The city council. They’ll approve effing anything, especially lounges (bloodbath background here) full of killers.

The mayor has begged them not to, but they all just laugh, y’know? UD doesn’t know whether lounge owners are bribing council members, or whether members just like it in principle when new abattoirs open up, but, you know, welcome to Bama.

Amy Wax loudly espouses views that most reasonable people find repellent. This does not justify punishing her for expressing them. Her suspension, with the other penalties, is a kind of ritual act, an unconvincing performance of moral purity. 

John McWhorter was right back in October, when he defended the free speech rights of U Penn’s benighted law professor; and now that she has, with great fanfare, sued the university for having imposed sanctions on her, this long sad story will continue for some time to play out.

FWIW, ol’ UD figures she’ll win her case and get herself some money and an apology. Her lawyers can easily point to really disgusting speech from U Penn professors that has occasioned not a peep.

That’d be Jews standing around drinking the blood of Gazans, vs Wax showing her racism. Lots of ick to go around at Penn apparently.

Wax is old and has cancer – maybe Penn thinks it can wait this out.

How tonally appropriate that the composer whose works were wiped out in the Pacific Palisades fire was Arnold Schoenberg. His famous atonality swept us away, said Leonard Bernstein, from Keats’s “poetry of the earth,” from our innate, universal, position in a world which sings harmonically to us, to a weird mystical alien otherwordly place. A place whose utterances we do not understand, but which can generate in us an undifferentiated anxiety.

This is in fact the anxiety of homelessness. Just as the homes of Schoenberg’s son and his neighbors have been swept away, making world and psyche rootless and afraid, so most of the composer’s work literally abandons the home note, the first note of the scale, which we leave and return to in harmonic, non-dissonant, tonal, music — which is to say, in virtually all of the music, classical or popular, we all know. The server who approached UD in a Matera restaurant and asked her to join in with him in singing Volare (he had overheard me singing something else at our table) assumed rightly that UD knows the song because of its simple, strongly rhythmic, redundant lines, inanely reassuring lyrics, and sweet, strong, resolution. On vastly more complex levels than this, our innate tonal drive seems to demand that we be housed in a structurally sound musical universe, that the architecture of music be grounded and sheltering.

We can manage the radical ambiguities of Mahler, but the unambiguously ungrounded atonalities of Schoenberg are a musical bridge too far for most people. He seems to have burned down the musical house.

First there was the antisemitic DEI official from the University of Michigan; now there’s the DEI project manager who was recently filmed calling a woman an ugly dumb cunt.

You are surprised? Really? Familiar with the phrase return of the repressed? If your very livelihood forces you to suppress the routine mildly derogatory/belittling shit we all express now and then as a perfectly healthy social outlet, it’s liable to come out — and eventually it will come out — in an explosive extreme form onaccounta the power of all that repression.

It’s normal and necessary for women among themselves to occasionally laugh and call men assholes; it’s just as normal and necessary for men among themselves to demean women. All affinity groups produce a certain amount of derogatory discourse about other groups; it’s called letting off steam. But if your vocation won’t let you – if you always have to pretend to have none of these non-DEI thoughts – then eventually, like Mount Etna, it’s all gonna come rushing back from your depths of resentment at having to deny it, and you are gonna BLOW.

At this stage of his life, [Natrona County Commissioner Dallas] Laird finds that he cries often. He wonders whether it’s his age, or if there’s simply a lot to cry about, or maybe it’s some mixture of the two. [A young man who recently killed himself] was loved, and yet he didn’t seem to believe it. How could that be? What is happening in his community? He thinks that most families don’t know what to do when someone is in crisis, or they can’t afford therapy. Guns are everywhere, woven into the fabric of rural American culture. Hunting elk and moose is a tradition that connects one generation to the next. Children are taught to shoot. Notions about self-protection, and what it means to stand sentry before your family, have become like a religious creed, even when the real danger tends to lurk within. 

Laird believes too many people feel like they’re going nowhere, and that feeling worms its way into the soul, infects it, until the day comes when they grab a firearm. In Wyoming, more than 85 percent of gun deaths are suicide.

“We do have significant mental health problems, there is no doubt about that. …We don’t have enough mental health providers, facilities, treatments. It’s the way that we have facilitated killing ourselves that leads to death with firearms, where we take this to the extreme.”

Yessir, Mr Police Chief. A madman takes three guns to a house where his eleven year old daughter is staying and blows away her and her grandmother and then kills himself. The dying child managed to drag herself to a neighbor’s porch, but ultimately “succumbed to her wounds.”

Quite a way to go. Shot by your father, and probably witnessing him killing your grandmother and then himself. Bleeding out on a neighbor’s porch.

He’d been on leave from his job at Cornell, and he and his ex-wife were having custody disputes.

He showed her. Killed her mother and her child.

See any red flags here? The local police chief didn’t (the police were called to the grandmother’s home by the killer just one day before the shooting – did they contact Cornell and ask why he was on leave?), so the guy took the guns from a relative and did his thing. Why three? (One source says four.) Why not take one? Cuz he wanted to be a hundred percent certain he’d kill everybody, so he needed backup weaponry.

Oh – and here’s a source that says the police had had multiple contacts with the guy but “all encounters before 2025 were medical-related interactions and were not linked in any way to domestic violence.” What’s that mean? How often do you have encounters with police when you have medical issues? Were these mental illness related?

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So let’s see. How do the child’s schoolmates deal with this insane family massacre in a healthy positive way?

Well, let’s look at how Cornell is coping. The guy was a dean. Cornell hired him as a dean. Cornell has erased his name from its website as its major coping strategy. It hasn’t said anything. It won’t tell anyone why he was put on leave.

Maybe the kids can do something similar. Pretend she didn’t exist. Don’t say anything. Don’t ask why an obviously troubled man easily got hold of three guns (why weren’t they secured so that – I don’t know – a madmen couldn’t grab a bunch and shoot his child to death, letting her bleed out in the snow on a neighbor’s porch?); don’t ask why you live in a country where manifestly insane people have no trouble getting hold of many guns.

The Humiston daughter – also eleven – was also shot to pieces by unsecured guns, and she also ended up bleeding on a neighbor’s porch, but she managed to survive. Her fifteen year old brother killed her whole family (five people), but what’s important is that she cope with this in a healthy, positive way.

The attorney representing a gun club where members get all drunk and shoot all over the place acknowledges all the bullets neighbors are complaining about on their property. But hey it’s Texas — there are bullets effing everywhere, babe, so who’s to say they come from our drunk shooters club?

Gunnies hate the idea that there might be ways for states to have slightly better chances of discovering insane mass murderers with immense personal arsenals before they massacre half their town. Nuts like Robert Card are the price of liberty or some such bullshit; and licensing/registration rules are oh so burdensome. Surely our Trumpian Supreme Court will see that.

Well ha. The court has gone ahead and left UD’s state alone as it works hard at not being Mississippi. The court has said that it doesn’t care if the poor citizens of MD are overwhelmed with the burden of rational gun rules.

Marylanders depressed by the rules can make a dash for SOOOOpergunny Montana and blow their heads off.

This just in: Airports suck, and nine hours of flying over the Atlantic is no fun.

This just in: Robust travel when you’re certifiably old is different from the same when you’re young. Hence: UD is proud she held up pretty well.

This just in: Nothing like being back in your comfortable bed after more than two weeks of Euro-wandering. “Hello, beautiful people,” our friend and neighbor Doug just greeted us as we shoveled the car and the driveway/front steps. Word is out in Garrett Park that we ditched the snowstorm and went to southern Italy instead.

Back to regular blogging later today.

UD has constantly been in very high places on this trip: A dizzying Neapolitan hotel balcony; the insanely steep cliffs of Matera, where crumbling walls alone fence out death; an outdoor restaurant in the Matera town center, where you twirl your pasta inches from oblivion. Of course your eyes are supposed to fix delightedly on the massive views of caves and churches, while your mind bothers itself not at all with the intimately close drop. Yet UD seems to suffer from (what fun to find a name/diagnosis) High Places Phenomenon, in which you feel “that you might jump off [a great height] despite the fact that you don’t want to die.” Sometimes, at great heights, “your mind is actually saying, ‘You’re in an unsafe situation—back up from the ledge.’ People usually obey that signal and back up. But we can misinterpret that and think, ‘I must have reacted that way because I wanted to jump.’”

“It might have something to do with how easy it would be to do something so irreversible and absurd, that the mere thought that it’s possible exerts some weird fascination,” [one person] said. “I [also] don’t like to sit in emergency aisles in planes because of that big red lever that looks so easy to pull. It probably isn’t, but I start obsessing over … what would happen if my hands just pulled it before I realized what I was doing? I would never actually pull the damn thing, but the obsessive thoughts are no fun,” she said. 

The theme seems to be a human attraction to/fascination with the sheer possibility life sometimes affords of doing something absurd, radically and madly free — we’re in the realm of Andre Gide’s acte gratuit, in which you act without meaning or motivation, but simply, and somehow defiantly, because you can. Because, in this case, the amazing, immediate facility with which you could move into, er, an entirely other realm weirdly and excitedly enthralls you… There’s a hyperdramatization here, a melodramatization, of Stevenson’s insistent point in his great essay Aes Triplex, and of Mrs Dalloway’s thought as she walks through London on an ordinary day:

She had the perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, out, far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very, dangerous to live even one day.

It is very very dangerous to live even one day; but we rarely feel and see that danger; and anyway, as Stevenson points out, you’d be stupid to miss your chance at a rich life by being always, as it were, on edge. Millions of people live cheek by jowl with volcanoes, hurricanes, tornadoes, flood plains, and earthquakes, and they transact perfectly wonderful existences. We all happily carry around with us scads of internal organs, any one of which could turn sour on us at any moment. Bah! There’s a life to be lived.

And maybe this weird HPP of UD’s is just that – a distillation, in a moment of obvious peril, of the love of life, the immediate pulsing stuff of life, a life which includes the absurd fact that, in some twisted way, witnessing the ease with which we could lose life turns out to be a moment of wildly gratifying affirmation.

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I wonder if it all resonates in some way with ‘Brian Eno, who talked of “idiot glee.” Idiot glee is a kind of sheer joy at the mad fact of the world.’

It’s hard to beat Operation Sudden Fall, but practically incinerating one of our frat pledges at an illegal party comes close. Scummy frats and don’t give a shit administrations remain central to the life of the mind at SDSU; expect more good shit from our school’s unique perspective on higher education.

Without them veils I'd be a goner.
I must have taken too much bourbon ...
Quick!  Lend me PDQ your turban!
Ah.  Now I feel at peace, and calmer."

Promoted to a Principle?

And all because of his firearm skills.

… postmodernized.