Weird Winter

Without getting into the global warming issue, may I just say that this warm January (we've had a couple of snowy Wednesdays, but other than that temps in the 40s and 50s and rain) has caused mixed feelings for me. Sure, I love the warmer weather, but surely real winter will return. The TV weatherman said yesterday that winter's half-way mark is Feb. 4. Daffodils are poking through in front of the student center, daffodils and crocuses are also coming up in my garden, and they are making even higher shows in the five pots I planted last fall and stored in the garage so as to have excessive, exuberant displays come early spring. Will they be frozen with only their potential loveliness to remind us of our weird winter?

Festival of Faith & Writing

I guess I'd better stop scraping wallpaper and start reading Shalimar the Clown, the newest Rushdie novel--which is very interesting, by the way. I like it much better than The Moor's Last Sigh. I'm a little more than half way through, but other tasks were calling today. The reason? My paper on Rushdie's The Satanic Verses has been accepted at this April's Festival of Faith & Writing at Calvin College (www.calvin.edu/festival)! Rushdie is their featured speaker, but that doesn't mean that I expect he'll stop by this talk. My paper is a very condensed version of the Pro Rege article and in its current permutation is called "The Satanic Verses: Incentive to Dialogue." It's being paired with a talk on Rushdie's Midnight Children (which I have not read). How exciting. Maybe I'm becoming an academic after all these years. I've hung up the scraper and squirty adhesive remover for the evening, and a rental steamer is not available at Lowe's. We'll have to go a-hunting for one tomorrow. So back to my chair and my books. I hope there's still Mozart on (see the previous post) because I'm so tired, I'm about to fall asleep. I need some of Mozart's through-the-centuries energy.

Two Hundred and Fifty

It's been all Mozart all day as I scrape wallpaper from the bathroom. Our wonderful NPR stations, WKSU, is celebrating the 250th anniversary of Mozart's birth as probably many other stations are. Without the music, I may not have persisted as long as I did. This job is not as easy as the adhesive remover bottle advertises. We may break down and rent a steamer for 24 hours. I'm perhaps a third done with all the tedious cleanup not counted in that estimate. The job has to be done and the walls painted by the time for the WCF Super Bowl party in two weeks, but working days are quite limited.

Update: Five down, one to go

Since I last reported on the explosion of Hampton-loved babies in November, we have received more bundles of joy. On December 30, Andrew Thomas was born to the Atlanta web-guru nephew and his wife and is called Drew. A few days later Marco Cruz was born to California niece E (and A her husband). Both those babies were early. And continuing the early trend, Laura Claire (spelling uncertain) was born 5 and 1/2 weeks early this morning to guru's sister and her husband. She will be called Claire and is doing well despite her early arrival. Can't wait for our southern journey during spring break to give Drew, Claire, Meghan and her brother Andrew their quota of Ohio/Michigan hugs. Don't know when we can plan a CA trip :(

"Crash"

As part of the MLK commemoration at Wooster, I joined about 50 people to watch the movie, "Crash," to share a Chinese dinner and good conversation around tables with some of these people, and to discuss the movie guided by local facilitators. Now if you are offended (as I am) by the ubiquitous use of the f-word, then watching the movie might be hard for you as it was for me. If you are offended by racism (as I am), then you might have mixed feelings about it as I did. Certainly the published reviews of the movie have been mixed, but the Af-Am student I know love it and have seen it several times. Every permutation of racial, ethnic and class stereotypes are exhibited in the movie, but its purpose is to break those down by its characters who are not just the surface stereotype but a complex mixture of that and something good below the surface. What didn't quite work for me was just that mixture--how could several of the characters be so awful one minute and so wonderful the next without seeming to feel the disconnect? The prime example of that behavior was with the cop who sexually abuses the wife of a film director in his presence, having stopped their car on a pretext, and then risks his life to save her from a car wreck the next day. "Just doing my duty, ma'am?" I don't think so. One of the things I did like about the movie though (despite the disapproval of many of the printed reviews) was the seemingly coincidental intertwining of lives of the characters. Believing as I do in God's sovereignty, it isn't a stretch for me to realize the web that connects individuals for his divine purposes. That aspect of the film "worked" for me.

More interesting than the movie itself was how we discussed it afterwards. The facilitators broke us "randomly" into eight tables of people, and at our tables, we were to share a motto that typified our lives along with how we lived that out and what frustrated it for us. We then shared those as a get-to-know-you and....then we were given a character in the movie (our table became the black detective, Graham). As a group we had to decide what his life's motto was, how he lived by it, what frustrated it. Then we could formulate questions from our character to the other (tables') characters and ask and have to answer them. As an aside--what was sad for me as we went through this process was the way we/characters defended their actions with "Really, I AM a good person. We had to stay in character, but even so, I don't think many in the room realized the depth of sin that denies this illusion of I'm really good." Back to theh process, I found it to be effective in trying to get into someone's skin, which was the purpose of the exercise. Of course, it was a bit of "preaching to the choir" to do it with this group because just being there meant that we were trying (I make no claim about succeeding) already. Nevertheless, it strikes me as a possible way to debrief a movie for class or as something to do in class with any kind of text. An article a dean once gave to FYS faculty claimed that just this ability or even desire to understand "alien" ideas is what incoming students do so poorly these days and is one of the prime tasks of education.

In the meantime, I rejoice in the fact that three young Af-Am families have recently arrived in Wooster to work at the nearby Christian Children's Home (for at-risk youth) and have volunteered to help us on campus make a safe place for Af-Am students (among others) to maintain, express, live out (and even find) faith in Christ. At that level, I can keep plugging away and can do so more effectively with their assistance. Look here for further updates about the resurrection of Word Up!

San Antonio Impressions

Back in the saddle for the new semester on Monday, it hardly seems possible that just yesterday, Chuck and I were enjoying the warm sun and very good company in a Riverwalk outdoor café. Here are a few of my impressions about San Antonio and the mathematicians who gathered there.

• SA has much more a Hispanic feel than an urban cowboy feel. I wonder if that is part of its appeal? Some of the most attractive places we saw were the old governor’s mansion with its expansive courtyards, massive dark wood furniture and woodwork, and small chapel; the San Fernando Cathedral with its whitewashed walls and simply decorated ceiling; and the walkway along the river through the King Williams district (not on the boat tour, so less traveled). The Tex-Mex lunch in the Mexican market was yummy.

• Flowers in January ☺ Hong Kong orchid trees; beds of cyclamen, petunias, pansies; rose bushes. Ummm. The vibrant color against the fresh green of the lawns and the palms (some of which, admittedly, were still in their winter dormancy) does wonders for the heart – of gardeners, at least.

• Everyone “remembers the Alamo,” but I did like the architecture, courtyards and sweeping oak and cypress trees the best.

• My daytime companion was the wife of one of C’s oldest math friends, a very lovely woman with great grace and elegant style. She’s a “shop til you drop” person, which probably comes naturally to someone who is an interior decorator, but I dropped long before she wanted to stop shopping. My feet did not do well on this trip (as compared to Turkey and Eygpt), probably because I did not prepare for it and then just kept on walking and walking and walking. Not all that far, but far enough, evidently. My still swollen ankles tell the story.

• On the first morning’s shopping at the Mexican Market, I decided to give into the impulse to buy a very reasonably priced Mexican dress and headdress, figuring Karen would love it for a Halloween costume. She could intersperse it with the African woman costume I can create for her from our things here….When I told her about it, she seemed interested enough, only she had already planned next Halloween, and for far less cost: “But, Mom, I was going to wear my pajamas and put spots on my face like when I had chickenpox when I was four.” OK. We’ve got costumes lined up now for three years, a great relief to me for whom (unlike Karen) Halloween is the least favorite of the year’s “celebrations”!

• Mathematicians all look like a variation on a theme by Chuck, even if they were (a little) younger or fatter or taller. Tweed jackets and often not-quite-matching shirts (even COW’s president, a mathematician, fit this bill with his pink and yellow plaid shirt and brown plaid jacket). Chuck’s matched, by the way. Or rumpled tee-shirt with math equations and jeans or loud shorts. All looking intently ahead or at their companions thinking IMPORTANT THOUGHTS and not quite paying attention to the real life details in their immediate context. My favorite female version of this outfit was a young woman with a black turtleneck, flowy black chiffon skirt and lilac colored high top tennis shoes. The (young) exceptions were obviously on the job market—they had squeaky-polished black shoes and obviously new suits. Once they get that job, as was the case with C’s newest department member, they can go back to tee shirts, jeans and sneakers. It was really fun to people watch.

• Wireless is IN. But for those of us without it or without our computers, one of the vendors set up a room of 25 computers for email. You were on your honor to use one for only 10 minutes and the wait was never long.

• Just to give you a sample of such IMPORTANT THOUGHTS: Here are a couple of titles of the talks Chuck thought were the best of the conference. One is by a young ACMS (see below) professor, FS, “Preference Sets, Graphs, and Voting in Agreeable Societies” and brought rave reviews. Another of C’s “bests” was in the special session on current events: “Contact network epidemiology: Bond percolation applied to infectious disease prediction and control.” Those have understandable words in them, so I’ll give you one by a Wooster grad: “Adaptive precision in homotopy continuation.” C was on a panel about making sabbaticals productive that also garnered much praise; it may be developed as a webpage or an article…..Chuck’s favorite stories about math conventions is that the colleagues go out for a beer or coke and sit nursing it all night long all the while filling napkins with equations, oblivious to the fact that others might be wanting tables or the restaurants and bars need to move the traffic through. Evidently, though, cities don’t mind the mathematicians.

• The mathematicians in the Association for Christians in the Mathematical Sciences, which Chuck helped found many years ago now, are wonderful folk (as are their wives—see above). The annual banquet drew 75 people, despite the fact that it is pricier now that it must be held in a hotel venue. Our dinner conversations were stimulating, and the after dinner speech, by the husband of the my week’s companion, on “The Myth of Certainty,” spoke to a deep emotional crisis of another of our table companions. W had had no idea, of course, of how God would use his talk. The next morning, the second (annual—for those years the meetings are on Sundays) worship service drew about 125. Hearing the Welsh choir effect of so many men singing their hearts out in praise (with an occasional woman’s voice—one a beautiful descant—above it) was special. Just simple Scripture, creeds, prayers and song. All the elements of worship except a sermon.

• Next year the conference will be in New Orleans, moved a day to accommodate the Sugar Bowl and hopefully to encourage the city’s rebuilding.

Two organ concerts and a lecture

And all in one week. Of course, it is not hard to hear many lectures in one week if you happen to be in Grand Rapids during January because of Calvin's famous January Series. (A reason to retire to G.R.) John Hamersma (husband of the little dynamo who runs the J series)opened this year's series with a lecture/concert on what makes an organ different from other instruments, complete with a student assistant who blew over Heinekin (sp?) beer bottles and a set of pan-pipes. Then today I heard George Weigel, the biographer of Pope John Paul II (a fascinating biography, by the way), speak about JP's legacy, the significance of the choice of the new pope, and the challenges facing Benedict XVI. One of the legacies stood out to me--John Paul's raising the question of freedom for our age. Is it merely personal wilfulness (to quote Frank Sinatra--"I did it my way.") or is it truly choosing the good. Weigel claims that this is a central issue for the future, relating to the nature of marriage, beginning and end of life issues and other biotechnical conundrums.

As for the significance of the cardinals' choice of Ratzinger (which we'd know if we had read his book God's Choice), it is, he claims, a resounding affirmation of JPII, a resounding affirmation of Ratzinger himself, the refusal to buy into the (false)media characterization of Ratzinger, and a signal that the forty year effor of the world to compell the Roman Catholic church to bend its moral teachings otmodernity is over.

The four challenges he mentioned were the death of Europe from spiritual boredom(literally with its declining population) which can only be stemmed by a reconversion to its spiritual roots, a strategic dialogue with those elements within Islam who desire reform, reforming the Curia and reform of the criteria for selecting bishops. I wish I could have asked about how one can dialogue with Islam's reformers and still hold to a notion of "truth-centered dialogue" (which is one of JPII's other legacies. My reading of some Islamic reformers tells me that not all of them hold to that kind of notion of truth (but my reading is limited).

And the other organ concert? A concert last Sunday celebrating 25 years of the organ at First Pres in Wooster, with its organist, a trumpter--Ellen's "old" teacher and now a prof at Old Miss, and his wife, a fine (light) opera singer, both regulars at Ohio Light Opera each summer. Wonderful!