When this story first broke … Paterno said, “This is not a football scandal and should not be treated as one.”
Many agreed. Many still do, including some misguided alumni and football All-Americans and … surely those numbskull students who marched on campus, embraced Paterno’s statue on campus and protested his firing without any regard for the victims.
The problem is concluding that because Sandusky’s reprehensible acts did not lead to a competitive advantage, the football program shouldn’t pay. But the cover-up changes that. What the powers at Penn State did was beyond anything any college athletic program has ever done, beyond free clothes or free rent and academic fraud.
To hell with a free Camaro. We’re talking about sweeping allegations of a child sex offender under the rug in order to protect a school’s image, fundraising and recruiting. There is no more extreme example of a lack of institutional control.
Penn State deserves to be hit hard.
… Paterno and the powers at Penn State were too concerned about the ramifications, off and on the field. That makes it a football scandal, as well.
Jeff Schultz, Atlanta Journal-Constitution
… conclusions about Penn State. Thanks to football, the school has become a pathetic inbred place, hopelessly in thrall in the sort of hero worship that makes the worshiped behave with arrant disregard.
Now the adults on campus will – far too late – move in to remove Paterno’s name from the library and various professorships. It will be harder to convince the true believers to remove his statue from the stadium, but in time that will happen too.
As we all await the Freeh report on Penn State (it will be released today), consider the Joe Paterno statue. Consider universities with a penchant for putting up statues of their living coaches and presidents — like Mountain State University in West Virginia (photo of its statuesque, just-fled, president here, along with details of its loss of accreditation). Ask yourself which sort of political leaders have statues of themselves dotting the landscape. Ask yourself why faculty members at Penn State weren’t so embarrassed by the cult of personality on their campus – a cult that made Paterno and his inner circle untouchable for years — that they opposed that statue.
You say it wouldn’t have done any good to oppose it? Of course it wouldn’t. That doesn’t matter. You’re supposed to go on record as caring about these sorts of things.
…chlodnik?
UD now walks to Whole Foods in Somerville Massachusetts in search of things that go with chlodnik. Twin infant girls, and one of their grandmothers, accompany her.
UD has been way maternal this week. Much dandling.
Read it here.
And here, as I sit in an air conditioned bedroom in Arlington, Massachusetts, is my take on the poem.
Morningside Heights, July
By William Matthews
The title, like the name of a painting, merely sets place and time, which makes sense, since the poem will be a quick impressionistic sketch of a few moments that pass on a hot city street in the summer. The quick-cut, free verse, sheerly descriptive technique makes sense for the evocation of an urban setting, an urban consciousness. Here, bits and pieces of conversation and action rush by in a blur, a blur thickened by layers of superheated air. But this poem will rise from mere description into meaning by subtly elaborating a connection between the feverish confused setting and the speaker’s inability to make emotional sense of his life.
Haze. Three student violists boarding
a bus. A clatter of jackhammers.
Granular light. A film of sweat for primer
and the heat for a coat of paint.
Jump to the poem’s last word and you see that the poet has begun with one word – haze – and ended with one word – hail. He has sandwiched his poem between these two words, as if to underline the fact that he intends here only to capture one strictly limited set of moments – those moments that occur between (the curtain rises) heat and (the curtain falls) hail, between the hot build-up to a storm and the outbreak of the storm on a summer afternoon in New York. The words are monosyllabic, four letters, starting with h. This simplicity deepens our sense of the speaker as someone stunned by the weather into almost trance-like invocation, a kind of passive registering rather than active responding. And stunned by something else.
A man and a woman on a bench:
she tells him he must be psychic,
for how else could he sense, even before she knew,
that she’d need to call it off?
Let us say that the speaker of the poem is the man who, amid this hot and crowded urban scene, is being dumped by his lover. The poem is not just a recording consciousness; it is a wounded and perplexed consciousness, for whom the oppressive weather and the random action are a rough equivalent of his depressed awareness and his sense of the wounding contingency of life events.
A bicyclist
fumes by with a coach’s whistle clamped
hard between his teeth, shrilling like a teakettle
on the boil.
Heat. The metaphor is nicely extended via the boiling teakettle whistle on the bicyclist; but we can also read this as an objective correlative of the fevered rage within the poem’s speaker as his lover dismisses him.
I never meant, she says.
But I thought, he replies. Two cabs almost
collide; someone yells fuck in Farsi.
Life as mischance, as accident, misunderstanding, almost-thereness, near-misses, miscomprehension … The theme is clear enough in relation to the lovers (But I thought…); it is amplified in the larger setting of almost-collisions and obscure, aggressive use of language.
I’m sorry, she says. The comforts
of loneliness fall in like a bad platoon.
This is a slovenly, random world, inside and out, so that when the speaker finally understands what has happened to him – he has been deserted, and will now be lonely – he feels the impact of that wound as one more undisciplined, hazy, thick, painted over thing in his world.
The sky blurs — there’s a storm coming
up or down. A lank cat slinks liquidly
around a corner.
Is his coming emotional storm going to be cathartic (up) or catastrophic (down)? Who knows? Everything is blurred. That meager, lank cat is the speaker, hollowed out by lovelessness, about to rise and slink through the next phase of his life.
How familiar
it feels to feel strange, hollower
than a bassoon.
So here the poet reveals himself fully. He indeed seems to have been not merely an observer of an urban scene in the summer but the devastated man on the bench who has been (the way one will as trauma is unfolding) looking at the world around him, his perceptions and descriptions of it marked, tinged, tainted, by his melancholy, anger, and shock. As with the wounded, confused, passive speaker in Prufrock, whose opening lines describe a hazy night in a city with lots of cats, the speaker here finds himself in an all too objectively correlative miasma of mystery and pain and foreboding. The speaker’s identity turns out to be too weak to compete with his complex, powerful, and painful world. He is simply hollowed out by it all – a hollow man. Recall the violists at the beginning of the poem – the poet is just the opposite of the ringing strings of that instrument.
A rill of chill air
in the leaves. A car alarm. Hail.
On an intensely hot day, a rill of chill air — the speaker, let us say, suddenly shivers with a sense of his non-existence, his death, or deathliness amid this horribly teeming life. The car alarm announces the full expression of the pending disaster, and sure enough hail now falls. Hail here also has the dark suggestion of a twisted welcoming – he hails and greets the official arrival of the storm.
In Garrett Park, Maryland, UD lives under heat and huge trees – a jungle setting, with the branches of a derecho treefall pressing against her windows. The treefall has brought wildlife closer as animals explore the dead limbs. Loud animal noise deepens the jungle feel.
Here in rural New York, it’s about big sky and cool air, a bowl of blue-and-white swirl above, and, around your shoulders, a morning breeze that almost makes you tremble.
The only tea in the house is green. UD puts two bags in her cup in a vague effort to make it taste more black, but basically she’s after the warmth of it.
Of course you could argue it’s wilder here than in suburban Maryland – Garrett Park doesn’t have bears, and Summit neighbors warn us to make loud noises when we take walks – but sitting on the gray deck of our house on top of a hill overlooking small green mountains sloping into farm valleys, you’d think this the more settled place. The dawn chorus is pips and clicks, not the shriek of grackles. We’ve kept the front acres of our hill down to Seven Ponds Road a wildflower field, so no trees press against our windows. A sweet smell comes off the field.
And it’s almost silent here, without the trains and planes and people and dogs of Garrett Park. Down the hill in back of me, past our pond, the Sousias have a lumber yard, and you can sometimes hear them cutting. But for miles around it’s thinly settled. We see no houses from our deck, and are ourselves invisible from the road.
You could say Garrett Park lacks hunters and guns, but, precisely because of this, herds of deer live inches from our houses, while, at least in this part of Schoharie County, the population is under control.
The only wild part of my immediate setting is our little house, empty almost all the time, and so host to hordes of critters. They make themselves scarce when we turn on lights, but they come back when we leave.
While Garrett Park’s always protecting itself from the massive development of boom town Bethesda, Summit New York is a particularly depressed part of generally depressed upstate. The tiny main street has since our last stay closed the general store, a restaurant, and a church. Four miles from town, the Summit Shock Facility, a long-shuttered juvenile detention center, is one of many pieces of local real estate the state is trying to unload.
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So here is a woodpecker, which does shriek a bit coming in for a landing in the maple next to me. It taps a central limb for a few seconds and flies off.
In the evening and early morning you hear pond frogs.
There’s tree removal to be done here too – some dead cypresses (I think they’re cypresses) and a grouping of firs that blocks part of the view. Planted decades ago to give a sunning platform privacy, these got so big they dominate the foreground.
It’s late morning now, and with the sun comes the sleeping problem. The setting is so tranquil – butterflies in the grass, only a faint wind for sound – that life becomes variations on light napping. “You need amphetamines to stay here,” I said to Mr UD. “Even if I had the world’s blackest tea, I don’t think I could stay awake.” I sketch an entrepreneurial future in which we retrofit the place as a yoga lodge. Deep in the most distant part of our view – the blue tips of the Catskills – lie many spiritual retreats.
We have calming the mind down to a science at our house; but what about awakening?
Maybe ours could be the place where you calm your mind, and then you’d move on to one of the Catskill retreats for the next step.
… where readers who’ve been reading UD for awhile know she’s got a little house. No internet connection, however. This place is way, way out of the way.
I’m in a cafe at the moment. So there won’t be much blogging for the next day or two. I’ll be in Boston soon – serious blogging will resume there.
USC’s fit to burst with pride over Drew Pinsky, graduate of its med school and now on its faculty. He was last year’s commencement speaker!
Some say he’s a pharma whore. Some say… well…
The government alleges that Pinsky was paid a total of $275,000 over just two months – March and April 1999 – to deliver messages about Wellbutrin SR, a Glaxo antidepressant, “in settings where it did not appear that Dr. Pinsky was speaking for GSK.”
USC’s dean says “we know he will inspire [our students] as they take the next step in their medical careers,” and if you don’t think making close to three hundred thousand dollars for pushing a drug for a couple of months isn’t inspiring…! Here indeed is a role model for our students as they embark on their careers as healers.
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USC’s guy is not just a mouthpiece… He’s a truly dedicated, truly enthusiastic – I might almost say over the top – mouthpiece.
[Pinsky appeared on a radio show that] began with a clip from a woman who said she had 60 orgasms in a row, “just nonstop.” When asked if this was even possible, Pinsky replied, “Oh yeah. For some women. What I think she was amazed about was it just suddenly started and that kind of thing most typically happens from medication, frankly.” He then segues into saying that that is what he is on the show to talk about. Soon he’s talking about … Wellbutrin …
Sure, you can say this is a low number. Most women start at around a hundred orgasms in a row and move up from there. But sixty ain’t too shabby, is it? For someone on an anti-depressant?
A dear deer, because it’s so hot outside, and I pity it in the heat.
This deer, lying a few feet from my bedroom window, watches me through the grapes and hollies. Its black eyes watch me lying in my cool bed, laptop on my belly.
Things have swung back to some normality. We now have both power and the internet. Every day, for as long as I can bear it, I move my lopper through branch after branch of downed walnut, slipping over yellow fruit as I go. I hatchet through thicker limbs.
So far I’ve regained the side path to my backyard — my backyard, where the walnut was split clean in the middle by a massive tulip poplar that fell on it. The woodpeckers can’t believe their luck.
Now that my lopping has revealed convoluted tree bones, my neighbors tell me what I’ve got is artistic, eco-art. I contemplate saving the money it will cost us to have big stuff removed… Just give the pile a title and let it be… Soltan 2012… No… Sultan 2012. Donald Sultan is a famous artist… I think over the Buddhist metaphysics I was reading last night… Change, the insubstantiality, immateriality, of all seemingly stable things. No shit.