… attack on for-profit universities. The article is unavailable online.
We’re really not in Rehoboth anymore.
I’m on a boardwalk near Pier House, and the ocean beyond the ropes and poles is aquavelva.
The sky, divided from it by a thin line, is a weaker, more conventional, blue. Sky blue.
Pelicans and gulls rest on pilings. The pilings are graywhite against the aquavelva.
“Try to get it away from the pelicans and near the barracuda.”
A guy fishing off the pier gives advice to another guy who, having caught a small fish, drags it back and forth in the water in hopes of catching a barracuda with it.
“Fastest fish in the water,” the first guy says to me. “Had a big mackerel the other day and I’m reeling it in and here comes a barracuda and just grabs it.”
But I’m trying to get across the beaming fantasy, the crayola storyboard, of UD‘s current setting. Such a cotton candy concoction. Nature can’t be serious.
The cotton is the clouds, stretched out and using just enough of the sky to be picturesque. Seaplanes buzz beneath them.
“The gloss the sun puts on the surroundings – the triumph of life, so to speak, the flourishing of everything makes me despair.” This is Saul Bellow’s narrator in Ravelstein, describing a peak moment in Paris in June. “I’ll never be able to keep up with all the massed hours of life-triumphant.”
You feel that about the people around you along the water in Key West. There’s an unhappy assurance of their inability to keep up.
A model of good writing, complete with a clever rounding back to his literary theme at the end.
I found these two paragraphs in particular a precise evocation of what I see and feel every night.
Taking my cue from the Wallace Stevens poem ”The Idea of Order at Key West,” which describes the harbor at night, I found myself doing a lot of walking around Key West after dark – not just the harbor with its colored reflections (”emblazoned zones and fiery poles,” as Stevens writes), but the residential streets as well. It’s cooler for one thing, and you don’t have the distraction of the daytime tourist trolleys. The old frame houses, which somehow look New Englandy and tropical at the same time, send out light from their shuttered windows, sometimes through the beautifully complex interference of palm fronds.
All sorts of flower fragrances fill the air, plus the occasional pungency of deep-fried conch fritters when you pass one of the boatmen’s houses. The tropical plants – flame trees, orchid tree, royal poinciana, kapok, jacaranda – show handsomely in the lamplight. Occasionally you come into an open space where the sky looms into prominence, with high, heaped-up cumulus clouds against the midnight blue background, a scattered handful of stars, and perhaps a crescent moon.
It’s by Alfred Corn, and it came out in the New York Times in 1988.
… for $500,000 (and the price keeps dropping). It’s a couple of blocks away from UD‘s place, and it’s part of a small hidden compound where Richard Wilbur, John Ciardi, and Ralph Ellison also lived.
Scroll down to 719 Windsor Lane.
… reminds us about the openness of university classrooms.
The University of Oklahoma issued a warning to professors on Thursday after several men walked into a classroom and refused to leave.
In the alert issued to Arts and Sciences chairs and directors, Dean Paul Bell Jr. warned staffers about the incident last Wednesday.
It said two groups of men went into two large adjacent lecture halls in Dale Hall. The letter said that the men walked in uniform and most of them sat down at the same time, while two stood by the back doors. The letter said the men refused to leave when asked by the instructor, but eventually did walk out without incident.
In uniform meaning wearing uniforms, or simply together? The same way?
Could be a frat prank, but it’s very similar to the way terrorist dry runs look. There have been enough mass shootings at American universities for this to be extremely scary behavior.
If it were only one classroom, I’d wonder about some local gang protecting a member in the class. This is more sinister.
… here’s how to write total nothingness, at a cost to the citizens of Ohio of over a million dollars a year.
Frost and Wallace Stevens were together on a train to Florida.
The two poets were nervous with each other. Stevens however was more in the vacationer’s mood. He made witty remarks, and finally said, “The trouble with your poetry, Frost, is that it has subjects.”
This begins to get at UD‘s problem with Frost. Many of his poems have a sort of didactic, subject-driven intentionality about them. Seamus Heaney talks about “the knowingness that mars [certain] poems by Frost.” Rather than gradually reveal the writer’s consciousness, and, in so doing, suggest the living, ongoing, tentative complexity of what one person thinks about the world, these poems simply, flatly, state the facts of existence. Their slightly over-engineered rhymes don’t help matters.
Robert Lowell notes what those subjects are: “[I]solation, extinction, and the learning of human limitation. These three themes combine, I think, in a single main theme, that of a man moving through the formless, the lawless and the free, of moving into snow, air, ocean, waste, despair, death, and madness. When the limits are reached, and sometimes almost passed, the man returns.”
Or not. In a poem like Desert Places, the experience of nothingness is all there is, without much movement, and therefore with no real return:
Snow falling and night falling fast, oh, fast
In a field I looked into going past,
And the ground almost covered smooth in snow,
But a few weeds and stubble showing last.
The woods around it have it — it is theirs.
All animals are smothered in their lairs.
I am too absent-spirited to count;
The loneliness includes me unawares.
And lonely as it is, that loneliness
Will be more lonely ere it will be less—
A blanker whiteness of benighted snow
With no expression, nothing to express.
They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between stars — on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places.
The first rather panicky lines make us expect a serious reckoning with nothingness; we await the emotional effect of this blank world on the poet. But for me at least the rest of the poem reads like poetry rather than utterance, especially the awkwardly redundant “no expression, nothing to express.” It feels like a strategic poet manipulating words, rather than a consciousness responding to things.
Which is why the final lines are for UD at once wonderful and bogus. I mean, they’re perfect; the perfect ending to a poem about nihilism, depression, morbidness, all those subjects. But it’s too neat for me. I don’t, on some very important level, believe Frost. Not a drop of blood seems spilled.
Compare this similar poem by Auden. I mean, similar in that he’s trying also to evoke inner emptiness.
Brussels in Winter
Wandering through cold streets tangled like old string,
Coming on fountains rigid in the frost,
Its formula escapes you; it has lost
The certainty that constitutes a thing.
Only the old, the hungry and the humbled
Keep at this temperature a sense of place,
And in their misery are all assembled;
The winter holds them like an Opera-House.
Ridges of rich apartments loom to-night
Where isolated windows glow like farms,
A phrase goes packed with meaning like a van,
A look contains the history of man,
And fifty francs will earn a stranger right
To take the shuddering city in his arms.
*******************************
Why is this a much better poem, IMHO?
Hold on. I need to take a break.
… in UD‘s Key West apartment has a remarkably good library, and among its books is Auden’s Collected Poems.
Every time UD starts reading a Robert Frost poem BECAUSE SHE PROMISED YOU SHE’D WRITE ABOUT ONE ON THIS BLOG BECAUSE FROST LIVED ON KEY WEST she gets about four lines in, puts it aside, and reads an Auden poem instead. What does this mean, doctor?
Anyway. It says here that when UD walks through Frost’s KW garden, which she’s about to do, she’ll hear his poetry coming off the walls. Something special in the air. Here I go.
Madoff will likely join a corps of aging white-collar convicts including former WorldCom Inc. Chief Executive Officer Bernard Ebbers, 67, now housed at the Federal Correctional Institution in Oakdale, Louisiana, and John Rigas, 84, the ex-CEO of Adelphia Communications Corp. who is imprisoned at the Federal Correctional Institution in Butner, North Carolina.
Possible spinoff: The Producers.
… Madoff will have to take a job in prison that will pay anywhere from 12 cents to 40 cents an hour… Offering inmates help with legal or financial needs might give Madoff a certain “diplomatic immunity”…
… the “I’m a CEO” bullshit.
In regards to administrative salaries, I was appalled to hear the defense of President Baker’s salary was to compare his position to the salaries of CEOs in the private sector. As far as I’m concerned, if salary is an issue, then he is welcome to leave and find himself a well-paying company to lead. I want someone heading our school who is here because he is passionate about the students he is serving… [To] say that [President Baker] … takes a salary of $328,000 with allowances over $60,000 to “do public service”? I would rather see a few new faculty hired with money saved from administration cuts than hear another lame justification about how Baker’s salary is “peanuts” compared to top CEOs.
The Mustang, California Polytechnic State University
… UD‘s gotten as far as Caroline Street and been waylaid by the Coffee Plantation, a great find. Excellent jazz piano piped in (Skylark at the moment – I can’t hear the Youtube, but I think this is the piece.), free internet for an hour with purchase (In UD‘s case, this would be a glass of iced tea, much needed. Must tell you — if you’re thinking of hopping down to KW — it can get seriously hot here. Never humid, and the breezes are great, but if you take long walks like UD in the midday sun, be prepared.) The annual Robert Frost whatever’s coming up (Whoops. Just checked out the Frost House website, and the place closes at four! Can you tell I’m somewhat reluctant…?), and I did promise to take a close look at a Frost poem (UD thanks various readers who’ve written with suggestions) as part of my ongoing Key Western Civ course…
You know, Frost didn’t even like Key West.
A Spanish judge best known for indicting Augusto Pinochet and Osama bin Laden denies any wrongdoing after being paid $200,000 for work at a U.S. university while drawing his salary in Madrid, a court official said Wednesday.
Judge Baltasar Garzon insists he acted in good faith, hid nothing and reported both sources of income to tax authorities in both countries, said the official at the National Court, where Garzon is based.
A judicial oversight board is investigating Garzon for allegedly failing to warn his superiors he would be getting paid for teaching and lecturing at New York University during a sabbatical in 2005 and 2006.
Judicial officials say Garzon received …more than $200,000 in salary, travel expenses and school tuition for his daughter during that stay
… Spanish judges must tell the judicial oversight board if they will receive an outside salary during leaves of absence, the board said Tuesday in announcing the probe.
Council investigators have a month to decide whether to drop the case or recommend that Garzon be penalized. Punishment could range from a fine or suspension to outright expulsion from the court.
UD’s not feeling too sanguine about Peter Singer’s efforts to get American university students “adequately informed about world poverty, its consequences, and the ways in which it can be reduced.” Even our best universities don’t seem to be conveying very much along these lines. Take this Yalie.
A Yale University student from Ohio has filed a lawsuit seeking $1 million from US Airways for a video game console he says was taken from his luggage.
Twenty-one-year-old Jesse Maiman alleges that during a flight from New Haven, Conn., to Cincinnati in December, his Xbox 360 with a specialized hard drive disappeared from his luggage.
Maiman says he got what he called “an unconscionable run-around” from the airline. He’s asking $1,700 for the loss of the gaming system and for the maximum damages allowable, or $1 million.
Maiman filed the suit Monday in Hamilton County Common Pleas Court.
A US Airways spokeswoman said the airline was unaware of the suit but noted that the government limits liability for lost luggage to $3,300 per bag.
Unconscionable!
… when you learn one little extra thing about a person, and then go back and read something about them, it reads completely differently.
For instance, Robert Hebbel is a professor who uses his wife’s disability parking permit illegally. He was just fined $500 for doing it at the school where he works, the University of Minnesota.
So here’s an article written about him not long ago. UD has enjoyed snickering through it with this new information.
Start with the headline.
DR. ROBERT P. HEBBEL IS DRIVEN TO DISCOVER HOW THE BIOLOGY OF SICKLE CELL DISEASE WORKS
[Dr. Hebbell is] a fellow who’s very busy and very driven.
… Hebbel was attracted to the problem solving approach of internal medicine. “”I love the chase! I love using your wits to design an experiment to solve the problem,” he says. “I love the “aha!” moment, finding out how something works in biology.” [The chase! Problem solving! Using your wits! You can experience the very same thrills figuring out how to take parking spaces away from disabled people.] … I do things that are risky,” he says. … “I’ve always just done what seems to be interesting to me in the moment.”