Tom Bartlett’s review of a big new biography of liar, thief, bigamist, and fascist symp Paul de Man brings back memories, for UD, of her time in his classroom when he was a visiting professor at the University of Chicago.
The truth about him wasn’t yet known, and indeed UD had been instructed to find him a demigod.
She recalls her puzzlement, watching him lecture about the language of Yeats and Rilke, at this haughty reptilian man, scarcely aware of the students sitting behind him as he trailed his chalk from one language group to another on the blackboard.
The New York Times limned the grieving after his death, and UD again said huh? “In a profession full of fakeness, he was real,” mourned one of his followers. And UD thought Well yeah real but really nasty. She didn’t know why he felt so removed from human emotion, from any authentic human setting… She figured it was snobbery, that his real life, his warmth, lay somewhere (his home institution?) but had been put on ice while he was in Hyde Park…
… de Man was … a convicted criminal. In 1951 a judge in Belgium sentenced de Man in absentia (he had fled to the United States by then) to six years in prison for theft and fraud related to Hermès, the publication house he created and ran. De Man had looted the funds of the company to cover his own lavish expenses. In one case, Barish writes, de Man engaged in a “deliberate swindle” of a family friend, fooling him into making a loan that was never repaid. All told, more than a million Belgian francs disappeared — and, before he could face creditors and courts, so did de Man.
His conduct in his personal life was similarly irresponsible. The most heart-wrenching example is the abandonment of his three young sons from his first marriage (a marriage he didn’t end before marrying a second time, adding bigamy to his résumé). He did not support or even see the boys — even refusing to take a phone call from one of his sons years later.
Harold Bloom despised de Man’s “serene linguistic nihilism,” and UD was I suppose privileged to witness that nihilism – that confidence game, really – in action in a classroom in Chicago in 1979.
But why did this repellant man, this obvious fraudster, capture Yale? The author of the biography speculates:
“Most of the time we don’t know what we’re doing. When someone comes along and seems to have it right or to be very clear and very intelligent and immensely seductive, intellectually and personally, we say ‘Right, let’s go that way.'”
This can’t be quite right. Yalies are hardly know-nothings. And de Man was as seductive as … Rush Limbaugh. Joseph McCarthy. Huey Long. Ted Cruz. He was just like those guys. Not at all physically attractive, and immediately identifiable as an easily irritated narcissist. But – also like those guys – de Man was excitingly wildly himself, a big old nasty old way out there unto the breach POS.
I think intellectuals as much as anti-intellectuals are susceptible to serene – which is to say, sociopathically rockhard-confident – nihilism. Bloom called it for the bullshit it was, but a lot of other people fell for its brass balls come and get me coppers Nietzscheanism.
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UD finds it intriguing that today’s nihilists – the group of people in this country everyone’s calling nihilists – are the Ted Cruz-run tea partiers, and that their party shares de Man’s abiding impulse: secession. As his biography makes clear, de Man was always running away – from countries, marriages, crimes, children, and of course meaning. The impulse de Man embodied and appealed to was toward withdrawal from a messy world full of all sorts of incorrect people and the embrace of a pure cult of just a few correct people. Yale was the cult of de Man.
[A]lthough we were all supposed to act shocked and appalled when a Confederate flag showed up in front of the White House during a [recent] Tea Party protest …, nobody actually was.
de Man’s Yale was the functional equivalent of Tod Palin’s Alaska – a fantasy island just for us.
The Paul de Man story should remind us that anti-democratic dreams, and the dreams of unreason, are perennial, and widely shared.
[Y]ou can’t just kill someone’s revolutionary nihilism. The Ted Cruz “filibuster” is a great example: it served no actual legislative purpose, and at the end of his idiotically long speech, Cruz ended up voting yes on the very bill he was trying to kill. That’s zombie politics, and the problem with zombies is that — being dead already — they’re incredibly hard to kill.
The point here is that the zombie army, a/k/a the Tea Party, is a movement, not a person — and it’s an aggressively anti-logical movement, at that. You can’t negotiate with a zombie — and neither can you wheel out some kind of clever syllogism which will convince a group of revolutionary nihilists that it’s a bad idea to get into a fight if you’re reasonably convinced that you’re going to lose it.
Felix Salmon is right. In the case of serene political nihilism, we can only do what people have been doing with de Man. We can only unmask it.
[Michelle] Crawford was hired [as a business professor] despite the fact she [had been] disbarred as a lawyer and faced criminal prosecution. [Crawford is the sister-in-law of an ASU trustee.]
Crawford was a licensed attorney in North Carolina before she was disbarred in about September 2008 “for misappropriation of entrusted funds and failure to reconcile her trust account,” according to [a] report. She was hired as a business professor at ASU in 2011 and was retained through August or September 2013 (different dates have been reported). She was indicted April 19, 2012, in U.S. District Court in North Carolina… Crawford, also known as Michelle Mallard, pleaded guilty July 10 to “mortgage fraud conspiracy, money laundering conspiracy, and embezzlement in violation of the wire fraud statute.”
She faces a sentence of up to 70 years in prison.
Professors Robert Dworkin (University of Rochester) and Dennis Turk (University of Washington) are feeling no pain!
Read their hilarious emails about how they’re making tens of thousands of dollars off of pharma – which wants to listen in on American professors conversing about new developments along the Oxycontin line (We Americans ♥♥ LOVE♥♥ our Oxycontin. Just look at any town in West Virginia. Eli Lilly’s got us eating out of its hand!).
’20k [to attend a meeting] is small change, and they can justify it easily if they want to be at the table,’ Dworkin wrote to Turk in July 2003, after an Eli Lilly representative bridled at the price.
Dworkin’s absolutely right. Once you’ve got a national (soon to be international!) epidemic going, you’re talking real money. Dworkin knows Lilly routinely pays billions in fines every year for illegal this and that, and it really don’t make no never mind since when your profits are zillions you can laugh at billions. So this Lilly asshole has the gall to bridle at paying twenty thou to sit in a room for twenty minutes? UD finds it amazing the Dworkin/Turk gang isn’t demanding twenty million per meeting.
Possibly Dworkin and Turk are low-balling because they’re professors and not businesspeople and there’s a learning curve for them. This might be helpful for context:
[There’s a new rule,] unveiled by the S.E.C. … requiring companies to disclose the ratio of the C.E.O.’s pay to that of the median worker. The idea is that, once the disparity is made public, companies will be less likely to award outsized pay packages… [Yet C.E.O. compensation continues, and almost certainly will continue, to rise.] Sunlight is supposed to be the best disinfectant. But there’s something naïve about the new S.E.C. rule, which presumes that full disclosure will embarrass companies enough to restrain executive pay. As [one expert] told me, “People who can ask to be paid a hundred million dollars are beyond embarrassment.”
If Dworkin and Turk find themselves at all hesitant, they can tape this article to their refrigerators and reread it just before talking price with Lilly.
Governor Vaginal Probe, Penn State — more and more people and institutions are eager to see up the old canal… But aside from the fact that initiatives of this sort prompt equity questions, there’s the matter of privacy. Mandated monthly bouncy-wouncy updates didn’t sit well with women on the Penn State faculty, who felt that whether they wanted their partners’ sperm to squiggle eggward unimpeded was their own business.
In response to complaints, Penn State has opted for the withdrawal method and will not after all impose a financial penalty on canal proprietors. But the university points out that it’s got to find some way to deal with exploding health care costs…
Well but listen. If Penn State had just kept an eye on Jerry Sandusky – a man projected to cost the university almost as much as its health care expenses for one year (both come in at around two hundred million) – it wouldn’t be so desperate.
… has died. Here’s a good remembrance.
“[W]hy should a people want to know modern art?” Berman asks in a review of Orhan Pamuk’s Snow. “What can it give them? Pamuk doesn’t offer a single ringing answer, but here’s a start: A global horizon and an expansive flow of empathy, a feeling for irony and complexity, a capacity to embrace contradictory ideas and believe and love them both.”
Berman’s one of those rare writers whose style, in almost everything he writes, is as much cheer-leading as arguing. You can always feel his tumbling excitement for the ‘sixties modernism he lived, his unapologetic nostalgia for the wraparound avant-gardism of post-war American cities:
As an ironic result of the flight of capital from American cities after World War II, every city gained grungy low-rent neighborhoods that could incubate bookstores and art studios and modern dance groups, experimental theatres, venues for jazz and folk music and performance, and the sort of shabby clubs and coffee houses and music stores and cabarets that nourished Lenny Bruce and Nichols and May and Woody Allen and Bob Dylan. New York’s Village (first West, then East) is what I knew, but there were neighborhoods like this all over America. Late in the 1950s, they started to fill up with kids from all over metropolitan areas who could read the little magazines and the Grove Press paperbacks in the bookstores, hang out in streets and play their guitars in parks, hear sounds of music that carried from clubs they couldn’t afford to go to, find intense people like themselves to walk and talk with through the night, and maybe to grope and love.
Grungy, shabby, grope: This is the loose-limbed prose that accompanies Berman’s perpetual enthusiasm for the intense, generative, experimental life that modernity’s secularity and freedom, and urbanism’s moment-to-moment dynamism, allow. Few wrote as evocatively, as convincingly, as he did about the importance of cultivating a critical consciousness and a rebellious life (Isaac Rosenfeld could match him, I guess — though Rosenfeld brought much more jaded eyes to the scene; and there’s the Henry Miller of Tropic of Cancer…).
Like anyone writing with seriousness and commitment in this Blakeian tradition, he was easy to mock. But Berman held aloft a certain comprehensive modernist ideal, and it’s the same ideal that a postmodern writer like Don DeLillo, in a novel like Underworld, with its long Lenny Bruce soliloquies, is exploring. And pursuing.
… has been strutting his stuff at Michigan State, saying stupid shit and getting in trouble for it. What Ward, a professor at the University of Colorado, said was far worse (little Eichmanns, etc.), but William Penn’s arrogant rant is just as powerful an insult to his university. To any university.
Excerpts from an obituary in The Telegraph:
… On the afternoon of November 3 1944, as [his unit] assaulted a series of batteries set in the dunes which ring [an island near the port of Antwerp], the leading troop came under sustained heavy fire that killed 15 marines and wounded 21 . With mortar shells bursting all around him, Forfar attended to the wounded. The troop commander, Major JTE Vincent, was not found until Forfar went on another 50 yards under a rain of mortar bombs. It was the first time that Forfar had come under mortar fire, and each time he saw a shell coming he threw himself flat on the sand behind the wooden groynes before rushing forward once more.
He found Vincent lying grievously wounded, and as he was treating him, five Germans appeared over a sand dune and opened fire with a machine gun, killing one of the stretcher party who had crawled forward to join Forfar and wounding another. Forfar coolly continued to treat his patient, who had been shot through the eye and pleaded with Forfar: “Don’t leave me here, sir.” Forfar, who was a small and wiry man, picked the casualty up, put him over his shoulder and carried him to safety.
… It was largely thanks to Forfar’s tireless lobbying — in the teeth of considerable opposition — that the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health was established in 1998.
Forfar’s commitment to medical education was expressed in the long-running course in Saudi Arabia which was run by him and his some of his colleagues in Scotland. Theirs was the only course in that country which taught male and female students together, and one of Forfar’s first tasks was to dismantle the barrier in the lecture theatre which the security police had set up to separate the genders.
In 1973 Forfar was the driving force behind the production of Forfar and Arneil, a 2,000-page textbook of paediatrics which is used throughout Britain, and recently went into a seventh edition.
… In June 2009 the mayor of Port-en-Bessin-Huppain unveiled a memorial plaque on the Allée Professeur John Forfar, a walk which links the two villages…
Emeritus professor Gary Conti does magic tricks to give back and (according to his arrest warrant) accounting tricks to take back. Gary seems to have been part of a conspiracy that stole about ten million dollars of our taxes — a particularly contemptible conspiracy, since it involved stealing money meant for children’s mental health programs.
The embezzlement charges include [co-conspirators] sending $475,078 to a business owned by Conti called Learning Associates between 2008 and 2011, using fake invoices to justify the payments.
Conti, in turn, kicked back $231,550 in 44 separate transactions to the Child Family Advocacy Fund’s bank account in Cut Bank, from which Augare and Onstad drew $225,482 for their person use, prosecutors said.