… UD helped Jerzy Soltan write an essay of Le Corbusier reminiscences for this book (Soltan, Mr UD’s father, was a Corbu disciple).

English was Soltan’s fourth language. His son’s girlfriend was just the person to turn Soltan’s rather raggedy prose (full of exclamation marks !!! and ellipses  ……. ) into something chic.

I loved doing it. The story of Soltan’s discovery of Corbu, and the way Soltan, fresh from six years in a prisoner of war camp, simply appeared at the door of Corbu’s Paris atelier — it’s quite a thing.

The latest big biography of Corbu – Le Corbusier: A Life, by Nicholas Fox Weber – quotes a great deal from that essay, UD‘s pleased to say.

Mind/body problem brewing in France…

The skull of famous French philosopher René Descartes could be on the move from its current resting place, the Musée de l’Homme in Paris, to the north western town of La Flèche.

Descartes, one of the founding fathers of modern philosophy developed theories which helped to provide a framework for natural sciences. He is most famous for his Discourse on the Method [sic], his Principles of Philosophy and the expression cogito ergo sum, or “I think, therefore I am”.

The remains of his body were separated shortly after his death in Sweden in 1650, and his skull is housed in the Musée de l’Homme in central Paris.

But with the backing of French Prime Minister François Fillon, the Prytanée military school has submitted an official request to move Descartes’ cranium to an adjoining church for display.

The school, run by Jesuits, was attended by Descartes from 1607 to 1615, and is looking to honour its alumni. They believe its current home alongside prehistoric man and a moulding of the head of footballer Lilian Thuram, is not suitable.

There is also an ongoing dispute about the authenticity of the remains, with four skulls that could theoretically be Descartes’.

The one requested by the school turned up in Stockholm in 1821, where he was originally buried, before his body was moved to Paris, where it now lies in the Saint Germain des Près church.

Some experts say the authenticity must be checked, while others believe it is more important to reunite his head with his body.

From Inside Higher Ed:

State Rep. Ray Sansom of Florida announced on the first day of a special legislative session Monday that he would reluctantly give up his $110,000 a year, part-time job with Northwest Florida State College, the Associated Press reported. Sansom, the majority leader in Florida’s House of Representatives, became the latest lawmaker there to generate conflict of interest accusations with jobs at colleges to which they’ve also helped direct funds. Sansom was hired by the college in November as vice president for development and planning, a newly created position that was not publicly advertised, after he helped steer $25.5 million toward Northwest Florida State College during a year when budgets were being cut across the state.

It’s Florida.

It won’t change much of anything.

…will sing at the opening

ceremony of the Obama

inauguration events.  She’ll

be part of a chorus at the

steps of the Lincoln Memorial.

Obama will be in the audience.

Sunday January 18,

around 2:00 PM.

… the Madoff thing’s getting positively Shakespearean.

Bard College, a liberal-arts school in New York State’s Hudson Valley, lost about $3 million in investments related to Bernard Madoff.

The losses involved $11 million of Bard’s $270 million endowment that the college invested in the Ariel Fund, managed by J. Ezra Merkin, Bard President Leon Botstein said today in a telephone interview from Jerusalem. Merkin was introduced to the school by the late Leon Levy, a Bard trustee who founded OppenheimerFunds Inc., and serves as a governor of Bard’s Levy Economics Institute, Botstein said. [Bit confusing there. If Levy’s late, how can he serve?]

Bard believed about a fourth of its Ariel investment was in cash, Botstein said. Instead, it was invested with Madoff without the school’s knowledge, he said.

“It’s absolutely outrageous,” Botstein said. “We never knowingly invested with Madoff. We invested with Ezra Merkin.”…

… is discussed in this book.

I haven’t ordered it yet; I only
know from Google Books that
UD‘s part of
his discussion of blogs. I’m
looking forward to reading
what the author has to say.

… to get us going for the New Year.

“If one follow Blake’s mind through the several stages of his poetic development it is impossible to regard him as a naïf, a wild man, a wild pet for the supercultivated. The strangeness is evaporated, the peculiarity is seen to be the peculiarity of all great poetry: something which is found (not everywhere) in Homer and Æschylus and Dante and Villon, and profound and concealed in the work of Shakespeare—and also in another form in Montaigne and in Spinoza. It is merely a peculiar honesty, which, in a world too frightened to be honest, is peculiarly terrifying. It is an honesty against which the whole world conspires, because it is unpleasant. Blake’s poetry has the unpleasantness of great poetry. Nothing that can be called morbid or abnormal or perverse, none of the things which exemplify the sickness of an epoch or a fashion, have this quality; only those things which, by some extraordinary labour of simplification, exhibit the essential sickness or strength of the human soul.

… Blake …  knew what interested him, and he therefore presents only the essential, only, in fact, what can be presented, and need not be explained. And because he was not distracted, or frightened, or occupied in anything but exact statement, he understood. He was naked, and saw man naked, and from the centre of his own crystal. To him there was no more reason why Swedenborg should be absurd than Locke. He accepted Swedenborg, and eventually rejected him, for reasons of his own. He approached everything with a mind unclouded by current opinions. There was nothing of the superior person about him. This makes him terrifying…”

T.S. Eliot,  The Sacred Wood

A herd of elephants today strayed into the Berhampur University campus [in India], some 180km from the state capital, injuring one person and causing panic among students, employees and their families.

The herd comprising 10 elephants kept people on the campus terrified till the evening, said Berhampur divisional forest officer A.K. Jena, while speaking to The Telegraph from the spot.

Jena said the elephant herd that was seen around Sundar hills near Chhatrapur some 20km from Berhampur last evening was sighted in the jungle behind the university high school in the campus at around 4am today.

…

Preparations for the celebration of the 43rd Foundation Day of the university scheduled for tomorrow have been hampered due to the presence of the animals, sources said.

District forest officer Jena conceded that a large crowd gathered to see the elephants was creating logistical problem for the forest officers.

“We will start the drive in the evening and take efforts to chase them away towards the Berbera forests,” he added.

This herd was a part of huge herd comprising more than 20 elephants that had strayed from Chandka sanctuary located on the outskirts of Bhubaneswar in 2007 and have been moving across Ganjam since then.

…is the title of my third and final post about Norman Maclean at Inside Higher Ed.  Here tis.

An article in this morning’s New York Times picks up the ever more gruesome tale of American university students and debt.

Even as the economy tanks, tanked students stagger over to the bright tent at university football games and open a credit card account in exchange for a gift. How innocent they are…

[One] bank has an $8.4 million, seven-year contract with Michigan State giving it access to students’ names and addresses and use of the university’s logo. The more students who take the banks’ credit cards, the more money the university gets. Under certain circumstances, Michigan State even stands to receive more money if students carry a balance on these cards.

Their university and the banks have created the perfect sucker storm… Flush with drink and a sense of invincibility as her team wins 27 – 0, the student excitedly accepts her free blanket and her third credit card…