Newspapers should not write bland articles quoting presidents of schools like Texas Southern University (graduation rate virtually non-existent; one corruption scandal after another) saying that the campus “is in the midst of a renaissance.” Newspapers should not affix bland headlines like NEW PLANS TO IMPROVE PERFORMANCE AT TSU to these articles. Is this Pravda? Izvestia? Is it the job of the nation’s press to jolly taxpayers into continuing to subsidize a disgrace? Why is TSU accredited? That’s the sort of question journalists should ask. Instead, the New York Times publishes some guy talking about how they just planted a bunch of trees.
Here’s the deal, from a much better article about TSU and schools like it:
… Nearly everyone considers it scandalous when poor kids are shunted into lousy high schools with low graduation rates, and we have no problem naming and shaming those schools. Bad primary and secondary schools are frequently the subject of front-page newspaper investigations and the backdrop for speeches by reformist mayors and school district chiefs. But bad colleges are spared such scrutiny.
… [D]ismal institutions like Chicago State … prey on underserved communities, not just for years but for decades, without anyone really noticing.
… Low graduation rates will never cause a loss of accreditation.
… As for helping your students earn degrees, why bother? State appropriations systems and federal financial aid are based on enrollment: as long as students keep coming, the money keeps flowing. And since the total number of college students increased from 7.4 million in 1984 to 10.8 million in 2009, colleges have many students to waste. “It’s like trench warfare in World War I,” says Michael Kirst, a Stanford University education professor. “You blow the whistle, and they come out of the trenches, and they get mowed down, but there are always more troops coming over. It’s very easy to get new troops. If 85 percent of them don’t finish, there’s another 85 percent of them that can come in to take their place.”
… [We have] to broach a heretofore-forbidden topic in higher education: shutting the worst institutions down.
… No university, regardless of historical legacies or sunk cost, is worth the price being exacted from thousands of students who leave in despair.
… made a whirling world around our house this afternoon; and if the sky stays this clear, UD might be able to see an excellent meteor shower around three AM.
Longtime readers know that UD goes to her upstate New York house every August hoping to lie on the front field and see the perseid shower. She has seen a few of these, but sometimes the moon’s too full, the sky’s too cloudy, whatever.
Now here’s another shower – the Quads – due to appear in ‘thesda, and UD will be ready.
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Meteors tend to do what you’d think they’d do in poetry: They represent short bursts of brilliant life (as in, say, an elegy for Keats), or, more consolingly, they suggest a living universe of which we are somehow eternally a part. Even in way slangy pomo poetry – the contemporary form derived from modern poets like Frank O’Hara, the form UD calls the meta-maunder – you see the same symbolic value the Romantics gave the meteor.
Here, for instance, is a pomo maunder.
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Death, Is All
by Ana Božičević [Click on this link to read the poem uninterrupted by UD‘s commentary.]
I woke up real early to write about death (the lake through the trees) from
the angle of the angel. There’s the kind of angel that when I say
Someone please push me out of the way
Of this bad poem like it was a bus.—well, it comes running &
tackles me and oh, it’s divine football—Or
in the dream when the transparent buses
came barreling towards us:—it was there.
[Loose, drifty, stream of pedestrian consciousness… This is Rilke brought down from the Chateau de Muzot to talk about angels in the argot of the American everyday. Angels protect us from truly destructive collisions with the too-blunt — too transparent — truths of our lives and deaths.]
Half of all Americans say
they believe in angels. And why shouldn’t they.
If someone swoops in to tell them how death’s a fuzzy star that’s
full of bugles, well it’s a hell of a lot better
than what they see on TV: the surf much too warm for December, and rollercoasters
full of the wounded and the subconscious
that keep pulling in—
[Taken too far, though, this angel-thing can get a little silly — can become a way of denying even the fact of our deaths, fuzzying things up until it’s all about vague comforting lies.]
Who wants to believe
death’s just another life inside a box, tale-pale or more vivid?
Not me. Like in Gladiator, when they showed the cypresses
flanking the end-road—O set
Your sandal, your tandem bike, into the land of shadows—of course
I cried. Show me a cypress and I’ll just go off, but
I don’t want that to be it.
[I haven’t the slightest idea what death is, but I’m not going to fall for myths and fables of an afterworld, a tale more pale or more vivid than the one I’m living, but still a tale, still a series of events happening to a being who continues to be me. I mean, I’m perfectly capable of falling emotionally for the kitsch of some imagined human sequel, but rationally I know better.]
Or
some kind of poem you can never find your way out of! And sometimes
I think I nod at the true death: when from a moving train
I see a house in the morning sun
and it casts a shadow on the ground, an inquiry
and I think “Crisp inquiry”
& go on to work, perfumed of it—that’s the kind of death
I’m talking about.
[So we can’t really know, but we sense that there are fake deaths (mythic deaths, mythic tv deaths) and truer deaths, deaths we intuit by being alive to what around us is fragile and perishing and somehow trying to transmit truths. Amid morning sunlight, a contrasting ground-shadow reminds us – in a non-painful way, a way having nothing to do with buses barreling into you – that darkness underlies light.
We catch death’s perfume in moments like these.]
An angle of light. Believe in it. I believe in the light and disorder of the word
repeated until quote Meaning unquote leeches out of it.
[She’s a poet, a writer. She may not have the faith of a Christian in angels, but she has the faith of the writer in the way intense receptivity to the world’s angles, combined with patient efforts to get the better of words, may generate meaning – even transcendent meaning.]
And that’s
what I wanted to do with dame Death, for you:
repeat it until you’re all, What? D-E-A-T-H? ‘Cause Amy
that’s all it is, a word, material in the way the lake through the trees
is material, that is: insofar, not at all.
Because we haven’t yet swam in it. See what I mean?
I see death, I smell death, it moves the hair on my face but
I don’t know where it blows from.
[Perfumed of it, she explains to her friend, who I guess has asked her to tell her about death. I smell it, I sense it – in a visceral way – all around me in the world, but since I haven’t experienced it – haven’t swam in it – I can’t say anything more about it.]
And in its sources is my power.
I’m incredibly powerful in my ignorance. I’m incredible, like some kind of fuzzy star.
The nonsense of me is the nonsense of death,
[Death is the mother of beauty, says Wallace Stevens; our felt sense of the brevity and value of our lives, our own nonsensical forms of fuzzy-star imagining — these are the sources of individual creative power.]
and
Oh look! Light through the trees on the lake:
the lake has the kind of calmness
my pupils’ surface believes…and this is just the thing
that the boxed land of shades at the end of the remote
doesn’t program for:
[Isn’t it more plausible to think of death as an ineffable calm final beauty, a beauty the world sometimes gently forecasts for us in dark-and-light moments, rather than a packaged, fully pre-imagined plot?]
the lake is so kind to me, Amy,
and I’ll be so kind to you, Amy, and so we’ll never die:
there’ll be plenty of us around to
keep casting our inquiry
against the crisp light.
[Love’s the ticket – above all, we cherish our sense of a fundamentally well-intentioned world. Richard Wilbur puts it this way:
“I feel that the universe is full of glorious energy, that the energy tends to take pattern and shape, and that the ultimate character of things is comely and good. I am perfectly aware that I say this in the teeth of all sorts of contrary evidence, and that I must be basing it partly on temperament and partly on faith, but that’s my attitude.”
Comely and good, we take care of one another and we take care of the world, generation after generation.]
Light is all like,
what’s up, I’m here I’m an angel! & we’re
all: no you’re not, that doesn’t exist. We all laugh and laugh…
Or cry and cry. The point is, it’s words, and so’s
death. Even in that silence
there’s bird calls or meteors or something hurtling
through space: there’s matter and light. I’ve seen it
through the theater of the trees and it was beautiful
It cut my eyes and I didn’t even care
I already had the seeing taken care of. Even in the months I didn’t have
a single poem in me, I had this death and this love, and how’s
that not enough? I even have a quote:
Love is the angel
Which leads us into the shadow, di Prima.
… the Threshold is UD‘s title for the massive, ever more massive, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, with its infinitely embellished mental debility stories, in one of which you’re sure to find your sad, anxious, confused, discontented self.
By the simple expedient of having lowered the threshold for clinical disorders to include pretty much anything you’re experiencing right now, the editors of the upcoming DSM have broadened their market share to Everybody. Somewhere inside the Thousand and One Nights of the American Psychiatric Association lies a take-this-pill tale tailored to you, and to all of your children.
With this latest DSM, there’s absolutely no reason for you to put off spending the rest of your life taking psychotropic drugs.
In the course of a funny and perceptive essay about the fear of public speaking, Sam Harris touches on the scourge of PowerPoint.
Most speakers have learned that PowerPoint should be restricted to interesting images and other graphical aids, with a minimum of text. A few seasoned academics are holding out, however, and still oppress their audiences with walls of words, often in random fonts and terrible colors, so that they can turn their backs at regular intervals and consult a full set of notes… Imagine Martin Luther King, Jr., using PowerPoint, and the price will be clear: To truly connect with an audience, you want their attention on you. To change slides every thirty seconds is to be rendered nearly invisible by the apparatus.
On public speaking – I loved in particular this bit:
Pathological self-consciousness in front of a crowd is more than ordinary anxiety: it lies closer to the core of the self. It seems, in fact, to be the self — the very feeling we call “I” — but magnified grotesquely. There are few instances in life when the sense of being someone becomes so onerous…
For one who is terrified of public speaking, standing in front of a crowd exploits the cramp of self …Yes, that is the problem with being me. Ow… The feeling that we call “I” — the ghost that wears your face like a mask at this moment — seems to suddenly gather mass and become the site of a psychological implosion.
… it’s time to look at a chilled-to-perfection poem. Auden’s Brussels in Winter puts you inside how it feels when the world switches on what Stephen Dedalus, in Portrait, calls the refrigerating apparatus. What the poet describes is already (to him) an unknown world – the city of Brussels – and when this world freezes over, its mystery hardens into absolute darkness. In Brussels in Winter, each charter’d street evaporates, and the desperately lost poet desperately seeks his bearings. Or any bearings.
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Brussels in Winter
Wandering through cold streets tangled like old string,
Coming on fountains rigid in the frost,
Its formula escapes you; it has lost
The certainty that constitutes a thing.
Only the old, the hungry and the humbled
Keep at this temperature a sense of place,
And in their misery are all assembled;
The winter holds them like an Opera-House.
Ridges of rich apartments loom to-night
Where isolated windows glow like farms,
A phrase goes packed with meaning like a van,
A look contains the history of man,
And fifty francs will earn a stranger right
To take the shuddering city in his arms.
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Look at how much poetry Auden packs in, how much implication, mood, and philosophy he cooks up in his few abbreviated rhymed lines… Look at his vanful of similes and metaphors as they speed by your eyes…
But slow it down. Take it little by little. See how a poem does what a poem can do.
Wandering through cold streets tangled like old string,
Coming on fountains rigid in the frost,
Its formula escapes you; it has lost
The certainty that constitutes a thing.
There’s an unclarity of agency here. Who is wandering? Not its formula escapes me; its formula escapes you. The poem is written in an insinuating second-person, in which the poet assumes that the condition of existential lostness and self-alienation he’s about to evoke is certainly not his own alone, but is shared by his reader. He assumes that however grounded you may feel at this or that moment, you easily understand – because you’ve experienced it – the eerie dépaysement that occurs when you lose the formula of existence, the certainty that constitutes your life on earth as a thing, an object of familiarity and recognition.
As for style: cold streets/old string has the assonance, balance, and the near-rhymey feel that make that odd transition – from streets to tangled string – feel plausible. The linguistic proximity suggests a conceptual kinship.
The stopped flow of the fountains has an abrupt feel to it, instantly (along with the poet’s insinuating you) locating you alongside the poet in the same suddenly arrested cityscape.
And here’s another unclarity: Its. Its formula escapes you. It has lost. We don’t yet know to what it refers, which keeps us in the same confusion as the poet. Gradually it becomes clear that it is Brussels, the city.
Only the old, the hungry and the humbled
Keep at this temperature a sense of place,
And in their misery are all assembled;
The winter holds them like an Opera-House.
Only if you’re trapped in some operatic theater of despair can you keep your bearings here. Frozen into place, you take your background part in a chorus of human misery. The reader hears the plaintive calls of the chorus throughout this stanza, with all its long O‘s and A‘s. It sings.
Ridges of rich apartments loom to-night
Where isolated windows glow like farms,
A phrase goes packed with meaning like a van,
How odd the world is; and to carry that oddness the poet finds odd figures. City apartments look like sudden outcroppings of the natural world – the world of bearings, groundings… Of course the desperate poet sees them in this way, as distant objects of desire – rich ridges, glowing farms. Warm things, glowing with the fire of their unstoppable being, their autonomous radiance as living, meaning-rich things-in-themselves.
And now the poet picks up a bit of language as it passes him on the street. French? Dutch? His effort to recapture his lost sense of existing has him grasping onto it as definitive in significance, if only he can understand it. But it drives on.
A look contains the history of man,
And fifty francs will earn a stranger right
To take the shuddering city in his arms.
Again the poet’s desperation finds the very history of humanity in the expression of a random face… a face also quickly lost in the old, hungry, and humbled winter crowd.
A look contains the history of man, and a body – any random streetwalker’s body – is the embodiment of the shivering city itself. This body carries the frozen city’s pathos, its wispy uncertain half-thereness; and, in the way of humanity, the poet, suffering horribly from his estrangement, comforts himself with the thought that through the streetwalker’s body he can rather cheaply purchase at least a momentary sense of possessing an otherwise tangled and elusive reality.
… that there’s big news about Osama Bin Laden.
Killed or captured?
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Update: Bin Laden is dead.
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Remember.
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People are gathering at the White House to celebrate.
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Looks as though there are a lot of GW students among the celebrants.
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From the Gaston Gazette:
[Adam] Royston lives in a dorm just a few blocks away from the White House. He held up his cell phone and chants of “USA, USA” could be heard. He likened Sunday night’s celebration to gatherings for a new government in Egypt.
“There are tons of American flags,” said Royston, who is studying Middle Eastern government at the private school in the nation’s capital. “People are just running for the White House. I just knew that since this is a great day that I had to be there.
“This has got to be the most exciting day at George Washington University in my freshman year.”
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From the Associated Press:
Twenty-year-old Alex Washofsky came despite finals on Monday at George Washington University. He’s also a member of the Navy Reserve Officer Training Corps.
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More GW reaction.
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Tomorrow, after she gives a final exam at GW, UD will again visit the Pentagon Memorial. She wrote about it in 2008, here.
