… Key West, though of course I won’t be here long enough to understand much.

But today, for instance, reading through The Secret of Salt while eating a spinach salad at Kelly’s, I discovered that in fact Richard Wilbur no longer lives here, having decided a couple of years ago that he and his wife were too old to manage two houses. His upstairs study in Key West, he recalls, was “full of airiness and swaying leaves.”

“It was marvelous to go every winter to a place where there’d be plenty of old and lively friends … It was quite a world of writers and artists with whom to enjoy oneself in the evenings. … I’m going to miss it a great deal, not just for its temperature… It’s a place that makes me feel youthful.”

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Tonight, UD‘s going to the Waterfront Playhouse to see BITCHSLAP.

… with my interruptions. To see it in its pristine state, go to the post directly below this one.

HOW TO DO THINGS WITH TEARS

[Title’s clever, and makes an English major think of How to Do Things With Words, the philosopher J.L Austin’s book about how language performs. So a sensibility here of someone literate, playful…]

In thy springs, O Zion, are the water wheels
Of my mind! The wheels beat the shining stream.
Whack. Dying. And then death. Whack. Learning. Learned.
Whack. Breathing. And breath. Whack. Gone with the wind.

[Hm. Already much to note! Tone’s all over the place. It’s madness. Starts all formal and religious, invoking Zion as some essential body of water – a spring from which spring certain operations of the poet’s mind — operations he compares to water wheels. Bit confusing. But fun. Difficult, but seductive. We want to figure this out.

But, you know, when I say sensibility I have in mind this rather weird, violent, disjunctive writing Grossman hits us up with right off. Now if it were just weird, it would be trifling; but in fact Grossman’s going to capture the complex truth of complex consciousness, as it moves from ancient pious formulations to Batman language and back…]

I am old. The direction of time is plain:
As the daylight, never without direction,
Rises in a direction, east to west,
And sets in a direction, west to east,

[Notice the control that the poem’s about to manifest. Having chosen an image – the water wheel – the poet will play that through to the end of the poem. But he has chosen another image for consciousness as well, that of a wandering traveler reckoning always with, fighting always against, the absolutely immutable movement of time toward the traveler’s death. And that image will also play itself out with careful thoroughness through the poem.]

Walking backwards all night long, underground;

[A wonderful image for morbid dreams or morbid night thoughts. Reviewing your life as you age toward death.]

So, this bright water is bent on its purpose—
To find the meadow path to the shore and then
The star (“Sleepless”) by which the helmsman winds

And turns.

[At some point those morbid thoughts become spiritual, and we’re searching for God.]

Zion of mind! This is the way:
Towards nightfall the winds shifts offshore, north by
Northwest, closing the harbor to sail
And it stiffens, raising the metal water

[The poet imagines his oncoming death, the shutting down of consciousness.]

In the roads. The low sun darkens and freezes.
The water shines. In the raking light is
Towed the great ship home, upwind, everything
Furled.

[That Old Ship of Zion. The reader may well at this point think of this great spiritual, in which the ship of God arrives at your death to take you home.]

And, behind the great ship, I am carried,

A castaway, in the body alone,
Under the gates of Erebus

[Here death’s imagined without spirituality, without transcendence, in the body alone. This is truly hell, the haunt of Erebus, where one is cast away rather than taken into the arms of God. Maybe this, the poet laments, is the truth of our end.]

—the meeting
Place of daylight underground and night wind
Shrieking in wires, the halliards knocking and

[The ships a mess. Everything’s come undone. Its loose ropes – halliards – are knocking against it. Great word, halliard. Probably had to look it up, no? Learning. Learned. We like that. Anyway, here the poet finds a brilliant figure for the failure of religious consolation, the mind unmoored.]

Ravelled banners streaming to the south-east
Like thought drawn out, wracked and torn, when the wind
Shifts and rises and the light fails in the long
School room of the setting sun.

[Light fails in the long school room of the setting sun. We learn a great deal as we age, but what we learn is that the light fails.]

What is left

To mind but remembrances of the world?

[All sorts of wonderful plays on “mind” here. What is left to take heed of. To beware. To take care of. To remember. And literally, what is left – as a sort of final gift – to the fading mind as it ages? Memories. As the old are notorious for being lost in memories. And yet again: We are earthly creatures. When we live and when we die we have only the earth. So when we begin to disappear, when, “on that green evening … our death begins,” it will be our love of the earth that we remember.]

The people of the road, in tears, sit down
At the road-side and tell stories of the world
Then they rise again in tears and go up.

[The poet imagines his funeral.]

The mill sits in the springs.

[Back to the mill. A formally clear and satisfying poem.]

Water wheels whack
Round: Alive, whack. Dying, whack. Dead whack. Nothing.

[After his lyrical journey round his morbid mind, the poet sinks again into the sardonic nihilism of that grinding mill: Old age as a painful assault by one meaningless moment after another, ending in nothingness.]

How, then, to do things with tears?

[Can I make something of my sorrow? My sadness for myself, for the world untranscended?]

— Deliver us,
Zion, from mist. Kill us in the light.

[Yes, I can do something. I can rage against death in life. I can rage against blindness…

You’re right. We’re landing somewhere in the vicinity of Dylan Thomas here. But Grossman’s better than Thomas, because he’s not a sentimentalist. His consciousness is more interesting, more challenging, more strange. Both poems want you to die, as you have tried to live, in full possession of your faculties. They want you to die in the truth. Never to lie to yourself in order to console yourself. But for me at least Grossman captures the battle as it rages far better than Thomas. Thomas merely exhorts his poor father to keep fighting as he lies on his deathbed; he rather mindlessly assumes the absolute value of life over death. Grossman ain’t so sure — that’s what the water wheel’s doing in the poem.]

The piece this comes from is a bit treacly, but the sentence itself deserves a closer look.

Mainly because of the word cerebral. Great poetry has to have an idea.

It also has to have a sensibility.

And it has to be written well.

I think the hardest of these three to accomplish, actually, is sensibility. The consciousness the poem expresses has somehow to be strikingly original. Strange, original, but also immediately recognizable as true — as like our own, as possibly our own, as a form of consciousness we, influenced by the reading of a certain poet’s body of work, might even in some sense make our own.

See, I think superficial readers of poetry (like the writer I talk about in a recent post titled Nothing’s More Reactionary than Mental Confusion) are getting excited about a sensibility. They pick up on the liberation in the loose lines of Ginsberg, and they like that feeling of freedom; but they don’t really get the cerebral part, let alone the intricacies of style. They don’t pick up on the study and suffering and seriousness that gets you to where Ginsberg’s consciousness has gotten. If readers like this aren’t careful, they end up fans of bad poets like Charles Bernstein, without ideas and without interesting language, but loose-limbed.

The most notorious recent bad poem, the Obama inaugural poem, lacked all sensibility; and though its language was also dull and its ideas shopworn, it might have succeeded had it been able to infuse its language and ideas with sensibility.

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The most recent winner of the Bollingen Prize, Allen Grossman, shows you how it’s done.

HOW TO DO THINGS WITH TEARS

In thy springs, O Zion, are the water wheels
Of my mind! The wheels beat the shining stream.
Whack. Dying. And then death. Whack. Learning. Learned.
Whack. Breathing. And breath. Whack. Gone with the wind.

I am old. The direction of time is plain:
As the daylight, never without direction,
Rises in a direction, east to west,
And sets in a direction, west to east,

Walking backwards all night long, underground;
So, this bright water is bent on its purpose—
To find the meadow path to the shore and then
The star (“Sleepless”) by which the helmsman winds

And turns. Zion of mind! This is the way:
Towards nightfall the winds shifts offshore, north by
Northwest, closing the harbor to sail
And it stiffens, raising the metal water

In the roads. The low sun darkens and freezes.
The water shines. In the raking light is
Towed the great ship home, upwind, everything
Furled. And, behind the great ship, I am carried,

A castaway, in the body alone,
Under the gates of Erebus—the meeting
Place of daylight underground and night wind
Shrieking in wires, the halliards knocking and

Ravelled banners streaming to the south-east
Like thought drawn out, wracked and torn, when the wind
Shifts and rises and the light fails in the long
School room of the setting sun. What is left

To mind but remembrances of the world?
The people of the road, in tears, sit down
At the road-side and tell stories of the world
Then they rise again in tears and go up.

The mill sits in the springs. Water wheels whack
Round: Alive, whack. Dying, whack. Dead whack. Nothing.
How, then, to do things with tears?—Deliver us,
Zion, from mist. Kill us in the light.

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

… Hokay. I’m gonna tell you what the hell all that’s about, but I’m busy gchatting with my old ‘thesdan playmate, David. Hold on. Next post.

But you also know that they’re all pretty much alike. They feature Harvard law professors and overseers (Ogletree, Tribe, Dershowitz, Goodwin) using slave labor to write their books for them (a technique fraught with dangers, of which plagiarism is only one); or they’re about desperate illiterates (Glenn Poshard, president of Southern Illinois University) drawing upon their betters…

Very straightforward, these plagiarism tales. But here’s one that’s really twisted.

A loving, demented son decides to defend his father’s controversial research by assuming the identity of one of his father’s critics and making the critic out to be a plagiarist.

[Raphael] Golb is accused of using stolen identities of various people, including a New York University professor who disagreed with his father, to elevate his father’s theory and besmirch its critics, Robert M. Morgenthau, the Manhattan district attorney, said at a news conference.

Mr. Golb, 49, was arrested Thursday morning and charged in Manhattan Criminal Court with identity theft, criminal impersonation and aggravated harassment. He faces up to four years in prison if convicted.

Prosecutors said Mr. Golb opened an e-mail account in the name of Lawrence H. Schiffman, the New York University professor who disagreed with Mr. Golb’s father. He sent messages in Professor Schiffman’s name to various people at N.Y.U. and to others involved in the Dead Sea Scrolls debate, fabricating an admission by Professor Schiffman that he had plagiarized some of Professor Golb’s work, Mr. Morgenthau said. Raphael Golb also set up blogs under various names that accused Dr. Schiffman of plagiarism, Mr. Morgenthau said.

Raphael Golb, who lives in Manhattan and received his law degree from N.Y.U., also created e-mail addresses using the names of other Dead Sea Scrolls scholars, Mr. Morgenthau said.

“This exemplifies a growing trend in the area of identity theft,” Antonia Merzon, an assistant district attorney, said during the news conference. “It’s very easy to open an account using any name you want on the Internet. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with that. But when you start using another person’s true identity for some purpose, you’re crossing the line into a possible identity theft crime or impersonation crime.”

The district attorney’s office began investigating the case after Professor Schiffman, who is chairman of the Hebrew and Judaic studies department at N.Y.U., came to them saying he believed that Mr. Golb was impersonating him on the Internet.

Golb’s father, an 81 year old University of Chicago professor who seems to share the paranoid tendencies of his son, thinks these charges are all part of the larger conspiracy against his work.

Which is why this little essay in the Washington Post, whose author prides himself on his radicalism and chides current college students for their quietism, fails.

He, a product of the sixties, still “care[s] about literature,” while today’s “narcotized” students read “inferior literature.”

The problem lies in the writer’s conflation of radical writing and superior literature. While some of the writers he admires – Ginsberg, Lessing – are indeed both artistically impressive and politically radical, others — Plath, Nin — are not political. Yet others – Mary Daly, Robert Pirsig, Jerry Rubin, Eldridge Cleaver, Germaine Greer – write broadsides and not literature; and while some of these people (Greer, for instance) are powerful prose stylists, others (Daly) are almost unreadably bad.

The category confusion in the essay, its facile generalities — “The only specter haunting the groves of American academe seems to be suburban contentment.” — and its willingness to overlook the importance of writers like David Foster Wallace and Toni Morrison and Don DeLillo to this generation of college readers, makes the piece more emotive than polemical, the expression of a certain contentment with one’s own cherished forms of radicality. Note that the writer doesn’t even have time for the wildly popular Chuck Palahniuk, whose work is without much literary merit, but has the exact same transgressive thing going (he’s best known for Fight Club) as many of the not-well-written works the author of the Post piece cites.

When Chris, our guide through the mangroves, said this to UD at the end of her kayak trip today, UD smiled very broadly. She’d been so nervous about going out solo that at the last minute she asked Chris if she could share his kayak.

“Can’t do that,” he replied. “I’ve got to have my own boat in case people need rescuing.”

So against a twenty mile an hour wind, UD joined four other kayakers as they paddled out to the mangroves. The wind settled down when they got to the islands.

It wasn’t the wind and the choppy water that made the outing a bit of a challenge; it was negotiating the narrow inlets through the trees — staying clear of voluminous roots, threading the boat through vegetation.

Once inside the long cathedral the sun-filtered canopies made, UD let her paddle rest. She drifted among the creeks and watched the waterbirds and the starfish. Chris dipped his little yellow net here and there and came up with prickly things and slimy things, all of which he insisted UD hold. Once in awhile he’d suddenly row like mad after a ray or a shark, and we’d follow him and watch large dark creatures ripple just below the waves.

Military jets broke the silence now and then, but it was mainly a quiet and meditative thing, being out there. Once UD calmed down about her ability to steer a kayak, she floated happily above the shallow grassy water. She recalled how her mother liked kayaking on the C & O Canal.

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

UPDATE: For a terrific primer on all things kayaking, go here, to Chris Cole’s article at Nature Sport Central, “How to Kayak – A Beginner’s Guide.”

UD readers interested in thinking about

What kinds of citizens (if any) do good regimes need? What should such citizens know, believe, and do? What institutional structures promote the right kinds of citizenship? How do individuals learn civic skills, habits, values, dispositions, and knowledge?

and/or interested in meeting the sort of person who would marry UD, might want to attend the tuition-free Summer Institute for Civic Studies at Tufts University, from July 13 – 24. Mr UD is one of the three organizers.

This page offers a framing statement.

… by these guys for some more kayaking of the out islands.

A couple of comments from a Volokh Conspiracy thread. Commenters are responding to Eugene Volokh’s laptop ban experiment.

This semester, all three of my professors banned laptops in class. One of the professors did this via a two week trial period, and then administered a survey. The results were overwhelmingly in favor of keeping the ban in effect. Is it “paternalistic”? That definitely may be a fair charge to levy. However, as my one professor explained it (and I think that, 2 months into the semester, this is a very accurate explanation), the point isn’t to be protecting you and making sure you pay attention. Rather, it is to keep the class as a whole engaged, which is to everyone’s benefit.

Even if you’re on your laptop “properly”, you may still get distracted by other people’s screens, whether they are typing, checking e-mail, etc. People’s faces are also obscured by their laptop screens, and they create an artificial barrier in the classroom. Absent laptops, the class seems much more engaged in the discussion, making the classes much more interesting. Even if you turn off the internet, you will still have the second problem above. People staring into their computer screens blankly, pecking away at the keyboard for two hours, is hardly conducive to a good learning environment.

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

If the arguments for laptops were true, the most efficient way to run a course would be to distribute full outlines at the beginning of the class, along with the course material and class transcripts, all in electronic form so the student could go through it all efficiently, and wouldn’t have to sit through classes over several weeks, taking notes and making outlines. But we don’t do that because students are not computers that you can just fill with information. To get things into your brain, you must engage with them. Brief the cases while you read them (info goes into eyes, through brain, out hands). Take notes by hand (into ears, through brain, out hands). Participate in class (in ears, through brain, out mouth). Make your outline from notes (into eyes, through brain, out fingers). The more your brain is involved when doing law school tasks, the better you will learn the material.

Not that UD‘s telling these schools anything they don’t know. Frank Tanzini used public funds to get a fake degree and then after the story broke (he was an Assistant Superintendent of Schools when it broke) Rowan and Ramapo gave him faculty appointments.

Here’s his listing at Rowan. Here he is at Ramapo.

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

If you’re thinking of going to Ramapo or Rowan, don’t. Their professors are frauds.

If you already go to Ramapo or Rowan, transfer.

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

UD thanks a reader for this story.

UD‘s many quotations from poets and philosophers who lived on Key West begin to constitute a new field of study. Call it Key Western Civ.

Merrill, Bishop, Stevens, MacLeish, and now John Dewey (the paragraph below is from Art and Experience) — all of these islanders evoke the tireless quest for intensified life, and describe artistic creation and aesthetic experience as our supreme paths toward the clarity, exultation, presentness, and sense of inner unity that constitute intensified life.

“To the being fully alive, the future is not ominous, but a promise; it surrounds the present as a halo. It consists of possibilities that are felt as a possession of what is now and here. In life that is truly life, everything overlaps and merges. But all too often we exist in apprehensions of what the future may bring, and are divided within ourselves. Even when not overanxious, we do not enjoy the present, because we subordinate it to that which is absent. Because of the frequency of this abandonment of the present to the past and future, the happy periods of an experience that is now complete because it absorbs into itself memories of the past and anticipations of the future, come to constitute an aesthetic ideal. Only when the past ceases to trouble, and anticipations of the future are not perturbing is a being wholly united with his environment and therefore fully alive. Art celebrates with peculiar intensity the moments in which the past reenforces the present and in which the future is a quickening of what is now.”

Dewey House, the original home of philosopher and educator John Dewey and its neighbor, the intimate La Mer Hotel are located in the heart of Key West’s historic district on the Atlantic Ocean.

Today, Emory; tomorrow, maybe you.

…Within a few months, officials plan to file civil and criminal charges against a number of surgeons who they say demanded profitable consulting agreements from device makers in exchange for using their products.

… The move against doctors is part of a diverse campaign to curb industry marketing tactics that enrich doctors but increase health care costs and sometimes endanger patients. Taken together, the new measures are likely to transform the relationship between medicine and industry.

… Also, as part of plea bargains, federal health officials are forcing a growing number of drug and device makers to post publicly all payments made to doctors who serve as consultants or speakers. Manufacturers have repeatedly used consulting payments in illegal schemes to persuade doctors to prescribe drugs or devices in inappropriate and unapproved ways, according to federal charges.

… [T]he United States attorney said officials hoped to send a strong message to doctors. “I have been shocked at what appears to be willful blindness by folks in the physician community to the criminal conduct that corrupts the patient-physician relationship,” he said.

New York Times

UD has never reckoned with that set of instructions before, and she probably never will again.  But as you enter the Key West Butterfly and Nature Conservatory, that’s what you’re asked to do.

These tubbies are bobbing about underfoot as you walk the butterfly path, and you don’t notice them because you’re taken up with the psychedelic flittering all ’round your head.  Everywhere immense and profuse lepidoptera, with the usual insane range of colors and patterns, buzz you.

No touching, of course, and sometimes you’re close to stepping on them.  You’re not even supposed to reach out to them, but it’s impossible not to.

The same music they play when UD‘s at a spa getting a facial pipes along as you pause at a pond and look at koi. 

The whole thing’s way zen, and UD kept going back in, flashing the little red butterfly stamp on her hand at the ticket taker and circling the path.

… electronic cigarettes, you must not expect her — she’s addressing university students among her readers here — you must not expect her to know anything, really, about your world.

If you name your band The Airborne Toxic Event, or Titus Andronicus, she’ll eventually get wind of it. But she really knows nothing about your world.

Still, every now and then her online activity produces something like this – a review of Alcoholics Unanimous and other works – and she does get a glimpse.

A seven minute excursion into the agit-funk of ’77 era Talking Heads (or, if you prefer, Julian Cope’s ‘Safe Surfer’) complete with the Pulitzer-prize worthy couplet: “I can’t remember anything I’ve done/I fought the floor and the floor won!” it’s a sobering account of the morning after the night before which seems destined to fill dancefloors from Paris to Pasadena.