UGA PROFESSOR LOSES TENURE
AFTER PUBLIC SEX WITH STUDENT

Background here.

Three more people — including a star wide receiver on Vanderbilt University’s football team — were indicted Friday in connection with the ongoing investigation into the rape of a 21-year-old unconscious woman at a campus dorm this summer.

Commodores wide receiver Chris Boyd, 21, is charged with one felony count of being an accessory after the fact. [He is accused of] taking part in an attempted coverup of the sexual assault through advice to certain defendants indicted last week as part of the ongoing investigation.

Also charged were Miles Joseph Finley, 19, of Bermuda Dunes, Calif., and Joseph Dominick Quinzio, 20, of Palm Desert, Calif., both accused of tampering with evidence.

They were high school teammates and friends of Brandon Vandenburg, one of the four former Vanderbilt players charged with multiple counts of rape.

Background here.

Dartmouth boy stands at the foot of the bed,
Drops on a woman his little gold thread.
Hush! Hush! Stop him who dares!
Christopher Robin is saying his prayers.

Dartmouth boy stands at the foot of the bed,
Drops on a woman his little gold thread.
Hush! Hush! Stop him who dares!
Christopher Robin is saying his prayers.

For a warm, musing, quiet time, a time when things slow down or stop, a poem by Stanley Kunitz, full of quiet musing. UD stops the poem when she feels like it, thinking aloud about its form and its meanings.

The Abduction

Some things I do not profess
to understand, perhaps
not wanting to, including
whatever it was they did
with you or you with them
that timeless summer day
when you stumbled out of the wood,
distracted, with your white blouse torn
and a bloodstain on your skirt.

[This is a wispy, thin-lined, first-person account – directed to a man’s lover – of a memory involving her that continues to baffle and unnerve him. The thinness of his poetic line, and his opening admission of his inadequacy, create a mood of lassitude, vagueness, half-thereness. The poem will be a narrative – the story of the lover’s abduction – but it will be told in the sketchy thin-lined manner of a man in fact defended against the story’s meanings.

We are in a fog, in short, of the sort one knows from Kafka stories, or from novels like The Good Soldier. It’s the condition – the pathology – of not knowing that interests writers like these.

That summer day on which the abduction took place was “timeless,” which is to say it has made on the speaker (and presumably his lover) a permanent mark; they both return to it again and again in memory and in desire. Timeless too in the sense that the events the poet is about to recount seem mythic, unreal, out of time altogether, some miraculous break in the fabric of time. Think here of that unnerving Australian film, Picnic at Hanging Rock which also features virginal women in white dresses “taken” by an alien force, taken out of time.

Here the lover returns from her abduction, spilled sexual blood on her whiteness…]

“Do you believe?” you asked.

[Do you believe the transformation that has happened to me? Do you love me enough to believe the bizarre tale I’m about to unfold? To believe my way of knowing/not knowing what has happened to transform me from white to red? To love is to enter into the deepest, most wounded, most obscure mental world of the loved one, as in this poem, by Stephen Spender. Or this one, by Richard Wilbur. Are you willing to do that?]

Between us, through the years,
we pieced enough together
to make the story real:

[This is love: That together you give life and even plausibility to… hell, you honor the particular myths, repetition compulsions, odd ways of making sense of one’s destiny, that the loved one has generated out of her experience, her imagination, her – to anticipate the end of this poem – rapture and dread.]

how you encountered on the path
a pack of sleek, grey hounds,
trailed by a dumbshow retinue
in leather shrouds; and how
you were led, through leafy ways,
into the presence of a royal stag,
flaming in his chestnut coat,
who kneeled on a swale of moss
before you; and how you were borne
aloft in triumph through the green,
stretched on his rack of budding horn,
till suddenly you found yourself alone
in a trampled clearing.

[So here’s the medieval myth itself, the way-weird account of her torn and bloodied self she offers the lover. The hunting dogs first appear, and then what sounds like flagellants, and they all lead her to a major stag who stretches her on his “budding horn.” Here is her dream of her triumphant sex, her initiation into the power (“kneeled… before you”) of her own body.]

That was a long time ago,
almost another age, but even now,
when I hold you in my arms,
I wonder where you are.

[Same thing Spender and Wilbur wonder, gazing at their lovers. If these men are going to get anywhere near where these women are, they will indeed have to “believe,” have to enter lovingly into the far country that is the soul of any other human being. The poet feels his inability/unwillingness to enter the deepest, strangest, sources of this woman’s being; yet, loving her, he wonders.]

Sometimes I wake to hear
the engines of the night thrumming
outside the east bay window
on the lawn spreading to the rose garden.

[There is a world inside the world, as Don DeLillo has Lee Harvey Oswald repeat to himself throughout Libra; there is that realm of power, of being, that thrums through our existence, a constant dark engine pulsing through us, making us and making our lives, generating our stories. You can be upbeat about this, and suggest that eventually we can have access to these deep sources of ourselves and even others:

… then he thinks he knows
The hills where his life rose,
And the Sea where it goes.

Or you can be far less upbeat:

…in time,
We half-identify the blind impress
All our behavings bear, may trace it home.
But to confess,

On that green evening when our death begins,
Just what it was, is hardly satisfying,
Since it applied only to one man once,
And that one dying.]

You lie beside me in elegant repose,
a hint of transport hovering on your lips,

[A hint of transport hovering — always an allusion, in her repose, to that transformative mythic moment of transport which has nothing to do with her lover.]

indifferent to the harsh green flares
that swivel through the room,
searchlights controlled by unseen hands.

[Always, ecstatically, she returns to her primal triumph, and this in some sense protects her from the harsh temporal material world that seeks her out, seeks to awaken her to the end of power, eros, solace.]

Out there is a childhood country,
bleached faces peering in
with coals for eyes.
Our lives are spinning out
from world to world;
the shapes of things
are shifting in the wind.
What do we know
beyond the rapture and the dread?

[Outside their bedroom rages a world of monsters out of childhood; outside their haven of life intensified lies death (bleached faces… with coals for eyes), and even as she circles endlessly into her glorious scene of transformation, she – and he – are being otherwise transformed, spun out from the world of life into the world of death.

So this is where we are; this is all we know — the rapture of our death-defying embrace of existence, and the dread of our knowing/not wanting to know how this compulsively reiterated erotic fable will end.]

Good ol’ Bert. University of Georgia through and through.

Graham Spanier, Holden Thorp, Gordon Gee, Donna Shalala, David Boren – As Chief Inspiration Officers of football factories, these leaders have taken whatever dignity the office of university president once had and run all the way downfield with it.

Rick Perry’s football factory – Texas A&M – has got itself a way-depraved chancellor who’s been out there boohooing over little Johnny Manziel and his drunken greedy ways. So the boy’s a lout — so what? Physical aggression, financial self-serving, and booze up the wazoo happen to be the values we cherish at this school, and Manziel’s three for three.

Korea’s Dongguk University keeps suing and suing Yale, trying to get them to give it fifty million dollars because of an administrative mistake relative to the amazingly, comprehensively corrupt Shin Jeong-ah.

Their latest appeal has failed – since in order to prove defamation you need to prove malice – and it looks as though instead of enriching itself by tens of millions it has seriously impoverished itself through court costs in a case about faked credentials that should never have been filed.

**********

UD thanks Ruth.

… but when four heavily recruited football players show up for their first semester and almost immediately team up to rape an unconscious student and photograph themselves doing it (these are the charges), your school has just caught and begun to run with the Penn State pass, and there’s nothing your pleading can do about it.

It’ll be a long carry, in part because Vanderbilt is one of the few remaining morally and academically respectable big-football schools in America, so there’s novelty here. Schadenfreude, too. People from all the dirtbag schools will certainly enjoy smearing shit on clean-as-a-whistle Vandy. And as the trial gets going (if there’s a trial) we’ll get all the Steubenvillesque details.

Yes, Vandy’s new to this, so maybe it thinks dismissing these people from the team and protesting the school’s innocence in the matter (Recruit predators? Us?) will do the trick. Learning curve time.

… in this article about a fake PhD who gets paid handsomely — on the basis of his pretend degree — to fuck up people’s lives in South Dakota.

President Credit Swaps is once again on the move!

[W]hen the 58-year-old [Larry] Summers came to the Obama White House, he was worth $7 million; when he left at the end of 2010, he “jumped into a moneymaking spree” at a hedge fund and at Citigroup — a bank rescued by a government bailout — so he could be a gazillionaire by the time Ben Bernake retires and the job is open.

His stuffing of his pockets within hours of leaving the White House job now makes it unseemly for him to lead the Federal Reserve in enforcing the important new regulations from the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill.

He is an exemplar of, rather than a solution to, the obscenely lucrative revolving-door problem mocked by Mark Leibovich in his new book, “This Town.”

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Maureen Dowd, New York Times

… Dean Shirley Mays allegedly described as ‘building a better mousetrap.'”

Wow. If true, Dean Mays certainly has a way with words.

She’s at wild and wacky (background here: scroll down) Northern Kentucky University; he’s at the University of Cincinnati. Their notorious litigation seems to be about divorce, custody, blahblah; but UD asks you to note that she has a book.

It’s a self-published Christian tract about having been abused by her litigation-mate. (NKU seems happy to let her emblazon her university webpage with this vanity project.)

Of course the person she married is contributing to the disgusting outcome about which more and more judges are complaining; but she’s got a book to promote.

The sky in the wee hours shone milky white, a cloud latte without celestial seasoning. Mocha sheep pastured below the froth and a toad belched. A cat, slinking along our shins, startled us.

The air was wet and cool and I didn’t miss the meteors since what brewed up in their place was this sweet evening with glimmering hosta flowers.

The bowl of the heavens was white, and white also (that last phrase was a verbal tic of James Joyce’s) were the low picket fences along the butterfly gardens.

So no dark sky, no black brew studded with stars, for ol’ UD last night. “Sorry about the rain!” wrote the cottage keeper in the note she attached to our breakfast basket this morning. She walked it down from her house (she wore a yellow poncho and a knee brace): A goat cheese frittata, sausages, cheese grits with bacon (“use green chili salt if desired”), date nut muffins, rhubarb tart, fruits, coffee, tea.

(As I write this, on the cottage porch, a hummingbird buzzes me.)

Strange that this place, Pleasant Springs Farm, is only fifteen minutes from the built-up suburb of Germantown. These thirty acres are tranquil, pristine, with all the rustic bells and whistles.

UD‘s insta-meteor blogging starts here, in this historically registered cabin on a Maryland sheep farm. UD has left ‘thesda for dark open sky, and so far things look pretty good. The cottage keeper prepared for us by setting two chairs out at the edge of the pasture. “Just be sure to lock the gate behind you.” Three sheep will share the star party.

It’s hot, I’m not gonna lie to you. Our walk across the pasture just now (it’s late afternoon) was sweaty and buggy. But a breeze is coming up, and it’s bound to be cooler at three AM.

Speaking of bugs, I saw, on my way to the creek, a gold and black horned spider at the center of a vast web. Must find out what it is. Also saw maybe a skunk? Not sure.

Butterflies are everywhere, of course – a big garden opens out from the cabin, and right now a lot of it is about blooming butterfly bushes.

The window unit here in the bedroom keeps things cool. There’s a musty smell all over and lots of exposed beams and a small library upstairs which includes a 2008 Critical Inquiry.

The plan is as follows: Les UDs go back down county for dinner. On their return, they sleep until midnight. Then they steal out to the pasture (scaring the shit out of the sheep, I guess), place their chairs in the center of the field, and look up.

Make way for the lawsuits.

But don’t hold your breath waiting for an American university with a significant football program to stop bashing its students’ brains in.