The University of South Florida Polytechnic has been good to the Goodman family…

23 percent of women aged 40 to 59 take antidepressants…

(From The New Yorker. Adam, a reader,
sent it to UD.

It can be found online here.)

… the Runango Running Forum. Take a look around.

Its rejection rate has soared.

This bizarre story from non-bizarre eastern Ohio would appeal to Franz Kafka.

The owner of an animal farm has been found dead (we are not told how he died, and so are free to imagine his own animals attacked him), and many of his animals have escaped. Armed police are driving around in pickup trucks and shooting at “bears, lions, tigers … cheetahs… wolves, giraffes, and camels.”

On Tuesday, commuters reported spotting bears and wolves along I-70.

A surreal tale for Halloween.

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UPDATE: This gets more Kafkaesque by the moment.

The guy opened all the cages and then killed himself.

… the eruption of unregulated capitalism into the university — billion-dollar tv contracts that make already filthy university athletics unspeakably filthier; massive, Goldman Sachs-run online for-profit tax siphons; university presidents who presided over obscene corporate bonuses; professors with outrageous corporate conflicts of interest, and so on.

Peter Beinart, in a post about Occupy Wall Street, considers the larger culture of destructive greed in America, and the growing outrage over “financial elites responsible for the global economic meltdown [who have] have almost entirely escaped justice.”

The Occupy Wall Street movement … represents a direct reckoning with the most powerful forces in American life, forces that are not voted in and out of office every two or four years. And it represents a belief that young Americans must force that reckoning by themselves. No politician will do it for them. Those instincts are exactly right, and we’ve never needed them more.

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UPDATE: Legal scholar Jack Balkin writes that if the American government has become so oligarchic as to violate the Constitution’s Guarantee Clause, citizens – like the Occupy Wall Street crowd – have a right – even a responsibility – to protest this violation vociferously.

The Guarantee Clause says that the United States shall guarantee to the states a republican form of government. It says that we are guaranteed a responsive government, a government that cares about the 99 percent, not a government that is of the 1 percent, by the 1 percent and for the 1 percent.

The ideals (and the fears) of the framers are still relevant today; the wisdom of the Guarantee Clause still applies. If government no longer pays attention to the vast majority of its citizens; if the government has been hijacked by the most wealthy and powerful in the country to perpetuate and expand their wealth and power; if the agencies of government have been derailed from their constitutional obligation to “promote the General Welfare,” then we no longer live under a republican form of government, and the government we have is no longer consistent with the United States Constitution.

A broken government, unresponsive to the public, is more than a misfortune. It is a violation of our basic charter– our Constitution.

[T]echnology use [by students] in class has become a norm, something that I feel not only distracts and prevents us from understanding and learning class material, but also disrespects professors and other speakers in the academic setting of the University… If you do not think you can get through class without falling to this temptation, it may be in your best interest to try another method of note-taking such as returning to the olden days of pen and paper. You might still get distracted by daydreaming, but it is much easier to snap out of a daydream than it is to pull yourself away from the Internet.

This University of Virginia student responds to one of the most idiotic claims tech-pushers make: There’s no difference between surfing and daydreaming, between clicking through one visual world after another and doodling.

… the Garrett Park Bugle, UD‘s hometown newspaper, and her coverage of the latest Town Council meeting.

It has already affected it. Some people, says Rachel Azaria, consider Jerusalem already “a lost city,” ruled by segregationist ultra-orthodox. They’ve succeeded in creating sex-segregated streets for an upcoming holiday; and of course many public buses make women sit in the back, just like Rosa Parks.

To tell women that they have to sit at the back of the bus, or that they have to stand in certain lines in the supermarket, or that the supermarket will be closed to women during certain hours goes against our beliefs … we will not stand for it.

All of this segregation, mind you, is illegal. Go to the Israeli courts, and they’ll obligingly rule again and again that you can’t do any of this in a democracy. But it doesn’t matter, because the haredim ignore the laws, and the police don’t enforce them.

Israel even has a national curriculum, because you don’t want a large, unemployable population. Opting out isn’t a legal option.

Only it is. The haredim opt out.

The larger picture here.

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An update; and an excellent idea:

Perhaps Haredi goggles should be developed. With picture recognition software these goggles would identify human females in the field of vision and replace them with convex pink patches (color could be selected by the user). Think about night vision goggles that show infrared as “false color”. This would allow pious men to walk anywhere, read illustrated newspapers (without female images cut out) without being disturbed, and without disturbing females. I would assume that in cases when women can fail to be recognized by the software they should look sufficiently un-exciting. With a “cautious” setting, all human figures with bare elbows and bare heads could be covered. With “most cautious” setting, the only visible humans would be properly dressed Haredi males.

St. John’s, Mon Amour.

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The bench which UD gave St. John’s
in memory of her mother.

(Click on the photo for a larger image.)

As brave as Dimitrov, as wise as Stalin.

You’re a Gaelic poet and a Stalinist. You remain a Stalinist way past the degenerate stage (invasion of Hungary). While a Stalinist you write and publish a poem with the above line. (A Bulgarian communist, Dimitrov was head of the Comintern from ’34 to ’43. Although all traces of him have been removed from Bulgaria, “A massive painted statue of Dimitrov survives in the centre of Place Bulgarie in Cotonou, Republic of Benin, two decades after the country abandoned Marxism-Leninism and the colossal statue of Vladimir Lenin was removed from Place Lenine. Few Beninois are aware of the history of the statue or its subject.”) You edit the lines out of the poem much later – for a 1989 collection – but now – on the centenary of your birth – a big collection of your work comes out which restores the original passage. You died in 1996, and so have nothing to say about the restoration.

The editors explain that “it is perhaps time to remind people that there is more to [Sorley] MacLean’s work than what he presented himself back in 1989.” Another Gaelic poet comments, “MacLean’s self-shaped ‘biographical legend’ might not stand up to scrutiny in the way he intended, but his status as a major European poet is never in doubt.”

It’s an intriguing moral question. To what extent should editors honor only the poet’s approved versions of much-redacted poems? Especially when the poet has arguably airbrushed his own political history?

A study does side by side comparisons of the University of Singapore and the University of Malaysia, “two institutions that both began as offshoots of the same British colonial university.”

Lack of academic and administrative freedom, plus non-meritocratic admissions, guarantee substandard schools.

Yesterday, Les UDs hiked the towpath at the C & O Canal Park in Maryland. UD has visited these rocks and waterfalls all her life, first following the flat canal past mules pulling tourist boats, and then hanging over bridges above the rapids.

One winter Sunday in 1969, she walked the half-muddy, half-frozen towpath with her boyfriend, David Kosofsky. The day after that walk, she wrote a poem about it (the poem appeared in the Walter Johnson High School literary magazine, The Spectator). The first lines of the poem are this post’s title.

With David’s recent death in mind, UD yesterday recalled that day at the canal forty-two years ago. Her poem described David crashing a good-sized rock onto the canal’s surface, and the rock barely denting the ice. This seems to have struck wee UD as a metaphor for the way lovers try to break through the resistant enigma of each other … Maybe lovers even believe they have pierced the ice and gotten to the deep heart’s core , through the labyrinth of another’s being… More likely, love represents an unstoppable, every-day-briskly-setting-out, venture into the labyrinth… The thrown boulder, UD wrote in her teenage poem, barely nicks the surface. / Yet we never quite admit defeat. / Is this love?

Throughout our lives, David’s and mine, this idea of the mystery of other people expanded to embrace the mystery of one’s own self, and then the mystery of a larger world of humanity, nature, the divine. Here’s an excerpt from an October 2008 Gchat between UD and David. In it, he mentions his sister, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick.

UD: i’ve always been able to – it feels like really enter into the personality of certain other people
i guess that’s often a novelist’s – or a deep reader’s – trait
leaving yourself
entering other people
or some plausible version of other people
like… norman bates becoming his mother!!

David: and manage to experience other people from the inside?

UD: that’s how it feels
obviously one can’t know to what extent one’s getting anything right
but that’s how it feels – really climbing into their skin

David: have you ever read Dilthey? His idea of `verstehen’? It’s about that… only as applied to history or sociology.

UD: yes – verstehen is in fact an interesting way of approaching what i’m trying to get at
understanding deeply
selflessly
only sometimes i think it’s a little crazy

David: Eve and I, when we were younger, used to talk about what you were just talking about… that kind of understanding of another person… whether it was possible… and if so whether desirable.. and if so whether (as Eve always insisted) FRIGHTENING.

But in Iris Murdoch’s unfrightening sense, this entering into the truths of another person was the basis of virtue:

[M]ost great writers have a sort of calm merciful vision because they can see how different people are and why they are different. Tolerance is connected with being able to imagine centers of reality which are remote from oneself. The great artist sees the vast interesting collection of what is other than himself and does not picture the world in his own image. I think this kind of merciful objectivity is virtue…

Key to mercy is this retained sense of the shadowiness of other human beings. Robert Penn Warren begins a poem to his child this way:

Here is the shadow of truth, for only the shadow is true.

He wants to speak to his child directly, unload his wisdom and his love… And yet nothing direct can be said. The poem is a series of beautiful indirections, failures to say anything forthrightly.

And when, by the hair, the headsman held up the head
Of Mary of Scots, the lips kept on moving,
But without sound. The lips,
They were trying to say something very important.

In that same chat, David put the matter in Buddhist terms.

David: within each person (I’m not stating this as an empirical fact or observation at all… it’s a `belief’ if you will) there is what I’ll call (since I guess I got…
… the idea from this tradition) a Buddha Nature. The trick of really understanding a person… in the sense of wanting to be compassionate… or of actually BEING compassionate towards them…
… is to find… to recognize their Buddha Nature.

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Was anything less shadowy now, avoiding stretches of towpath mud with my husband?

No. The clarity I’d gained was about the compassion drawn forth from obscurity.

In an excellent article, Takis Pappas talks about the failed state of Greece.

Longtime readers know that, since the founding of this blog, UD has singled out the Greek university system as the very worst in Europe. Current events in Greece clarify the larger context of this scandal.

Fifty thousand! FEEEEFFFTEEEEE TAOZAND!

Do you know how much money Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs earns every, I dunno, minute? His mere bonuses in the last few years have ranged between fifty and one hundred million dollars.

FIFTY THOUSAND DOLLARS?  Him AND the Missus?

Lawdy. Maybe he figures putting Barnard’s president on the Goldman Sachs board is like giving the school a lot of good stuff, but Debora Spar should probably talk to Ruth Simmons about that one. (Upside: It pays you insanely well for doing almost nothing. Downside. Simmons has announced her resignation from Brown. She will be busy with Goldman litigation no doubt.)

Blankfein recently blanked on a speech he was supposed to give at Barnard. Word is he cancelled because of School the Squid Week, planned to coincide with his appearance. (It’s a reference to the vampire squid metaphor in Matt Taibbi’s famous Goldman Sachs article.) Plus there’s the Occupy Wall Street thing down the block.

It’s all getting a lot of press attention — as will Spar herself when students discover the sorts of colleges their president presides over.

But anyway. Predatory capitalism is certainly interesting, and worth studying, and Barnard students – plus their president – have front-row seats.