The bright yellow building in the distance is the Hotel Rehoboth. The walk from there to the Pig and Fish restaurant was a real umbrella-crusher.

The soup is butternut crab bisque with cinnamon. Sounds hideous. Tasted great.

… but it’s the wind that gives the beach that typhoon feel. UD‘s at Rehoboth, drying out at the Hotel Rehoboth and pondering her next move. Tomorrow, everyone at the front desk assures her, will be “gorgeous,” and she’s got a great view of the parade if the parade happens.

Off to lunch.

… are preparing for snow. But UD, as is her tradition, now goes to Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, to celebrate Halloween. (Today will be rainy, tomorrow sunny.)

With her she will take her laptop (I think; therefore, I blog.), as well as mucho broody thoughts about her late friend David and his late sister, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, whose writings on depression and Buddhism I find moving and thought-provoking. I will try to write about some of this.

There’s Michael D. Higgins – not a very good poet, but good at so many other things (like getting elected President at age seventy) that we will praise him here.

There’s W.S. Merwin (age eighty-four), who tells an interviewer that

I still find myself reciting for pleasure, as I have ever since I was 18, [Yeats’] “Sailing to Byzantium” and hearing something in one of the lines that I didn’t hear before. You go on learning. What a great poem teaches you, and it’s not intellectual at all, is the resonance in the language that’s heard there. This goes back to the very origins of poetry and to the very origins of language. I think poetry is as old as language, and both come out of the same thing — an effort to try to express something that is inexpressible. If something can’t be said, what do you do? You scream. You make some terrible noise of pain or anguish or anger or something like that. You make a sound, an animal-like sound which, with time and society trying to calm you down, begins to take shape into something.

Merwin’s just like Higgins; he has, the interviewer notes, “no intention of slowing down.”

And of course Merwin cites restless old Yeats, who wrote “Sailing to Byzantium” in his sixties, because Merwin wants to make a statement about resonance — about living long enough to make and hear sounds that resound very deeply.

Sailing to Byzantium

Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

Expressing the inexpressible, the poem is a scream calmed, shaped; but you still want the resonance of the scream, the vibrant memory, coming off the sensual music the words make, of the outburst.

Yeats begins not resonantly, because his first stanza wants merely to describe the always-dying song of mindless physical beings. Happy in their summer of full heedless life – who wouldn’t be? – the young ignore their coming paltriness, and so remain in place, feeling none of the old poet’s spiritual restlessness.

In the next stanza, when he evokes old age, the poet spits out simple, often monosyllabic words, which convey both anger and the personal meagerness prompting the anger:

An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick

baBAHbaBAHbaBAHbaBAH BAH!

The anger’s sharpened with all those loud hard letters: t, p, k. Then, with unless, the soft sibilant esses begin, the soft confiding whisper of poetic voice to poetic soul begins:

unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.

The holy buzz of Byzantium whispers to the poet that the only way he’s going to sustain his own being is through transcending it into art, into being the art to which he has so far given only sensual music. Now he must study, in Byzantium, an aesthetic that doesn’t, like the poet, die. He must learn what it means to be immortal.

… proceeds apace.

It’s the details that separate the criminal from the ordinary mind. If UD were – like Barry Landau and Jason Savedoff, the Batman and Robin of historic document theft – going to steal and then sell our nation’s heritage, she’d take the treaties and letters and all, but she wouldn’t think to remove their card catalog entries so that there wouldn’t be a record of the documents having been in the library or the museum in the first place.

I mean, now, when she reads that the guys did that, sure… it makes perfect sense … remove your footprints …

This article features a photo of the innocent University of Vermont library, an easy mark for Barry and Jason (they got 67 documents).

This article features Savedoff pleading guilty.

… Camus writes about suicide.

Although every suicide is private and enigmatic, certain types of people seem particularly susceptible. Two years ago, Cal Tech experienced a cluster of suicides among Asian American students. A writer in Time magazine notes:

[C]ertain sub-groups of the Asian American community have higher rates of suicide compared with the nation as a whole — in particular, older Chinese women and Asian American students.

Satto Tonegawa, a student at MIT, and the son of a Nobel Prize-winning MIT professor, probably committed suicide (suicide has not been officially confirmed) two days ago in his dorm room.

After Sussex, [Raj Rajaratnam] decided to get an M.B.A. at Wharton. Of the 600-odd students there, 20 were South Asian. That’s where the Galleon network began. His roommate ended up being head of investor relations at Galleon; another classmate later oversaw Asia for Galleon. Altogether, four people from his class ended up working for him.

UD thanks David.

Some of your med school colleagues routinely list three, four, five hundred publications on their cvs. And all you can do is gaze in wonderment at these superior creatures.

You owe it to yourself to learn about the massive ghost and guest (also known as honorary) writing industry in this country. Drudges – drawn from pharma-controlled ghostwriting companies or from underlings in the lab – do most or all of the writing for these creatures.

It’s quite the scam. And it ain’t going anywhere.

More than 600 biomedical journals have adopted guidelines for responsible and accountable authorship established by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors, but previous research has found that the prevalence of honorary authors in articles is as high as 39 percent and the use of ghost authors as high as 11 percent.

Scary macho surgeon!

In August 2010, [Ivan] Oransky co-founded the blog Retraction Watch with Adam Marcus, managing editor at Anesthesiology News.

… In one memorable post, the reporters describe ringing up one editor, L. Henry Edmunds at the Annals of Thoracic Surgery, to ask about a paper withdrawn from his journal… “It’s none of your damn business!” he told them. Edmunds did not respond to Nature’s request to talk for this article.

What a system!

You need to look at the nuts and bolts of free enterprise here in the States to fully appreciate it.

… when dealing with moneybags hanging around your university in search of respectability. You need to do some vetting before you take their money. You may not be aware of this, but some of the ways people accumulate large personal fortunes are illegal.

Yeshiva University’s distinguished trustees (Bernard Madoff, Ezra Merkin) are again in the news as yet a third Yeshiva trustee (Moshael Straus) succeeds in wresting some of his stolen cash from Merkin. It’s a convoluted big-time New York City crime story, and Yeshiva probably would have preferred not to feature in it.

In a dissenting opinion, Cravath Swaine & Moore lawyer Rory O. Millson, the member of the arbitration panel chosen by Merkin, found that Straus, a member of Yeshiva University’s board of trustees, lied to the arbitrators, including about his knowledge of Madoff acting as a manager for Ascot. He noted that Ascot was referred to as “Bernie” at Yeshiva and that Straus invested in Ascot shortly after joining the university’s board in 1999.

Huh? Don’t try to figure it out. Just a lot of university trustees in each others’ pockets. What’s the point of being a trustee if you don’t get inside access to elite money managers like Bernie and Ezra?

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Well, but now it doesn’t look pretty. It didn’t look pretty when Yeshiva had to do a lot of rapid trustee-erasure, in the wee hours after Madoff and Merkin first got in trouble; and it still doesn’t look pretty with Yeshiva’s name dragged through the long aftermath.

And speaking of long aftermaths — the London School of Economics continues to struggle, not just with its Libyan connections (scroll down), but, more recently, with one of its honorary fellows, Victor Dahdaleh.

On Monday, Mr. Dahdaleh voluntarily surrendered to police in London. Britain’s Serious Fraud Office alleges he paid bribes to officials of a smelting company in Bahrain for contracts with U.S. aluminium giant Alcoa Inc. The deals involved large supplies of alumina, a raw material used to make aluminium, shipped to Bahrain from Australia.

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(Dahdaleh also has long ties to McGill University, but

“I know very little about him,” said a school official who did not want to be named.

Nice try.)

“It’s an expression of ethnic pride and multiculturalism.”

Professor Samuel Heilman on the haredi practice of making women sit in the back of the bus.

And there it is. That’s just it. Selling degrees, as all diploma mills know, is incredibly easy and incredibly lucrative; and it’s always possible for this or that legit university to realize that two can play that game. Most of the three billion up there is legitimate work at legitimate UK universities; but a chunk of it involves trading on your university’s name for cash.

Things got so bad at the venerable University of Wales that they’ve shut the place down entirely.

The university has been hit with a series of scandals involving affiliated foreign colleges that award University of Wales degrees. Last year, Malaysian singing star Fazley Yaakob, who headed an affiliate in his homeland, turned out to have faked his qualifications, and a Bangkok affiliate turned out to be illegal.

The latest scandal involves Rayat London College. A report last week said foreign students there were sold the answers to exams that allowed them to enter a University of Wales MBA program with a British visa.

Here’s an administrator who needs a little public relations help. You see how he keeps defensively smiling and pretending everything is just peachy, peachy, peachy. The name University of Wales at the moment is trashy — hopelessly associated with either rampant negligence or a willingness to prostitute itself for money. No doubt gradually the newly constituted group of universities there will recover; but you only look like a fool when you deny the obvious.

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UD thanks Edmund.

… says the New Republic about “over-rated thinker” Frank Rich.

UD likes clicker-intellectual, and hopes it catches on. Here (scroll down) are UD‘s many posts about clickers in university classrooms.