… Going Cosmic.

Miami shouldn’t be given the death penalty, as Sports Illustrated argued again 15 years later. It’s big-time college athletics that should be.

The basic move is: We can’t do Local X until we totally solve Universal X.

It’s a fantastic deflection exercise, beloved of people who are always saying things like Better the evils we know.

… that only in sports writing are mixed metaphors considered okay. I mean, here’s the first paragraph of a New York Times piece about the latest Miami thing and about how nobody involved will be punished very severely because the people running the games are greedy amoral shits, etc.

As college sports officials confront yet another cheating scandal — this one involving Miami, the latest in a conga line of blue-chip programs that have recently stumbled into the crosshairs of N.C.A.A. investigators — speculation over the extent of the fallout intensified Wednesday.

A conga line made up of blue chips stumbles into crosshairs which emit fallout.

SOS doesn’t find this a very lucid sentence. Good writing is supposed to clarify, not to muddy. But never mind.

… colon.

… to highly specialized writing — writing that has one, and only one, quite narrow, interest. This sort of writing is the very definition of monoculture. It is the essence of one dimensionality, the pure beating heart of the provincial.

This writing is But is it Good for the Jews? writing.

And you gotta love it. Who wouldn’t want the thick, murky world distilled to one obsession? Everything in the vast globe understood in terms of one mania?

Here’s a good example of the form. A Forbes writer takes on the epidemic of mental illness and psychotropic drug taking in the United States today. But exclusively from the point of view of people who invest their money in pharma stocks.

Let’s take a look.

He begins with the nightmare story of Rebecca Riley, a four-year-old killed with prescription drugs by her parents and the doctor who just kept throwing drugs at the family (her parents’ other two children were similarly medicated). The parents were both found guilty of murder. This murder, which riveted national attention to the depraved overprescription of powerful drugs in America, “may one day prove very important to investors in pharmaceutical stocks,” warns the Forbes columnist.

“[P]harmaceutical marketing executives are evidently undeterred by the law,” he goes on to note (they routinely market drugs for off-label use and routinely have to settle federal charges in the hundreds of millions of dollars — just the price of doing business for them). If they keep this up for much longer, and if nasty stories like the Riley thing keep making headlines, you might see a total ban on off-label use, and that would “cut into a major growth area for pharmaceutical companies.”

And what a growth area! “[T]he increase in diagnoses [of mental illness in America] is a boon to pharmaceutical manufacturers. The new generation of psychoactives has displaced cholesterol-reducing medications as the biggest-selling class of drugs in the U.S.” Think of the investment possibilities here! Figure you can convince say twenty percent of the population that they and their children need lifelong powerful psychoactive drugs to function! I mean, there’s no physical basis for the diagnosis, so you can go to town! It’s a can’t lose proposition.

Unless! Unless party poopers like Marcia Angell keep making noise:

Dr. Angell links the astonishing rise in diagnoses of certain mental disorders to the huge financial stakes of physicians, pharmaceutical companies and SSI recipients.

Keep talking about this, the writer warns, and there could be a “public opinion backlash” that might affect your profit margin.

But — probably not. The writer concludes on a reassuring note. We’ll probably see increases in dependency on psychotropic drugs throughout the population, thank goodness.

… hit back cleanly. Here, Newt’s press secretary defends his man against recent attacks from the lamestream media.

The press secretary strikes the right belligerent tone, but his mixed metaphors confuse us rather than rouse us to indignation.

The firefight started when the cowardly sensed weakness. They fired timidly at first, then the sheep not wanting to be dropped from the establishment’s cocktail party invite list unloaded their entire clip, firing without taking aim their distortions and falsehoods.

Instead of gaining a clear picture of the press bullies, we struggle with three incompatible images:

1. A firefight.
2. Sheep.
3. Cocktail parties.

Our minds, striving to make sense of disparate phenomena, put it all together into a picture of party-going, pistol-packing, sheep. This takes us very far away from the image of embattled heroic Gingrich that’s intended.

Also – You want to end on a strong word. Here, we have a lot of exciting build-up, and we’re panting to see what actual evil thing the media has done to Newt Gingrich. But instead of a word like “lies,” we get the careful (cowardly?) “distortions and falsehoods.”

After all that firepower, this is a letdown. Big guns don’t shoot distortions and falsehoods! Not in the US of A! They shoot lies, baby!

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Update: Now, this is good writing.

The sheer spectacle of watching Newt try to live out his man-of-destiny fantasies and failing utterly — always in ways that were cringe inducing, yet impossible to turn away from — evoked something powerful that I couldn’t quite place. But then last night, I figured it out. It must have been Newt’s $500,000 Tiffany’s account, or maybe his apology to Paul Ryan. Anyway, I realized that everything about Newt Gingrich–the operatic temperament, the multiple divorces, the six-figure credit line at Tiffany’s, the ego, the solipsism, the sheer haplessness and capacity for self-delusion–it all summons up the “Real Housewives of Beverly Hills.”

You see how his build-up ends with a bang?

Newt press secretary: Take note.

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Update: Graphic.

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In recital.

When Bad Prose Happens to Good People might be one way to subtitle this blog’s ongoing and best-known feature, Scathing Online Schoolmarm. SOS identifies and analyzes unfortunate writing – writing so bad that it can get an otherwise blameless person into serious trouble.

A sad and much-discussed current instance is Dr. Lazar Greenfield’s Valentine’s Day column in the official organ of the American College of Surgeons. His column so outraged members of that organization that the entire issue of the newspaper was taken down and the otherwise dedicated and admired Greenfield removed from his editorship. Other high positions he holds within the ACS are also imperiled.

Read the entire column here and get back to me.

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… Hokay.

SOS suggests that the heart of the matter, the essential offending language, lies here:

[There are] ingredients in semen that include mood enhancers like estrone, cortisol, prolactin, oxytocin, and serotonin; a sleep enhancer, melatonin; and of course, sperm, which makes up only 1%-5%. Delivering these compounds into the richly vascularized vagina also turns out to have major salutary effects for the recipient.

… [N]ow we know there’s a better gift for that day than chocolates.

SOS read these sentences to a randomly encountered man in the street – Mr UD – and awaited his response.

“Ick,” he said.

“Ick?” said UD.

“In arguments about ethics there’s this thing called The Ick Factor,” Mr UD explained. “The idea is that there might be something revealing about our moral intuitions in the ugh response to a situation or a statement or a person or whatever.”

“You’re talking about what my younger sister calls oogie?”

“Oogie, ick, ugh, call it what you will. Immediate visceral disgust.”

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Writing that’s obviously intended to be lighthearted and maybe a tad risqué turns out to be for many readers unfunny and gross. Let’s get clinical about why.

Clinical is part of the problem. This clinician has brought the stark unamusing language of the surgical field (richly vascularized, compounds, deliver/recipient) to his little editorial sally; and while mismatches like these can be funny if they’re self-conscious and over the top, their use here is simply a mismatch, simply an indication that the writer cannot exploit the jargon of his field for comic effect.

In fact there was a comic effect for me when I got to richly vascularized vagina; but it involved my laughing at a clueless writer’s weird paean to an organ.

My response to Greenfield’s language is not so much ick as … what? I mean, yes of course the content is off-putting – the best Valentine’s gift a woman can hope to receive is a spray of semen – but it’s off-putting because the writer is, as the Retraction Watch blog notes, “rather strange.” Good writing is supposed to pull you in, not repel you. Greenfield has written something as weird as it is disgusting, and in this alienating combination lies its failure.

… complete with wishful thinking …

[T]here is nothing wrong that can’t be fixed by 18 strong college presidents — that’s how many seats there are on the NCAA executive committee — acting in concert to curb their own worst excesses, and impose stiffer penalties.

… and the apparent belief that all university basketball and football players graduate from their universities:

They get a four-year ride free of the mountainous student loans that burden so many of their peers — a collective $900 billion worth. Ask any parent who is paying tuition what a scholarship is worth. Pay players? Please. We’re already paying them as much as a half-million dollars apiece over four years, maybe more.

And, pound for pound, there’s the insanest defense of playing football and basketball as an exercise in college-level intellectuality you’re ever going to see:

I don’t know that revenue-sports, basketball and football, are more valuable than any other performance-based learning experience, in which stakes are damn high and the audience brutally demanding. But they’re certainly not less valuable. Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. once praised sports as “high and dangerous action,” because, “in this snug, over-safe corner of the world we need it, that we may realize that our comfortable routine is no eternal necessity of things . . .”

Yeah. Take the game they’ve been playing since they were ten, put it on a big field with tv cameras, and watch it morph into a university subject. Jenkins wants football and basketball players to be able to major in I ran up and down a field today.

Much better, UD thinks, that they major in ethics, taking advantage of field work opportunities in cults of corruption at American universities.

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

SOS loves the way Jenkins ends with Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. Reader: Make a note of it. To lend parting gravitas to your argument that football and basketball are university subjects, wheel out Holmes or Churchill or Lincoln saying they are high, and dangerous.

Dangerous, to be sure. They are full of danger.

What they bring to the university, however, is – so very often – unutterably low.

… is writing colorless, anonymous, committee-generated nothingness. You’d think a university president would know this.

Not only does he reuse exam questions. Professor William Bratton, U Penn law school, writes poorly.

Here’s an email he sent to his students about the reused questions:

Last Monday’s Corporations examination utilized a set of multiple choice questions that I had used previously at Georgetown. I reused the questions in reliance on an understanding I had with the authorities there pursuant to which multiple choice questions from my exams would no longer be posted absent my express permission. It now turns out that, unbeknownst to me, the questions were posted on the Georgetown Law website.

It has come to my attention that the some but not all students who took the exam had access to copies of the questions. Indeed, a group of five students notified Dean Clinton that they had copies of the questions within minutes of the conclusion of the exam. It is clear that other students also saw the questions.

Let’s (No, UD! Let’s NOT.) take a closer look (PLEASE NO.). It’s for your own good. Shush.

And let’s remember. This is not an address to Parliament, a Supreme Court presentation, a last will and testament. This is a simple straightforward note to students.

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

Last Monday’s Corporations examination utilized [Never use utilize. Why not, UD? What’s wrong with utilizing utilize? It’s in the effing dictionary… Well, is it pretty? Is it human? Does it sound like the sort of sound a human being, or a machine, would make? Is there a better, simpler, more attractive, more human, less robotic, less pretentious word that would be an equivalent? Hm. Hm. Remember the word use? How is use different from utilize? Oh yeah. It doesn’t allow you to use a big long pretentious word in place of a short non-pretentious word. And if you’re Professor Bratton, you desperately want to be pretentious. Better pretentious than, say, apologetic.] a set of multiple choice questions that I had used previously [that I had used previously. Again, how lovely. And how remarkably L….O….N…G. Loaf and invite yourself to my prose! Take all day! You have nothing better to do with your time than delectate that I had used previously instead of I used.] at Georgetown. I reused the questions in reliance on an understanding I had with the authorities there pursuant to which [Hey, I told the guys at Georgetown to take the questions offline because I’m a busy important person not about to devote ten or so minutes to coming up with new questions…. An understanding with the authorities there … The authorities!] multiple choice questions from my exams would no longer be posted absent my express permission. [Absent my express permission! Off with their heads!] It now turns out that, unbeknownst to me, the questions were posted on the Georgetown Law website. [Unbeknownst, my loyal subjects! Unbeknownst!]

It has come to my attention that the some [Royals don’t revise.] but not all students who took the exam had access to copies of the questions. Indeed, a group of five students notified Dean Clinton that they had copies of the questions within minutes of the conclusion of the exam. It is clear that other students also saw the questions.

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So sad, when a high-ranking administrator takes to the local paper to try to calm the populace.

In the wake of the University of Central Florida cheating scandal – brought on by the exquisite synergy of a professor who couldn’t be bothered to write his own exam (“Prof. Quinn barely created anything at all. He just pulled questions from a source that the students had access to as well and copied them verbatim. It would seem that, even if you think the students did wrong here, the Professor was equally negligent. Will he have to sit through an ethics class too?”), and students who, sensing he couldn’t be bothered, found the online exam he used and copied it – the school’s provost natters about how much integrity the school has, how this was an isolated incident, and how they’re going to “add to and improve upon our existing safeguards.”

A zillion students attend UCF – lots of them take online courses, where the cheating (and dropout) rates are sky-high; lots of them take massively over-populated classroom courses, complete with PowerPoint, clickers, laptops, dimmed lights, high absenteeism, security cameras, and total pointlessness. When you experience university as a series of variously degrading, intrusive, and stupid experiences, you don’t respect your school, and you don’t feel inclined to act toward it with much integrity, since it doesn’t seem to be acting all that well in regard to you.

UCF must sense how unpleasant its transformation into a Vegas casino, bristling with security cameras, is, since the provost lists all sorts of behavior-improvement initiatives on campus, but doesn’t mention this one. And this is the one that’s gotten the most press.

UCF is a failed enterprise. It has too many students, and professors can’t handle it. Pretty much everything it does reflects badly on the American university. It should shut its physical campus and enter fully into online oblivion.

… recounted here. Fun cast of characters, and makes for some interesting subsidiary reading.

The part about the sloppy professor threatening to sue the careful graduate student is a high point.

There’s much in this story that explains why a lot of people hate professors. As long as stories like this one keep happening (University Diaries has chronicled quite a few of them), Sarah Palin has a clear rhetorical field.

Scathing Online Schoolmarm has a slightly different take, though. SOS says Look at the passage he got sloppy with.

But this power is exercised rather than possessed; it is not the “privilege” of a dominant class, which exercises it actively upon a passive, dominated class. It is rather exercised through and by the dominated. Indeed, it is perhaps unhelpful to think in terms of “classes” in this way, for power is not unitary and its exercise binary. Power in that sense does not exist: what exists is an infinitely complex network of “micro-powers”, of power relations that permeate every aspect of social life. For that reason, “power” cannot be overthrown and acquired once for all by the destruction of institutions and seizure of the state apparatuses. Because “power” is multiple and ubiquitous, the struggle against it must be localized. Equally, however, because it is a network and not a collection of isolated points, each localized struggle induces effects on the entire network. Struggle cannot be totalized–a single, centralized [pagebreak 139-140] hierarchized organisation setting out to seize a single, centralized, hierarchized power; but it can be serial, that is, in terms of horizontal links between one point of struggle and another.

What sort of person, reeling with nausea from prose beyond anything George Orwell savaged in Politics and the English Language, would say Now this is exactly what I want to write in my book. In fact, I think I’ll lift verbatim a bunch of his beautiful phrases.

LOCALIZED LOCALIZED TOTALIZED CENTRALIZED HIERARCHIZED CENTRALIZED HIERARCHIZED LAY IT ON ME BABY DO IT TO ME ONE MORE TIME ONE MORE IZE BEFORE IZE CRIZE MIZE IZE OUT BABY OVER YOU

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Update, from the very long comment thread:

One problem in academia these days is that hardly anyone reads anyone else’s work.

… is the clever title Peter Copeland, a geology professor at the University of Houston, has given his forthcoming book about writing well when your subject is geology.

Copeland quotes in that book something UD wrote about good writing many years ago on this blog:

Writing—and speech—are intimately disclosing acts. The real difference between a good writer and a bad writer lies in the degree of awareness each brings to this truth. The good writer knows that, like it or not, she’s going to be giving away many things about the quality of her consciousness whenever she writes anything. She’s a good writer largely because she has some degree of control over what she discloses, over the effect she creates, over the human being that materializes, when she sets pen to paper.

UD‘s flattered to have her thoughts about writing featured in this way, for an audience of scientists. She looks forward to reading Copeland’s book.

A few years ago, Scathing Online Schoolmarm featured here a satire of a Christmas letter to friends (she seems to have lost it — she’s still looking for it). She thinks Gregg Easterbrook wrote it, but she’s not sure (she sent an email to him asking about it). The author found just the right combination of insufferably boasting tone and vulgar materialist content, and SOS went into some detail, in that post, praising and analyzing this little masterpiece…

Ah! Just heard back from Easterbrook! (His latest book is Sonic Boom.) Good man. It’s no longer at the New Republic (showed up in ’04), but Easterbrook found it for me in a pretty obscure place, and I’m very grateful to him. Here it is:

UD is so glad she and Mr UD passed up a trip to Sundance when we were in Utah this summer…

Anyway, why is UD revisiting this great piece of satire? Because a non-satirical, entirely sincere version of the form is now being passed around online, and a comparison of the real thing, written by the novelist Janette Turner Hospital, who’s on a visiting appointment at Columbia’s MFA program at the moment, with Easterbrook’s fake, is instructive.

Before she came to Columbia, Hospital taught at the University of South Carolina. In a letter to her former students there, Hospital admits she prefers Columbia.

Forwarded below are a couple of emails sent to all of our Columbia MFA students. It’s the kind of invitation students here receive-and take up-at least once or twice a week in a cornucopia of literary riches. It seems to me that USC writing students should also know about these opportunities, since you could car-pool up to NYC very cheaply and stay at youth hostels on Manhattan (within walking distance of Columbia U and Central Park) for just $30/night (shared room) with linen, towels, and breakfast provided. MFA students from other states take advantage of this and visit in groups. Why not USC?

As for news from this very different MFA planet, I’m in seventh heaven teaching here, and not only because I have Orhan Pamuk (whom I hope to bring to USC for Caught in the Creative Act), Oliver Sacks, Simon Schama, Richard Howard, Margo Jefferson, etc., etc., as colleagues, though that is obviously part of it.

My students also live and move and write in seventh heaven and in a fever of creative excitement. Columbia’s MFA is rigorous and competitive but students don’t just have publication as a goal – they take that for granted, since about half the graduating class has a book published or a publishing contract in hand by graduation – so they have their sights set on Pulitzers.

This program is huge, the largest in the country. It’s a 3-year degree, with 300 students enrolled at a given time. Each year, 100 are admitted (in fiction, poetry, nonfiction) with fiction by far the largest segment. But 600+ apply, so the 100 who get in are the cream of the cream.

Students take workshops and literature courses in equal measure. They are avid readers and intense participants in seminar discussion. And here is one of their toughest hurdles: they do not pick their own committee for the thesis. They do not even pick their own supervisor. These roles are assigned. They are not even informed who their committee members are until one week before the defense, when they receive the detailed written reports signed by their committee members. This is certainly a bit nerve-wracking for the student, but replicates exactly what happens in the publishing world where the coldly neutral eyes of agents and editors are assessing your manuscript. Columbia’s MFA feels this rigor has a lot to do with the high publication rate of students.

In my first week here, I was presented with two theses of students unknown to me and required to write detailed reports. I was given the names of other committee members, and it was up to us to make contact and arrange to meet to discuss the theses we’d been assigned. There are 30+ members on the MFA faculty, but the program also uses a number of well-known writers resident in NYC who are not faculty. I have found these meetings and discussions with NYC writers rather wonderful.

Sixty theses have been submitted for fall graduation (approx. 35 fiction; 15 poetry; 10 nonfiction). On average, each year from 5 – 10% of these will be failed, and the student will be advised to try again for spring graduation. If the thesis is failed, the student will not meet with the committee but will receive the detailed reports. In the two weeks from Oct 4 – Oct 15, all those who pass will meet with their committee for the “thesis conference.” Since pass or fail has already been decided, this is not a “defense” but a conference in which the committee discusses positive and problematic issues with the student and makes recommendations of what should be done before submission to a publisher.

This kind of rigor about the thesis (absolutely no easy rides here) has a lot to do with the high publication rate. But there are certainly other factors which contribute: students do internships at the New Yorker, Publishers’ Weekly, Paris Review, and at major publishing houses. They attend multiple readings by famous writers every week (not by any means all at Columbia, but at the NY Public Library, the 92nd St Y, at NYU, etc.

Also, the program hosts a reception for all graduating students with about 30 major editors and agents invited. At his reception, each agent or editor is presented with an anthology of the work of the graduating students, along with contact emails. No wonder the students are off to a flying start. Agents and editors hover like major-league recruiters at college championships.

But I think what thrills me most of all is the sheer intellectual intensity of the students. Although I have taught at a number of the most highly regarded MFA programs in this country and in England, there’s only one other place I’ve ever taught where there was a comparable atmosphere, and that was MIT, where I taught for 3 years. At both places the crackle of intellectual energy in the air is almost visible, like blue fire.

And then there are all the peripheral pleasures of living on Manhattan: we’ve seen the Matisse exhibition at MOMA, have tickets for the opening of Don Pasquale at the Met Opera, have tickets to see Al Pacino on stage as Shylock in the Merchant of Venice, etc etc. Plus I’m just 15 minutes walking distance from Columbia and from all the sidewalk bistros on Broadway, and 3 minutes from Central Park where we join the joggers every morning. This is Cloud Nine living on the Upper West Side (which is known to my agent and my Norton editor, who live in Greenwich Village, as “Upstate Manhattan.” ) We love it.

All best wishes,
and think about the invitations below which my Columbia students will be attending.
JTH

From the Chicago Trib:

… Even a [University of Chicago] colleague, former law school Dean Geoffrey Stone, had something pointed to say. [About this.]

“People are reasonably focused on the view that this is absurd for somebody who lives a relatively privileged life to define himself as not rich because there are people who are richer,” Stone said. “The way he wrote it opened himself up to that. If Todd had shown me a draft of it, I would have told him that this is going to call for scorn or derision, and that is not what you are trying to achieve here. You better think of another way to make the point.”

Scathing Online Schoolmarm says: He could have made the point. But the only way he could have made it was through humor, and the guy does not strike SOS as a natural comedian. Self-deprecation would probably be the best subcategory of humor with which to make the point, and here again the guy does not strike me as having the gift of self-deprecation.

Even Stone, I’m afraid, ain’t quite there when he calls Henderson’s life “relatively privileged.” SOS grasps the point that Americans more privileged than Henderson exist. This does not make his life relatively privileged. It is absolutely privileged.

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Add the recent focus on legacy admissions to the Henderson mess, and America’s privileged will need to look sharp for awhile. Incoming.

Last week it was the Psych department chair’s triple negative.

This week it’s a dean’s … Well. Couple of things.

She’s responding to a reporter’s question about the man who committed suicide a few days ago on the steps of Memorial Church on Harvard’s quad.

“It’s really sad, it was horrible, and these kinds of incidents affect all of us really negatively,” Dean of the College Evelynn M. Hammonds said in an interview yesterday. “This campus is situated in an urban context, and we can’t control these kinds of things.”

You tell me why there are Little Icks within Little Icks in these statements.