One of our fellow guests asked Christa, our innkeeper, this as we all ate breakfast this morning.
Well, there was one time… I knew it would be bad, so I told my guests – a young couple – they should leave one day early, before the big snow hit. “No,” they said; “we have an SUV. We’ll be fine.” So down came the snow and that SUV wasn’t going anywhere… I knew we’d be in for a few rough days, but I had some food in my freezer and I was able to cook simple meals.
We spent a lot of time chatting at the fireplace, and one evening I mentioned that I was going to miss an opera in Charlottesville and the young man says “You like opera?” And I said “I love opera.” And he said, “Well, we can sing for our supper.”
And his girlfriend turned out to be an opera singer! Her name is Hyunah Yu, and … well I’ll put on one of her cds.
So now there’s this strong melancholy soprano wafting a Bach cantata through the mountain house, and Christa tells us her story. “She was going to be a doctor…”
You can read the harrowing story here.
Here’s a YouTube that features her singing Amazing Grace.
… means waking to the hoots of the Great Horned Owl.
Hoo hoo huh-hoo. Hooo… Hoo.
We’re still in Shenandoah, spending mornings underground with stalactites and evenings high up in Skyland. Last night’s sunset was so spectacular that we took our beach chairs out of the trunk, planted them at the Jewell Hollow Overlook, and sat there for an hour.
(Found here.)
This wasn’t only about the last moments of a small bright orange sun behind a mountain; it was about the vast wash of blue and pink and white as the sky settled down at half past eight. We were alone except for a man with an easel a few yards out on a path in front of us.
Painting a sunset in the mountains is about as trite, I figure, as sharing a kiss in front of the same sunset. But who’s gonna stop us?
… Moo: the lost chapter.
Five Truman University students who thought they were going to spend the summer measuring hog odors in northern Missouri have lost their jobs because of a long running dispute between the hog farm operators, nearby residents and state politicians.
For those collecting UD‘s press clippings, here she is back in 2009 (I hadn’t seen it; UD thanks Shane for telling her about it) playing a condescending liberal in the Wall Street Journal.
What’s funny about the UD excerpt the author cites as evidence of liberal snobbery is that it’s an extremely close paraphrase of something his hero, Allan Bloom, wrote in the chapter Students, from The Closing of the American Mind. In fact, all over that book Bloom writes exactly what UD wrote – that a liberal arts education is high culture’s one big chance to catch you and save you from narrow provincialism.
Like UD, Bloom was attacking there not “an American upbringing,” as the author of the Wall Street Journal article claims, but any upbringing hampered by provinciality… which is to say almost any upbringing anywhere in the world at any time. Education is an obvious good, Bloom and I are claiming, because it offers to lead you out, into a larger world, from where you rather arbitrarily began.
In no way does education want to make you reject your roots or feel contempt for the smaller world in which you inevitably grew up. It wants to introduce you to a larger one.
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I mean, look at old UD, reviler of American roots. Look closely. Do you live three doors down from the house you grew up in? UD does.
Now look at Sarah Palin, the WSJ writer’s home and hearth American roots heroine, preparing to move to … Scottsdale? What the fuck is she doing buying a house in go-go new-town Scottsdale? (Her daughter’s also bought a place in Arizona.) Doesn’t she share UD‘s love of her own deep American roots?
It’s just as stupid for the WSJ writer to conflate cultural broadening with anti-American snobbery as it is for UD to conflate buying a second home a great distance from your “rooted” home with a betrayal of your roots.
In fact Bloom’s famous book is largely about questioning roots. It’s about asking whether everything about the “American upbringing” the WSJ writer uncritically invokes is an obvious good. Bloom’s autobiographical essay in Closing, in which he recalls his amazement and excitement at seeing the University of Chicago for the first time, is moving precisely because, like so many writers of autobiographies on the verge of university, he is recording the moment when he glimpsed in himself the possibility of profound self-transformation – aesthetic, intellectual, cultural, and spiritual broadening – through a serious liberal arts education.
Bloom is absolutely right that although life may provide other broadening experiences – travel, etc. – nothing is like the (to varying degrees at different schools) coherent four-year curricular discipline of the liberal arts degree. Nothing is like encountering professors who … well, remember, for instance, what Tony Judt wrote in his autobiography about the professor who
broke through my well-armored adolescent Marxism and first introduced me to the challenges of intellectual history. He managed this by the simple device of listening very intently to everything I said, taking it with extraordinary seriousness on its own terms, and then picking it gently and firmly apart in a way that I could both accept and respect. That is teaching.
Judt’s provincialism was Marxism; the university introduced him to a person able and willing to go back and forth and back and forth on the subject with seriousness and with respect for Judt in order to transform him. Liberal education takes a certain setting; it takes a certain patience; it takes a lot of seriousness. It has nothing at all to do with snobbery or condescension. In fact it is the opposite of those.
… the Morrissey fanatic. Morrissey gave a London concert tonight, during which a riot broke out in Brixton, which was near the venue.
While escaping the mayhem, my sister’s friend took pictures.
Up to the minute details here.
UD‘s nature adventure gets better and better. From our balcony, we just watched a flock of turkey – complete with poults – cross from Open Field Stage Left to Open Field Stage Right. Slowly. One even gobbled.
The chancellor of North Dakota’s university system could definitely express himself less windbaggedly; but that’s a small embarrassment. He has two big embarrassments to deal with, so forget the way he talks.
First big embarrassment: Turns out that if you so much as use a bathroom at ND’s Dickinson State University you’ll be enrolled as a full-time student and given all A’s.
Enrollment-technique-wise, the simplicity of physical capture is an improvement over the for-profits’ convoluted psych-ops. Just – comme disent les bouddhistes – Be Here Now.
Second big embarrassment: The president of Dickinson State is doing a Bootsie Mandel. He refuses to leave, even though the chancellor has fired him.
First up and then out of the Anglican Church, Jonathan Kirkpatrick turned to one of New Zealand’s universities, where, as head of this outfit, he got away with $666,000 until he got caught.
Court documents showed the large scale of the fraud, which stretched back to 2002 soon after Kirkpatrick got the job…
He resigned from his role as chief executive of AUT’s business innovation centre after large sums of money were discovered missing from research and development funds last week.
… Kirkpatrick was a Reverend and Priest in Charge at St Alban’s Church in Balmoral, in central Auckland, where his assistant priest was Reverend Philip Sallis, who is also the Pro Vice Chancellor of AUT.
… Hawksbill Greenway in Luray, Virginia this afternoon, we saw a green heron skimming along the creek, and then a black-crowned night heron, sitting on a stone (just like this), watching for fish.
That was our second walk of the day. Earlier, we followed the Shenandoah River around White House Farm — and this was one of the most beautiful rural walks I’ve ever taken. It’s got everything – blue mountains, a rolling river, a quiet winding road with just-shorn sheep and old white houses whose porches overlook the Shenandoah. There are acres of apple trees, long green fields of corn … and White House Farm itself, which dominates the view and is (if you’ve looked at its picture) a pastoral symphony.
When’s the last time you found a NOTHING FOUND page this lovely? It’s the farm building behind the main house, photographed in the early evening, the sun settling deep on the hills…
But don’t institutions expect their faculty … members to publish ethically and in the best interest of patients?
Apparently not.
… (as regular readers know, UD is fond of saying of UMDNJ that it has rolling prison admissions) scores another winner.
(Here’s a new book for UMDNJ to display in its visitors’ center. Sample sentence: The University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey (UMDNJ) is a microcosm for corruption in the rest of the Garden State.)
This place knows how to maintain a reputation: Keep ’em coming.
Maintain? Hell – enhance! The University of Medicine and Dentistry’s criminal class has traditionally been made up of local petty thieves who ended up on the board of trustees or whatever… This guy’s a med school professor! The crime is tax evasion on a most impressive scale, in fancy countries like Switzerland! Forget the whole Jersey backwater thing! We are moving up in the world!
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Why is this man smiling? Now we know.
I mean, we know why he was smiling. Five years in prison await.
… in the country’s recent banning of the burqa, says Time magazine.
Not strange at all. Same thing has happened in other European countries who’ve banned it, and will, UD predicts, continue to happen. Wherever you are on the political spectrum, you’re likely to recognize the lack of basic human rights when you see it.
