… at Vanderbilt pursues a political career.

… photographs by Tamara Trocki
(earlier work here) of UD’s
famed giant puffball mushrooms.

This is their season, their
moment to … well, calvatia gigantea
don’t shine… The moment
for their pale bruised flesh to
glimmer slightly from the floor
of the woods…

The shadows of grasses on the
surface of the shroom moons…

Right here in Tubby City!

It’s a spectacular fall day.
UD has been out enjoying it.

She began with brunch at Garrett Park’s
Black Market Bistro, with Rosemary, who
just got back from Thailand and has
many stories.

(Train carrying lumber in background.)

Then she and Rosemary went to
Johnson’s Gardens, where UD bought
mums like these.

Then UD worked in her garden,
stopping occasionally to stare
at her giant puffball mushrooms.

They look like this, only they’re
in the woods, not in a cow pasture.

UD paused in her gardening to
talk to her across the street
neighbor Martin, who with his
wife Tammy (Tammy took the photo
of UD that ran in the Chronicle
of Higher Ed article about UD)
is about to go to Israel, and
who wanted UD to know that they
gave UD’s phone number to their
cat sitters.

It’s really been the year of the coaches, hasn’t it? These incredibly well compensated university employees (at public universities they tend to have the highest state salary) can accumulate all the losses, scandals, and lawsuits they like – there’s always another school begging for them to take millions of dollars and be the most powerful person on campus.

Take Mike Kramer, fired by Montana State, where he didn’t notice or whatever a sophisticated drug market run by a bunch of his players. The drug scandal and a nasty lawsuit behind him, Kramer was pantingly courted by Idaho State, which knew a winner when it saw one.

So now the police are investigating Kramer because he shoved a player a mite too hard (he’s been accused of this sort of thing in the past), and the player is hurt, angry, and suing. Plus there’s a videotape of the incident.

I know what you’re saying. But UD, it’s not as though he forced him to have sex in a shower! Point taken. Still, it’s kind of disturbing…

UD‘s blogpal Allen Frances is currently down the street from her house, at the National Institutes of Health, where UD‘s father spent his whole career as an immunologist. Frances is lecturing to a group of journalists about what he calls diagnostic inflation, or the tendency of the culture, led by profit-seeking pharmaceutical companies, and abetted by the authors of the paradigmatic postmodern work of our time, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Illnesses, to designate everyone, from as young an age as possible, mentally ill.

It hasn’t happened yet in this election cycle, but UD anticipates American presidential and vice-presidential debates revolving mainly around a clash of diagnostic claims. You can see how easily it could have been done in this latest round, with Biden’s inappropriate affect, Ryan’s compulsive swallowing, Obama’s first-debate narcolepsy, and (most troubling) Romney’s disclosure at the Al Smith dinner that he hasn’t had an alcoholic drink in sixty-five years. All of these people are mentally ill, and all of the people who will run for these offices in the future are mentally ill. Americans will have a choice between borderline psychotic and psychotic.

…says Woody Allen, is just showing up; but UD wonders if he’s ever read Baudrillard on the postmodern simulacrum. Not showing up, these days, is far more powerful. Having your name appear as an instructor in a course catalog, a faculty member in a new university’s promotional materials, or a co-author on a scientific article, is pretty much the whole deal these days for a lot of people. You go to Harvard because Professor Famous teaches there; her picture’s plastered all over the glossies Harvard sent your secondary school. But when you get to Cambridge it turns out PF plus many other luminaries are on rolling leaves without pay. A few other PFs are in residence, but they’re teaching vast lectures and manifest themselves to you as pinheads at the dark end of a cavern.

Paul Fain, in Inside Higher Education, has a good piece on Cambridge Graduate University which features an

ambitious list of faculty members, many of whom had never heard of the university… [CGU’s head] said the university created its website only a few months ago, and that the concept is still evolving.

Wherever the concept goes, it’s going to be cutting-edge.

… August” was a 22-year-old student with Prozac, alcohol, and morphine in her system. The local coroner was astonished by the morphine: “It’s hard to get ahold of.”

Chico State has long been at the cutting edge of drug and alcohol deaths and injuries at American universities. I’m not sure why certain schools get this way. I’d guess that after awhile a place gets a reputation and starts attracting freshmen who’ve already been addicts for years. (See the first Chico student interviewed in this pretty good Chico State film.)

Three deaths in three months; and a hard-to-get drug showing up in the latest death. It’s ominous.

From Mozart and Chopin over station loudspeakers to blue mood lighting and safety patrols, railway companies are taking proactive measures to prevent suicides, which wreak havoc on train schedules that run like clockwork.

Asahi Shinbum

… is one of this guy’s specializations, but he seems to have flubbed it.

A faculty member at a public university in California, he sent out an email to hundreds of students on campus telling them to vote for

… Proposition 30 [a Jerry Brown tax initiative] and push others to vote for it, while warning of dire consequences if it fails. It also noted that students would receive a $498 tuition reimbursement if the initiative passes.

“The fate of Proposition 30 on the upcoming November ballot will directly affect our university (and our jobs),” said the email from Stromberg, a professor in CSUMB’s Division of Humanities and Communication.

Now there’s a lawsuit against the school, since what this guy did violates California law. You can’t “use … public resources for mass political mailings.”

“Yeah, last night a rat came out of the dumpster and ran up his arm.”

Today, leaving the Foggy Bottom station, UD watched a construction worker tell this to a woman he strolled with as he exited the site of George Washington University’s new science building.

He took the woman’s hands then.

“Wanna have lunch?”

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

Why not, thought UD. Why not. A city full of rats still gets pristine October afternoons. The streets glowed in sunlight, copper leaves fell along metro grates, mums flashed in front of fine cafes.

Disregard the ratworld, she thought, which made her think of the student in her short story class who can’t stand any of the works we’ve read except for Tolstoy’s Death of Ivan Ilych, because Ilych offers salvation. Which made her think of Georg Lukacs, who attacked Kafka’s writing because it makes social action feel futile…

UD went on musing as she reached the door to her office. She thought: The difference between ratworld and artworld is two transposed letters…

… What you would have him say.
But now and then he’ll say something
Binderful!

He has a five-point plan
That won’t come true
You know that he believes in it
And that’s enough for you…

From Mile High Sports:

A long-time donor to the University of Colorado athletics department entered Folsom Field prior to Thursday night’s latest embarrassment on national television, as the Buffs fell 51-17 to Arizona State.

It just so happened he and his group ran into Phil DiStefano, the chancellor of the University of Colorado-Boulder.

The donor asked DiStefano about [rumored new] facilities.

[The chancellor] asked the long-time supporter if he “[had] $50 million to donate to make it happen.”

When the donor admitted that he would fall significantly short of the absurd total that flew out of the chancellor’s mouth, he [the donor] reminded him that he had donated significantly over the years.

“Donors need to donate to make it happen; if you can get $50 million, we can get the facilities,” he said over his shoulder as he stormed away.

The donor stood in shock, but not before yelling back out to the campus’ leader that his days of donating to the university were now over.

Spending most of your time deciding whether to sell booze in arenas; screaming back and forth about money in public — the august vocation of the American university leader.

She’s not the only one.

(A picture caption in today’s Daily News.)

… of a University of Texas Arlington psychology professor points in the direction of suicide. His car was found at a park about fifty miles from campus.