Scathing Online Schoolmarm will let you decide.

No she won’t.

Look. If you’ve got something to say, and that something matters a lot to you, and you’re lucky enough to have what you say appear in all sorts of high-profile places, you should really go to the trouble of writing it competently.

You’re a smart person, so you know you have trouble writing well. You also know that the crappier your statement of your position on a subject, the more likely you are to be ignored. So you write your thing, and then you give it to a friend for editing. Right? You give it to someone who’s a good writer before you send it out to all those publications. Yes?

If you’re William Wulf, hotshot computer professor at the University of Virgina who resigned in protest during the Teresa Sullivan dust-up, I’m afraid no.  You don’t bother giving your writing to someone who can shorten it, clarify your points, take out the heavy breathing. All the things good writers know how to do and bad writers may never learn.

So here’s Wulf, reprinted in the Washington Post, explaining why he still won’t return to U Va, even though Sullivan has been reinstated. His basic point, which should have taken four paragraphs tops, is that the board remains a bunch of corporate know-nothings, and until people who understand and care about universities appear on the board, he won’t reappear at U Va. So far, of the six comments on the letter, two are about his terrible writing. Terrible writing distracts from what you want to say. It draws attention to your writing, rather than to your argument. And when your writing is this terrible, it also makes people wonder how generally cogent you are, and therefore how strong your arguments here (or anywhere else) are. See why competent writing — SOS doesn’t even say good! She just means writing that gets you there, that gets it said! — really does matter?

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Just in case you missed it, I am one of the folks that publicaly [glaring spelling error] resigned over the forced resignation of President Sullivan. I resigned because I deeply care about the University, I thought President Sullivan was doing a great job, and thus felt deeply that this action, and the way it was taken, was profoundly damaging to the University. [Commas where semi-colons should be, but this isn’t important, and SOS wouldn’t even mention it if it weren’t part of a larger shitpile.]

I was frankly surprised by the magnitude of the positive faculty and media reaction to my resignation – I don’t think of myself as the “marching in the street, and placard waving” type. [Unnecessary, distracting quotation marks. Why are they there? Who is he quoting? Is marching in the street and placard waving a well-known phrase?] So, after the initial flurry of email, except for bland replies to some, I have kept pretty quiet about the whole fiasco. But now I feel I need to voice a perspective on the solution to the underlying problem.

I have been asked by President Sullivan, my Dean, and even my departmental faculty, to “un-resign” – I have said NO, and the rest of this note is to explain to all of you why, and perhaps what it means to you. It is not because I don’t love UVa, and would love to rejoin its faculty – quite the opposite, it’s precisely because I do love and respect it so much! [Vaguely messy, conversational feel to the whole thing. Which is fine. No one says you have to write with more formality than that, and this is after all a letter. But lack of parallel structure – would he or would he not love to rejoin its faculty? – as well as what’s going to be an avalanche of exclamation marks will confuse and distract the reader.]

Like most of you, I was delighted by the re-instatement of Terry Sullivan – but that, I my view, didn’t fix the underlying problem!  [typo, exclamation] As my original message noted, my wife [Relevance of wife to his expertise?] and I have extensive experience in both executive positions and board positions in industry, academia, and government – we’ve seen the executive-to-board relationship from both sides, and in multiple contexts – and my judgment is that the current BOV is incompetent to govern UVa! Let me repeat – it’s incompetent for the task of governing UVa!  [Bad writing is often hyper-emotional, insistent, vehement, compulsively redundant.  Note that he repeats in almost exactly the same words what he’s just said.  A pointless, diluting move that merely makes the reader wonder what he’s on about.]  I am more than willing to stipulate that the BOV members are smart, good and accomplished people –but to be competent on a board requires a significant understanding of the institution they are governing. That’s what is lacking!  [The editor he didn’t consult would have put a big fat red line through the last sentence.]

The present BOV appointed by the Governor is 14 lawyers or corporate executives with no experience with academic governance, one part-time medic at John-Hopkins [Don’t bother to learn how to spell the university; you wouldn’t want the reader to think you cared enough about the people and the situation to get that sort of thing straight.], and one CEO of a small university. Alas, they don’t even seem to know much about UVa! While fond of selectively quoting Jefferson out of context, they overlook the deeply philosophical fact that Mr. Jefferson’s design for UVa had *no* President or central administration – the faculty governed the University, and did so in an open collaborative way, not in secret meetings behind closed doors,with no faculty input. Total faculty control wouldn’t work for today’s larger university, BUT … the BOV’s instincts were that top-down, command and control management was “right” [More pointless quotation marks.] and so tried to impose it. Well, it’s not right for universities, especially for UVa – and in fact,the data says that it is not right for most corporations either! It certainly wasn’t right for the corporations that I ran! But my main point is that faculty involvement in university governance is central to all universities, and especially to UVa.

Moreover, the current BOV clearly didn’t even investigate the issue they expressed concern about – for example on-line presence of the University (seemingly a big deal in TS’s firing), but they apparently just reacted to the hype of recent announcements by some other universities without investigating UVa’s record on the subject. Well, our involvement in digital scholarship and learning goes back at least twenty years – I know because I was a principal in getting it started! Please note in the prior sentence I said scholarship AND education. Great universities are about both – not just mass teaching! And a future great UVa must be about both! The current BOV, or at least those involved in firing Terry Sullivan, pretty clearly doesn’t understand that.

Are these uninformed folks likely to make smart future decisions for UVa? Alas, I think not! Smart and accomplished as they may be individually in other contexts, they just don’t have the knowledge base to make good decisions for UVa.

Just imagine a board imposed upon General Motors that consisted of 14 smart/accomplished academics, but with no industrial experience, one Chevy customer, and the CEO of a mom-and-pop grocery store. Would that work? No, of course not! And the converse isn’t working here either!  [Pretty well-stated, pretty strong point.  But look how he takes the air out of his tires by his goofy garrulous sentences at the end.  Just stop at store.]

What we need is a significant fraction of the BOV to be folks that deeply understand academia, and UVa in particular – I have been astounded by how shallow and un-informed the comments [verb needed here] by rector Dragas, for example.

I have a substantial list of distinguished current or former academic administrators that I know first hand, that are really bright and I would be happy to recommend them to serve on the BOV, and I’d even to be the first contact with them – but I haven’t been asked. Alas, they almost certainly didn’t make major contribution to the Governor’s campaign, so the chance of their selection under the current system are probably nil. BUT, it’s the system needs to be changed!

I am a more-than-a-tad concerned that the reinstatement of President Sullivan has taken a bit of wind out of the sails of faculty/student pressure for reform. In my view the time is not to compromise, but to stand for the principles of the University, and particularly the principle of faculty deeply involved its governance!!  [Ah.  There we go.  Double exclamation marks.  Will he go for three?]

Corporate style boards (of which both my wife and I have deep experience) are NOT the model for the BOV – nor is “damn the torpedoes” top-down executive management – and the fact that the current BOV doesn’t understand that is damning and destructive, and says a lot about the selection criteria that chose them! We MUST fix the selection criteria!  [What are you visualizing, personality-wise, for the guy at this point?  I’m seeing a guy who can’t get one thought out without bursting his appendix.]

Permit me to cycle back to my opening – I am not a “march and wave placards” type – partly because I find it intellectually repugnant, but also in no small measure because I don’t think it’s especially effective in our context. You may disagree. What I do think we need is a moderate,well-reasoned argument for why the structure of the BOV needs to be changed for the benefit of the University – and the state. But please note that I think the argument needs to be delivered to the folks that can effect that change and that the present process is a political one,and while I am not in favor of marching and placard waving, I also think our actions need to include political ones – just what those actions are should be needs to be a collective decision of the faculty, so I’ll stay silent on that for now.

But we DO need to act to fix the problem underlying President Sullivan’s firing! Will she stay long term, or would we be able to recruit a comparable replacement given the current BOV and the criteria for future BOV selections? In my view — NO! Unless there is fundamental change, UVa is on a downward spiral. It hurts me to the core! UVa has been SO special! To see it self-destruct is as painful as I can imagine.

The scandal at Ohio State further fueled perceptions of a tail-wagging-the-dog culture at major universities, where administrators look the other way as long as the golden goose athletics program is reeling in wins and dollars.

Edit this sentence.

… when you have absolutely no arguments, and cannot write, it’s better to remain silent.

… this is excellent writing.

Yes, there’s one mistake.

After getting caught on tape repeatedly using the heliport on the weekends — when it’s supposed to be closed because of noise pollution — a reporter for ABC 7 confronted the mayor, who explained…

This makes it look as though the reporter got caught, not the mayor.

But otherwise this piece is terrific satire, snark, irony, sarcasm, whatever.

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And you can relax. Ira Rennert, who used to be one of Yeshiva University’s fabled trustees (that great religious institution also had Bernard Madoff and Ezra Merkin running the place), will continue to break the rules and use the heliport on the weekends. “Being an entitled plutocrat just isn’t what it used to be,” complains the Gothamist writer. But it is. Rennert’s holding down the fort.

Laced with a deadly zinc phosphide, wildlife officials predict the rats will die after consuming it while burrowed underground.

Scary wildlife officials.

When UD was a tyke, her mother, who bred dogs, took her to many dog shows up and down the east coast. Once, while her mother was gazing at handlers running English Cocker Spaniels round and round and round, UD wandered away and got lost. (What’s the definition of trauma if you grew up in Bethesda, Maryland? Getting lost at a dog show.)

The one thing UD took away from all those shows was a phrase she heard over and over again at them: CLEAN-UP CREW, RING ONE. Or two or whatever. UD seems to have been impressed that a group of people existed whose function was to rush about cleaning up dog shit.

With the soon to be infamous “muppet” letter published in today’s New York Times, corporate clean-up crews are pressing pooper scoopers into service all over the country. Let’s see if we can help them. Here’s the mess in the ring. Here’s what Brown University’s president, until very recently a highly paid member of the Goldman Sachs board of trustees, was in with.

Today is my last day at Goldman Sachs. After almost 12 years at the firm — first as a summer intern while at Stanford, then in New York for 10 years, and now in London — I believe I have worked here long enough to understand the trajectory of its culture, its people and its identity. And I can honestly say that the environment now is as toxic and destructive as I have ever seen it.

To put the problem in the simplest terms, the interests of the client continue to be sidelined in the way the firm operates and thinks about making money. Goldman Sachs is one of the world’s largest and most important investment banks and it is too integral to global finance to continue to act this way. The firm has veered so far from the place I joined right out of college that I can no longer in good conscience say that I identify with what it stands for.

It might sound surprising to a skeptical public, but culture was always a vital part of Goldman Sachs’s success. It revolved around teamwork, integrity, a spirit of humility, and always doing right by our clients. The culture was the secret sauce that made this place great and allowed us to earn our clients’ trust for 143 years. It wasn’t just about making money; this alone will not sustain a firm for so long. It had something to do with pride and belief in the organization. I am sad to say that I look around today and see virtually no trace of the culture that made me love working for this firm for many years. I no longer have the pride, or the belief.

But this was not always the case. For more than a decade I recruited and mentored candidates through our grueling interview process. I was selected as one of 10 people (out of a firm of more than 30,000) to appear on our recruiting video, which is played on every college campus we visit around the world. In 2006 I managed the summer intern program in sales and trading in New York for the 80 college students who made the cut, out of the thousands who applied.

I knew it was time to leave when I realized I could no longer look students in the eye and tell them what a great place this was to work.

When the history books are written about Goldman Sachs, they may reflect that the current chief executive officer, Lloyd C. Blankfein, and the president, Gary D. Cohn, lost hold of the firm’s culture on their watch. I truly believe that this decline in the firm’s moral fiber represents the single most serious threat to its long-run survival.

Over the course of my career I have had the privilege of advising two of the largest hedge funds on the planet, five of the largest asset managers in the United States, and three of the most prominent sovereign wealth funds in the Middle East and Asia. My clients have a total asset base of more than a trillion dollars. I have always taken a lot of pride in advising my clients to do what I believe is right for them, even if it means less money for the firm. This view is becoming increasingly unpopular at Goldman Sachs. Another sign that it was time to leave.

How did we get here? The firm changed the way it thought about leadership. Leadership used to be about ideas, setting an example and doing the right thing. Today, if you make enough money for the firm (and are not currently an ax murderer) you will be promoted into a position of influence. [Scathing Online Schoolmarm says: Nice bit of humor there.]

What are three quick ways to become a leader? a) Execute on the firm’s “axes,” which is Goldman-speak for persuading your clients to invest in the stocks or other products that we are trying to get rid of because they are not seen as having a lot of potential profit. b) “Hunt Elephants.” In English: get your clients — some of whom are sophisticated, and some of whom aren’t — to trade whatever will bring the biggest profit to Goldman. Call me old-fashioned, but I don’t like selling my clients a product that is wrong for them. c) Find yourself sitting in a seat where your job is to trade any illiquid, opaque product with a three-letter acronym.

Today, many of these leaders display a Goldman Sachs culture quotient of exactly zero percent. I attend derivatives sales meetings where not one single minute is spent asking questions about how we can help clients. It’s purely about how we can make the most possible money off of them. If you were an alien from Mars and sat in on one of these meetings, you would believe that a client’s success or progress was not part of the thought process at all.

It makes me ill how callously people talk about ripping their clients off. Over the last 12 months I have seen five different managing directors refer to their own clients as “muppets,” sometimes over internal e-mail. Even after the S.E.C., Fabulous Fab, Abacus, God’s work, Carl Levin, Vampire Squids? No humility? I mean, come on. Integrity? It is eroding. I don’t know of any illegal behavior, but will people push the envelope and pitch lucrative and complicated products to clients even if they are not the simplest investments or the ones most directly aligned with the client’s goals? Absolutely. Every day, in fact.

It astounds me how little senior management gets a basic truth: If clients don’t trust you they will eventually stop doing business with you. It doesn’t matter how smart you are.

These days, the most common question I get from junior analysts about derivatives is, “How much money did we make off the client?” It bothers me every time I hear it, because it is a clear reflection of what they are observing from their leaders about the way they should behave. Now project 10 years into the future: You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure out that the junior analyst sitting quietly in the corner of the room hearing about “muppets,” “ripping eyeballs out” and “getting paid” doesn’t exactly turn into a model citizen.

When I was a first-year analyst I didn’t know where the bathroom was, or how to tie my shoelaces. I was taught to be concerned with learning the ropes, finding out what a derivative was, understanding finance, getting to know our clients and what motivated them, learning how they defined success and what we could do to help them get there.

My proudest moments in life — getting a full scholarship to go from South Africa to Stanford University, being selected as a Rhodes Scholar national finalist, winning a bronze medal for table tennis at the Maccabiah Games in Israel, known as the Jewish Olympics — have all come through hard work, with no shortcuts. Goldman Sachs today has become too much about shortcuts and not enough about achievement. It just doesn’t feel right to me anymore. [He’d actually have done better not to list the particular accomplishments – it edges toward boasting, and humility is the idea here.] [Update: See? A lot of people are having fun with this.]

I hope this can be a wake-up call to the board of directors. Make the client the focal point of your business again. Without clients you will not make money. In fact, you will not exist. Weed out the morally bankrupt people, no matter how much money they make for the firm. And get the culture right again, so people want to work here for the right reasons. People who care only about making money will not sustain this firm — or the trust of its clients — for very much longer.

Hokay, so what’s corporate clean-up going to do?

Oh, you know.

So do I.

First, it’s going to impugn the guy. Secret resentments; he was close to retirement; he was increasingly irrelevant and he knew it so he thought he’d take a last potshot. (Damn! Traitors everywhere.)

And – if that’s how he feels, why did he stay so long? Cashing in baby, cashing in, just like everyone else! Do you know how much money he made last year? Twenty, fifty mil, maybe? If he’s so pure, we await his return of the cash…

Stuff like that.

And anyway! Muppets is a term of endearment.

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Notice that one thing his conscience couldn’t take anymore was looking college students in the eye and telling them Goldman was a good place to work when he knew they weren’t exactly going to be turned into model citizens.

Well, he can stop worrying about that. These students come from universities whose boards of trustees and presidents have been in bed with Goldman and Goldman veterans for a long time. So…

Muppets of Barnard College! I give you your president, Debora Spar, Goldman Sachs board of trustees! Goldman will be giving her around $500,000 a year to do … pretty much what Brown University’s Ruth Simmons did. Pretty much nothing. Pretty much rubber stamp hundreds of millions in compensation each year for Goldman executives.

See, she’s a muppet too.

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

Update: Live-blogging the Muppet Show:

TO SAVE GOLDMAN SACHS, LLOYD BLANKFEIN MUST GO

shouts a headline that just appeared at Forbes.

B-b-but…! What happens to Barnard College in that case? The reason its president got on the Goldman board is that Blankfein’s wife – until recently herself a member of Barnard’s board – seems to have put her there.   This is from 2011:

Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Lloyd C. Blankfein’s wife, Laura, is a Barnard College alumna and is listed on the school’s website as a member of the board of trustees. She has resigned that post, Stephen Cohen, a spokesman for Goldman Sachs, said today. The Lloyd & Laura Blankfein Foundation donated $50,000 to Barnard College in fiscal 2010, which ended Jan. 31, 2010, and $25,000 in the previous year, according to the nonprofit’s federal tax filings.

You put me on the Barnard BOT; I put you on the Goldman BOT. And look at those numbers, will you? Blankfein’s been making around fifty million dollars in compensation each year for many years. Can you believe he and his wife were willing to part with – let’s do the math – $75,000 for Barnard?  Who said greed?  Shut up about greed!

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Favorite headline so far:

Goldman Sachs Exec Suddenly Realizes His Company Is Evil, Quits in NYT Op-Ed

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G is for Goldman, it’s good enough for me!

Be proud, Barnard muppets, of your very own Cookie Monster!

The real muppets, in this story, are Goldman’s board members, who have never had any real control over how the company is run. And, frankly, never will. The most remunerative skill, at Goldman, is the ability to flatter someone into believing that they’re incredibly important and clever and sophisticated, even as you’re getting that person to do exactly what’s in your own best interest. No one rises to lead Goldman Sachs who doesn’t have that skill. And you can be sure that Lloyd Blankfein uses it on the board every time he meets with them.

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We promise it’ll never happen again: Andy Borowitz writes a Lloyd Blankfein response.

At Goldman, we pride ourselves on our ability to scour the world’s universities and business schools for the finest sociopaths money will buy. Once in our internship program, these youths are subjected to rigorous evaluations to root out even the slightest evidence of a soul. But, as the case of Mr. Smith shows, even the most time-tested system for detecting shreds of humanity can blow a gasket now and then. For that, we can only offer you our deepest apology and the reassurance that one good apple won’t spoil the whole bunch.

… takes a close look at an instance of superior writing. Superior not only in its displaying higher verbal skill than most other pieces of prose display, but also in its having the effect of elevating us, ethically and emotionally, as we read it.

Jennifer Homans, Tony Judt’s widow, wants to clarify, for readers of his last book, Thinking the Twentieth Century, “the conditions under which it was written.” These were profoundly dark, and “the darkness shaped the book, in its form but also in its ideas.” For Judt, ideas were personal as well as public; abstract laws were about bettering the living conditions of not at all abstract people, and as he gradually, humiliatingly, miserably died of ALS, he became very intimately enraged at the way people less fortunate than he were suffering with it:

[M]any of these people were younger than Tony and destitute or medically uninsured, with narrow if not ruined life possibilities. They needed help — practical social and medical services. Humiliation was a terrible feeling, but, as he felt strongly, it was also — and should be treated as — an ugly social fact. “Night,” his essay describing his “imprisonment without parole,” was partly for these new friends, and so, in another key, was the end of Thinking the Twentieth Century, where Tony mounted as fierce — and felt — a case as ever he had for our need to “think socially”: to make human rather than monetary gain the goal of social policy. This was not the politics of disability or special interest; it was about collective responsibility and the duty of us all to each other.

So that’s the basic thing, the thing Homans wants to convey as people open Judt’s book – its particular intensity about injustice and the social good derives from his having felt, viscerally, a certain unjust endgame. “Tony’s own physical hardship, and his sense of the fragility of human dignity, if anything increased his worry for the world he was about to exit.”

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

But there’s so much more in this essay than its basic point…. Phrases like the fragility of human dignity, for starters, fragility and dignity having a nice brittle uncertain assonance… When interrupted by the smooth word human the phrase generates an almost graphic sense of the shaky balance we try to maintain between the ideal of dignity and the reality of, well, shakiness.

Or take the way Homans conveys the always peculiarly intense nature of Judt’s intellectuality:

For Tony, ideas were a kind of emotion, something he felt and cared about in the way that most people do about feelings like sadness or love.

This is odd – hard to understand, perhaps. How can concepts be sad or happy or passionate? Maybe one can think about it in a couple of ways. Judt spent his life raising, rearing, if you’d like, ideas – he loved to gestate ideas, expand them, argue them; and in this thinking and molding and arguing he was cherishing, maintaining, defending, growing, his sense of the world, his sense of the best ways to think about the world. Like a lot of intellectuals, he seems never to have outgrown the excited erotic fun of the adolescent bull session. So ideas were emotions in this sense, that they were always an intense part – perhaps the most intense part – of his affective life.

And in another way Judt was simply a materialist thinker, in the left tradition …

And yet that is an abstraction, and it doesn’t take into account the emotionality involved here, which I think has to do with the pathos of his lifelong effort to feel the reality of human suffering — to feel the link between that suffering and certain settled political and social ways of doing things. Think of an excerpt like this one from Orwell’s essay, Down the Mine:

Here am I sitting writing in front of my comfortable coal fire. It is April but I still need a fire. Once a fortnight the coal cart drives up to the door and men in leather jerkins carry the coal indoors in stout sacks smelling of tar and shoot it clanking into the coal-hole under the stairs. It is only very rarely, when I make a definite mental-effort, that I connect this coal with that far-off labour in the mines. It is just ‘coal’– something that I have got to have; black stuff that arrives mysteriously from nowhere in particular, like manna except that you have to pay for it. You could quite easily drive a car right across the north of England and never once remember that hundreds of feet below the road you are on the miners are hacking at the coal. Yet in a sense it is the miners who are driving your car forward. Their lamp-lit world down there is as necessary to the daylight world above as the root is to the flower.

You sense in this paragraph the same emotionally intense “mental-effort” to connect political abstraction with human suffering. One reason Judt’s brief autobiography (I reviewed it here) is so beautiful is that it breathes life into the all but moribund ‘lost illusions’ plot of so many lives — so many politically engaged lives. Judt recalls, as he lies dying, his several youthful attempts toward ideologically charged collective life – kibbutz Zionism, for instance – and how they all failed, all brought him to where “Fierce unconditional loyalties – to a country, a God, an idea, or a man – have come to terrify me.”

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As he grew sicker, he became understandably more fearful. There was too much he couldn’t control in the outside world: everything from electrical outlets for the breathing machine (batteries fail) to his wheelchair (power-operated but he had no way to steer it) and — not least — the unbearable goodwill of people who didn’t understand. He took grim refuge in his study, his sickroom, his closed, safe prison-cocoon that would house his deteriorating body and entrapped mind.

Grim refuge is something of a cliché, but never mind; the phrase that hit me here was “the unbearable goodwill of people who didn’t understand.” For a couple of reasons. Since Homans has already made vividly clear how much lucidity, clarity, and understanding meant to Judt, we now feel with a special ache just how hideous this incomprehensible, incommunicable condition must have been for him.

And then too, the writing here is so personal, I’m receiving it so strongly, she’s been able to place me so powerfully in his sickroom (“thick air and layers of dust impossible to clean, smells that seemed almost visible, of antiseptic, flowers, morphine, and the burn and buzz of electricity from the amplifier that projected his ever-weakening voice; windows thrown open for air and light and hastily shut against the unnatural chill in his static and stationary bones”), that I absolutely see myself there understanding. And then I absolutely recognize that although I want to see that – want to idealize that – the reality is that like almost everyone else I would have brought into that study an unbearable goodwill… Which has me musing yet more deeply on my empathy generally, my… humanity — a very big abstraction, but this great writing has fitted it to one particular prison-cocoon.

Ultimately this is great writing because Homans regenerates in me a powerful and immediate sense of what an abstract phrase like the life of mind really means. The life of the mind.

For Tony the incentive behind the book — and it had to be a powerful one to overcome the discomfort and depression that were his constant companions — was primarily intellectual, a matter of clarification. [W]hen his dialogue with his co-author] worked, as it usually did, Tony was transformed. Sick Tony, frustrated and anguished Tony, unable to eat or scratch or breathe properly, his body aching from inactivity, was able, with Tim and through sheer mental and physical exertion, to find some relief and exhilaration in the life of the mind… To hell with the disease, with fate, with the body, with the future and the past. He would keep the conversation going and raise the stakes; his public would fight back — and when you fight, you feel alive. Engagé. He needed that to keep going. Which is why he kept going with Thinking the Twentieth Century; it was part of the fight, from his withering comments on intellectuals who supported the Iraq war right down to his ever-prescient defense of the role of the state in public life. He had a soldier’s discipline and even though he was miserable he fought on, saying what he had to say and refining and honing his every word. That was the only kind of public intellectual he knew how to be.

The first means to show off; the second to show contempt for.

Pharma Giants Flaunt Rules writes an AARP blogger. Scathing Online Schoolmarm thinks she means flout.

This is not the way to bat cleanup. This Sports Illustrated column on the massive drug bust at Texas Christian University – featuring plenty of football team involvement – is the first of what will be many attempts at damage control.

This writer’s prose is the functional equivalent of someone in a crowded room waving madly away at marijuana smoke because it’s so thick everyone’s choking on it. A polite gesture, but futile.

Let’s take a few tokes of this guy’s prose and see what went wrong.

His basic moves are two:

1. Aw shucks.

2. I’m shocked. Shocked.

To get us to the point where we actually believe that big-time university football is made up of clueless saintly coaches and adorable lunk kids who sometimes do the darnedest things, the writer must throw deep into platitude territory. His prose must evoke an Americana that would embarrass Edgar Guest. Let’s see how he does it!

The coach has created a winning team

the right way by recruiting guys who were a step too slow or an inch too short. Patterson persuades his players to use those slights — real and perceived — as motivation to maximize their ability. [Start with the hard-luck, overcoming obstacles, come from behind, motley crew that shows up the sports machine schools — the whole motivational enchilada. Ignore the fact that the investigation began when a recruit rejected a TCU offer because of notorious drugging on the team. Ignore that. Don’t ask why some random recruit knew about this and the coach didn’t. Just keep reading. And keep your hankie ready.]

That’s been the foundation of Patterson’s success, which has ultimately resulted in TCU achieving its dream of being in the Big 12 and becoming, you know, one of the big boys. [Achieving its dream. Maximize their ability. Keep the cliches coming. They feel so damn good.]

In one day, four knuckleheads — linebacker Tanner Brock, defensive tackle D.J. Yendrey, safety Devin Johnson and offensive tackle Ty Horn — destroyed much of the program Patterson has built. [Knuckleheads! Cue the Three Stooges! Adorable! Clowns!]

Having shooed away the dealers on the team, the writer will concentrate for the rest of his piece on the clueless sainted coach.

[W]e can only imagine the cauldron of emotions that must’ve been bubbling within him.

After all, he must’ve felt dumb that so much illegal activity seemed to be hidden in plain sight. And he probably felt betrayed by the players and disappointed because he let down the parents who trusted him with their kids.

Kids is always a good choice for stories like this one. The basic dynamic the writer’s going for, after all, is familial – the coach is the fond, too fond, dad, incapable of imagining his kid a dealer; the player is… just a kid!

And oh lord the churning, churning cauldron of emotions he must be experiencing as it hits him so hard out of thin air that the kid sells drugs…

Knucklehead v. Dumb: The sad sorry story of our sports family… But the coach and the team “will survive this shameful day.” We will survive!

… presents for your inspection the following opening sentence:

Newt Gingrich, Rick Perry, Michele Bachmann, and Rick Santorum have all endorsed Personhood USA’s pledge to grant full rights to fertilized eggs if they are elected president.

I suppose we could do worse.

These Iowa Caucuses create a seismic shift in the presidential nominating contests. Obama catapulted to the top of the Democrats’ dance card when he captured 38 percent of Iowa voters in 2008, and then swept to victory at the Democratic Convention eight months later. Without such a strong initial showing in Iowa, Obama might not have been able to steamroll through subsequent state primaries to win the presidency.

Scathing Online Schoolmarm says: This is the writing of the Vital Hack, the hack who’s read Hunter Thompson. The Vital Hack is Now; he’s Nervy; he’s Out There. Step aside, little lady. Coming through.

Yet why – given his supercharged metaphors – does his writing fail to achieve lift? Why, with all the weaponry (seismic catapults and steamrollers), the flaccidity? Why is this man failing to steamroll the Schoolmarm?

The Schoolmarm is more than happy to be steamrolled. But she finds men who try too hard a turn-off. In trying to get SOS going, this writer has simply ransacked his arsenal – which turns out to be everyone’s arsenal – and dumped all the weapons onto the page. As they clatter about, SOS suffers an empty feeling.

The passage pumps manfully away, but all it’s really got is a salade fatigué of clichés (swept to victory) and mixed metaphors (why would you get a catapult to reach the top – wherever that is – of someone’s dance card?).

(Check out the Google swept to victory page. Swept to Victory is the name of a horse!)

Anyway. Let’s put aside SOS‘s disappointment and focus on the larger notoriety of this essay, written by a transplanted urbanite who’s been teaching at the University of Iowa for a couple of decades. On the verge of the Iowa caucuses, he wants to acquaint ignorant ‘thesdans like SOS with his state, and his descriptions of life there have upset the locals. Many of them quote this sentence, for instance:

Those who stay in rural Iowa are often the elderly waiting to die, those too timid (or lacking in educated) to peer around the bend for better opportunities, an assortment of waste-toids and meth addicts with pale skin and rotted teeth, or those who quixotically believe, like Little Orphan Annie, that “The sun’ll come out tomorrow.”

Sure that hurts. But what hurts more is how badly written this is. Note the (still-uncorrected) educated. Note again the besetting sin of this writer — the inability to edit himself. Do we need waiting to die? Waste-toids is great – why add meth addicts when you’ve already provided an exact description of them (pale skin, rotted teeth)? And Orphan Annie? Since you’ve said quixotic, why not stick with that? Man of La Mancha offers the same treacle. Choosing infantile Annie over noble Quixote is rather rubbing it in.

But really all you need in that last clause is this: who believe the sun’ll come out tomorrow. If you dump all the other shit – quixotically, Annie – the terse masterful sentence that results totally gets SOS in the mood. SOS likes a man of few words.

… the more pretentious you are, the more words you’ll misuse.

Take the very pretentious Washington guy, Lanny Davis. He’s trying to say that he thinks it’s wrong to impute anti-semitic motives to people who disagree with you on Israel. This is what he says.

Impugning motives of people at the Center [for American Progress] and impugning [that] those motives are driven by anti-Semitism is, in my opinion, wrong.

The first use of impugning is okay, if mushy; impugning the motives would help a little. Imputing anti-semitic motives to people… would be much better.

The second use of impugning is incorrect. Implying would be correct. Implying that these motives are driven…

Pretentious people never speak or write clearly, being too grand for clarity.

Scathing Online Schoolmarm has told you and told you and told you that good writers have their prose and their emotions under control. Helen Vendler cites Yeats:

Yeats, in “The Fisherman,” thought a poem should be “cold/And passionate as the dawn” — that it should embody, along with the rising passion of inception, the cold inquisition of detached self-critique.

Passion and chill: You might say this about any good piece of writing, as in, most lately, this consideration of body radiation by Christopher Hitchens.

But I do remember lying there and looking down at my naked torso, which was covered almost from throat to navel by a vivid red radiation rash. This was the product of a month-long bombardment with protons which had burned away all of the cancer in my clavicular and paratracheal nodes, as well as the original tumor in the esophagus. This put me in a rare class of patients who could claim to have received the highly advanced expertise uniquely available at the stellar Zip Code of MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. To say that the rash hurt would be pointless. The struggle is to convey the way that it hurt on the inside. I lay for days on end, trying in vain to postpone the moment when I would have to swallow. Every time I did swallow, a hellish tide of pain would flow up my throat, culminating in what felt like a mule kick in the small of my back. I wondered if things looked as red and inflamed within as they did without. And then I had an unprompted rogue thought: If I had been told about all this in advance, would I have opted for the treatment? There were several moments as I bucked and writhed and gasped and cursed when I seriously doubted it.

Hitchens learned how to write from the master, George Orwell, here describing his own encounter with pain:

[T]he doctor and the student came across to my bed, hoisted me upright and without a word began applying [a] set of [cupping] glasses, which had not been sterilized in any way. A few feeble protests that I uttered got no more response than if I had been an animal. I was very much impressed by the impersonal way in which the two men started on me. I had never been in the public ward of a hospital before, and it was my first experience of doctors who handle you without speaking to you or, in a human sense, taking any notice of you. They only put on six glasses in my case, but after doing so they scarified the blisters and applied the glasses again. Each glass now drew about a dessert-spoonful of dark-coloured blood. As I lay down again, humiliated, disgusted and frightened by the thing that had been done to me, I reflected that now at least they would leave me alone. But no, not a bit of it. There was another treatment coming, the mustard poultice, seemingly a matter of routine like the hot bath. Two slatternly nurses had already got the poultice ready, and they lashed it round my chest as tight as a strait-jacket while some men who were wandering about the ward in shirt and trousers began to collect round my bed with half-sympathetic grins. I learned later that watching a patient have a mustard poultice was a favourite pastime in the ward. These things are normally applied for a quarter of an hour and certainly they are funny enough if you don’t happen to be the person inside. For the first five minutes the pain is severe, but you believe you can bear it. During the second five minutes this belief evaporates, but the poultice is buckled at the back and you can’t get it off. This is the period the onlookers enjoy most. During the last five minutes, I noted, a sort of numbness supervenes. After the poultice had been removed a waterproof pillow packed with ice was thrust beneath my head and I was left alone. I did not sleep, and to the best of my knowledge this was the only night of my life — I mean the only night spent in bed — in which I have not slept at all, not even a minute.

Do ye nae see that great writing – prose or poetry – is not the shriek, but the shriek mediated by consciousness? The mind at the same time registering and reflecting on experience? Compiling the metaphors and physical details that will generate in the reader the mood of the writer — the world of the writer? Not simply shrieking I HURT MAN but patiently, perceptively, gathering in the details of the material and social and psychological world in which consciousness moves?

I am offered a final scratch on any of a dozen itchy spots from hairline to toe; the Bi-Pap breathing device in my nose is adjusted to a necessarily uncomfortable level of tightness to ensure that it does not slip in the night; my glasses are removed…and there I lie: trussed, myopic, and motionless like a modern-day mummy, alone in my corporeal prison, accompanied for the rest of the night only by my thoughts.

The late Tony Judt, describing the bondage of his last illness.

I could go on. But note in all of these great writers a sedate, almost stately, pace; an embroilment in the world around them rather than in their feelings; a stoical disposition that takes anguish for granted and sets about getting some leverage over it by thinking and writing about it…

One may be tired of the world — tired of the prayer-makers, the poem-makers, whose rituals are distracting and human and pleasant but worse than irritating because they have no reality — while reality itself remains very dear. One wants glimpses of the real. God is an immensity, while this disease, this death, which is in me, this small, tightly defined pedestrian event, is merely and perfectly real, without miracle — or instruction. I am standing on an unmoored raft, a punt moving on the flexing, flowing face of a river. It is precarious. I don’t know what I am doing. The unknowing, the taut balance, the jolts and the instability spread in widening ripples through all my thoughts. Peace? There was never any in the world. But in the pliable water, under the sky, unmoored, I am traveling now and hearing myself laugh, at first with nerves and then with genuine amazement. It is all around me.

Yes, yes, I’ll stop. I wanted to toss Harold Brodkey into the mix. This was written days before he died.

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

In the recent dust-up between Rita Dove and Helen Vendler over what good poetry is, we see what happens when you go with the shriek rather than the mediated shriek. In choosing poems with lines like

We want poems
like fists beating niggers out of Jocks
or dagger poems in the slimy bellies
of the owner-jews. Black poems to
smear on girdlemamma mulatto bitches
whose brains are red jelly stuck
between ‘lizabeth taylor’s toes. Stinking
Whores!…
Setting fire and death to
whities ass.

for the poetry anthology she’s edited, Dove prompts the question of poetic standards. In including this poem, she has given me access to an angry consciousness. Poems should be blades and fists with which to kill people; but they are also smears, which confuses me. The enemy is smears – red jelly, slime. To call the poem also a smear is to mix up the low sliminess of the enemy with your side’s high slashing quality. You’re hard; they’re soft. If you’re also a smear, the sides get mixed up.

This isn’t a surprising outcome, because when your writing is a spew, it’s likely to be a mess. Ralph Ellison’s narrator in Invisible Man is equally rageful, but the writer chills the passion with his prose… which has the effect of making Ellison’s rage far more powerful and disclosing than Baraka’s. The very fact that Ellison has gone to the trouble of removing the rage from one singular consciousness, and placing it a larger, accessible world, makes his writing ramify out to an audience in a way Baraka’s simply cannot.

So this, Vendler points out, is a bad poem, and there are too many others like it in Dove’s anthology – flat, propositional, linguistically dull statements of rage and suffering and celebration and love.

“One wants the contemporary poets of Dove’s collection to ask more of their language, to embody more planes of existence,” writes Vendler; and this is because readers of poetry want the same “more capacious regard for the world” that everyone engaged in aesthetic experience wants, not an encounter with a singular shriek.

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

What about the umbrage in this post’s title?

That’s Dove’s, in her unfortunate response to Vender’s dislike of her anthology.

See, raw emotion doesn’t cut it. Writing is a cool medium, and if you can’t be cool, you make a hash of things.

You can’t do better than a close read of this article, by an Indiana University student. Foreign observers from, say, former Communist countries will recognize the article’s rhetoric immediately.

Title: SHUT UP AND SHOW UP

The student is enraged because many of his fellow students do not share his passion for the basketball team. They are failing to put on their team jerseys and join the fervent throng. They are failing to understand what Indiana University means. Their absence at the games demoralizes their fellow students. If they continue to opt out of these mass rallies, they should be punished.

I’ve noticed an attitude change in IU students over the last five years or so. No longer are they dedicated fans by the masses, that will plan their schedule around the games. Fans that will always wear their IU gear with their head held high and be confident in their university.

Comrade Brezhnev has noticed a deterioration in the dedication of the masses to the cause.

I do want note, there is a solid core of passionate students but there are far too few of them. It looks like no more than a few hundred.

The radical core remain intact, to be sure! But there has been a serious falling away.

There has been an attitude change and I don’t like it. In a group of about 50 students polled, only about seven classified themselves as a diehard IU fan that will watch the team no matter their talent level. The worst part about this informal poll was that about ten claimed they rarely watch IU sports, yet they are a sports marketing major.

Those who reap the benefits of the revolution should make their fair contribution to it!

Too many times I’ve said at my fraternity house that I’m getting ready to work the game and they ask what game and who they are playing. Seriously? I cover every game and how could they not know when their university’s top sport plays? Maybe these students won’t buy in until Indiana wins consistently and against good teams. I think it should go the other way around.

The revolution has no need of fair-weather friends!

[Students] they don’t like the fact that their section is not the prime seating surrounding the basket. Instead of being grateful for the largest section in the country, nearly 7,600 seats, they believe that they are above alumni and donors. How irrational. There’s no way Indiana can take away seats from longtime donors and alumni that donate thousands each year to the university.

Our leaders have sacrificed for the party; they deserve a little special treatment.

If students aren’t dedicated and in attendance for the non-conference games, they don’t deserve to stand in the student section for the big games.

… [If] the students don’t show, cut the size of their section… [IU] is bringing in too many students out of state that just don’t get what Indiana basketball is all about. They don’t get the history, tradition or culture. They don’t understand you should show up early and heckle the opponents during warm-up.

Little as I wish to do this, I have decided that punishment is in order. Insufficiently committed comrades will stand for the big games. The so-called intellectuals on the admissions committee will be instructed to admit only those who understand our indigenous revolutionary traditions.

A letter writer in the Washington Post takes issue with a Ruth Marcus column about Israel’s haredim.

No woman in Israel is “forced to board public buses from the back and stay there,” as Ruth Marcus stated. There are several bus lines, servicing overwhelmingly Haredi communities, where there is a voluntary separation of the sexes — the wish of female passengers no less than of males. If a woman chooses to flout that convention, she is protected by law.

Flout. SOS likes that flout. Synonyms for flout, we’re told, include

mock – scoff – jeer – deride – gibe – scorn – taunt

It’s interesting that this writer considers acting in accordance with your country’s laws (which forbid gender segregation in public places) to be an expression of contempt.

Nor is the flouter at all protected by the law. No one will intervene when the men on the bus spit at her and the women call her a whore. The haredim on the bus don’t do laws; they do conventions which, if disobeyed, are being flouted and will get punished.

Just as Marcus says, Israel is becoming a land of cults, not laws. It’s pretty remarkable that there are people in this country willing to justify this trend.