… emerges again (a student was killed at an off-campus party near Seton Hall not long ago), this time at Central Washington University, where a bunch of students, mainly women, have overdosed.

When officers arrived at the party, they found approximately 50 people, predominately underage students from Central Washington University. Several people were severely intoxicated, semi-unconscious or unconscious, Ferguson said. Twelve people were taken to the hospital, including a sexual assault victim.

Ferguson said police suspect drugs were given to the victims, most of whom were female, without their knowledge.

There’s also been, since the start of the academic year, a highly controversial police raid at an off-campus Yale party, and a student riot (it began as a tailgate gathering) near the University of Oregon.

… a mathematician at Berkeley, has made an intriguing short film, Rites of Love and Math. It’s based on “Rite of Love and Death” by Mishima.

It’s currently in competition at the Sitges Film Festival in Barcelona.

Frenkel kindly sent UD the film, and she watched it, together with the Mishima.

Both films seem to UD to want to think about our self-damaging pull toward pure truth and ultimate beauty. But while the lover in the Mishima film is happy to go with the loved one to a purer realm (both commit suicide), there’s none of that self-annihilating spirituality apparent in Frenkel’s film. It’s got the same stark intensity as the earlier film, but seems a cautionary tale: The pursuit of pure truth and ultimate beauty will destroy you, because once you discover it, everyone else’s passion for it will make you a marked man.

When all the other stimulants fail.

At that time, Lennon had not decided what instrument to use, but he subsequently asked George Martin to play a piano solo, suggesting “something Baroque-sounding”. Martin wrote a Bach-influenced piece that he found he could not play at the song’s tempo. On 22 October, the solo was recorded at half-tempo … and tape speed was doubled for the final recording, solving the performance challenge and giving the piano solo a unique, harpsichord-like timbre.

Marking what would have been John Lennon’s 70th birthday.

“[W]hen you start reading your slides,” a University of South Dakota student writes to his professors in the school’s newspaper, “I’m picking my FarmVille crops.”

The student’s mainly complaining about mandatory attendance policies. He reasonably enough points out the absurdity of insisting that students attend morgue-like events — especially when everything coming from the crypt is already downloadable.

I don’t know which is more offensive: Being forced to listen to a person with a PhD read PowerPoint slides for an hour when I could have done it in 20 minutes at home or the fact that if I don’t go then I will be dropped from the course and thus robbed of a few hundred dollars.

How does a person with a PhD think reading PowerPoint slides is an effective teaching method? At least have the decency to not drop me if I don’t show up.

PowerPoint: I had not thought death had undone so many.

… beat Bethesda Chevy Chase High in football 42-28 yesterday. In dramatic style.

[A]t this time in 2008, the Wildcats had not won a game in four years.

… written immediately after Sylvia Plath’s suicide. It’s not published yet – it will be, tomorrow, in The New Statesman

You can hear it, though. Jonathan Pryce reads it, here.

… Britain’s Forward Prize for poetry.

This is from Singing School, a Wordsworthian account of his development as a poet.

6. Exposure

It is December in Wicklow:
Alders dripping, birches
Inheriting the last light,
The ash tree cold to look at.

[He somehow manages in these few words, these short lines, to establish a sad, depleted, inexpressive mood – winter, the wick of the candle low in the last light, the ashen ash tree… Even alders hints, in this context, at elders .]

A comet that was lost
Should be visible at sunset,
Those million tons of light
Like a glimmer of haws and rose-hips,

[Deepening the theme here of light – energy, creativity – dimmed. A comet that was lost… The poet hopes to see it this evening, its brilliant tail naturalized here as the way the bright red fruit of the hawthorne and rose-hip would look, bursting forth in the dark.]

And I sometimes see a falling star.
If I could come on meteorite!
Instead I walk through damp leaves,
Husks, the spent flukes of autumn,

[The theme of exhausted creative energy becomes yet clearer. Falling star – this, the poet, himself fading, will sometimes see… He’s trying to discover new resources for his art, new sharp illumination (If I could come on meteorite!), but instead, spent, he walks in a world of spent leaves.]

Imagining a hero
On some muddy compound,
His gift like a clingstone
Whirled for the desperate.

[Embarrassed, he confesses that he pretends he’s a heroic poet, offering the desperate world healing beauty.]

How did I end up like this?
I often think of my friends’
Beautiful prismatic counselling
And the anvil brains of some who hate me

As I sit weighing and weighing
My responsible tristia.
For what? For the ear? For the people?
For what is said behind-backs?

[Depressed, he poses the question directly: How did I lose my gift? Where did the fire of my poetry go? Why, for that matter, did I ever take up the pen? Why do I write again and again on the theme of my sense of exile from Ireland? Do I write merely to please myself with language (For the ear?), or for my fellow Irish (the people?)?]

Rain comes down through the alders,
Its low conducive voices
Mutter about let-downs and erosions
And yet each drop recalls

[The low of Wicklow is revisited in this stanza, with the muttering rain steadily eroding the poet’s flinty spark.]

The diamond absolutes.
I am neither internee nor informer;
An inner émigré, grown long-haired
And thoughtful; a wood-kerne

[Meteorite, diamond: The poet reminds himself of the brilliancy that still resides in the world, that he might still attain. Yet at this late season – December – he feels himself to have softened into a sort of intellectual withdrawal into himself, away from the world that is the source of inspiration.

In the seventeenth century, wood-kernes were Irish warriors who attacked British settlements.]

Escaped from the massacre,
Taking protective colouring
From bole and bark, feeling
Every wind that blows;

[He has left the scene of history and found protective cover in the natural world.]

Who, blowing up these sparks
For their meagre heat, have missed
The once-in-a-lifetime portent,
The comet’s pulsing rose.

[This longhair has tried to continue making art out of the shrinking, meagre world around him; he has tried to blow (see how Heaney plays throughout on low and blow) the few sparks the wind kicks up around him into the fire of poetry. (This is by the way the dominant image in Shelley’s Ode to the West Wind. Other poets use the image as well.) And meanwhile as he’s vainly huffing and puffing, that comet has flashed overhead, he has missed it, the real show, the real thing, the rare event about which the poet was born to write…

The pulsing rose here returns to the rose-hips in the first stanza — the brilliant natural flare of the world should draw the poet’s eye; he should look up from his depressive world and meet again, as he did in his youth, the hard brilliance of his world, his history.

Yet for me the real pathos of this poem is more general; it marks, as much as Auden’s more famous one does, the anguish of never really getting a grip on the actual, always being at a self-protective remove from it.]

… discovers that significant portions of his BA thesis have been lifted, unattributed, by two South African academics.

… Alex Park ’09… discovered parts of his Sociology senior thesis “A Tale of Two Townships: Political Opportunity and Violent and Non-Violent Local Control in South Africa” were unattributed seven times in a University of Johannesburg paper titled “Khutsong and Xenophobic Violence: Exploring the Case of the Dog That Didn’t Bark.”

The Johannesburg article is co-authored by two figures in the university’s Centre for Sociological Research. One of the authors is a Harvard graduate and a doctorate, Park and his Macalester advisor Erik Larson said, but it is unknown as to which author improperly used Park’s work.

Park learned of the incident this summer while searching for any references of his paper that might have been made…

Park’s thesis director complained to the publisher, who pulled the piece and then republished it after the authors provided citations.

A history professor at Yale talks laptops.

In seminars, laptops are still more harmful [than in lectures], serving as physical barriers that prevent a group of students from becoming a class.

UD has taken to calling the relationship between professors who allow and students who use laptops Mutually Assured Cynicism.

— proudly self-sufficient.

… in Italy.

… about her beloved Don DeLillo and other writers gathering to protest the imprisonment of Liu Xiaobo, a Chinese human rights advocate and writer.

DeLillo doesn’t hit the protest circuit often, but when he does, he certainly chooses well. Liu Xiaobo just won the Nobel Peace Prize.

Before his imprisonment, Liu Xiaobo was a literature professor.

“I don’t think it’s a great idea to be honest with you, because I have the one class tonight. I’m not a big football person. I’m here for the education,” student Jackie Fulco said.

A student at the University of Central Florida fails to get on board for the half-day-because-of-football thing.

… Mario Vargas Llosa.

Excerpts from his essay, Why Literature?

Literature has even served to confer upon love and desire and the sexual act itself the status of artistic creation. Without literature, eroticism would not exist. Love and pleasure would be poorer, they would lack delicacy and exquisiteness, they would fail to attain to the intensity that literary fantasy offers. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that a couple who have read Garcilaso, Petrarch, Gongora, or Baudelaire value pleasure and experience pleasure more than illiterate people who have been made into idiots by television’s soap operas. In an illiterate world, love and desire would be no different from what satisfies animals, nor would they transcend the crude fulfillment of elementary instincts.

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I cannot accept the idea that a non-functional or non-pragmatic act of reading, one that seeks neither information nor a useful and immediate communication, can integrate on a computer screen the dreams and the pleasures of words with the same sensation of intimacy, the same mental concentration and spiritual isolation, that may be achieved by the act of reading a book.

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[A]ll good literature is radical, and poses radical questions about the world in which we live. In all great literary texts, often without their authors’ intending it, a seditious inclination is present… [T]here is no better means of fomenting dissatisfaction with existence than the reading of good literature; no better means of forming critical and independent citizens who will not be manipulated by those who govern them, and who are endowed with a permanent spiritual mobility and a vibrant imagination.

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As a consequence of technology and our subservience to it, we may imagine a future society full of computer screens and speakers, and without books, or a society in which books–that is, works of literature–have become what alchemy became in the era of physics: an archaic curiosity, practiced in the catacombs of the media civilization by a neurotic minority. I am afraid that this cybernetic world, in spite of its prosperity and its power, its high standard of living and its scientific achievement would be profoundly uncivilized and utterly soulless–a resigned humanity of post-literary automatons who have abdicated freedom.

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“Spiritual mobility” is nice; akin, I think, to Richard Rorty’s notions of contingency and irony.