The author of America’s biggest health care fraud ever goes to trial February 11! (Various boring underlings have already pled guilty. I’m sure Philip Esformes’ lawyers will describe the evil way these evil people led their client astray.) UD promises you that the guy who bribed U Penn’s basketball coach to get his kid on the team will be spectacular on the stand. This is one to watch. We’ll enjoy – hell, love – covering it here on University Diaries.

They really don’t get it, do they? Here’s an article about how people are abandoning football games in droves – even in Alabama (enjoy the photo of a recent game) – and Alabama thinks the solution is to take out seats and replace them with a massive screen incessantly screaming advertising in the faces of people there to watch football. Another important part of the solution is to sell booze so that already pretty obnoxious people in the stands will become much more so, driving the few families that still attend games way far away from the stadium.

When your school can’t think of anything else to do with money, and when it’s run by dumb guys, you get this result:

Moody’s rated the University of Arkansas’ athletic revenue bonds for stadium expansion Aa2 with a stable outlook in 2016, citing 200% revenue coverage of the debt service. Since then, Razorbacks football attendance has slumped. The university saw a dramatic drop in attendance in 2018, a 2-10 season that ranks competitively as the worst in the team’s history.

“Something has changed,” said … an Arkansas native. “In a state like Arkansas where there is no professional team, the Razorbacks are the major attraction. To see attendance down like that is tough. It could squeeze them a little bit in a very competitive conference.”

… The university’s Athletics Department in 2016 issued $25 million of tax-exempt and $90 million of taxable bonds to expand Donald W. Reynolds Razorback Stadium by more than 4,000 seats to a capacity of 76,212. The once-rabid Razorbacks fans never came close to filling the stadium in six home games in 2018, hitting a maximum of 50,988 for the team’s loss to the University of North Texas.

An article about the niqab assures us that it’s entirely worn by choice, ignoring all sorts of evidence that, as Christopher Hitchens wrote, “goes the other way.” (Let’s not even talk about people who put their eight-year-old daughters under them.) The author goes on to endorse a niqab wearer who tells her that if we only learn more about Islam we’ll see the religious grounding for the garment. But those of us who have learned a bit about Islam know there’s absolutely no grounding for it; indeed, it’s illegal in increasing numbers of Muslim countries. Increasing numbers of imams in Europe and abroad have condemned the burqa/niqab.

The article goes on to condemn every one of the several million people in countries around the world who have supported a ban as racist.

Nail-biting events in Venezuela currently being led by a guy who spent time in UD‘s Foggy Bottom. Very exciting. Very scary.

Crowd scenes.

This blog’s Venezuela posts.

… on a cold day.

The link is to Christine Gosnay’s erotic poem, “Strangers,” which seems to UD a nice antidote to the current freezing conditions in her world. Not that things aren’t freezing in Gosnay’s poem; they are. But they’re also jazz-hot. The poem’s a surrealistic sexual reverie, and it runs hot and cold. Let’s eavesdrop.

The title suggests that the object of her reverie will be a stranger with whom she had sex; or the title might be suggesting that whatever the degree of knowledge and intimacy, we are always sexual (and other kinds of) strangers to one another. As in the Philip Larkin poem:

Talking In Bed

Talking in bed ought to be easiest,
Lying together there goes back so far,
An emblem of two people being honest.
Yet more and more time passes silently.
Outside, the wind’s incomplete unrest
Builds and disperses clouds in the sky,
And dark towns heap up on the horizon.
None of this cares for us. Nothing shows why
At this unique distance from isolation
It becomes still more difficult to find
Words at once true and kind,
Or not untrue and not unkind.

Gosnay finds very strange words indeed as her speaker evokes for herself, in memory, in reverie, a sexual encounter. Here goes.

Tremendous orange things are happening somewhere.
I lay a wooden stick for stirring on the white note
on the desk. I lay a stain on the clean note.

Somewhere things are happening. Marvelous orange
and purple things. Flooding rivers at dusk, wheels threading
roads in the desert. Strangers. Strangers. Sea.

Makes no linguistic sense; the first sentence calls to mind Chomsky’s famous Colorless green ideas sleep furiously. OTOH, the emotional feel of that jumbled sentiment might also call to mind the wonderful first scene in the film Amélie, where the child-like, fantasizing title character suddenly vividly imagines all the exciting sex that must be going on in various places in Paris at that instant. Tremendous vivid and hot (orange) things are happening somewhere; and the images in this poem (flooding rivers at dusk…) leave little doubt that it means to evoke orgasmic release.

The poem’s speaker sits at a desk with a coffee stirrer, and when she puts it down on a clean sheet of paper she leaves a stain. This trivial domestic moment will broaden symbolically as the poem proceeds; it will become an icon of a white-sheeted bed on which a woman leaves a post-sex stain. It will remind the speaker of the sexual encounter that will produce her reverie.

Somewhere you are lying in a white bed. The clock
on your thigh is ticking. Somewhere a human form
is being lifted from the ground.

Somewhere, yes, and I am counting. The clean note
with its numbers has changed. I will remember.
You are a location, with a bed.

Now she addresses her stranger/lover directly; or perhaps she addresses herself. In any case, the simple point here seems to be that she found this sex both memorable and transformative: She has been lifted by lust into a new life – the once “clean” note on which her life was written has changed, “staining” her (not in a pejorative sense) forever. She now knows herself through that sexual interaction: You are a location, with a bed.

The road ends somewhere in the flooding river
at dusk. Why here, strangers. A cartwheel in the stow hold
of a ship. A stranger who wheels it on the ice.

Somewhere the ship has frozen. The ship has frozen
in the ice. A frozen form. The ship cannot be lifted
from the purple sky at dusk.

She’s revolving and revisiting her images now – river, road, strangers, wheel, dusk – all with the intent, I think, to suggest the following. Sex can be what Kafka says certain books can be: ‘the axe for the frozen sea within us.’ Sex can set rivers flooding, can break through the ice of the isolated self, and, weirdly, that can even happen – especially happen? – between strangers.

Stain in the somewhere. You are lying in a white bed.
Why here is the river. On the thigh. Remember
what we did with clocks. Orange and purple.

Lovely trees in the frozen sky. Holding somewhere and threading
thighs. Strangers. I lay a stain on the white bed.
Remembering what tremendous purple things we did.

Stain in the somewhere; holding somewhere. It’s wonderful the way she sustains the vague surrealism that authentically conveys the dusky fuzzy encounter and its dusky fuzzy remembrance. Looking up from that flooded bed, she now remembers, she noticed the lovely untransformed frozen world framing her transformation.

The mind ends every thing stirring. Somewhere the ship
is being lifted from the desert. Marvelous. You will change
from the river location to the sea.

Somewhere, things are happening. You are lying in the white bed
beside the sea with coffee. I am lying in the white bed.
Tremendous strangers. Blind roads in the sea.

There are many ways to read the first sentence, but in keeping with the rather simple reading I want to do: Everything in me was so excitedly stirred that I blessedly lost – temporarily, wonderfully – the very capacity for thought. Truly you lifted me from the desert of the self – selfishness, self-awareness, self-consciousness… I have gone from river to sea; from self to world. Three times she writes tremendous; twice she writes marvelous. This liberation from the stow hold of a frozen self, this being wheeled out into bliss, is too massively, enigmatically stupendous for words, so I’ll content myself with somewhere, and with vague indicators of immensity: tremendous, marvelous.

There are ways out of the frozen self! But the roads are “blind” – which is what this inchoate but symbolically controlled poem very nicely conveys. (Recall the first phrase of Joyce’s story, “Araby”: North Richmond Street, being blind...) Even at moments of intensest liberation, we don’t know where we’re going – we barely know where we are – and the best we can do is ruminate on liberating events. This poem is the trace of that rumination.

Some students at one of the University of Toronto campuses don’t want a laptop ban, and they are uncomfortably aware it’s the wave of the future. In arguing for the laptop’s necessity, they cite the ‘wastage of paper’ that will ensue if students write in their notebooks.

First managing director! First chief economist! Take a bow, DSK.

… a very, very cold day.

...UD sat on her back deck with Mr UD moments ago, watching the incredibly clear full moon go through its shadow and its blue and pink and vanishing pearly cap as it eclipsed. We never get skies like this in Garrett Park! We didn’t have to go to Strathmore!

And we’ll go out there again in about a half hour to watch the moon’s red deepen. UD will add another layer to her already ridiculous get-up and she’ll lie next to Mr UD on their loungers and they will silently pass the binoculars back and forth.

William Blake?

The New York Times.

The poetry of tonight’s lunar eclipse.

UD will be out there – probably on the darkish hill in front of the Strathmore Concert Hall (which her uncle, you recall, insisted on building despite UD‘s repeated suggestions that he not). “Dark skies are always a plus, but your backyard or city street will work just fine.” The only things UD will bring are her binoculars and Mr UD.

East Carolina’s classy football program – its larger athletic program – is beginning to piss off a generous alumnus. He shares his contempt for the deficit-ridden, student-soaking institution in a letter to the campus newspaper.

For it is Sackler, Sackler, emblazoned on our faculty
But now it looks as though they got the dough through smack-dependency.

Yes it was Sackler, Sackler long before the o.d.s came.
But now the name has come to sound like scum — it’s a bad bad name.

UPDATE: Soak the state!

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

“The [University of Connecticut’s $40 million athletic] deficit was plugged with $30 million in institutional support and $8.5 million from student fees.

UConn football remains the department’s most expensive team to operate at more than $15.7 million last year. Also, ticket sales for the one-win team in 2018 totaled $2.4 million vs. $3.3 million in 2017.

That resulted in a $8.7 million deficit for the football team.

As of Aug. 2018, the football program’s attendance at Pratt & Whitney Stadium at Rentschler Field in East Hartford has declined by more than 48 percent since it peaked in 2008 when it averaged 39,331 fans per game, according to the NCAA.

UConn men’s basketball lost $5 million, while women’s basketball lost $3 million. It cost $11 million to operate the men’s basketball team and $7.8 million to manage the women’s program, the statement said.

UConn athletics spent nearly $17 million on scholarships and $14.4 million for staff and administrative support.

The athletic department also spent $17 million on salaries for coaches.”

The authors said they were particularly struck by the fact that the number of [opioid-maker] marketing interactions with doctors — such as frequent free meals — was more strongly associated with overdose deaths than the amount spent.

“Each meal seems to be associated with more and more prescriptions,” Dr. [Scott] Hadland said.

With Title-Game Prices Plummeting more than 90 Percent, Should College Football be Worried?