… for a Polish Easter. Blogging will be a bit light.

… Lady Bracknell.

The current House of Lords turns out to be a bevy of Bracknells.

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April Fool’s. I guess.

… you’re a better man than I am.

… enjoys this description of a bad book. The book is Dildo Cay, and the person describing it is Jonathan P. Eburne of Penn State.

It is so earnestly bad as to call its own existence into question… [The novel is] the product less of an unsteady hand than of a resoundingly tin ear, [with prose] so categorically graceless as to supersede camp and plunge straight into ontological confusion.

Robert Penn Warren was born there, in Guthrie, Kentucky, and the state has just put up signs on the highway north of the town telling people about it.

… “Only one person has won the Pulitzer Prize in both fiction and poetry,” the governor said of Warren [at the ceremony].

Warren was also deemed the first Poet Laureate of the United States.

“Robert Penn Warren reflected his pride of where he lived in his writing,” said Beshear. “Robert Penn Warren was proud of the place where he lived and the sign is to show him we’re proud of him.”…

Everyone knows his novel, All the King’s Men; his poetry, somewhat less known, is a series of strenuous spiritual nature lyrics. UD, though not immensely keen on Warren’s poetry, has always admired his lines’ unembarrassed intensity of emotion, their unreconstructed romanticism. Here’s a poem of his I just discovered. It has a surprising word in it.

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The Nature of a Mirror

The sky has murder in the eye, and I
Have murder in the heart, for I
Am only human.
We look at each other, the sky and I.
We understand each other, for

Is the mirror into which you stare.

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The sky has murder in the eye, and I
Have murder in the heart, for I
Am only human.

[I’ll die. I know that. The sky will survive me; the nature the sky’s part of will in fact kill me — I’m only human, only a fragile artifact of the natural world.]

We look at each other, the sky and I.
We understand each other, for

For the solstice of summer has sagged.

[The long sunlit days of summer are ending; the sky and the poet know that the poet’s days also shorten, darken.]

I stand
And wait. Virtue is rewarded, that
Is the nightmare,

[Like the blind Milton, the poet serves God even if he only stands and waits. But there’s a darker reading. The poet is full of rage when he considers how his light is spent; his impending death is night – a nightmare – and nothing else.]

and I must tell you

That soon now, even before
The change from Daylight Savings Time, the sun,
Beyond the western ridge of black-burnt pine stubs like
A snaggery of rotten shark teeth, sinks
Lower, larger, more blank, and redder than
A mother’s rage,

[Nightmare, from the Middle English, is a female demon disturbing the sleep; here, the nightmare takes shape as a burnt and rotten Mother Nature raging murderously after the poet. More blank. Nothingness gradually prevails.]

as though
F.D.R. had never run for office even, or the first vagina
Had not had the texture of dream.

[A bit of whimsy, a bit of wistfulness. The poet thinks, amid the big nothing, of the big somethings in his life: F.D.R.; his amazing initial encounter with the inside of a woman. The nothingness he feels in the face of the sky and the setting sun turns those things into nothings too. As though they never existed. What does Leopold Bloom say at his lowest? No one is anything.]

Time

Is the mirror into which you stare.

UD alone saw it coming.

… Inside Higher Education.

Title: Being and Nothingness.

… all graduated from Johns Hopkins University. UD almost went there.

As Baltimoreans, all of these people knew and know that it’s Johns, with an S; but most people say John.

The university has finally tired of correcting everyone all the time. UD‘s friend Courtney, who works at Hopkins, sends her this article from the university’s website:

(Baltimore, April 1, 2010) The Johns Hopkins University announced today that it is bowing to the inevitable and officially changing its name to “John Hopkins.”

“We give up,” university President Ronald J. Daniel said. “We’re fighting a losing battle here. And we strongly suspect the extra ‘s’ was a typo in the first place.”

Since its establishment in 1876 as America’s first research university, Daniel said, anyone and everyone has stumbled over “Johns Hopkins,” omitting the seemingly superfluous “s” altogether or dropping it randomly into the name anywhere but where it belonged.

… Squads of staff members fanned out early today over the university’s campuses throughout the Baltimore-Washington area; in Bologna, Italy; and in Nanjing, China. They employed screwdrivers, chisels, spackle, spray paint – whatever it took to remove the annoying surplus sibilant from residence halls, lab buildings, buses and trucks.

“Thank heavens,” a history of art/flute double major said as she joined a grounds crew trying to pry a particularly recalcitrant consonant from the East Gate at the Homewood campus. “It’s bad enough trying to convince everyone that we’re not all pre-meds. But correcting people’s pronunciation 41 times a day? It’s just exhausting.”…

He has won his court battle. Slowly, England’s libel laws become more sane.

The science writer Simon Singh has won his court of appeal battle for the right to rely on the defence of fair comment in a libel action.

Singh was accused of libel by the British Chiropractic Association (BCA) over an opinion piece he wrote in the Guardian in April 2008.

He suggested there was a lack of evidence for the claims some chiropractors make on treating certain childhood conditions including colic and asthma.

The BCA alleged that Singh had in effect accused its leaders of knowingly supporting bogus treatments.

In May last year, high court judge Mr Justice Eady, in a preliminary ruling in the dispute, held that Singh’s comments were factual assertions rather than expressions of opinion – which meant he could not use the defence of fair comment.

Today, the lord chief justice, Lord Judge, master of the rolls Lord Neuberger and Lord Justice Sedley allowed Singh’s appeal, ruling that the high court judge had “erred in his approach”….

From an article about SUNY Binghamton in the Wall Street Journal:

… “Basketball is the cesspool of college sports,” says James Duderstadt, a man too familiar with the game’s pitfalls. He was the University of Michigan’s president from 1988-96, a period marred by scandal. Federal charges were later brought against a booster, Ed Martin, and two others, for making illicit loans of more than $600,000 to four players. Mr. Martin pleaded guilty in 2002 to one count of conspiracy to launder money but died while awaiting sentencing; severe sanctions were placed on Michigan by the University and the NCAA. “It only takes a few outstanding players to make a program nationally competitive, which is why basketball is the source of such cheating. Universities don’t realize that it’s so visible that the blowback can cause enormous damage to the institution, damage that lasts for decades…

… is (who knew?) the house and garden and gravesite of Edna Saint Vincent Millay. It’s now open to the public, and UD, who will be in New York for most of August, will visit. And write about it here, on University Diaries.

As a kind of counterpoint to the terrible theme, lately, of university student suicides, there’s the following Millay poem.

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God’s World

O world, I cannot hold thee close enough!
Thy winds, thy wide grey skies!
Thy mists that roll and rise!
Thy woods, this autumn day, that ache and sag
And all but cry with colour! That gaunt crag
To crush! To lift the lean of that black bluff!
World, World, I cannot get thee close enough!
Long have I known a glory in it all,
But never knew I this;
Here such a passion is
As stretcheth me apart. Lord, I do fear
Thou’st made the world too beautiful this year.
My soul is all but out of me, let fall
No burning leaf; prithee, let no bird call.

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Too much beauty. Must be the hills of upstate she’s looking at, height of autumn. The passion the too-candescent world makes her feel stretches her apart; she’s about to burst. Her soul is all but out of her.

She asks God to knock it off – no more orange leaves, no more birdsongs – or she’ll perish of bliss.

…”got a running start and cleared a barrier on the observation deck, on the 86th floor” of the Empire State Building in order to commit suicide, was a Yale undergrad.

Berkeley College junior Cameron Dabaghi ’11, an East Asian studies major from Austin, Texas, took his life in New York City on Tuesday, Yale College Dean Mary Miller said in an e-mail to the College community Wednesday morning.

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UD thanks David for the link.

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Update: Some details —

A Yale University junior left a suicide note in his dorm room before heading to New York, where he apparently plunged to his death by jumping from the Empire State Building, police said Wednesday.

Cameron Dabaghi, 21, from Austin, Texas, jumped from the 86th floor observation deck Tuesday during evening rush hour. His note said he was sorry and he would be jumping from either the George Washington Bridge over the Hudson River in upper Manhattan, or the Empire State building, police said.

There were seven other people on the observation deck at the same time, and one person tried to talk to the jumper as he climbed over the barrier, but was unsuccessful…

Not sure if this can be right – the part about “climbed.” He seems to have jumped over the barrier.

… Berkeley, but the University of Memphis?

The Faculty Senate passed a motion last week urging University of Memphis President Shirley Raines to stop subsidizing the athletic department $2.2 million from education and general funds.

After almost an hour of debate, 25 members voted for the motion, five voted against and six abstained.

Besides the athletic department subsidy, which increased from $1.5 million last year, education and general funds pay for scholarships, equipment upgrades, employee raises and other amenities to benefit students and faculty at The University…

To quote Michelle Obama: Damn.

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Oh. Not that these votes mean anything. Look at the latest on Berkeley athletics.

… is that many American universities routinely give millions of dollars every year to totally anti-intellectual coaches and athletic directors.

The university foundation of California State University, Stanislaus, is under fire for hiring Sarah Palin to speak at a $500 per ticket, gala black-tie fundraising event in June, to celebrate the university’s 50th anniversary. The foundation is refusing to disclose Palin’s fee. And students, professors and even a state lawmaker, point to the former half-term governor of Alaska’s vitriol, divisiveness and her hefty speaking fees of at least $100,000, as not appropriate for a University celebration. Her lack of intellectual curiosity is cited by Zoology Professor Patrick Kelly, who started an anti-Palin Facebook page, pointing out her distinct lack of academic accomplishments. In other woods, the academic community of CSU is outraged and embarrassed to have their school’s 50th anniversary celebration represented by a know-nothing, polarizing woman, whose major contribution to the public discourse has been inflammatory rhetoric…

Most coaches don’t give a shit about academics — they pressure their universities to admit students bound to fail and drop out; they have the highest salaries on campus (sometimes the highest salaries in the state) because they don’t see why they shouldn’t drain resources from students.

Palin’s populist tirades against professors and universities differ in no way from the contempt lots of coaches routinely express for these things. When you reward the coach with four million dollars a year, and then get upset when a university gives Palin – What? She’s probably getting a paltry $100,000 – you’re being a mite hypocritical.

… but a sensible enough article in the Huffington Post.

… The cause of suicide is not Ivy League pressure or the social and academic expectations that distinguish one school from another. Suicide is the third leading cause of death among young people between 15 and 24 years of age: the college years simply fall within this period.

The brain changes that occur in adolescence–specifically the pruning of gray matter that makes our brains more efficient and capable of complex, intellectual operations–are often responsible for adolescent angst as well as the onset of serious psychiatric disorders. The first peak of depression typically occurs around age 13-14; schizophrenia first appears around 18-19; and adult-onset bipolar disorder, or manic depression, tends to begin suddenly around 19-20.

… Don’t think … that the Arizona sunshine, or the prestige of Harvard, or the Florida beaches will cure your child’s psychiatric disorder…