He is Peter Conti-Brown of Stanford law school, and he’s being quoted in my headline by Felix Salmon, who has a blog at Reuters.

Conti-Brown provides the hard numbers:

From 2003 through 2008, Harvard’s annual budget grew an average of 7% per year, starting at $2.43 billion in 2003 and ending at $3.46 billion. Including an estimated 30% loss to the endowment in 2008, the endowment grew an average of 10.15%, from $16.24 billion to $25.59 billion. In absolute terms, while the budget grew annually at an average of $206 million, the endowment grew an annual average of $1.56 billion. More strikingly, Harvard’s payout rates during this period remained a steady 4.4%, an average of more than 5.5% less than endowment growth. Far from spending like “drunken sailors,” universities were, if anything, not spending enough.

You already know all of this if you read University Diaries from ’03 to ’08. You also know that Harvard did spend like a drunken sailor on one thing: hedge fund employee compensation. (It didn’t need to spend like a drunken sailor on President Lawrence Summers’ salary because, at the same time he was running Harvard, he was a hedge fund manager. As Frank Rich at the New York Times puts it, he was “moonlighting in the money racket while running the entire university.”)

Salmon concludes, as does Conti-Brown that

If these institutions aren’t going to spend the money in their [ultra-bloated] endowments on providing educational services, they should pay tax on it.

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

UD is particularly intrigued by Conti-Brown’s suggestion that the awesome, anally hoarded university endowment has finally transmogrified and hardened into a physical object, like a fantastic yacht, or Ezra Merkin’s Rothko room…. A commenter on the Salmon thread (all of the comments are worth a read) gets at something like this when he or she writes:

I see top universities with their massive endowments, tax free status, and generally state of the art and connected financial planning as becoming the new Church.

From the dark ages, to the middle ages and somewhat beyond the Church became an ever increasing landholder.

Yale in 2007 bought the nearby 137 acre Bayer Labs Complex which now makes it similar in size to the Vatican City.

Over the next hundred years, I see rich universities hoarding and growing their endowments and then splurging occasionally to buy up properties.

Are there any countervailing forces that will prevent Yale from owning one quarter of Connecticut 100 years from now?

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

What if there were a car, the ultimate luxury car, called The Harvard Endowment? What would it look like?

Like this, I guess.

They took that Veyron and rammed it right into a wall.

If our top universities are going to become the new church, they’re going to have to manage their endowments better.

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

But hey. Speaking of what you’ve got and how you should spend it… Allow UD, on this her birthday, a moment of payout.

The lesson of the crashed roadster is more than clear to me: Appreciate your assets, and be wise with them.

I’ve got a blog that a lot of smart, witty, and humane people read. It’s the most liquid asset in the world this thing, allowing me immense purchase on pleasure and understanding.

It even, amazingly, lets me do, in a small way, what I said from the start, in my blog’s tagline, I wanted to do: change things.

For this, I thank you.

University of Manchester professor Annmarie Surprenant, who seems not to read her students’ exams before grading them (background here), has issued a statement in response to press reports about this behavior, now under investigation by her university.

Here tis.

I am quite politically incorrect, outspoken and have never adhered to the oft-repeated and probably excellent advice to ‘watch your back’, because I believe watching one’s back will never move us forward.

This makes me an easy target for a certain type of person. Half-truths, false accusations and malicious gossip readily ruin one’s reputation in the eyes of that certain type of person. But in the end it is your work that stands.

No student has ever been inaccurately or unfairly graded by me, and that stands. [Every exam paper has been double-graded and] diligently and accurately annotated and marked.

While not as bad as Columbia University’s Madonna Constantine, whose corner cutting involved plagiarizing her students’ work, or Bonnie Ashley, Annmarie Surprenant’s statement is quite, quite bad. SOS will now tell you why.

When you’ve been accused of something so bad that it makes the papers, you have a couple of choices. If you’re guilty, and you probably are, you can confess to the behavior, or something short of the behavior but bad nonetheless, and offer a reason or two maybe… The most important thing, though, after acknowledging some fault and expressing willingness to cooperate with investigators, is to shut up.

Bonnie and Madonna, as you see if you’ve clicked on their names, gassed on and on and on. Wrote volumes.

Why shouldn’t you pen your confessions at this point?

Well, because you got into the deep shit you’re in because you’re kind of an idiot, kind of an unpleasant whacked out individual. Specifically, what got you into trouble is a sense of your exemption from the rules other people follow, coupled with a pinch of paranoia. THE MORE YOU WRITE, THE MORE EVERYONE WILL SEE THIS. Your prose will give you away. You’re the sort of person who should never be allowed to testify on your own behalf. The best thing for you to do is shut up.

Annmarie begins her statement with a big fat pat on the back for being so great. She is bold, bold, free as the wind, standing firm at the fierce crosswinds of human progress. And we all know that in repressive countries like England people who go against convention are beaten down. The world is full of evil envious gossipers who will try to destroy your work by destroying you….

Yet Annmarie herself almost destroyed her life’s work a few years ago, by repeatedly lying on grant applications about having earned an MD.

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

Surprenant ends with a belligerent insistence on her total innocence.

Like the other two writers I’ve mentioned, Surprenant has broken the cardinal SOS rule to control your emotions. Especially when you’ve been accused of something, you’ve got to stay cool. Why? Because we all learn, from dealing with children, that the guiltier you are of something, the louder your insistence that you’re not guilty is likely to be.

And again – most damning of all – what’s lacking in this statement is any expression of willingness — you could even make it eagerness — to cooperate with investigators.

I’m distressed by the accusation that I’ve been negligent in my grading. I look forward to working with the university investigating committee.

Something like that. Short, calm. Acknowledge you’re upset, by all means. That’s honest. But then stop talking about how you feel and get down to business. Don’t tell me you’re being pilloried for being such a gifted person.

It bothers SOS when writers work hard on their articles or papers and blow off their headline.

Your headline is like a hostess welcoming you into her restaurant. (La Kid’s hostessing this summer at a local ‘thesdan eatery, so SOS has that on her mind.) Does she make you feel welcome? Do you positively want to go in ?

So here’s an Atlanta Journal-Constitution writer’s headline for his Pitino piece:

SEX IN A RESTAURANT, A JOB IN JEOPARDY

Dullsville. Spice it up.

SEX AT A TABLE, FUTURE UNSTABLE

SEX AT A DIVE, WILL HE SURVIVE?

SEX ON A PLATE, PITINOGATE

SEX AND GRUB, THERE’S THE RUB

SEX IN TRATTORIA, SIC TRANSIT GLORIA

Nothing a brain cell or two couldn’t fix.

Ron Prince can teach you, too, how to demand $6.2 million with a 17-20 record…

… The university’s [legal] case [against the football coach] is undermined by the apparent fact that quasi-secret, extra-contractual deals seem to have been the norm for KSU’s top earners: An internal audit released in June found 13 payments totaling $845,000 to [athletic staff] Snyder, Krause and former AD Tim Weiser that had “no supporting documentation” and raised possible conflicts of interests and/or tax issues (a revelation that left Snyder rather nonplussed, as it might a few other coaches around the country as well), adding to Prince’s claim that it was Kansas State’s idea both for him to enter the deal as an LLC rather than an individual party and to effectively keep the agreement off the books.

… With his possible termination looming off a losing season, multiple, sane adults in positions of authority at Kansas State actually agreed to pay Ron Prince an exorbitant salary nearly a full decade into a very uncertain future. And now, by attempting to cover it up, may owe him nearly twice as much in the very near future…

KSU: Dumbest school this side of … anywhere.

… is well-known. But it’s a sort of background fact until forced resignations and conflict of interest scandals break through to the daily papers.

That’s what’s happening today, as its head of medical device regulation resigns (way industry-friendly, he approved all sorts of quackery) at the same time as its head of drug approval gets investigated for conflict of interest.

In the COI case, Janet Woodcock appears to have been been friends – and a collaborator on scientific papers and articles – with MIT Professor Ram Sasisekharan.

They wrote one of those thirty-author, ten-page thingies you see in the New England Journal of Medicine. Here’s the thing itself:

Kishimoto TK, Viswanathan K, Ganguly T, Elankumaran S, Smith S, Pelzer K, Lansing JC, Sriranganathan N, Zhao G, Galcheva-Gargova Z, Al-Hakim A, Bailey GS, Fraser B, Roy S, Rogers-Cotrone T, Buhse L, Whary M, Fox J, Nasr M, Dal Pan GJ, Shriver Z, Langer RS, Venkataraman G, Austen KF, Woodcock J, and Sasisekharan R. “Contaminaed Heparin Associated with Adverse Clinical Events and Activation of the Contact System.” N Engl J Med 2008 Jun 5;358(23):2457-67

And of course the MIT guy’s really an entrepreneur with his own company and that company appears to have been unfairly favored by the FDA in a recent competition for approval for a blood thinner; and the competing company filed an ethics complaint against Woodcock, which is now being investigated by the Inspector General.

In April 2008, after the tainted-heparin article was published, an investment report from Morgan Stanley cited Momenta’s FDA connection as a “game-changer,” and Momenta’s stock jumped 17% in a day.

Ten little pages, and look what happened! Talk about significant research results…

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

Update: Roy Poses, at Health Care Renewal, provides crucial background and analysis on the heparin scandal.

She gets sued a lot, so I guess that takes up a lot of her time… But as to what she contributes to the university, it’s hard to tell.

Her webpage tells us she teaches “in” one course every spring. Does this actually mean she has less than a one-course load every year?

As for her scientific research, she’s been dealing with a dragged-out lawsuit from a former student — and she’s been losing every element of it — for years, costing Stanford a good deal of time and money in lawyers.

She grabbed credit for patented work much of which he seems to have done; she subsequently plagiarized parts of his dissertation for a different patent application.

When he tried to deal with all of this in a direct way, calling her, she left the following phone message:

You have no case, and I really don’t want to spend time on this.

But what does Professor Calos spend time on?

Oh right. Lawsuits.

From a memo to the American University community from Facilities Management:

… The Army Corps of Engineers [is trying to] remove World War I era debris from areas around the AU campus… [The debris] resulted from the US Army Chemical and Weapons testing in this region from 1917 to 1918.

… [We have] confirmed the presence of mustard agent [near the president’s house]… A guard has been stationed at the site 24 hours a day…

*******************
UD thanks Mary Anne.

That’s Mr UD describing a just-released sexual harassment on campus study UD asked him to look at.

She asked him to look at it because its description on PR Web smelled heavily of bullshit:

A study conducted across ten of our nation’s college campuses to determine if they are physically and intellectually safe revealed disturbing levels of intolerance across the board. The Survey of more than 2,600 undergraduates, sponsored by Campus Tolerance Foundation (www.campustolerance.org), was conducted by the FDR Group from October 2008 to January 2009 and revealed the following alarming statistics:

-59% of all students surveyed said they have either witnessed or have been victims of bias incidents on campus;

-62% of women surveyed report that they have been victims of broader sexual harassment or personally know someone who has been; and

-33% of women surveyed were victims of serious sexual harassment — forced sex, attempts to force sex, or attempts to force kissing or fondling — or personally know someone who was

“As a grandmother of children soon to be looking at colleges to attend, I found these Survey results very disturbing, to say the least,” said Marcella Rosen, founder of Campus Tolerance Foundation. “By publicizing these alarming findings, the Foundation hopes that colleges and universities will address bias where it exists, and that parents and students will consider tolerance when selecting a college.”

Bugger me — it’s even got a granny!

Disturbing, alarming, disturbing, alarming. You get one disturbing in the first paragraph, and then a matching disturbing in the last. You get one alarming in the first paragraph and a matching alarming in the last. If you’re not disturbed and alarmed by the time you finish reading this release, you must not be a grandmother.

You must be something evil, like a social scientist who knows bullshit research techniques when he sees them.

A social scientist who says What the hell does intellectually safe mean?

And get a load of these results!

… Ohio State University fared worst (at 69%) when it came to students witnessing or being victims of bias incidents (verbal insult, graffiti, physical threat or physical assault) on campus, followed by Texas A&M (66%), University of Florida (65%), University of Nebraska (64%), George Washington University (60%), University of Minnesota (58%), UCLA (57%), and University of Washington (56%). Harvard fared best (at 40%), followed by Barnard (42%).

On the subject of sexual harassment, an alarming 73% of female students surveyed at George Washington University said that they have experienced or witnessed broader sexual harassment; Barnard was at the low end of the spectrum (at 52%).

Regarding serious sexual harassment (forced sex, attempts to force sex, kissing or fondling), Harvard fared worst, with 45% of female students saying that they had been victims or personally knew a victim, followed by George Washington University (43%), Ohio State University (42%), University of Nebraska (40%), University of Minnesota (35%), UCLA (30%), and the University of Florida (30%). The University of Washington fared best (23%), followed by Barnard and Texas A&M (both 24%).

73% of female students at La Kid’s own GW! My blood ran alarmed when I read that.

But then I read the home page of the organization that did the survey. I looked at the questions they asked. I tried to figure out if the research sample is random. I tried to figure out a lot of things about the research method, but even the section of the website meant to be read by other researchers is completely inadequate as description.

They formulate the questions very cleverly. They bundle into one inquiry about sexual harassment things like forcible kissing (all women have endured some of this at some time — some guy on your first date kisses you when you don’t want him to) and rape; or they bundle seeing offensive graffiti (in no way does this constitute harrassment) and physical assault. And then they report the results in such as way as to mix up mild or non-existent with extreme and hope you don’t notice.

Or they give you alarming, disturbing results like 52% of students at Texas A&M “sometimes or often fear speaking in class because others might disagree with you.”

First, get the sometimes or often. Makes a big difference, don’t it? I mean, if something happens to you sometimes, or if it happens often?

But don’t make no nevermind for this survey… And… why are students who often fear speaking onaccounta someone might disagree with them in college? Isn’t polemical discussion the basis of the seminar? Did these schools go out of their way to admit people who said in their application essays I often sit silently, full of fear that others may disagree with what I say?

Fear not. Do not fear disagreeing with bogus science that comes to us complete with grandmothers warning about the big bad wolf.

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

Update: PhilosopherP, a reader, mentions in her comment something about the survey that Mr UD also noted. UD forgot to put it in the original post:

Don’t forget lumping together “have experienced” and “observed” and “knows someone who experienced” — so, one incident of public/ gossiped about unwanted kissing could generate a large number of responses.

UD thanks PhilosopherP.

Not dipped in M&Ms. Not flecked
with coconut. Not a caramel apple
martini, cheesecake, or crumble.

A classic, as it’s now known,
a classic Granny Smith
caramel apple.

It’s a quiet high point of UD‘s
Rehoboth Beach stays. Her one
classic Granny Smith caramel
apple.

She felt ready for it today,
though it meant walking in
serious heat down the
boardwalk to Dolly’s and
then standing in line —
just for a minute,
but the heat was hellish —
and then convincing the
Belarussian woman
behind the counter that
the classic Granny Smith
without anything on it
was really what UD wanted.
And a bottled water.

Even in its clear plastic
bubble, the apple’s caramel
had begun to melt in the
sun.

On the way back to her apartment,
sipping the cold water and
swinging the bag holding the
apple, UD, from under her
wide-rim hat, thought This
really isn’t too bad. There’s
a breeze.

But she was happy to
be back in the air conditioning.

Mr UD was on the balcony,
reading, and gazing at the hot
beach and the blue umbrellas.

UD felt a little sad, looking
at the beach, because this
morning she’d watched twenty
or so lifeguards swim from
pretty far out in the ocean
to shore — one of their many
training exercises — and she
was rooting for a woman to
come in first but not only
did a woman not win but
all of the men got to shore
before any woman finished.

So the women were all losers
and this put UD in a bad
mood — made worse by
Mr UD‘s crowing.
What? You thought women
were stronger than men? You
thought that? You thought
that?

No. I guess what I thought
was that one freak woman out
there with enormous muscles
and brilliant strategic
instincts would come in first.

I settled myself by the view,
cracked open the caramel
apple container, and began
swatting away flies. Quite a
bit of the caramel stuck to
the plastic as I struggled to
get the apple out of its
holder, but this was fine,
because part of the pleasure
of eating the classic caramel
apple is scraping the pure
caramel out of the container
with your fingers.

I’ve now finished eating
the apple, which means
I’ve finished this post.

Blake, D.H. Lawrence, Ted Hughes — our strongest poets make immediate experience present for us. They make language that makes the world right now, as we feel it and see it, alive in what Lawrence called its quivering momentaneity.

UD thought of this threesome while watching, with Mr. UD, from 5:30 to 6:30 this morning, a sunrise that started with blue rays over a dark sea and then proceeded to total cosmic pink.

Watching its changes, UD recalled this little Blake poem:

He who binds to himself a joy
Doth the winged life destroy.
He who kisses the joy as it flies,
Lives in eternity’s sunrise.

(John Tavener put this to music.)

It’s one of your nice neat paradoxes – try to stop the world and you’ll kill it; live life on the fly and you’ll live forever.

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

In a great essay about Hughes, Alice Oswald describes her discovery of him at a time in her life when she had a job as a gardener at the Royal Horticultural Society:

… I’d been up at dawn that morning, pruning apples all day. I was fed up with people floating past me using the word “idyllic” and I was fed up with reading about nature at one remove. I thought I’d rather hear a gardener’s or a farmer’s account of the landscape than any poet’s. Then I opened The Hawk in the Rain (Hughes’s first collection) and there was my worked-in world alive in all its freshness.

She mentions in particular a sunrise poem by Hughes, “The Horses.”

I climbed through woods in the hour-before-dawn dark.
Evil air, a frost-making stillness,

Not a leaf, not a bird –
A world cast in frost. I came out above the wood

Where my breath left tortuous statues in the iron light.
But the valleys were draining the darkness

Till the moorline – blackening dregs of the brightening grey –
Halved the sky ahead. And I saw the horses:

Huge in the dense grey – ten together –
Megalith-still. They breathed, making no move,

with draped manes and tilted hind-hooves,
Making no sound.

I passed: not one snorted or jerked its head.
Grey silent fragments

Of a grey silent world.

I listened in emptiness on the moor-ridge.
The curlew’s tear turned its edge on the silence.

Slowly detail leafed from the darkness. Then the sun
Orange, red, red erupted

Silently, and splitting to its core tore and flung cloud,
Shook the gulf open, showed blue,

And the big planets hanging –
I turned

Stumbling in the fever of a dream, down towards
The dark woods, from the kindling tops,

And came to the horses.
There, still they stood,
But now steaming and glistening under the flow of light,

Their draped stone manes, their tilted hind-hooves
Stirring under a thaw while all around them

The frost showed its fires. But still they made no sound.
Not one snorted or stamped,

Their hung heads patient as the horizons,
High over valleys in the red levelling rays –

In din of crowded streets, going among the years, the faces,
May I still meet my memory in so lonely a place

Between the streams and the red clouds, hearing the curlews,
Hearing the horizons endure.

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

Oswald comments:

This non-nostalgic way of writing is, to my mind, the only way of getting through to the animate part of nature, the soft growing tip. Hughes called it “the vital somewhat terrible spirit of natural life which is new in every second”. DH Lawrence, whose poems Hughes admired, called it “quivering momentaneity”. He spoke of the need for an “unrestful, ungraspable poetry of the sheer present”, which is a pretty good prediction of what Hughes was to write 50 or so years later.

It’s very strange to me, the way poems like this one by Hughes are in fact nostalgic, if you like — maybe very nostalgic. After all, the poem is remembering a transcendent moment in the speaker’s past, and remembering it not all that differently from the way Wordsworth, or Yeats – a later Romantic – would remember and render it … He tells it in the past tense, while a lot of contemporary poets would tell it in the present; and he ends his misty narrative with a prayer, for goodness sake:

May I still meet my memory in so lonely a place…

Or call it a hope, or whatever, but my point is that for a momentaneous poem, this one spends its time either in the past or anticipating the future.

And, I mean, a sunrise. What could be more Romantic? Romantic to the point – this poem being written in the twentieth century – of kitsch?

Well, but language matters. A world cast in frost. Every word snapped shut with a d or a t: world, cast, frost. Short shut lines. Frigid, tapping on the page like a frosty twig tapping on a window. Icy shivery words and lines that makes us feel, and shudder.

And this is no Romantic sunrise, with its blackening dregs of the brightening grey.

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

Megalith.

Breathe.

The sounds take us from the cold shut-in world to the exhaling horses — the world begins to make noise. Not language, but noise. The poet’s breath, the horses’ breath — breaths that conjure tortuous statues now coming to life in the sunlight. I listened in emptiness; and may I – he writes at the very end of the poem, continue hearing the horizons endure.

Sensory funny business here: You can’t listen in emptiness, and you can’t hear horizons. You listen in silence and you see horizons. Or so tightass literalist Scathing Online Schoolmarm would insist. Yet it’s precisely the weird momentous momentary sense of merging with the physical and metaphysical world, the experience of transcending your senses, that the poet recalls, brings back — by writing the poem, by explicitly asking in the poem that it be brought back, and by, perhaps, if you’re the right reader, like Alice Oswald, somehow conjuring it back — your version of it back — for you.

… the last one hundred percent political dictatorship of Europe,” said Mr UD when I read him an article my sister just sent me about Belarus. “By comparison, Russia is a great democracy.”

In 1993, in Diatlovo, he visited The Museum of Peoples’ Glory (or something like that; Mr. UD forgets), though his main purpose was to visit significant Soltan family sites. “The woman at the museum was absolutely shocked that someone showed up wanting to see it.”

I suppose when you hold on to icons of Soviet glory past their expiration date, this sort of thing will happen:

A massive statue of Soviet founder Vladimir Lenin collapsed on a man who was hanging from it Monday, killing him on the spot, authorities said.

The 21-year-old man was drunk when he climbed onto the five-meter (16-foot)-high plaster monument and hung from its arm, the Emergency Situations ministry said. It then broke into pieces and he was crushed.

The statue in the southeastern Belarus town of Uvarovichi was built in 1939…

… who asked Why are Swedes So Stupid?

A retired Norwegian linguistics professor has described Swedes as “stupid” for not being able to understand Norwegian. Norwegians have no problem with Swedish, the professor points out.

Finn-Erik Vinje has caused an escalation in what is promising to become an all out language war, by publishing a post on his blog last week asking, “Why are Swedes so stupid?”.

… The basis of Vinje’s assertion is that Swedish viewers of Himmelbå, a Norwegian television series based on the British production “Two Thousand Acres of Sky”, have complained that the language is too difficult to understand and would prefer to see a series in Swedish, with Swedish actors, in a Swedish setting.

Vinje reacts to a review of the series in the Expressen newspaper in which Norwegian is described as an “incomprehensible and ugly language”.

“Line Verndal in the female lead can look as much like (the Swedish actress) Lena Endre as she likes. But she is still speaking that strange double Dutch,” Expressen’s Nils Schwarts writes.

Vinje [claims] it is… unnecessary for Swedish to be subtitled on Norwegian television although adds that perhaps it may be useful to do so for some of the Norwegian dialects…

Heart-rending story out of New York about four close-knit New York University graduates who “us[ed] their knowledge of the law and the financial industry to further the[ir] fraud.”

If they hadn’t learned finance and the law at NYU, in other words, they wouldn’t have been able to do what they did…

And what did they do, UD?

Well, let’s see.

… The four defendants are charged with stealing $422,000 over five years, by telling various banks that their ATM cards had been lost or stolen, after they allegedly emptied their accounts themselves.

… The indictment charges Eric Manganelli, 36; Lam Dang, 37; John Tluczek, 37; and Marzena Tluczek, 35; made false claims totaling more than $700,000, to more than 20 banks, that unauthorized transactions were made on their accounts.

The defendants then demanded reimbursement from the banks, which paid them more than $422,000, according to the indictment.

In each case, the defendants opened accounts and padded them with large deposits, over the course of several months. Later, the indictment charges, they drained the accounts, with withdrawals of $500 to $1,000 per day.

Once the accounts were empty, the defendants allegedly would contact the bank and say their ATM cards had been stolen or lost and that the withdrawals were unauthorized. After the banks reimbursed the money, the defendants would close the accounts…

… lurks in the unlikeliest places.

Found this toward the end of the comment thread for a New York Times debate on whether direct to consumer television commercials for prescription drugs is a good idea.

(Answer, according to virtually all debaters and commenters:

Are you effing kidding?):

An erection pill called Ta Da? Ta Da! I’m now a vacuous, bourgeois, self-entitled cretin chasing his menopausal, morbidly obese spouse around our stucco McMansion with a raging erection – Ta Da! the American Dream!

There’s more where that came from. The whole thing’s worth reading.

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

Results of the debate here.

And NOT Dover Beach!

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

UD (to Mr. UD, who just this moment returned from sitting on the beach for two hours): Why are there no good beach poems?

Mr. UD: There are many good mountain poems.

UD: No there aren’t.

Mr. UD: Name a bad mountain poem.

UD: “The Mountain in Your Butt.”

Mr. UD: Our daughter is absolutely wonderful, but the day she taught you to end your sentences with in your butt was not a good day.

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

Rhode Island, by William Meredith, is the best I can do at the moment.

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

Here at the seashore they use the clouds over & over
again, like the rented animals in Aïda.
In the late morning the land breeze
turns and now the extras are driving
all the white elephants the other way.
What language are the children shouting in?
He is lying on the beach listening.

The sand knocks like glass, struck by bare heels.
He tries to remember snow noise.
Would powder snow ping like that?
But you don’t lie with your ear to powder snow.
Why doesn’t the girl who takes care
of the children, a Yale girl without flaw,
know the difference between lay and lie?

He tries to remember snow, his season.
The mind is in charge of things then.
Summer is for animals, the ocean is erotic,
all that openness and swaying.
No matter how often you make love
in August you’re always aware of genitalia,
your own and the half-naked others’.
Even with the gracefulest bathers
you’re aware of their kinship with porpoises,
mammals disporting themselves in a blue element,
smelling slightly of fish. Porpoise Hazard
watches himself awhile, like a blue movie.

In the other hemisphere now people
are standing up, at work at their easels.
There they think about love at night
when they take off their serious clothes
and go to bed sandlessly, under blankets.

Today the children, his own among them,
are apparently shouting fluently in Portuguese,
using the colonial dialect of Brazil.
It is just as well, they have all been changed
into small shrill marginal animals,
he would not want to understand them again
until after Labor Day. He just lays there.

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

Eh. I don’t say it’s great. Drifty thoughts of a middle-aged daddy lying, laying, lieing, alie, on the beach, his kids nearby. The bit about eroticism is sort of okay, all that openness and swaying. Gives you a sense of the guy’s orientation, summer for him being perturbingly messy and bestial, an out of joint season during which Yalies misspeak and his own kids sound Portuguese.

The speaker, Hazard, looks at his own, what, tenting little erection or something, “like a blue movie.”

He doesn’t like summer, in short. Can’t wait for Labor Day, when we go back to work. Summer creatures have morphed from sandless serious citizens to shrill marginal animals, and he doesn’t like it.

He ends with a joke which links him — drily, ironically — to the gibberish world around him: He just lays there.