… among faculty and staff. At our most career-criminal schools, like the University of Louisville, the theft starts at the top (UL is currently trying to use the courts to claw back a few of the millions their last president apparently swiped) and moves briskly and efficiently through various heads of programs (who can forget Dean Felner?) and also into – no kidding – athletics.

UD has learned over the blogging years that the less legitimacy – hell, the less reality – something calling itself a university has, the more the random people hanging around this random place will steal. Schools with a graduation rate approaching zero percent – for instance, Southern University, with its beloved, larcenous band leader – and schools approaching zero enrollment, like Chicago State University, will be the national theft standouts.

Obviously, as the school tanks, very few conscientious people will want to have anything to do with trying to run it. You end up hiring rogues, hastening the process of decline.

Just hours before Richie Incognito, a violent paranoid wreck with a long history of mental illness, was hauled off to the hospital, this Vikings fan wrote:

[S]igning Incognito at least gives the Vikings more options at figuring out the best offensive line combination for next season… [H]e has seemingly turned a corner for the better …

Sho nuff. That’s what they said of Richie way back when he attended the University of Nebraska, and then during his … brief scholarship run at the University of Oregon.

Incognito fell into [a] mind-numbing pattern of offensive behavior, always washed away by the fact that someone was willing to ignore his troubles because he could physically handle himself on the football field. He’s been identified as a menace, suspended and dismissed. He’s been kicked out of games for fighting, accused of being dirty, and now, exposed as an apparent bully who shook down a younger teammate for $15,000 in milk money.

Universities and professional teams have been all over this profoundly damaged man for years and years and years, excited by the vicious bullying that is his sickness and their field advantage. Surely after Richie’s latest incarceration and observation for dangerous insanity he will be picked up by a team once again, and we can once again enjoy the spectacle of this volcano of a man erupting all over a town near you, as local reporter/boosters and coaching staff assure us he’s turned a corner.

UD leaves today for a vacation at the beach. Longtime readers know this almost always means Rehoboth, where over the years a passel of family and friends has also gathered.

Mr UD totally needs the break, his week in Warsaw having been way gratifying but exhausting.

Much to say about bizarre developments in academe, and I’ll say them from the beach. Ne quittez pas.

Photographed outside, in front
of one of UD‘s dragonfly pillows.

… Nebraska, which just loved him, and which still loves him. Like Johnny Manziel, Richie was lionized during his college years even though everyone could see he was all fucked up.

Jock schools can’t get enough of broad-shouldered psychotics cuz they make the best plays, and these schools are certainly not in the business of noticing that their hotly-recruited wrecks are sick in the head and in need of help.

And then it’s on to the pros for these shambling bohemoths, for more fun basket-case-voyeurism. We’ve even got Richie’s latest paranoid attack and collapse on tape.

… at the exhibit honoring his modernist designs.

*************
Photo: Joanna Soltan

Prolific, hilarious, shameless, truth-bearing.

Like his anti-hero, Mickey Sabbath, Roth had “the talent of a ruined man for recklessness, of a saboteur for subversion, even the talent of a lunatic — or a simulated lunatic — to overawe and horrify ordinary people.” Whether young and reckless like Ozzie Freedman, or old and reckless like Sabbath, Roth’s characters tend to age toward self-hatred at the settled spectacle of their all-too-human depravity, their daily hopeless struggle (no; they’ve given up the struggle) against sloth, filth, lust, despair, envy, violence…

Notice how, in the excerpt from Sabbath’s Theater, the name Dostoevsky recurs:

I had been reading O’Neill. I was reading Conrad. A guy on board had given me books. I was reading all that stuff and jerking myself off over it. Dostoyevsky — everybody going around with grudges and immense fury, rage like it was all put to music…

The unbearable lightness of being. Unmitigated rage at being. Writers put this to music. What was it I quoted in a post a few days ago? A writer’s comment on the suicide of musician Scott Hutchison:

Frightened Rabbit [Hutchison’s band] was virtuosic when it came to expressing the odd anxieties of an early, hungover morning, when a person wakes up and has to reckon with herself, again — the relentless ennui of being, and being, and being, and being.

The deeply hopeless lowness of the human can be played strictly for laughs – Portnoy’s Complaint, or Woody Allen’s “Notes from the Overfed” – but the best writers at their best (Kafka) throw in high and low for a real Alban Berg effect.

Roth located this modern leit-motif and settled there, teasing out variations on our vileness and our moment-by-moment reckoning with our vileness, a reckoning that grinds on without any Jesus to perceive and forgive and redeem.

Right now. Warsaw.

Mr UD: Far right.

On her way to her Uber, UD spied
a turtle in her pachysandra.

At Potomac Park, she bought tea
and coffee at this new Italian cafe,
stuffed her backpack with grapes,
Cheerios, toothpaste and dog treats
from Harris Teeter, walked briskly
around residential Potomac Park,
and then Ubered home.

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

UPDATE: UD‘s rather – uh –
informal garden turns out to be
a perfect spot for turtles.

Hungary goes down the tubes.

Daddy’s Guns. (Sing it.)

When people ask of me
What would you like to be,
Now that you’re not a kid any more?
I know just what to say,
I answer right away.
There’s just one thing
I’ve been wishing for.

I wanna take Daddy’s guns
I wanna take Daddy’s guns
That’s the most important thing to me.
Cuz when I get Daddy’s guns
When I get Daddy’s guns
I’ll blast the girls who aren’t nice to me.

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

Gunny, isn’t it?

Gunny. You’re a land that loves weapons
That’s a peculiar sign
Gunny. You give guns to your children.
Gunny, isn’t it?
Large, and gunny, and mine.

Bravo, Trudeau.

What a remarkable country UD lives in.

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

Also great for gramps!

Big sports programs are such a boon to universities.

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

Penn State: “Whew! We got off easy.”

Once again, students must instruct professors on the gross negligence of failing to restrict/outlaw laptop use in their classes. This Northwestern University student nicely rehearses the by-now almost universally accepted arguments against laptop use in the classroom; he goes on to note that plenty of professors still don’t give a shit.