… the “I’m a CEO” bullshit.

In regards to administrative salaries, I was appalled to hear the defense of President Baker’s salary was to compare his position to the salaries of CEOs in the private sector. As far as I’m concerned, if salary is an issue, then he is welcome to leave and find himself a well-paying company to lead. I want someone heading our school who is here because he is passionate about the students he is serving… [To] say that [President Baker] … takes a salary of $328,000 with allowances over $60,000 to “do public service”? I would rather see a few new faculty hired with money saved from administration cuts than hear another lame justification about how Baker’s salary is “peanuts” compared to top CEOs.

The Mustang, California Polytechnic State University

… UD‘s gotten as far as Caroline Street and been waylaid by the Coffee Plantation, a great find. Excellent jazz piano piped in (Skylark at the moment – I can’t hear the Youtube, but I think this is the piece.), free internet for an hour with purchase (In UD‘s case, this would be a glass of iced tea, much needed. Must tell you — if you’re thinking of hopping down to KW — it can get seriously hot here. Never humid, and the breezes are great, but if you take long walks like UD in the midday sun, be prepared.) The annual Robert Frost whatever’s coming up (Whoops. Just checked out the Frost House website, and the place closes at four! Can you tell I’m somewhat reluctant…?), and I did promise to take a close look at a Frost poem (UD thanks various readers who’ve written with suggestions) as part of my ongoing Key Western Civ course…

You know, Frost didn’t even like Key West.

A Spanish judge best known for indicting Augusto Pinochet and Osama bin Laden denies any wrongdoing after being paid $200,000 for work at a U.S. university while drawing his salary in Madrid, a court official said Wednesday.

Judge Baltasar Garzon insists he acted in good faith, hid nothing and reported both sources of income to tax authorities in both countries, said the official at the National Court, where Garzon is based.

A judicial oversight board is investigating Garzon for allegedly failing to warn his superiors he would be getting paid for teaching and lecturing at New York University during a sabbatical in 2005 and 2006.

Judicial officials say Garzon received …more than $200,000 in salary, travel expenses and school tuition for his daughter during that stay

… Spanish judges must tell the judicial oversight board if they will receive an outside salary during leaves of absence, the board said Tuesday in announcing the probe.

Council investigators have a month to decide whether to drop the case or recommend that Garzon be penalized. Punishment could range from a fine or suspension to outright expulsion from the court.

UD’s not feeling too sanguine about Peter Singer’s efforts to get American university students “adequately informed about world poverty, its consequences, and the ways in which it can be reduced.” Even our best universities don’t seem to be conveying very much along these lines. Take this Yalie.

A Yale University student from Ohio has filed a lawsuit seeking $1 million from US Airways for a video game console he says was taken from his luggage.

Twenty-one-year-old Jesse Maiman alleges that during a flight from New Haven, Conn., to Cincinnati in December, his Xbox 360 with a specialized hard drive disappeared from his luggage.

Maiman says he got what he called “an unconscionable run-around” from the airline. He’s asking $1,700 for the loss of the gaming system and for the maximum damages allowable, or $1 million.

Maiman filed the suit Monday in Hamilton County Common Pleas Court.

A US Airways spokeswoman said the airline was unaware of the suit but noted that the government limits liability for lost luggage to $3,300 per bag.

Unconscionable!

… when you learn one little extra thing about a person, and then go back and read something about them, it reads completely differently.

For instance, Robert Hebbel is a professor who uses his wife’s disability parking permit illegally. He was just fined $500 for doing it at the school where he works, the University of Minnesota.

So here’s an article written about him not long ago. UD has enjoyed snickering through it with this new information.

Start with the headline.

DR. ROBERT P. HEBBEL IS DRIVEN TO DISCOVER HOW THE BIOLOGY OF SICKLE CELL DISEASE WORKS

[Dr. Hebbell is] a fellow who’s very busy and very driven.

… Hebbel was attracted to the problem solving approach of internal medicine. “”I love the chase! I love using your wits to design an experiment to solve the problem,” he says. “I love the “aha!” moment, finding out how something works in biology.” [The chase! Problem solving! Using your wits! You can experience the very same thrills figuring out how to take parking spaces away from disabled people.] … I do things that are risky,” he says. … “I’ve always just done what seems to be interesting to me in the moment.”

R J O’Hara reminds UD of this essay by Key West inhabitant Annie Dillard on writing. Let’s see if she’s got something useful for us.

Write as if you were dying. At the same time, assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients. That is, after all, the case. What would you begin writing if you knew you would die soon? What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?

Quelle downer! I’d rather write as if I were living if you don’t mind. I mean, I take the point that I should aim for non-triviality (I guess – though I can think of plenty of essays about absurd teeny things that I’ve loved.), but must we be so grim? And it’s not the case that we’re all terminal patients. Terminal, to be sure, but I understand by patient someone hospitalized. And who says dying people become enraged at anything other than profundities? The classic scene of dying people shooing away well-meaning clergy should tell you something.

She is careful of what she reads, for that is what she will write.

Absolutely. Writers have an intense and interminable relationship to other writers, always circling around and rereading inspirations. It’s important to choose well. You know UD‘s prose obsessions. Feel free to share them.

Every book has an intrinsic impossibility, which its writer discovers as soon as his first excitement dwindles. The problem is structural; it is insoluble… Complex stories, essays and poems have this problem … – the prohibitive structural defect the writer wishes he had never noticed. He writes it in spite of that.

Exactly what John Banville says here. One will always fail. And it’s partly because of this that Dillard goes on to make her strongest point:

One of the few things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. The impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now. Something more will arise for later, something better. These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water. Similarly, the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you.

Not to be trivial, but UD’d call this the Scrabble rule. Veteran players know not to hoard, hoping each turn for the G that will enable them to make a seven-letter word. Always go with your strongest hand, now.

Dillard’s right that this is true of writing too. Just do it.

This is easy to say, though. The problem of constraint – verbal and otherwise – lies very deep. UD has noticed that many smart and talented people over the years develop comprehensive internal brakes. She knows not why, but there are brilliant singers who do not sing, dancers who do not dance. She presumes this odd repression has to do with the complex balances needed to succeed in other things. Psychologically, you find yourself unable to pursue your brilliant corporate litigation career and play the guitar. Or maybe it’s a time thing. You just don’t have time. And maybe instead of the musical release, you take an easier chemical one — since, whatever you do, UD assumes you need your share of disinhibition…

“[T]he draftsman must aggress.” Yes. But notice how many drafts are about the failure or errancy of that energy. We may want the writer to “magnify and dramatize our days,” as Dillard claims, to “illuminate and inspire us with wisdom, courage and the hope of meaningfulness,” but we shouldn’t be surprised when the writer gives us something smaller and sadder.

UD had a wonderful visit from a University Diaries reader yesterday. Chris is a linguist, and over a late lunch at Siboney’s, he introduced her to this distinction.

Turkish is another agglutinating language: the expression Avustralyalılaştıramadıklarımızdan is pronounced as one word in Turkish, but it can be translated into English as “one of those whom we could not make resemble the Australian people.”

… totally collapsed on Duval, the island’s main commercial street. What with spring breakers avoiding Mexico, it’s madness out there.

Duval North (UD lives a few blocks from Duval South, the quiet end of the street) is always pretty raucous, with cruise shippers jostling frat packs on the narrow sidewalks — made narrower by whiskey kiosks and hawkers done up as pirates. But now it’s insane, and UD finds herself apologizing in advance to Mr UD (he arrives soon) for what he’ll soon endure beneath the noonday sun.

My Key Western Civ course isn’t complete without this notable denizen of the island… But I really can’t stand Robert Frost, and my effort to find ONE poem of his about which I can think of something to say is going very badly… Stay tuned.

… in a BBC interview. He’s talking about the attack on the internet as an avenue of illiteracy amid the decline of the novel.

I doubt you can find any sentence describing how human learning has degraded now that isn’t congruent to a similar sentence written at the time of rise of the novel – about how people were no longer reading sermons and classical literature, but were reading novels from subscription libraries instead.

The literature at the time in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, describing the contempt that the learned establishment had for the rise of the novel – and then of course later with the rise of the penny dreadfuls and sensational literature as more and more people came to read it – again there was a great cry of despair at how there would be nothing but illiteracy in the world, or at least a kind of refusal or inability to engage in proper, serious study.

And we hear the cry again.

The novel is indeed a rather disreputable form. Many of the novels UD teaches were banned, or in some way suppressed, or subjected to serious legal trouble, when their publishers attempted to release them.

Whole syllabi of hers constitute once-criminal elements: Lolita, Madame Bovary, Ulysses, Tropic of Cancer… Some of the poetry she assigns had run-ins with the law, too — Ginsberg’s Howl had to lie low for a year before being ruled non-obscene.

And, as Fry suggests, the content of novels, involving the murk of personal relationships rather than loftier spiritual or classical meditations, seemed to many people degraded.

I mean, plenty of communities in the United States continue to attempt to suppress various novels.

… beginning to write themselves.

… by Columbia News Service, “which distributes content to more than 400 newspapers across the U.S. and Canada, and is operated by the New York Times News Service,” about Google Chat. The reporter wanted to know how she uses it, whether she gchats with her students, etc.

UD does indeed gchat with some of her students, and enjoys it. She went into great detail about this, and other online forms of communication. In a week or so, the article will be available, and I’ll link to it.

The Washington Post quotes the impressive new president of what the Post correctly calls the “long-troubled” University of the District of Columbia. He’s talking about dropping the school’s undergraduate major in education, which has many students but graduates almost no one.

There are about 380 undergraduate education majors now, but enrollment has gradually declined for five years. During that time, the school has issued diplomas to just a handful of students a year from each of four specialty areas. In undergraduate special education, which has about 30 students a year, there are years when no one graduates.

“Are you writing the great American novel?”

UD‘s server, a thin young man in a thin cotton shirt, asked her this as he set a spinach salad in front of her at a sunny corner table at Kelly’s. UD had been writing in her notebook.

“Nope. I’m writing about writing.”

“Writing’s hard!” he said. “I’ve been trying to write a novel based on my travels. But I don’t know how to start! How to start?”

“All kinds of ways. Some people just do a kind of automatic writing which somehow if they’re lucky begins to be what they want. Other people spend weeks outlining…”

“You have to know what you want to say…”

“But not entirely. A vague sense of the general point can work. What’s more important, I think, is some particular catalyst: A person you met along the way who moved you. The hats women at an outdoor market wore. Often you gain entry to your writing and thinking through small stuff.”

And often as you lie in bed a sentence comes to you. UD wrote a poem this morning that she likes a lot so far (Ask her again when she rereads it in a day or two.), and the first line came to her as she lay in bed thinking about its subject. Really just a pure sentence-visitation. Can’t rely on those, though.

“I spend half the year here, and half in Catalina. So my surroundings are certainly inspiring…”

“Well, the other thing you need is to read. A ton.”

“I do. You know who I love? Bill Bryson. I’ve read every word of his a bunch of times. He’s hilarious.”

“And a fine prose stylist. Good choice.” UD‘s phone rang. Mr UD, giving her information about his arrival in Key West at the end of the week. “Good luck with your writing.”

“Thanks. Enjoy your salad.”

From the Daily Cal.

… I actually dropped a class at the beginning of the semester because the professor wouldn’t allow laptops in lecture.

But I do admit that the professor had a point. Most of the time, Microsoft Word is minimized with Facebook or Gmail taking its place. The problem is that this is distracting for everyone who can see the screen. For some inexplicable reason, indirectly Facebook-stalking a random stranger is much more intriguing than the atomic mass of uranium…