UD‘s back at the beach.
She got the book and the film The Diving Bell and the Butterfly as holiday gifts, and last night for hours she did the whole multimedia thing.
First she lay in bed and read the book, the sound of her American Atlantic waves echoing the sound of the author’s French Atlantic as he lay in a hospital bed in 1995 — he died the following year — entirely paralyzed after a stroke. He listened to the water from the balcony of the Naval Hospital on the northern coast; UD listened from an apartment balcony in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware.
Julian Barnes says there’s a “strange, unwitnessed, yet deeply intimate relationship between writer and reader,” and this intimacy is particularly intense when the writer has been reduced to consciousness alone, and when he is writing quickly and honestly, in the face of death.
Of course Jean-Dominique Bauby didn’t write the book at all; he dictated — oculated? –his final thoughts via blinks from one good eye.
The result of this painstaking process is a thin reflective volume, 132 pages of staccato prose… A bit of regret here, a burst of agony there. Stabbing prose.
Ashamed as nurses bathe him, Bauby recalls “the protracted immersions that were the joy of my previous life. Armed with a cup of tea or a Scotch, a good book or a pile of newspapers, I would soak for hours, maneuvering the taps with my toes.” He imagines summer vacationers “boating around [an] island, the small outboards laboring against the current. Someone will be stretched out in the bow, eyes closed, arm trailing in the cool water.” He’s a universe away from them, among “broken-winged birds, voiceless parrots, ravens of doom, who have made our nest in a dead-end corridor of the neurology department.”
The only unshattered things he has left are consciousness and emotion. “I need to feel strongly, to love and to admire, just as desperately as I need to breathe. A letter from a friend, a Balthus painting on a postcard, a page of Saint-Simon, give meaning to the passing hours.” On Sundays, everything dies. “I contemplate my books, piled up on the windowsill to constitute a small library: a rather useless one, for today no one will come to read them for me. Seneca, Zola, Chateaubriand, and Valéry Larbaud are right there, three feet away, just out of reach.” Alone, he falls into “regret for a vanished past, and above, all, remorse for lost opportunities. … [T]he women [I was] unable to love, the chances [I] failed to seize, the moments of happiness [I] allowed to drift away. Today it seems to me that my whole life was nothing but a string of … small near misses…”
On the very last page, he suddenly looks at the open purse of his speech therapist:
…I see a hotel room key, a metro ticket, and a hundred-franc note folded in four, like objects brought back by a space probe sent to earth to study how earthlings live, travel, and trade with one another. The sight leaves me pensive and confused. Does the cosmos contain keys for opening up my diving bell? A subway line with no terminus? A currency strong enough to buy my freedom back?
And then I watched the film – in that hunched and solitary way you watch when you watch on your laptop, with its little sounds and images shedding their little circle of light… But I felt far less intimate with Bauby than I did reading his prose – even his translated prose. To read his book is to be encased with him in his consciousness; the film’s about too many other things besides his morbid subjectivity. The other things are moving and true — the intensely loving desire of other people to help him, in particular — but you only get the truth head-on, UD thinks, in the grain of the prose, in consciousness unbound contemplating unspeakable boundedness.
And then I got online and read all about the controversy over the film’s distortion of Bauby’s ex-partner and the girlfriend he left her for …
Down there! A
few posts down!
Take a look, and
think of something
clever.
An inscribed copy
of this book shall
be your reward
should you triumph.
… applauds the school’s decision to shut down its football program.
Western, at least in my 14 years on its faculty, never had a football culture. Most students were apathetic, faculty rarely attended games, and Whatcom County evinced little interest despite a passion for high-school games. Aside from the rivalry with Central Washington University, a football game rarely drew more than 2,000 fans. When Shepard’s decision was announced in Thursday’s Bellingham Herald, not a single reader posted a comment.
The Saturday tailgate culture of big-school football had no grip on a campus with no fraternities or crowds of community backers available in larger cities. Western students prefer active snow sports and basketball; Title IX brought women’s sports into the limelight, and Western women in crew, volleyball, and basketball developed excellent records and lots of campus support…
A commenter disagrees:
It’s beyond question that there’s not much of a “football culture” at Western. To me, the fact that the university could field a team and avoid that very “culture” was one of the great things about the program. You can make a sound argument for dropping the program. But purely line-item budgeting isn’t a good one. By that measure, Western, which doesn’t have much of a Shakespeare culture, either, would be issuing pink slips to English professors…
The problem with this argument is that universities exist to encourage a culture of Shakespeare. They’re supposed to lead people toward things like Shakespeare, even if people don’t know shit about Shakespeare and don’t care that they don’t know. Educate — to lead forth. Universities are not about leading people to football.
… or not quite a millionaire… But ol’ Roy did do pretty well…
A Houston County [Alabama] educator was overpaid by about $50,000 over a 10-year period based on his questionable doctorate, according to an internal investigation.
Roy Watford, Houston County Schools secondary curriculum/accreditation director, received extra pay for a doctoral degree he held from the University of Beverly Hills, Houston County School Superintendent Tim Pitchford said. The extra pay amounted to about $5,000 more per year between 1994 and 2004 than he should have received.
Educators are paid according to their years of experience and highest degree level obtained. To get credit for the degrees, they must come from a university or college accredited by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools. SACS does not recognize the University of Beverly Hills…
… Yale’s president puts the endowment losses in perspective:
Our endowment only passed the $17 billion mark a little less than three years ago. It’s not like this is a catastrophe.
A reader sends UD a 1975 Time magazine article which describes the diploma mill the University of Massachusetts education school was in those years.
This is the school from which, during that decade, Bambi Cardenas (background here) earned her Ph.D. The School of Education, noted Time, had “earned a reputation as a diploma mill. In the past three years it granted more than 387 doctoral degrees. Some doctorates were awarded to students who had no undergraduate degrees. The writing in many doctoral theses was barely at high school level.”
No wonder Bambi – president of the University of Texas at Pan American – is now being investigated for having plagiarized her U Mass dissertation in educational leadership.
And… I dunno… Sad, isn’t it? That so many ed schools remain, as the New York Times recently wrote, “little more than diploma mills.”
**********************
The other hoax? The journal Quadrant. Australia.
Keith Windschuttle, its editor, published a science piece that agreed with his global warming skepticism, but he did no checking on its author or its sometimes absurd claims.
… Windschuttle admitted the article was unsolicited and from an unknown author, and that he had failed to even Google the author’s name or check easily validated facts, such as the claim that the paper was first presented at the 19th International Conference on Genome Informatics in Brisbane last year.
A check of the program on the internet by The Australian yesterday revealed there was no such paper or author listed.
Windschuttle said his practices were the same as any editor of a publication and that checking every fact and quotation in an article was impractical.
“I guess I could have done more to investigate the author but the content was something I did investigate because I was interested in some of the sources,” he said.
The latest entry on the hoax blog says: “So neatly did my essay conform with reactionary ideology that Quadrant, it seems, didn’t even check the putative author’s credentials”.
“Nor it seems did they get the piece peer-reviewed. Nor did they check the facts; nor the footnotes. Nor were they alerted by the clues. I’m almost embarrassed for you, Windschuttle. Just look at you above, a pea in a pod alongside those other culture warriors.”
The hoaxer wanted to expose the absurdity of the journal’s views on the environment by writing patently extreme nonsense and watching him print it. A hoax very much like the Sokal hoax.
The last one was way successful, so here UD goes again.
Please read the following article from Ontario’s Daily Commercial News:
With a nod to [Waterloo’s] industrial past, and an eye to a green future, designers unveiled plans on January 7, 2009 for an uptown school that aims to attract sharp minds from around the world.
To be built on land where whisky barrels used to roll, the Balsillie School of International Affairs will transform an empty Seagram’s distillery site into a tree-lined campus with understated brick buildings, living roofs, a public auditorium and central courtyard.
“This is an institution that will go head to head with the rest of the world,” declared Shirley Blumberg, principal architect for the project.
Speaking at a packed open house at the Centre for International Governance Innovation, Blumberg said the school was designed to be “functional but not fancy,” as per the wishes of its namesake and chief bankroller, Research In Motion co-CEO Jim Balsillie.
Balsillie is giving $33 million to the new school, while University of Waterloo and Wilfrid Laurier University will add $25 million over 10 years.
The site connects to the Centre for International Governance Innovation.
The project will be built in phases, with ground preparation beginning by the end of this year.
City council will be asked to approve the site’s master plan on Feb. 23.
Although the economic downturn will affect the timing of later construction, the section housing the Balsillie school will be the first to be finished.
It’s designed to hold about 25 faculty, plus 70 to 100 students.
Future plans call for another academic wing to hold other university programs, plus a proposed 12-storey building that would serve as housing for faculty and students and an underground parking garage.
Okay, so here you have a new university rising from the ashes of a whisky distillery. A … frothy atmosphere for puns… In fact, ol’ Shirley up there already did it… The place will go head to head…
So — Readers are invited to come up with a university motto, presidential inaugural remarks, copy for promotional brochures… stuff like that.
*****************
As with the last contest, the prize is an inscribed copy of Teaching Beauty.
Her nickname’s Bambi.
An investigation begun in October of a plagiarism allegation against Blandina Cardenas, president of the University of Texas at Pan American, is still under way.
Barry Burgdorf, vice chancellor and general counsel of the UT System, said today that the system’s Board of Regents was briefed on the review during a closed-door session on Friday. Burgdorf is overseeing the investigation along with David Prior, executive vice chancellor for academic affairs.
The review was prompted by a packet of materials, sent anonymously to UT System administrators and news organizations, alleging that Cardenas plagiarized her doctoral dissertation. She received her doctorate in educational leadership from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 1974, according to UT System records.
In 2007, Cardenas reimbursed UT-Pan American for more than $7,000 in improvements to her home and for use of a campus vehicle after auditors found UT System rules were violated…
Background here.
… it’s also at the heart of protecting yourself from Ponzi schemes.
SOS talks about it all the time.
What is it?
The control of your emotions.
One person who worked with Markopolos on a risk-management committee in the early part of this decade said he was not surprised that he remained focused on Madoff for so long.
“His background is one of risk management and mathematics,” said Mark Williams, professor of finance and economics at Boston University. “It’s about when you see an error, correcting it. … Madoff was breaking the normal equation…. From a pure academic standpoint, Harry was trying to break that and prove that something is wrong here.”
Markopolos. You know.
Many people were fooled, but not Harry Markopolos, the 52-year-old former financial executive who [has] been onto Madoff since 1996.
…UD will attempt to update her list of links. She tends to be lazy about adding new sites and deleting inactive ones, etc. Apologies.
Here’s a wonderful new site: Ars Psychiatrica. Beautifully written, and thoughtful in a thousand directions: medicine, spirituality, ethics, beauty…
UD thanks Barney for telling her about it.
… Even though [Rutgers athletic director Robert] Mulcahy was dismissed, the university will continue to pay his generous salary — and his over-the-top perks — for the next 18 months while getting nothing in return. If he deserved to be fired, he deserved to be prevented from continuing to feed at the public trough.
But Mulcahy will be fed, and fed well. A university spokesman told the Bergen Record this week the university is obliged to honor the remainder of Mulcahy’s contract. His salary alone will cost them another $511,875. He will continue to receive a car or annual automobile stipend of $12,000 and health benefits and insurance for the next 18 months.
Rutgers also must pay Mulcahy’s annual membership fees at the exclusive Baltusrol golf club, believed to be about $8,000. That’s outrageous. Why should taxpayers and struggling college students have to foot the bill for any already highly paid public employee — a fired employee, no less — to sharpen his golf game?…
The girl can’t help it. She doesn’t understand what conflict of interest is.
Rep. Marti Coley, R-Dist. 7, has no plans to give up her $60,000 job at Chipola College, unlike fellow state legislator and Speaker of the House Ray Sansom, who resigned his post at another college amid criticism about his dual role.
The legislator said she sees no conflict in her two jobs and she’s puzzled by the air of criticism surrounding legislators who also work at Florida colleges.
Coley had worked as an adjunct professor at Chipola for two decades before taking the job she now holds there — special assistant of business and community affairs. Her pay started at $45,000 when she took the postion, but she got a 33 percent raise in July of this year, bringing her salary to $60,000.
Her job entails, among other things, fund-raising activities for the Chipola honors program and the school at large.
… As for speculation that her double service puts Chipola at special advantage come budget time in the legislature, Coley said that’s just not so.
She readily admits to advocating for the school she works for — she sees it as part of her job as a representative of the district where Chipola is located — but said her work on the school’s behalf is above-board and really begins after funding requests have made their way through a certain process.
As a legislator, she said, it would be her duty to advocate for the college, whether she was employed by Chipola or not.
“I represent nine counties, and any entity in that community is going to get 100 percent effort from me in the legislature. Even with budget cuts, we have a very large budget and that money is going somewhere,” she said. …
J. Ezra Merkin, the New York financier tied to Bernard Madoff’s alleged $50 billion Ponzi scheme, is hearing from collectors interested in buying his dozen $150 million Mark Rothko paintings, the world’s largest private grouping, according to his art adviser.
Though the paintings aren’t for sale now, “everything has a price,” said Ben Heller, 83, who helped Merkin buy the abstract expressionist paintings during the past five years. …
… only slightly better than that of Greece, will reform itself a little bit.
The Italian Parliament on Thursday gave a definitive green light to a government decree designed to promote meritocracy in Italy’s higher education system and overhaul the hiring of university staff.
“Today the university system changes,” Italian Education Minister Mariastella Gelmini said after the Chamber of Deputies okayed the decree with 281 in favor, 196 against and 28 abstentions.
Among measures introduced in the decree, which forms part of a wider program of cost-cutting reforms for the sector yet to be finalized, 7 percent of government funds allocated to universities will be shared out on a performance basis from 2009, rewarding universities which demonstrate excellence in teaching and research.
In a bid to help out people at the start of their careers, 60 percent of funds must be spent on the employment of young researchers.
The decree also increases funding for research studentships by 135 million euros from this year.
The decree has been welcomed by some university bodies including the Conference of Italian University Chancellors and heads of research institutes.
There is a general consensus that the university system, which fails to gain a single entry in the top 100 universities in the world and which Gelmini has said “produces fewer graduates than Chile,” needs to be overhauled.
But critics have downplayed the usefulness of the decree in the light of government spending cuts of an estimated 1.5 billion euros in the sector planned from 2010.
Background here.
