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Read my book, TEACHING BEAUTY IN DeLILLO, WOOLF, AND MERRILL (Palgrave Macmillan; forthcoming), co-authored with Jennifer Green-Lewis. VISIT MY BRANCH CAMPUS AT INSIDE HIGHER ED





UD is...
"Salty." (Scott McLemee)
"Unvarnished." (Phi Beta Cons)
"Splendidly splenetic." (Culture Industry)
"Except for University Diaries, most academic blogs are tedious."
(Rate Your Students)
"I think of Soltan as the Maureen Dowd of the blogosphere,
except that Maureen Dowd is kind of a wrecking ball of a writer,
and Soltan isn't. For the life of me, I can't figure out her
politics, but she's pretty fabulous, so who gives a damn?"
(Tenured Radical)

Wednesday, February 04, 2004

DE PROFUNDIS

Being the Prison Diaries
of Gerald M. Goldhaber [see yesterday's post below: Teaching Today]
Director, Communications Department
University of Buffalo

1 February 2004
The City of Georgetown
Cayman Islands
Her Majesty’s Correctional Facility

The hardest part is lack of eye contact. My guaranteed effective “Donahue” teaching technique relies above all on constant eye contact. I never use notes when I teach because you have to look down, if only for a second, to check them. I’m always dashing around the lecture hall, fixing students with my bold stare, challenging them, stimulating them!

But now, friends, I’m trapped within four thick walls, and making eye contact with the guys around here would be a mistake. The energy, the one-on-oneness which is my trademark is impossible in this prison, where I pace my cell alone, awaiting word from my lawyer, my dean, whoever.

Lying on this filthy cot, exhausted from pacing, I ask myself what happened to catapult me from my waterbed to a malodorous pallet.... Only a few hours ago I was gazing at Seven Mile Beach from my breakfast room. Now, as I peer through the hazy window of my holding pen, the darkness gathers...

I ask myself - - Why is it that the most high-profile, emulated, talented, attractive people always seem to end up hounded, harassed, indicted, even imprisoned? I’m one of many influential personalities - Martha Stewart, Michael Jackson, Jennifer Lopez, Kobe Bryant, Rush Limbaugh, William Bennett, Ariel Sharon, Alain Juppe, Janet Jackson - whose very success seems to spell their doom. What does the world have against ambition and acclaim? I have to figure it’s envy.

People love to bring successful people down. I had a guy write to me saying, “Big-shot communicator! Aren’t you supposed to be a specialist in analyzing social differences? Didn’t you notice that the Cayman Islands differs from the United States in having draconian drug laws?” Sure - I know the Caymanians are culturally conservative church-goers and all that. But put yourself in my place. Here’s a pissant protectorate - not even a country - whose sole industry is money laundering. Would you assume they’d give a shit about some guy in a condo scoring Ecstasy? It’s an effing Caribbean island! Everybody’s drugging!


2 February 2004

My lawyer’s getting me out today. He says I’ll have to pay a few thousand dollars and act contrite in front of the judge.

In a way I’m grateful for this time alone. I’ve been living a crazy life, with the consulting business plus the university gig. Things like this are nature’s way of telling us to slow down.

I’m thinking of getting into the Simplicity thing. Zen, saunas, feng shui or however you spell it, meditation ceremonies, retreats, mindfulness - that shit. ... And there’s always the anti-drug talk circuit -- Don’t do what I did, look how I’ve been brought low, blah blah... the “patter of penitence” I believe Gore Vidal calls it...I’ll start my talk with Oscar Wilde - classy writer:


“The gods had given me almost everything. But I let myself be lured into long spells of senseless and sensual ease. I amused myself with being a FLANEUR, a dandy, a man of fashion. I surrounded myself with the smaller natures and the meaner minds. I became the spendthrift of my own genius, and to waste an eternal youth gave me a curious joy. Tired of being on the heights, I deliberately went to the depths in the search for new sensation. What the paradox was to me in the sphere of thought, perversity became to me in the sphere of passion. Desire, at the end, was a malady, or a madness, or both. I grew careless of the lives of others. I took pleasure where it pleased me, and passed on. I forgot that every little action of the common day makes or unmakes character, and that therefore what one has done in the secret chamber one has some day to cry aloud on the housetop. I ceased to be lord over myself. I was no longer the captain of my soul, and did not know it. I allowed pleasure to dominate me. I ended in horrible disgrace. There is only one thing for me now, absolute humility.”