From the New York Times:

Born in the Bronx on June 23, 1954, she was diagnosed with diabetes at the age of 8. Her father, a factory worker, died a year later. Her mother, a nurse at a methadone clinic, raised her daughter and a younger son on a modest salary.

Judge Sotomayor graduated from Princeton University summa cum laude in 1976 and became an editor of the Yale Law Journal. She spent five years as a prosecutor with the Manhattan District Attorney’s office before entering private practice.

But she longed to return to public service, she said, inspired by the “Perry Mason” series she watched as a child. In 1992, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan recommended the politically centrist lawyer to President George H. W. Bush, making good on a longstanding promise to appoint a Hispanic judge in New York.

Not very Darwinian of the great-great-grand-daughter of Charles Darwin to have resigned, under pressure (she turns out to have written emails reminding people that her rival, Derek Walcott, had an accusation of sexual misconduct against him), from the Oxford University poetry chair she just won. 

Having done what she needed to do to triumph in the struggle for dominance, Ruth Padel caved to pressure from the pack.

… is a beautiful farmhouse on a snowy night in Upstate New York. Les UDs were getting started in their academic careers, both teaching at the University of Rochester, and they’d been invited to take part in a faculty discussion group that met at various homes. I don’t remember the subject of the reading group; neither does Mr UD.

Perez Zagorin, a history professor, was the genial host that night. Christopher Lasch sat to my left, smoking. He was emotionally intense. He was always intense.

Mr UD thinks we might have been discussing Jacques Derrida, which would explain why I recall Lasch not only as intense, but as angry.

I do remember thinking that if we ended up staying in Rochester (we didn’t want to) the thing to do would be exactly what Zagorin had done: Get a farmhouse and some acres in the hills outside the city.

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

That was almost thirty years ago.

Today UD reads two obituaries, first that of Zagorin’s wife, a noted artist. She died April 17.

He died nine days later. Both were 88.

Here’s an excerpt from an interview Zagorin gave about his wife at the time of a 2007 exhibit of her work at the Smithsonian (“Anatomy of a Painting: Honoré Sharrer’s Tribute to the American Working People,” Lawrence A. Fleischman Gallery of the Archives of American Art.).

When Kathy Calderwood – when we first knew her, she came over to our house one day… We had a big fireplace there. It was very pleasant, we were having a conversation. … I said to her, what’s so great about self-expression? I said, the self isn’t that important. She was stunned by it.

I mean, when you’re a worker, such as Honoré is, you don’t think about self-expression at all. … [S]he was not an artist. I don’t ever recall her ever thinking – just wasn’t, and for myself as a historian and a writer – of course, I have the experience of intellectual creativity, which is very satisfying and sometimes exciting, but it’s the work that counts; it’s not the self. It’s so tiresome, you see. And I think this profoundly important in dealing with [university] students.

When I have students … I feel great concern about – I would never humiliate a student or anything like that, and I have had quite close relations with some of my students. What I want to teach them is to be competent, to be really good at something, and when you’re good at something, you’re confident of yourself and you’ll be wanted. And it’s hard work.

… [S]elf-expression should be – it’s like happiness.

The greatest work of moral philosophy in the Western tradition and quite possibly of the literature the whole world is Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, and it begins with the theme that all men aim at happiness. But how do you – you don’t aim at happiness. Happiness is not a goal. Happiness is the byproduct of the things you do. And I could say, truly, I’ve had a happy life and I know Honoré’s had a happy life, and that was because we were all the time doing just what we wanted to be doing. Happiness emerged, it effervesced.

So you don’t aim – I mean, to your husband, your self is very important, and it should be, and the other way … the other way around. But for other people, why should they give a damn about your self? There’s a famous remark that T.S. Eliot made with regard to self-expression… One of his critical essays has a remark to the effect that – he posits a disjunction between the artist’s personal emotions and sufferings, and the work, which is a very anti-romantic attitude, and he always said he was in favor of classicism. I mean, not that there aren’t romantic elements in his work, there are, but this is a distinct critique of romanticism.

And so – and many people have hunted out the personal things in his work which seem to run contrary to the doctrine of impersonality, but in speaking about self-expression, he says somewhere – he says, self-expression – but of course, you have to have something to express, and that’s the heart of the thing, you see. These selves that are being expressed in those [purely personal] cases, we must respect individuals, but they are very ordinary selves. They haven’t anything much to say. So that’s why Kathy was stunned by this remark of mine. The work is everything…

Harvard’s pissed.

A Brooklyn woman who is a Harvard University senior has been barred from graduation next month due to her connection to the fatal shooting of a 21-year-old man in a university dorm last week.

Police have arrested Manhattan resident Jabrai Jordan Copney, 20, for the murder of Justin Cosby; police said Copney, whose girlfriend is a senior at Harvard, and two other men intended to rob Cosby of marijuana and money. Two (unidentified) female Harvard students are described as “the nexus between Cosby and Copney.”

A lawyer for the Harvard senior told the Boston Globe, “This is a highly educated, independent young woman who has literally been cared for since she was a teenager by Harvard – and now they have terminated her right to be on campus. There is no justification for it. She may have known the people involved, but you know, it’s not guilt by association in this country.”

The student was also kicked out of her dorm, Kirkland House, which is where the shooting took place; a previous report said that Copney’s girlfriend’s “gave Copney her dorm hall access card, which allowed him to float in and out of Harvard dorms.”

I asked [the poet Frederick] Seidel if, looking back, he understood what was in the way of his getting back to poetry [during a seventeen-year absence from it]. Seidel didn’t hesitate:

“Cowardice.”

What was there to be afraid of?

“The expression of aspects of the self that you understand or, rather, that you fancy may not be attractively expressed or attractive once expressed.” He added: “Another way of talking about this is to talk about your becoming yourself: your finding who you are as a poet, finding what you sound like, finding your subjects that bring you out of you [-] that are your subjects. It’s almost as if there’s a moment when you decide, Well, whatever the problem of writing this way, of writing these things, whatever the difficulty with presenting yourself this way . . . well, that’s it.”

This is from the New York Times magazine. Here’s a review of his collected poems, also in the New York Times.

Home again in Garrett Park after spells in Key West and Rehoboth Beach, UD finds in her garden among overgrown holly bushes a low-lying wood thrush nest with an anxious egg-sitting mother and an aggressively patrolling father.

The nest is ugly but clever, composed
of semi-circular twigs that form a deep,

well-rounded bottom, and, for connective
tissue, bits of white paper from human trash.

Having been dive-bombed, UD cedes this part of her backyard to the thrushes, and contents herself with watching through binoculars the big mother bird, the trembling nest, the tyrannical father. And although she misses the raucous chants of the Key West macaws, she knows she’s fortunate to have orchestra seats at the famous sound of the wood thrush.

… [T]he rich, liquid song of a Wood Thrush resonates through the morning air.

… [In the] moist and shady deciduous forests throughout the eastern United States, …the sensory experience of a walk in the woods is enriched by the flute-like sounds of the Wood Thrush. These sounds have inspired many lofty descriptions, such as this excerpt from the writings of a naturalist in the 1930’s:

“As we listen we lose the sense of time—it links us with eternity…Its tones…seem like the vocal expression of the mystery of the universe, clothed in a melody so pure and ethereal that the soul still bound to its earthly tenement can neither imitate nor describe it.”

Perhaps the most famous reference to the Wood Thrush’s song is this quotation from the writings of Henry David Thoreau,

“The thrush alone declares the immortal wealth and vigor that is in the forest. Here is a bird in whose strain the story is told…Whenever a man hears it he is young, and Nature is in her spring; whenever he hears it, it is a new world and a free country, and the gates of heaven are not shut against him.”

The legendary “ee-o-lay” song of the Wood Thrush is actually a one-bird duet. Because the Wood Thrush has the equivalent of two sets of “vocal cords,” it is able to sing two overlapping songs at once. In other words, the Wood Thrush sings with two voices simultaneously. The syrinx, or voice-box, of the majority of bird species contains two membranes which when vibrated produce sound. The ability to control each membrane independently makes birds such as the Wood Thrush capable of impressive vocal gymnastics.

Immortal bird.

Sweet bird of youth.

Thomas Hardy, Walt Whitman, and, more recently, Amy Clampitt have all had what to say about the thrush.

The Darkling Thrush, by Hardy, starts with the speaker entirely depressed at the thought of his exhausted civilization, a condition for which he finds a visual equivalent in his lifeless wintry scene:

I leant upon a coppice gate
When Frost was spectre-gray,
And Winter’s dregs made desolate
The weakening eye of day.
The tangled bine-stems scored the sky
Like strings of broken lyres,
And all mankind that haunted nigh
Had sought their household fires.

Only a poet would stand outside in such a deathly scene; everyone sensible is inside at a household fire. Those strings of broken lyres — a world once musical with beauty and life and meaning now violently broken off into silence — will recompose themselves in the throat of the thrush. But not yet. Next stanza will deepen and clarify the poet’s problem:

The land’s sharp features seemed to be
The Century’s corpse outleant,
His crypt the cloudy canopy,
The wind his death-lament.
The ancient pulse of germ and birth
Was shrunken hard and dry,
And every spirit upon earth
Seemed fervourless as I.

The poet’s time is a dead time – war, social upheaval, spiritual confusion, the usual suspects, have made earth and the poet spiritless. But ahoy.

At once a voice arose among
The bleak twigs overhead
In a full-hearted evensong
Of joy illimited;
An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,
In blast-beruffled plume,
Had chosen thus to fling his soul
Upon the growing gloom.

A messy old thrush, his feathers mussed by the wind, nonetheless pours forth. If he can do it, goddammit, so can I!

So little cause for carolings
Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
Afar or nigh around,
That I could think there trembled through
His happy good-night air
Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
And I was unaware.

In Whitman’s gorgeous When Lilacs Last in the Door-yard Bloom’d, a threnody for Abraham Lincoln, the thrush sings a death carol that captures both the poet’s grief and his conviction of the country’s immortal soul: ‘The voice of my spirit tallied the song of the bird.’

Sing on! sing on, you gray-brown bird!
Sing from the swamps, the recesses—pour your chant from the bushes;
Limitless out of the dusk, out of the cedars and pines.

… (Victorious song, death’s outlet song, yet varying, ever-altering song,
As low and wailing, yet clear the notes, rising and falling, flooding the night,
Sadly sinking and fainting, as warning and warning, and yet again bursting with joy,
Covering the earth, and filling the spread of the heaven,
As that powerful psalm in the night I heard from recesses)…

Poetically, the Clampitt piece, A Hermit Thrush, is the least impressive. It’s a garrulous shapeless thing in which the poet worries here and there and everywhere about impermanence. But she’s got a way of talking about the thrush that pleasantly domesticates the high exotic note of the earlier poets. Here are some excerpts:

no point is fixed, … there’s no foothold
but roams untethered

Every summer she returns to a tree at the beach; every summer she worries it’ll be damaged or even washed away, but so far it’s still there.

aloof seraphic mentors urge us
to look down on all attachment,
on any bonding, as
in the end untenable.

This is your Buddhist buddy lecturing you on non-attachment as a solution to your worries. The poet finds it unpersuasive.

Base as it is, from
year to year the earth’s sore surface
mends and rebinds itself, however
and as best it can, with
thread of cinquefoil, tendril of the magenta
beach pea, trammel of bramble; with easings,
mulchings, fragrances, the gray-green
bayberry’s cool poultice–
and what can’t finally be mended, the salt air
proceeds to buff and rarefy: the lopped carnage
of the seaward spruce clump weathers
lustrous, to wood-silver.

So actually even though everything’s always changing (and what doesn’t get said here but what underlies the poem is our misery at our recognition that our changes, once youth passes, are all toward the grave), the earth every year rejuvenates itself, or if it doesn’t find youth again, it finds ways of mending and sustaining its life. And even those earthly objects that do die… you know…

Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell…

Clampitt concludes:

we drop everything to listen as a
hermit thrush distills its fragmentary,
hesitant, in the end
unbroken music. From what source (beyond us, or
the wells within?) such links perceived arrive–
diminished sequences so uninsistingly
not even human–there’s
hardly a vocabulary left to wonder, uncertain
as we are of so much in this existence, this
botched, cumbersome, much-mended,
not unsatisfactory thing.

Fragmentary and yet unbroken, the music of the thrush affects us because we intuit a link between its beautiful, inexhaustible — though diminishing — self-expression, and our own human assertion of ourselves in the world. We barely understand this world, but as we move through it we find ourselves — at first hesitatingly, later smoothly — in possession of an ever-renewed voice.

… What Cornell [University] is putting into Cayuga’s waters and possibly ending up in the water glasses at graduation dinners could become important table discussion.

Cornell plans to deliver a liquefied brew of animal carcasses and veterinary medical waste to the Ithaca Wastewater Treatment plant. There, the material would be treated and discharged into Cayuga Lake. The lake is the source of drinking water for thousands of county residents, businesses and visitors – like those Cornell families staying in area hotels this weekend.

For more than a month, Cornell has refused to disclose the components of its liquefied brew of dead animals and medical waste. In early April, The Ithaca Journal requested under the New York Freedom of Information Law that Cornell provide details on the chemical and biological ingredients of the waste.

Cornell argues New York’s FOIL does not apply to the university. Even though New York taxpayers fund many of the university’s programs and several state schools are located on its campus, Cornell claims it is a private institution and not subject to FOIL.

… Cornell’s brew of animal carcasses and waste is generated by the Cornell College of Veterinary Medicine. That state college also houses the New York State Animal Health Diagnostic Center and the New York State Diagnostic Lab. Note the word “state” in the previous sentence.

… The list of possibilities of what may be in the Cornell waste is broad and is a significant public health and safety concern. We’ve asked Cornell to provide documents that detail the chemicals and/or materials that the waste might contain, including:

* Anesthetics, carcinogenic, mutagenic or teratogenic agents and chemotherapeutic agents.

* Contraceptives, drugs, pharmaceuticals and other therapeutic agents.

* Dyes, formaldehyde, formalin, other tissue preservatives, phenol and phenolic compounds.

* Sterilizing solutions, immunization agents or laboratory chemicals.

* Mercury, lead, silver, iodine or other heavy and non-heavy metals and metalloids.

* Persistent compounds of potential environmental or public health concern or volatile organic chemicals.

* Radioactive solutions, tracers or elements…

the ithaca journal

Tell me about it. I just walked out on my deck because I thought I saw a bird floating in the birdbath. In short, my motives were compassionate.

The male wood thrush guarding the nest in my backyard came bombing out of a tree right at me. He made threatening noises.

The story of my inability to set foot on my own property because of a slew of threatening animals continues.

… for the past few days.

1.) The botched-robbery murder inside a dormitory at Harvard University. This seems to have been a planned attack, organized perhaps by a senior at Harvard, the girlfriend of the shooter.

2.) Kansas State president John Wefald‘s (put it all together, it spells FLAWED) parting fiasco as he retires. That fine middle linebacker Sigmund Freud (The Sigmeister to his fans) would have plenty to say about a long-serving leader expressing his accumulated resentments, and his conviction that the school will fall apart without him, by arranging for it to fall apart. Oh! I didn’t know that the crony I appointed AD would do secret deals that would embarrass the school around the world and bankrupt us! Whooooops….

These are strange stories, a kind of Extreme College Sports. They represent a deepening of campus tendencies everyone knows are already there — widespread student drug use, filthy athletic programs.

In a move Harvard University should consider in connection with Joseph Biederman, Washington University has rid itself of a professor so deeply compromised in his research ethics as to do terrible damage to the school’s reputation as long as he remains on the faculty.

… [F]our former colleagues [accuse Kuklo of] falsifying research on a bone-growth product made by Medtronic that was used on severely injured soldiers. He was also accused of forging the other doctors’ signatures when he submitted a research report to a medical journal last year.

The Army, which investigated the matter, issued a report rebuking him. It took no further disciplinary action, Army officials said, because Dr. Kuklo is now retired from the military. But Walter Reed notified Washington University of its findings five months ago.

The Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery, a British publication, retracted Dr. Kuklo’s article in March after receiving a report of the investigation from the Army. But the episode largely escaped public notice until last week.

This week, a Republican senator, Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, sent letters seeking more information about Dr. Kuklo from Walter Reed, Washington University, two medical journals and Medtronic.

Dr. Kuklo has been a consultant to Medtronic…

Kuklo’s silence in the face of all of this has been as total as the silence of the pretend soldiers he enlisted in his study. He won’t talk to anyone. UD guesses he refused to talk to Washington University too, and that this persuaded the university of his guilt – or at least so pissed it off that it booted him out.

… because while cleaning up the fenced-in part of the yard a few moments ago – the area right outside our bedroom – I encountered a bird’s nest with an anxious bird in it, and I’m trying to identify the bird.  Brown head, big black eyes, black spots on its belly…

The bird has built its nest quite low among the azaleas and hollies, and I can’t blame it for thinking that was a clever move.  While I was away all those months in Rehoboth and Key West, the place was neglected, and things grew massively wild.  The bird must have figured it had plenty of cover.   And because of the, er, untidiness of our gutters, it had a vast and convenient supply of nest junk.

But this afternoon, under pressure of guests for dinner tonight (someone might – gulp – want a garden tour), UD went out there, gloved, hatted, and insect-repellented.  Hacking at honeysuckle, she suddenly uncovered the nest and thought Again.  Again the animals make it impossible for me to maneuver in my own backyard. Yes because now the back area has to be treated like a hospital so the babies aren’t disturbed, blahblah.  I stopped hacking midhack.  God forbid the whatevers — cowbirds? — should be disturbed in their egg-maintenance…

No – now I’m almost certain it’s a wood thrush.

Same big melting black eyes and speckled belly.

… can’t spell Harvard, Gawker’s got a useful update on the Harvard killing. Excerpts:

… The chief suspect, Jabrai Jordan Copney, who was arrested in New York yesterday, was visiting two unidentified female Harvard students who also knew Cosby — who was not a Harvard student. Copney allegedly made the trip to Cambridge with the intent of robbing Cosby of drugs and cash, and the Harvard girls were “the nexus” between the two men.

The facts that have emerged so far have given way to a swirl of rumors that Cosby was a major supplier to three of the schools Final Clubs, which are their so-called “secret” societies. [“Huh?” said Mr UD, a Harvard grad, when I asked him. “Never heard them called that.”] And since he was visiting the unidentified girl with a pound of pot there is speculation that she was one of his campus distributors.

… [T]he girls could have just been personal-use buyers, and Cosby could just have carried around way too much pot for his own good when he went out on calls. Either way, it looks like some nice Harvard girls started hanging out with some bad boys…

Why assume all Harvard girls are nice? What’s that mean, anyway? That they don’t buy and smoke and maybe sell dope?

UD reminds you about the nice Hofstra girl engaged, apparently, in the trade there.  Many of the news items about Adi Stern called her a man.  I guess everyone has trouble realizing that women commit crimes.

… trying to steal the victim’s drug money. The shooters were visiting Harvard friends. The victim had apparently just transacted some drug business in the dorm.

… Justin Cosby … was shot in the abdomen Monday in what [police] described as a “drug rip” attempt.

Cosby was found with about a pound of marijuana and about $1,000 when he collapsed outside the dormitory.

Police are looking for two other people said to have been involved in the shooting.

If all of this information is confirmed — especially the part about wild gunplay inside a Harvard dorm (Cosby was shot multiple times) — it’s really, really bad.

Update on Ezra Merkin:

[Merkin] stepped down Wednesday night as an officer of the Fifth Avenue Synagogue, a wealthy congregation founded 50 years ago by his father, and whose members included some of Mr. Merkin’s largest individual investment-losers.

Mr. Merkin disclosed his unexpected decision in a speech at the synagogue’s annual membership meeting, in which he declined the nomination to become chairman of the synagogue’s board of trustees.

Ira Rennert, a tax cheat, remains Chairman.

… the Snowflex?

Liberty University is pulling the plug on the campus Democratic Party club, saying the group stands against the conservative Christian school’s moral principles.

The Lynchburg school founded by the Rev. Jerry Falwell formally recognized the group in October. But club president Brian Diaz told The News & Advance of Lynchburg that he was notified via e-mail last week by vice president of student affairs Mark Hine that the university was revoking its decision.

Hine said the club must stop using Liberty’s name, advertising events and holding on-campus meetings. Violators could be reprimanded under the school’s conduct code and students could face expulsion after accumulated reprimands.

Associated Press