I noted in this recent post our country’s almost total amorality when it comes to football heroes. This is what I mean:

Virginia Tech is so impressed with animal torturer Michael Vick it’s putting him in its hall of fame.

To the shock of seemingly everyone involved in this decision, numerous anti-Vick petitions are gaining tens of thousands of signatures. After all, Vick graduated from Virginia Tech!

Haha I mean he failed to graduate – another point of honor I guess… Executes non-performing dogs, college dropout… convicted felon… If that’s not a man of honor, what is?

The honor will go through despite the petitions, believe me. We’re talking virtually total amorality when it comes to football.

But it doesn’t hurt to sign them.

For John Ashbery’s ninetieth birthday, the Guardian’s poetry critic reproduces and discusses this late-career poem of his:

Life is a Dream

I know I’ll have a chance to learn more
later on. Waiting is what’s called for, meanwhile.
It’s true that life can be anything, but certain things
definitely aren’t it. This gloved hand,
for instance, that glides
so securely into mine, as though it intends to stay.

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

In her telling, it’s bristling with homophobia, Auschwitz, coming of age, and love; UD on the other hand reads it as a mildly anxious gloss on Yeats’s similar late-career poem, Circus Animal’s Desertion.

Both poems, IMHO, feature old poets reflecting on the process of aesthetic creation, on the way some people – people like them – are sort of both blessed and cursed with the ability to take the random broken stuff of the world and transform it into art. In Yeats, the poet mucks around in the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.

Those masterful images because complete
Grew in pure mind but out of what began?
A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street,
Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can,
Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut
Who keeps the till. Now that my ladder’s gone
I must lie down where all the ladders start
In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.

Ashbery’s in the same trash- and lumber-yard:

A talent for self-realization
will get you only as far as the vacant lot
next to the lumber yard

Same point, no? A capacity for transforming the vague fallen dross of the world into meaningful formal beauty is only a capacity – all your poetic life you must try to get farther than the vacant lot (note the nice internal contradiction of that phrase, the word “lot” meaning not only enclosed place, but many – so again the rag and bone shop, the lumber yard, is full of things; there’s a lot in or near that lot; but since nothing has been done to transform any of its objects and make it meaningful, it is vacant, expressionless). The vacant lot is the abundant object-nothingness, the object-silence, of the world that confronts the poet again and again as he attempts to write a poem and give the world words. At this late stage in their poetic lives, both Yeats and Ashbery are feeling some degree of panic, let’s say, as their imaginative powers wane (What can I but enumerate old themes) and their profoundest images begin to look old.

Letters, being “read off,” the beginning of the line: The rest of Ashbery’s first stanza expresses – in his typical oblique vague dreamy way – the difficulty of beginning a poem — beginning an Ashbery poem, with a capital A. This poem self-reflexively elaborates upon the perennial gnawing anxiety of the poetic vocation, the creative imperative; and the surrealistic introduction of the nasty urging rodent-like man in the next stanza would, in this account of the poem, be the poet’s own anxious impatient self-punishing insistence on a life of continued artistic productivity: Don’t just muck around inside this dream, you fool – you’ve learned how to make anything “real” – that is, you’ve learned how to give anything persuasive aesthetic shape and life – and your vocation is to continue to do so. Take whatever you like from the lumber yard/rag and bone shop. Take

The corner of the stove,
a cloud of midges at dusk-time.

And fashion it into poetic form.

Or maybe Ashbery’s poem/poetic dream is the temporal inverse of Yeats’s – maybe this is the old Ashbery remembering himself as a young poet, a poet just beginning to be “schooled” in poetry. If so, his last stanza is the old poet reflecting on his subsequent decades of education in world-transformation:

I know I’ll have a chance to learn more
later on. Waiting is what’s called for, meanwhile.
It’s true that life can be anything, but certain things
definitely aren’t it. This gloved hand,
for instance, that glides
so securely into mine, as though it intends to stay.

What is life, and what is a dream? Both dream and life are dream, and if you are a poet “It was the dream itself enchanted me.” Dream is anything, but sly life slips in things that boast of solid empirical real life, like the sudden feeling in your hand of a gentle, guiding, and loving gloved hand that slips so easily into yours and seems destined to stay by you permanently — that’s a certain thing that definitely is not life. That is the poet’s writing hand gloved into a false comfort and ease which amounts to an evasion of the artistic imperative. Think of the complex invitations and evasions of the painterly hand that dominates Ashbery’s most famous poem; “Life is a Dream” is yet another enumeration of the theme of poetic consciousness and poetic procedure:

Dreams prolong us as they are absorbed […]
Something like living occurs, a movement
Out of the dream into its codification.

It’s rare that a university professor kills; when he does (it’s almost always he), it’s almost always a husband or boyfriend killing a wife or girlfriend in a rage.

This much-covered case of a Northwestern University professor allegedly stabbing a young man to death in the professor’s apartment sounds like something similar, although this might have been a gay relationship.

To the newsworthiness of a professor killing (and a professor from a major university), we can add the fact that the guy specialized in the plague!

Oxford College Treasurer and
Black Death Professor
Sought in US-Wide Murder Manhunt

Here’s hoping he didn’t arm himself with a few bacilli on his way out of town.

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

He’s on the run. Maybe I saw him last Wednesday.

I was on the metro, the red line, from Bethesda into the city to have lunch with a friend, and across from me on the train sat a guy who looked somewhat like the description and photo the police provided. He was probably in his forties, athletic, on the tall side, and what really struck me was the t-shirt he had on: It said VASSAR on it, and the guy graduated from Vassar.

He had a lot of luggage, but lots of people on the DC metro carry lots of luggage.

And – yeah, I hear you – would a smart guy like this one wear a shirt that had Vassar emblazoned on it?

Athletics and the med school: At many universities, these are the big ticket items, featuring massive salaries and high-profile staff, plus smarmy rhetoric about teamwork and making the world a better place through selfless scientific discovery and character-driven winning traditions.

So what if these same two locations may be shot through with conflict of interest, other forms of personal and financial corruption, and even criminality?

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

And… I dunno… On the eve of the anniversary of Woodstock — (Has UD already told you she’ll be in Woodstock for her birthday later this month, at the Bear Cafe, and as her carful of family and friends approaches that hippie town she will slide this into the CD player and make everyone sing along?) — on this sacred anniversary, UD will simply echo Janis and say Get it while you can... Honey, get it while you can.

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

Your basic Five Million Dollar Man don’t have no truck with hippies. When Hugh Freeze coached women’s high school basketball, he was so incensed at a player wearing a Grateful Dead shirt that he had to stay in the room while she took it off. That’s how dedicated he was to Just Say No.

One woman [says that] Freeze forced her to change shirts in his office, claiming her Grateful Dead shirt violated the school dress code because it “represented drugs.” At the time, [she] was in eighth grade; according to her, Freeze did not leave the room while she changed.

“Coach Freeze pulled me in his office and told me that my shirt represented drugs. … I said, ‘I’ll go change in the bathroom,’ and when I said that he said, ‘No, you’re going to change in here so I get the (Grateful Dead) shirt and you can’t have it back.’

He didn’t do anything sexual. But I stood in the corner and faced the wall when I did it and I changed out of my shirt. No privacy.”

Five mill and free nubile body viewing… And all the while you’re being billed as a saint and a miracle man. Get it while you can! Over in the med school, Carmen Puliafito’s also getting his… As long as he can… And both Ole Miss and Southern Cal are dumbfounded at what the heads of their football program and med school are up to…

UD could care less about sports of any kind (exception: competitive Scrabble), but she’ll say this: Her need to read about athletics for this blog at least led her to Deadspin. Who knew some of the best writing in America would come out of this funny, subversive, knowledgeable, source? Deadspin has taught UD much of what she’s learned about the lingo and lunacy of the jock shop, and along the way it has delighted her not only with its literacy, but also its amused embrace of the ultra-loucheness of this thing that has taken over – of all places – our universities.

Nobody notices or cares when professional soccer, football, and basketball are disgusting. We only pay attention at the very grossest margins, as when an NFL player tortures his dog to death. Moral monstrosity on the level of mere money registers not at all, as in the failure of the FIFA story, or the related story about the apparently universal tax evasion of international soccer players, to get anywhere at all. Who cares. Put a bunch of guys together with a lot of money and surprise.

But the university. Ah the university. Little streamers of seriousness continue to flutter ‘pon it. Wilted garlands of gravitas shake aloft their dying buds. The Sacred Groves of Academe! When a university reveals its true rot, as in the moral desert of (in effect) all-male Baylor, the extremity of response – A new woman president! Who, asked why she took the job, says “I love Jesus.” – tells you all you need to know about the effort required to keep stray wisps of legitimacy flying.

But I don’t want to overstate the matter…

So people do indeed tend to notice the truly debauched campus. Whorehouse-for-teens-and-their-parents proprietor University of Louisville is the higher ed scuzz-meme of the moment, cited in a kind of shorthand in many articles about other athletic scandals; indeed, it’s mentioned in a wonderful Deadspin piece about Hugh Freeze, a guy who has a lot in common with the miscreants at Baylor, being both a superduper Christian and a (reportedly) twisted piece of shit.

Ole Miss, ex-haunt of football coach Freeze [background here], has many advantages when it comes to ultra-louche supremacy on a university campus, the most important of which is its location in the most corrupt, most benighted, state in America. Nobody much cares what goes on down there, and this includes the people who run the state. So the tired business of boosters giving impermissible benefits to players, and similar venerable forms of corruption, continue to thrive at Ole Miss, which means the NCAA’s always sniffing around. The general air of loucheness in a steamy south that time forgot, plus William Faulkner having lived in Oxford, means that people often reach in the direction of his novels (with special attention to the Snopes family) to, er, contextualize some of the goings on, as Deadspin notes in a wonderful summarizing paragraph:

The revelation of Freeze’s possible sex-having brought its fair share of confused hilarity [to observers], but did little to outline the future of either of Ole Miss’s ongoing, convoluted [legal] cases with [former former Ole Miss coach suing Freeze for defamation Houston] Nutt and the NCAA. There were (are) still a number of questions to be answered — namely, how Nutt and [his lawyer Thomas] Mars knew exactly where to look [for dirt on Freeze]; whether anybody comparing this case to a William Faulkner novel actually read a William Faulkner novel; how long Freeze was possibly using school technology and school funds to maybe fuck; how far back into his career Freeze’s general misbehavior extends; whether Freeze was even the one doing the fucking; whether Ole Miss know about Freeze’s extracurriculars beforehand; and how Nutt’s legal team will use this information moving forward.

That one about whether Freeze was actually doing the fucking: There’s a theory that the calls on his phone to an escort service might have been on behalf of a recruit…

UD does think the Faulkner comparison works, since he wrote convoluted stories like this one, about vague imperishable grudges among unsavory people, like these people.

The phrase about how far back Freeze’s misbehavior extends: The Deadspin piece includes some way-twisted testimony about the way Freeze behaved when he coached a women’s high school basketball team.

One woman [says that] Freeze forced her to change shirts in his office, claiming her Grateful Dead shirt violated the school dress code because it “represented drugs.” At the time, [she] was in eighth grade; according to her, Freeze did not leave the room while she changed.

“Coach Freeze pulled me in his office and told me that my shirt represented drugs. … I said, ‘I’ll go change in the bathroom,’ and when I said that he said, ‘No, you’re going to change in here so I get the (Grateful Dead) shirt and you can’t have it back.’

He didn’t do anything sexual. But I stood in the corner and faced the wall when I did it and I changed out of my shirt. No privacy.”

Another student, remaining anonymous, claimed Freeze was “hyper attentive” when it came to making sure the girls’s skirts adhered to school policy. She also claimed that on one occasion, when she was late getting back to class from her lunch period, Freeze obliged her request to be paddled rather than sit in detention; instead of fetching a female administrator to complete or at least proctor the punishment, Freeze paddled her himself.

“(Freeze) did some bizarre warm-up taunt before actually making contact,” said the woman, who spoke to USA TODAY Sports on the condition of anonymity because she said she fears reprisal. “I was humiliated that he didn’t have a female in the room. I don’t know if the acts were intentionally sexual or if he was really that oblivious to the inherently sexual nature of his approach to discipline.”

In the winter of 2012, we met up in Dublin, where he received an Honorary Doctorate of Letters from Trinity College. He was often embarrassed by accolades but embraced this one, coming from the same institution where Samuel Beckett walked and studied. He loved Beckett, and had a few pieces of writing, in Beckett’s own hand, framed in the kitchen, along with pictures of his kids. That day, we saw the typewriter of John Millington Synge and James Joyce’s spectacles, and, in the night, we joined musicians at Sam’s favorite local pub, the Cobblestone, on the other side of the river. As we playfully staggered across the bridge, he recited reams of Beckett off the top of his head.

As you know, Saudi Arabia has announced the launch of a massive new tourism initiative, and UD – whose first job out of Northwestern was copywriter at Kenyon and Eckhardt – has some advertising ideas.

Possible print ad copy, men-only, appears in this post’s headline.

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

Overall concept and tagline, men and women:

Saudi Arabia: LIVE THE STORY OF O.

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

Girls: “[F]emale travellers are warned they must meet their ‘sponsor’ on arrival into the country.” OOOH. Shiver me timbers…

Observers estimate 12.5 million American women lie somewhere on the Masochism Scale, with roughly one million women outright masochists. Saudi has something for all of them: Infantilization, restraints, imprisonment, degrading clothing.

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

S and A — S and M: LIVE THE DREAM.

Step into the pages of Pauline Reage’s classic novel when you enter our magic kingdom. Revel in the freedom to take your bondage and discipline out of the bedroom and onto the ancient winding streets of our beckoning desert towns. You will never want to go home!

Yeah, yeah, it makes your brain mush... But it also pays for four years of a fine college education!

… talented as he was in so many directions, has died.

True American. True West.

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

From a 1997 Paris Review interview.

Alcoholism is an insidious disease; until I confronted it I wasn’t aware that it was creeping up on me. I finally did AA in the hardcore down on Pico Boulevard. I said, “Don’t put me in with Elton John or anything, just throw me to the lions.”

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

Violence and conflict are part of the music… There’s no way to escape the fact that we’ve grown up in a violent culture, we just can’t get away from it, it’s part of our heritage. I think part of it is that we’ve always felt somewhat helpless in the face of this vast continent. Helplessness is answered in many ways, but one of them is violence.

… Don DeLillo. Just discovered it. Haven’t yet read it. But UD loves Don DeLillo and considers the appearance of any new writing of his to be worth mentioning.

It’s called “The Itch.”

Gaelic football? Something of
that sort.

I mean, you can watch it.

All well-provisioned universities need access to an Emergency Title Reserve, a list of names they can immediately slap on a professor with a named chair when the original name on the professor’s chair suddenly becomes… well…

Take Mary Waters, the socially conscious Zukerman Professor of Sociology at Harvard until it turned out Zukerman had stolen around fifty million dollars from the United States government. When it looked likely Zukerman would go to prison (that is in fact his current primary residence), Harvard was able to scrounge around in its ETR and come up with the name of some schmuck willing to sit there until he or she was needed (Theirs not to reason why/Theirs but to do or die).

Zukerman stole from the poor to give to the rich, as did the fascinating Esformes family, long one of the filthiest nursing home operators in Chicago, but now, in the person of Philip Esformes, “charged … in what has been touted as the nation’s biggest Medicare fraud case.” These named chair donors don’t think small – if you’re going to steal from America’s struggling taxpayer, steal tens – hundreds? – of millions! Then spread it around among the deserving rich so you can get your name emblazoned in some hoitsy-toitsy joint like Harvard, the University of Chicago…

Nothing says whitewashing like a university chair. If Bernie hadn’t suffered a reversal, hands down there’d have been a Madoff chair at Yeshiva University.

So Nir Uriel, once touted as the Esformes Chair in Medicine at Chicago, has been re-named the Block Professor.

UD of course has nothing against universities scrambling to dump crooks and replace them with saints. She has only two comments to make about this.

1. Better make sure the second-in-command is pure as the driven snow. It would be positively Rube Goldberg to have to keep giving their professors new names.

2. Instead of just quietly doing it, UD thinks universities should announce the change. Disclosure matters, and there’s a way of writing this sort of news release that makes it honest and unembarrassing.

For many years the University of Chicago has been pleased to be the recipient of financial generosity from the Esformes family, which endowed a professorship in our medical school. We have, however, now removed the Esformes name from that chair, because members of the family have been accused of Medicare fraud.

His sins trickled from his lips, one by one, trickled in shameful drops from his soul, festering and oozing like a sore, a squalid stream of vice. The last sins oozed forth, sluggish, filthy. There was no more to tell. He bowed his head, overcome.

Sluggish. It’s kind of like that at USC, only it’s not sins – it’s lies. The president, the provost … sluggishly, sluggishly, sluggishly, they begin to ooze the truth about their protection – nay, their celebration – of a (probable) drug addict, a man for quite some time notoriously disengaged from the responsibilities of his $1.1 million a year job. They seem more or less to have let Carmen keep doing his drug- and sex-addled thing and ignoring his job until those extremely annoying Los Angeles Times reporters couldn’t be brushed off anymore.

So okay. Okay! You wanna know what really happened? Not the blahblah we told you last week, but the actual stuff that happened? OKAYOKAYOKAYOKAYOKAY. The Times should be grateful, by the way. If it weren’t for our stonewalling, its reporters wouldn’t be getting a Pulitzer for investigative reporting this year. So you’re welcome.

The president’s letter was released hours after The [LA] Times provided USC with findings about Puliafito’s behavior during his tenure heading the medical school.

Fine. We’ll only stop lying when totally cornered. We’re totally cornered. So here’s the deal. Here’s the letter where the soon to be ex-president of USC finally coughs it up. (Not that ol’ UD thinks that even now he’s entirely coughed it up. Ol’ UD is sure there’s more even than this. But this is certainly something.)

[The prez] revealed late Friday that the university had [in fact] received complaints and imposed disciplinary measures against the then-dean of its medical school…

… Puliafito had [in fact] been the subject of “various complaints” during nearly a decade as the dean of the Keck School of Medicine. … Puliafito [had in fact] received [obviously toothless] “disciplinary action and professional development coaching.”

Nikias also provided new details about Puliafito’s final months in the job before he resigned in the middle of the Spring 2016 term.

In 2015, USC Provost Michael Quick put Puliafito “on notice for being disengaged from his leadership duties,” the president said.

UD would have loved to be in the room for the professional development coaching. CARMEN PUT DOWN THE BUTANE TORCH …

Oh, read the article. Feast your eyes on the USC receptionists, committees, provosts, and presidents who couldn’t be bothered checking up on whether the person in charge of medicine – you know, patient care, doctor education – at the university was as fucked up as he, well, yes, now that I look at him, certainly seemed to be. Consider an entire university leadership treating the local newspaper of record like a worthless piece of shit.

And sit tight – the producers of the film probably haven’t even starting thinking about casting it yet — they’re waiting out the story before they do that. Al Pacino should be finished doing Joe Paterno by then; he’d make a great Carmen Puliafito. For prez: John Waters.

… this story … for UD to share with you one of her favorite ads.

So when eminent Stanford med school professor John Borchers staggered onto his private plane and flew himself into the side of a mountain in 2008, Stanford could get away with saying nothing when reporters tried asking the school about the fact that the body of the busy teacher/clinician was loaded down with so many drugs it took like a page and a half to list them all. He’d been a known addict for ten years.

In addition to cocaine and Prozac, toxicology tests by the FAA turned up opiates, mood stabilizers and anti-psychotic drugs. One of the drugs, buprenorphine, was among those Borchers prescribed to patients suffering from heroin addiction, according to his own online business profile.

John Borchers didn’t know how to fly very well, and he was maybe finally close to losing his license to practice medicine, so this was arguably a carefully prepared (#1: swallow the medicine cabinet; #2: pilot your plane alone at night through mountains) suicide. Yet Stanford has never said a word about having maintained this dangerous wreck of a man in a responsible and visible position on its faculty, though given his long record of addiction and attempted detox Stanford must have known about him.

UD drags up this ancient history because if you put aside the difference that Carmen Puliafito is still alive (though from his total silence in response to all efforts to talk to him you wouldn’t know it), his is a similar story of pretty overt fuckedupness determinedly ignored by a university that already has quite the history of ignoring fucked up high-level people.

USC faculty members I’ve been in touch with are incensed that a doctor was allowed to take patients for more than a year after his drug-fueled behavior was reported to the university, and they’re not buying the administration’s claims of ignorance.

Puliafito engaged in behavior (partying with meth-head friends in his campus office) that seemed designed to dare the University of Southern California to do something about him. Even after the LA Times told USC’s president that Puliafito had spent an evening lying through his teeth to the police about his relationship to a young woman found overdosed beside him in a Pasadena hotel room littered with drug paraphernalia (if you enjoy this sort of thing, you can listen to the police interview), the president simply wouldn’t hear what he was being told. In effect, he still won’t.

What we have here is a cover-up. Systematic cover-ups, as Steve Lopez notes. And you know what? Cover-ups exist to cover up not just a specific triggering event (Puliafito/Pasadena/Police), but, one has to assume, related, and possibly worse, stuff. What is USC hiding?