…[M]ost basketball coaches, including KU’s Bill Self, are opposed to the new NCAA policy [ranking coaches on the basis of the academic progress of their players]. The coaches claim they are being singled out in the grade matter when there are many other factors in determining an individual’s or a team’s academic record. Such factors include faculty, tutors and others on campus who play a role in how a student athlete does in the classroom.
Those favoring the policy point out, however, that having their APR records publicized will make coaches more likely to pay attention to the type of young men they recruit and to the academic abilities of those being recruited.
It is surprising Penn State President Graham Spanier disagrees or questions the NCAA policy, saying the coaches ratings “could have a modest influence.” He added, “realistically, wins and losses weigh most heavily on a coach’s reputation.”
This coming from the president of one of this nation’s major universities. Spanier’s position on this matter lays bare any belief that university presidents and chancellors honestly believe the football and basketball players at their schools really are “student athletes.”
Chancellors and presidents talk a good game, acknowledging the need to rein in the almost runaway spending on Division I collegiate athletics and contending their athletes are students first, not athletes taking customized class loads to advance academically and remain eligible to play.
These pompous university executives want to win on the football field and basketball courts just as much as their alumni do and they want a coach who can deliver wins, full stadiums and fieldhouses and post-season contests. The classroom grades of the players are not as important as their grades on the football fields and basketball courts….
Lawrence Journal-World
The Leadership Institute or whatever [Find it yourself. UD doesn’t link to porn.] at Kansas State has released this fellatial book about the university’s president. It’s certainly true that his leadership style is much in the news. You can read dozens of articles about it this morning. Here’s one.
Wefald regrets error in pact
K-State president says mistake was giving ex-AD lengthy deal
MANHATTAN — Kansas State athletic director Bob Krause once spoke with optimism about the groundbreaking contract extension awarded to his predecessor, Tim Weiser.
… Weiser’s K-State career ended less than three years later, a separation that will cost the university $1.9 million. In light of those events, Krause and university president Jon Wefald now view the 10-year contract as a mistake.
“I can’t over-emphasize the fact that we just made a mistake,” Wefald said Wednesday, a day before details of Weiser’s $1.9 million separation agreement became public. “I’ll openly tell you that.” [We. Note the president’s willingness to take responsibility for what he and he alone has done.]
Wefald said K-State “got caught up in the BCS arms race” when other big-budget schools began expressing interest in Weiser. [Note the president’s lie. Weiser left because Wefald – against his advice – gave tons of money to keep a coach who crapped out on them.]
… “I don’t think we’ll be paying ADs here at Kansas State $700,000 again,” said Wefald, who will retire at the end of the academic year. “Who knows. I’m only going to be the president for another (few months). I’m just speculating about the future, (but) I don’t think you have to pay an AD $700,000 to have a good one.” [Note the president’s continued accountability: I’m outta here! Note the president’s self-alienation: I TOLD you not to pay him that much!]
… At K-State, one of Krause’s first major moves as athletic director was to give football coach Ron Prince a new contract with a larger buyout. That move backfired when the school fired Prince three months later, triggering the $1.2 million buyout clause…
“When you turn staff over, you budget it as a one-time expense,” said Krause, who estimated the school would pay $1.7 million in buyouts to Prince and his coaching staff. “That’s what you’ve got reserves for.” [Hey fuck you. We got a reserve.]
… One K-State donor said he stopped making financial contributions because of the instability within the athletic department, expressing frustrations echoed by K-State student Anika Bergh.
“It angers me because I pay so much money a year to be here and get the education that I want,” said Bergh, a season ticketholder in football and basketball. “To have them throwing away money like that, it just makes me feel like it’s money coming out of my pocket.”
Wefald viewed the settlement as the first step toward a more fiscally responsible strategy, one he said will not include long-term contracts like Weiser’s.
“Sometimes partnerships can’t last that long,” Wefald said. [Note the president lecturing us on how to run a university so that you don’t run it into the ground the way the president did.]
Potato Heads up close.
“During the last nine seasons, the University of Idaho football team has lost 82 of 105 games. Even with its winning seasons as members of the Big Sky conference, its “all-time ranking” is 118 out of 125 schools.
For the past three seasons, the UI men’s basketball team has lost 73 of 89 games. Its current NCAA standing is 316th out of 341 colleges and universities.
If any UI academic program had such a poor performance record, it would certainly be eliminated or reduced in its mission.
But since 1999, state funding for UI athletics went from $1.78 million to $3.04 million, a 71 percent increase. By comparison, general education budgets for Idaho higher education have increased 46 percent during the same period.
In 2003, athletics was given a $500,000 “gift” from the president’s office, presumably to cover the costs of joining the Western Athletics Conference.
Also in 2003, the basketball coach received a $15,000 pay raise, the second highest in the university. UI athletic director Robert Spear tried to fudge the raise as one based on future performance, but the increment was added to his base salary before the season began.
During the financial crisis of 2004-05, the UI liberal arts college was forced to cut $326,000, but $322,600 was added to the athletics department budget. A faculty committee recommended that then-President Tim White reduce the athletic budget by $300,000, but he decided to fire 27 staff employees instead.
In 1987, the state Board of Education reinstituted the policy of using general education monies for athletics. Since then the annual subsidy has grown from $665,500 to $3,041,679, a 357 percent increase. Athletics on all Idaho campuses experienced a similar increase. Without that subsidy, the Idaho Vandals won five Big Sky championships from 1983-87.
While all other UI faculty and staff received little or no raises this year, the athletic director enjoyed an 8 percent raise, and the salary line for football coaches with record losses has also increased 8 percent.
Since 1997, all UI departments have paid an administrative fee on all external funds to the central administration. The fee has now risen to 8 percent, but athletics only pays 3 percent.
From 2001-2004, athletics paid no administrative fee at all, claiming it had to reach gender equity goals. What is odd about this excuse is this department has received gender equity money from the Legislature, starting with $115,000 in 1997 and growing to $621,560 this year.
Many other departments could have presented equally persuasive reasons why they too should be exempt. For example, auxiliary services and facilities management generate lots of external funds, and they could very well argue that their salaries, 19 percent of which are below the poverty level, should rise before they are required to pay the administrative fee.
The athletic department has defended its low fee by boasting it returns $2.5 million back to the university in tuition, fees, room and board for scholarship students. About half that amount comes from state funds.
Private scholarship funds for all UI colleges total $4.1 million, so they have a much better reason to ask for a lower administrative fee.
If the implication of this claim is that athletics makes money for UI, then this is clearly false. This year, the athletics department estimated that it would take in $2.1 million dollars in student fees and $726,500 in “institutional support,” plus the $3 million direct subsidy from the Legislature. Simple arithmetic shows at least a $3.3 million deficit not “profit.”
A national study concluded only nine athletic programs are able to actually return money to their respective academic programs. Contrary to conventional wisdom, winning athletic programs do not increase alumni funding.
As a vice president at the University of Notre Dame said: “There is no empirical evidence demonstrating a correlation between athletic department achievement and alumni fundraising success.”
At a Dec. 16 Faculty Council meeting, the chair said it was not fair to pick on any one specific unit of the university during bad times. But when one program has been favored over others for years, then an appeal to equitable treatment is the only principled position.”
A couple of professors write in the University of Idaho newspaper.
It was like this twenty minutes ago, without the hills.
Without the hills, but with a dark crimson band across the horizon.
The band lightened, and the sun came up, fast.
Now it’s so bright on my balcony I have to close the curtains to see the keyboard.
She’ll miss a week of class if she goes.
Should she go?
After you read UD‘s take on the inaugural poem, feel free to stick around for a longer visit with University Diaries.
… has asked her to elaborate on why the inauguration day poem was so bad. Here goes.
Each day we go about our business,
walking past each other, catching each other’s
eyes or not, about to speak or speaking.
All about us is noise. All about us is
noise and bramble, thorn and din, each
one of our ancestors on our tongues.
Someone is stitching up a hem, darning
a hole in a uniform, patching a tire,
repairing the things in need of repair.
Someone is trying to make music somewhere,
with a pair of wooden spoons on an oil drum,
with cello, boom box, harmonica, voice.
A woman and her son wait for the bus.
A farmer considers the changing sky.
A teacher says, Take out your pencils. Begin.
We encounter each other in words, words
spiny or smooth, whispered or declaimed,
words to consider, reconsider.
We cross dirt roads and highways that mark
the will of some one and then others, who said
I need to see what’s on the other side.
I know there’s something better down the road.
We need to find a place where we are safe.
We walk into that which we cannot yet see.
Say it plain: that many have died for this day.
Sing the names of the dead who brought us here,
who laid the train tracks, raised the bridges,
picked the cotton and the lettuce, built
brick by brick the glittering edifices
they would then keep clean and work inside of.
Praise song for struggle, praise song for the day.
Praise song for every hand-lettered sign,
the figuring-it-out at kitchen tables.
Some live by love thy neighbor as thyself,
others by first do no harm or take no more
than you need. What if the mightiest word is love?
Love beyond marital, filial, national,
love that casts a widening pool of light,
love with no need to pre-empt grievance.
In today’s sharp sparkle, this winter air,
any thing can be made, any sentence begun.
On the brink, on the brim, on the cusp,
praise song for walking forward in that light.
*********************************
Why is this a bad poem?
Forget delivery. Could have been delivered in a shimmery soprano by Kathleen Battle. Look at the language. Look at where UD began to laugh.
She began to laugh here:
picked the cotton and the lettuce
“Why lettuce?” she asked out loud. No one answered. UD‘s alone at the seashore. Only the melancholy, long, withdrawing roar of the tide replied.
“Why not?” the tide replied. “Why not? Why not lettuce and peanuts and coffee beans and rice?”
“Well … cotton, you know… I get cotton. It’s a reference to slavery. But lettuce…? Man does not live by bread alone, says Woody Allen: Frequently there must be a beverage. It’s like that. What my kid would call random.”
“I see what you mean, UD. But why? Why does it come across as random?”
“Here’s why. The poem lacks a metaphor. It lacks a controlling dominant image. It also lacks a controlling mood. Its title promises a song. A song of praise. That’s a bit vague, but okay. We’re ready. We’ve encountered songs of praise before, and we’re ready for another one. We expect an upbeat mood, etc. But where’s the singing here? Where’s the praising? Where’s anything? We’re looking for a way to ground ourselves in this poem. We’re looking for an image that recurs, or an idea that recurs. We’re looking for language that holds together by means of rhythmic repetition — after all, it tells us it’s a song — or by means of a controlling metaphor through which all of the poem’s images can be understood so that when we get to the end of the poem we feel we’ve had a coherent experience. Something comprehensible, graspable, has been said… Forget beauty. Beauty would have been nice, but there isn’t any here. Plain speech and all that. Okay. But at least give us a coherent utterance.”
“You’re being awfully harsh, UD. Karlson’s right. You’re going to have to elaborate.”
“Line by line?”
“Line by line”
“Hokay.”
************************************
Each day we go about our business,
walking past each other, catching each other’s
eyes or not, about to speak or speaking.
First off, forget rhyme. You’re not going to get a song that rhymes. What about intriguing, beautiful language instead? Language that sings? Poetry that doesn’t rhyme is fine, but poetry lacking all lilt, all linguistic oomph, is not fine. Especially if its title tells us it’s a song.
The idea in this first stanza is that we live quotidian inauthentic frustrated lives – stuck in daily business, asocial… Sometimes we catch each other’s eyes, and sometimes we speak, but it’s no different from not speaking or not catching each other’s eyes. Rather depressing, this.
All about us is noise. All about us is
noise and bramble, thorn and din, each
one of our ancestors on our tongues.
Yet more depressing. In place of speech, mere noise. We note already the use of repetition in this poem. And yet – why? In what way does it strengthen or underline or shift in some noteworthy way what the poem wants to say by having it say certain things twice? I see no point to the repetition.
Many people report having been bored by this poem. Pointless repetition is one of the reasons.
Now we get a new image: bramble, thorn. When we speak, our words are the accumulated words of all of our ancestors, and OUCH. They hurt. They are brambles, thorns. Bleeding tongues. Not pretty. Odd in a praise song. Vague thoughts in the reader’s mind of Jesus here. Should there be? Will there be a Christian element? Er, a little maybe, at the end. But the poet does nothing with it. Which is the other big problem with this poem. Random stabs in the direction of many images, none of which becomes a symbol or metaphor, because each is dropped as soon as mentioned, and no shaping, therefore, of a larger message takes place.
Someone is stitching up a hem, darning
a hole in a uniform, patching a tire,
repairing the things in need of repair.
Put this in the form of a sentence. Same deal. It is a sentence, that’s why. It’s not poetry. Poetry is a special sort of utterance in which plain prose is lifted up into something that sings. This is flat speech. Not poetry. It tries, with ye olde repetition, to be poetry at the end of the sentence — repairing the things in need of repair. But because there’s no content here beyond simple statement, and no poetic elevation of the prose in which it becomes suggestive of more than mere propositional statement, it just sits there, looking stupid. Looking like a tautology. We repair… things that need to be repaired! We speak or… we don’t speak! If there’s no larger meaning, or at least larger implication, that you can lend your language, you’re lost.
Someone is trying to make music somewhere,
with a pair of wooden spoons on an oil drum,
with cello, boom box, harmonica, voice.
A woman and her son wait for the bus.
A farmer considers the changing sky.
A teacher says, Take out your pencils. Begin.
Again, the sense of arbitrary observation rendered in dull language. We begin to detect a slight theme — the difficulty of expressing ourselves — weighed down by ancestors, by mutual incomprehension, by the dull dailiness of life’s business… But then we get images of waiting and watching… What are they about? And we get a teacher who speaks to her students telling them to start writing… And?… Do we condemn the teacher? She perhaps has contributed to the linguistic dullness, the desperate attempts to communicate, that this song of praise describes…
We encounter each other in words, words
spiny or smooth, whispered or declaimed,
words to consider, reconsider.
Well, it was thorn and bramble before; now it’s still spiny, but also smooth. If spiny means painfully derivative, what does smooth mean? And note once again the deadly repetition that feels not like a song but like a kindergarten teacher repeating things for our slow-witted benefit. words, words… consider, reconsider… This poem is talking down to us.
We cross dirt roads and highways that mark
the will of some one and then others, who said
I need to see what’s on the other side.
I know there’s something better down the road.
We need to find a place where we are safe.
We walk into that which we cannot yet see.
This fails to make sense spatially, and in a variety of other ways. Who crosses highways?
And is it the crossing we’re supposed to be thinking about — Like the chicken, we want to see what’s on the other side — or is it travellin’ down that highway? I know there’s something better down the road. Across or down? See – it’s just muddy. Poetry is supposed to be language at its most carefully deployed. This is a mess.
And it gets worse. Put aside the cliches that comprise this entire stanza. Note instead another pointless transition — again, her transitions come across as pointless because the poem is unstructured by any dominant image or mood — We need to find a place where we are safe. Where did that idea come from? Who said we were in danger? This reads as bathos.
Say it plain: that many have died for this day.
Sing the names of the dead who brought us here,
who laid the train tracks, raised the bridges,
picked the cotton and the lettuce, built
brick by brick the glittering edifices
they would then keep clean and work inside of.
Okay, this is a promising moment. The stifled or failed or painful speech that went before is now set aside, and we are enjoined to say it plain. Sing it out. But if you introduce your stanzas like this, the reader has a right to expect a reasonable elevation of language at this point. It feels like a climax. Yet we get more dully reported examples of human effort. The ugliness of the final two lines – “brick by brick the glittering edifices / they would then keep clean and work inside of.” – cannot be evaded. Brick by brick is a terrible cliche. And ending her sentence with the deadly little creepy crawly of? Really. Look at this language. Read it aloud. And tell me how it could possibly be understood as poetic.
Praise song for struggle, praise song for the day.
Praise song for every hand-lettered sign,
the figuring-it-out at kitchen tables.
This is about as good as it gets. She at least alludes to her title. But the stanza remains a compendium of cliches.
Some live by love thy neighbor as thyself,
others by first do no harm or take no more
than you need. What if the mightiest word is love?
Love beyond marital, filial, national,
love that casts a widening pool of light,
love with no need to pre-empt grievance.
Because the poet has been unable to rise above cliches, the ancient and beautiful truths she cites here – love thy neighbor, etc. – become as it were infected by her trite linguistic universe. They too wither into cliche. Then we suddenly get love — again, since the metaphorical ground hasn’t been prepared for it, it just jumps out as the next thing the poet grabs — which, in a stale version of Wallace Stevens’ calm darkens among waterlights, becomes a widening pool of light. And why at this late stage in the poem the pool image? Again — nothing in the poem has done anything with that liquidity. As a result it’s just a bore — part of a grab bag of images which together amount to little more than sentimentality. As to the glorious word pre-empt, no comment.
In today’s sharp sparkle, this winter air,
any thing can be made, any sentence begun.
On the brink, on the brim, on the cusp,
praise song for walking forward in that light.
The poet pulls herself together here and concludes by returning to her inadequately expressed idea about self-expression.
A poem mainly about the importance of overcoming the difficulty of expressing ourselves should be able to express itself. There lies the depressive dullness at the core of this lament: The poem tells us that we’ll never make any progress toward the light.
*****************************
Update: Here’s another explanation of why this poem failed.
*****************************
Another update: Well, I thought “lettuce” was random, because I recall everyone in my town boycotting grapes, not lettuce. I take the point that lettuce is another clear reference to oppressed farmworkers.
… Elizabeth Alexander’s inaugural poem, “Praise Song for the Day,” …failed to live up to the standard of public, official verse. … The contemporary poet who set[s] out to write an official occasional poem … gives up the privacy in which modern poetry is born, without gaining the authority and currency that used to be the advantages of the poet laureate in Rome or England. Her verse is not public but bureaucratic–that is to say, spoken by no one and addressed to no one…
“Praise Song for the Day,” the poem Elizabeth Alexander read this afternoon, was a perfect specimen of this kind of bureaucratic verse. … [The] weakness of Alexander’s work is precisely its consciousness of obligation. Her poetic superego leads her to affirm piously, rather than question or challenge. … [Her poetry is] public in the worst sense–inauthentic, bureaucratic, rhetorical. So it was no surprise to hear Alexander begin her poem … with a cliché (“Each day we go about our business”), before going on to tell the nation “I know there’s something better down the road”; and pose the knotty question, “What if the mightiest word is ‘love’?”; and conclude with a classic instance of elegant variation: “on the brink, on the brim, on the cusp.” The poem’s argument was as hard to remember as its language; it dissolved at once into the circumambient solemnity…
The University of Minnesota – dominated by sports, devastated by medical school scandals – really has slipped. An alumnus writes to the university newspaper:
The latest ethics scandal at the University of Minnesota involving the dean of the medical school and a faculty member she appointed to review and improve ethical practices who turned out to have a whopping and profitable conflict of interest himself, underscores the need for a president who is more interested in the academic side of University life than in the athletic side.
This all happened on President Robert Bruininks’ watch, and one hopes he learned something about how to properly do his job at the Insight Bowl and will give us taxpayers our $700,000-a-year money’s worth — his annual salary. (Maybe the University should establish an Oversight Bowl at its new, needless, wasteful football stadium.)…
We must not allow another ethics scandal to occur on anyone’s watch at our once-proud University.
UD‘s covered the decline of UM for a long time. She concludes that the university needs a new president.
LITERACY MINISTRY TOLD TO
USE PLAIN ENGLISH IN REPORTS
It’s from The Independent.
The Government department responsible for universities is castigated today for its “impenetrable” language “peppered with jargon” in its reports.
MPs on the Commons select committee monitoring the new Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills – which is also responsible for courses in basic literacy for adults – have told its civil servants to use plain English.
It accuses them of using “jargon-riddled phrases” and “euphemisms deflecting likely failure”. It cites part of the annual report, which says the department has a “challenging growth strategy for 2010”: that is, it is unlikely to meet targets. Other examples of obscure language include sentences such as: “An overarching national improvement strategy will drive up quality and performance underpinned by specific plans for strategically significant areas of activity, such as workforce and technology.”
… Even Ian Whatmore, the department’s Permanent Secretary, could not explain what this meant when asked by MPs. The department itself refused to translate it to The Independent yesterday.
Everybody’s covering the story. Let’s see what else they’re saying.
MPs said the department’s new annual report – used to measure its progress – contained so much “impenetrable” jargon that whole sections were “nearly impossible to read or understand”.
Giving evidence to the committee, even the DIUS permanent secretary Ian Watmore was “unable to explain the meaning” of one passage, MPs
Phil Willis, the committee’s Liberal Democrat chairman, said: “We were less than satisfied with the DIUS report, which we found unhelpful and too reliant on promoting a positive tone rather than providing us with clear and comprehensive information.
“While we appreciate that it will take some time for DIUS’s work to be realised, this must not be used as an excuse to produce a sub-standard report. A more concise report written in plain English with independently verified statistics would be of far greater use next year.”
A DIUS spokesman said the department had achieved a “great deal” in the past 18 months and would be replying in detail to the report.
“We are confident that DIUS is well placed to meet the challenges of the future and our work remains at the forefront of the Government’s response to the economic downturn, giving real help now to individuals and businesses,” he said.
Confidently striding forth to meet the challenge of the future, the DIUS is unable, even humiliated for it on an international scale, to write in any other way, you see. Euphemism, cliche, vague reassurance, jargon — Strange to realize that you learn this prose and this pose not merely in American schools of education. This language has the whole ed-world in its hands. We call it eduspeak here. There’s no degree of public humiliation which will change it, because the people who use it don’t understand its criticism. It’s like asking the Australian civil servants who wrote a report about depression what’s wrong with this:
MH-QUERI has partnered with VA organizational leaders to develop a focused yet flexible plan to address key factors to prepare for national dissemination and implementation of collaborative care for depression. Early indications suggest that the plan is laying an important foundation that will enhance the likelihood of successful implementation and spread across the VA healthcare system.
Same lethal bullshit. SOS is convinced a person can die from too much exposure to this. Who wants to live in a world of smiling automata always telling you things are great, moving right along, focused yet flexible? Haven’t we already seen that world in its full smiling flowering?
Yes, comrades, the Five-Year is right on track, focused yet flexible, laying an important foundation whose significant strategy for driving up quality will drive up quality…. You see how this totalitarian writing technique relies on the assumption that you are as much a mindless automaton as the totalitarian writer? There’s a strange intimacy in this approach… It says You’re exactly like me. We’re all alike. We all live within a self-pleasuring fog… We float about within a world of happy psychic stasis, constantly stimulated in a low-level way… It’s okay… It’s okay… says this writing… Everything’s fine… Always has been… Always will be… Things are just fine… And they’re getting even better… Sleep now… Let the fog of my letters envelope you…
To die: to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache, and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, ’tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish’d.
Yeah… what the hell… bring it… on………
The idea of great American poetry on inauguration day’s a good one. UD thought she’d share a great American poem — one that says things about the sea she’s been trying to say in her own writing. It’s The Slow Pacific Swell, by Yvor Winters.
Far out of sight forever stands the sea,
Bounding the land with pale tranquillity.
When a small child, I watched it from a hill
At thirty miles or more. The vision still
Lies in the eye, soft blue and far away:
The rain has washed the dust from April day;
Paint-brush and lupine lie against the ground;
The wind above the hill-top has the sound
Of distant water in unbroken sky;
Dark and precise the little steamers ply-
Firm in direction they seem not to stir.
That is illusion. The artificer
Of quiet, distance holds me in a vise
And holds the ocean steady to my eyes.
Once when I rounded Flattery, the sea
Hove its loose weight like sand to tangle me
Upon the washing deck, to crush the hull;
Subsiding, dragged flesh at the bone. The skull
Felt the retreating wash of dreaming hair.
Half drenched in dissolution, I lay bare.
I scarcely pulled myself erect; I came
Back slowly, slowly knew myself the same.
That was the ocean. From the ship we saw
Gray whales for miles: the long sweep of the jaw,
The blunt head plunging clean above the wave.
And one rose in a tent of sea and gave
A darkening shudder; water fell away;
The whale stood shining, and then sank in spray.
A landsman, I. The sea is but a sound.
I would be near it on a sandy mound,
And hear the steady rushing of the deep
While I lay stinging in the sand with sleep.
I have lived inland long. The land is numb.
It stands beneath the feet, and one may come
Walking securely, till the sea extends
Its limber margin, and precision ends.
By night a chaos of commingling power,
The whole Pacific hovers hour by hour.
The slow Pacific swell stirs on the sand,
Sleeping to sink away, withdrawing land,
Heaving and wrinkled in the moon, and blind;
Or gathers seaward, ebbing out of mind.
******************************
Any reader can sense, even on a first reading, the writer’s effort to convey something about how the mind works. Maybe the way awareness comes and goes. Sometimes we experience very sharp precision of thought, and sometimes we float into vagueness; sometimes we’re mentally agitated, and sometimes we’re very calm — pacific, if you like. Sometimes we drift very close to the truth; sometimes we’re kept infinitely far away from it.
More interestingly, sometimes consciousness feels like both of these states at once. Like the seawater that washes up on the poet’s ship, consciousness can be a “loose weight” — which sounds like an oxymoron, but water is very heavy, and at the same time without structure. Our thoughts have weight, perhaps, but they are after all merely thoughts.
So, to wade through the poem…
Far out of sight forever stands the sea,
Bounding the land with pale tranquillity.
[Note the last phrase of the poem: “Ebbing out of mind.” The land is where we walk through our lives, grounded, in a familiar world. The sea remains, in its vastness, looseness, and distance, ungraspable, incomprehensible, to us. So say it conveys here the realm of intellectual and spiritual mystery — all that we’ll never understand, however advanced we become. We gaze at it and listen to it because we’re enchanted and intrigued by what we don’t know.]
When a small child, I watched it from a hill
At thirty miles or more. The vision still
Lies in the eye, soft blue and far away:
The rain has washed the dust from April day;
Paint-brush and lupine lie against the ground;
The wind above the hill-top has the sound
Of distant water in unbroken sky;
Dark and precise the little steamers ply-
Firm in direction they seem not to stir.
That is illusion. The artificer
Of quiet, distance holds me in a vise
And holds the ocean steady to my eyes.
[Everything here goes to precision, clarity, the ability to hold something steady in order to see it, analyze it. No dust in the eye; a clear April day; the sky’s unbroken by cloud. Dark and precise the little steamers ply – / Firm in direction they seem not to stir. Glorious poetic concision here, stating something I’ve thought too, gazing through my binoculars at cargo ships in the afternoon, so geometrically clear, heading somewhere full of goods… And yet – he’s right – they don’t seem to be moving. They’re so far away. Sometimes I’ll stare them a long time just to measure their forward progress from place to place; but it’s so hard to see them actually moving as they get somewhere! So another paradox beloved of poets — firm in direction but not stirring.]
Once when I rounded Flattery, the sea
Hove its loose weight like sand to tangle me
Upon the washing deck, to crush the hull;
Subsiding, dragged flesh at the bone. The skull
Felt the retreating wash of dreaming hair.
[Cape Flattery’s “the farthest northwest point of the contiguous United States.” Here all the clarity, precision, and stillness dissolves as the poet’s thrown to the deck by the force of the waves. He’s lost consciousness, briefly, and lies dreaming.]
Half drenched in dissolution, I lay bare.
I scarcely pulled myself erect; I came
Back slowly, slowly knew myself the same.
[The slow pacific swell. So much of our lives we spend dreaming, half-conscious; and then the slow pacific swell of thought and feeling overwhelms us, rouses us to awareness. I came / Back slowly, slowly knew myself the same. Yet the act of awareness — the formation, the swell, of thought — will be maddeningly slow. We’ll be getting somewhere, perhaps — like those steamers — but it’s going to feel as though we’re stuck.]
That was the ocean. From the ship we saw
Gray whales for miles: the long sweep of the jaw,
The blunt head plunging clean above the wave.
[The poet’s skull; and now the whale’s head: The theme of awareness, of consciousness itself as it tries to understand and act upon the world, seems dominant to me in this poem. The whale is a kind of perfection of consciousness; it can lift itself clean above the wave.]
And one rose in a tent of sea and gave
A darkening shudder; water fell away;
The whale stood shining, and then sank in spray.
[Same paradox of consciousness: A shining moment of clarity, triumph over the ungraspable infinite; and then it sinks in spray, back to the deeps.]
A landsman, I. The sea is but a sound.
I would be near it on a sandy mound,
And hear the steady rushing of the deep
While I lay stinging in the sand with sleep.
I have lived inland long. The land is numb.
It stands beneath the feet, and one may come
Walking securely, till the sea extends
Its limber margin, and precision ends.
[I prefer to live on land, where I can feel somewhat secure in my world, though I know that by keeping a distance from the rushing of the deep I remain only half-awake. I don’t confront, or try to take into account, that deeper enigmatic realm that undoes our sense of precision.]
By night a chaos of commingling power,
The whole Pacific hovers hour by hour.
[There’s something frightening – and hence evaded – about the powerful realm of chaos the sea expresses to us constantly.]
The slow Pacific swell stirs on the sand,
[This line wins the alliteration award.]
Sleeping to sink away, withdrawing land,
[Here again things feel pretty ominous. The sea doesn’t merely remind us of the erosion of our certainties; it withdraws land… It actively undermines our sense of solidity.]
Heaving and wrinkled in the moon, and blind;
[Heaving – like the poet himself heaving on the deck under the water’s influence; and – blind. The poem ends with that ultimate image of darkness… And the sea is under the influence, after all, of the moon; and so it is passive, and unable, like the little steamers, to set its own direction. You might have at some point in reading this poem been reminded of Matthew Arnold’s Dover Beach, which has a similar theme — the sea in its circular powerful chaos is both a figure for our own sense of spiritual and intellectual futility, and a challenge to us to struggle toward greater clarity.]
Or gathers seaward, ebbing out of mind.
[The poem concludes with the final escape of the sea and all its philosophical challenge; or, rather, with our banishment of the sea, our insisting that it ebb out of our minds so that we can regain a sense of uprightness on solid ground.]
[Maybe you didn’t think of Arnold. Maybe you thought of Elizabeth Bishop – At the Fishhouses. This is how that poem ends.]
I have seen it over and over, the same sea, the same,
slightly, indifferently swinging above the stones,
icily free above the stones,
above the stones and then the world.
If you should dip your hand in,
your wrist would ache immediately,
your bones would begin to ache and your hand would burn
as if the water were a transmutation of fire
that feeds on stones and burns with a dark gray flame.
If you tasted it, it would first taste bitter,
then briny, then surely burn your tongue.
It is like what we imagine knowledge to be:
dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free,
drawn from the cold hard mouth
of the world, derived from the rocky breasts
forever, flowing and drawn, and since
our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown.
***********************
Cape Flattery
The president of University of Texas Pan American announced Tuesday she will retire at the end of the month, citing “pressures” that taxed her health and distracted her from leading the university. [Background here.]
Blandina “Bambi” Cardenas will step down after 4 1/2 sometimes turbulent years at the university. Last October, anonymous allegations mailed to the University of Texas System and media outlets around the state suggested Cardenas had plagiarized portions of her dissertation. The senders claimed to be UTPA faculty.
The UT System said in late October it would investigate. But David Prior, the system’s executive vice president for academic affairs, said the inquiry was halted before concluding.
“Once we understood Dr. Cardenas’ intention to resign we abandoned it,” Prior said. Asked if Cardenas was pressured to step down, Prior said, “not to my knowledge.” In a letter to the campus, Cardenas said she informed UT System Interim Chancellor Kenneth Shine of her decision in late December.
Under Cardenas, the university in Edinburg increased the number of students receiving degrees by 58 percent, to more than 3,200 annually. It also raised the number of graduate degrees offered, the number of nursing graduates, the amount of available financial aid and the freshman and sophomore retention rates, according to Cardenas’ letter.
But in 2007, Cardenas had to pay back more than $7,000 to the university she used to pay for landscaping service and install an air conditioning unit, sprinkler system and alarm in her home. She had also been billing the university for mileage for her commute to work…
This story is about faculty persistence. They kept at her, writing anonymously about her, um, unorthodox billing practices, her plagiarism… And she finally decided it would be better for her if the plagiarism investigation didn’t happen. Good call.
… arranged it so that just after Elizabeth Alexander recited her verse, Joseph Lowery recited his?
It’s a lesson, if you want to learn it. A graphic lesson, in art and oratory.
From the University of Pennsylvania newspaper:
… There’s no reason why students should use the Internet so heavily during class. Unless a professor asks everyone to navigate to a certain page, open laptops do nothing more than attract eyeballs that should be attending to lecture notes. Bright, shiny monitors in front of a college student during lecture are evolved bug-zapper lamps.
Sure, you may say that you’re not affected by it. That you can pay attention, take good notes and still catch up on the latest headlines at nytimes.com. Or that you have the discipline to remain oblivious to your neighbor’s open PennLink page. But then you’d be lying to yourself.
The evidence? Take this annual example. Every spring, there’s that one fraternity pledge who causes a stir in a big lecture class because he’s watching porn in the first row. If no one was paying attention to the laptop ahead of him or her, the annual commotion would never occur – but it always does, without fail. Just wait a few weeks from now.
… [L]ast spring, the University of Chicago Law School … cut out non-class related computer use. As Dean Saul Levmore said in his letter to the school’s students and faculty, “we know that class time is not for shopping and e-mailing.”
… In the name of the New Year, let’s all make a resolution to cut our internet activity while a professor is talking. If not in the name of our own GPA, then for the sake of our classmate whose notes may suffer because they’re distracted by the porn two rows up.