And why?

Because it’s one of those ur poems, one of those echt poems, one of those poems that simply does what a poem can do, and does it beautifully. Everyone loves Adelstrop because it isn’t showy and it isn’t sentimental and it isn’t welcome to my psyche. Art arrests life, wrote someone or other, and Adelstrop artfully describes life suddenly arrested so you can see it pure. Pure – what do I mean by pure… I mean life for most people contains these very occasional epiphanic moments when the sheer flow and contingency of event breaks and you see – quoting Wallace Stevens here, in his poem Snowman:

Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

The poet’s poet – Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop – is almost always doing Adelstrop, variations of Adelstrop. These poets evoke a consciousness able for a moment to perceive the true silent steadfast life of the world – call it Gaia, if you’d like – as it breathes its being behind our daily agitations. Meditation, prayer – there are disciplines that can take you to a similar place. But the most powerful poetry represents a body of writing that inaugurates you into this condition of calmed and clarified consciousness, this state of full receptivity to the song of the earth, simply by making you feel what someone feeling the receptivity feels.

Yes. I remember Adlestrop —
The name, because one afternoon
Of heat the express-train drew up there
Unwontedly. It was late June.

And for that minute a blackbird sang
Close by, and round him, mistier,
Farther and farther, all the birds
Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.

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The life train suddenly and inexplicably puts on the brakes; we have no idea where we are. No motion, and a silent empty platform, and letters that don’t refer to anything. ADELSTROP means to designate a place, but designates instead the nothing that is. Its very absurdity eases the poet into nothingness in a way Portsmouth – a name with meanings in it – wouldn’t.

There’s hardly any sound – hissing steam, a throat cleared – and everyone’s abandoned the midday June heat for the shade. But for the poet in the passenger car, the full summer sun can now burn into the human void and shed absolute radiance on the world of natural objects, objects commonly obscured by humanity. He lists each thing he sees as if playing a children’s game, reconstituting the world out of nothingness … I spy with my little eye… Each of these objects hits him with the same newness, the same sense of having burst fresh and alone from the earth’s body, that objects seem to have to children playing pointing games in the semi-dark. Grass. Haycocks. Meadowsweet.

The name, the objects: all seem

No whit less still and lonely fair
Than the high cloudlets in the sky.

As his eye lifts to the clouds, the poet realizes that while each of these singular objects claims radiant independent life, each is also part of a mysterious multiplicity. The willow has a kinship with the cloud – both are infused with powerful and beautiful being, and together with all the natural objects of the world they make the world, the world whose life, again, always seems mere backdrop to our human drama.

So for this minute the world discloses itself to the poet. He sees its singularity and multiplicity. For him for this minute it pulls itself into singing unison, allowing him to hear all the birds of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.

And just like The Snowman, and just like Virginia, this poem, which wants to give verbal life to the staggered accretion of life-awareness, will compose itself out of small lines and small words – new to this newly disclosed form of life, we bring to it a child’s gathering recognitions.

Coach tries to recite the alphabet.

Remember: There are university sports apologists who think the coaching staff should be on the faculty.

Les UDs own a Cambridge house a few streets away from Somerville, where, inside her apartment there, a Boston University math professor has allegedly been cooking up meth.

Boston University Professor Irina Kristy is expected to face charges for abetting her son in running a drug lab in their apartment, according to an article published Monday by the Somerville Journal.

Kristy, a professor of math and statistics at BU, and her son Grigory Genkin are suspected of cooking methamphetamine from their apartment in Somerville, the article said.

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UD thanks Annie.

A neo-Nazi group will be allowed to participate in Delaware’s Adopt A HIghway program, but can’t use the word “Nazi” in the signs designating their segment of the roadway…

“[Their] request to have the words ‘Nazi Party’ displayed on a state sign was denied because DelDOT chose not to associate the state with the term and its generally understood philosophy of advocating the denial of civil rights,” DelDOT spokesman Geoff Sundstrom.”

Scathing Online Schoolmarm read Mr Sundstrom’s description of Nazism to a randomly encountered man on the street (Mr UD, at the breakfast table). He laughed when she read it. She read it again. He laughed again. Why, asked SOS, did he laugh?

Mr UD put down his bright red coffee cup and looked away from his New York Times.

“Well… One normally expects a stronger statement about Nazis. It’s the bureaucratic care he brings to the subject…”

That was written in 2010. Add the billion-dollar tv deals, much, much more money for the coach, etc.

My point is that the University of Oklahoma football program is rolling in it. The University of Texas and the University of Oklahoma are the “two richest, most powerful programs” in their conference.

And yet like many rich and powerful sports universities, Oklahoma has become visibly microcephalic, bearing on its enormous body a shrinkingly small brain. Oklahoma, with its pathetic academic budget, its hopeless struggle to have anything to do with education, is what you look like when you graft, as George Will says, “a 109,901-seat entertainment venue [onto] an institution of higher education.”

You get a manic depressive university president who spends Monday slobbering over the team’s amazing amazing victories OH MY GAWD I CAN’T BELIEVE IT COACH STOOPS WE’RE NOT WORTHY!!!! and Tuesday sobbing into his beer about no money for, well, the school: “You have to keep the lights on. You have to keep health insurance,” Boren wailed to the student newspaper the other day.

Forget classes and professors. We can barely put food on the fucking table! What kind of a world are we living in when you can have a trillion dollar football team and no lights in the library? If we can put a man on the moon, why can’t we run our little school?

“It would be a tragedy if we lost the humanities, the social sciences, the arts and the rest,” Boren stated. “That’s one of the real dangers: universities will think, ‘Ah, quick solution. Do away with all that.’”

Being president of a school like Oklahoma is sort of like being one of the generals who run Myanmar. You preside over a resource-rich campus which should be able to sustain itself at a pretty high level. But because of greed and corruption, your job is essentially to oversee a few people making a lot of money while pacifying a starving population. What a tragedy if we lost the humanities! Message: I care.

Paul Krugman says what UD‘s thought as she’s watched Newt Gingrich over many, many years.

Gingrich has the worst traits of the worst stereotypical professor: Vain, irritable, cynical, superior, verbally fat and polemically thin.

Yet stupid people read his fast-talking smooth-operator thing as smart; they think being a smug and dismissive know-it-all is what it means to be a smart person.

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

On the first – and last – day that Mr UD attended one particular graduate course offered by the University of Chicago, the professor cast his eye ’round the seminar table and began the semester with the following statement: “You’re looking at the world’s most distinguished living political philosopher.” That’s a stupid person’s idea of a smart person – farcical self-regard plus a James Deen-hard conviction that you’re right about everything.

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

UPDATE: This is what a smart person sounds like.

At a Natural Resources Committee hearing Friday on oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, Rep. Don Young (R-Alaska) mistakenly addressed the professor as “Dr. Rice“ while calling his testimony ”garbage.”

Brinkley interrupted, saying: “It’s Dr. Brinkley, Rice is a university,“ and ”I know you went to Yuba [Community College in California] and couldn’t graduate — ”

Then it was Young’s turn to interrupt. “I’ll call you anything I want to call you when you sit in that chair,” he told the witness. “You just be quiet.”

Brinkley countered: “You don’t own me. I pay your salary. I work for the private sector and you work for the taxpayer.”

I recognize that Brinkley looks pretty irritable and self-regarding in this exchange. But I’d like to suggest that there are good reasons for his insolence, having had his ideas called garbage by a congressional bully. Young insults not just Brinkley, but the entire discussion, calling it “futile.” He calls Brinkley an elitist when it is Young (“I’ll call you anything I want to call you…”) who’s the elitist throughout the exchange. Brinkley’s what a smart guy sounds like when he’s speaking truth back to power (“You just be quiet.” – Infantilizing power at that.). Brinkley is one of Paul Fussell’s X‘s – people “impelled by insolence, intelligence, irony, and spirit.” Gingrich may share the insolence, but the rest of his list is very different.

It’s not quite over for copyright troll Righthaven (its owner will probably be appearing in court soon for a debtor examination), but as the attorneys at the Electronic Frontier Foundation note, EFF’s latest court victory – in which Stevens Media, financial backer of Righthaven, conceded that “posting a short excerpt of a news article in an online forum is not copyright infringement” – constitutes a decisive victory against the outfit that went after, among hundreds of other blogs, University Diaries.

… the University of Louisville (read all about it). It’s the lowest of the low.

But Louisville burnishes its sports reputation with rates of campus employee theft that simply knock the school of the park. In response to the latest theft, the Courier-Journal reviews the school’s klepto-history.

U of L’s problems with employee theft first came to light in 2008 with the case of Robert Felner, U of L’s former education dean, who is serving a 63-month prison sentence.

Felner pleaded guilty last year in U.S. District Court in Louisville to fraud, money laundering and tax evasion in the theft of $2.3 million from U of L and two other institutions.

Most recently, a university audit completed in August accused a former senior program coordinator in the College of Business of stealing more than $463,000 from the Equine Industry Program. That case has been turned over to the U.S. Attorney’s office, but no charges have been filed.

The latest thief used stolen money from the athletics program to buy scads of oxycodone, which she later sold.

All schools have internal problems, but UD can think of no American university with UL’s over-the-top combination of sports corruption and employee criminality.

And you might ask – Is it such a big deal that Yale’s football coach wasn’t a candidate or a finalist for a Rhodes scholarship, as he has claimed?

Well, yes. Especially at academic institutions, fake degrees, falsely claimed degrees, faked credentials, falsely claimed honors — these are almost as destructive to a school’s reputation as its sports program.

The president and dean of instruction at Bishop State in Alabama both have diploma mill degrees, which makes the place a laughingstock. A university run by people unable to graduate from universities … People running around calling themselves doctors when they’ve pressed a BUY YOUR DEGREE NOW button on their computer… It maketh a mockery of all aspiration to institutional seriousness.

The Yale thing is of course much paltrier; but the principle’s the same: You need to be legit.

… at a tailgate.

Herman Cain goes for the dipshit vote.

Big-time university athletics, in which, writes George Will, “a 109,901-seat entertainment venue [is] attached to an institution of higher education,” has become “impervious to reform.”

This being the case, our only option is to anticipate the myriad ways it’s trying to hurt us, and to defend ourselves against as many of these as we can.

For instance, University Diaries has attempted, over the years, to flag the off-field fraudsters who make football so exciting for schools like University of Miami — guys like Nevin Shapiro with big mouths and big cars and big luxury boxes and big money. Before these guys go to jail, they tend to be BFFs with the university president and the coaches and players etc. … After all, what is a university if not an institution established to honor assholes waving cashwads? Who can blame Donna Shalala for falling hard for Nevin Shapiro?

But UD says that if you’d rather try to see someone like Nevin coming, if you’d rather try to defend yourself against a class of people that accumulates like scum around your 100,000-seat arena, you should do what she does: Stay current on the scammers so that you can perceive patterns. Once you know the patterns, you can establish an early-warning system.

Yes, I have a brand new example for you.

Before Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast in 2005, natural gas broker Paul Lawing lived lavishly in big houses and flew in corporate jets to University of North Carolina basketball games.

Corporate jets to the game… and:

In October 2009, Lawing was placed on probation after pleading guilty to selling UNC and Atlantic Coast Conference basketball tickets for a total of more than $10,000 but not delivering them to the buyers.

That sort of thing.

From Idaho to Indiana to Florida, recently passed laws will radically reshape the face of education in America, shifting the responsibility of teaching generations of Americans to online education businesses, many of which have poor or nonexistent track records. The rush to privatize education will also turn tens of thousands of students into guinea pigs in a national experiment in virtual learning — a relatively new idea that allows for-profit companies to administer public schools completely online, with no brick-and-mortar classrooms or traditional teachers.

… “Why are our legislators rushing to jump off the cliff of cyber charter schools when the best available evidence produced by independent analysts show that such schools will be unsuccessful?” asked Ed Fuller, an education researcher at Pennsylvania State University, on his blog.

Uh, because they don’t care? Because they get insane amounts of money from the online education industry?

[Central Florida University,] which has more than 50,000 students, was [asked by the IRS] if dues paid for its president, John Hitt, to belong to the Interlachen Country Club in nearby Winter Park and the Citrus Club in downtown Orlando, as well as $4,000 a month for travel for his spouse, was reported as taxable income. Chad Binette, a university spokesman, declined to comment.

But the tax-free thing only gets really disgusting when it gets to Harvard — a THIRTY-TWO BILLION DOLLAR endowment, and still claiming exemptions up the wazoo.

In the recently published Steve Jobs biography by Walter Isaacson, Jobs discusses how he re-invented Apple during the iMac phase by abolishing the use of presentation software in meetings. He felt that people were relying on the creation and presentation of a slide deck instead of actually thinking about the business problem and how to solve it. On page 337 of the telling biography, Jobs says, “People who know what they’re talking about don’t need PowerPoint.”

How much more dispiriting to see its constant use in university classrooms.