Martin Amis concludes his remarkable essay on Vladimir Nabokov with praise, and with the same uncanny clarity of understanding he’s shown throughout the essay. He expresses the essence of Nabokov’s miraculous genius.
They call it a “shimmer” – a glint, a glitter, a glisten. The Nabokovian essence is a miraculously fertile instability, where without warning the words detach themselves from the everyday and streak off like flares in a night sky, illuminating hidden versts of longing and terror. From Lolita, as the fateful cohabitation begins (nous connûmes, a Flaubertian intonation, means “we came to know”):
“Nous connûmes the various types of motor court operators, the reformed criminal, the retired teacher, and the business flop, among the males; and the motherly, pseudo-ladylike and madamic variants among the females. And sometimes trains would cry in the monstrously hot and humid night with heartrending and ominous plangency, mingling power and hysteria in one desperate scream.”
Isn’t this the same sort of sentence we saw here, in Part Two of my series of posts on the Amis essay? Recall the sentence from Nabokov’s short story, “Signs and Symbols,” the sentence Amis calls a “one-sentence demonstration of genius.”
Aunt Rosa, a fussy, angular, wild-eyed old lady, who had lived in a tremulous world of bad news, bankruptcies, train accidents, cancerous growths – until the Germans put her to death, together with all the people she had worried about.
Both sentences offer amusing lists of homely human attributes and homely human types. Then, either with a dash or with a new sentence, both suddenly shift to death, power, and hysteria. From the trivial to the thunderstruck, from ordinariness to extremity, from insipid to insane, these small sentences first settle us into the world and then shatter it.
They shatter it in the direction of truth. The plangency in the Lolita sentence is, by frightful implication, Lolita’s, in bed with Humbert. The power and hysteria is Humbert Humbert’s hideous self-imprisonment.
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Versts? A verst is a Russian unit of distance. The word is obsolete.
Fourth part of a series of posts on University Diaries about an essay by Martin Amis on Vladimir Nabokov. Nabokov’s unfinished novel, The Original of Laura, has just appeared.
Left to themselves, The Enchanter, Lolita, and Transparent Things might have formed a lustrous and utterly unnerving trilogy. But they are not left to themselves; by sheer weight of numbers, by sheer iteration, the nympholepsy novels begin to infect one another – they cross-contaminate. We gratefully take all we can from them; and yet . . . Where else in the canon do we find such wayward fixity? In the awful itch of Lawrence, maybe, or in the murky sexual transpositions of Proust? No: you would need to venture to the very fringes of literature – Lewis Carroll, William Burroughs, the Marquis de Sade – to find an equivalent emphasis: an emphasis on activities we rightly and eternally hold to be unforgivable. [Amis seems to express his thoughts spontaneously here, as he asks himself questions, pauses, produces an ellipsis or two — it feels as though we are following, in real time, the movement of his mind as he attempts to clarify for himself the nature of Nabokov’s obsession, and the degree of condemnation — aesthetic, moral — he ought to bring to it.]
In fiction, of course, nobody ever gets hurt; the flaw, as I said, is not moral but aesthetic. [Something a little too quick and dismissive here, no? No fictional character gets hurt, true. But literature has profound effects upon us, and it’s no good insisting there’s a bright clear line between weightless pretend little stories and the big hefty actual world of moral and immoral human beings.] And I intend no innnuendo by pointing out that Nabokov’s obsession with nymphets has a parallel: the ponderous intrusiveness of his obsession with Freud – “the vulgar, shabby, fundamentally medieval world” of “the Viennese quack”, with “its bitter little embryos, spying, from their natural nooks, upon the love life of their parents”. Nabokov cherished the anarchy of the inner life, and Freud is excoriated because he sought to systematise it. Is there something rivalrous in this hatred? Well, in the end it is Nabokov, and not Freud, who emerges as our supreme poet of dreams (with Kafka), and our supreme poet of madness. [Part of the attraction of this essay lies in its both confident and tentative feel. Amis, from the outset, is a deeply informed lover of the best literature, the sort of practitioner who knows exactly where to go for the most inspiring writing – the most lucid, controlled prose. Yet he also understands, and cherishes as much as Nabokov did, the anarchy of the inner life, and the right of each anarchist to a bit of privacy as he lives that life. And he understands that great literature often emerges, in some alchemical way, from a special sort of mucking about in that inner life — the foul rag and bone shop of the heart, Yeats called it. So Amis in this essay shows you his struggle between a desire to grant the artist’s inner life as much freedom as it likes, and a recognition that what Nabokov, as he got older, did with that freedom — aesthetically — produced both bad art and bad morality. The Freud point is particularly intriguing — that perhaps the root of Nabokov’s way over the top detestation of Freud was his sense that psychoanalytical thought is about bringing to the artist’s conscious awareness internal patterns of which the artist wishes to remain unaware.]
One commonsensical caveat persists, for all our literary-critical impartiality: writers like to write about the things they like to think about. And, to put it at its sternest, Nabokov’s mind, during his last period, insufficiently honoured the innocence – insufficiently honoured the honour – of 12-year-old girls. In the three novels mentioned above he prepotently defends the emphasis; in Ada (that incontinent splurge), in Look at the Harlequins!, and now in The Original of Laura, he does not defend it. This leaves a faint but visible scar on the leviathan of his corpus.
Taipei Times
The president of the nation’s top university yesterday conceded that a poor attitude to learning was common among Taiwanese students.
Approached for comment after National Taiwan University’s (NTU) 81st anniversary ceremony yesterday, NTU president Lee Si-chen (李嗣涔) said he accepted National Central University (NCU) professor Daisy Hung’s (洪蘭) criticism of NTU students because what Hung highlighted was a common phenomenon among students.
Hung, director of NCU’s Graduate Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, said in an article published recently that during an inspection visit at NTU’s College of Medicine, she saw students arriving late for class, dozing off, eating instant noodles or drumsticks, watching TV on their laptops or sending text messages during class.
… While Lee was addressing the ceremony, a number of students in attendance were caught on camera dozing off, having breakfast, playing games on their cellphones or reading comic books…
I have read at least half a dozen Nabokov novels at least half a dozen times. [A novelist reading a novelist is a marvelous thing. Bellow reading Joyce, Amis reading Nabokov, Foster Wallace reading DeLillo… You know they’re not really reading; they’re grazing. Slowly, repeatedly, they’re nourishing themselves, they’re ruminating, chewing on this phrase and that figure. The Amis essay is terrific in part because it’s all about this special sensibility: The hyper-receptive writer working a verbal field. Nobody knows another writer as well as another writer.] And at least half a dozen times I have tried, and promptly failed, to read Ada (“Or Ardor: A Family Chronicle“). My first attempt took place about three decades ago. I put it down after the first chapter, with a curious sensation, a kind of negative tingle. [For what it’s worth, our own UD, mad lover of Nabokov, bought, when she was an undergrad, the black hardback of this novel and opened it all agog. Fifty pages later, weary and vaguely embarrassed, she closed it.] Every five years or so (this became the pattern), I picked it up again; and after a while I began to articulate the difficulty: “But this is dead,” I said to myself. The curious sensation, the negative tingle, is of course miserably familiar to me now: it is the reader’s response to what seems to happen to all writers as they overstep the biblical span. The radiance, the life-giving power, begins to fade. Last summer I went away with Ada and locked myself up with it. And I was right. At 600 pages, two or three times Nabokov’s usual fighting-weight, the novel is what homicide detectives call “a burster”. It is a waterlogged corpse at the stage of maximal bloat. [First, there’s the reader’s purely visceral rejection response. Then — and this is what’s so good about Amis — there’s the explanation. Listen up.]
When Finnegans Wake appeared, in 1939, it was greeted with wary respect – or with “terror-stricken praise”, in the words of Jorge Luis Borges. Ada garnered plenty of terror-stricken praise; and the similarities between the two magna opera are in fact profound. Nabokov nominated Ulysses as his novel of the century, but he described Finnegans Wake as, variously, “formless and dull”, “a cold pudding of a book”, “a tragic failure” and “a frightful bore”. Both novels seek to make a virtue of unbounded self-indulgence; they turn away, so to speak, and fold in on themselves. [Old people – and old, venerated writers, tend to do this, no? Withdraw from the world, indulge more and more deeply in their own fantasies, give themselves license to do any old thing because they’re don’t care about or can’t deal with the world outside themselves anymore.] Literary talent has several ways of dying. With Joyce and Nabokov, we see a decisive loss of love for the reader – a loss of comity, of courtesy. The pleasures of writing, Nabokov said, “correspond exactly to the pleasures of reading”; and the two activities are in some sense indivisible. In Ada, that bond loosens and frays. [This is crucial, I think. Julian Barnes writes that there’s a “strange, unwitnessed, yet deeply intimate relationship between writer and reader,” and it’s just that delicate and profound transaction that gets betrayed when writers fold in on themselves. The writer no longer makes the courteous effort to conceive, as he writes, the existence of a creature, a consciousness, separate from his own. Perhaps he tells himself he’s so powerful a writer that he’s creating a new consciousness in the reader, bringing the reader to greater heights of awareness, to a form of understanding analogous to the writer’s own, in forcing the reader to enter the writer’s hermeticism. But every careful reader instinctively senses the difference between a jarring aesthetic sensibility that changes her as she makes the effort to enter into it, and a sort of plugged-up verbal belligerency.]
There is a weakness in Nabokov for “partricianism”, as Saul Bellow called it (Nabokov the classic émigré, Bellow the classic immigrant). In the former’s purely “Russian” novels (I mean the novels written in Russian that Nabokov did not himself translate), the male characters, in particular, have a self-magnifying quality: they are larger and louder than life. They don’t walk – they “march” or “stride”; they don’t eat and drink – they “munch” and “gulp”; they don’t laugh – they “roar”. They are very far from being the furtive, hesitant neurasthenics of mainstream anglophone fiction: they are brawny (and gifted) heart-throbs, who win all the fights and win all the girls. Pride, for them, is not a deadly sin but a cardinal virtue. Of course, we cannot do without this vein in Nabokov: it gives us, elsewhere, his magnificently comic hauteur. In Lolita, the superbity is meant to be funny; elsewhere, it is a trait that irony does not protect.
In Ada nabobism disastrously combines with a nympholepsy that is lavishly, monotonously, and frictionlessly gratified. Ada herself, at the outset, is 12; and Van Veen, her cousin (and half-sibling) is 14. As Ada starts to age, in adolescence, her tiny sister Lucette is also on hand to enliven their “strenuous trysts”. On top of this, there is a running quasi-fantasy about an international chain of elite bordellos where girls as young as 11 can be “fondled and fouled”. And Van’s 60-year-old father (incidentally but typically) has a mistress who is barely out of single figures: she is 10. This interminable book is written in dense, erudite, alliterative, punsome, pore-clogging prose; and every character, without exception, sounds like late Henry James.
In common with Finnegans Wake, Ada probably does “work out” and “measure up” – the multilingual decoder, given enough time and nothing better to do, might eventually disentangle its toiling systems and symmetries, its lonely and comfortless labyrinths, and its glutinous nostalgies. [Lovely writing from Amis here in this list of items — and at this point, who could miss the alliterative sweetness of each? The letters T and S played out in the first; L in the second, G in the third — along with the devil-may-care making of neologisms — nostalgies… Sounds a bit French, which does nicely for Nabokov… Or, okay, not so much a neologism as the opposite: nostalgies is archaic.] What both novels signally lack, however, is any hint of narrative traction: they slip and they slide; they just can’t hold the road. And then, too, with Ada, there is something altogether alien – a sense of monstrous entitlement, of unbridled, head-in-air seigneurism. Morally, this is the world for which the twisted Humbert thirsts: a world where “nothing matters”, and “everything is allowed”.
But again, as Amis notes, Lolita will condemn everything is allowed, while the self-important convolution of Ada will appear to endorse it.
In this section of his essay (I’m being selective; it’s quite long), Martin Amis simply wants to establish Nabokov’s artistic control in Lolita, the way the text makes its condemnation of Humbert Humbert brilliantly clear to the careful reader:
… Lolita’s … judgment of Humbert’s abomination it is … severe. To establish this it is necessary to adduce only two key points. First, the fate of its tragic heroine. No unprepared reader could be expected to notice that Lolita meets a terrible end on page two of the novel that bears her name: “Mrs ‘Richard F Schiller’ died in childbed”, says the “editor” in his Foreword, “giving birth to a still-born girl . . . in Gray Star, a settlement in the remotest Northwest”; and the novel is almost over by the time Mrs Richard F Schiller (ie, Lo) briefly appears. Thus we note, with a parenthetical gasp, the size of Nabokov’s gamble on greatness. “Curiously enough, one cannot read a book,” he once announced (at the lectern), “one can only reread it.” Nabokov knew that Lolita would be reread, and re-reread. He knew that we would eventually absorb Lolita’s fate – her stolen childhood, her stolen womanhood. Gray Star, he wrote, is “the capital town of the book”. The shifting half-tone – gray star, pale fire, torpid smoke: this is the Nabokovian crux.
The second fundamental point is the description of a recurring dream that shadows Humbert after Lolita has flown (she absconds with the cynically carnal Quilty). It is also proof of the fact that style, that prose itself, can control morality. Who would want to do something that gave them dreams like these?
“. . . she did haunt my sleep but she appeared there in strange and ludicrous disguises as Valeria or Charlotte [his ex-wives], or a cross between them. That complex ghost would come to me, shedding shift after shift, in an atmosphere of great melancholy and disgust, and would recline in dull invitation on some narrow board or hard settee, with flesh ajar like the rubber valve of a soccer ball’s bladder. I would find myself, dentures fractured or hopelessly misplaced, in horrible chambres garnies, where I would be entertained at tedious vivisecting parties that generally ended with Charlotte or Valeria weeping in my bleeding arms and being tenderly kissed by my brotherly lips in a dream disorder of auctioneered Viennese bric-a-brac, pity, impotence and the brown wigs of tragic old women who had just been gassed.”
That final phrase, with its clear allusion, reminds us of the painful and tender diffidence with which Nabokov wrote about the century’s terminal crime. His father, the distinguished liberal statesman (whom Trotsky loathed), was shot dead by a fascist thug in Berlin; and Nabokov’s homosexual brother, Sergey, was murdered in a Nazi concentration camp (“What a joy you are well, alive, in good spirits,” Nabokov wrote to his sister Elena, from the US to the USSR, in November 1945. “Poor, poor Seryozha . . . !”). Nabokov’s wife, Véra, was Jewish, and so, therefore, was their son (born in 1934); and there is a strong likelihood that if the Nabokovs had failed to escape from France when they did (in May 1940, with the Wehrmacht 70 miles from Paris), they would have joined the scores of thousands of undesirables delivered by Vichy to the Reich.
In his fiction, to my knowledge, Nabokov wrote about the Holocaust at paragraph length only once – in the incomparable Pnin (1957). Other references, as in Lolita, are glancing. Take, for example, this one-sentence demonstration of genius from the insanely inspired six-page short story “Signs and Symbols” (it is a description of a Jewish matriarch):
“Aunt Rosa, a fussy, angular, wild-eyed old lady, who had lived in a tremulous world of bad news, bankruptcies, train accidents, cancerous growths – until the Germans put her to death, together with all the people she had worried about.”
Pnin goes further. At an émigré houseparty in rural America a Madam Shpolyanski mentions her cousin, Mira, and asks Timofey Pnin if he has heard of her “terrible end”. “Indeed, I have,” Pnin answers. Gentle Timofey sits on alone in the twilight. Then Nabokov gives us this:
“What chatty Madam Shpolyanski mentioned had conjured up Mira’s image with unusual force. This was disturbing. Only in the detachment of an incurable complaint, in the sanity of near death, could one cope with this for a moment. In order to exist rationally, Pnin had taught himself . . . never to remember Mira Belochkin – not because . . . the evocation of a youthful love affair, banal and brief, threatened his peace of mind . . . but because, if one were quite sincere with oneself, no conscience, and hence no consciousness, could be expected to subsist in a world where such things as Mira’s death were possible. One had to forget – because one could not live with the thought that this graceful, fragile, tender young woman with those eyes, that smile, those gardens and snows in the background, had been brought in a cattle car and killed by an injection of phenol into the heart, into the gentle heart one had heard beating under one’s lips in the dusk of the past.”
How resonantly this passage chimes with Primo Levi’s crucial observation that we cannot, we must not, “understand what happened”. Because to “understand” it would be to “contain” it. “What happened” was “non-human”, or “counter-human”, and remains incomprehensible to human beings.
By linking Humbert Humbert’s crime to the Shoah, and to “those whom the wind of death has scattered” (Paul Celan), Nabokov pushes out to the very limits of the moral universe. Like The Enchanter, Lolita is airtight, intact and entire. The frenzy of the unattainable desire is confronted, and framed, with stupendous courage and cunning…
Why is that sentence from the short story a demonstration of genius?
“Aunt Rosa, a fussy, angular, wild-eyed old lady, who had lived in a tremulous world of bad news, bankruptcies, train accidents, cancerous growths – until the Germans put her to death, together with all the people she had worried about.”
Well, for one thing… speaking of rereading… I’m always rereading “Signs and Symbols,” and not only because I teach it when I teach The Short Story. I read it all the time because it’s beautiful and mysterious. And this particular sentence that Amis cites always gets to me; it jumps out at me. I think it’s because it compacts into itself so much – the smartly listed attributes of Rosa, her farcical delight in bad news. She’s a comic Jewish stereotype, the woman who greets everyone she knows with Who died?
Having sketched her wild tremulous hyperactivity, Nabokov just as quickly has the Germans put all that hyperactivity to death – thereby conveying the staggering, naked rapidity of her murder, the instant sledgehammer of the real, as opposed to the soft, scattered, mainly fantasized disasters with which she liked to excite herself. Nabokov’s phrase “put her to death,” in this context, echoes sickeningly with the image of a parent calming a child and putting her to bed. The final phrase of the sentence – “together with all the people she had worried about” – carries a very strong force of restrained outrage; it seems the longterm result of a disgust so distilled as to become a sort of weird, sardonic stoicism.
Here’s this spectacular essay about Vladimir Nabokov by Martin Amis. Way better than any literary essay I’ve seen in a long time. And now that I’m back from my Saturday walk with Mr UD (Brookside Gardens. They were moody on a mid-November day. Burnished late fall leaves. Decorative lights laced through the trees. The sky was all gray and wavy and if gaunt branches weren’t a cliché I’d report gaunt branches.), maybe we should walk through this wondrous prose. So wondrous that we will forgive its multiple misspellings.
Language leads a double life – and so does the novelist. You chat with family and friends, you attend to your correspondence, you consult menus and shopping lists, you observe road signs (LOOK LEFT), and so on. Then you enter your study, where language exists in quite another form – as the stuff of patterned artifice. Most writers, I think, would want to go along with Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977), when he reminisced in 1974:
“. . . I regarded Paris, with its gray-toned days and charcoal nights, merely as the chance setting for the most authentic and faithful joys of my life: the coloured phrase in my mind under the drizzle, the white page under the desk lamp awaiting me in my humble home.”
Well, the creative joy is authentic; and yet it isn’t faithful (in common with pretty well the entire cast of Nabokov’s fictional women, creative joy, in the end, is sadistically fickle). Writing remains a very interesting job, but destiny, or “fat Fate”, as Humbert Humbert calls it, has arranged a very interesting retribution. Writers lead a double life. And they die doubly, too. This is modern literature’s dirty little secret. Writers die twice: once when the body dies, and once when the talent dies.
What do you see, from the outset?
I see confidence — the strong initial assertion about language, an assertion whose meaning we don’t yet know. Yet precisely the confidence of assertion coupled with the mystery of the assertion’s meaning draws us forward. He’s put it in second person – you – and that makes sense, because he’s a novelist, like Nabokov, and he gets what novelists are about. They spend much of their time in the same utilitarian language world the rest of us inhabit; but they also inhabit a private world rich with the “stuff of patterned artifice.” (Note the poetic phrase here – the repeated sound of the letter T: sTuff / paTTerned / arTifice. The very idea of artful writing – its patterned artifice – is exemplified, brought to linguistic life, in the lilting words Amis has chosen.)
After the lovely praise of writerly inspiration he quotes from Nabokov, Amis begs to differ from it a bit. In fact inspiration isn’t faithful; as a writer ages, he can’t rely on it at all. Talent dies. Think of Philip Larkin, arguably the greatest English-language poet after the modernists, who stopped writing poetry years and years before his death because whatever power had been inspiring him to write poetry withdrew.
Notice how from the start Amis lightly, easily seeds his essay with exactly pertinent quotations from Nabokov, a practice that both deepens our understanding of Nabokov and reassures us that we are in the hands of an essayist who knows his work intimately.
Nabokov composed The Original of Laura, or what we have of it, against the clock of doom (a series of sickening falls, then hospital infections, then bronchial collapse). It is not “A novel in fragments”, as the cover states; it is immediately recognisable as a longish short story struggling to become a novella. In this palatial edition, every left-hand page is blank, and every right-hand page reproduces Nabokov’s manuscript (with its robust handwriting and fragile spelling – “bycycle”, “stomack”, “suprize”), plus the text in typed print (and infested with square brackets). It is nice, I dare say, to see those world-famous index cards up close; but in truth there is little in Laura that reverberates in the mind. “Auroral rumbles and bangs had begun jolting the cold misty city”: in this we hear an echo of the Nabokovian music. And in the following we glimpse the funny and fearless Nabokovian disdain for our “abject physicality”:
“I loathe my belly, that trunkful of bowels, which I have to carry around, and everything connected with it – the wrong food, heartburn, constipation’s leaden load, or else indigestion with a first installment of hot filth pouring out of me in a public toilet . . .”
Otherwise and in general Laura is somewhere between larva and pupa (to use a lepidopteral metaphor), and very far from the finished imago.
Even as he’s writing in sorrow (he reveres Nabokov, but this last unfinished work is terrible), Amis is linguistically playful, echoing Nabokov’s twisted, antic ways. This is lively, fun prose, with its butterfly homages and alliterations (following, funny, fearless).
Apart from a welcome flurry of interest in the work, the only thing this relic will effect, I fear, is the slight exacerbation of what is already a problem from hell. It is infernal, for me, because I bow to no one in my love for this great and greatly inspiring genius. And yet Nabokov, in his decline, imposes on even the keenest reader a horrible brew of piety, literal-mindedness, vulgarity and philistinism. Nothing much, in Laura, qualifies as a theme (ie, as a structural or at least a recurring motif). But we do notice the appearance of a certain Hubert H Hubert (a reeking Englishman who slobbers over a pre-teen’s bed), we do notice the 24-year-old vamp with 12-year-old breasts (“pale squinty nipples and firm form”), and we do notice the fevered dream about a juvenile love (“her little bottom, so smooth, so moonlit”). In other words, Laura joins The Enchanter (1939), Lolita (1955), Ada (1970), Transparent Things (1972), and Look at the Harlequins! (1974) in unignorably concerning itself with the sexual despoiliation of very young girls.
Six fictions: six fictions, two or perhaps three of which are spectacular masterpieces. You will, I hope, admit that the hellish problem is at least Nabokovian in its complexity and ticklishness. For no human being in the history of the world has done more to vivify the cruelty, the violence, and the dismal squalor of this particular crime. The problem, which turns out to be an aesthetic problem, and not quite a moral one, has to do with the intimate malice of age.
That should be despoliation, by the way.
But now we have Amis gradually shifting from his general point about the failure of talent as even the greatest writers age (there are exceptions – Bellow wrote Ravelstein in his eighties), to his particular point about the form that failure took in Nabokov. And again, via his subtle, knowing extraction of just the right bits from Nabokov, Amis establishes that writer’s deeply unpleasant obsessive recurrence to the theme of sex with very young girls.
An aesthetic, but not quite a moral, problem, he says. What does that mean? As with his initial provocative assertion, one wants to know more.
The word we want is not the legalistic “paedophilia”, which in any case deceitfully translates as “fondness for children”. The word we want is “nympholepsy”, which doesn’t quite mean what you think it means. It means “frenzy caused by desire for the unattainable”, and is rightly characterised by my COD as literary. As such, nympholepsy is a legitimate, indeed an almost inevitable subject for this very singular talent. “Nabokov’s is really an amorous style,” John Updike lucidly observed: “It yearns to clasp diaphonous exactitude into its hairy arms.” With the later Nabokov, though, nympholepsy crumbles into its etymology – “from Gk numpholeptos ‘caught by nymphs’, on the pattern of EPILEPSY”; “from Gk epilepsia, from epilambanein ‘seize, attack'”.
doesn’t quite mean what you think it means. This is sassy writing, taking liberties with the reader — You think it means this, but it doesn’t. And note how his use of the second person has sort of shifted from being about himself and other writers — as if he were writing this to himself as a sort of exhibitionist meditation — to being a direct address to you out there. You, me, the lot of us reading this essay… The use of the second person is always a touch insolent, with its implicit presumption — you think this, you’re wrong about that — but I think we rather like that insolence. It perks us up, makes us consider whether we want to be defensively at odds with it, or uneasily okay with it, etc.
Amis quotes from another spectacular writer, John Updike, to get at the underlying reason for Nabokov’s nympholepsy; he was a messy, compromised, and corrupted animal searching always for the uncorrupted “diaphonous exactitude” (diaphanous is spelled incorrectly) of youth. But at some point he lost control of the hunt and became the hunted; he fell into a nymphetic frenzy.
More later. Dinner break.
St. Norbert College bid farewell to its unofficial campus mascot, an albino squirrel named Snowy, with a memorial service on Tuesday afternoon.
The squirrel gained popularity with students this academic year, with a Facebook group dedicated to the animal drawing the interest of 131 members.
Students organized the event after finding Snowy apparently had been struck by a car on Third Street on Sunday.
The service was held at the St. Norbert College Townhouse Village Square. In lieu of flowers, organizers asked guests to bring a canned food item for the Townhouse Village Thanksgiving Food Drive.
The service included music, a eulogy, poetry readings and prayers…
… UD noted the bad behavior of the University of Michigan’s athletics director.
An old friend of hers on the UM faculty writes:
Hey, Bill Martin is a good guy. He runs a clean athletic program, with relatively high and enforced academic standards. (For example, one of the better players on our football team, which sucks this year, got kicked off for a set of transgressions which included missing classes. More importantly, Martin fired the corrupt and awful basketball coach.) He takes as much pride in the successes of women’s sports as men’s (and devotes resources to them) and in non-football/basketball sports as much anything else (not just hockey and soccer, men’s and women’s, but also the even less traditionally popular ones).
He went through amazing hassles to rebuild the stadium where the incidents took place. He behaved badly when some [people] didn’t recognize him when going into a room that he himself had built in order to schmooze the regents, which is a big, big part of his job (and a real pain; all they really care about is the football team).
I agree that football controls too much of out lives here at Big-10 U (though in marked contrast to, for instance, the University of Minnesota, the athletic department is totally self-supporting), and that Martin acted in a petulant anger. But this is not the story you’re making it into–by a long shot.
There’s actually even more to say about Martin, who is a fascinating character, and a subtle, interesting well-read guy–studied with Gunnar Myrdal when fresh out of college, for example. But the point is, if you’re going to have college athletics at all, you want to have them the way they are here–and Bill Martin gets a lot of credit for keeping it that way.
[Having said all that, let me add that] the presence of big-time sports is a subtly corrupting influence on the university–I mean it’s ridiculous that our political support in the state and our (non-athletic department related) alumni contributions go way up when the football team does well. And of course when I say we’re clean I mean relatively clean: Our basketball team of the 1990s was run by a thoroughly corrupt coach in cahoots with a crooked booster who fed our players bucks on the side which came from a gambling ring in auto plants. The point is that Bill Martin cleaned that up…
… than accounts of mandatory online ethics exams at universities. I’ve covered these exams on this blog for years, and their description is always a riot.
Take a look at this, from Western Illinois University. Read all the way through to the end, because the last line’s the best.
It’s that time of year again. If you happen to work for Western Illinois University in any way, shape or form, you must complete an ethics course online by Nov. 16.
In six years I’ve taken many different versions of this dreaded test, ranging in length anywhere from 15 to 90 minutes. The “course” was always a technicality, providing very shallow imaginary situations from which we must draw conclusions.
Yet every other time I took this course, it was followed by a test. Not this year! After procrastinating as much as possible I completed this obligation yesterday, and much to my surprise, it was not followed by a test of any kind.
Just to clarify, I sat through 74 pages of hypothetical scenarios, entering my most random haphazard guess, and grazed through every answer, expecting a test at the end. Needless to say I answered quite a few of them incorrectly, with no penalty.
Without a test at the close of this year’s ethics training, I am concerned. In my mind, the test was the only portion of the “course” that forced employees to retain this information. Perhaps the training writers are banking on the fact that you expect a test.
I hate to throw this out there, but I know someone has already figured it out: this training procedure allows for students and employees to pick any random answer and click the next page arrow without reading.
Yet again we’re concentrating on standardization and completion above learning. I have half a mind to report to my local ethics officer that this test is unethical…
I’m concerned about any institution that deems this a “course” of ethics. This is no course at all, no one’s learning, and certainly no one will retain the information. You’d think we’d tighten up this policy, since we had to remove our ethics officer this year for engaging in unethical activities.
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The author is Sara Gregory.
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Unsurprisingly, Illinois — arguably our most corrupt state — has also for decades been the most mandatory-online-ethics-quiz enthusiastic. Rod Blagojevich, for instance, insisted on them.
The absolute catastrophe that the corrupt state of New Mexico has visited on its public university assumes, with each new scandal, the dimensions of a novel by Cormac McCarthy.
Maybe the darkest pages of All the King’s Men get closer to it. Or the film Mad Max, with its apocalyptic gore. Never, in UD‘s memory, has a university fallen so low.
A local writer, Joe Monahan, attempts to come to grips with the reality that an American campus has been buried. He asks whether it can be unearthed.
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The slow motion destruction of the credibility of the University of New Mexico continues inexorably. It seems no one can or will stop it. Not the UNM Board of Regents. Not the Governor. Not the Lieutenant Governor who would be Governor. Not the powers that be in the Legislature. And not depressed university boosters who remain silent.
The university sails alone in troubled waters, captained by the politics of cronyism. The ship is listing badly, struck by too many torpedoes–the coach Locksley scandal, the faculty vote of no-confidence in the UNM president, the hiring of multiple Governor-backed political appointees and the blatant politicization of the UNM regents.
The leading figures at the helm of the university are locked so deeply in politically incestuous relationships that no one will check the other’s actions. What is to be done?
THE PRESIDENT
The time for bashing university president David Schmidly is past. This administration is effectively over.
Now we can only beseech him to announce that he will resign his position within a year and spend that time attempting to clean up the mess (Ditto for Schmidly’s right hand man, the politically connected executive vice-president David Harris). The president’s best chance to preserve any legacy is to acknowledge that his has been a very troubled tenure, but that in the end reality was recognized.
Once his resignation is announced the president will need to dismiss UNM athletic director Paul Krebs and his key associates. He will also have to hand walking papers to UNM football coach Locksley which could mean a large severance payout, but there is no choice. The damage is done, and irrevocable if the same players remain. The cover-up culture must be purged and with it the elitist salaries and perquisites.
After securing Krebs’ resignation, the president should then consider giving the title of athletic director to UNM Lobo basketball coach Steve Alford. Through this violent storm he has retained his credibility nationally and locally. Paid $1 million a year, Alford should have no problem handling both jobs on a temporary basis.
The search for permanent replacements for Locksley and Krebs should be confined to New Mexicans. There are many fine coaches and administrators at area high schools. UNM alumni, athletic boosters and the sports media cheerleaders need to have expectations dialed down.
In short, the bar needs to be reset on the aspirations of Lobo athletics. Student athletes–especially those in the football and basketball programs–have been subjected to unreasonable expectations which in turn leads to the chaos we now confront. Basketball coach Alford seems to be finding a balance–another reason why we see him as a prime choice for an interim athletic director.
THE GOVERNOR
There is apparently no chance that Governor Richardson will take any action to acknowledge the manifold messes strangling UNM. His forceful political personality, so effective in other matters, overwhelmed the institutional strength of the university and set in motion the events that are consuming the school. But if he were to see the light, he would call for the regents’ resignations and begin replacing them with appointees who are not from the world of politics. (Is that possible?)
THE SENATOR
There is still a chance for the Legislature to prevent a complete shipwreck. We warned during the 2009 legislative session that the decision of state Senate Rules Committee Chairwoman Linda Lopez not to hold an intensive confirmation hearing on the reappointment of regent Jamie Koch and the turmoil-ridden campus sent a signal that legislative oversight of UNM was not to be. Lopez could still hold that hearing in January and appropriators could start demanding change in exchange for dollars.
THE HOUSE
In the state House the current leadership is so deeply entwined with regent Koch and regents president and former longtime NM House speaker Raymond Sanchez, we don’t know where to look for reform. But university area state representatives and senators are a start. That would be Sen. McSorley and Rep. Chasey. They have safe seats for life. Where are they?
THE LIEUTENANT GOVERNOR
Lieutenant Governor Diane Denish has made education a banner issue, but she has yet to wade into the UNM waters. That will come when the campaign for Governor begins in earnest. But she needs to know now that deep concern is being expressed among major donors and supporters of UNM about her long political relationship with former Democratic Party chairman and regent Koch. It is causing worried speculation that her election as Governor would be more of the same–which in this case means an endless spiral of controversy, cronyism and damage to UNM’s reputation. Will she have the political will to break with the past? Will she send any early signals?
THE OTHER REGENTS
And where are the regents you hear little from–Santa Fe attorney Gene Gallegos, car dealer Don Chalmers, attorney Carolyn Abieta and Farmington’s Jack Fortner? These are all distinguished volunteers, but the time for being bumps on the log is long past. They have the power to pressure the UNM president and even the governor who appointed them. Being an “honorific” regent in the breaking point year of 2009 is not an option.
Change must and will come, but this rudderless ship is headed into the sandbars. How much more damage it will suffer before the rescue party arrives is the dreaded unknown hanging over the home of the Lobos and those who fret for its future.
Joe Monahan, New Mexico Politics
