Very different.

Students at the University of Miami, under attack by hawks, are escorted across nesting areas by security guards with umbrellas (hawks consider umbrellas unthreatening), in a procedure known as hawk walk. UM has crocodile problems too.

UD doesn’t have a hawk problem at her house in Key West, but she’s got a parrot problem.

It’s more a question than a problem. It only occurred to her today, and it may be peculiar to UD because of her house’s odd setting on the other side of a jungle wall from Nancy Forrester’s famous parrots. (There are many unfamous, uncaged parrots in Key West. UD watched one of them today with its owner, a restaurateur. The owner sat in a wicker chair talking on his cell phone, while the bird, bored, hopped around trying to get his attention. Eventually the bird started eating the wicker.)

Nancy Forrester’s parrots, as you know, don’t merely squawk and shriek. They talk. A lot. All at once. This isn’t refined parrot, as in this excerpt from Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities Specially Adapted for Parrots. (It’s about a minute into the YouTube.) It’s a cacophony.

One bird alone among the Forrester lot has a lovely soft melodic voice. She only says Hello, but she says it so wistfully. HAH-loo. HAAAAH-looooo. Smooth and sad. A lute amid the loons.

So this afternoon, sitting in the jacuzzi, I suddenly heard only her, inches away from me, doing her Hello.

I said hello back, imitating her lutelike voice.

And she said it again, and I said it again, and she said it again, und so weiter.

I was delighted.

Until the thought crept upon me that maybe behind the green wall was not the parrot who said hello, but a person, like me, saying hello like the parrot and thinking that the parrot was saying hello. Thinking that behind the ferns and palms was not an English professor on sabbatical sitting in a tub trying to sound like a parrot, but one of Nancy Forrester’s parrots saying hello.

… [The Pains of Being Pure at Heart’s] incredibly brief self-titled EP released in 2009 (which totals a whopping 34 minutes) reveals a hipster-glasses-wearing, library-sex-having, pulsing beat all their own.

… So what is close to the heart for these three from New York City? One of their cutely pun-titled songs, “Tenure Itch,” explores the story of a clandestine hook-up with a professor. Berman sings, “He says your thoughts need form / but your form’s not that hard to find.” Another song romanticizes sex in the stacks, and yet another adolescent incest…

A music review from the Cornell Daily Sun.

UD doesn’t know where on Professor McDonald’s list of priorities sitting on the board of a notorious spamming firm appears, but I guess it’s important to him, or he wouldn’t be on the board.

On the other hand, he doesn’t list the board membership on his otherwise fulsome bio at Stanford. Maybe he doesn’t want to be publicly identified with a business that uses aliases.

While the Better Business Bureau has registered only two complaints for QuinStreet under advertising and sales practices (and several more in other categories), other complaints have been filed under QuinStreet’s aliases — such as VendorSeek.

It’s not spam anyway. QuinStreet/VendorSeek is performing the public service of keeping us informed — every day, every minute — about new products.

… and now the University of Connecticut has its own art controversy.

The Bowling Green thing, you recall, involved high ranking administrators sneaking into the campus gallery and removing a sculpture (High school teacher, male; high school student female; BJ.) they found offensive.

In the U Conn case, students have voted for the show to be moved out of the library and into the campus art museum (everyone has to use the library; few students, I guess, go to the museum).

The offensive material here is not sexual but animal.

The artist specializes in dead birds. One piece features “a dead brown sparrow on a noose with the phrase ‘The bird got what it deserved’ etched in glass.”

The artist complains that he is misunderstood.

Nelson says the title of the bird piece, “The Birdwatcher’s Verdict,” should indicate that it is about the preferences of birders for “good birds” like cardinals and bluebirds over invasive species like sparrows or starlings.

More broadly, the artist says that the exhibit’s title, Connecticut Wilderness, “is an oxymoron that refers to the sense of confusion and ambiguity that prevails in our lives, and that I try to portray in my artwork through multi-layered meanings and unusual visual imagery.”

Birders hate sparrows so much that they think they deserve lynching.

I’m not picking up on the ambiguity.

Anyway. Students are grossed out, don’t want to have to look at dead birds in the library, want the thing out of there now.

UD says more power to them. This controversy is really about the preferences of students for “good artists.”

… UD‘s ten-part series on guns – Professor Meets Gun – in Inside Higher Education.

UD visited the NRA shooting range in Virginia for that series, and, gazing at the shooters, she thought about how easy it would be to kill yourself – or someone else – there. I mean, you go to a building, and someone hands you a gun, gives you a private booth from which to shoot to your heart’s content…

In the wake of a Columbus State University student’s recent gun range suicide, UD again wondered about the popularity of this setting for self-destruction.

The same gun range the CSU student used hosted another suicide just last month.

And says here suicide in gun ranges is not unusual. The article describes a California range that’s had seven suicides in twenty or so years.

… quotes this sentence from an English professor’s book about the history of creative writing programs:

Technomodernism identifies with the ‘emptiness’ of pure formality — that is, with the systemacity of the system itself, drawing the machine to itself in a form of ontological prosthesis.

McGrath comments:

[Writing like this] may explain why creative writing is so popular. If stuff like this is what you get to read in regular English class, then no wonder students would rather write texts of their own.

What was that sentence again?

Technomodernism identifies with the ‘emptiness’ of pure formality — that is, with the systemacity of the system itself, drawing the machine to itself in a form of ontological prosthesis.

Let me pull on my ontological prosthesis and see what I can make of this.

[Deep breath.]

[Expulsion of breath.]

[Overwhelming sense of futility.]

[Reminder that you have clicked on University Diaries because you’re in desperate need of something beyond the ’emptiness’ of pure formality.]

Okay. The sentence appears to want to help us understand what an artistic movement, technomodernism, is. We cannot help but note, however, that the sentence does not help us. It hurts us. It hurts our understanding, and it hurts our sense of beauty. Unlike Susan Boyle who is not pretty but can sing, this sentence is not pretty and cannot sing.

Problems start almost immediately. What can it mean to say that an artistic movement identifies with something? People identify with things; things do not identify with things.

And yes. My prosthesis edges
toward the author’s upcoming
quotation marks like a ouija
pointer loaded for bear.

Emptiness, pure, and formality all mean pretty much the same thing in this sentence, but only emptiness gets the mysterious quotation marks. Why? Our sense of confusion deepens. Is pure formality — the simple functional working of this or that machine, let’s assume he means — not empty? Why not?

Have you ever seen the word systemacity before? I ain’t. I’ve seen systematicity, though I’m not proud of it. I’m not proud I hang out on street corners where people use words like systematicity, but systematicity is in fact a word. You can look it up.

You will not find systemacity in the dictionary.

Not that you won’t find it used! Google it and discover that it’s a very specialized word, used mainly by mathematicians and linguists. Why would a writer, in an effort to help people understand something, use a word like systemacity?

… drawing the machine to itself in a form of ontological prosthesis.

The repetition of “itself” only deepens our sense that instead of getting out of a confusing and circular world, we are entering it more and more surely. And what can it mean to draw a machine to itself? The word draw is clearly the problem here. What sort of an act is this? Artists draw, and the subject is art, so our mind goes perhaps to the visual arts and reads draw literally. But this can’t be what the author intends. Who or what is doing the drawing, and what sort of drawing is this? Dunno.

I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that the idea behind ontological prosthesis is that the technomodernist attempts to lend life (ontology — being) to lifeless empty machines by infusing a kind of aesthetic vibrancy, a presentness, into the technological object. This infusion is an artificial construction, as all art is, and therefore it’s …prosthetic.

Have I made myself clear?

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

Update, correction: A reader who has looked at the book writes in this post’s comment thread:

[T]he Times seems to have misquoted the sentence from the book, which uses the word “systematicity,” not “systemacity.”

… by UD‘s favorite novelist, Don DeLillo, appears in the latest Esquire.

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Update before we go any further: A reader, James, points out that although it stands alone as a story in Esquire, this is in fact an excerpt from the final pages of DeLillo’s novel Cosmopolis. I didn’t recall this at all (I sped through Cosmopolis, disliking it from the first page, so maybe that’s the reason.), and I’m very grateful to James for reminding me.

Since it’s presented as a self-standing story in Esquire, I’m going to keep this post. Just keep in mind that it is also part of a novel.

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

DeLillo’s short stories, like his plays, don’t do much for UD. His strange and beautiful writing style needs space to work its magic; it needs space and it needs a shifting around of scenes, a sort of pastichy movement. It also needs to stretch out in terms of presenting us with the complicated fullness of consciousnesses.

Packed tightly, in a very brief narrative, DeLillo’s prose seems to me schematic. If you know his writing, you can see all too clearly in a short story like this one in Esquire his playing out and weaving in of familiar themes — simulacral urban culture, in which real trauma is replaced by play-acted trauma; the replacement of a sense of reality and a sense of privacy by a sense of surreality, and by the public exposure of everyone’s life that constant filming and other forms of voyeurism prompt; a conviction, despite this exteriorization of human life, that you’re radically isolated from other people, even from the person to whom you’re married; the sad pathos of our bodies, emblems of our flickering existence…

As in Advanced Disaster Management’s simulated disaster on the streets of Jack Gladney’s town in White Noise, so here DeLillo’s fascinated by the vague line between contrived human catastrophe and — even as we’re only simulating it — the real disaster of our fragile embodiment inside a dangerous world.

Were they pretending to be naked, or were they naked?

Part of a crowd of naked living bodies lying motionless on a New York City street, posing for a scene in a film, DeLillo’s narrator nicely describes the surface of a city street when it’s right up against your face:

He felt the textural variation of slubs of chewing gum compressed by decades of traffic. He smelled the ground fumes, the oil leaks and rubbery skids, summers of hot tar.

A professor at Columbia University’s Teachers College who was fired over plagiarism allegations is suing the graduate school for $200 million.

Madonna Constantine filed a lawsuit in Manhattan Supreme Court on Tuesday calling her 2008 firing an “academic lynching.”

Constantine was a clinical psychology professor at Teachers College, which is affiliated with Columbia University. She says her firing was fueled by “academic rivalry and political intrigue.”

Teachers College says the lawsuit has no merit and intends to defend itself vigorously.

Constantine’s firing came after a noose was found dangling from her office door. Police never determined who put it there…

Associated Press.

… weren’t grim enough.

A plaything of hacks, Chicago State University has apparently been kicked around one too many times for its long-suffering faculty.  They’ve only just evicted President Elnora Daniel – a party girl with a penchant for long, university-subsidized Caribbean cruises – and now the school’s hopeless board of trustees wants to unload another hack on them.

It’s not every day that a faculty pulls itself together to ask the governor to remove its entire board of trustees, and to halt the appointment of its next president, but that’s what CSU’s professors have done.

Chicago State University faculty took the unusual step Tuesday of asking Gov. Pat Quinn to remove the university’s board of trustees.

The unanimous request from the Faculty Senate, which comes days before trustees plan to announce their decision on the next university leader, also asks Quinn to stop the board from hiring a president.

Chicago State faculty and students have argued they were excluded from the presidential search process and have criticized the two finalists as local political insiders. On Friday, 13 of the 15 members of the campus’ search advisory committee resigned in protest.

The finalists are Carol Adams, secretary of the Illinois Department of Human Services, and Wayne Watson, the retiring chancellor of City Colleges of Chicago.

[From earlier news coverage: “Donald Pettis, president of Chicago State’s alumni association and an advisory committee member, said that only one of the 14 committee members voted for Adams. None voted for Watson…”]

Rev. Leon Finney, the Chicago State board chairman, did not respond to a request for comment…

Yeah, why comment. Really, why bother. Who cares.

… a tribute to Mother Earth.

Tracy Nelson and Mother Earth, that is, and the song my ‘thesdan playmate played for me in the year of Earth Day’s founding.

I’ve never stopped listening to it and singing it.

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Earth Day Fun Fact!

UD went to Kensington Junior High School with Happy Nelson, son of Gaylord Nelson (D-Wisconsin), who started Earth Day.

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

One more thing. If UD does have an Earth Day post, I guess it’d be this one, from earlier this year, at Rehoboth Beach.

… by the write-up she got today in The Tenants of Colson Hall (great name) — the blog of the English department at West Virginia University. She thanks the Tenants, and welcomes their readers.

From “The Rage of the Privileged Class,” in New York magazine.

I asked [a Goldman Sachs veteran] what will happen if Congress succeeds in regulating compensation. “These guys will not work on Wall Street,” he says flatly. “People go to Wall Street out of greed. When I was interviewing for jobs, frequently some form of the question came up: How much do you want to make money? If my answer was something like—and it wasn’t—but if my answer was, ‘I’m here for intellectual betterment,’ their response might have been, ‘University is a great place for you.’ They want people who think ‘I’m greedy, I want to be a billionaire.’ That was viewed as a really good thing.”

… for her blog at Inside Higher Education.

From the News-Democrat.

Throughout East St. Louis Senior High School, Principal Ethel Shanklin has been known as “Dr. Shanklin.”

At numerous online sites connected to School District 189, Shanklin has been referred to as “Dr. Shanklin,” a reference, she says, to a doctorate in education degree or its equivalent, which she claims to have received from Southern Illinois University Edwardsville in May 2007.

But no more.

At the request of the News-Democrat, District 189 Superintendent Theresa Saunders checked Shanklin’s personnel file. Saunders said to her surprise, she found no proof of a doctorate degree or its equivalent.

She said she believes that Shanklin does not hold a doctorate degree and ordered her to tell her staff that she is not doctor.

“She told the staff today,” Saunders said Wednesday.

Saunders said Shanklin also planned to tell an assembly of high school students that she would no longer refer to herself as “Dr. Shanklin.”

Shanklin said she mistakely thought that a two-year “education specialist” degree she completed at SIUE was the last step for a doctorate in education.

But Shanklin could not have received such a degree from SIUE because the university’s School of Education does not offer a doctorate in education, spokesman Greg Conroy said.

A check of the university’s computerized records showed that what Shanklin received was a two-year “education specialist” degree, which Conroy called an “advanced degree” but not a doctorate. This degree stated she majored in “education administration.”

Conroy said a person holding this degree, “should not be calling themselves a doctor.”

Shanklin said, “I don’t have a piece of paper stating that I have a doctorate,” but insisted during a telephone interview last week that what she received from SIUE allows her to refer to herself as “doctor.” She said her salary is not based on having a doctorate.

Saunders said after investigating, she believes Shanklin was confused and did not intend to deceive…