… has been announced.
The winning sentence:
Cheryl’s mind turned like the vanes of a wind-powered turbine, chopping her sparrow-like thoughts into bloody pieces that fell onto a growing pile of forgotten memories.
Other goodies:
The victim was a short man, with a face full of contradictions: amalgam, composite, dental porcelain, with both precious and non-precious metals all competing for space in a mouth that was open, bloody, terrifying, gaping, exposing a clean set of asymptomatic impacted wisdom teeth, but clearly the object of some very comprehensive dental care, thought Dirk Graply, world-famous womanizer, tough guy, detective, and former dentist.
As the young officer studied the oak door, he was reminded of his girlfriend — for she was also slightly unhinged, occasionally sticky, and responded well to being stripped and given a light oiling.
Convinced that the fabled Lost Treasure of Eggsbury was concealed within the statue of the beloved Sister Mary Francis in the village square, Professor Smithee would steal away in the darkest hour of each night to try to silently chip away at her impervious granite vestments – a vain and fruitless nightly exercise, he well knew, but it was a hard habit to break.
Like a bird gliding over the surface of a Wyoming river rippled by a gentle Spring breeze, his hand passed over her stretch marks.
… worked out,” writes George Orwell, in Keep the Aspidistra Flying, about the employees of an advertising agency.
The Independent’s Johan Hari, about to be stripped of the writing prize that bears Orwell’s name, has his own cynical code, its writerly implications described by Guy Walters, who notes
… the 42 quotes in his ‘interview’ with Malalai Joya that Hari lifted from her ghosted autobiography; the 545 words plagiarised from the Daily Mail that Hari inserted into the mouth of his interviewee Ann Leslie; the lies about his Sky appearance with Richard Littlejohn; his fabrications and distortions of quotes in his prize-winning piece on Dubai; the startling familiarity of quotes in his interview with George Michael; his copy-pasting in his interview with Antonio Negri; his outrageously fabricated quotes for his piece on the Central African Republic; his quotes pinched from the New Yorker for his interview with Hugo Chavez; his alleged posting of unpleasant and defamatory comments online under the name of David Rose; his invention of names for interviewees whose quotes he had taken from Der Spiegel …
Beyond the plagiarism, UD has been struck by Hari’s lazy writing, the sort of writing a “tired hack …mechanically repeating … familiar phrases” produces. What would Orwell make, for instance, of Hari’s pointless attack on Prince Philip for having had the gall to turn ninety? Start with his pointlessly contemptuous and juvenile title:
SPARE ME THE FAWNING OVER ‘PRINCE’ PHILIP
No one fawned. The event barely registered.
And the marks around ‘prince’! Wow!
In the piece itself, a way-random series of hits on a man Hari ends by praising, Hari calls the monarchy “a snobbery-soaked institution” – precisely the sort of verbal political hackery Orwell hated.
No. It wasn’t. A heroin addict about to graduate from pharmacy school at Oregon State University has been arrested for dealing.
Drugs fuck up a lot of people, but not this guy. Although addicted, he was a terrific, stand-out senior, ready to put on a white coat and play Mr. Roxicet’s Neighborhood.
UD has written before on this blog about medical and pharmacy and nursing students who get these degrees for the express purpose of giving their distribution business legitimacy. Obviously there’s little a university can do by way of screening for these people… but I’m reminded of something Russell Brand said in an essay he wrote about his friend Amy Winehouse:
All addicts, regardless of the substance or their social status share a consistent and obvious symptom; they’re not quite present when you talk to them. They communicate to you through a barely discernible but unignorable veil. Whether a homeless smack head troubling you for 50p for a cup of tea or a coked-up, pinstriped exec foaming off about his speedboat, there is a toxic aura that prevents connection. They have about them the air of elsewhere, that they’re looking through you to somewhere else they’d rather be. And of course they are. The priority of any addict is to anaesthetise the pain of living to ease the passage of the day with some purchased relief.
I’ve seen the toxic air of elsewhere plenty of times among people I know. Also, sometimes, among students. I’m as guilty as anyone of ignoring it, deciding it means something besides addiction, or just allowing myself to be pointlessly annoyed by it.
But university programs graduating people who will have access to lots of drugs have much larger detection problems.
UD don’t even blink at this shit no more.
Not so much good ol’ universities like Tennessee with almost fully criminalized sports teams… Not that, onaccounta she done read about that for five, ten years goin’ on now… No, UD don’t even blink at the way the local rags report this shit.
I mean, look at it from the rags’ POV. Every year, all year, including the summer, they know they’re going to have to report constant devilry on the part of their local gods, like say the football players at the University of Tennessee. Scary stuff – driving around dead drunk, beating people on the streets of Knoxville, taking part in armed robberies …
So – in order to hold fast the faith of the people, there’s a formula their scribes use for every incident. UD will cite this article – one of thousands of clones – to clarify.
1.) First they remind the people that it’s been eons since they had to put the last player in jail. I mean, really, to be fair, the team’s been clean for an incredible stretch. (“[T]he football team’s arrest record remained clean for nearly five months…”)
2.) Then the assistant director of fuckups gets on the horn and tells the scribes the school is vaguely aware that something vague has happened and they’re looking into I guess or they sure will soon as they know something but it’s real early days and let’s be fair. (“We’re aware of an incident…”)
3.) Now, without giving any detail about the incident, you go on for paragraphs and paragraphs about the position the guy played, the effect on game strategy of possibly losing this guy to suspension or jail or whatever, etc. (“The position is one of the Vols’ biggest concerns…”)
4.) Next, testimonials. (“He made a mistake but he was not causing trouble.”)
5.) Wrapping up, another reminder of the amazing crime-free stretch. (“UT coach Derek Dooley’s continued efforts to clean up the program’s run of recent off-field troubles and change the culture appeared to have paid off, as the Vols were nearly through the entire summer without any incidents.” Have you ever tried to get through an entire summer without getting arrested?)
6.) And finally: The players’ court date is checked against the team’s practice schedule. (“His court date is scheduled for Aug. 4, the Vols’ third day of preseason practice.”)
… and since he’s a feisty fellow, ever ready to defend his position, UD sees a promising future for him.
He’s entirely unfazed that the editors of America’s three major medical journals found a recent study he published (it argues that the FDA’s product reviews stifle the medical device industry) scientifically shoddy and rife with conflict of interest. A congressional committee report summarizes:
“After reviewing the paper, the editors of the three premier peer-reviewed medical journals concluded that the study would not be fit for publication in a peer-reviewed journal.” Dr. [Gregory] Curfman concluded that “it is not really a study at all.” Dr. [Rita] Redberg found “several serious methodological issues with the Makower report that render its findings scientifically invalid.” Dr. [Howard] Bauchner determined that “[g]iven the extent of these limitations, the inferences and conclusions that can reliably drawn from this report are limited.” Finally, all three editors identified significant conflict of interest concerns with the report.
The objections to the study were similar to reactions by Dr. Jeffrey Shuren, director of the Center for Devices & Radiological Health, who lambasted the study when it was released in December. Shuren told MassDevice that the study was “horrible.”
“That’s well below the quality level of a good study,” Shuren told us at the time. He pointed out that lower response rates would magnify the opinions of people unhappy with the process. He added that a sufficient response rate would have been 35 to 40 percent. “We want to have good data.”
The Minnesota Star Tribune provides more conflict of interest details:
Dr. Curfman writes that he was surprised Makower did not disclose his financial ties to the device industry since they “clearly constitute a significant conflict of interest.” Further, he states, “this isn’t a study as all. This is an opinion piece that is dressed up to look like a research study.” The authors had a specific agenda from the outset, he continues, and “they conducted their work in a biased manner.” The CHI report “advocates a potentially dangerous position — that regulation stifles innovation, he says, and “do a serious disservice to medicine and the health of the public.”
Now on to Dr. Redberg, who says there are “serious methodological issues” with Makower’s report, claiming a selection bias among the companies that responded to his inquiry. She goes on to claim the authors, funders and survey respondents may have a conflict of interest because their “livelihood depends on fast approval of medical devices.”
She also quibbles with the report’s conclusion that FDA regs are driving med-tech companies abroad. This argument is flawed, Redberg writes, because approving unsafe devices “actually hurts the economy by allowing limited health care dollars to be spent on expensive devices that do not help patients” [which leads] to higher health care costs that may result in economic difficulties and possible bankruptcies of small businesses.
Stanford is a hotbed of professor-entrepreneurs for whom fast approval is of course the name of the game. Note to Congress: Shut up and get out of the way. Note to Stanford: Terrific research program you’ve got going there.
College President Elizabeth Tice’s office is locked most of the time. She is located in California and visits the Clinton [Iowa] campus maybe twice a year. That doesn’t seem to hinder her work there, thanks to technology that allows for easy communication, despite the distance, [Ashford University’s vice president] said.
…died.
His great poem, The Graveyard by the Sea, is a long stroll through mortality, a mental narrative that begins in an attitude of post-human calm, and then gradually returns to the agon of ongoing existence.
The poet is walking through a cemetery that overlooks the sea. He begins with an epigraph from Pindar, reminding him to “make what you can of the possible.”
Here are some excerpts (I’ve just given a link up there to the entire poem. Here’s another translation.), with a bit of commentary.
The sea, the sea, the recommencing yet!
O recompense, in long abstraction set
Over the gods’ own calm, to gaze and gaze.
The poet begins by feeling the vast sense of calm anyone would feel perched above quiet waves, beneath a quiet blue sky, and adjacent to silent white tombstones and mausoleums. Yet the sea itself is a principle of infinite movement – recommencing yet – always beginning anew – and the poet must know that he gazes at it not as a god but as a man whose own movement through the world will end.
… what a peace we fancy here below!
Over a blue abyss the noon at pause
– Pure products, then, of an eternal cause
Time’s all a shimmer, and to dream’s to know.
The poet still fancies himself a god, one among many pure products in an eternal noontime pause.
O silence, mine! … and structure in the soul
With domes of gold, tile over tile… you, Roof!
The silence is not merely the world’s; it is the poet’s. He continues to align himself with the architecture of eternity (structure in the soul).
I scale pure heights and grow at home here …
I could get used to this place, to this sense of immunity from my own humanity.
But now the poet smells perishable fruit from nearby trees, and
I sniff in this my drift – to ash in air.
Soul’s worn away…
I’ll burn to nothingness under this same hot sun; my very life is a process of erosion.
On mansions of the dead my shadow trails
With many a lesson in its meager length.
Yes, this is my reality. I’m a meager body with a meager shadow, pretending the world is my mansion.
My true location is
Between the nothing and the pure event.
I on the edge of grandeur hang and hark:
The reservoir reverberant, surly, dark
– Threats of erosion in the echo sent.
Here is where I live – after the nothingness that prevailed before my birth, and before the realm of the eternal into which I will eventually be absorbed. I struggle to write from this place, always just on the edge of grandeur, always stuck in the realm of relative inexpressivity. I throw my words into the reverberating ocean, but what comes back is precisely a reminder of my transience.
Yet there’s something therapeutic about this stark encounter with death and infinity:
Once here, the future yawns, an empty stare.
The curt cicada grates the bone-dry air.
All’s burnt away, undone, in sky refined
To some astringent essence. Wide debris –
Life, with its wild addiction not to be!
Here bitterness is sweet, and clear the mind.
What a line – life with its wild addiction not to be… Exclaimed as the poet surveys the immensity of death strewn all about him. As if we can’t wait to go, as if the very pleasure and even obsession of our lives is to achieve the end of our lives. A bitter thought but clarifying, like this essential scene.
Yet while we live, we alone can give voice to the earth and its mysteries. And so we are not negligible; we are in fact indispensable:
Impeccable head, tiara without flaw,
See I’m the secret change astir in you.
… The fears you move – I hold them, I alone.
Repentance, doubt, compulsion, moods I’ve known
Show as your noble diamond’s only blur.
Still, dead is dead, and it’s no good pretending that
When you’re a mist, your singing lips can live…
Away! The world’s in flight! My flesh a sieve.
Days of the holy hankering finish too.
A few more stanzas of wry and melancholy meditation on our fate (“Shovels of earth sent packing to your beds.”) follow; and then there’s a dramatic transition:
Off with those poses of a thoughtful dunce!
Revel in wind; it quickens! Drink and thrive!
A coolness breathing from the open sea
Restores – O vigor of salt! – my soul for me!
Plunge in the surf! Come springing out, alive!
… The freshening wind! Let’s live, or try to! Look,
The vast air ruffles, and claps shut my book;
Reckless, the surf goes geysering on the rocks.
Sun-spangled pages, dazzled, blow away!
Shatter in a jubilant spray
This quiet roof…
No more writing, reading, pondering; time rather to put bittersweet astringency behind me and take up my life, just as it is, once again.
A gifted writer and singer, she tried but failed to overcome drug and alcohol addiction.
UD thanks David for letting her know.
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From a Jon Pareles essay:
Ms. Winehouse has often sung about harmful appetites, not just in “Rehab” but in “Addicted” (about a freeloading pot smoker) and in “Back to Black,” in which she sings, “You love blow and I love puff/And life is like a pipe.” Back when the album was released, it sounded as if she already had some wry perspective. She didn’t have to get any more “real” than that… [Why did Winehouse let] someone shoot video, in a private setting, of her puffing [a crack] pipe …? Maybe it’s some version of “keepin’ it real,” the fallacy that insists art must be autobiographical to be worthwhile, as if art were documentation rather than storytelling. Maybe it’s obliviousness, although, since the camera followed her around, she was likely to know it was there. Maybe she mistakenly trusted that whoever made the video would resist another temptation: the potential profit to be made providing it to a tabloid.
Perhaps Ms. Winehouse misunderstood what should be clear in the age of the Internet: Everything recorded can be duplicated and distributed. And possibly the video was, in its own bleary way, a kind of performance. She is keeping her audience informed if not exactly entertained.
… journalism is a distinction Christopher Hitchens introduces (new one on me, at least) in a recent post about Rupert Murdoch; but the distinction also works in ranking bottom-feeder universities. Gutter would be for-profit online tax siphons; sewer would be their kissing cousins, the diploma mills.
For those, like UD, who enjoy the spectacle of a real shitstorm, there’s this story out of Kentucky:
A Louisville-based ministry and a large Arizona church are suing each other over the disputed sale of an unaccredited online university last year, each accusing the other of fraud.
Child of the King Ministries of Louisville agreed to sell an entity called American International University for $400,000 to the Phoenix-based Church for the Nations in May 2010, both lawsuits say.
Okay, so straightforward sale of a diploma mill from one house of God to another… Happens every day… Only Church for the Nations is so dumb it thought a diploma mill… I dunno… was something… had assets or something rather than just being a website that sold pieces of paper…
The church’s lawsuit said the [diploma mill owner church] claimed the university had numerous accreditations, affiliations with other schools and a regular cash flow of between $15,000 and $30,000 from foreign students who wanted a credential from an American institution.
That church… Ah say that church didn’t get the no honor among thieves memo…
Looks like them big tough guys at the coalface can’t take a little heat.
A Wyoming politician has expressed his own displeasure with a University of Wyoming artwork attacking coal’s environmental effects in this way:
[E]very now and then, you have to use these opportunities to educate some of the folks at the University of Wyoming about where their paychecks come from.
See, folks at the University of Wyoming don’t understand that ideas critical of funding sources are forbidden. This here’s a kind of learning opportunity for them in the limits of free expression.
“[S]haring funds between the Athletics Department and the [University of Iowa] is a good idea; it would go a long way toward alleviating the university’s budget woes and prevent the Athletics Department from being an essentially independent corporation using the UI’s name, trademarks, and academic allure.”
With state funds falling, public big-time sports universities are wondering why they get so little of the tens of millions generated by their programs. Administrators patiently explain that coaches need millions and millions of dollars in compensation every year just to get by, but students and faculty aren’t listening. Here’s the editorial board of UI’s newspaper:
The university’s Athletics Department predicts revenues in excess of $70 million for fiscal 2011. With the UI facing an $8 million decrease in state appropriations, there’s a cogent argument for at least pulling enough from the athletics budget to make up the difference.
After all:
Kinnick Stadium will [soon] be rumbling with more than 70,000 rabid football fans, many of them university students. Few will probably take the time to consider the sheer magnitude of wealth concentrated around them…
Felix Salmon reviews Lawrence Summers’ Harvard presidency (get all the details you want by typing any phrase from his sentence into this blog’s search engine).
He forgets to mention his fabled multi-tasking. As Frank Rich wrote in the New York Times: “That the highly paid leader of arguably America’s most esteemed educational institution … would simultaneously freelance as a hedge-fund guy might stand as a symbol for the values of our time.”
But anyway, everyone’s talking, today, about Summers’ use, in a recent interview, of the word asshole to describe two notorious Harvard students – the Winklevoss twins:
If an undergraduate is wearing a tie and jacket on Thursday afternoon at three o’clock, there are two possibilities. One is that they’re looking for a job and have an interview; the other is that they are an asshole. This was the latter case.
So there’s a wee wumpus this morning about a treasury secretary and a university president and all calling someone an asshole. Who cares. But what this does do is allow me to share with you one of my favorite scientific articles. It originally appeared in the Journal of Irreproducible Results, and has been collected in a book called Sex as a Heap of Malfunctioning Rubble.
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Title: THE AH GENE: Implications for Genetic Counseling
Excerpts: “[We wish to discuss] evidence supporting the existence of a gene (henceforth called the AH gene) that predisposes an individual to chronic behavior in an obnoxious, boorish, selfish, overbearing, and generally offensive manner…. [T]he percentage of adults in the United States exhibiting chronic AH behavior is about 32% (95% confidence interval, 27-37%)… [Being] a carrier of one of … three genotypes is strongly associated with exhibiting chronic AH behavior (i.e. with being phenotypically a “real AH”)… [It] can be argued that almost all of the world’s problems are due to some degree to the influence of the AH gene….”
… Cy Twombly, Lucian Freud has died.
He was Sigmund Freud’s grandson. In a recent interview, he said: “I am not at all introspective.”
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He was interested in presence, and not only human presence: a lightbulb’s glare, a dog’s leg, a horse’s arse, a frayed bit of carpet. The language with which he described people and things, animals and lovers, atmosphere and futility, was a frightening construction. I believe he shared more with his psychoanalyst grandfather than he liked to admit.