… The $1.5 million deficit is due to a carry-over from last year, when SDSU athletics was $2 million in the hole despite $15 million in subsidies from student fees, state funds and other university support.

Scathing Online Schoolmarm very much likes Leonard Bernstein’s lectures on music, The Unanswered Question. She especially likes the way he explains musical modernism as having introduced, among other things, a striking chromatic ambiguity into composition. Take Chopin’s Etude in Thirds:

Are we in the major or minor? Or in the Phrygian mode? Is this music tonal or modal? Are we to infer ninth chords, or diminished sevenths?

This sort of ambiguity, Bernstein remarks, is intriguing – even exciting – in art forms like music and poetry.

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But SOS is here to tell you that being up in the air like this for extended periods of time does not work very well in the essay.

Certainly readers are willing to be confused or disoriented for awhile in reading essays – the writer might be drunk or dreaming or just mentally drifting at the beginning of an essay – but pretty quickly the form needs to find its dominant, its key, its voice, its mood, its argument. If it starts with an anecdote, it has to tell us why it starts with an anecdote, where that anecdote stands in relation to the subject around which the essay is organized… If it doesn’t do this sort of thing, it’s not really an essay — it’s a prose poem, maybe, but not an essay.

A glance at Wikipedia yields, among others, this definition of an essay: A prose composition with a focused subject of discussion. We can of course think of ways in which essayists can depart from this emphasis on steady focus and dominant subject matter; but SOS would suggest the nature as well as the strength of the essay as a distinct mode of writing involves its relative non-ambiguity. It tends to want to argue something clearly, or make you see what it’s like to be inside of a particular experience clearly. And even when we’ve got the second sort of essay – call it a narrative essay – that narrative is still, almost always, in the service of some sort of cultural or spiritual or political argument.

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One of the signs of a very bad essay is indeed an unpleasant interminable ambiguity. The writer doesn’t allow you to get a foothold in the writing. You’re not sure what she’s on about. What is she urging that you believe, or feel?

Where, for that matter, is she? It’s not that bad essays lack a voice; typically they have all too many voices, a sort of confused, insecure trying on of many tones, attitudes, and dialects.

You never know what key you’re in. The feeling grows upon you, as you read, that you are in an emotionally and intellectually muddled world; and since you have entered the essay for the dual pleasures of good writing and clarified perceptions, you are eventually put off by the essay, and you probably stop reading it.

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Carlin Romano’s recent essay about Christopher Hitchens exemplifies the failure of the form.

Its title – No One Left to Pray To? – poses a question that – like the essay that follows – seems to come from a person at once insecure about his hold on his subject and boastful about his superiority to it (the subject here being a human being, Christopher Hitchens). One of Hitchens’ books – the one about Bill Clinton – is titled No One Left to Lie To, and, as that title makes clear, it’s a strong polemic arguing that Clinton is so intense and inveterate a liar that eventually no one believes anything he says.

Romano’s title is a question rather than a statement – a move that ushers us in to the vagueness and timidity of his essay’s assertions. Hitchens may be dying and doesn’t believe in God, so … he has no one to pray to. Is that it? Okay. But why put the twist on his title in the form of a question? If your essay is going to be about how sad or strange or ironic it is that Hitchens is dying and, since he doesn’t believe in God, God won’t keep him from doing that — a not very generous thought on Romano’s part, but let’s go with it — then why not put the title in the affirmative? Why the weaselly question mark?

Or is Romano simply trying to be clever? Where is his conviction in this matter? We assume, from the title on, that Romano is a religious person. We’re prepared, having been signaled by this title, for an essay in which Romano will, let us say, lament the desperation and sterility of this atheist’s last days. But we’re not fully prepared, because the tentativeness of that question mark puts us someplace ambiguous.

First paragraph:

If God occasionally intervenes in the world to shoot down an atheist—to show who’s boss, or simply to vent—it makes sense for Him to target the esophagus.

Are we being funny? Is this an effort at the folksy humor of the preacher, or is it the insouciant observation of a secular sophisticate? What’s the key?

As organs go, it’s long and conveniently placed, stretching from throat to stomach, making a good target for an elderly yet determined deity with possibly shaky hands. Its importance to speech heightens the symbolic force intended. And its connection to swallowing suggests the irony some believers think God enjoys too much: You can’t swallow me? You won’t swallow anything!

Since this last statement is about as funny as God saying to a woman with breast cancer You don’t enjoy breast feeding? You don’t even get a breast! the reader right away dismisses the possibility that this essay means to be somehow lighthearted and witty as well as serious. The vulgarity of the piece suggests that the writer wishes to be seen as… brash? We’re not sure.

For atheist apostle and recent memoirista Christopher Hitchens, who announced on June 30 that he’d cancel the rest of his Hitch-22 book tour to undergo chemotherapy on said cancerous organ, the argument for such personalized intelligent design presumably doesn’t hold. Hitch does recognize the role of vengeance and resentiment in believer/nonbeliever relations, but only in fueling institutions established by believers further down the Great Chain of Being. “Religion,” he wrote in God Is Not Great, “does not, and in the long run cannot, be content with its own marvelous claims and sublime assurances. It must seek to interfere with the lives of nonbelievers, or heretics, or adherents of other faiths.”

By this point the careful reader has stepped pretty far into that sense of reading unpleasant interminable ambiguity I described earlier. It’s not that the reader takes offense at any particular position in regard to Hitchens — she’s ready to read someone hating or pitying him or admiring or taking energetic issue with this or that position of his. It’s rather that the reader is beginning to take offense at being asked to remain within the prose world of a person whose writing is confusing rather than enlightening.

To be sure, there are many cutesy words and turns of phrase here (apostle; memoirista; said organ) that continue to make us play with the idea that this means to be a lighthearted and ultimately charitable take on the bad turn in Hitchens’ life; yet these words seem a strained effort at lightness, and when we get to the writer’s use of Hitch – a nickname – we wonder why he uses it. Yes, the Hitchens memoir (Is this supposed to be a book review?) titles itself with that name; yet Romano seems to use it in the way of an intimate. This comes across as pretentious, or at least as weird, especially since the essay is beginning to look unfriendly. Maybe.

We also note that Romano has misspelled ressentiment, which makes us wonder why he uses the French version of the word resentment. What did he think was gained by the French spelling? Since his subject is an erudite man who would not make this mistake, Romano’s foray into French makes him look inferior to Hitchens, whereas his rhetoric, to the extent that we can understand it, suggests a self-appraisal as superior. Romano also spells god is Not Great incorrectly.

One thing’s for sure—Hitch is not in great health. Indeed, he faces the possibility of not being at all if the chemo proves useless. Should believers pray for him, a man celebratedly insensitive to norms of politeness and acts of altruism?

Not being at all. Romano’s essay turns out to be a jig atop a grave-to-be.

At this point, the reader – this one at least – turns away from the prose in embarrassment.

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SOS has often said on this blog that bad writing is, among other things, writing that cannot help betraying things the writer clearly does not mean to betray to the reader. This is one of the things we mean by saying that good writing is about control.

It does Romano no good that he goes on, in his essay, to pretend a sort of even-handedness about his subject. He has betrayed his hatred. Nor is it the honestly and sometimes wittily proffered hatred of certain ideas and people for which Hitchens is notorious. It is the unpleasant inchoate passion of a writer who has not learned to master himself or his prose.

“College football is my favorite sport, and I’d rather not be ashamed of that fact.”

Although they’d have had to up that hourly rate to at least $500 to attract that faculty…

… [BP] has been “offering signing bonuses and lucrative pay to prominent scientists from public universities around the Gulf Coast” to muster a defense against inevitable litigation in the wake of the April 20 oil spill, according to a report in the Press-Register newspaper in Alabama.

At one point, BP plc “attempted to hire the entire marine sciences department” at the University of South Alabama, the report states.

The contract, obtained by the newspaper, would have barred the scientists from publishing their research, sharing it with other scholars or even talking about it.

The department did not sign…

Scientists interviewed by the newspaper told of being offered $250 an hour…

Surely the most embarrassing American university at the moment must be Tennessee State, an ill-run institution at the best of times.

TSU’s response to a critical series about the place in the local paper has been to write a column defending the school and run it under the name of a high-profile graduate. I mean, public relations people at the school wrote it and then gave it to this guy. Who gave it to the paper. Which published it as if it were written by the guy. Which is reasonable. When a person’s name is on something as the author, we assume he’s the author.

TSU is totally unfazed by the plagiarism.

… [TSU Communications Chief Peter] Nwosu sent an approximately 1,700-word e-mail to the campus community Friday afternoon [in response to the series] titled “TSU responds.”

A shorter 600-word op-ed column by TSU track legend Ralph Boston, which ran two days later in The Tennessean, was nearly identical in several sections. The Boston piece was submitted to the newspaper’s editorial board Friday morning.

… I think people have noticed and said, ‘What are you doing?’” said history professor Sheri Browne. “In an academic environment, this is quite astounding.”

Nwosu e-mailed the campus on Tuesday, saying the information was “provided to Ralph Boston by (TSU), with the permission to use it in whole or in part. He had the University’s consent. Therefore, all accusations of plagiarism are not accepted.”

Boston could not be reached by phone or e-mail on Tuesday. Nwosu said there was nothing unusual about providing Boston information in what he called a strategy of “message consistency.”…

There is something strange about 10 specially printed copies of a biography of the great Indian cricketer Sachin Tendulkar. It is not just that the 850-page volumes will sell for £49,000 each. The really rum thing is that the endpapers will be made from pulp mixed with drops of the batsman’s blood…

Max Brod, you recall, ignored Kafka’s request (in writing) that he destroy all of his manuscripts… Which, you know, I guess was okay since Kafka’s manuscripts were really good.

But then Brod gave all the originals plus lots of other not-yet-released stuff to his girlfriend, who was nuts and hid it away, and then she left it all to her children (now old ladies), also nuts. Nuts and mercenary.

They’ve been selling it off bit by bit (it resides in Israel and Switzerland in bank vaults) for millions. To Germany.

Israel, finding this grody to the Max, and quite certain Brod intended all of it for the state of Israel, has been suing for decades, etc.

Here’s the latest chapter of The Trial:

… Four safety-deposit boxes were opened in Zurich Monday by order of the Israeli court, revealing a wealth of Kafka-related manuscripts that now are being catalogued. In the next few days, five other safe deposit boxes are to be opened in Tel Aviv.

When the very first of the total of 10 boxes was opened last week in Israel, one of the sisters, Eva Hoffe, is reported to have burst into the bank in an effort to prevent the vault from being opened, shouting “It’s mine, it’s mine!”

Though present this week in Switzerland, Ms. Hoffe was barred from the bank vault and from the conference room where the papers were examined.

… The library has produced evidence that Max Brod intended the manuscripts for it and, in three decades of frustrations worthy of Kafka himself, found its deal to receive the papers repeatedly blocked by Ms. Hoffe.

Sure, there’s a limerick or two here. I’ll give it a whirl. Later.

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Okay. So here’s what they find in the vault.

Codicil

Dear Max, here’s my scariest thought:
That this writing, so painfully wrought,
Will fall to some bitches
Who’ll sell it for riches
And, oddly, will never be caught.

A Duke researcher’s questionable experimental methods seem to have inspired someone to look closely at his cv. On it, he claims a Rhodes scholarship he didn’t earn.

The Duke University School of Medicine has suspended a researcher and stopped patient enrollment in three cancer studies upon learning of reports that the researcher had overstated his academic credentials.

The lead researcher, Dr. Anil Potti, was placed on administrative leave, said Douglas J. Stokke, a spokesman for Duke, while it investigates allegations that Dr. Potti falsely claimed to have been a Rhodes scholar.

The article goes on to suggest that Potti has a habit of padding his cv.

Harvard Medical School tightened its policy on conflict of interest, banning faculty from receiving corporate gifts and meals and restricting them from speaking on behalf of companies…

Harvard University also adopted a campus-wide policy on conflict of interest, the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based school said on its website…

The medical school was earlier stung by criticism when Senator Charles Grassley said Harvard psychiatrist Joseph Biederman failed to disclose some payments from drug companies while he conducted research recommending their medications for treating children with mental disorders…

That’s because there aren’t any. Especially not at the University of Florida.

… and found this illustrated account of for-profit colleges in my email. Thank you, Dave.

… yesterday’s New York Times account of Elie Wiesel’s having crushed a play about him through the use of legal threats is compelling.

Wiesel and Bernard Madoff were fellow trustees of Yeshiva University. They occasionally dined together. Wiesel invested lots of his money with Madoff. There’s every reason they should appear in a play together.

But Wiesel doesn’t like appearing in a play with Madoff, and he has, with remarkable vulgarity, gone after its writer, an artist who, as she says in the article, “can’t get sued, there’s no way I could afford it.”

The word for Wiesel’s behavior is disgusting.

After UD leaves Rehoboth Beach, she goes to Upstate New York, where she has a house. Not far from that house is Stageworks/Hudson, where she and Mr UD will go to see the revised version of this play, Imagining Madoff. Unable to deal with Wiesel’s threats, the writer has removed his name from her play’s list of characters. But UD gathers that his spirit, if you will, lives on. We shall see.

Meanwhile, as is so often the case when people act in the way Wiesel has acted, Imagining Madoff is receiving far more publicity than it would have if it had run as originally written.

One of the panelists who voted in favor of the diabetes drug Avandia at a Food and Drug Administration advisory meeting last week is a paid speaker for the drug’s maker, GlaxoSmithKline PLC, according to the company and its records.

… Endocrinologist David Capuzzi of Philadelphia confirmed that he has been on Glaxo’s speakers bureau for several years and said he doesn’t see the relationship as a conflict.

… Dr. Capuzzi defended the drug during the meeting. He was one of only three experts who wanted the drug to stay on the market with no additional warnings or restrictions.

Glaxo’s website shows that he received $3,750 from the company as a speaker between April 2009 and March 2010. A Glaxo spokesman said Dr. Capuzzi also received about $8,000 in speaking fees from the company before that period and an additional $3,000 in the second quarter of this year, making the total payments about $14,750. The company has said Avandia is safe and should stay on the market…

Wall Street Journal

… At a time when LSU’s academic budget is being slashed, the fortunate athletic administrators received pay raises of better than 15 percent.

… [T]he scenario is nothing new in Louisiana. Sports and politics rule…

… of an event last night at an art gallery. It involved a University of Pittsburgh scholar-athlete. The account is from the Fulmer Cup website.

The Fulmer people, for those who don’t know, award an annual prize for the American university with the most criminal sports teams.

We wrote this last night before the details came out, and whoa Nelly were we right:

Jabaal Sheard, Pitt DE, must have given someone a Habsburg Chin through upper cut, because average bar tussles don’t often earn felony assault charges as well as three other misdemeanor charges. Sheard got into some kind of titanic fracas and unleashed hell and six neighboring territories on someone, earning Pitt three for the felony and three more for the disorderly conduct, criminal mischief (tee-hee!), and resisting arrest charge. (The Resisting Arrest Charge: The Bank Of America service fee of Fulmer Cup points.)

Hell-unleashing is right: Sheard pulled a Charles Barkley on Edward Parker, the man he was beating senseless when Pittsburgh police ordered him to stop. He declined, evidently.

The officer said he identified himself as police, ordering the two to stop, but he said Sheard ignored him and continued to beat Parker in the face and body. Other officers arrived and unsuccessfully tried to break up the fight, police said. One officer used a baton on Sheard, who grabbed Parker and threw him through the glass door of the LaFond Gallery, police said. As Parker laid [Should be lay.  Unless he was also laying someone.] on his back bleeding, police said Sheard continued to hit him, which is when they used pepper spray on both men.

The LaFond Gallery is a contemporary art museum, so this was clearly an aesthetic argument gone haywire.

Parker: Man, fuck this contemporary shit. That’s some endless recycled wallowing in neorealism and late-arriving retroprimitivism bullshit, dawg.

Sheard: OH HELL NAW YOU DIDN’T INSULT RETROPRIMITIVISM.

[They fight.]

Six points for Pitt in the Fulmer Cup were initially awarded last night, but the plate glass throw surely deserves a bonus point, so if the official Fulmer Cup watchers would update to seven points, that would be really ultra-nice of them please.