… up to his evil tricks again.

It’s a perennial problem, most significant at our weaker colleges and universities, and one UD has covered for years. How does a school hire, let alone retain, let alone tenure, a dolt-maniac whose convictions – often shared in the classroom – are extraordinarily stupid as well as morally vile?

From the lot of them, UD looks back most vividly on Florida Atlantic University’s James Tracy (though Ward Churchill will always be a favorite with many), who decided that the Sandy Hook massacre was a hoax, and that he was therefore free to harass the parents of the dead children for having taken part in it.

The answer to how a university could tenure an ostentatious degenerate is simple: Doesn’t care, doesn’t know, doesn’t read, doesn’t review, doesn’t. Mark of a bad school. No idea who the hell is teaching classes, and big deal.

Even worse: William Paterson University has known for decades about Mad Dog Magarelli (the moon landing was a hoax; the Germans not only didn’t kill Jews but saved many of their lives, etc.) and done virtually nothing.

It took an 18-year-old freshman to get things going on the guy. Recognizing both that he was a kook and that her university refused to do anything about him, she simply kept her head down, stayed in the course, videotaped him, and made the videos public. The resulting attention has embarrassed the university.

I guess. Maybe they’re beyond embarrassment and really truly forever do not care.

In which case, there’s only one thing to say. Let the buyer beware.

With the nation riveted to the subject of suicide, Utah attracts more and more attention with its astoundingly high rates.

This blog has already noted the many suicides this year at just one Salt Lake City-area high school.

Yet Utah seems distinctly not in crisis mode – there’s little in-depth coverage of the problem in the local press; state government vaguely gestures toward a youth summit here, a not-well-funded research inquiry there…

UD will now suggest some of the possible reasons Utah holds this sad distinction.

Many of the people who live there hate government, and don’t want to pay the sort of taxes that might sustain serious treatment of the problem.

It is illegal in Virgin, Utah not to own a gun. Everywhere else in Utah is awash in guns, though you can choose, legally, not to own one.

Guns are used in over half of American suicides.

If you’re a young Utahan growing up gay, you’re quite possibly at heightened risk of suicide.

It’s a toxic combination of elements.

Ignorant religious fanatics aren’t a good look for a democracy. But Israel (see the above absurd statement) lacks the will to mandate its mandate.

The level of haredi education is terribly low,” [Nobel Prize-winning] Professor Dan Shechtman [said], adding that he viewed the haredi education system as inferior to that of Iran.

Piling on to the absurdity are the lawsuits from various ex-haredim who enter the actual world unable to do shit, let alone get a reasonably good job.

Last year, a judge dismissed a lawsuit by young ex-haredim who left the stringent and non-Zionist Orthodox community who had sought damages from haredi educational institutions and the State of Israel for failing to provide them with the necessary education to function in the secular world.

Sorry, kids. Israel decided to pant after the most primitive forms of Judaism. Enjoy.

An obituary, in the Economist, of Lini Puthussery, an ambitious young Indian nurse.

The journey [to the hospital] from her home village of Chempanoda by bus was slow but beautiful, across fresh-flowing rivers, through groves of areca-nut and rubber trees and past wooded hills. The Western Ghats towered to the east and, in the evenings, took the light of the sun. The place was not quite paradise, because from time to time farmers gathered outside the village office to protest when their land was misclassified as protected forest and their claims to ownership were rebuffed. In 2017 a farmer hanged himself there. Yet apart from those things it was a quiet, green place, with her parents, aunts and cousins all close by.

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

In her spare time she was busy improving her knowledge, to be eligible for a permanent government nursing job. She had filled a large black hard-bound book with neatly underlined entries in English, rather than her native Malayalam, on diseases and their treatments. Her notes, however, did not seem to cover what Sadiq had.

Sadiq had a new, often fatal, virus.

For the virus to spread between humans, contact had to be intensive and direct. That was exactly what Lini, with her tireless nursing, had provided. On May 16th she felt feverish, but insisted … that she would go to work because “lots of patients are there”, as always. When she grew worse, she checked herself into a hospital in Kozhikode and asked to be quarantined. [Her husband] flew back from Bahrain to find her barely conscious. She left him a note, partly in Malayalam and partly in English, which he folded away inside the cover of his phone.

Sajeeshetta, am almost on the way. I don’t think I will be able to see you again. Sorry. Please take good care of our children. Poor Kunju [Sidharth], please take him to the Gulf with you. Don’t stay single like our father. Plz. With lots of love, Umma

Giggle, giggle, goes Scathing Online Schoolmarm.

No.

Make that laugh out loud.

Talk about Freudian slips getting by reporters and their editors.

In an article stating the obvious – Moscow under the imminent World Cup regime will be both the world’s strictest police state and the world’s violent epicenter – the LA Times writer can’t help but let slip the even more obvious point that Russian corruption, in this and every other sphere, is not only widely, but wildly, credited.

… more of a possibility with the death of Anthony Bourdain in France.

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

Nobody heard him, the dead man,
But still he lay moaning:
I was much further out than you thought
And not waving but drowning.

Oh, no no no, it was too cold always
(Still the dead one lay moaning)
I was much too far out all my life
And not waving but drowning.

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

A 2016 New Yorker article about the suicides of two high-profile French chefs.

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

Reading and thinking about Bourdain, I find myself recalling August Kleinzahler’s comment on his wild and brilliant brother, who killed himself at 27:

He wasn’t designed for the long haul. Not everyone is.

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

I am fucking furious with him.

This reaction, from one of Bourdain’s friends, rings very true to UD, since the same sort of anger was certainly her first reaction to her father’s suicide.

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

In line with my two recent posts on horror:

“Sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose or paint can manage to escape the madness, the melancholia, the panic fear which is inherent in the human condition,” wrote Graham Greene in his second autobiography, Ways of Escape, a book which the chef, author and travel show host Anthony Bourdain, who died on June 8 at 61, kept on his nightstand.

END THE ERASURE OF WOMEN.

Now back from Green Man, where UD ate a lunch (spiced chickpeas, cucumber, roasted beets, housemade pickles, lemony herbed yogurt [they substituted tumeric-tahini sauce] over organic farro) she only a short time ago would have considered, well, a horror (she’s on a health kick), I return to my sermon on horror.

Where were we? … People will flock to Hereditary, says a reviewer of this brutal horror film, because they “want to be fucked up.” No sane, rational person (you’d think) would pay money to sit through the hideous relentless dread, and the extremely gruesome visuals (I won’t describe them, but having listened to a detailed spoiler, I know what they are), this film features. But given the hype – and given the amazingly great reviews (94% on Rotten Tomatoes) – millions of people will indeed pay money to sit through this film. Many of them will want to watch it repeatedly. Because they want to be fucked up.

But what does this mean?

Put aside the obvious somatic pleasures, for some people, of lurid excitement, voyeuristic bloodlust, etc. This film transcends routine horror film payoffs. “Hereditary is far more upsetting than it is frightening.”

UD would put it this way: People want their intuition that life is a horror (ja, ja, life is much more than a horror; we’re talking here about the horror) actualized; they seek opportunities to feel the sharp actuality – visualized, narrativized, aestheticized – of what they sense to be true of human existence. They want this because most people want to feel that they are living reasonably lucid and undeluded lives – that they are not denialist cowards in the face of very difficult human realities.

There are high and low, reputable and disreputable, orderly and disorderly, ways to achieve, or feel, this actualization. UD wouldn’t be caught dead at Hereditary, but she’ll pay much more than ten bucks to attend a performance of King Lear. So maybe part of this is snobbery on her part, but more interestingly I think it’s about preferring orderly expressions of disorder, Apollonian openings onto Dionysianism, to the messy horror plenitudinis of offerings like Hereditary.

The first half of Hereditary feels like its own thing, while the second is a kind of highlight reel of things we’ve seen before, with [the director] conjuring up the specters of a half-dozen horror classics and letting them take over; by the end, the movie has become an empty vessel for its references rather than a fully inhabited drama… It’s ambitious to try to make something that balances psychodrama with paranormal activity — to draw from the DSM-V and the Necronomicon — and the ratio here is off. It’s frustrating to watch the intricate psychological architecture of Hereditary’s script collapse under the weight of gory, aggressive schlock — or else reveal itself as nothing more than a pretense for that shlock in the first place. By sacrificing subtlety and suggestion for a blunt-force attack, Hereditary reaps a cheap sort of reward.

Its intricate psychological architecture having been successfully built into a provocative and even – disturbingly – plausible house of horrors, in other words, Hereditary collapses into a wreck of genre cliches and gratuitous scary bits, or, as another review of the film puts it, a “patchwork-quilt concoction of ghoulish clichés.” Which of course the audience is ready for, because our sense of life as nothing alternates with our sense of life as far, far, too much (see my Rilke quotation in Part One). But throwing all that muchness at people risks aesthetic failure.

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

I think that the special horror of a high-profile suicide like Robin Williams’ or Kate Spade’s resides in our sense that their act of self-destruction somehow comprehends both nothing, and too much of everything, and thus gives us a double jolt of horrible clarity. They were blessed with over-rich lives (success, adulation, money, beauty galore galore galore), but this very over-richness maybe was part of the problem – the pure too-little (Rilke’s language) insidiously tipped over into the empty too-much, and they were drowning in it. Maybe what I’m talking about gets diagnosed as mania.

… has had UD thinking about horror. So here is her sermon on horror.

This is Part One, because Les UDs are going out for a meal soon.

She begins with this text, from the novelist Harold Brodkey’s memoir, written as he was dying of AIDS:

Life is a kind of horror. It is OK, but it is wearing.

It is OK – that is, we can take it, we do take it; or we ignore it (“I have wondered at times if maybe my resistance to the fear-of-death wasn’t laziness and low mental alertness, a cowardly inability to admit that horror was horror,” Brodkey writes elsewhere.), or we – and this is where it gets interesting, if you ask ol’ UD – we cultivate that admission as an important awareness.

Brodkey rightly identifies his inability to admit that horror is horror as cowardly: Keep your mind in hell and do not despair is the epigraph to Gillian Rose’s early-dying memoir, and it goes to the ethical imperative, if you want to be a serious, reflective person, to evolve and sustain the double vision implicit in Saint Silouan’s famous statement.

Even our writers, though, seem reluctant to help us out here. In his essay, “Inside the Whale,” George Orwell points out that “ordinary everyday life consists far more largely of horrors than writers of fiction usually care to admit.”

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

Taking on board the horror means not merely acknowledging as fully as you can the first noble truth of suffering; it also means (I suppose this is a subset of suffering; but hold on, cuz my sermon wants to focus on our love of profoundly horrifying films) acknowledging how intimately, sickeningly, undone we are by the lifelong spectacle of just how enigmatically grotesque and grotesquely enigmatic are both grounded human existence and ungrounded cosmic reality.

I read somewhere (can’t find the source) that the best way to get through life is engrossed in “reasonably short-term, manageable anxieties.” Your kid needs to get a job; you want to pay off the mortgage in five years; you want to take fifty points off your cholesterol score. If you can manage, for most of your run, to keep your head down and contend not at all with the incommensurable violent isolating madness just over the atmosphere, bravo. Or maybe it’s cowardly. But anyway, it’s functional, and you’ll get by.

Think of all those great books about the building of the Brooklyn Bridge. Most people would prefer to be John Roebling, totally engrossed for decades in iron probes, than doomed, metaphysical, Hart Crane.

You probably don’t get Chartres or the Brooklyn Bridge built if, like John Koethe, you spend extended time wondering this:

What feels most frightening
Is the thought that when the lightning
Has subsided, and the clearing sky
Appears at last above the stage
To mark the only end of age,
That God, that distant and unseeing eye,

Would see that none of this had ever been:
That none of it, apparent or unseen,
Was ever real, and all the private words,
Which seemed to fill the air like birds
Exploding from the brush, were merely sounds
Without significance or sense,
Inert and dead beneath the dense
Expanse of the earth in its impassive rounds.

Horror vacui is a place many of us have been, and fine, because the capacity to entertain the possibility of nihilism is, I think, a mark of a sensitive, educated person.

But there’s also horror plenitudinis, no? That moment in our lives, wrote Rilke, where

the pure too-little

into that empty too-much.

And this is where the horror film comes in.

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

My opening text on that subject is this one, from one of many excited reviews of Hereditary:

Despite the challenge of watching the film, reviews so far have been almost universally glowing. Critics have lauded Hereditary’s ability to get under their skin, noting that it’s the kind of movie you just can’t shake, as much as you’d like to. The feedback suggests that people turn to films like Hereditary because they want to be fucked up…

Rehoboth.

Photo UD.

— so successfully fashionable that her name is on quite a number of UD‘s things, even though UD is unfashionable — has committed suicide at the age of 55.

Since Spade was a massive success – at least in public, worldly terms – and a very high-profile person, her apparently out of the blue death will generate much speculation.

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

Longtime readers know that this blog has, for a long time, had what to say about suicide. (Type suicide in my search engine to read my thoughts on the matter.) In the very early hours of this particular case, I’ll venture only the following: We are most likely going to discover that Spade had long suffered from severe depression.

Other possible reasons include a recent diagnosis of a bad disease, despair at a relapse into an addiction, or a sudden psychotic onset either in response to a family tragedy, or in response (most frighteningly) to absolutely nothing that anyone is able to discern.

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

She was found fully clothed, her 6ft 3in frame slumped on the floor, having hanged herself with a black silk scarf.

That was wealthy New York fashion designer L’Wren Scott, in 2014. Spade also hanged herself with a scarf.

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

The clear persistence of suicide throughout history suggests that it is a part of the human experience. Until we live in a radically different time and consciousness, one where people are never driven by internal or external demons to look for a way out of intractable suffering, we are not likely to be effective at eliminating suicide altogether. However, because the act so powerfully prompts those of us left behind to reflect on the sacredness of life and the role we individually and collectively play in easing the suffering that results in suicide, it leaves in its wake a deep inspiration to act; to care; to create webs of support that might catch those among us whose suffering becomes intolerable.

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

UPDATE:

Kate Spade Suffered Years of Mental Illness,
Sister Says. Suicide ‘Not Unexpected’

Seen on this morning’s walk
through Rehoboth Beach.

A startling poll released on Friday by public broadcaster ARD showed 81 percent of Germans support banning the most conservative types of Islamic veils from schools and government institutions. The garments they want banned are the burqa, which covers women from head to toe, including the face, and the niqab, which does the same except for a narrow slit instead of mesh square to see out of.

Could we please declare a moratorium on this particular startle reflex? I guess the Foreign Policy guy who wrote this 2016 article was startled; I guess he thought gobs of Germans, and no doubt other Europeans, were fine with public spaces full of degraded women. Will he also be startled to discover that a not-small part of that 81 percent is Muslim? Wow. Gosh.

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

UD has rarely seen so graphic an instance of separation between elites and everyone else as she has on the burqa/niqab front. Each time another European country bans these vile shrouds, startled reporters round up indignant people to talk about how nasty everyone in every European country is.

Maybe we could do better than this. Maybe we could stop reacting like this. It’s really dumb.

Positively spiritual.

Photo UD.