… has a good take on Suicide Note. (Background here.)

Christine Smallwood, PhD student, Columbia University, gets it said. It’s in today’s New York Times.

When you leave your room for class, leave the laptop behind. In a lecture, you’ll only waste your time and your parents’ money, disrespect your professor and annoy whomever is trying to pay attention around you by spending the whole hour on Facebook.

You don’t need a computer to take notes — good note-taking is not transcribing. All that clack, clack, clacking … you’re a student, not a court reporter. And in seminar or discussion sections, get used to being around a table with a dozen other humans, a few books and your ideas. After all, you have the rest of your life to hide behind a screen during meetings.

Oh, and entire online classes! Quelle joie.

… wins the PEN Saul Bellow Award.

Excerpts from a PEN interview with him:

I still have my old paperback copy of Herzog (Fawcett Crest, $0.95), a novel I recall reading with great pleasure. It wasn’t the first Bellow novel I encountered—that was The Victim, whose opening sentence (“On some nights New York is as hot as Bangkok.”) seemed a novel in itself…

The theme that seems to have evolved in my work during the past decade concerns time—time and loss. This was not a plan; the novels have simply tended to edge in that direction. Some years ago I had the briefest of exchanges with a professor of philosophy. I raised the subject of time. He said simply, “Time is too difficult.” Yes, time is a mystery and perhaps best examined (or experienced by my characters) in a concise and somewhat enigmatic manner…

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So…. maybe we make a little mixed cocktail? A little Bellow, a little Mitchell Heisman, author of Suicide Note [details here].

In Herzog (UD‘s got the same old Fawcett Crest edition DeLillo’s got, and she’s been pawing through it), our seriously fucked up hero, Moses Herzog (his name taken, as you may already know, from a very minor character in James Joyce’s Ulysses) is visiting his seriously fucked up friend Luke, a University of Chicago scientist who can’t deal with people at all, but who so loved his recently deceased monkey that as the monkey was dying he gave it mouth to mouth resuscitation.

Since the monkey’s death Luke has been deeply, dangerously depressed.

“It really threw me into a spin. I thought that palling around with Rocco was a gag. I didn’t realize how much he meant to me. But the truth is, I realized that no other death in the world could have affected me so much. I had to ask myself whether the death of my brother would have shook me up half as much. I think not. We’re all some kind of nut or other, I realize. But…”

He finds a psychotherapist who tells him to imagine himself dead, in a coffin, with all the people who meant something to him in his life passing by his body. He’s supposed to think of what he wanted to tell them in life, what the real truth was between them, within him, etc.

But it doesn’t work. All he can think about are memories of farcical events involving fat aunts and cornfed showgirls from his urban youth…

Herzog says to him:

A man may say, ‘From now on I’m going to speak the truth.’ But the truth hears him and runs away and hides before he’s even speaking. There is something funny about the human condition, and civilized intelligence makes fun of its own ideas…

Human life is far subtler than any of its models. …

Do you have to think yourself into a coffin and perform these exercises with death? As soon as thought begins to deepen it reaches death, first thing. … I really believe that brotherhood is what makes a man human…. When the preachers of dread tell you that others only distract you from metaphysical freedom then you must turn away from them. The real and essential question is one of our employment by other human beings and their employment by us. Without this true employment, you never dread death, you cultivate it. And consciousness when it doesn’t truly understand what to live for, what to die for, can only abuse and ridicule itself.

… provides updates through the day on the mass shooting at a fraternity party near its campus. Students from Seton Hall and the New Jersey Institute of Technology are among those shot.

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Update: One student has died.

… are about to drive to Baltimore to see:

1. the Frank Zappa statue; and

2. the Katyn Memorial.

I’ll blog about it, of course.

Every day’s going to be Bloomsday.

Ireland may be on its way to elect a gay president after the first opinion poll in the race showed Senator David Norris, a Dublin-based gay activist, well-ahead.

… The size of the Norris lead is surprising. The Joyce scholar and gay rights campaigner is an independent senator representing Trinity College in the Irish senate and has never been considered a candidate for national office…

A protestant, he was actually born in what was then the Belgian Congo in 1944 but came to Ireland a few years later…

[Norris] has also played a major role in popularizing Bloomsday, now celebrated on June 16th every year.

If they want to go even further and elect a Jew and a Joyce freak, there’s always UD.

FLORIDA SAYS FOOTBALL ARRESTS
SHOULDN’T DEFINE ITS PROGRAM OVERALL

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headline, usa today

Answer: It doesn’t.

… after a few too many.

Mr UD read this New York Times article to UD yesterday, over breakfast. One of UD‘s readers, David, also sent it to her. As if its content weren’t moving enough, there’s the photo.

UD instantly thought of the David Hare play, Plenty.

From the Chicago Trib:

… Even a [University of Chicago] colleague, former law school Dean Geoffrey Stone, had something pointed to say. [About this.]

“People are reasonably focused on the view that this is absurd for somebody who lives a relatively privileged life to define himself as not rich because there are people who are richer,” Stone said. “The way he wrote it opened himself up to that. If Todd had shown me a draft of it, I would have told him that this is going to call for scorn or derision, and that is not what you are trying to achieve here. You better think of another way to make the point.”

Scathing Online Schoolmarm says: He could have made the point. But the only way he could have made it was through humor, and the guy does not strike SOS as a natural comedian. Self-deprecation would probably be the best subcategory of humor with which to make the point, and here again the guy does not strike me as having the gift of self-deprecation.

Even Stone, I’m afraid, ain’t quite there when he calls Henderson’s life “relatively privileged.” SOS grasps the point that Americans more privileged than Henderson exist. This does not make his life relatively privileged. It is absolutely privileged.

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Add the recent focus on legacy admissions to the Henderson mess, and America’s privileged will need to look sharp for awhile. Incoming.

… to want to read Margaret Soltan’s monthly articles in the Garrett Park Maryland Bugle. She covers the Town Council meetings.

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Link doesn’t seem to be working at the moment. I’ll try to fix it.

Remembering Nora Miller.

… the blog Universal Hub, which seems to be all about Boston.

Readers there are linking to, Twittering, and Facebooking UD‘s post on the suicide in Harvard Yard.

It means you want to make an intellectual spectacle of yourself. You have something urgent to say to the world, a final truth, and you want the world to notice you and what you have to say.

Mitchell Heisman has accomplished this, somewhat. Before shooting himself in the head in front of tourists and students in the Yard, he emailed to hundreds of academics a long manuscript titled Suicide Note.

Although Heisman’s suicide was his own, with his own specific miseries and obsessions, he’s given us something broadly valuable in Suicide Note. Suicide is traumatic and mysterious for the rest of us; when someone about to do himself in writes at length about why, we can profit from it.

I’ve only read the last few chapters of Heisman’s note; they contain the core of his convictions.

I rage at the entire cosmos for having no ultimate meaning.

Heisman’s nihilism was acute, extreme. His super-rationalism insisted that in the absence of any obvious, overarching point to human existence, one might as well end things. He describes, quite tellingly, his experience of “reductionist collapses” – moments in his life when all of the emotions, faiths, myths, and attachments we generate to give ourselves pleasure and purpose crash to bits. With “my analytic tendencies,” Heisman explains, “I could take myself apart in some ways, but I could not put myself back together.”

In a desperate reconstitution-experiment, Heisman begins listening to Bach:

Bach bounds me to the earth enough so that I can function as a living human being. Bach is ground from outside of myself that makes up for the nihilistic lack of ground within myself.

The choice of Bach is significant: Heisman seeks order, narrative, feeling, in a disordered, fluctuating, emotionless cosmos, and Bach is the most ordered of composers.

But Bach – a deeply religious man – doesn’t last long. Heisman’s “unadulterated material objectivity” sees the crutch, the lie, in his consort with Bach. “The progress of reason leads to nihilism,” he concludes; “there is no fundamentally rational basis for choosing life over death.”

Heisman’s hypertrophic rationalism allows him no non-rational or even semi- or weakly-rational basis for existence. He is an intellectual fanatic, demanding all or nothing — a fully meaningful world according to strictly rational laws, or forget about it.

Places like universities – locations packed with people invigorated rather than depleted by analytic tendencies – must be unmasked as the contemptibly false consolations that they are. So you travel to the local pinnacle of human thought – Harvard University – and point your gun at both sources of your misfortune: the life of the mind, and your particular mind.