… you’re the only one like you,” sings Barney, and the reassurance extends, surely, to countries. No other place is like Bulgaria, Germany, France … These countries might now be part of the European Union, but they retain their unique national characteristics…
And so the current president of the Union – the Czech Republic – commissioned a Czech sculptor to create for the European Council building in Brussels a vast mosaic celebrating the rich uniqueness of each member country. The sculptor would subcontract, as it were, each country’s part of the mosaic to a sculptor in that country, and the result would be a big colorful celebration of diversity.
… Here is Bulgaria, represented as a series of crude, hole-in-the-floor toilets. Here is the Netherlands, subsumed by floods, with only a few minarets peeping out from the water. Luxembourg is depicted as a tiny lump of gold marked by a “for sale” sign, while five Lithuanian soldiers are apparently urinating on Russia.
France? On strike.
The 172-square-foot, eight-ton installation, titled “Entropa,” consists of a sort of puzzle formed by the geographical shapes of European countries…
[The sculptor] admitted that he and two of his friends constructed the whole thing themselves, making up the names of artists, giving some of them Web sites and writing pretentious, absurd statements to go with their supposed contributions.
For example, next to the piece for Italy — depicted as a huge soccer field with little soccer players on it — it says, “It appears to be an autoerotic system of sensational spectacle with no climax in sight.”
The fake British entry, a kit of Europe in which the piece representing Britain has been taken out, says, “This improvement of exactness means that its individual selective sieve can cover the so-called objective sieve.” [Someone’s been reading Alfred Jarry.]
… The Germans are probably not too thrilled that their country is represented as a series of highways that, looked at a certain way, possibly bring to mind a swastika. Spain has to settle with being a huge construction site, while Romania is shown as a Dracula-themed amusement park…
**********************
Update: Pictures. Plus this, from the Daily Mail: “The eight-tonne mosaic will also go ‘live’ later this week, when certain country ‘pieces’ will start to move and make noises.”
Well, that little item about the college football coaches who got to wrestling with each other at the Opryland Hotel and fell out of a window [go here] has hit the bigtime. Google News is on fire.
And you know why? Because every now and then an event occurs that so distills the essence of a certain world as to give the event mythic stature. What a local Nashville reporter calls the “tragic” defenestration of two big drunk semi-nude members of the Westminster College community has swiftly taken on the same important national resonance as Borat.
************
Reminder: Here’s another recent university coach story. These guys really know how to get into the paper.
The spoiled ‘thesdan theme has gotten totally out of hand.
You know. The University Diaries theme involving the ridiculous privileges accruing to UD’s kid. It’s gotten totally out of hand.
Here’s who she’s singing with in a few days. She’s already had one rehearsal with the chorus.
Recording artists Beyonce, Mary J. Blige, Bono, Garth Brooks, Sheryl Crow, Renee Fleming, Josh Groban, Herbie Hancock, Heather Headley, John Legend, Jennifer Nettles, John Mellencamp, Usher, Shakira, Bruce Springsteen, James Taylor, will.i.am and Stevie Wonder are scheduled to play the opening celebration, which will be free and open to the public.
Um. Words fail me.
… has died. Here’s a memorable poem of his.
April Inventory
The green catalpa tree has turned
All white; the cherry blooms once more.
In one whole year I haven’t learned
A blessed thing they pay you for.
The blossoms snow down in my hair;
The trees and I will soon be bare.
The trees have more than I to spare.
The sleek, expensive girls I teach,
Younger and pinker every year,
Bloom gradually out of reach.
The pear tree lets its petals drop
Like dandruff on a tabletop.
The girls have grown so young by now
I have to nudge myself to stare.
This year they smile and mind me how
My teeth are falling with my hair.
In thirty years I may not get
Younger, shrewder, or out of debt.
The tenth time, just a year ago,
I made myself a little list
Of all the things I’d ought to know,
Then told my parents, analyst,
And everyone who’s trusted me
I’d be substantial, presently.
I haven’t read one book about
A book or memorized one plot.
Or found a mind I did not doubt.
I learned one date. And then forgot.
And one by one the solid scholars
Get the degrees, the jobs, the dollars.
And smile above their starchy collars.
I taught my classes Whitehead’s notions;
One lovely girl, a song of Mahler’s.
Lacking a source-book or promotions,
I showed one child the colors of
A luna moth and how to love.
I taught myself to name my name,
To bark back, loosen love and crying;
To ease my woman so she came,
To ease an old man who was dying.
I have not learned how often I
Can win, can love, but choose to die.
I have not learned there is a lie
Love shall be blonder, slimmer, younger;
That my equivocating eye
Loves only by my body’s hunger;
That I have forces, true to feel,
Or that the lovely world is real.
While scholars speak authority
And wear their ulcers on their sleeves,
My eyes in spectacles shall see
These trees procure and spend their leaves.
There is a value underneath
The gold and silver in my teeth.
Though trees turn bare and girls turn wives,
We shall afford our costly seasons;
There is a gentleness survives
That will outspeak and has its reasons.
There is a loveliness exists,
Preserves us, not for specialists.
NASHVILLE, Tenn.: Two assistant coaches apparently wrestling with each other fell through a hotel window Tuesday morning and fell four stories to a concrete sidewalk, leaving one in serious condition.
The American Football Coaches Association is holding its annual convention at the Opryland Hotel, and hotel security had been called around 4:10 a.m. with a noise complaint when officers found a broken window and Scott Coy and Darren DeMeio outside on the ground below.
“They wrestled each other too close to the window going through it and down to the ground floor,” Nashville police spokeswoman Kris Mumford said. “That’s four floors.”
Coy, 29, is 6-foot-2 and 300 pounds from Newcastle, Pa. He was in critical condition and having surgery Tuesday afternoon at Vanderbilt University. DeMeio, 24, is 6-4, 225 pounds and from Clinton, Ohio. Police said he was in fair condition but remained in the hospital as of Tuesday afternoon.
Coy is co-offensive coordinator at Westminster College in New Wilmington, Pa., and DeMeio is the running backs coach, according to the college’s Web site. A telephone message left with the sports information office was not immediately returned Tuesday afternoon.
Hotel spokeswoman Kim Keelor said the window the men fell through was double-paned with a strong wooden sash in the middle.
“It’s very sad. I definitely want to express our sympathy to their families. It’s just a very strange and unfortunate occurrence,” she said.
The unassuming development economist [Esther Duflo], recently named as one of the 100 most influential thinkers in the world, this week became the youngest woman ever to lecture at one of France’s most prestigious institutions when she addressed the Collège de France – a 500-year old open university on the Left Bank in Paris.
The lecture – which sparked a fervour rarely seen since the days of Jean-Paul Sartre – was packed, with one former prime minister failing to secure a seat.
… She is a world expert on understanding why despite throwing billions at development programmes in poor countries, many fail, and why others succeed. A pioneer in this field, which has only existed for ten years, she has devised a technique to test the effectiveness of anti-poverty programmes through “random testing”, much like pharmaceutical companies test drugs.
Rather than pontificate on abstract, lofty thoughts, her work is about homing in on precise details, such as raising pupil and teacher attendance in schools in poor countries by offering free meals…
Some details on her ideas and methods here.
… from the Bellingham Herald:
… [W]e applaud Western president Bruce Shepard for being willing to make the tough decision to cut the football program. It took a brave leader to cut a program that some consider important to the school’s reputation. Some students, alumni and community members are very sad to see football go. But academics should always come before athletics – for students and for schools.
… The University of Washington could use the same kind of leadership. In Seattle, the university has agreed to pay nearly $3 million in total annual salaries to the new head coach and offensive and defensive coordinators. That seems an incredible waste of public funds…
An essay about Greece in Harvard International Review.
[T]here is a certain cult of student unrest in Greece which goes back to 1973, when the occupation of the Polytechnic school by students contributed to the overthrow of a military dictatorship which had ruled Greece since 1967. The cult of this occupation persisted well after the reestablishment of democracy in 1974. It is celebrated every year and taught at schools as one of the most glorious events of Greek history. Those who lived it have often kept a belief that the politicization and mobilization of the youth is essentially good for democracy, even when it takes violent forms.
• Remove the management of the academic counselors in the Academic Success Program from the Athletic Department, transferring it to the dean’s office in the College of LS&A. ASP counselors do “excellent” work and become athletes’ second families, said [a member of the committee reforming athletics]. But their advice has to be aligned with athletes’ post-graduation goals.
• Remove the task of hearing appeals of student athletes who wish to stay academically eligible to participate in sports from the Committee on Academic Performance. That faculty body has come under scrutiny on campus because its members are offered free trips to attend Michigan football bowl games, courtesy of the Athletic Department.
These are a couple of the recommendations a University of Michigan faculty committee has put forward in order to clean up various athletic scandals, or scandals in the making, there. For background on the ticket business, go here. UD figures the recommendation about this means to put pressure on the conflict of interest-challenged members of that committee so they’ll give up their precious freebie.
UD‘s back at the beach.
She got the book and the film The Diving Bell and the Butterfly as holiday gifts, and last night for hours she did the whole multimedia thing.
First she lay in bed and read the book, the sound of her American Atlantic waves echoing the sound of the author’s French Atlantic as he lay in a hospital bed in 1995 — he died the following year — entirely paralyzed after a stroke. He listened to the water from the balcony of the Naval Hospital on the northern coast; UD listened from an apartment balcony in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware.
Julian Barnes says there’s a “strange, unwitnessed, yet deeply intimate relationship between writer and reader,” and this intimacy is particularly intense when the writer has been reduced to consciousness alone, and when he is writing quickly and honestly, in the face of death.
Of course Jean-Dominique Bauby didn’t write the book at all; he dictated — oculated? –his final thoughts via blinks from one good eye.
The result of this painstaking process is a thin reflective volume, 132 pages of staccato prose… A bit of regret here, a burst of agony there. Stabbing prose.
Ashamed as nurses bathe him, Bauby recalls “the protracted immersions that were the joy of my previous life. Armed with a cup of tea or a Scotch, a good book or a pile of newspapers, I would soak for hours, maneuvering the taps with my toes.” He imagines summer vacationers “boating around [an] island, the small outboards laboring against the current. Someone will be stretched out in the bow, eyes closed, arm trailing in the cool water.” He’s a universe away from them, among “broken-winged birds, voiceless parrots, ravens of doom, who have made our nest in a dead-end corridor of the neurology department.”
The only unshattered things he has left are consciousness and emotion. “I need to feel strongly, to love and to admire, just as desperately as I need to breathe. A letter from a friend, a Balthus painting on a postcard, a page of Saint-Simon, give meaning to the passing hours.” On Sundays, everything dies. “I contemplate my books, piled up on the windowsill to constitute a small library: a rather useless one, for today no one will come to read them for me. Seneca, Zola, Chateaubriand, and Valéry Larbaud are right there, three feet away, just out of reach.” Alone, he falls into “regret for a vanished past, and above, all, remorse for lost opportunities. … [T]he women [I was] unable to love, the chances [I] failed to seize, the moments of happiness [I] allowed to drift away. Today it seems to me that my whole life was nothing but a string of … small near misses…”
On the very last page, he suddenly looks at the open purse of his speech therapist:
…I see a hotel room key, a metro ticket, and a hundred-franc note folded in four, like objects brought back by a space probe sent to earth to study how earthlings live, travel, and trade with one another. The sight leaves me pensive and confused. Does the cosmos contain keys for opening up my diving bell? A subway line with no terminus? A currency strong enough to buy my freedom back?
And then I watched the film – in that hunched and solitary way you watch when you watch on your laptop, with its little sounds and images shedding their little circle of light… But I felt far less intimate with Bauby than I did reading his prose – even his translated prose. To read his book is to be encased with him in his consciousness; the film’s about too many other things besides his morbid subjectivity. The other things are moving and true — the intensely loving desire of other people to help him, in particular — but you only get the truth head-on, UD thinks, in the grain of the prose, in consciousness unbound contemplating unspeakable boundedness.
And then I got online and read all about the controversy over the film’s distortion of Bauby’s ex-partner and the girlfriend he left her for …
Down there! A
few posts down!
Take a look, and
think of something
clever.
An inscribed copy
of this book shall
be your reward
should you triumph.
… applauds the school’s decision to shut down its football program.
Western, at least in my 14 years on its faculty, never had a football culture. Most students were apathetic, faculty rarely attended games, and Whatcom County evinced little interest despite a passion for high-school games. Aside from the rivalry with Central Washington University, a football game rarely drew more than 2,000 fans. When Shepard’s decision was announced in Thursday’s Bellingham Herald, not a single reader posted a comment.
The Saturday tailgate culture of big-school football had no grip on a campus with no fraternities or crowds of community backers available in larger cities. Western students prefer active snow sports and basketball; Title IX brought women’s sports into the limelight, and Western women in crew, volleyball, and basketball developed excellent records and lots of campus support…
A commenter disagrees:
It’s beyond question that there’s not much of a “football culture” at Western. To me, the fact that the university could field a team and avoid that very “culture” was one of the great things about the program. You can make a sound argument for dropping the program. But purely line-item budgeting isn’t a good one. By that measure, Western, which doesn’t have much of a Shakespeare culture, either, would be issuing pink slips to English professors…
The problem with this argument is that universities exist to encourage a culture of Shakespeare. They’re supposed to lead people toward things like Shakespeare, even if people don’t know shit about Shakespeare and don’t care that they don’t know. Educate — to lead forth. Universities are not about leading people to football.
… or not quite a millionaire… But ol’ Roy did do pretty well…
A Houston County [Alabama] educator was overpaid by about $50,000 over a 10-year period based on his questionable doctorate, according to an internal investigation.
Roy Watford, Houston County Schools secondary curriculum/accreditation director, received extra pay for a doctoral degree he held from the University of Beverly Hills, Houston County School Superintendent Tim Pitchford said. The extra pay amounted to about $5,000 more per year between 1994 and 2004 than he should have received.
Educators are paid according to their years of experience and highest degree level obtained. To get credit for the degrees, they must come from a university or college accredited by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools. SACS does not recognize the University of Beverly Hills…
… Yale’s president puts the endowment losses in perspective:
Our endowment only passed the $17 billion mark a little less than three years ago. It’s not like this is a catastrophe.