaust. Jesus and his death. The Mormons. Hmm. I guess you can.
Me: (hoping to deliver an intelligent epigram to end the conversation) Gary, I think it can be argued that history is completely subjective.
Gary: (completely upstaging me) I wonder if objectivity is merely the subjectivity of the fortunate?
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Is it value I want, or authority? Who will have dominion?
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Simple faith.
Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress: As Christian advances through the Valley of the Shadow of Death, he encounters a whispering ghoul who flies up behind him and whispers to him, "Why don't you die?" Christian is tired, and weak, and he eventually confuses the ghoul's voice with his own. Bunyan says that he would have fallen on his sword and ended the struggle, except he remembers his faith at the last minute and begins to repeat a simple sentence: "I will take my strength from the Lord God."
Sometimes, you only need a sentence.
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Post structualist, deconstructionist, etc. -- were they created to point out the chaos and simply destroy everything? Didn't they have the goal of replacing the deconstructed values with something else? Have they painted themselves into a corner?
If everything is untrue, how is truth chosen?
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We're like adolescents, reveling in the fact that adults compromise, and ignoring them if they are fallible . . . why?
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I want choice -- I don't want marginalization -- but I also want TRUTH. What is it? Does it exist? Can it exist? Why or why not?
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