… is the last phrase uttered by Antonio Damasio in this interview. Damasio is a neuroscientist.
UD thinks a good deal about consciousness. The novels she teaches tend to be stream of consciousness works by the high modernists — James Joyce, Virginia Woolf. UD suspects she loves modernist novels precisely because they put consciousness, and degrees of consciousness, in motion, over time; they feature characters actively, eloquently, being conscious. These characters are basically saying, over and over again in their narratives, I exist, I have a life, I am surrounded by a particular world, I have a self that observes my organism, that organizes my experience… These modes of being are, as Damasio describes them, the constituents of consciousness.
Damasio calls consciousness “an add-on” to the comparatively passive, registering “mind.” It’s something “specialized, to create what we call the self.”
A passage like this one in Ulysses, in which Leopold Bloom, at a cemetery, ponders what it must be like to be conscious that you’re dying, is, what, a tour de force of consciousness…. It begins not with Bloom’s stream of consciousness, but with a few lines from the novel’s disembodied third-person narrative voice. Only with “Well cut frockcoat” do we enter Bloom’s speaking consciousness.
Gentle sweet air blew round the bared heads in a whisper. Whisper. The boy by the gravehead held his wreath with both hands staring quietly in the black open space. Mr Bloom moved behind the portly kindly caretaker. Well cut frockcoat. Weighing them up perhaps to see which will go next. Well it is a long rest. Feel no more. It’s the moment you feel. Must be damned unpleasant. Can’t believe it at first. Mistake must be: someone else. Try the house opposite. Wait, I wanted to. I haven’t yet. Then darkened deathchamber. Light they want. Whispering around you. Would you like to see a priest? Then rambling and wandering. Delirium all you hid all your life. The death struggle. His sleep is not natural. Press his lower eyelid. Watching is his nose pointed is his jaw sinking are the soles of his feet yellow. Pull the pillow away and finish it off on the floor since he’s doomed. Devil in that picture of sinner’s death showing him a woman. Dying to embrace her in his shirt. Last act of Lucia. Shall I nevermore behold thee? Bam! expires. Gone at last. People talk about you a bit: forget you. Don’t forget to pray for him. Remember him in your prayers. Even Parnell. Ivy day dying out. Then they follow: dropping into a hole one after the other.
We are praying now for the repose of his soul. Hoping you’re well and not in hell.
So this is exciting, no? This is James Joyce’s consciousness in brilliant compassionate synergy with the consciousness of his creation – that’s the first reason it’s exciting. He’s making a never-alive human being live fictively. Great fiction raises the dead, or, rather, the never alive. Great art is the strongest and most beautiful reaching out of an individual consciousness to resuscitate human reality.
But in its own terms, Bloom’s consciousness, aroused by all the death around him to a most acute morbidity, is just as exciting. In this insanely condensed paragraph, these few moments out of Bloom’s consciousness-stream, we experience something more profound (if you ask UD) than, say, Tolstoy’s Death of Ivan Ilych.
Indeed, Bloom’s rapid-fire dawning-death narrative is a sort of Ivan Ilych for Dummies, ain’t it? The two-minute version…
Only it doesn’t really feel reductive, because it’s attached to a consciousness in whose reality we believe (even though, if you ask me now, I’ll concede that Leopold Bloom does not, and never did, exist), and whose comic, philosophic richness we admire, recognizing its intellectual maneuvers in the face of this sort of threat to its integrity (I mean, cemeteries, funerals – that threat) as rather similar to our own.
This is the great joy, the triumphant feeling, of Ulysses, the reason people adore it and perform their Bloomsday bacchanalia every year… Antonio Damasio calls consciousness an add-on, which falls rather short, descriptively, of the intoxicating miracle of this specialized thing brewed to make a self.
There’s no sweeter consciousness-cognac than James Joyce’s Ulysses.
… without a stop at Communications.
Lucas Hanft, a Yale Daily News writer, complained as far back as 2003 that Yale had no Communications major:
We were watching the NCAA tournament when we happened to notice that (surprisingly) the majors of most of the players were stuff like communications, marketing schemes, or hotel management.
These are not majors offered by Yale College. Could Yale’s inability to recruit big-time athletes be the result of their now-seemingly narrow curriculum? Could this bastion of educational superiority be behind the times? Cornell has a school of hotel management, human ecology, and according to some, pharmacology. We can’t be left behind, sucking at the winds of change…
Yet nothing’s happened in all that time to change the majors at Yale. You still can’t major in communications.
Hanft is right to notice its popularity among big time college athletes. In an opinion piece about the big academic scandal going on at UNC Chapel Hill, Bomani Jones counts “seven communications majors” among the athletes being investigated:
When will more athletic departments uphold their end of the bargain and stop shielding athletes behind easy majors and preferred professors? When will they challenge their players to do things they never thought they were capable of scholastically, the way they do athletically?
… As long as education is treated as something to fit in around football, those people use the kids just as the agents Nick Saban so famously referred to as “pimps” do.
… Two and a half years ago, the Ann Arbor News published a damning series about the University of Michigan that detailed a patronizing system in which athletes were encouraged to take “easy” majors and shuffled into independent-study courses that sometimes involved as little as using a day planner. (And this was before Rich “‘Round the Clock” Rodriguez showed up.)
If the series made a ripple, the waters have long since stilled.
Majoring: It’s all about teamwork.
… not far from UD‘s house (she’s home today), involving a man with a gun and maybe bombs.
*********************
Update: Situation over. Hostages out safely. Gunman reportedly shot to death by police.
From the Toronto Sun:
… “You can’t write a good essay if you’re also texting your friends and checking your Facebook page,” [said University of Western Ontario sociology professor Doug Mann].
Because many students now bring laptops to class to take notes, websites such as Facebook and Twitter offer a tempting escape from lectures.
Mann said many students come to class, sit near the back and zone out, rarely taking part at all.
Nicole Segal agrees. Heading into her first year at the University of Western Ontario next week, she took a first-year psychology course in Gr. 12 through WISE — Western’s Initiative for Scholarly Excellence — to better prepare for university.
She said watching people check sites such as Facebook distracted her from what the professor was saying, and made her want to do the same.
“If you see people in front of you checking it, you’re like ‘Oh, I’m going to check mine, too’,” she said. “Then you’ll get even more distracted and say ‘Oh, what did i just miss?'” …
Slow blogging day around here yesterday, because UD was busy with her first day of classes.
She returned to her office after months away and found a number of fun things there.
Remember her great victory (well, first runner-up) in the 2010 Washington DC Bloomsday reading? Her award – a fine, framed Joycean map of Ireland – was on her door, with a congratulatory note from one of her colleagues.
On UD‘s desk sat a grand new computer she couldn’t use because she didn’t know its password.
Hearing her old friend Connie’s voice down the hall — Connie, department office manager, will fix this! — UD bawled out her name, and Connie came running and figured out the password.
As if this weren’t enough goodies, there was this congratulatory note on her desk (something about how UD‘s been teaching at GW for a long time) with a gift next to it: A glass apple paperweight.
UD wrote a thank you email for it, and then put it to work holding down a stack of syllabi.
In her pile of mail, she was particularly happy to see an invitation to an event of some kind at the National Press Club sponsored by Oxford University Press (the event had already happened). She was happy because it was addressed to
MARGARET SOLTAN
UNIVERSITY DIARIES
ENGLISH DEPARTMENT …
They’re addressing me by my blog now!
“Georgia football still leads all collegiate programs in offseason arrests,” continues an opinion writer in the University of Georgia newspaper. He’s unhappy about it.
… the story of Kevin Morrissey’s suicide closely. He was the managing editor of the Virginia Quarterly Review, a small, ambitious literary magazine at the University of Virginia, and he staged a very public suicide, first calling the police to say someone was dead, and then shooting himself in downtown Charlottesville.
Many people are accusing the journal’s top editor of having bullied Morrissey into suicide. Every day, the story gains in intensity and complexity.
The top editor is clearly a most aggressive, unpleasant character; but it’s a long way from this personality type, and the nastiness it can express, to his being responsible for the death of a man who for a long time suffered from clinical depression.
UD wants to keep an open mind, though. She’ll follow the story here. Meanwhile, here’s a skeptic. Here’s another one.
… of the Marc Hauser situation continues.
Now he won’t teach in the Extension School – his courses have been canceled. Which is the right thing to do; but why in the world was he given the courses in the first place?
As with the rash of plagiarism incidents in its law school a few years ago, Harvard has shown itself, in regard to Hauser, to be timid and tone-deaf.
How many billions do you need in your endowment to afford good public relations people?
… UD needs to discuss DSMBs. (The link takes you to an Emory University page informing medical researchers there about Data and Safety Monitoring Boards.)
UD thought she’d covered most of the ways in which some pharmaceutical companies interfere with, compromise, and control university clinical trials and their results. Turns out there’s more. There’s the corruption of DSMBs.
These are supposed to be independent boards (though they’re appointed by the person doing the trial, which already seems odd) which oversee trials as they’re going on, so as to detect problems that might emerge in the midst of a study. The idea is to protect research subjects and, if necessary, call a halt to things if they’re beginning to look dicey.
An editorial in this month’s New England Journal of Medicine (I got the link via the indispensable Alliance for Human Research Protection) notes that the independence of DSMBs is routinely compromised by drug manufacturers who get advance information about a trial going poorly, let’s say, and decide to call it off — to “unblind” the data — before any shit hits the fan. In more than one documented case, write the NEJM editors:
… a commercial entity decided to unblind aspects of trial data rather than let the DSMBs exercise their important and appropriate responsibilities both to the trial participants and to the wider community.
… These and other episodes have undermined public confidence in the ability of trials to operate independently of the sponsor. The current way that DSMBs are constituted and report has resulted in a loss of faith. First, many commercial entities, as illustrated by the above-mentioned examples, have not given the DSMB the independence such a panel requires. Second, outside parties view the DSMB as serving the trial sponsor rather than the selfless volunteers who put themselves at risk to advance our medical knowledge…
… stand for all the alcohol deaths among university students we will see this academic year.
Let her sad, addled end – drunk on a New York City window ledge – stand for all the early deaths we’ll read about on our campuses.
John was about to start her freshman year at the Parsons School of Design; her father, the US Ambassador to Thailand, had just brought her to New York to settle her in.
Because of Eric John’s high profile, his daughter’s story has received enormous attention. Maybe it will reverberate a little among returning students…
UD has, for seven years, read and blogged about the awful alcohol story on American university campuses, and she still has no idea what one might do about it. Universities try lots of things – mandatory online alcohol education courses; arrests; rapid notification of parents; restriction of alcohol, or types of alcohol, on campus; restriction of the number of bars that can operate within a certain radius of campus, etc.
We certainly know how to maximize alcohol death and injury on a campus: Have a wild, inescapable sports scene, have tons of fraternities, line the streets surrounding campus with bars. But no one seems to know how to reduce the havoc.
And, you know, so many people drink — so many of the administrators and professors and parents drink, and drink a lot… In Mankato, Minnesota, where there’s a big state university with a big drinking problem, the mayor was just arrested for drunk driving, and it wasn’t his first arrest.
…. two suicides among its players in the last five years. UD noted the more recent death here.
One of the team captains, Bradford Blackmon, is remarkably eloquent and thoughtful on the matter.
“Time helps things get better, for the most part,” he said, the heartache in his voice still evident over the phone. “You know Owen’s where he wants to be now. This is actually the second time I’ve had to deal with it, one of my cousins when I was 14. You can contemplate the whys all day, but you’ll never know. They made the decision they were going to make. If anyone could have stopped it, they would have let them stop it.
“You take it day-by-day. You don’t really worry about what’s going to happen next. You worry about what’s going on right now. In May, we addressed it to exhaustion, almost like we couldn’t talk about it anymore. After a while, you just sit in silence. But I think it definitely helps to talk to other people. It’s not something you can control internally.”
… “We had unlimited [campus support] resources, if we needed it,” Blackmon said. “That helped me. Ultimately, you learn that you can’t beat yourself up. Any answer you come up with, either you’re not going to be satisfied or you don’t know that that’s the reason. But that’s the natural human reaction. We just talked about how with people, you never know what’s going on, no matter how things seem on the outside. Either they’re not telling someone else or they don’t know themselves.
“You want to tell yourself that you learned something from this, but you still don’t really know.”
UD likes the honest tentativeness of his comments, his sense of the mysteries. After a while, you just sit in silence.
Here’s the article in The Hatchet, the George Washington University student newspaper, in which UD – in agreement with other GW professors interviewed for the piece – downplays worries about the effects of texting on university writing.
Soltan said bits of texting language occur only on very rare occasions and in informal settings.
“If it’s an in-class writing assignment and it’s a student that’s writing in a very relaxed, colloquial way, then maybe a student makes a mistake and is kind of embarrassed and might put ‘lol’ in parentheses,” [Soltan] said.
Correction, from the Associated Press:
In a story Aug. 23 about spending in college athletics, The Associated Press, relying on a researcher working for the NCAA, reported erroneously that Florida, Ohio State and Tennessee were among the 14 Football Bowl Subdivision schools that made money from campus athletics in the 2009 fiscal year. The researcher now says athletic expenses exceeded revenue at those three universities, and federal records confirmed it.
… IMG, the world’s largest sports marketing company, has recently acquired Host Communications, International Sports Properties and The Collegiate Licensing Corporation in order the create the most powerful and integrated collegiate sports marketing company in the industry. Colleges can’t generate this revenue from within. They need to partner with, outsource to or accept guarantees from entities like IMG and ESPN in order to maximize revenues. What determines the value of these deals? The answer, plain and simple, is winning. Thus, the immense pressure on athletic directors and head coaches to win conference championships and get to bowl games. When the pressure is this intense, the money this great and the scrutiny this acute, we should expect to see the best and the worst in people …
This is from a rather strange piece in Forbes about the commercialization of university football, and the shocking (to the writer, at least) academic and financial scandal now raging in the North Carolina Chapel Hill sports program. The writer correctly describes, here, the incredible distortions and corruptions attendant on having to win big if you’re going to justify the expense of your program, and maybe even make a profit (almost no universities do). But he describes the functioning of big time athletics programs incorrectly throughout the piece.
He argues, for instance, that all programs go to great lengths to hold down costs.
You need only revisit the recent private plane scandal at the University of Kansas, or consider how universities compensate coaches these days, to shoot that one down. How many schools have bought totally unnecessary, insanely expensive Adzillatrons for their stadiums? How many schools spend millions and millions of dollars every year in litigation with coaches and players any idiot could have seen were going to be trouble?
No – see – it’s like this. Bunch of cowboys ridin’ the bomb.
