La Kid and Ingrid Michaelson,
just before Michaelson’s DC
concert the other day.

A new student came up to me after yesterday’s Novels of Don DeLillo seminar.

“Can I join your class? I got thrown out of Painting because I can’t paint.”

ty of teaching again at George Washington University after a yearlong sabbatical:

*** There are three-foot tall Purell dispensers in front of all elevators.  (The elevators in her own building, Academic Center, are being upgraded.  One of them is already way chic, with recessed lighting and bright silver buttons; but when its doors close, it lets out a high-pitched whine that goes on forever; and when it takes you to the first floor, it flashes the number seven.)

*** Now that Michelle Obama and UD‘s university have made their pact, UD ponders, while walking to class, what she’s done for the world (blood donation; tutoring; town clean-up… what else?).   Plus she marvels at how many Peace Corps, Teach for America, Habitat for Humanity, etc., people there are among her students.

*** Because she’s picked up extra teaching duties this semester (an independent study; other classroom stuff) on top of her regular courses, UD‘s on campus all the time, working, working.  She has renamed herself Ekaterina Stakhanova.

*** And because she’s always on campus, marching from one classroom to another, UD has taken to scanning the students around her, hoping for a La Kid sighting (her daughter goes to GW). She often thinks she’s had one, only to discover that almost all GW women have straight blond hair, fine threads, and UGG boots.

So yesterday, Saturday, UD was
returning her sprinkler

to the side of the house, and near
the wall she saw a toad. An American
toad.

It was well-camouflaged, as it
is in this photo, but she saw it,
and she stared at it.

A few years ago, when she saw
a turtle in the front yard, UD
ran into the house and got La Kid
and Mr UD and they came out
and everyone stared at the turtle.

La Kid‘s off at college now, which
leaves Mr UD, and UD ran
into the house to get him.

She really did run, because she was
afraid the toad would hop away.
And then Mr UD would do
this elaborate stupid thing about
how UD made up the toad sighting,
or about how UD‘s getting old
and seeing things.

Sure enough, the toad was gone by the time
Mr UD hauled himself out there,
and sure enough he went into his old,
totally no longer funny routine about how
UD made it up, or only thought she saw it.

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

A few hours later, Les UDs went out
for a little weekend hike at Lake Frank.
They walked around the lake, and then continued
on to the nearby Meadowside Nature Center.

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

The minute she walked into its two
small rooms, UD felt a
strong sense of déjà-vu.

“I think,” she said to Mr UD, as they
surveyed the dusty, random,
exhibits (pioneer bunk beds, stuffed beaver,
whelks), “I must have been here last
when I was in elementary school.
Field trip? I’m definitely feeling something.”

Mr UD encouraged UD to think about that
while he hiked back to get the car.

UD sat on a couch and read
books in the teeny nature library about
the wildlife of Montgomery County, which
turns out to include bobcats.
UD now thinks she sighted one.
It was very early one morning, and loping
across Rokeby Avenue was a cat, she guessed,
but an insanely large cat…

Here’s a university angle on the thing.
Montana State University in Billings has
a bobcat:

“[T]he dean of business at MSU Billings…
has seen the bobcat several times in
the early morning hours. He called
[Fish Wildlife and Parks] Billings office
out of concern, but was told there
was nothing the agency would do.”

UD also learned, from her reading,
that the teeny nest she discovered
in the azalea bushes in front of her
house recently was a hummingbird’s.

Finally, UD discovered that since
the Meadowside Nature Center
was built in 1972, she… er…
without going into ugly detail…
could not have visited
it on an elementary school field trip.

This two-year school near UD‘s house has long prepared not-quite-ready ‘thesdanians for transfer to a university, or given them an Associate’s degree (UD‘s older sister got a mental health-related degree from MC).

Its new president looks to be a Benjamin Ladner clone (background on the ex-president of American University here):

A $4,051 hotel bill in Delhi. A $780 tab for limousine service in Boston. And a growing tally of missed meetings and unexplained absences at home. Critics of Brian Keith Johnson — and they are many — say the Montgomery College president has spent the past two years running up outsize expenses while neglecting important job responsibilities.

… The report alleges that Johnson’s “frequent and noted absences at essential meetings and functions have diminished the visibility and jeopardized the reputation of Montgomery College.” The president leaves his office for days at a time without explanation, the report says, and has not deputized anyone to sign documents in his stead, leaving college administrators “unable to carry out the daily and necessary activities and business of the institution.”

As the college has frozen long-distance travel and scaled back on refreshments served at faculty, staff and student events, Johnson has spent thousands on hired cars and fine dining and thousands more on hotels and airplane flights. Expense records obtained by faculty through a public records request and shared with The Washington Post show Johnson charged $58,165 on his corporate credit card between July 2007 and April, including several hundred dollars on floral arrangements and $302 in a single charge to a Borders bookstore. The reports do not contain details beyond what is listed on a credit card statement.

Faculty members allege that Johnson has directed administrators not to talk to college trustees and that information is “routinely censored.” Several employees say they believe that listening devices have been planted in offices and meeting rooms, according to the report.

A banner hung near campus late last week drew attention to another potential embarrassment: a bench warrant issued last year against Johnson by an Arizona court for $12,000 in unpaid child support to a former spouse. Johnson has since paid the sum.

… Johnson failed to attend at least a dozen meetings with state and county representatives, including such politically potent events as a March news conference for the county operating budget, according to the faculty report. He told trustees that he had met with Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski (D-Md.) at a June 3 meeting of the Maryland Association of Community Colleges; in fact, neither he nor Mikulski had attended it, according to the report…

This Washington Post article makes it sound as though the president is on his way out. As opposed to the squalid Ladner story, in which a squalid board of trustees kept throwing MORE money at the man, and then, forced to let him go, gave him a massive golden parachute, Montgomery College will probably dismiss this guy pretty quickly.

Jerzy Soltan, UD‘s father-in-law,
a lieutenant in the Polish cavalry.

He fought until the last battles of
October 1939.

He spent the duration of the war
a prisoner of the Germans,
in Murnau.

… and terrible youth wrote James Joyce at the very end of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

Today, UD only saw the exultancy — on the playing field, the college quad, the city street.

The playing field was in Poolesville, a distant suburb of Washington and site of the Chesapeake Open frisbee tournament, where, under massive white clouds and blue sky, UD listened as her friend Courtney started explaining how frisbee’s played and then suddenly raced off to the field with her team, Scandal. Courtney wore a backwards baseball cap, a powder blue team shirt, and gray shorts that said SCANDAL in big black letters.

Profane UD was in her element here, as the mild summer air rang with fuck, shit, bitches, asshole, eat me and other cheers. These were women after UD‘s heart – frolicsome foulmouths who already knew what that silly British scientist felt he needed to prove scientifically: swearing is a beautiful thing, especially in a woman. It makes the pain go away.

Later Les UDs met up with La Kid, just moved into tony new digs at George Washington University. All over campus groups of students gathered to talk about their summers and get to know one another again. UD gazed at them as they lounged in the evening light. Beautiful.

Group picture, Homogeneous Immunoglobulin Workshop, 1969. National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland.

UD‘s father, Herbert J. Rapp, National Cancer Institute, is eighth from the left. In the middle of the picture. Standing between two guys wearing glasses. I scrawled a little blue line on the top of his head to help you find him.

Because traffic and links to University Diaries have been exploding lately (I figured, as the academic year neared, readership would grow, but I’ve been surprised at just how much it’s grown), this might be a good time to introduce myself and my blog to new readers.

I teach literature at George Washington University, a wonderful school, insanely well-located right under the Presidential helicopter flight path. Over the years, from my office window on the sixth floor of Academic Center,

I’ve watched hundreds of limos float by, foreign flags flapping, armored SUVs fore and aft, sirens gone mad.

When truly exalted people come to speak on campus, we’re instructed to stay away from our windows. We can see black-suited men holding weaponry on the tops of the buildings across the street.

Our hospital, a few hundred yards from UD‘s office, hosts angina-ridden vice-presidents and madmen who shoot people at the Holocaust Museum.

UD‘s daughter was born in the old GW hospital, recently pulverized to make room for a corporate tower.

Most mornings, UD stops in the hospital’s Starbucks (there are countless Starbucks in and around campus) for a latté and a roll, though sometimes – because of security-sensitive patients – it’s not easy to get in. UD likes the fact that the hospital is steps from the Foggy Bottom Metro, so that she can move smoothly from a seat on the train to a seat in the café.

UD enjoys eavesdropping on interns.

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

UD‘s been on sabbatical for a year. It was strange for her, the other day, returning to campus for the first time in a long while. She met Carolyn, a student, for lunch, and after, as they walked back to Academic Center, they bumped into Dasha, another student of UD‘s.

Dasha and Carolyn know one another, and Dasha was excitedly on her way to her first law school class (she’s in an accelerated BA/JD program), so there was hugging and chatting and UD thought A rather sudden change from my sabbatical life in Key West, where I walked silently over the island knowing no one…

But why be surprised by these campus encounters? UD‘s been at GW for more than two decades, and she grew up in the Washington suburbs. If students don’t stop her to say hello, old high school buddies do. One of her GW friends, Helen, went to a Joan Baez concert with UD in 1969.

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

Since UD started this blog, she’s noted, as each academic year begins, various changes. Not at GW necessarily, but at many universities across the country. A few years ago, for instance, she registered the fact that landlines were disappearing from dorm rooms. (UD still hears landmines when people says landlines. This dates her somewhere around the First World War.) This year she reads about vanishing university email accounts for new students. (UD hasn’t used her GW account for years; everything’s forwarded to her GMAIL.)

It’s the larger university changes, though, that keep University Diaries going. If there’s one dominant theme in UD‘s writing on both of her blogs (she also blogs for Inside Higher Education), it’s the commercialization of the American university (UD also covers foreign universities) in all its manifestations — corrupt, para-professional campus athletics, mercenary hoarding of non-profit endowments, crass conflict of interest in medical schools.

But really, she looks at just about everything going on at universities.

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

An English professor, UD also, in her Scathing Online Schoolmarm persona, subjects terrible prose to stern correction.

She madly praises excellent prose.

She’s been known to write limericks and other verse forms here; she also analyzes the poetry of others, great and crappy.

…UD begins using this

as face cream, she
knows that it is finally
time for her to go shopping
at the mall. She needs
everything. It will take
hours. She returns to
University Diaries when
it’s all over.

Blake, D.H. Lawrence, Ted Hughes — our strongest poets make immediate experience present for us. They make language that makes the world right now, as we feel it and see it, alive in what Lawrence called its quivering momentaneity.

UD thought of this threesome while watching, with Mr. UD, from 5:30 to 6:30 this morning, a sunrise that started with blue rays over a dark sea and then proceeded to total cosmic pink.

Watching its changes, UD recalled this little Blake poem:

He who binds to himself a joy
Doth the winged life destroy.
He who kisses the joy as it flies,
Lives in eternity’s sunrise.

(John Tavener put this to music.)

It’s one of your nice neat paradoxes – try to stop the world and you’ll kill it; live life on the fly and you’ll live forever.

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

In a great essay about Hughes, Alice Oswald describes her discovery of him at a time in her life when she had a job as a gardener at the Royal Horticultural Society:

… I’d been up at dawn that morning, pruning apples all day. I was fed up with people floating past me using the word “idyllic” and I was fed up with reading about nature at one remove. I thought I’d rather hear a gardener’s or a farmer’s account of the landscape than any poet’s. Then I opened The Hawk in the Rain (Hughes’s first collection) and there was my worked-in world alive in all its freshness.

She mentions in particular a sunrise poem by Hughes, “The Horses.”

I climbed through woods in the hour-before-dawn dark.
Evil air, a frost-making stillness,

Not a leaf, not a bird –
A world cast in frost. I came out above the wood

Where my breath left tortuous statues in the iron light.
But the valleys were draining the darkness

Till the moorline – blackening dregs of the brightening grey –
Halved the sky ahead. And I saw the horses:

Huge in the dense grey – ten together –
Megalith-still. They breathed, making no move,

with draped manes and tilted hind-hooves,
Making no sound.

I passed: not one snorted or jerked its head.
Grey silent fragments

Of a grey silent world.

I listened in emptiness on the moor-ridge.
The curlew’s tear turned its edge on the silence.

Slowly detail leafed from the darkness. Then the sun
Orange, red, red erupted

Silently, and splitting to its core tore and flung cloud,
Shook the gulf open, showed blue,

And the big planets hanging –
I turned

Stumbling in the fever of a dream, down towards
The dark woods, from the kindling tops,

And came to the horses.
There, still they stood,
But now steaming and glistening under the flow of light,

Their draped stone manes, their tilted hind-hooves
Stirring under a thaw while all around them

The frost showed its fires. But still they made no sound.
Not one snorted or stamped,

Their hung heads patient as the horizons,
High over valleys in the red levelling rays –

In din of crowded streets, going among the years, the faces,
May I still meet my memory in so lonely a place

Between the streams and the red clouds, hearing the curlews,
Hearing the horizons endure.

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

Oswald comments:

This non-nostalgic way of writing is, to my mind, the only way of getting through to the animate part of nature, the soft growing tip. Hughes called it “the vital somewhat terrible spirit of natural life which is new in every second”. DH Lawrence, whose poems Hughes admired, called it “quivering momentaneity”. He spoke of the need for an “unrestful, ungraspable poetry of the sheer present”, which is a pretty good prediction of what Hughes was to write 50 or so years later.

It’s very strange to me, the way poems like this one by Hughes are in fact nostalgic, if you like — maybe very nostalgic. After all, the poem is remembering a transcendent moment in the speaker’s past, and remembering it not all that differently from the way Wordsworth, or Yeats – a later Romantic – would remember and render it … He tells it in the past tense, while a lot of contemporary poets would tell it in the present; and he ends his misty narrative with a prayer, for goodness sake:

May I still meet my memory in so lonely a place…

Or call it a hope, or whatever, but my point is that for a momentaneous poem, this one spends its time either in the past or anticipating the future.

And, I mean, a sunrise. What could be more Romantic? Romantic to the point – this poem being written in the twentieth century – of kitsch?

Well, but language matters. A world cast in frost. Every word snapped shut with a d or a t: world, cast, frost. Short shut lines. Frigid, tapping on the page like a frosty twig tapping on a window. Icy shivery words and lines that makes us feel, and shudder.

And this is no Romantic sunrise, with its blackening dregs of the brightening grey.

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

Megalith.

Breathe.

The sounds take us from the cold shut-in world to the exhaling horses — the world begins to make noise. Not language, but noise. The poet’s breath, the horses’ breath — breaths that conjure tortuous statues now coming to life in the sunlight. I listened in emptiness; and may I – he writes at the very end of the poem, continue hearing the horizons endure.

Sensory funny business here: You can’t listen in emptiness, and you can’t hear horizons. You listen in silence and you see horizons. Or so tightass literalist Scathing Online Schoolmarm would insist. Yet it’s precisely the weird momentous momentary sense of merging with the physical and metaphysical world, the experience of transcending your senses, that the poet recalls, brings back — by writing the poem, by explicitly asking in the poem that it be brought back, and by, perhaps, if you’re the right reader, like Alice Oswald, somehow conjuring it back — your version of it back — for you.

… the last one hundred percent political dictatorship of Europe,” said Mr UD when I read him an article my sister just sent me about Belarus. “By comparison, Russia is a great democracy.”

In 1993, in Diatlovo, he visited The Museum of Peoples’ Glory (or something like that; Mr. UD forgets), though his main purpose was to visit significant Soltan family sites. “The woman at the museum was absolutely shocked that someone showed up wanting to see it.”

I suppose when you hold on to icons of Soviet glory past their expiration date, this sort of thing will happen:

A massive statue of Soviet founder Vladimir Lenin collapsed on a man who was hanging from it Monday, killing him on the spot, authorities said.

The 21-year-old man was drunk when he climbed onto the five-meter (16-foot)-high plaster monument and hung from its arm, the Emergency Situations ministry said. It then broke into pieces and he was crushed.

The statue in the southeastern Belarus town of Uvarovichi was built in 1939…

UD‘s sunning in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware right now, but faithful readers know she lives in Bethesda, Maryland, a place UD, following her old friend David’s usage, calls ‘thesda.

In UD’s absence, lots has been happening up there. (Is it up? I think it’s across. I think we’re directly east of ‘thesda.) She’ll mention a couple of items here.

First, one of her ‘thesdan neighbors is going to jail because he did the revolving door dance too fast:

A former top NASA official was found guilty Thursday of breaking ethics laws by helping a consulting client get nearly $10 million of the space agency’s funds.

A jury found Courtney Stadd, of Bethesda, Md., illegally benefited a private client while on the agency’s payroll and lied to ethics officials. He faces up to 15 years in prison at sentencing, scheduled for Nov. 6.

Stadd was NASA’s chief of staff and White House liaison from 2001-2003, when he left to start a consulting business — Capital Solutions — that specialized in advising aerospace clients. But he came back for two months in 2005 as the interim No. 3 official at the request of President George W. Bush’s newly installed administrator, Mike Griffin, who wanted to reorganize the agency that was still reeling over the Columbia space shuttle disaster.

During that time, he steered $12 million in agency funds for earth science research to the state of Mississippi. One of his clients, Mississippi State University, ended up with $9.6 million.

… When Mary Cleave, acting director of NASA’s Earth-Sun System Division and a former astronaut, decided to conduct a nationwide search for bids for [an] earth science earmark, officials at Mississippi State were upset that they may not get the funds, according to e-mails introduced as evidence. Stadd’s contact at the university e-mailed him asking if he could “provide some prodding” from inside the agency.

Cleave testified that Stadd summoned her to his office and told her only $3 million should be put out for nationwide bids. The remaining $12 million, he told Cleave, should go to Mississippi because of an agreement between the state’s congressional delegation.

Afterward, Stadd tried to get the university to raise his fee from $7,000 a month to $10,000 a month, citing his help with the funding.

That last bit’s the ‘thesda Touch, The Mighty ‘thesda Touch (to paraphrase Jule Styne)… Now gimme more money…

Oh, and the second ‘thesdan thing … Actually, a Garrett Park thing — Garrett Park being the specific town where UD lives within the ‘thesdan metropolis… It’s about how despite the US Post Office closing hundreds of post offices across the country, they’re not going to close Garrett Park.

As you know, Garrett Parkers like UD do not get mail delivered to their doors. Everyone has a rented box at the post office. We like it that way. We fought to keep it that way. We like taking walks, and we like greeting our neighbors while picking up our mail.

Here’s a photo of the building
our post office is in.

It’s on the lower level. The first floor’s a restaurant (“It’s in the middle of nowhere off of Rockville Pike. I had to keep tapping the GPS to make sure it was working. ‘Uh, I don’t think there is anything to eat around here…’ ” “It is nestled in the woods, next to a train track, on a cul de sac in some cute little town in Maryland. Thank god for dashboard navigation system — otherwise I never would have found it.”), and the upper floor is town offices.

… Rehoboth Beach dispatches
from UD, here’s a glamour
shot of La Kid, taken
last June on the beach.

As always, blogging
continues apace,
whatever my location.

When UD looks out her back
windows at her overgrown forest,
it’s all about birds. They’re everywhere.

Just now, UD saw a female red
cockaded woodpecker on top of
her garden fence.