Your morning giggle.

This one is subdued, commemorated in a quiet house on a hot sunny day. In years past, UD has performed parts of Molly Bloom’s soliloquy at the Irish Embassy, won a prize at the Harvard Club Bloomsday in Washington for her reading (and singing) of parts of the Sirens chapter, crawled through the pubs of Dublin, and met up with a few of her students at a local DC bar for Irish food and recitation.

Here’s what she did this year. She downloaded the score of Mein junges leben hat ein end by Sweelinck (1562-1621), played it at her piano, and thought of this passage from the Eumaeus chapter of Ulysses, when Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom really begin to talk to one another. These are Bloom’s thoughts as he listens to Dedalus name and sing some songs he likes.

Exquisite variations he was now describing on an air Youth here has End by Jans Pieter Sweelinck, a Dutchman of Amsterdam where the frows come from. Even more he liked an old German song of Johannes Jeep about the clear sea and the voices of sirens, sweet murderers of men, which boggled Bloom a bit:

Von der Sirenen Listigkeit
Tun die Poeten dichten.

These opening bars he sang and translated extempore. Bloom, nodding, said he perfectly understood and begged him to go on by all means, which he did.

A phenomenally beautiful tenor voice like that, the rarest of boons, which Bloom appreciated at the very first note he got out…

Bloom knows good singing, being married to Molly, and from the first note Dedalus gets out (recall that Dedalus is exhausted, beat up, and drunk) he recognizes his exceptional voice. We are also reminded here (he perfectly understood) that finally, at the end of a trying day, both men have found someone to whom they can talk honestly and by whom they can (to some degree) be understood.

The full lyrics to the Sirens song go like this:

From the Sirens’ craftiness
Poets make poems
That they with their loveliness
Have drawn many men into the sea
For their song resounds so sweetly,
That the sailors fall asleep,
The ship is brought into misfortune,
And all becomes evil.

Both songs express definitive Ulysses themes: With the death of his mother, Dedalus has indeed in some important sense come to the end of his youth; yet it’s clear from his self-destructive behavior throughout June 16 1904 that he’s resisting growing up, or let’s say that he doesn’t quite know what next step to take. The sirens song suggests one reason for his paralysis: Dedalus not only has that rarest of boons, a great singing voice. He’s – more importantly – a great writer. Yet something in him fears the pull toward the aesthetic, and though he concludes Portrait of the Artist stupendously, euphorically sure of his vocation, he has in fact grown up quite a bit by the time Ulysses begins. He has not produced the great art he thought he would by fleeing Ireland; in fact in Proteus he looks back with self-loathing on his childish narcissistic aestheticism while on the Continent:

Reading two pages apiece of seven books every night, eh? I was young. You bowed to yourself in the mirror, stepping forward to applause earnestly, striking face. Hurray for the Goddamned idiot! Hray! No-one saw: tell no-one. Books you were going to write with letters for titles. Have you read his F? O yes, but I prefer Q. Yes, but W is wonderful. O yes, W. Remember your epiphanies on green oval leaves, deeply deep, copies to be sent if you died to all the great libraries of the world, including Alexandria? Someone was to read them there after a few thousand year, a mahamanvantara. Pico della Mirandola like. Ay, very like a whale. When one reads these strange pages of one long gone one feels that one is at one with one who once…

How to avoid the narcotic element of the aesthetic – the aesthetic as pure escape? Dedalus doesn’t yet know (his encounter with Bloom will presumably help him along here), and he is dealing with this not knowing – and of course with the pain of his mother’s death – by losing himself in the narcotic of alcohol. Indeed, the Sweelinck lyrics describe not just the end of youth, but the end of life, and Dedalus, who doesn’t eat, drinks like a fish, wears only black, is deeply depressed and angry, has earlier in the day given up his job and his lodging, and refuses any touch of (life-giving) water, himself seems drawn toward death.

Our last view of him has him quite alone, walking who knows where in a still-dark Dublin dawn.

Oh, plus there are lots of regular, non-student, empty seats.

Yes, TCF Stadium, when the University of Minnesota made its case to hit up state taxpayers and students for it, was going to be such a big deal, such a big success…

Since the 50,800-seat stadium opened in 2009, the number of student season-ticket holders has dropped from 10,248 to 4,953 last year.

Oh and we’ve been treated, since the opening of this pathetic hole, to the entire panoply of excuses – no alcohol (they fixed that), the team loses sometimes, heavy traffic, it’s really a commuter school (but TCF Stadium was going to strengthen the campus community!), bad WiFi, competition from tv…

Hey. Did anybody mention all of that while people were discussing whether they wanted to spend everyone’s money on a huge new stadium?

Did anybody talk to any students?

… [W]hen I arrived at the University of Minnesota in the fall of 2005, I didn’t identify myself as a Gopher. I came to study and get my degree, not to frolic in the flamboyance of our college sports teams and most certainly not to fund a $288.5 million TCF Bank Stadium. Yet this was an identity that was forced upon me. It was built into my tuition. It was assumed, because I lived within the University community, that of course I was a Gophers football fan and that I would have no qualms about chipping in for the sake of sport. It is a ridiculous and insulting assumption … We should be fighting for the separation of university life from collegiate sports. … Yes, TCF Bank Stadium has already been built, but we still have time to rethink the future of university sports. The recession affords us the opportunity to look critically at the institutions we have designed, modify them and maybe even start over…

OTOH, that separation she’s talking about is definitely happening. Professional coach, professional players, professional stadium, almost exclusively non-students in the stands… It’s happening!

… uselah.

The Japanese have actually arrested someone in the Novartis scandal (background here). Color UD shocked. Color her shocked beyond recovery if the guy actually goes to jail for more than a day or two.

Novartis embedded one of its employees – made him a staff scientist – in five Japanese university laboratories. Five.

As a Novartis Pharma employee [Nobuo] Shirahashi took charge of analyzing data from clinical tests comparing Diovan and other blood pressure-lowing drugs at five Japanese universities … between 2002 and 2004.

How did that happen? How did a Diovan pusher get accepted – hired? – into five university labs in Japan and then take charge of clinical results?

That’s the ¥1.1 billion question, ain’t it?

Hell, they’re just shooting themselves in the foot. They do that, and the professional-league coaches, Saban on down, will bolt as their several million dollars a year salaries plummet. Right now, the highest paid public employee in most states is a college coach. That will start to change if you go the Mike Slive route.

… UD will go ahead and make it again. The most corrupt states have, with a few exceptions, the most pathetic public university systems. Here’s the list:

1. Mississippi
2. Louisiana
3. Tennessee
4. Illinois
5. Pennsylvania
6. Alabama
7. Alaska
8. South Dakota
9. Kentucky
10. Florida

Think too of how many of these lucky finalists boast corrupt big-time sports programs, with Penn State lately leading the pack, of course.

But Louisiana, Tennessee, Alabama, Kentucky, and Florida are also University Diaries perennials.

For Father’s Day, a UD favorite. D. Nurkse, much of whose poetry captures the life is but a dream problem… We so often sense that even (especially?) in the most important things we cannot (will not?) lift ourselves out of a perceptual, intellectual, emotional fog…

A lot of modern poetry seems located right there, in fact, in the thick of the fog, with the poetic voice sort of questioning itself about why it remains fogbound. Poetry, as they say, is the tunnel at the end of the light… But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends— / It gives a lovely haze! If the haze is looked at with care. Paradox? Yes. We both protect ourselves from the truth, from the worst, by aestheticizing it (art heals, softens, shades), and at the same time, with the same aestheticizing gesture, expose ourselves to the truth, the worst.

‘Almost all art,’ [Ted] Hughes writes to American artist Leonard Baskin , ‘is an attempt by someone unusually badly hit (but almost everybody is badly hit), who is also unusually ill-equipped to defend themselves internally against the wound, to improvise some sort of modus vivendi… in other words, all art is trying to become an anaesthetic and at the same time a healing session.’ The artist is the person who because he is so much in need of anaesthetics – and is therefore tempted to trade in them – must also, ‘at the same time’ be able to resist them.

In “Introit & Fugue,” Nurkse enters (introit means entrance) into the ‘fugue state’ which is the defensive semi-awareness of the wound, and then lingers, looks, describes, the inside of the tunnel…

Introit & Fugue

but who is the other old man
in the identical flannel gown,
head cocked, listening
ever more critically,
deeper in the empty room?

That interrogative that ends the thing, that question as to the identity of another old man in a room that’s actually empty, is quite typical of Nurkse, who among many foggy poets is for UD the most interestingly foggy. (I suppose for some readers Prufrock is the Frogmore of Fog, and UD certainly admires Prufrock, but there’s a lot to say about fog.) I wonder whether the other old man is the poet himself, the poet reckoning with himself both as his father’s son (indeed he has grown “identical” to him) and as an old man, as the thing his father became. The poet realizes, in this tableau, just how close he himself is to death (deeper in the empty room) even as he clings to life – life understood as the retention of our restless critical capacity, our lack of peaceful “seamlessness.” On this side, we still struggle; we are not at one with ourselves (split fingerings); in death, the poet’s father attains the delicate perfection of “spun glass,” the capacity to spin about with, and to draw coherence and continuity from, the madly note-studded Bach. On this side, we’re still in the light; on his side, the poet’s father is in the tunnel; and in a fugue state the poet follows him there, enters the empty room of the grave, where his father’s lifetime struggle with Bach (UD probably likes this poem because her own father struggled all his life with Bach) infinitely plays itself out.

So, this shows you what a really good poem can do. It can enter that weird glancing realm of knowing without realizing, seeing while refusing to see, cobbling dreams in order to prompt a scene you won’t script when you’re conscious.

We’re not allowed to forget that the poet’s father is dead. That spun glass becomes a creepy cup of ice in the second stanza… His father is on ice, no softening the matter here… But he’s after all engaged in a kind of counterpoint with his son – the fugue form featuring, usually, two musical voices in harmonic relationship with one another. And so this poem is the wound and the bow, the wound of age, loss, and mortality as well as the soothing lyric itself – the lyric not as vulgar “anaesthetic,” which the great poet resists, but as the honest evocation, the laying out for what it’s worth, of the agonizing, clarifying, transcending, dream tableau.

… where we – along with family and friends – floated along in the strange trance that close proximity to beach, water, wave, and firmament generates.

The silent-Prius trip back to ‘thesda, through Delaware’s immense, flat cornfields over which child’s-picture-book white clouds hovered, kept the trance going.

I’m beginning to shake out of it now; blogging resumes when I am fully functional.

… and the university professor.

… swaggers through the squalor of capitalism and ends up smelling like a rose.

Il tutor di tutti tutori breaks through the whole pathetic Mary Willingham I’m here to teach them something bit into the light of nasty brutish short. Yes, he helped squads of university athletes cheat, and he couldn’t be happier.

They liked that I swore a lot and didn’t give a fuck. Eventually, I became the go-to tutor for jocks… And helping [them] cheat the system didn’t seem any more unethical than forcing some kid to learn about how great capitalism is… [The] argument that the athletes I helped cheat were taking advantage of public tax dollars is a moot point when you consider how much [their] coaches are paid… Our education system is just one giant hustle — and if you ain’t hustling, you’re getting hustled… I don’t see a problem with student athletes cheating. As far as I can tell, that’s the American way.

There are many possible responses to endemic cheating among our big time university sports programs. There’s indifference, anger, amusement, protest rallies, petitions, withholding of student fees, going to the press with what you know, writing about what you know, etc. Adding to the corruption because The World is Shit is pretty much the worst possible response.

… as she read (and listened to) this visiting law professor at way-past-hopeless West Virginia University complain about the school spending $75 million to upgrade its football stadium. As another WVU professor explains:

[T]he party school is [now] a business, and alcohol is part of the business model. Schools lure students to attend their schools with the promise of sports, other leisure activities and overall fun. Part of this fun, whether schools like it or not, is drinking. Thus, even as university officials want to keep students safe, they also need to keep their consumers happy. This means letting the alcohol industry do what it does best – sell liquor.

The important part of that statement is the beginning: In America today, the party school is a business, and WVU is America’s number one party school.

Anyone trying to introduce changes to that business model is excuse me but kind of a fool.

The only thing that changes this business model is un p’tit peu too much rape and pillage, and then things only change for as long as it takes to clean up the lawsuits and probations and all. Then it starts up again.

So who is this Michael Blumenthal who gets on the local airwaves and says

I have to admit that I hold to the now antiquated belief that universities are for education, not sports; that the most important people on a university campus are the students, not the football players, and that the main purpose of large amounts of spare change is to do things for those who need it most, and have it least.

He can’t be the poet Michael Blumenthal, because he’s a poet and not a law professor…

OTOH, the poet Blumenthal is also notorious — for having written another futile protest, this one against the love me do ethos of many creative writing programs. In a 2001 letter to his students at Santa Clara University (he was there for a visiting gig), he wrote that often their writing instructors simply flattered them in order to get good course evaluations:

You have been neither loved nor nurtured. You have, rather, been lied to and betrayed. Though the mother’s milk that flows from such breasts may temporarily satisfy your ravenous appetites for praise (and its donors’ hunger for tenure), it is not, I assure you, a very nourishing brew. You have been told that the not good is good, that the unworthy is the worthy.

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

… But yes! Turns out the WVU Blumenthal is the Santa Clara Blumenthal. This restless, interdisciplinary man has taught all over the world and has lately landed in one of the weirdest campuses in America, a truly anti-intellectual funhouse.

UD admires Blumenthal’s willingness to open himself to hostility, incomprehension, and indifference; but surely he knows no one’s listening.

A candidate for tenure at Harvard was told, she claims, that her “scholarly work in Spanish did not count toward tenure.”

… at Chapel Hill.

It’s true that investigations require withholding facts and that federal privacy laws limit what can be said about student records. It’s also true that the university system president and the UNC-CH chancellor can’t respond to every allegation. Folt and Ross are following the advice of university lawyers. But when the university is hit by allegations as strong and high-profile as those coming from McCants, leaders can’t take refuge behind lawyers and investigators.

This is when leaders step forward, address the public and answer questions. That imperative is particularly strong for leaders of a public university who must uphold the public trust with more than constrained silence and appeals for patience.

It makes a lot of noise when accusations of sexual assault come out of the Ivy League, especially when the accused are football players. The Brown University story is rapidly getting national coverage.

On the other hand, it took newspapers ages to notice what was going on at the University of Montana, where things have gotten so bad that “UM officials concede the controversy [over reported incidents and the university’s response to them] contributed to the school’s enrollment drop.” That drop in enrollment – a very big drop – has continued since the story began to break in 2012. It doesn’t help that UM is featured in the opening paragraphs of a Time article about campus rape.