When UD got to the word “amorality” in the famous anonymous op-ed, she was pleased. She loves the word amoral, its soft letters smoothly rolling out, and inside it love itself – amor, folded equally beautifully inside the famously beautiful word sycamore.
******************
The root of the problem is the president’s amorality
Anyone who works with him knows he is not moored…
******************
The long soft Os
You moored in your prose…
Although everyone knows
Amoral: poetry, moral: prose
When eye and ear encountered those
Something poetic interposed
(Moored, and the Moor himself arose
Root, The Name of the Rose)
Amid constitutional throes
Aesthetic repose
********************
When something poetic interposes, we fly above morality. For his poem, “A Spring Song,” Donald Davie chooses as epigraph a phrase from Pope:
“stooped to truth and moralized his song”
Truth is what we’re moored in; art frees us. Here’s Davie’s poem.
********************
Spring pricks a little. I get out the maps.
Time to demoralize my song, high time.
Vernal a little. Primavera. First
Green, first truth and last.
High time, high time.
A high old time we had of it last summer?
I overstate. But getting out the maps…
Look! Up the valley of the Brenne,
Louise de la Vallière… Syntax collapses.
High time for that, high time.
To Château-Renault, the tannery town whose marquis
Rooke and James Butler whipped in Vigo Bay
Or so the song says, an amoral song
Like Ronsard’s where we go today
Perhaps, perhaps tomorrow.
Tomorrow and tomorrow and… Get well!
Philip’s black-sailed familiar, avaunt
Or some word as ridiculous, the whole
Diction kit begins to fall apart.
High time it did, high time.
High time and a long time yet, my love!
Get out that blessed map.
Ageing, you take your glasses off to read it.
Stooping to truth, we potter to Montoire.
High time, my love. High time and a long time yet.
****************
Spring pricks because the dude is old and way unspringlike; the whole poem is an ironic Spring Song, a sour, self-mocking meditation on the increasing failure of the yearly regreening project, and the unavoidable oncomingness of his dissolution/silence (syntax collapses; diction kit begins to fall apart).
Meanwhile – ahem! – let’s de-moralize our song – that is, let’s use poetry for what it’s always been – a way to sidestep and postpone, beautifully, sinuously, the ugly obdurate boring truth of death. “First / Green, first truth and last.” Obvious truth: We’re born; we die.
So, shit. Have a high time while you can; haul out the maps and travel the Loire Valley.
But it was precisely his wife’s act there, last summer, of getting out a map – such a simple, ordinary gesture – that shatteringly disclosed for the poet the truth of their both being very old. “Ageing, you take your glasses off to read it.”
So, fuck. I just did it. I stooped to truth.
Okay, so sometimes one stoops. But one ought not stop. Let’s not stop at truth. Let’s keep traveling and keep singing the amoral song, the song that doesn’t say anything but truthlessly, ruthlessly, ecstatically, sings.
Merrily we roll along, so where do we go tomorrow? Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow fuck I did it again, let my truthy mind creep in a petty pace to the last syllable and dusty death. James Merrill made the same point, although in the last stanza of his poem, “Santorini: Stopping the Leak,” it’s not singing but dancing:
Here, finally, music that would take Satie
Twenty-five hundred years to reinvent
Put naked immaturity through paces
Of a grave dance – as if catastrophe
Could long be lulled by slim waists and shy faces…
*****************
As if!
*****************
Shake it off! There. Back to the amoral song and dance. High time, my love. High time, and a long time yet.
Johns Hopkins med school grad Jumana Nagarwala has really done the place proud, huh? And let’s figure you and I – via our taxes, whatever – helped pay her way through one of America’s greatest schools of medicine so that she could mutilate thousands of three-year-old American girls (Nagarwala’s only 45, and if found innocent of female genital mutilation in her upcoming trial, has many more years of baby-clitoris-slashing ahead of her).
Thousands of people compete every year for a coveted place at Hopkins, and someone there reviewed her application, which I’m guessing didn’t say I want to be a doctor because I want in secret in the dead of night to force screaming little girls to have mutilated sexually pleasureless lives, and decided to put her out there in our country with certification as a medical doctor.
Nor can she be the only one.
The sect she belongs to is as we speak defending castration of the innocents most passionately in front of the Indian Supreme Court because of course they are doing God’s will… And this is why Nagarwala, if freed, will return to her butchery at once: Slashing genitals is the best, most pious, most godly thing, she does. It is a commandment from the lord and cannot, will not, be disobeyed.
Since the particular sect to which this woman belongs is high-profile and unapologetic about its barbarism, UD proposes at the very least that when a medical school in this country receives a viable application from anyone they are able to identify as a member of the sect, the admissions committee have a nice long talk with the applicant.
We must do what we can, as a country, to defend our children against attack. We must certainly do what we can to avoid educating and then letting loose in our cities another Jumana Nagarwala.
[T]he woman paid the fine, removed her full-face cover and walked away.
Which is the way burqa bans are working all over Europe. Wear a burqa, remove the burqa, pay a fine for having worn the burqa. This woman didn’t know about the ban. Now she knows about it. End of story.
Wanna make something of it? Wanna spend your personal fortune paying the fines of all the women who wear burqas so they can continue to wear burqas? No problem. Go ahead.
Wanna trash your incredibly hard-won freedoms by wearing burqas in street demonstrations, in some twisted gesture of affiliation with erased women? Okay.
Meanwhile countries across the world are issuing calm directives to their citizens not to wear the burqa in most European countries. People are calmly removing the burqa. Civil existence, often called upon to defend itself, defends itself. Life goes on.
From My Blockbuster Tell-All on Rudy
By his (soon to be ex) third wife Judy:
‘He’d straddle a picture of Trump
And take a spectacular dump.
Cuz working for him made him moody.’
*************
[I swear I wrote this before Diapergate.]
… 25-year-old Shane Colombo, a native of Sun City, California, was in the 7600 block of North Clark Street in the Rogers Park neighborhood at about 8:25 p.m. Sunday when he was caught in crossfire between two people, Chicago police said. A statement from the university said Colombo was waiting at a bus stop.
Colombo was struck in his abdomen and was taken to Saint Francis Hospital in Evanston, where was pronounced dead at 9:02 p.m., police said.
… Colombo was planning to join Northwestern’s psychology Ph.D. program as an incoming student this fall, according to a statement from university officials. He received a bachelor’s degree from San Francisco State University and was in the process of moving to Chicago from New York, where he was a researcher at Columbia University’s Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience Lab.
How long can a university football program remain on automatic?
A hollowed-out, expensive, stadium; a perennially losing team; staggering costs to students and faculty; a statewide embarrassment… Yet on it goes, tearing down the reputation and finances of a university forever and ever.
Take University of Kansas football. This 2015 article called the program “doomed,” but it wasn’t, even though the millionaire coaches, million-dollar buyouts, and on-field losses continue.
Increased football spending was supposed make more money for the entire Kansas athletic department. It has not. Instead, there has been a domino effect of failure: Kansas is second to last in the Big 12 in the number of men’s and women’s teams it fields…
This fall, Kansas fans figure to have a front row seat to the worst college football team money can buy — and a up-close view of how everyone else loses in the process.
*****************
Apparently it’s all finally too much for one KU professor – a guy in the law school has tweeted:
What’s the argument for continuing KU football (serious question)? It’s an enormous money loser for a cash-strapped university. Life-altering injuries and cumulative brain damage are inevitable. Wouldn’t this money be better spent elsewhere (e.g. more scholarships)?
To charge KU students higher fees to support the football team (the biggest drain on KU’s athletic budget) just seems wrong. With yesterday’s loss to Nicholls St., it seems like an appropriate time to ask: why have a football team?
Not that this guy’s tweet will go anywhere; but UD thinks it’s worth noting that at least one person on KU’s campus is asking these questions.
*************
UPDATE: And then there’s the University of Maryland. A columnist in the school newspaper first reviews the program: Lots of seriously losing seasons; excessive and expensive coach changes; shitty game attendance; the heatstroke death of a player on the practice field; damning reports in the sports press of a “toxic culture” in the program.
In light of these problems and others, the time has come for frank discussion of a question seemingly absent from the discourse surrounding athletics at this university — namely, whether the university should continue to sponsor a varsity football program at all. There are a few compelling reasons to think the answer is a resounding “no.”
The whole massively costly football deal is “a project that will be useless to the vast majority of the student body.” Football players get concussed and may suffer lifelong brain injury.
Very nice final paragraph:
President Wallace Loh’s favorite metaphor for athletics is that they’re the “front porch” of the university, the face we present to the public. Allow me to extend the metaphor. If your front porch regularly required multi-million-dollar improvements, caused brain disease in those who sat on it and recently left someone dead, wouldn’t you consider removing it?
Bravo.
Now that a major Israeli tech company has boycotted El Al — “We don’t do business with companies that discriminate.” — the airline has released a statement that they will do things differently. They won’t hold up their flights for hours as they negotiate with ultra orthodox men who refuse to sit next to women. In fact, “from now on, a passenger who refuses to sit next to another passenger will be immediately removed from the flight.”
To which UD says, take a look at Israel’s national education mandate. The same ultra orthodox refuse to follow it, and Israel lets them refuse to follow it, but the country still refers to its national education mandate. So El Al can make all the announcements it wants, but they’re as scared of the ultra orthodox as everyone else in Israel, and will in practice continue to give in to their disgusting behavior on their planes.
******
Why? Put yourself on the plane, okay? Twenty ultra orthodox men – in collective protest against one of their group having been seated next to a woman – are standing in the middle aisle and refusing to sit down. A couple of them have wrapped cellophane all over their bodies because the plane will be flying over cemeteries.
Everyone else on the plane, as it sits forever on the tarmac, is creeped out and angry.
“Okay, new policy!” says a steward. “The guy refusing to sit next to a woman will now be immediately removed from the flight.”
Screaming ensues from the men in the aisle, who continue to refuse to move.
What’s El Al’s policy on passengers who refuse to sit down? Do you think they’re going to make all of these guys get off the plane?
*************
The problem in Israel, and on its planes, is that the ultra orthodox can be violent. Hardliners among them are pretty routinely violent. I don’t think El Al wants pitched battles on its planes. I don’t think it wants the interiors of its planes trashed.
There will be more and more boycotts until – you knew this was coming – El Al lays on ultra orthodox only planes.
************
We have followed the El Al situation on this blog for a long time. Just put El Al Israel in my search engine.
Seven Florida Gators have been suspended for the season opener against Charleston Southern.
Dynamic sophomore receiver Kadarius Toney and senior defensive end CeCe Jefferson headline the list of players.
The suspension of Toney and reserve defensive tackle Kyree Campbell stems from their role May 28 altercation on campus with a group of local Gainesville men. Jefferson will sit out due to academic reasons, a source confirmed.
Defensive tackle Luke Ancrum, cornerback Brian Edwards, tailback Adarius Lemons and walk-on offensive lineman James Washington also will not play.
Toney and Campbell brandished Airsoft rifles during the confrontation in May. Then on July 22, police stopped Toney for a seat belt violation and discovered an assault rifle in his backseat.
Four Gators — receivers Tyrie Cleveland and Rick Wells, quarterback Emory Jones and tight end Kemore Gamble – lied to university police when questioned about the incident and had to appear in front of the student conduct council. None was suspended.
And every one of them on scholarship!
