Life imitates art – Molly Bloom and gambling emerge in the real world, on the front page of the New York Times.
This Molly totally approves of gambling.
Her soliloquy – a tell-all, just like Leopold Bloom’s Molly’s – will appear in 2014.
It’s not clear if Bloom herself will appear in order to promote it. She might be in jail.
I think they really need to update this webpage. It says Stanley Chesley is a member of the Kentucky bar, but he’s not. He’s been disbarred.
The Kentucky Supreme Court upheld the disbarment of famed class action lawyer Stanley Chesley, a partner at Waite Schneider Bayless & Chesley Co. in Cincinnati, for “unreasonable” fees received in the settlement of a class action. Under Ohio Rules of Professional Responsibility, the disbarment may provide grounds for disbarment in Ohio as well.
Eh, unreasonable is a relative thing. You think it’s unreasonable for Stanley to have collected 20.5 million dollars for doing nothing in a class action suit. Others may differ.
Let’s see what he did for his cut of the settlement.
[Chesley] show[ed] up at the mediation and [went] through the motions of announcing the agreement.
Nice work if you can get it; and he doesn’t have to pay back anything, so fine. However, his greed appears to have embarrassed the bar enough for them to dump him.
Ohio’s next.
UD, an English professor, is a big believer in re-reading what you wrote and editing as the need arises. Go to it, Cincinnati.
… asks UD‘s blogpal Ophelia Benson about a cleric who encourages the murder of gay people and positively insists that by eight years of age girls must be hidden behind the burqa.
Well, it’s an old story, British universities sponsoring the ideas of men who think like this – seems every time UD turns around a school is tussling with on-campus prayers that call for the death of apostates, etc., etc.
Now, in both of these cases there has ultimately been a sensible response: Mr Kill the Filthy Dogs has been cancelled; and the other university has asked that the content of prayers be submitted in advance. But the thing just keeps happening – British universities sponsor events that segregate women and prohibit them from asking questions, sponsor speakers who want to murder adulterous people… I mean adulterous women… I mean women accused of adultery…
Anyway. Maybe these most recent responses suggest that the British are getting some backbone.
Gentle Hitler meek and mild appears, a statue kneeling in prayer, as you peer through a hole in a wall at the site of the Warsaw ghetto. It’s an art installation.
Art journals dredge up the dead language people dredge up on occasions such as this. The artist’s work “reveal[s] contradictions at the core of today’s society.”
Praying little boy Hitler (We can look forward to praying little boy Pol Pot in the killing fields, praying little boy Stalin in the gulag, and praying little boy Assad in Aleppo.) is a quintessential work of kitsch – so much so that UD intends to feature it in her aesthetics course this semester. It conforms to Milan Kundera’s definition of the form: “the absolute denial of shit.” It’s the functional equivalent of “the Hitler with a song in his heart” in The Producers. Like Franz Liebkind, it wants to remind you that Hitler was essentially an innocent – a flawed human being like every one of us. He knows what he did was wrong, and if he were alive today and in touch with his inner child he’d be on his knees in the middle of the Warsaw ghetto praying for forgiveness.
Praying little boy Hitler conveys the important truth that we’re all potential Hitlers. Paul Berman, reviewing the work of Andre Glucksmann, writes:
The eleventh commandment that Glucksmann wants to append to the biblical ten is this: to know thyself as capable of being a monster – even if that means saying (and here the imp of excess wraps its fingers around Glucksmann’s neck […]), “Hitler, c’est moi.”
As more victims from the slaughter of 20 children and six adults were laid to rest, long funeral processions clogged the streets of Newtown …
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They walked out together into the fine fall day, scuffling bright ragged leaves under their feet, turning their faces up to a generous sky really blue and spotless. At the first corner they waited for a funeral to pass, the mourners seated straight and firm as if proud in their sorrow. […] “It seems to be a plague,” said Miranda, “something out of the Middle Ages. Did you ever see so many funerals, ever?”
Katherine Anne Porter, “Pale Horse, Pale Rider”
The voice of the people. Philosophy of education, American-style. If the University of Georgia students and alumni like to shit all over the campus during football games, “it’s a college campus for crying out loud.” That’s what college campuses are for.
To be well-treated is as unnerving as to be badly treated.
When you call room service at the Inn at Harvard, the person who answers says, “Good morning, Professor Soltan!”
The bed you’re lying on has gold-wrapped chocolates on it and is big enough to share with, at the very least, the cheating contingent of the Harvard basketball team.
Two nights ago, UD left her massive bed for a spanking new in-the-round lecture hall down the street, where Harvey Mansfield spoke about science, non-science, wisdom, and damn hippies. UD liked the talk, but as an old hippie disliked the claim that hippies are anti-scientific. “Hippies,” UD informed Mansfield later as they headed for his car, “are very serious about empirical science. Especially chemistry.”
The walled garden in front of Mansfield’s house has curved paths of ivies and rhodies and liriopes — all lit with white lights. This was a fine house with a Harvard-heavy crowd, but any anxiety UD might have felt about the snoot-factor lifted as soon as she began chatting with this genial, funny group. Several Straussians were there, all of them perfectly happy to try to explain this thing UD‘s been hearing about since her high school boyfriend, David Kosofsky, began describing it in 1968.
… this blog claims that Teresa Sullivan, expunged president, has filed suit. I have no idea whether it’s true, but if it is, lots of new documents will come to light.
UD‘s friend Jack sends her this breaking news from the campus of the University of Alberta: Three security guards were shot to death a few hours ago in an attempted robbery of an armored car in front of a bank machine. The location was a combined shopping mall and residence hall. A student who lives in the residence hall is quoted in my headline.
A few quick points about this developing story.
Don’t forget that Canada has a high level of private gun ownership.
Should universities not build shopping mall/residence hall combinations? This isn’t much of a solution. All urban (and many suburban) campuses have banks and bank machines, or are adjacent to these things. In the lobby of the campus building housing UD‘s office, there’s a Bank of America ATM. Whenever she sees uniformed men working on it, she thinks about how vulnerable they are (she is). But universities like George Washington University (four blocks from the White House) are so vulnerable in so many ways it’s not even funny. No one talks about dismantling these campuses.
There’s a real issue here having to do with notification of students, faculty, and staff. Woo claims she wasn’t notified:
On twitter, the university said that those within ‘close proximity’ were notified. i live in hub and i witnessed many of these events. i, along with many other students, did not get any sort of emergency notification. i am extremely disappointed in the lack of concern the university places on student safety.
Look at the Pope over there in Vatican City taking a star turn in What the Butler Saw as his city state fails to “shed its reputation as a scandal plagued tax haven.”
Look at the big happy family of University of Texas scientists who just went ahead and gave the family a huge state grant, without bothering to check with the provost or anything.
And look at another huge bureaucracy, the place UD‘s father spent his entire scientific career: the National Institutes of Health. The NIH just went ahead and gave America’s own tête d’affiche pour conflit d’intérêts (Charles Nemeroff has been called poster boy for conflict of interest so many times, I thought I’d jazz it up by putting it in French) another big grant, since you want to encourage his sort of behavior… or whatever…
I mean, it’s about bureaucracies, isn’t it? In all three cases? You’ve got cronies and histories of you do me and I do you and all… Everybody’s in everybody else’s pocket…
But eventually, as in all three of these cases, things get so brazen that the media notices; and then, if the money involved comes from taxpayers, politicians get all het up about it. As in this what the fuck? letter from Senator Charles Grassley to NIH. Grassley sends a copy to the notorious Donna Shalala.
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More coverage of the nettlesome Nemeroff.
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The latest University of Miami scandal jumps to the Miami Herald. Shalala and Nemeroff are trying out the no comment option, but I don’t think it’s going to work.
… essay? Opinion piece? Indictment? Not sure what to call it.
It appears in ESPN, of all places, and expresses a strange emotion – hopelessness, I guess. There’s something religious, something sinners-in-the-hands-of-an-angry-God about it. It recalls some of the most disgusting scandals in college football in the last few months, missing quite a few of them but touching on enough to make the tired point about the stinking corruption of the enterprise.
But this is a routine rhetorical strategy, beginning your article about the vileness of all aspects of university football by reviewing five or six of the most recent you-could-pukes. Usually the next step is to point out that even by those standards the Miami story startles; or people are getting upset but really the latest Chapel Hill vomit isn’t chunky enough to count… (Here’s a good example. Typical sentence: “After the last 12 months, which were filled with scandal and cover-ups and lies and payouts and allegations of child molestation and motorcycles and mistresses, The Ohio State recently reported something like four dozen secondary violations and we didn’t bat an eye.”)
Instead of this, the author goes all Ballad of Reading Gaol:
We make a monster of what we love, and to make a point about what our society honestly values, a writer might post here a comparison of the state-by-state salaries of head football coaches and governors… In the end we remain helpless against ourselves.
Each man kills the thing he loves, it turns out. As in the endlessly anthologized poem by James Wright about the beginning of football season in American towns:
In the Shreve High football stadium,
I think of Polacks nursing long beers in Tiltonsville,
And gray faces of Negroes in the blast furnace at Benwood,
And the ruptured night watchman of Wheeling Steel,
Dreaming of heroes.
All the proud fathers are ashamed to go home.
Their women cluck like starved pullets,
Dying for love.
Therefore,
Their sons grow suicidally beautiful
At the beginning of October,
And gallop terribly against each other’s bodies.
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We who are about to die for you losers salute you. Our mothers lie abed wondering why instead of fucking them our fathers want to watch us concuss.
Has another year of scandal and revelation and condemnation finally undone the sport? Are Petrino, Tressel, Paterno, Miami or Montana the beginning of the end?
C’mon. Does any casual fan, any casual reader, any casual viewer, any reasonable person anywhere at the beginning of the 21st century think of “big football schools” as anything other than big football schools?
As it was in 1905, it was another tough year for fans. How do you root for what’s on the helmet without worrying about what’s in it?
Yet we remain helpless against not merely our indifference to what’s in it but indeed to what’s on it. What fan really gives a shit whether it’s Auburn or Alabama? What you’re after is gladiatorial gore good enough to get you going.
I Dreamed That in a City Dark as Paris
I dreamed that in a city dark as Paris
I stood alone in a deserted square.
The night was trembling with a violet
Expectancy. At the far edge it moved
And rumbled; on that flickering horizon
The guns were pumping color in the sky.
There was the Front. But I was lonely here,
Left behind, abandoned by the army.
The empty city and the empty square
Was my inhabitation, my unrest.
The helmet with its vestige of a crest,
The rifle in my hands, long out of date,
The belt I wore, the trailing overcoat
And hobnail boots, were those of a poilu.
I was the man, as awkward as a bear.
Over the rooftops where cathedrals loomed
In speaking majesty, two aeroplanes
Forlorn as birds, appeared. Then growing large,
The German Taube and the Nieuport Scout,
They chased each other tumbling through the sky,
Till one streamed down on fire to the earth.
These wars have been so great, they are forgotten
Like the Egyptian dynasts. My confrere
In whose thick boots I stood, were you amazed
To wander through my brain four decades later
As I have wandered in a dream through yours?
The violence of waking life disrupts
The order of our death. Strange dreams occur,
For dreams are licensed as they never were.
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Many poems and songs recount dreams – I Dreamt I Dwelt in Marble Halls, I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine, I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill, I Dreamed that I Was Old – and this poem about remembering and forgetting wars also casts itself as a dream. How else really to reach the war dead? If you are, like the poet, a war veteran, you will make contact with those dead in subconscious, flickering, tumbling, wandering moments…
I mean, UD has always loved Siegfried Sassoon’s Prelude: The Troops – especially its last verse, which pretty reliably makes her cry:
O my brave brown companions, when your souls
Flock silently away, and the eyeless dead
Shame the wild beast of battle on the ridge,
Death will stand grieving in that field of war
Since your unvanquished hardihood is spent.
And through some mooned Valhalla there will pass
Battalions and battalions, scarred from hell;
The unreturning army that was youth;
The legions who have suffered and are dust.
Yet this is direct, formal address, wide-awake sorrow and homage. Simpson’s night visitation feels more likely to be the way actual people make contact with the war dead, which is to say by being haunted by them.
Both poets use blank verse, with Simpson occasionally using end rhyme (unrest/crest; occur/were) but mainly featuring unrhymed lines (all of Sassoon’s lines are unrhymed); both poems derive from this form a stately hesitant gait, a queer little funeral march. The absolutely strict measure of Sassoon’s final two lines is at spectacular odds with the explosive rage and despair behind them, and this is what we typically expect in a poem, the poet asserting at least linguistic control over emotional and intellectual chaos, over outcomes too grotesque and vast really to be comprehended, much less assimilated.
Simpson’s poem is all subliminal, all, as he says, a strange dream, its strangeness extreme, but somehow licensed by the beyond-strange atrocities of our century (his poem’s speaker is – assuming he’s Simpson – a Second World War veteran communing with a soldier of the First World War). And as dream, it is free to invert and invent…
So its first line seems immediately all wrong. Isn’t Paris the city of light? A city dark as Paris… Paris during the war? War blasting even the city of enlightenment back to violet (the word one letter short of violent) night… Well, and it’s a dream after all with all the shifty inchoate imagery of the sleeping mind. Rumbling guns pump color – you hear the assonance, the repeated uh a vague menacing sound. And things are vague because the poet stands alone and a distance from them; there is the Front, and the poet is in the back, in the shadows, left behind. All he can see are the edges of war; and this is his mind struggling to get to the Front, to apprehend that reality directly. Restless, he stands alone in a Paris square, and finds himself – bizarrely – to be a poilu, a French World War One infantryman, an ordinary sort from the countryside.
I was the man…
reminds us of Walt Whitman’s line:
I am the man, I suffered, I was there.
Whitman celebrates here his powerful capacity to empathize, to feel exactly what are others – especially suffering others – are feeling; and Simpson is after something similar, his dreaming persona literally taking on the identity of “my confrere.” Yet as to really remembering: The wars are too great (there’s an echo here of course of The Great War), too vast, once again, for us to grasp; they become historical abstractions, like the ancient and vast Egyptian dynasties:
These wars have been so great, they are forgotten
Like the Egyptian dynasts. My confrere
In whose thick boots I stood, were you amazed
To wander through my brain four decades later
As I have wandered in a dream through yours?
I thought of you, that’s all; I didn’t really commemorate you, as Sassoon commemorates, or feel with you, as Whitman feels with you; it’s just that you, poilu, wandered through my brain at some point while I was awake; and then that wandering presence inhabited, solidified, stood stock still, in my dreaming mind — ghosts inhabit a house; this ghost inhabits the speaker’s mind.
The violence of waking life disrupts
The order of our death. Strange dreams occur,
For dreams are licensed as they never were.
Things are out of joint; our war-torn world upends everything, makes everything weird, so that my (dead; dreaming) life propels itself backwards to your still-living, still-dreaming being in the darkness of the eternal war zone. The new global world of conflict – a world in which any behavior is “licensed” – is so grotesque that it infects our dreams in unprecedented ways. We are losing orderly ways of commemoration; we risk flattening our wars into abstraction. Yet we remain open to inhabitation.
UD reads these so you don’t have to.
UD reads the mainly indignant but occasionally explanatory (see this post’s headline) comments from University of Kentucky fans in response to an article that notes a faculty group’s objection to Kentucky’s basketball schedule. The notorious John Calipari’s insistence on “neutral sites” for games means “a geographic separation of entities which already can have a tenuous coexistence: athletic programs and the student body/campus community.”
In short, who gives a shit whether his team’s games have anything to do with whatever sports factory gives them a home? These are NBA men, not wussy college boys. As for that faculty group…
…who gives a rats opposite end orafice…They can say what they want…and make all the accusations they want…
I think he means Orafix.
Maybe what they ought to do…is have no college sports at all…maybe that would thrill the no life, calculus formula discussing intellects of the ever so popular and important entity as the faculty coalition….
Calculus formula discussing is nifty.
Most students take five years to move from academia to their chosen profession. We should celebrate those that are gifted enough to do it in one.
But they can do it in zero! We should celebrate that by shutting down Kentucky basketball.
UD‘s friend Dave Ridpath dreams the impossible dream by going to Colorado State University (site of some recent national sports news) and pointing out that building a new on-campus stadium when they already have an off-campus one is stupid.
Ridpath tonight is set to speak at a forum organized by opponents of an on-campus stadium. Skeptics argue CSU already has a perfectly decent facility in the 32,500-seat Hughes Stadium west of the city.
Ridpath said he was “dum[b]founded” when he heard CSU was considering building a new stadium. He said athletic success and student engagement aren’t linked directly to facilities, and he predicted that even if a new stadium is privately financed, costs for students will inevitably rise.
They’ll build it, of course; but Dave is in there trying.
Despite (because of?) my having recently called an excerpt from his book “tepid,” Andrew Delbanco has directed Princeton University Press to send me a copy (it’s here on my desk, sixth floor, Academic Center, George Washington University, Foggy Bottom, Washington DC) of said not-yet-released book, College, What it Was, Is, and Should Be (tepid title).
UD is pleased to have gotten the book, which she will now read and blog about.
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Ok, UD, so what’s your idea of a hotter title for a book of thoughts about college?
Lots of them. Here’s one:
College: Ooooooooh why is it I spend the day, wake up and end the day, thinking of yoooooooooo…..