… of the University of Maryland College of Behavioral and Social Sciences Excellence in Teaching Award, “one of our most visible and prestigious means of recognizing [teaching] excellence.”
UD’s sister, the Morrissey fanatic, is here, and she’s taken some photos. Here’s one of zillions of roosters on the island, posing atop a column in front of an amazingly beautiful house on Southard Street.
This is from the Key West Butterfly Conservatory. The little buggers are all over the place.
One of the mad macaws at Nancy Forrester’s Secret Garden.
How a college grad would interpret the gift of a book of life advice written by a man who proceeded to take his own life, well, one would need a writer with Wallace’s darkly comic gifts to pen such a scene. One’s sympathies go out to the editors: how to publish a speech of 137 sentences into a book? The unfortunate solution was to place just one sentence per page, giving the book the look and feel of an oracular text: Khalil Gibran’s The Prophet or Rumi’s love poetry. Those who embraced Wallace’s phenomenal talent may find themselves wishing the Kenyon speech had been left unbound, to be folded into a future edition of his nonfiction as a three- or four-page coda. Here, when a three-word sentence—“And so on,” page 87—is forced to balance an entire page on its shoulders, the reader starts to feel sorry not only for the sentence, but—if such indulgences may be permitted—for Wallace, posthumous.
Get it? A 137-sentence college graduation speech by David Foster Wallace has been turned into a glossy fifteen dollar book by printing only one sentence – or sentence fragment – on each page.
And, you know, it’s a good speech, UD has written admiringly about it – but many of those pages express, as Wallace himself said, the self-evident.
The book’s packaged as self-help, Oprah-style. Part of its title is Living a Compassionate Life.
Live Your Best Life Now!
It might remind you of Randy Pausch, a similar phenom, though Pausch had more interesting things to say, and wrote with far more verve.
Or again it might remind you, with its page-per-sentence simplification, its big-print infantility, of Doctor Seuss.
It might remind you of
daily motivational calendars.
Deborah Digges, a poet and Tufts University professor of English, jumped off the top of the University of Massachusetts stadium while the Temple University women’s lacrosse team was practicing there. The team noticed her, “in the upper reaches of the stadium,” but thought little of it, and then they found her body.
She was an accomplished writer. Much of her poetry and prose chronicles the despair behind her suicide. Disillusionment, every reflective person’s experience, undid her.
In a memoir about her troubled son she writes, “I have been a snob, a bohemian snob who believed that the arts, music, poetry were religion enough . . . and that somehow, above all the groups in culture – rich and poor alike – we were superior in our passionate pursuits.”
Reading her, you get the sense of a person extraordinarily bifurcated, unable to overcome the gap between the beliefs and passions upon which she set her life, and the failure of those beliefs and passions.
Here’s one of her strongest poems. Read it first here, without my commentary:
RUNE FOR THE PARABLE OF DESPAIR
Little left of me that year [The poet recalls a terrible year of despair, which almost did her in.]—I had a vision
I was strata, atmosphere. [Little left of her. Mere air.]
Or it was that the host entire coded in my blood
found voice and shrieked, for instance,
at what we now call roads
and I must maneuver freeways, bridges with these inside me
falling to their knees beating the ground howling. [The self-eviscerating despair was so great that her very reality as a self was taken over by a “host” of shrieking creatures.]
One might well ask why they’d come forward—
fugitives flushed from a burning house,
converts fed down the aisles, [Should this be “led” down the aisles? UD isn’t sure – thinks maybe this is a typo…]
bumping and blubbering their way into revival light,
light so eroding, the human face is aberration,
the upright stance a freak
with no means otherwise. [How do I even stay upright under this despair?]
Some things won’t translate backwards.
Some things can’t be undone,
though it takes years to learn this, years. [The pain of recognizing that you’ve made unalterable mistakes in your life.]
Such were the serial exhaustions of my beliefs, [One by one, the convictions on which I grounded my life wore out.]
whatever drug worn off that must belong to youth,
or to the feminine, or simply to the genes begun a wintering.
Then I knew the purest bitterness,
as if my heart were a wrecking ball,
my love for the man an iron bell used of the wind,
calling to task a population,
calling them in, as from these fields,
before the stone wheel became speech,
before fire dropped from the sky to be caged and carried into the caves. [The fire of youthful romantic passion transmutes into an embittering, imprisoning flame.]
And so they came to be with me,
whom I suspect was nothing more to them than shelter,
a ransomed hall, a shipwreck among dead trees,
the fallen branches lichen-studded,
which they dragged into my rooms. [The host again; the sense of her self taken over by morbid aggressive forces of misery.]
And when the lights burned out they wept,
and when the heat was gone they gathered my rugs around them. [Again, even the flame of bitterness burns out eventually, and one is left with cold emptiness.]
I’d never known how quickly a house
can be taken back, taken down,
nor will I grant myself the balm—
though it’s been centuries—
that I was “blessed” to see it turned inside out,
the furniture thrown through the windows, and the books
to lie face up, riffling, swelling, until the pages
emptied into a thousand seasons, [An honest person, she won’t console herself with the facile notion that the total destruction of everything you’ve stood for and the end of your love affair is somehow purgative, clarifying, an energizing challenge to begin anew. She knows better. No pathetic “revival light” for her.]
books that once possessed the magnet pull of stars!
In the end I let them keep the house
the way they wanted, wash from the toilet,
hang yew boughs from the eaves,
my sturdy doors fallen from the hinges,
even my hair commingling with theirs— [She gives herself over to despair, lets everything go. The hosts take her over.]
huge animal clumps a-swirl in the eddies
of spiders’ eggs and broken teeth and cemetery moss and pine needles— [Great list here. Note how good poets can toss together a set of images and have them carry a theme — here, the theme of the dessication of her youthful fertility.]
until not one ornament was left that said I lived, [Preparing the Christmas theme with which she’ll end here.]
not even a drinking glass
I might have toasted with just as the clouds
shifted, my shadow disappeared, [Again the ‘little left of me’ theme.]
O, drink from once before my leaving, leaving.
With any luck, I sang, I’ll be in hell by Christmas. [Sardonic final line, anticipating a holiday release of suicide.]
***********
The surprise of dusk come early is from her poem Lilacs.
Besides the obvious question of why managers of a nonprofit educational institution were making hundreds of millions of dollars, perhaps it’s time to ask if this is a rational way to actually fund higher education.
… to express its anger at the university’s leadership. The draft resolution on disproportionate administrative salaries is here.
Via FITS News.
Background here.
… my ‘thesdan playmate’s famous sister, has died.
… but their content stinks. Here’s an example, from an opinion piece in today’s Boston Globe.
The title tells us The Way to Fight a Recession. The way to fight a recession is for businesses to keep going, expand, never say die, beat back their fear, etc. There’s a coffee shop chain that’s doing just that, and the writer commends them. But there’s another business, a developer named Harvard, that isn’t doing that, and the writer berates them.
… I’m standing along Western Avenue in Allston, construction site of Harvard University’s much trumpeted science center. The new complex is just the first part of what has been promised to be an epic transformation of the area. Or at least, that was the hope. The tall red construction cranes are still busy clearing the area, but Drew Faust, Harvard’s president, has just announced that the university is putting on the brakes. For the moment, work proceeds, but at the end of the year the school will reassess. This has come as a shock to many, especially Allston residents, who now fear they may be stuck indefinitely with what some call the Harvard Hole. And the rest of the projects? No one is saying, but things don’t look good.
Both of these are recession stories, tales of two significant organizations (Harvard, America’s oldest college, and Nespresso, a unit of Swiss food giant Nestle) with two different approaches to the economic crisis. One bulls forward. The other quails. [Yeah, what’s Harvard afraid of? Ain’t it a for-profit corporation just like Nestle? Isn’t it all about the bottom line, just like Nestle?]
… A reported 30 percent drop in the value of its endowment seems to have thrown the university into a tizzy. [A few hundred million off their bottom line and look what the weenies do! A tizzy! Don’t they know they’re a money-generating multinational that has to keep going in order to do what they’ve been created to do — generate money?]
… Economies are strange things. Sophisticated computer modeling, Nobel Prizes, and great thinkers notwithstanding, no one can really explain how to make them grow or why they shrink. Presented with an illness, a group of doctors would pretty quickly figure out how to assess, diagnose, and treat. That’s because medicine really is a science. Economics, pretensions otherwise, is not. Put 100 economists in a room, and the only sure thing you’d get would be 100 different theories. One can see this in today’s throw-it-on-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks approach to economic policy making or in the profession’s slippery language: consumer “confidence,” “virtuous” circles, “giddy” (or “panicked”) investors. There’s an almost self-fulfilling, touchy-feely quality to this: If we believe things are going to be good, then they will be. If we believe otherwise, then they won’t be. [Put aside the fact that medicine — especially that queen of twisted research and conflict of interest, psychiatry — is a notoriously inexact science. Concentrate only on the nonchalance with which this writer dismisses the many economists who warned money managers like those at Harvard that their risky investments would implode.]
So when a company such as Nespresso spends money and makes plans, it sends a message — the bad times will end, growth will resume. If enough companies behaved the same way, then indeed, the economy would turn. Harvard, too, is sending a message. “If Harvard can’t build, who can?” worried one construction industry publication. Perhaps, many will conclude, no one can, and, as a consequence, no one will. [Yes, the American construction giant Harvard needs to set an example, so that other construction companies around the country — Yale, Princeton — and other more specialized builders — for instance, sport franchise/construction ventures like the University of Georgia and the University of Minnesota, can be emboldened by Harvard’s business plan and keep growing.] …
… are excited about the prospect of travel to Cuba, and this news will certainly cheer them:
President Obama will announce today that he is lifting travel restrictions that block Cuban Americans from traveling to Cuba and will relax the rules governing what items can be sent to the island, a senior White House official said.
The decision does not lift the trade embargo on communist Cuba but eases the prohibitions that have restricted Cuban Americans from visiting their relatives and has limited what they can send back home.
No, UD still can’t go. But maybe soon.
… about Peter Zumthor,
the Swiss architect who
just won this year’s
Pritzker award.
It should be up pretty soon.
… an artist who’s a close family friend.
He just got a Guggenheim!
UD’s favorite paper thought it’d be a great idea to have Ezra Merkin’s sister write about the Madoff/Merkin scandal, and his sister thought so too.
I mean, this would be fun all around: Daphne Merkin could use the paper’s editorial pages to try to exonerate her brother, the NYT could boast of its proximity to high-society banditry, and NYT readers could satisfy their obscene curiosity as to how the sister of one of the major financial malefactors of our time feels about her brother … Sort of like Shot in the Heart for rich people…
But now the paper’s public editor thinks maybe there were some problems in the plan:
Times readers who realized the connection protested that the newspaper had given Ezra Merkin’s sister a platform to make what they saw as a veiled defense of his conduct without coming clean about the depth of his involvement.
“Her column attempts to put some of the blame on the investors, but the people who invested with her brother knew nothing about Madoff,” said Jane Isay of Manhattan. “Daphne Merkin is a good writer, but readers might consider her ideas more analytically if they knew who her brother actually is, and what he has actually done.”
Daphne Merkin is a very good writer, able to mix it up quite splendidly. NYT readers as a result really need to be on their toes. The paper’s not going to help them.
*************************
Update: America’s most high-profile synagogue continues to be run by Merkin and Ira Rennert, a most godly pair.
From the Washington College newspaper:
… [F]ish are not the only animals living on our campus. Junior Robbie Dinneen keeps two sugar gliders (a small marsupial) in his Talbot room named Jager and Maui. One is male and the other is female. Interestingly enough, these two have yet to mate. Dinneen said it’s really easy to take care of them. The most important thing is to give them a lot of attention because they can get depressed pretty quickly. He has never had any problems with Public Safety, and the majority of people really like the sugar gliders.
Another junior, who would like to remain anonymous, has a soft side for keeping rats. Last year he had two rats in his dorm on campus and this year he houses a whopping seven rats in his apartment off-campus. The seven rats are all girls named Peaches, Pumpkin, Bridget, Xing Xing, Mimi, Luffy and Panya.
Concerning difficulties with caring for them, all he said was, “It’s a bit tough to find supplies for them, especially now that the Pet Store is closed. Still, I try to load up on bedding and stuff whenever I go home.”
Luckily, he never had any problem with Public Safety. He did want us to know, “Rats aren’t as scary as movies and television make them out to be. When they’re healthy and happy, they’re actually more like little dogs than rodents. They make great pets!”
One senior girl agrees, who wishes to remain anonymous, but has joint custody with another girl on campus of two boy rats named Mator and Achilles. She said she opted to get boy rats because they are more social and friendlier.
“I think that having pets is a great thing,” she said. The problem is, she said, they can smell and it’s sometimes difficult to pay for food and bedding. But despite that, she said, “I think the no pets policy on campus is kind of ridiculous.”
Last year, I kept two pet rats in my on-campus room. I also agree that rats make fantastic pets. My roommate and I shared them, though she mostly took care of them. We never had any issues with Public Safety because we made sure not many people knew about them. Our RA knew we had them and assured us that as long as we kept them out of trouble she wouldn’t make us get rid of them.
My first year here at Washington College, I lived in Queen Anne dorm and roomed with a sophomore. I waited three days for her to arrive, and when she finally got here, the first thing she introduced me to was her pet hedgehog. Unfortunately, after a while word spread and Public Safety made her take the hedgehog home…
The scrappy, much-maligned firm has gone straight for the heart of evil by taking on the great and powerful goldmansachs666.com, a blog unfriendly to GS.
Here we are in the midst of the worst credit crisis in memory and the bank was forced to take bailout money from the government shortly after it was forced to change its structure from an investment bank to a bank holding company.
Really, Lloyd? Fighting Goldmansachs666.com is where you want to put your money right now?
… How long Morgan will last in this legal battle with Goldman Sachs will likely depend on the generosity and effectiveness of his lawyers. But how long Goldman will last may well depend on the level of populist rage that fueled the very existence of Morgan’s site in the first place.
First, make that our money.
And second, UD finds this populist rage thing very interesting. Evidence accumulates that many Americans have had enough of the massive greed of our recent markets and marketeers.
But what can do we do? They’ve got the government as sewed up as they’ve got the banks. As Ben Stein reminds us in today’s New York Times, “Wall Street knows how to get its hooks into government. This is how the world works. Money talks.”
*******************
Thanks for the tip, RJO.
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Update: When GS decides to go after satire too, they should keep an eye on this author’s projected book:
The Takeover: Goldman Sachs and the Leveraged Buyout of America
No single company has ever had the prolonged hold on the American political establishment that has been achieved by Goldman Sachs. Of the last four Goldman CEOs, two have been chief economic advisor to the president (Rubin and Friedman), two have been Treasury Secretary (Rubin and Paulson), and one has been a governor and a senator (Corzine). But the firm’s unparalleled influence has extended for decades from former Deputy Treasury John Whitehead thru Bush 43 White House Chief of Staff Josh Bolton to current Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner’s chief of staff plus the guy who runs the TARP program plus there are rumors that new White House public liaison official Kal Penn’s movie Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle was actually backed with Goldman money. During this period in which Goldman rode the government like a pony, U.S. policy has not only thrown off the regulatory shackles that freed them to make money by the boatload, the USG has intervened directly and regularly to the benefit of Goldman from the Tequila Crisis “bail-in” to the AIG “bail out.” How can this have happened? Why has the media rolled over and let Goldman scratch them on the belly throughout? … Why is the government still full of them and others from even less reputable financial institutions (which, to Goldman’s credit, is virtually all others)? Why are we still drinking the Kool Aid that somehow these people have special powers after all we have been through? This book will provide answers. (Unless Goldman pays the author more to shut up. In which case, this one, I volunteer to write…well, to be lucratively co-opted out of writing.)
Frank Rich, New York Times:
… Lawrence Summers, the president’s chief economic adviser, made $5.2 million in 2008 from a hedge fund, D. E. Shaw, for a one-day-a-week job. He also earned $2.7 million in speaking fees from the likes of Citigroup and Goldman Sachs. Those institutions are not merely the beneficiaries of taxpayers’ bailouts since the crash. They also benefited during the boom from government favors: the Wall Street deregulation that both Summers and Robert Rubin, his mentor and predecessor as Treasury secretary, championed in the Clinton administration. This dynamic duo’s innovative gift to their country was banks “too big to fail.”
Some spoilsports raise the conflict-of-interest question about Summers: Can he be a fair broker of the bailout when he so recently received lavish compensation from some of its present and, no doubt, future players? This question can be answered only when every transaction in the new “public-private investment plan” to buy the banks’ toxic assets is made transparent. We need verification that this deal is not, as the economist Joseph Stiglitz has warned, a Rube Goldberg contraption contrived to facilitate “huge transfers of wealth to the financial markets” from taxpayers.
But perhaps I’ve become numb to the perennial and bipartisan revolving-door incestuousness of Washington and Wall Street. I was less shocked by the White House’s disclosure of Summers’s recent paydays than by a bit of reporting that appeared deep down in the Times follow-up article on that initial news. The reporter Louise Story wrote that Summers had done consulting work for another hedge fund, Taconic Capital Advisors, from 2004 to 2006, while still president of Harvard.
That the highly paid leader of arguably America’s most esteemed educational institution (disclosure: I went there) would simultaneously freelance as a hedge-fund guy might stand as a symbol for the values of our time. At the start of his stormy and short-lived presidency, Summers picked a fight with Cornel West for allegedly neglecting his professorial duties by taking on such extracurricular tasks as cutting a spoken-word CD. Yet Summers saw no conflict with moonlighting in the money racket while running the entire university. The students didn’t even get a CD for his efforts — and Harvard’s deflated endowment, now in a daunting liquidity crisis, didn’t exactly benefit either.
Summers’s dual portfolio in Cambridge has already led to one potential intermingling of private business and public policy in his new White House post. He tried — and, mercifully, failed — to install the co-founder of Taconic in the job of running the TARP bailouts. But again, Summers’s potential conflicts of interest seem less telling than the conflict of values that his Harvard double-résumé exemplifies…
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Ben Stein, New York Times
… I read that Lawrence H. Summers — wonderful guy, fine economist, former Harvard president, high-ranking economic adviser to Mr. Obama — was paid about $5 million last year by a large hedge fund, D. E. Shaw.
… If anyone thinks that a man who has had a taste of honey from Wall Street on that scale will ever really crack the whip on Wall Street, he’s dreaming. Wall Street knows how to get its hooks into government. This is how the world works. Money talks.