Rap for the JAP, von Stuck for the Stuck Up, Beardsley for if you went to Brearley, Plath for the Upper Clath — Frederick Seidel’s suddenly much-talked-about poetry offers pilled-up and plastic-surgeoned Americans an insider’s view of their insides. Listen to his comic drawl as he recites tons of his poems here.

Frederick Seidel affords access to Bernard Madoff’s mentality, and we need that. But looked at from the point of view of literature, Seidel’s poems are barely poems. They’re one-offs. William Logan is correct to complain that “Seidel’s jet-set tastes and upmarket sinning get pretty tiresome.”

Sinning itself is of course far from tiresome. UD could sun herself under a sinning sky all day long. But the sky must speak to her; it must have poetry in it.

Seidel finds clever ways to express his hellcats-of-the-gravy world (“I want to date-rape life.”), but these are not poetic ways. His poems are bunches of what Logan calls “blunt phrasings.” He declaims. His recited poetry is riotous because he’s a performer. The poems are performances.

Superficiality is super and – as a take on twenty-first century Manhattan – illuminating; but the poems become tiresome because Seidel refuses depth of any kind, even as a sort of faintly recalled antiphony. There’s no Why am I what I am? There’s only This is what I am. The obsessive childish word pairings throughout Seidel’s work (china vagina), coupled with the crystal-shattering self-presentation, eventually makes you feel you are reading The Cat in the Hat, with Seidel as the Cat, Thing One, and Thing Two.

In an excellent appraisal of Seidel in The Nation, Ange Mlinko compares him to one of UD‘s favorite novelists. “Mostly I’m reminded of Michel Houellebecq, another quiet chap with a virulent literary persona and a thing about sex and Islamic fundamentalism.” I see her point, and yet there’s an important difference: Houellebecq actually does use language to explore the vile bodies and minds of his dissolutes. By the time his best-known novel, The Elementary Particles, is over, its main character, in a gesture toward seriousness, has decided to move to Ireland — a country that attracts him in part because, unlike France, it’s still seriously Catholic.

But hey. How about a poem. Nothing like talking about a poet without giving you a sample. Here goes.

ODE TO SPRING

I can only find words for.
And sometimes I can’t.
Here are these flowers that stand for.
I stand here on the sidewalk.

I can’t stand it, but yes of course I understand it.
Everything has to have a meaning.
Things have to stand for something.
I can’t take the time. Even skin-deep is too deep.

I say to the flower stand man:
Beautiful flowers at your flower stand, man.
I’ll take a dozen of the lilies.
I’m standing as it were on my knees

Before a little man up on a raised
Runway altar where his flowers are arrayed
Along the outside of the shop.
I take my flames and pay inside.

I go off and have sexual intercourse.
The woman is the woman I love.
The room displays thirteen lilies.
I stand on the surface.

The writer, Brian Cook at The Sporting Blog, explains how the NCAA handles the criticism that it’s the most profit-driven non-profit this side of Harvard University.

When its greed becomes so rank that the national legislature smells it and starts threatening to take away its tax exemption, the NCAA shifts from, as Cook says, its basic money money money orientation to a we’re all about educating America’s kids orientation …

Amazingly, this approach continues to work, even in the face of a system that schedules farcical football games like the one coming up between the University of Florida and Charleston Southern. Point spread: 73 points. Why does Charleston Southern do it?

Two reasons.

One, as Ron Morris points out, Florida will pay Charleston Southern $450,000 to play with it.

Two: It’s an act of God. “There’s a lot of parallels you can use with regard to faith, and for us to be in this position [the speaker is Charleston’s coach] is an act of God, first and foremost.”

What sort of loving God would allow that point spread?

… for my other blog, over at Inside Higher Education.

Title: RICHARD POIRIER, VAGUELY

Link to the post: HERE.

One of the high points of UD‘s writing life was being published, about twenty years ago, in Richard Poirier’s journal, Raritan. She had long admired Poirier’s essays on literature — his independent spirit, his beautiful writing style — and was thrilled when he put her in Raritan.

Poirier has died, age 83, from a fall.

This charming tribute to him — “”He was a wonderful man. He was fantastic, rambunctious, beefy with energy.” — comes from the poet Frederick Seidel, Poirier’s longtime friend. (Have I posted on Seidel on this blog? I think I have. I’ll check.) (I have. But this reminds me that I’ve meant to write about his poetry. I’ll do that. Maybe today.)

I was surprised to read that his father was a fisherman. I’d have guessed diplomat, lawyer.

PowerPoint Confidential, a new University Diaries feature, quotes university students on their experience of PowerPoint in the classroom. Here’s a PPC from an Indian student:

I’m a student at one of the most prestigious technology institutes in my country, and yet, in my 3 years of study, I’ve never come across an interesting PowerPoint presentation. All of my professors, with only one rare exception, try to cram as much text as possible into as few slides as possible.

Here’s another, from the same comment thread:

The worst Powerpoint presentation I ever sat through was in my second year at University. It was about the theory of Fascism and lasted two hours without a break. Plus, it had over 70 slides. Each slide was packed with information and it was impossible to keep up. I have never been so bored or learnt less.

Both remarks come from a comment thread for a BBC News PowerPoint retrospective: Twenty-five years of PowerPoint. The article itself is a pithy summary of everything that’s wrong with PowerPoint: too much information, too many slides, too much text, very little eye contact. People aren’t designed to read and listen at the same time, the author notes. He concludes that the whole thing tends to create a lazy, disengaged, slide-dependent speaker.

Do we really want to read the three hundred page transcript from “an October 2008 hearing in Indianapolis, attended by [Florida State University] President T.K. Wetherell, at which FSU and NCAA officials discussed the case involving 61 student-athletes who cheated, many in an online music class.“?

Some judge just ruled that the NCAA’s decision to hide the transcript from us is “clearly contrary to the broad interpretation given to the definition of public records in Florida courts and legislative language.”

So now UD will have to read – at least skim — at least read other writers’ excerpts from — a conversation about an instance of academic fraud so enormous that FSU has had to “vacate … 14 football victories from the 2006 and 2007 seasons and two national championships in men’s track and field.” Wetherell’s a clueless, sports-mad fool; the NCAA … well, you know.

It seems to UD that Florida has grotesquely overbroad notions of what’s in the public record. It’s in no one’s interest to have to read these men. I say keep it sealed.

… but pretty much everyone else is cool with the latest alcohol promotion campaign in America, timed to coincide with the beginning of the academic year. Supermarkets near football schools now stock Bud Light cans with each school’s team colors on them.

“Show your true colors with Bud Light,” the company says, according to copies of internal marketing materials obtained by colleges. “This year, only Bud Light is delivering superior drinkability in 12-ounce cans that were made for gameday.”

Sure, there’s a little controversy. There’s a little embarrassment among some administrators at so … vivid a demonstration of the college football / alcohol synergy … I mean, campuses are even as we speak preparing to hit incoming students up with mandatory online you shouldn’t drink so much classes, and with stern admonitions about the unacceptability of wall-to-wall booze on campus; and yet here’s school pride stamped on case after case of beer lining the walls of the local supermarket. Funny.

The single big ick is John Calipari, but UD ain’t gonna sully her pages with his latest thing.

What interests her is that a sports columnist writing about Calipari commits two little icks in a row.

Let’s take a look.

Now that Calipari has raised his hind leg and defacated all over the basketball program by causing Memphis to now have the unique distinction of having its Final Four appearance tossed in the trash — all before scampering off to Kentucky — what do Memphis fans and university backers think of him now?

Hm. Now that I look at it again, there are any number of icks in this sentence. But … When’s the last time your dog raised his hind leg to shit? Plus … If you can’t spell defecate, you should write shit, because that’s easier to spell.

“Call it weed, Mother. Or call it pot.”

Okay, weed. Pot. I don’t smoke it.

Nor do I light cigarettes.

Or farts.

Since I never cook, I do not light my oven.

I used to light candles, but now I’m afraid.

When it’s cold out and I’m in the mood, I light a fire in my hearth.

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Far as UD can tell, from her admittedly limited ‘thesdan perspective, she and Mr UD are about the only people of any age anywhere in the region who do not sometimes take a hit. UD hasn’t gone out and interviewed people, but that’s kind of how it looks.

So she figures this guy is probably telling the truth when he says his step-father — a law professor at Suffolk University — smokes pot with him. This guy deals the drug, and he has brought to his anxious upscale neighborhood some of the gun play disagreements among dealers can sometimes prompt. So he’s in court, and he has been talking about his family life. Of course, he could be lying. But his account has the homely feel of the truth.

Jonathon Cook, 20, said his stepfather, Suffolk University law professor Timothy Wilton, helped him build a place to grow marijuana in exchange for some of the profits and also smoked it in the house, according to a police report.

He said that his mother, Kathy Jo Cook — the former president of the Women’s Bar Association of Massachusetts — also knew about the drug activity and frequently complained that her husband’s smoking left the house smelling like marijuana, authorities said. … Authorities said they found a small smoking pipe in a dresser drawer in the parents’ bedroom, a scale and several baggies in the bedroom and another pipe in a closet in an office only they use… After his arrest, Cook told police his parents knew that he was selling drugs out of their home, and that his stepfather built a “grow closet” for marijuana plants. They agreed to split the proceeds of sales from the plants, Cook said.

Cook also said his stepfather bought marijuana from him, occasionally stole it from him and “constantly smoked marijuana,” according to the police report.

“He said that Mr. Wilton walks around the house smoking marijuana and his mother gets upset at him because the house smells like marijuana,” police wrote in the report…

If it’s true, it’s no one’s business. On the other hand, you shouldn’t tell lies.

They’re hip, they’re hot, and, after years in the shadows, they’re coming to a university near you.

They’re the new wave in academia, and they’re blowing all the old ways of being a professor out of the water.

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Move over, Guest Lecturer; make room for Ghost Lecturer.

Visiting Professor? Visitant Professor!

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It’s the Prime of Miss Jean Spooky. It’s Goodbye Mr Chips, Hello Mr Blips. It’s Goodbye Mr Spock, Hello Mr Spook.

It’s Ghoul School, and it’s just in time for Halloween.

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

Ghost professors we’ve always had with us, but they’ve mainly haunted Europe, where the halls of derelict public campuses echo with the spirits of absentee lecturers, and the Middle East, where veiled specters flit from room to room.

It’s only lately, with the rise of medical school ghostwriters, PowerPoint zombies, and the daemons of distance learning, that America has come to know its own faculty phantasms. These are the professors who take advantage of new technologies and corporate simulations of scholarship to enter into a liminal realm where one is at once disembodied and salaried, silent and published, vanished and teaching.

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

To be sure, a few naysayers have crawled out of the woodwork.

They even have a rallying cry, something Frederic Chopin once said:

Every difficulty slurred over will be a ghost to disturb your repose later on.

Excerpts from the comment thread of a New York Times article about ghostwriting among medical school professors.

Launch budgets can easily exceed $300 to $500 million. Madison Avenue firms write the ghost articles, drug reps target regional physician ‘opinion leaders’ who are compensated in creative ways to put their names on the articles. Later the drug reps coordinate numerous speaking opportunities for the ‘opinion leaders.’ A single rep might in a two to three day event usher the ‘opinion leader’ through 10 or so physician offices to speak directly to the ‘script writers’ in the rep’s territory. During the evening hours the ‘opinion leader’ addresses large gatherings of ‘script writers’ at dinners.

The really interesting thing is that the ‘opinion leader’ generally reads from a pre-written script and a deck of PowerPoint slides with which he has almost no familiarity. It is supposed to be his research. I have literally witnessed ‘opinion leaders’ read directly from the slides prepared in advance by the drug maker, then not be able to answer reasonable questions based on what he has read.

What is most striking is that no one in the audience seems to be shaken by this.

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

Most physicians are barely literate and could not write a grammatical paragraph if their lives depended on it. As one friend of mine has said, “If you take out the writers, the medical literature would be gibberish.”

They also don’t have the time to do much writing. Medical writers are just writers — much like corporate or political speechwriters — who help the author get the words on the paper.

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Regardless of their technical brilliance, many medical and scientific professionals are poor writers. They need help to write well-organized, comprehensible journal articles.

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When a professor is handed a manuscript and they make a few phone calls or minor corrections, they have not met the standard of ownership. Placement of their name on the paper, and in some of these papers as the only name, is claiming property rights that have not been earned and is a form of plagiarism. It is up to their university to enforce the rules on academic misconduct and take appropriate action. If a few full Professors were stripped of their tenure, you would see this malignant process grind to a quick halt.

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That this could be considered acceptable and even the norm in academic medicine is an indication of the depth of corruption of the medical schools in the U.S.

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From the Associated Press:

Drugmaker GlaxoSmithKline used a sophisticated ghostwriting program to promote its antidepressant Paxil, allowing doctors to take credit for medical journal articles mainly written by company consultants, according to court documents obtained by The Associated Press.

… Known as the CASPPER program, the paper explains how the company can help physicians with everything from “developing a topic,” to “submitting the manuscript for publication.”

The document was uncovered by the Baum Hedlund PC law firm of Los Angeles, which is representing hundreds of former Paxil users in personal injury and wrongful death suits against GlaxoSmithKline. The firm alleges the company downplayed several risks connected with its drug, including increased suicidal behavior and birth defects.

… According to ghostwriting expert Dr. Leemon McHenry, Glaxo’s program was unusually intertwined with its internal sales and marketing department.

“We know that GSK has engaged in ghostwriting for many years,” said McHenry, who works as a research consultant for Baum Hedlund. “But to create an internal ghostwriting program and have the gall to name it after a cartoon ghost demonstrates their juvenile attitude and careless disregard for patients.”…

What an irritable, judgmental remark on the part of McHenry. The man has no sense of humor.

Is Arnold Klein — Michael Jackson BFF, probably father of two of his kids, supplier of calming agents to Jackson, and soon to be arrested — is Arnold Klein a professor at UCLA?

He’s not listed on the medical faculty page, and yet as recently as last June the UCLA Newsroom cited a magazine article that quotes him, and the school identified him as a “UCLA clinical professor of dermatology.”

Indeed, he shows up on a directory page.

Most surprisingly, given how much in the headlines he’s been lately, Klein’s mentioned not at all on the dermatology department’s professors-in-the-news page, which contents itself with cellulite and athlete’s foot updates.

Its campus bat house has collapsed under the weight of its own urine, and now thousands of bats are flying about everywhere. Those that died in the collapse are being eaten by hawks.

Yummy! And just in time for new student week.

America’s newspaper of record, and a high-profile senator, keep up the pressure.

But still nothing. And we need, once again, to ask why that is.  Why universities refuse to do anything about professors on their faculties who ghostwrite in medical research journals.

The New York Times has published yet another, even longer, exposé of faculty who do no work on articles to which they sign their name.  The true authors of the articles are drug companies who both shape the content of the articles and place them in journals read by prescribing physicians. 

The ghost professor essentially does nothing at all.  Nothing.  That’s why she’s called a ghost. She takes money from the company in exchange for allowing it to float her name over the article.  She often has little notion of what’s in the article. 

If she took the time to look, she’d find a whitewash.  An argument for the obvious superiority of the company’s drug over all competing drugs.  She’d find not a scientific article, but a commercial.

… [M]any universities have been slow to recognize the extent of the problem, to adopt new ethical rules or to hold faculty members to account.

Those universities may not have much longer to get their houses in order before they find themselves in trouble with Washington.

With a letter last week, a senator who helps oversee public funding for medical research signaled that he was running out of patience with the practice of ghostwriting. Senator Charles E. Grassley, an Iowa Republican who has led a long-running investigation of conflicts of interest in medicine, is starting to put pressure on the National Institutes of Health to crack down on the practice.

… “How long does it have to go on before it actually is stopped? One way to stop it would be if the actual authors were punished in some way,” said Dr. Carl Elliott, a professor at the Center for Bioethics of the University of Minnesota. “But the academics who are complicit in it all never seem to be punished at all.”

… [B]ioethicists said that medical schools must take responsibility for faculty members whose publications do not explicitly acknowledge the work of writers receiving industry support. Such subsidized articles allow pharmaceutical companies to use the imprimatur of respected academics — and by extension, the stature of their institutions — to increase sales of certain drugs, ultimately skewing patient care, they said.

… [T]he medical school of a single university, Columbia, is home to three professors who were authors of Wyeth-financed articles.

… Dr. Michelle P. Warren, [is] a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Columbia. Her article was published in The American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology in 2004, when women feared that Wyeth’s brand of hormone drugs could be causing particular problems. The thesis of the article was that no one hormone therapy was safer than another.

The published article acknowledged help from four people. But it did not disclose that DesignWrite employed two of those people and the other two worked at Wyeth. Court documents show DesignWrite sent a prepublication copy to Wyeth for vetting and charged Wyeth $25,000 for the article, information not disclosed in the paper.

In a phone interview, Dr. Warren said the article was intended to clear up confusion over the risks of hormone drugs. She said she worked on the project in phone conversations and in meetings… [Way to publish scientific research, honey. Over the phone and in meetings. Hi, it’s Michelle! How much for putting my name on the article? … Sounds good. Go ahead. Presto -Warren’s 155th article this year. Raise and promotion for research productivity coming up.]

 … A new policy at Columbia took effect in January. It prohibits medical school faculty, trainees and students from being authors or co-authors of articles written by employees of commercial entities if the author’s name or Columbia title is used without substantive contribution. [Lots of wiggle room in substantive, so that’s worthless.]  The policy, which does not retroactively cover articles like Dr. Warren’s, requires any article written with a for-profit company to include full disclosure of the role of each author, as well as any other industry contribution.

But Dr. Elliott, the bioethicist, said universities should go further than mere disclosure, prohibiting faculty members from working with industry-sponsored writers. Policies asking only for disclosure “allow pharmaceutical companies to launder their marketing messages,” he said.

No, the laundry will continue to get done; the whitewashing will go on as always. A multi-billion dollar industry can afford a lot of detergent.