… the lower depths? Do you THINK she wants to read about, much less write about, the lurid sub-basements of the American university?

Well yes okay. She does rather enjoy it.

And yet for years now, on this blog, she has noticed that she’ll do almost anything to avoid writing about fraternities.

Imagine you’re starting out as a reporter at a local paper, and you’re told that your first assignment will be a multi-part series on the systematic abuse of dogs at puppy mills. That’s the sort of excitement with which I go to details of stories about those brick colonials set aside on the American campus for the purpose of concentrating young men willing to drink themselves to death so that someone will like them. Cover this rape, UD! Cover that sadistic haze! UD: Learn the folkways of lads who ladle gin… anally!

Louis-Ferdinand Céline captured the inside of many fraternities better than any other writer:

It so happened that just to one side of my bench there was a big hole in the sidewalk, something like the Métro at home. That hole seemed propitious, so vast, with a stairway all of pink marble inside it. I’d seen quite a few people from the street disappear into it and come out again. It was in that underground vault that they answered the call of nature. I caught on right away. The hall where the business was done was likewise of marble. A kind of swimming pool, but drained of all its water, a fetid swimming pool, filled only with filtered, moribund light, which fell on the forms of unbuttoned men surrounded by their smells, red in the face from the effect of expelling their stinking feces with barbarous noises in front of everybody.

Men among men, all free and easy, they laughed and joked and cheered one another on, it made me think of a football game. The first thing you did when you got there was to take off your jacket, as if in preparation for strenuous exercise. This was a rite and shirtsleeves were the uniform.

In that state of undress, belching and worse, gesticulating like lunatics, they settled down in the fecal grotto. The new arrivals were assailed with a thousand revolting jokes while descending the stairs from the street, but they all seemed delighted.

The morose aloofness of the men on the street above was equated only by the air of liberation and rejoicing that came over them at the prospect of emptying their bowels in tumultuous company.

The splotched and spotted doors to the cabins hung loose, wrenched from their hinges. Some customers went from one cell to another for a little chat, those waiting for an empty seat smoked heavy cigars and slapped the backs of the obstinately toiling occupants, who sat there straining with their heads between their hands. Some groaned like wounded men or women in labor. The constipated were threatened with ingenious tortures.

When a gush of water announced a vacancy, the clamor around the free compartment redoubled, and as often as not a coin would be tossed for its possession. No sooner read, newspapers, though as thick as pillows, were dismembered by the horde of rectal toilers. The smoke made it hard to distinguish faces, and the smells deterred me from going too close.

Now imagine a second pink marble staircase that takes you even lower than this.

You are now in SAE, the only fraternity with two mentions on this list. The fact that a chapter of SAE is currently dominating domestic news because its members do racist chants (to the tune of the only song they’ve all been able to learn: If You’re Happy and You Know it Clap Your Hands) is kind of weird if you ask ol’ UD. This sort of thing is way mild for Sigma Alpha Epsilon.