… surfing in the morning before class is killed by a shark.

University Diaries has already looked at Four Loko, which everyone calls blackout in a can, so I guess we have to as well. It’s the bière de choix at increasing numbers of campuses, and so there are increasing blackouts.

One school – Ramapo College – has now banned Four Loko, and a bunch of states, plus the FDA, are investigating the marketing (usually targeted at young people) of all cheap “caffeinated alcoholic beverages.”

… emerges again (a student was killed at an off-campus party near Seton Hall not long ago), this time at Central Washington University, where a bunch of students, mainly women, have overdosed.

When officers arrived at the party, they found approximately 50 people, predominately underage students from Central Washington University. Several people were severely intoxicated, semi-unconscious or unconscious, Ferguson said. Twelve people were taken to the hospital, including a sexual assault victim.

Ferguson said police suspect drugs were given to the victims, most of whom were female, without their knowledge.

There’s also been, since the start of the academic year, a highly controversial police raid at an off-campus Yale party, and a student riot (it began as a tailgate gathering) near the University of Oregon.

Everyone at SUNY Binghamton — which has had its share of scandals in the last few years — is trying to figure out why Phillip Calderon, a man in his mid-thirties, has been impersonating an undergraduate student there.

He was arrested last week for various misdemeanors (forgery, etc.); and now the many campus clubs he ran are doing damage control.

He can’t have gotten rich in these activities, so it is something of a question. Why did he do it?

I think the SUNY student I quote in my headline is probably right. It’s just such a good life.

After this appearance on CNN, an attorney general takes personal leave.

Michiganders can take comfort in the fact that he’ll be back, bringing his judicious temperament to the laws of their state.

Judith Shklar asked this question in a talk she gave in 1981; and it’s true that when you read about acts of brutal and consequential cruelty it’s hard to resist a feeling of hatred.

Yet when considering the two Rutgers freshmen who secretly filmed a fellow freshman – a gay man – having sex, and then broadcast it all over the internet, and when considering the student’s response to this exposure — he killed himself — the hatred rather rapidly gives way.

In its place is sorrow for him, and contempt for his tormentors. His tormentors’ youth and stupidity created a toxic brew; and UD has no trouble with the thought of both of them reflecting, for a couple of years, from a jail cell, on what they’ve done.

Wisconsin is one of our most proudly pissed states; and within Wisconsin the campus of UW-Stout is a veritable piss park.

In response to the carnage, the university has put serious new restrictions on students and their drink, which has the students (most of them; not the student I quote in my headline) in an uproar…

Last weekend’s incident might quiet them down, though.

Two students got into a shouting match with a third student at a bar. As the third rode away on his bike, the others

assaulted [Bradley] Simon causing him to crash his bicycle into a concrete wall. Simon flew over the handlebars of his bike and struck his head on the wall causing serious head trauma, according to the report.

[The students] then left the scene…

One will go to trial for felony murder, the other for being party to the same.

… provides updates through the day on the mass shooting at a fraternity party near its campus. Students from Seton Hall and the New Jersey Institute of Technology are among those shot.

**********************

Update: One student has died.

Remembering Nora Miller.

… is a George Washington University senior who has not seen fit to take any of UD‘s classes. Probably it’s because his aesthetic preferences (Favorite film: Scarface) are a bit fast for UD.

She will pay homage to him anyway here, since he’s a smart guy, a remarkable athlete, and has an unusual personal story.

(UD, as you know if you read her with any regularity, likes to feature students at her university – and at other schools – who seem to her intriguing.)

The Georgetown men’s tennis team hosted the annual Georgetown Classic exhibition tournament this weekend…

GWU senior Yan Levinski emerged as the singles champion, defeating Penn junior Phil Law, 6-2, 6-1 in the title match. Levinski, who defeated Georgetown junior Michael Clarke, 6-0, 6-2 in the semis, did not lose a set in the tournament.

Levinski was born in Ukraine; his father, who went to Australia for graduate school and stayed there, is an engineer in the defense industry.

An Australian tennis page gives us more information about Levinski:

Yan was inspired to play tennis after watching Yevgeny Kafelnikov compete at the Kooyong Classic in Melbourne. He was eight at the time and later admired Marat Safin, because ‘he is really unpredictable and the chicks love him’. A stand-out competitor in Melbourne’s top state grade pennant competition, where in 2006 he represented Kooyong, Yan came to the attention of the wider tennis community at Australian Open 2006, where he reached the round of 16 at the Australian Open juniors… At primary school, he was a grand master at chess and lists among his hobbies driving fast cars… ‘I play tennis like it’s a chess game,’ he says. Yan loves the feel of new balls, new grip and fresh strings. ‘Brand new socks are phenomenal.’

Oh, and by the way. 4.0 GPA, Fall and Spring 2009.

UD, an NU grad, is quite familiar with the library where, last May, a student was found dead.

The investigation into his cause of death took ages, which seems to me already strange, since it’s not all that difficult or time-consuming to find opioids in people.

When the NU student reporter asked the medical office for details, she was told that “More details [are] not available because the doctor who worked on Tsay’s case is no longer employed there.”

Huh? Does the Cook County Medical Examiner’s Office throw out all of a doctor’s files when the doctor leaves?

The report said that the student died of an “accidental opiate overdose.” How do they know it was accidental?

… are readers from Wesleyan University, opening University Diaries in hopes of finding further information about — maybe even finding a sort of explanation for — a student’s suicide by self-immolation on their campus this week.

At about this time two years ago — Halloween night, actually — a University of Rochester student went to the cemetery next to campus and immolated himself.

In April 2000, an MIT student burned herself to death in her dorm room.

********************************

The cruelty to which you subject your body in this method is only one of its shocking features. There’s also the will to leave in a public or semi-public setting your charred corpse.

The reality is that we’re shocked senseless by self-immolation, especially when, as in these cases, it has no political or spiritual motive.

Without those motives we’re forced back on sheer vindictive rage — against oneself, against the world.

Madness, we say. Lunacy. Yet if we truly believed that, we wouldn’t keep circling the fire.

**************************************

University students are young, intense, in their physical prime. Their methods of suicide often reflect, bizarrely, their vigor. They race off of the Empire State Building. They leap over campus bridges. There’s a twisted vigor to self-immolation as well.

“When there’s nothing left to burn, you have to set yourself on fire,” were the words, from a Stars song, the Wesleyan student left on her Facebook as a final message.

Which is strange. If you listen to the song, that sentence seems to be about hyper-vitality, about fiercely illuminating the world with your passion, and when you’ve accomplished that, making your very being a beacon of life. The lyrics affirm a person’s survival of dashed passions; when the speaker encounters an old girlfriend, it’s nothing to him, because he’s put it away. Still impassioned, he moves forward into more life, unencumbered by the past.

You were what I wanted
I gave what I gave
I’m not sorry I met you
I’m not sorry it’s over

The song’s form — an insistent, dissonant, waltz — conveys the brittle nature of sexual passion even as it affirms its reliable recurrence. Broaden the idea out to life itself, and once more there’s the insistence on burning brightly without fear of scorching.

This scar is a fleck on my porcelain skin
Tried to reach deep but you couldn’t get in

Nora Miller took the lines literally. For her, having used up her life force, she could do nothing but direct what force was left against herself.

************************************

Maybe. We can’t, as Donald Justice writes in his poem For the Suicides, know.

At the end of your shadow
There sat another, waiting,
Whose back was always to us.

What we can know, and what I think can help us think about and respond to suicides, is the other side of all of this — the particular incandescence of the not-at-all suicidal lives most of us live. Suicide wounds because it throws in our faces, forces a confrontation with, the foundation of our willingness to live. The question Why did they do it? can’t really be answered; but the question Why don’t we? can. It can be answered, and it should be posed.

As it is posed, again and again and again, in so much of the poetry that we love. Often poets simply want to convey what it feels like to exist, what we adore about the world, how the world comes at us and how we come at it, the mystery of our lives and the electrifying delight we take in them even as we understand almost nothing about the world and human existence.

That’s where I would go in the face of a suicide like this one, that shatters my sense of what life is — to the best poems about what life is. Because if Henry James is right that “Life is, in fact, a battle… [T]he world as it stands is no illusion, no phantasm, no evil dream of a night; we wake up to it again for ever and ever; we can neither forget it nor deny it nor dispense with it,” then suicide should have us girding our loins.

Take a poem like James Schuyler’s ridiculously long Hymn to Life. It takes him over a half hour to read it! And what is it… It’s a tumbling riot of observation and feeling and meditation… The poem itself, in its luxuriance, is life overflowing, the poet bursting with things to say to us and to himself about … about everything. The seasons, love, God, cities, animals, illness…

… The truth is
That all these household tasks and daily work—up the street two men
Install an air conditioner—are beautiful.
… The days slide by and we feel we must
Stamp an impression on them. It is quite other. They stamp us, both
Time and season so that looking back there are wide unpeopled avenues
Blue-gray with cars on them…
Not
To know: what have these years of living and being lived taught us?
… Attune yourself to what is happening
Now, the little wet things, like washing up the lunch dishes. Bubbles
Rise, rinse and it is done. Let the dishes air dry, the way
You let your hair after a shampoo. All evaporates, water, time, the
Happy moment and—harder to believe—the unhappy. Time on a bus,
That passes, and the night with its burthen and gift of dreams.
… Life, it seems, explains nothing about itself.
… You
Suddenly sense: you don’t know what. An exhilaration that revives
Old views and surges of energy or the pure pleasure of
Simply looking.
… Art is as mysterious as nature, as life, of which it is
A flower.
… You see death shadowed out in another’s life. The threat
Is always there, even in balmy April sunshine. So what
If it is hard to believe in? Stopping in the city while the light
Is red, to think that all who stop with you too must stop…
… Life, I do not understand…

On and on it goes like that, a mind in motion, taking in existence, teaching itself to accept enigma, wondering why the person attached to this mind is so beautifully fitted to the world…

So. UD says: Burned by negation, turn back, full-hearted, to the world.

No, said Mr UD. “Not irony. You leave the world in the place that meant most to you…”

UD quoted the statement in my title about irony to Mr UD as he ate breakfast.

It’s from a blog written by someone who knew Nora Miller, a Wesleyan student who a few days ago immolated herself on the university running field. Miller was a massively award-winning track star, first at Stanford, and then at Wesleyan, where she majored in film.

*******************************

Like many suicides among the intense and intensely promising, this one was as expressive as it was enigmatic. It meant, it meant, it meant. It meant like hell. But what did it mean?

A student writes in the Wesleyan campus paper:

Self-immolation is not a quiet act of suicide; it is clearly an intentional statement. I understand that the University had to respect the parent’s wishes to keep details about Nora and her death private, but when a suicide occurs in such a public way on campus property, it is the student body’s right to be able to mourn [publicly] and to be given time to process and think about what has happened.

It bothers this writer that Wesleyan hasn’t said and done more about the event; she suggests that a day be set aside for campus reflection. In this, she registers the staggering impact of the gesture. More should be made of it…

[A] status update on a Facebook account under Miller’s name read, “when there is nothing left to burn, you have to set yourself on fire,” a lyric from a track by the band Stars.

Which made UD think of Cocteau’s famous answer.

Someone once asked Jean Cocteau, “Suppose your house were on fire and you could remove only one thing. What would you take?”

Cocteau considered, then said, “I would take the fire.”

There’s the swift intensity of life; there’s life burnt out.

I encountered the Cocteau story in Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano, a novel about our subterranean fires.

Way serious drug business going on at the University of Alabama. Guns, wads of cash, impressive array of substances.

One of these lads is only 21. Wow.

… commits suicide.

She was funky, stylish.