In response to student demand that a Sarah Lawrence professor be detenured by a committee made up of students with complaints against him plus faculty of color (the professor wrote a couple of op/eds about the liberal-leaning academy in The New York Times), the school’s president wove an exceptionally long strand of dithery platitudes. Or, as SOS calls them, dithertudes.
The aims of today’s students are not dissimilar to those who made their voices heard 30 and 50 years ago: they seek to ensure a truly inclusive environment of respect and support at Sarah Lawrence, especially for students of color and low-income students… [The complainants bring to the] fore many pressing issues that students at Sarah Lawrence face, especially students of color, low-income students, first-generation students, LGBTQ+ students and others, and I am grateful for the willingness of our students to share their concerns with me and the campus community… [Collaboration from] all parties is the best means to move these efforts forward, and this will require us to develop the most effective process for working with students as well as faculty and staff…
A little throat-clearing followed, in which the president suggested that forming a tribunal to drive out a conservative professor isn’t “appropriate.” But this woman’s creative energy overwhelmingly directs itself to thanking the students for showing everyone what a show trial looks like; for being “not dissimilar” to ‘sixties free speech advocates even though they are their absolute and exact opposite; and for being open to the sort of “collaboration” to which they are utterly opposed.
Now that you’ve addicted the poor and defenseless of America, you’re making aggressive plans to addict the poor and defenseless of China and India. The reward for that is cultural oblivion, which is exactly what you’re going to get.
… beachy municipalities with wall to wall bars and little law enforcement attract really big vicious crowds. As one traditional spring break town after another says enough to the carnage, larger and larger groups of drunk fucks concentrate in smaller and smaller spaces, to the point where South Beach, and the handful of other still-certified SB locations, are absolutely choked with traffic jams police stops drugs guns fights biker gangs and open-air rapes for as long as two months. Residents seem to think this isn’t the best way to welcome in the spring, and even the merchants who in the past haven’t minded the grossness because it brings in so much cash have begun to respond to the city council’s pleas that they close up early or stop feeding infinite liquor to everyone who shows up or whatever.
UD wonders, though. Bestiality will have its way, and our enterprising country should be able to produce one or two cities/towns willing to make a name for themselves as crapulous destinations of last resort. I’m putting my money on Myrtle Beach.
… by the suicide of Princeton economist Alan Krueger at 58. It will perhaps be seen as an iconic death, carrying most powerfully within it horrible truths about the ultimate incorrigibility of some forms of clinical depression. His was as far as one could tell one of the golden lives: Brilliant, athletic, handsome, wealthy, esteemed by presidents, rich in friends and family. A “gentle, generous guy.” And still the mind has mountains.
O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall
Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap
May who ne’er hung there.
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After decades of reading, writing, and thinking about suicide, I’ve gathered a few statements about it that feel right to me.
Boris Pasternak wrote:
We have no conception of the inner torture which precedes suicide.
… The continuity of his inner life is broken, his personality is at an end. And perhaps what finally makes him kill himself is not the firmness of his resolve but the unbearable quality of this anguish which belongs to no one, of this suffering in the absence of the sufferer, of this waiting which is empty because life has stopped and can no longer fill it.
… What is certain is that they all suffered beyond description, to the point where suffering has become a mental sickness. And as we bow in homage to their gifts and to their bright memory, we should bow compassionately before their suffering.
Philip Roth wrote:
What was astonishing to him was how people seemed to run out of their own being, run out of whatever the stuff was that made them who they were and, drained of themselves, turn into the sort of people they would have once have felt sorry for. It was as though while their lives were rich and full they were secretly sick of themselves and couldn’t wait to dispose of their sanity and their health and all sense of proportion so as to get down to that other self, the true self, who was a wholly deluded fuckup. It was as though being in tune with life was an accident that might sometimes befall the fortunate young but was otherwise something for which human beings lacked any real affinity. How odd. And how odd it made him seem to be numbered among the countless unembattled normal ones might, in fact, be the abnormality, a stranger from real life because of his being so sturdily rooted.
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August Kleinzahler’s comment on his wild and brilliant brother, who killed himself at 27: “He wasn’t made for the long haul. Not everyone is.”
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This poem by Donald Justice is very much in line with Pasternak and Roth:
For The Suicides of 1962
in memory: J & G
If we recall your voices
As softer now, it’s only
That they must have drifted back
A long way to have reached us
Here, and upon such a wind
As crosses the high passes.
Nor does the blue of your eyes
(Remembered) cast much light on
The page ripped from the tablet.
*
Once there in the labyrinth,
You were safe from your reasons.
We stand, now, at the threshold,
Peering in, but the passage,
For us, remains obscure; the
Corridors are still bloody.
*
What you meant to prove you have
Proved: we did not care for you
nearly enough. Meanwhile the
Bay was preparing herself
To receive you, the for once
Wholly adequate female
To your dark inclinations;
Under your care, the pistol
Was slowly learning to flower
In the desired explosion
Disturbing the careful part
And the briefly recovered
Fixed smile of a forgotten
Triumph; deep within the black
Forest of childhood that tree
Was already rising which,
With the length of your body,
Would cast the double shadow.
*
The masks by which we knew you
Have been torn from you. Even
Those mirrors, to which always
You must have turned to confide,
Cannot have recognized you,
Stripped, as you were, finally.
At the end of your shadow
There sat another, waiting,
Whose back was always to us.
*
When the last door had been closed,
You watched, inwardly raging,
For the first glimpse of your selves
Approaching, jangling their keys.
The commenters at Deadspin never disappoint. This one wonders whether the all-’round nasty women’s soccer coach at Yale will end up a Jalie. The coach was raised in UD‘s neck of of the woods and went to a local school she knows well: Richard Montgomery High. I figure he couldn’t believe his eyes when he got to Yale, a billionaire thirty times over, and he reasonably enough looked around for ways he could be rich like all the people around him were rich. You know the deal, right? Our perceived wealth is largely based on the wealth of the people around us – neighbors, colleagues. How many eighteen year old fuckheads did he see driving Ferrari F60 Americas before he decided to get a piece of that?
Oh, and he didn’t only take bribes. He reportedly made his players write his papers for him. AND when told about it, Yale reportedly did nothing.
… from her recent brief illness. Still a bit weak, but recovering in a seaside room in Rehoboth Beach, so nothing to complain about. Frustrated that I don’t have the energy to blog just yet, since the admissions scandal keeps spawning scandalettes (many involving a UD fave, Philip Esformes!) and I’m determined to keep up. If there were ever a story that had UNIVERSITY DIARIES written all over it, this is the one.
I’m under the weather. It’s why I’ve not blogged for a bit. Am making tea. We’ll see.
[T]hey were plenty wealthy, and appeared very comfortable with lying without compunction to get their way, and with throwing around hundreds of thousands of dollars in their quest to buy status. They were immediately fascinating characters to me: vulgar, entitled, and un-self-aware, they seemed to embody the latest version of the showy American id, not unlike Bravo’s Real Housewives, or the Kardashians, or, for that matter, the Trump family. ..
The people involved [in the admissions scam] were so self-satisfied and secure in their power that they greeted unethical, perhaps felonious proposals with complete nonchalance.
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If you’ve ever wondered why everyone’s always telling you The Great Gatsby is the great American novel…
They were careless people, Tom and Daisy – they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.
