This afternoon Les UDs travel to a cottage on a sheep farm near Sugarloaf Mountain. Late this evening they will leave the cottage with two folding chairs. They will set the chairs out on a pasture, and, lying back, they will see what perseids they can see.

Is the farm far enough from city lights? Will there be too much cloud cover? No sense worrying the thing. Do not ask what is it? Let us go and make our visit.

And speaking of T.S Eliot, there’s this excerpt on the dark from East Coker:

O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark,
The vacant interstellar spaces, the vacant into the vacant,
The captains, merchant bankers, eminent men of letters,
The generous patrons of art, the statesmen and the rulers,
Distinguished civil servants, chairmen of many committees,
Industrial lords and petty contractors, all go into the dark,
And dark the Sun and Moon, and the Almanach de Gotha
And the Stock Exchange Gazette, the Directory of Directors,
And cold the sense and lost the motive of action.
And we all go with them, into the silent funeral,
Nobody’s funeral, for there is no one to bury.
I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you
Which shall be the darkness of God. As, in a theatre,
The lights are extinguished, for the scene to be changed
With a hollow rumble of wings, with a movement of darkness on darkness,
And we know that the hills and the trees, the distant panorama
And the bold imposing facade are all being rolled away
Or as, when an underground train, in the tube, stops too long between stations
And the conversation rises and slowly fades into silence
And you see behind every face the mental emptiness deepen
Leaving only the growing terror of nothing to think about;
Or when, under ether, the mind is conscious but conscious of nothing
I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.
Whisper of running streams, and winter lightning.
The wild thyme unseen and the wild strawberry,
The laughter in the garden, echoed ecstasy
Not lost, but requiring, pointing to the agony
Of death and birth.

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Dark is mental confusion, our brief weak being in the vastness. Dark is also our death, and dark is the apocalypse that will kill the earth forever; but meanwhile dark is consciousness – our living consciousness, but a consciousness that understands nothing. Darkness is where, unable to think, we do best to wait in the humility of not knowing. We do best to write poetry like this – poetry of still souls sitting in the stilly night, circling the same words — dark dark dark — to make a weak work of bricolage.

Or a frankly terrified work of bricolage, as in the Wallace Stevens poem, Domination of Black:

At night, by the fire,
The colors of the bushes
And of the fallen leaves,
Repeating themselves,
Turned in the room,
Like the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind.
Yes: but the color of the heavy hemlocks
Came striding.
And I remembered the cry of the peacocks.

Out of the window,
I saw how the planets gathered
Like the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind.
I saw how the night came,
Came striding like the color of the heavy hemlocks
I felt afraid.
And I remembered the cry of the peacocks.

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Same redundancy on the words, our marooned awareness circling the thin evidentiary setting of our mind’s and the world’s dark nature. The brilliant colors of the peacocks’ tails – the brilliant words of the poet’s beautiful and exceptional consciousness? – might lighten all of this. But no.

The colors of their tails
Were like the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind,
In the twilight wind.
They swept over the room,
Just as they flew from the boughs of the hemlocks
Down to the ground.

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So again and again these repetitive bricolages are the poems of our climate, as in this contemporary one, by John Taggart:

Orange Berries Dark Green Leaves

We will not look up how they got their name in a book of names
we will not trace the name’s root conjecture its first murmuring
the root of the berries their leaves is succoured by darkness
darkness like a large block of stone hauled on a wooden sled
like stone formed and reformed by a dark sea rolling in turmoil.

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

Pure distilled Stevens: The list of negations, as in The Snow Man; multiple deflecting similes in place of any approach toward assertion; the absence of foundations, roots, meanings, and the presence only of a dark perennial unapprehended tumultuous process of existential forming and reforming; and of course the rolling repetitive style. We are here as on a darkling plain.

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

But here are meteors, light streaking across darkness, and we see our own light in them.

“They’re human souls,” I said, “tired of that dazzling dream,
Returning to the sweet, cool fields of earth.”

This line from a poem about watching the perseids is like Cathy’s dream in Wuthering Heights:

“Heaven did not seem to be my home; and I broke my heart with weeping to come back to earth; and the angels grew so angry that they flung me out onto the middle of the heath on the top of Wuthering Heights; where I woke sobbing for joy.”

We see our imperishable earthly bliss in the meteors, as when Shelley saw Keats as “a dying meteor” that “stains a wreath / Of moonlight vapour.”

This is James Merrill, too, in Prose of Departure, contemplating, in a shop in Japan

… the most fabulous kimono of all: dark, dark purple traversed by a winding, starry path…

may be read as having emerged triumphant from the vats of night.

Paul Campos, one of this blog’s heroes, takes note of Southern California Institute of Law (bar pass rate 2012: zero), a shining example of what you get when your state bar will accredit anything.

SCIL has, understandably, sued the bar association for making it post pass rates on its website.

Its complaint also complains about a new requirement that accredited California schools maintain a pass rate of at least forty percent.

Think about it. Your tax money pays for SCIL student loans.

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

UD thanks Jeremy.

Or, as the headline in today’s Denver Post has it:

CU’s Tale of Riches to Rags

Another headline might have been

We’re following the breathless tale of Petro Melnyk, on-the-run bribe-demanding erstwhile rector of the National State Tax Service University of Ukraine (details here).

Melnyk has now called from his secret location to explain that he feels too under the weather at the moment for the whole arrest thing, but he’ll be back in touch when he’s perked up a bit.

… and it happened like this (Gorme has died, at the age of 84): I was singing and playing through Latin Songs and I discovered one song in particular that I really loved: Sabrás que te Quiero.

I did the thing I often do: I played and sang it again and again, trying to find the energy, flow, control, lightness, and expressivity in my voice (all of those things being really difficult for me to evoke), and at the same time trying to find a way to work my inept fingers through the piano accompaniment. The version in Latin Songs was quite dumbed down, but it still took me awhile to feel comfortable in the piece.

I’m not sure why I liked it so much. It’s simple, I guess, but it has that weird thing that good songs have. Despite its simplicity, it gets to you, it’s beautiful, emotional, even somehow musically interesting… It works its way up from quiet notes to amorous excited notes at the end…

Anyway, I also did a thing I often do — checked for YouTubes of the number.

I didn’t know it was a standard; there were plenty of versions, male and female, to be had.

The one I loved above all the others was Eydie Gorme’s — and this despite the fact that the musical arrangement was way kitschy. Her voice was so good it easily rose above the instrumental dreck. It had all that stuff I listed above, the stuff I find on any given day at the piano so difficult to pull from within myself — energy, flow, etc., etc. Occasionally, on mysteriously special days, UD‘s voice wakes up in the morning with all of those attributes, and I walk it over to the piano and just let loose through all of my songbooks… I sit there for hours marveling at this sudden vocal rightness I hear myself producing. But it’s utterly fickle, utterly unusual, that my voice does that.

Great singers, like Gorme and Cecilia Bartoli and Kathleen Battle and Ella Fitzgerald just have it there all the time, the sweet spot, and you can see that they have the personality that accompanies it. By this I mean that there’s a rather strange nervy buoyancy, a headstrong brilliancy, to all of them as human beings (this nervy buoyancy can be much darker, as in Nina Simone or Maria Callas, but I think it’s the same basic attribute of intense unstoppable essentially celebratory life energy which has managed to discipline itself in the direction of the production of sound) which allows them to carry a song tonally and emotionally, and even own it.

I was aware of Gorme’s tricks — the melismas; the sly dynamics on certain long notes; the whispering shyness of the opening lines which broadens until she produces the positively cosmic vibrato at the very end (it’s oddly and excitingly masculine in its muscularity, this final vibrato, suggesting the transcendent strength of her passion); the slight catch — a little cry – at certain moments; the coy curvature of some sounds, which has the effect of personalizing this as one particular woman’s love song… I was as aware of these tricks as I am when listening to Battle, who for my money has the purest and sweetest and most unearthly of soprano voices.

I wanted to hear more of Gorme. Song after song, she found the meaning of the piece, entered into it, and brought that weird and for me pretty unattainable mix of control and flow and overflow to it. She was a pop singer, no doubt about it, a creature of Vegas lounges and corny stage banter. But – like the kitsch accompaniment to her Sabrás que te Quiero – that stuff had nothing to do with the voice.

Emeritus professor Gary Conti does magic tricks to give back and (according to his arrest warrant) accounting tricks to take back. Gary seems to have been part of a conspiracy that stole about ten million dollars of our taxes — a particularly contemptible conspiracy, since it involved stealing money meant for children’s mental health programs.

The embezzlement charges include [co-conspirators] sending $475,078 to a business owned by Conti called Learning Associates between 2008 and 2011, using fake invoices to justify the payments.

Conti, in turn, kicked back $231,550 in 44 separate transactions to the Child Family Advocacy Fund’s bank account in Cut Bank, from which Augare and Onstad drew $225,482 for their person use, prosecutors said.

… Prudential Center, Newark, NJ…

… with the drummer from The Killers.
UD has not heard of The Killers, but
she is supposed to be ashamed of this fact
because they are famous. Maybe you have
heard of them. La Kid‘s the blonde.

The University of Miami – very close to becoming (with one scandal and another) the functional equivalent of the Las Vegas Strip – is in a tizzy over whether to delete A-Rod’s name from its baseball stadium. The article quotes one observer:

In cases like these where a donor’s name has been disgraced, their reputation and the purpose behind the gift have to be reevaluated, said Rae Goldsmith, vice president of the Council for Advancement and Support of Education.

“The Enron chair of business ethics is going to send a different kind of message than the Enron chair of the arts,” Goldsmith explained.

Different from would be better, but put that aside. Is it really true that we’d be okay with the Enron chair of the arts but not the Enron chair of business ethics? Isn’t that like saying we’d be okay with the Hitler chair of poetry but not the Hitler chair of race relations? The Madoff chair of creative writing but not the Madoff chair of accounting? Franchement, I think these names have sufficient general renown to make it unlikely that even human kinetics and leisure studies would have them.

A dispatch from America’s Number One Party School.

Ha! UD just walked out of her Montgomery County house to sample the humidity (absurdly high) and instantly saw, clinging to her house, both a living humming red-eyed cicada (it flew off when I approached) and, inches away from it, a discarded cicada shell. She brought the shell in and put it on her writing desk and it looks exactly like this.

Brian Emanuel Schatz
Expresses himself via blats.
“I learned it from Rona.
We met at Pomona.
It dates to my time in the frats.”

Is escaped university rector!

Esteemed ex-rector of National Tax University (is like if IRS had campus where to train agents) was under house arrest for selling admission to aforesaid university (here is photo of Petro Melnyk having vapors) for hundreds and hundreds hryvnia. Rector Melnyk “escaped by getting rid of an electronic bracelet… Interior Ministry addresses the citizens for help in obtaining information about possible stay of Melnyk.”

… meteor shower drags on, with Les UDs spending the night of August 12 somewhere in the mountains around here (or near the Chesapeake Bay) in search of a dark sky.

Les UDs are, this time of year, usually at their way-remote houselet in Upstate New York, where the night skies are amazing and where UD has indeed (wrapped in a sleeping bag and leaning back in a lawn chair) seen her share of meteors… But nothing you’d call a shower…

However life-altering or bitterly disappointing this year’s local outing, UD will of course blog it.

… with a Frontline investigative report (League of Denial) due in October, just keep in mind that this brain injuring violence is happening at universities, where that organ is supposedly being nurtured.

Think about it. We recruit young men to our universities in order for them to get their brains bashed in.

Only in America.

Mark Fainaru-Wada, an investigative journalist… said that it was difficult for viewers who watch the game on television at home to really appreciate how violent professional football actually is, something that came as a shock to him when he covered his first San Francisco 49ers game.

“I remember being down there for the first time and being both utterly shocked and terrified at what I was seeing,” he said. Watching the game on “TV or even being in person [in the stands] does not do justice to how violent, how fast, how loud the sport is… When you’re down on the field, even on the sidelines, it’s remarkable and it’s terrifying.”

I know, I know. What a sissy.

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

PS: Note the song that accompanies the program’s trailer:

Hear the screams from everywhere
I’m addicted to the thrill
It’s a dangerous love affair…

An ESPN commentator fails to understand the ethical nuances of being a Texan. (Audio.)