… another bird cackles in the mangroves, or flies just over my head, broad beak silver. Mullet leap out of the water. In the sky sometimes are little white airplanes. There’s no point in going inside because the morning breeze (after evening rain) is cooling, and the large family of egrets on the opposite shore stays there for me, letting me rest my binoculars on them as long as I like.

So sit here and let it gather, the pelican circus, and watch it revolve around you. Sanibel built a few houses, like this one, by the narrow inlets to the gulf, so that all day long you can settle on your deck and let it flow – the alligator water, the palm-shivering wind, the raptors and the passerines. They whistle about you their spontaneous cries.

… the friendly skies

to Sanibel Island.

We’ve been tracking disappearing attendance at university football games for years, and as stadia truly empty out, we’ll be interested to see which school pioneers live sex acts on a raised platform above the play in order to keep eyes focused more or less on the area of the field. “The experiential experience that a fan receives — positively or negatively — will affect a repeat customer,” says a University of Texas Vice President in an article noting that even Texas schools are lucky to fill half their seats for the first half of a game.

Kennesaw State’s football program is practically brand-new, so you can imagine the excitement it’s generated. Its 10,000-capacity stadium draws 2,000 or so on a good day, and coach is pissed. “There are 35,000 students here, and you tell me we can’t get 2,000 to come to a football game?”

Under my foot the veil that once had me down

Under my foot the veil that pushed me around

It’s down to me the difference in the clothes I wear

From an essay about a philosophy professor.

From a link to an article a reader, John, sent me about how fatal violence outside and racist violence inside Italian soccer stadiums mirrors “darker developments in a broader segment of the Italian and indeed the European body politic,” UD was easily able to jump to other similarly appalled analyses of the increasingly unworkable business of putting on a football match in many of the world’s countries (scroll down). Africa, North Africa, South America, the Middle East — ain’t only Europe where the world’s most corruptly run game is also the most violent.  Football, “a sport with a deeply tribal nature and a large captive audience full of disenfranchised working-class males, and thus in many ways the perfect arena for the unscrupulous populist and his macho, nativist fantasies,” has an important “function in the rise of global far-right populism.”

Global football thugs are in some intriguing ways the haredim of Europe:

Their potential for violence is … so strong that pacifying them has been a matter of public order. 

Punishment is as half-hearted as Israel’s efforts to deal with its mobs of violent tribal male ultras – the ultra orthodox – and for the same reason. Violent-Corrupt-People-Is-Us. Absurd moves like making players compete in empty stadiums (there are more and more of these Beckettian theatrics across the globe), allowing only one team’s fans to attend (The Sound of One Side Clapping), or identifying ringleaders and denying them admission to games (guaranteeing violence on the streets — exactly where a nation’s women and children are cowering in an effort to get out of range of fascist gangs) accomplish nothing. Leaders like Viktor Urban want it that way. Even as tribes become smaller and smaller (“[S]tadium attendances [in Italy] plummet every year as people decide it’s better to watch games on TV rather than amid the violence and hatred of the terraces. In Serie A, stadiums are less than 60% full…”) their political and social violence, often stoked by governments, intensifies.

LIGHT TRESPASS: A SONG

… on a walk through my woods in today’s rain.

I see the shrieking head of a monster.

It’s all Villains, Thieves, and Scoundrels Union here on planet earth, and University Diaries, in a year-end, retrospective mood, recalls with you not merely the prolific literary frauds of our day (chronicled on this blog, to the extent that I can keep up with them), but cultural frauds more generally. Obviously, we’re most interested here in frauds perpetrated in university settings – the hilarious venerable ‘student/athlete’ thing; plagiarism; made-up research; corporate-whore research; stashing federal funds away for personal use; or simply, Jimbo Ramsey-style, stealing your university’s endowment…

Or go way back to the much spiffier Andrei Shleifer, eminent Harvard economics professor, turning his federal-government-funded advisory position into a get-rich-quick scheme… Persistently, this blog, and planet earth, have been located in The World According to Trump University, and with the election of that university’s CEO, people have made it pretty clear that this is where they want to be. It’s not – as the Vanity Fair quotation in my headline has it – that we want to watch the rise and fall – few fraudsters fall… I mean, you’ve got to be Bernie Madoff to really FALL. His comrade in crime, Ezra Merkin, will remain out of jail – although, to be sure, in courtrooms – for the rest of his life. James Ramsey, larcenous president of the University of Louisville, will die with his McMansion lifestyle intact and the case against him grinding slowly on. The literary fraudsters described in the VF article are getting immortalized in fancy schmancy movies. Shleifer continues to ride high.

But it is true that watching ourselves being frauds and perpetrating frauds has become a keener and keener spectator sport – it’s part of the Italianization of culture about which Adam Gopnik writes. Our self-alienation, wrote Walter Benjamin long ago, has “reached such a degree that [we] can experience [our] own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order.”

Yet the blogeuse you hold in your hands hopes you can, like her models (Orwell, Camus, Arendt, Murdoch, Hitchens), resist la dolce vita spectatorship in favor of sour indignation.

It took years of cynical sloth to bring about the trash heap described in this article about one of the world’s great cities.

… UD wends her way, yet another year, to Boston, for a Soltan Christmas. Longtime readers know UD dislikes creaky old Boston and certainly wishes she didn’t have to go north in December. But at least she’s going south in January – Sanibel Island, a place I’ve always wondered about, and will of course blog about here.

But UD likes this one best, by Jon Lang.

Before we go there: My own winter night sky tonight – viewed from my back deck in Garrett Park, Maryland – is blackly clear, with a large, full, bright moon.  This cosmic clarity comes equipped, this evening, with very cold, very awakening, air.  Like all those winter night poets, I’m stirred, and I’m lifted, out here, off the earth, to something acutely articulate; something post-human, and post-humous…   Yet as it happens, I don’t know what the universe is saying — I only know I’m exposed, in my coatless, ghosty condition, to its voice.   Wallace Stevens hears something of this with similar recognition and confusion at the seashore: 

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

Winter Night

How often we draw back, detached from the world

Like a star, and thinking the mind a pure space

Imagine our fate somehow suspended – almost

As if, like a far eye, or a small fist

Of light, we might take the whole of it, coldly, in.

But ah, what a show … for nothing really stops –

And the further we fade, the more the smallest pain

Heightens, iced to a moon’s edge. O, could we just

See! How even without us the vanishing earth

Goes on, child without mother, bearing itself

Blindly toward spring! Would we still, like gods,

Think ourselves beyond it all? Now, shrinking

Within, we only at best mimick the dead,

Who have earned with a life that richer, darker distance.

… is “Christmas came early for the heirs of the historic building…” — but let that go. The heirs of UD‘s grandfather’s brother just won an appeal of a 2017 Worcester County Court decision that would have allowed Ocean City to take away from them a boardwalk building they’ve owned since 1905. 

UD‘s grandfather, Joseph Rapoport, was one of seven brothers who came here from Russia and settled in Philadelphia, but eventually bought and operated businesses in Ocean City, Maryland. Indeed, Nathan – the brother at the center of the appeal – eventually moved to OC full-time and lived on the second floor of the building at issue (its first floor has, for decades, been a Dumser’s ice cream parlor).

Interestingly, Nathan’s obituary only lists Joe among the many brothers.

Nathan Rapoport, 88, one of the business pioneers in Ocean City, died Wednesday in Peninsula General Hospital in Salisbury after a short illness. Mr. Rapoport was formerly of Philadelphia. He was born in Russia. He had operated a games concession business on the boardwalk since 1912, retiring about five years ago. Mr. Rapoport’s wife, Minnie, died in 1968. Surviving are a daughter, Mrs. Gertrude Goldenberg, who with her husband, Bernie, operates a beach accessory business here; three granddaughters; nine great-grandchildren; and a brother, Joe Rapoport, Baltimore. Funeral services wiil be held Friday at 2 p.m. in the Goldstein Funeral Home, Philadelphia. Interment will be in Roosevelt Memorial Park, near Philadelphia. The family suggests, that as a tribute to the memory of the deceased, contributions may be made to the State of Israel, in care of the Beth Israel Synagogue, Salisbury. 

Ocean City “failed to present sufficient evidence to support the circuit court’s conclusion that the Property is located within the boundaries of the dedicated and accepted public easement of Atlantic Avenue,” so it stays for the time being with the Rapoport heirs, who remain in OC and who get rent from Dumser’s.

The current owner of Dumser’s remembers Nathan:

 I remember him walking on the Boardwalk in the mornings in his long sleeved white shirt with a bow tie. A very quiet man. What I know of him is that he came to this country at the turn of the century, and decided to invest his life in business in Ocean City. He owned the property across the Boardwalk where Daytons and Dough Roller sit today. He had to rebuild after two devastating fires only to lose the property in the depression. He and his descendants have occupied the present building for more than 100 years. This is all that is left of one of our pioneers who took a chance on Ocean City when tourism was all about new businesses.

Urban Meyer To Unironically Co-Teach A Class On Character And Leadership At Ohio State

Claas will go to Fergus now,
And pierce the deep wood’s — make that prairie’s — shade,
And interview the local bores.
Young man, approach this mindless sow
Make buddies with that cretin maid,
And brood on fact and truth no more.

And no more turn aside and brood
Upon this country’s mystery;
For Fergus is your mason jar,
Containing all our kinfolk rude
And all our white supremacy
And all our politics bizarre.