… quotes this sentence from an English professor’s book about the history of creative writing programs:

Technomodernism identifies with the ‘emptiness’ of pure formality — that is, with the systemacity of the system itself, drawing the machine to itself in a form of ontological prosthesis.

McGrath comments:

[Writing like this] may explain why creative writing is so popular. If stuff like this is what you get to read in regular English class, then no wonder students would rather write texts of their own.

What was that sentence again?

Technomodernism identifies with the ‘emptiness’ of pure formality — that is, with the systemacity of the system itself, drawing the machine to itself in a form of ontological prosthesis.

Let me pull on my ontological prosthesis and see what I can make of this.

[Deep breath.]

[Expulsion of breath.]

[Overwhelming sense of futility.]

[Reminder that you have clicked on University Diaries because you’re in desperate need of something beyond the ’emptiness’ of pure formality.]

Okay. The sentence appears to want to help us understand what an artistic movement, technomodernism, is. We cannot help but note, however, that the sentence does not help us. It hurts us. It hurts our understanding, and it hurts our sense of beauty. Unlike Susan Boyle who is not pretty but can sing, this sentence is not pretty and cannot sing.

Problems start almost immediately. What can it mean to say that an artistic movement identifies with something? People identify with things; things do not identify with things.

And yes. My prosthesis edges
toward the author’s upcoming
quotation marks like a ouija
pointer loaded for bear.

Emptiness, pure, and formality all mean pretty much the same thing in this sentence, but only emptiness gets the mysterious quotation marks. Why? Our sense of confusion deepens. Is pure formality — the simple functional working of this or that machine, let’s assume he means — not empty? Why not?

Have you ever seen the word systemacity before? I ain’t. I’ve seen systematicity, though I’m not proud of it. I’m not proud I hang out on street corners where people use words like systematicity, but systematicity is in fact a word. You can look it up.

You will not find systemacity in the dictionary.

Not that you won’t find it used! Google it and discover that it’s a very specialized word, used mainly by mathematicians and linguists. Why would a writer, in an effort to help people understand something, use a word like systemacity?

… drawing the machine to itself in a form of ontological prosthesis.

The repetition of “itself” only deepens our sense that instead of getting out of a confusing and circular world, we are entering it more and more surely. And what can it mean to draw a machine to itself? The word draw is clearly the problem here. What sort of an act is this? Artists draw, and the subject is art, so our mind goes perhaps to the visual arts and reads draw literally. But this can’t be what the author intends. Who or what is doing the drawing, and what sort of drawing is this? Dunno.

I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that the idea behind ontological prosthesis is that the technomodernist attempts to lend life (ontology — being) to lifeless empty machines by infusing a kind of aesthetic vibrancy, a presentness, into the technological object. This infusion is an artificial construction, as all art is, and therefore it’s …prosthetic.

Have I made myself clear?

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Update, correction: A reader who has looked at the book writes in this post’s comment thread:

[T]he Times seems to have misquoted the sentence from the book, which uses the word “systematicity,” not “systemacity.”

… by UD‘s favorite novelist, Don DeLillo, appears in the latest Esquire.

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Update before we go any further: A reader, James, points out that although it stands alone as a story in Esquire, this is in fact an excerpt from the final pages of DeLillo’s novel Cosmopolis. I didn’t recall this at all (I sped through Cosmopolis, disliking it from the first page, so maybe that’s the reason.), and I’m very grateful to James for reminding me.

Since it’s presented as a self-standing story in Esquire, I’m going to keep this post. Just keep in mind that it is also part of a novel.

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DeLillo’s short stories, like his plays, don’t do much for UD. His strange and beautiful writing style needs space to work its magic; it needs space and it needs a shifting around of scenes, a sort of pastichy movement. It also needs to stretch out in terms of presenting us with the complicated fullness of consciousnesses.

Packed tightly, in a very brief narrative, DeLillo’s prose seems to me schematic. If you know his writing, you can see all too clearly in a short story like this one in Esquire his playing out and weaving in of familiar themes — simulacral urban culture, in which real trauma is replaced by play-acted trauma; the replacement of a sense of reality and a sense of privacy by a sense of surreality, and by the public exposure of everyone’s life that constant filming and other forms of voyeurism prompt; a conviction, despite this exteriorization of human life, that you’re radically isolated from other people, even from the person to whom you’re married; the sad pathos of our bodies, emblems of our flickering existence…

As in Advanced Disaster Management’s simulated disaster on the streets of Jack Gladney’s town in White Noise, so here DeLillo’s fascinated by the vague line between contrived human catastrophe and — even as we’re only simulating it — the real disaster of our fragile embodiment inside a dangerous world.

Were they pretending to be naked, or were they naked?

Part of a crowd of naked living bodies lying motionless on a New York City street, posing for a scene in a film, DeLillo’s narrator nicely describes the surface of a city street when it’s right up against your face:

He felt the textural variation of slubs of chewing gum compressed by decades of traffic. He smelled the ground fumes, the oil leaks and rubbery skids, summers of hot tar.

A professor at Columbia University’s Teachers College who was fired over plagiarism allegations is suing the graduate school for $200 million.

Madonna Constantine filed a lawsuit in Manhattan Supreme Court on Tuesday calling her 2008 firing an “academic lynching.”

Constantine was a clinical psychology professor at Teachers College, which is affiliated with Columbia University. She says her firing was fueled by “academic rivalry and political intrigue.”

Teachers College says the lawsuit has no merit and intends to defend itself vigorously.

Constantine’s firing came after a noose was found dangling from her office door. Police never determined who put it there…

Associated Press.

… weren’t grim enough.

A plaything of hacks, Chicago State University has apparently been kicked around one too many times for its long-suffering faculty.  They’ve only just evicted President Elnora Daniel – a party girl with a penchant for long, university-subsidized Caribbean cruises – and now the school’s hopeless board of trustees wants to unload another hack on them.

It’s not every day that a faculty pulls itself together to ask the governor to remove its entire board of trustees, and to halt the appointment of its next president, but that’s what CSU’s professors have done.

Chicago State University faculty took the unusual step Tuesday of asking Gov. Pat Quinn to remove the university’s board of trustees.

The unanimous request from the Faculty Senate, which comes days before trustees plan to announce their decision on the next university leader, also asks Quinn to stop the board from hiring a president.

Chicago State faculty and students have argued they were excluded from the presidential search process and have criticized the two finalists as local political insiders. On Friday, 13 of the 15 members of the campus’ search advisory committee resigned in protest.

The finalists are Carol Adams, secretary of the Illinois Department of Human Services, and Wayne Watson, the retiring chancellor of City Colleges of Chicago.

[From earlier news coverage: “Donald Pettis, president of Chicago State’s alumni association and an advisory committee member, said that only one of the 14 committee members voted for Adams. None voted for Watson…”]

Rev. Leon Finney, the Chicago State board chairman, did not respond to a request for comment…

Yeah, why comment. Really, why bother. Who cares.

… a tribute to Mother Earth.

Tracy Nelson and Mother Earth, that is, and the song my ‘thesdan playmate played for me in the year of Earth Day’s founding.

I’ve never stopped listening to it and singing it.

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Earth Day Fun Fact!

UD went to Kensington Junior High School with Happy Nelson, son of Gaylord Nelson (D-Wisconsin), who started Earth Day.

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One more thing. If UD does have an Earth Day post, I guess it’d be this one, from earlier this year, at Rehoboth Beach.

… by the write-up she got today in The Tenants of Colson Hall (great name) — the blog of the English department at West Virginia University. She thanks the Tenants, and welcomes their readers.

From “The Rage of the Privileged Class,” in New York magazine.

I asked [a Goldman Sachs veteran] what will happen if Congress succeeds in regulating compensation. “These guys will not work on Wall Street,” he says flatly. “People go to Wall Street out of greed. When I was interviewing for jobs, frequently some form of the question came up: How much do you want to make money? If my answer was something like—and it wasn’t—but if my answer was, ‘I’m here for intellectual betterment,’ their response might have been, ‘University is a great place for you.’ They want people who think ‘I’m greedy, I want to be a billionaire.’ That was viewed as a really good thing.”

… for her blog at Inside Higher Education.

From the News-Democrat.

Throughout East St. Louis Senior High School, Principal Ethel Shanklin has been known as “Dr. Shanklin.”

At numerous online sites connected to School District 189, Shanklin has been referred to as “Dr. Shanklin,” a reference, she says, to a doctorate in education degree or its equivalent, which she claims to have received from Southern Illinois University Edwardsville in May 2007.

But no more.

At the request of the News-Democrat, District 189 Superintendent Theresa Saunders checked Shanklin’s personnel file. Saunders said to her surprise, she found no proof of a doctorate degree or its equivalent.

She said she believes that Shanklin does not hold a doctorate degree and ordered her to tell her staff that she is not doctor.

“She told the staff today,” Saunders said Wednesday.

Saunders said Shanklin also planned to tell an assembly of high school students that she would no longer refer to herself as “Dr. Shanklin.”

Shanklin said she mistakely thought that a two-year “education specialist” degree she completed at SIUE was the last step for a doctorate in education.

But Shanklin could not have received such a degree from SIUE because the university’s School of Education does not offer a doctorate in education, spokesman Greg Conroy said.

A check of the university’s computerized records showed that what Shanklin received was a two-year “education specialist” degree, which Conroy called an “advanced degree” but not a doctorate. This degree stated she majored in “education administration.”

Conroy said a person holding this degree, “should not be calling themselves a doctor.”

Shanklin said, “I don’t have a piece of paper stating that I have a doctorate,” but insisted during a telephone interview last week that what she received from SIUE allows her to refer to herself as “doctor.” She said her salary is not based on having a doctorate.

Saunders said after investigating, she believes Shanklin was confused and did not intend to deceive…

… but you have to admit this is good stuff. From Washington Square News, student newspaper of New York University:

J. Ezra Merkin allegedly lost $24 million of NYU’s money by investing with Bernard Madoff. Now, according to recently released court documents, he had been warned to steer clear of Madoff in the early ’90s by a former employee but ignored the advice.

Victor Teicher, who managed Merkin’s Ariel Fund Ltd., told Merkin that he found some of Madoff’s practices to be questionable.

… “He told me sometime — perhaps it was ’92 or ’93, that he was considering investing with Bernie Madoff,” Teicher said in the Feb. 9 deposition. “He described Madoff in terms of what he was doing and the consistency of the returns, and I felt that that was just not possible.”

But Merkin continued to invest with Madoff, who pleaded guilty to stealing $65 billion and now faces up to 150 years in prison when he is sentenced in June.

… “Ezra had positioned himself in the marketplace as someone who was very knowledge about investing and researching matters,” Teicher said. “People believed that that was his specialty.”

NYU lost $24 million when it invested with Merkin’s fund after the university had directly told him not to invest with Madoff.

… “He ultimately fooled himself in the sense that by positioning himself in the marketplace as someone who does a lot of research, he actually believed it,” Teicher said.

Teicher graduated from the Stern School of Business in 1976 with a master’s of business administration in finance. He was convicted for insider trading in 1990. [Nice succinct cv there.  MBA → Insider trading… Okay….  MBA prepares you nicely for this sort of outcome, I guess, if you go by the numbers of degree recipients who, like Teicher … Anyway.   What UD really finds intriguing here are the dates of various events.  Teicher says he advised Merkin against Madoff well after his conviction.  So Merkin’s getting advice about the Ponzi mastermind of the century from someone recently convicted of insider trading.  Right?  Or am I getting this wrong?  If I’m right, Daphne Merkin needs to write another op-ed piece in the New York Times about how her brother was surrounded by criminals and had no place else to turn.]

After Madoff’s scheme fell apart, Teicher and Merkin had several e-mail and phone exchanges.

“You, however, took a brilliant career and actively, willingly, wiped your ass with it when it was obvious that you [knew what you] were doing,” Teicher said in his testimony.

In a Crimson article with suggestions for reducing the university’s budget, the writer includes this:

Harvard should cut its wasteful internal public relations division. The Harvard Gazette and the other fluff put out by the Harvard Office of Communications ought to be axed on both financial and environmental grounds. The publications and their staffs cost a few million dollars each year. Externally, they do nothing to strengthen Harvard’s brand. Internally, they are regarded as propaganda.

Certainly UD has complained for years on this blog about too much Harvard propaganda in her mailbox. But why not let some of this stuff go online?

After all, UD has a soft spot for the Gazette.

From an interview with Emily Haines, Canadian rock star.

Interviewer: In [a recent] documentary you said that you were unhappy and you weren’t sure where your life was headed. I’m sure a lot of people must have heard that and been like, “What is she talking about? She’s a rock star, how could you be unhappy? There’s no direction? What is she talking about?” What would you say to people who would react like that?

[Haines] I’d say, has nobody read Great Jones Street, by Don DeLillo? [Laughs] That’s what I’d say. You should read it.

[Interviewer] What’s it about?

[Haines] It’s about this rock star who just disappears from the whole reality that he’s in because he just can’t handle it any more. And for me, it wasn’t like a particularly dramatic thing. I think I was just being honest, that the idea of what a life is supposed to be like for a successful musician is such a trap, and it’s a trick. We’re really determined as people to not have our lives be something that we’ve lost control of, and that’s the trade off, you know? Like, that’s the cost of success—that you never have time for anyone but yourself, you’re constantly exhausted, you don’t have a home, your relationships are always in shambles. Like, no fuckin’ way. I’m not doing that. So when we came off of the last run, it was like, we’d been touring for 3 years before Live It Out—you know, 300 shows a year, literally—and then 3 years after Live It Out, and then I put out a solo record, and then I did that for a year, and the day I get home and drop my bag it’s like, ‘Okay, time to write a new record.’

… [Interviewer] Why did you choose Buenos Aires as the place to kind of escape to?

[Haines] Because nobody knew us. I didn’t know a single person. I didn’t know anything about it except things that intrigued me historically, and architecturally. But more importantly, I was just looking for a room that had a piano, and it was literally like a search engine thing, like, ‘PIANO, ROOM, CITY, RENT’.

From the obituary of Princeton engineering professor Norman Sollenberger:

… Sollenberger was a fine teacher who deeply cared for his students, according to colleagues. He once devoted many hours to ensuring a young civil engineering student from Hong Kong, a rarity in the 1950s, would graduate. That engineer, Gordon Y.S. Wu, went on to help found a major Hong Kong-based construction firm. When he returned to Princeton years later to announce a record-breaking $100 million gift to the University, the first person Wu asked to visit was Sollenberger.

Feral rabbits have been the bane of the University of Victoria for years, but now the problem is moving off campus.

No one knows when the first rabbit appeared on campus, but an estimated 1,500 of them currently call it home.

The university has come under pressure to cull the animals by angry neighbours but how that might be accomplished is fuelling a raging debate.

Proponents of the doomsday approach have taken a shine to something called the Rodenator.

The device, according to its U.S. manufacturer, “delivers a precisely measured mixture of propane and oxygen into the tunnel or burrow of invasive pests. This mixture is then detonated by the operator, causing an instantaneous underground shock wave of concussive force that eliminates the pests and in some (species specific) cases collapses some of the existing tunnel structure thus preventing immediate reinfestation.”

Not surprisingly, animal rights advocates are not wild about that option, and university officials have said they plan to try non-lethal approaches first.

Local veterinarian Nick Shaw has offered to perform vasectomies on the rabbits, but he says even that won’t solve all of the bunny problems…

CBC