Another gem from Jessica Krug’s RMP page. Worth reading the whole thing, and then asking yourself how a history department at a respectable university not only kept this woman in the classroom, but tenured her.
… of her rival Elizabeth Bennet; and this oldish word – brilliancy – came to UD‘s mind as she contemplated her undergraduate professor, Erich Heller. Not prone to thinking about the past (or the future – your blogueuse is somewhat in the buddhist way), UD was borne back into the past (truncated Great Gatsby reference there … hey it was your decision to read a literary blogger), via this memoir, written by Heller’s niece, and very much an evocation of the scholar of Rilke and Kafka who had a great impact on wee UD at Northwestern University in the 1970’s.
Heller’s brilliancy – by which I mean in part charisma – is obvious enough in this portrait of the young man as an impassioned Czech Jewish aesthete.
When I knew him, he looked like this.
Still the fully open, searching, lively eyes. He was always a beautiful polished dresser, which contrasted vividly with the thready hippies to whom he lectured so fiercely about the loss of meaning in the modern world. His own world had flamboyantly fallen apart with the Nazis, from whom he barely managed to escape, while his beloved brother spent years in concentration camps. (He also managed to survive.)
It was utterly, almost comically, clear to UD, as this man lectured, that he saw no way in which he could possibly begin to convey his and the world’s historical, spiritual, and existential wound to these frisky frisbee throwers.
Sixtyish, gay, hyper-snobby, dismissive of all NU students, all Americans (after cosmopolitan Prague, he spent years at Cambridge University, and now found himself prone on the prairie), and certainly all women (does the memoir ever make that one clear), Heller nonetheless hugely, hotly, attracted deine kleine Bloggerin.
How hotly? I had recurrent waking and sleeping fantasies about stumbling upon a solitary suffering Heller on the school’s lakeside beach and comforting him. Just – you know – happening to be the only person in the world who fully intuited his intellectual and emotional grief, his vell-done Weltschmerz (I’m antic about it now, but I assure you it was all passionately earnest then)…
Or imagine this – I was taking his all-Rilke-all-the-time course, and it was I don’t know the fifth Heller course I’d taken (Kafka, Thomas Mann, Nietzsche, Kleist?) and I was all fired-up as usual to re-enter this man’s hallowed hall … And yet from the first day of that particular course, I would sit, take out my paperback, and, at the opening “semi-operatic” tones of Heller’s voice (the memoir writer calls them this; I’d simply say operatic – he had a fine booming basso), fall completely to sleep. Ach, Doktor Freud, do tell. Vot vos dis Heller shpell?
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I wrote excellent exams and papers, appeared every day in all his courses, sat there at full attention (I figured out how to stay awake in the Rilke course; I cured myself, Doktor!) – eventually the poor man had to notice me a little bit. I didn’t care whether he did, but eventually he did. I remember two post-class chats: In one I must have mentioned Nabokov and was startled by the casual violence of Heller’s dismissal of him (something about his obscenity?). The other is much more vivid to me because it was much more consequential. I told him that I was miserable in the Medill School of Journalism (I’d enrolled there rather than become an English major because I’d convinced myself I’d never get a job with a degree in English), absolutely miserable. And he looked at me with those avid open eyes and just as casually said: “If you are not happy there, vhy don’t you leave?”
And I swear to you, mes petites, minutes after this exchange I marched to the journalism building and began the process of dropping out of Medill.
More on Heller later today. Must weed. As UD likes to say: Weeding is fundamental.
Remember the “terrible” (as Masha Gessen called it) Avital Ronell letter? (UD‘s posts about it are here.) Remember the regret its authors eventually expressed after it turned out they got the facts (about whether Ronell sexually harassed a graduate student) wrong, and in a very unseemly way threw their institutional weight around, and thus further abused an innocent grad student?
So… the fools who wrote the anti-Steven Pinker letter everyone’s currently laughing at maybe could have consulted that bit of history before marking up their own missive, with its overripe racism claims and its rich mix of real and forged signatures. Ask the authors of the Ronell letter whether it pays to be a bit … epistoleery…
Monroe, Louisiana ain’t what you’d call a premier destination, and students who attend the University of Louisiana Monroe ain’t got much to be proud of.
And, now that we’re all paying attention, the school boasts a couple of quite proudly out-there racists. Nursing professor Mary Holmes (who studies “why men sperm count has decreased 40% over the last couple of decades”) calls our last president a “monkey.”
Bernstein met second wife Susan Goldhor through mutual friends. “I thought he was kind of cute and had a really nice smile,” she recalled. Susan, a biologist with an interest in mycology, recalled Bernstein joking that “I did mushrooms, and he did mushroom clouds.” On their first date, they hiked the White Mountains. Then they planned a longer hike. “I didn’t have the right socks, and I got blisters. These were big hikes every day. I was really having a hard time, I was in pain, I was exhausted, and so I complained to Aron about this. Aron hated whiners, so he wrote me a letter afterward that it wasn’t going to work out, that he wasn’t going to deal with whiners. He was a very, very straightforward person — he didn’t play games.”
She convinced him that she wasn’t actually a whiner, and he took her to a Mozart concert at Jordan Hall. Bernstein loved music, “nothing later than Schubert, and preferably a lot earlier— I couldn’t get him to go to a Mahler concert.” They married in 1990. Hiking was a shared passion, and they bought a vacation home in the White Mountains. “We hiked in summer, fall, and winter — I remember hiking in a blizzard. Until Aron was 86, we were still hiking and snowshoeing together. The hikes got shorter but the pleasure was still there.”
From an MIT News obit for Aron Bernstein, professor of physics.
… UD is fond of tracking down the glorious newspaper articles about how glorious certain criminals are. Were. I just linked to one such article, from 2015, featuring about to be sentenced Professor Geoffrey Girnun — who, in sporting his yamulke for his perp picture today, has done quite the service for Orthodox Judaism.
In the 2015 article, he’s smiling broadly and climbing a mountain; in the 2020 article, he looks all gone to ground and sad and pale and ashamed that he’s been a criminal hiding under religious piety for as long as he could possibly get away with it and now – despite lying through his teeth when caught – he has been forced to confess.
Confess to what? Stealing cancer research funds. That’s right, kiddies. The mortgage on Girnun’s close-to-million-dollar house will have to take precedence over people with cancer because… because he has a mortgage to pay! His salary at Stony Brook?
The theft scheme began in 2013, with his submitting false invoices, just weeks after Girnun was hired by the medical school, according to officials. Girnun earned a salary of $145,000 a year at Stony Brook.
Yes, folks, he was up and running with the theft scheme minutes after he was hired at that pathetic, hopeless salary…
My favorite part of the glorious 2015 article about Girnun? Its halfway-there headline:
Stony Brook University Professor Seeks to Starve Cancer.
Seeks to starve cancer of funds. Of funds.
The 81-year-old Harvard Law School professor angrily poked the defense table — where he sat alongside his pack of five lawyers — passed notes to his attorneys and seemed to argue with them every time one of them jumped up to address the judge.
He’s in a courtroom, and very angry, because he’s being sued for libel by one of Jeffrey Epstein’s sex slaves. The brilliant jurist’s defense against claims that he has called the former sex slave – who says she was forced to have sex with Dershowitz – a serial liar, a prostitute, an extortionist, and a lot of other not very nice things is that sure he said all that shit but it was a long time ago and the statute of limitations yadda yadda. But what about the fact that he said the same shit and worse about her very recently? Well, see, precisely cuz he said the same shit before, the same statue of limitations applies. So he can, in the judge’s words, “repeat potentially libelous statements for eternity”? Oh yes your honor, respond his attorneys; absolutely. For eternity…
Er, but this interpretation of the law gives people “license to be serial defamers,” the other side points out to the judge, who seems to agree. Hence Dersh’s angry table poking…
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‘Course he wouldn’t be in this tight spot were it not for his much earlier alleged poking…
… got murdered in broad daylight for his troubles. The paid degenerates who did the deed will certainly be convicted (finally, after a five-year delay).
It’s equally important that the rich degenerates who paid the killers go to prison too. But that’s for after the state of Florida puts the paid degenerates away.
LOeffingL. UD, as you know if you read her blog, loves to chronicle the shit some professors do in class in order not to bother teaching at all. A long list of guest speakers is a perennial favorite, as is PowerPoint, which enables you to stand there for an hour staring down at and mumbling aloud someone else’s words. There’s the popular show a movie scam. Having students give papers and presentations all the time is also great for filling up that big ol’ néant which is your class period. There’s send students out to interview the homeless in the park across the street. There’s have students organize into small groups and talk among themselves. Truly ballsy fuckoffs just go ahead and cancel most of their classes.
Vanishing to meditate for half the class is a new one on UD and she adores it and must give props to this NYU prof (NYU: you figure her students are paying a fortune) whose… uh… methods were so scandalous that the class wrote the school a letter of complaint. The bit about meditating in private to while away the irritating hour of human contact is amazing – it’s much better than the classic I’ve got to take this half-hour-long cell phone call just talk amongst yourselves because it’s … you know… this urgent mystical deep practice we all respect… MUCH better than a cell phone call.
Richard Stallman, the computer scientist best known for his role in the free software movement… [argues that MIT professor and AI pioneer Marvin Minsky] had not actually assaulted [Virginia Giuffre, when she was seventeen and he was in his seventies]. Stallman insists that the “most plausible scenario” is that Epstein’s underage victims were “entirely willing” while being trafficked.
In a viral video, Stallman and a buddy were recently filmed at a bar.
Please Mister Malzman
Wait, oh yes wait a minute Mister Malzman
Wait, wait Malzman
Mister Malzman look and see
What that professor has said about me
I been waiting a long long time
For your reply to this email of mine
There must be some word today
From a provost so far away…
Please Mister Malzman, look and see
If you can hit him with a penalty
I been standing here waiting Mister Malzman
So patiently
For just a card or just a letter
Saying you will make it right for me
There must be some turpitude
Inside a person so very rude
Dear Mister Malzman, make me feel better
Please revoke my enemy’s tenure
You gotta wait a minute, wait a minute
You gotta wait a minute, wait a minute
You gotta wait a minute, wait a minute
Abolish his tenure, the sooner the better
You gotta wait a minute, wait a minute
You gotta wait a minute, wait a minute
You gotta wait a minute, wait a minute
A naughty young man from Fuzhou
Thought China should equally know
Our every analysis
Regarding catalysis.
And now off to prison he’ll go.
‘The big question is how does @Harvard Law still honor @AlanDersh by retaining him on its faculty list (esp as “Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law emeritus”). Imagine that distinguished jurist spinning in his grave !?’
When [my story on Epstein] came out, [Harvard Law School professor and former Epstein attorney] Alan Dershowitz wrote an open letter to the Pulitzer Prize committee, trying to discredit my work and influence the board [not to award the Miami Herald a prize]. He must have said a million times, “I know that you’re not going to tell the truth because you’re just aiming for a Pulitzer.”
But Harvard’s finest is after bigger fish now. He’s smearing the New Yorker as an antisemitic rag.