That’s precisely what I remember discovering, and being mesmerized by, in my also long-ago reading of his first novel, A Pale View of Hills.

This year’s Nobel Prize winner in literature, Kazuo Ishiguro, writes with a weird, weight-bearing austerity which really captured and held me. I remember that thin novel more vividly than I remember most.

When you are young, things like your moral stance and your political position seem very important. I’d spend long nights with my friends sorting out moral and political positions that we thought would take us through adult life. And part of that would end up meaning we despised some people not for what they did, but for the opinions they professed to hold. But as I’ve got older I think I’ve realised that while it is important to have principles, you have far less control of what happens. These principles and positions only get you so far because what actually happens is that you don’t carefully chart your way through life.

I know! I know! Pick me! Pick me!

Uh, yes, UD?

Legitimate!!

A++, UD!  We’re proud of you!

Killing-field fraternities, like massive numbers of big guns in the hands of people like Stephen Paddock, are simply part of the wonderful world of many American males, and nobody gets to mess with frats or guns.

Mr. Horras, quoted in this post’s headline, is charged with defending frats in the wake of yet more torture and slaughter, but, as Caitlin Flanagan notes, he’d do a better job if he, like, knew anything about what he was defending.

Yet why bother checking the narrative – straight out of the Marquis de Sade – of Tim Piazza’s death, when Horras knows that no one will ever do anything about sadistic, homicidal, fraternities in American universities? It’s like asking how many ten minute long massacres of scores of people the country can tolerate before it enacts gun restrictions. Answer: There is no upper limit.

So let us now imagine all the forces arrayed against 19-year-old Tim Piazza as he gets dressed in his jacket and tie, preparing to go to his new chapter house and accept the bid the brothers have offered him.

He is up against a university [the drenched-in-shame Penn State] that has allowed hazing to go on for decades; a fraternity chapter that has hazed pledge classes at least twice in the previous 12 months; a set of rules that so harshly punishes hazing that the brothers will think it better to take a chance with his life than to face the consequences of having made him get drunk; and a “checking system” provided by a security firm that is, in many regards, a sham. He thinks he is going to join a club that his college endorses, and that is true. But it is also true that he is setting off to get jumped by a gang, and he won’t survive.

And UD says:

Cut and paste
In haste,
Blame everyone else
At leisure.

Which is to say that the latest plagiarism miscreant, Jill Bialosky (read the last paragraphs of this review), is going to have to end her dignified silence pretty soon and start shoveling shit like there’s no tomorrow. My research assistant did it, my computer did it, my editor did it, my agent did it, my ex-husband did it, my publicist did it, solar storms did it.

“[I]t’s hard to imagine Bialosky’s intended audience,” writes William Logan, her plagiarism-unmasker. Yet therein lies the problem. Her “condescending” book of platitudes about poetry clearly intends to corner the high school textbook market, and really how much effort do you want to put into that? Just pick up capsule bios of the poets from the Poetry Foundation and stick them between pages of metrical triage.

Even Bialosky’s title has a familiar ring – she’s picked up her cheap urgency (Poetry Will Save Your Life) from Alain De Botton’s equally blowhardy How Proust Can Change Your Life.

If Bialosky has any sense, she will, having been caught red-handed, admit the plagiarism and have the book shredded. If she has more sense even than that, she will refrain not only from blaming others, but also from shifting into second gear when that fails: Confiding in us the dire psychological/financial/chemical problems that made her so desperate that she had to plagiarize. The less said the better, especially because plagiarists are notoriously prone to plagiarize repeatedly, and she doesn’t want our attention drawn to her other work.

UD and her theory of her country’s latest massacre will graciously step aside when investigators discover some simple, graspable motive on the part of the gunman. Until then, how about this.

This was a crime of boredom and intellect. A metaphysical crime mixing a sense of entitlement with a sense of having run out of amusements. This was a hobbyist murder.

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

UD will be surprised if, like Leopold and Loeb, Stephen Paddock had any acquaintance with Nietzschean nihilism. Maybe he read Cormac McCarthy. That’s the mental landscape I’m sketching.

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

His brother calls Paddock highly intelligent, successful, and rich – quite like the buddies who decided, in 1924, purely out of boredom, curiosity, grandiosity, and intellectual enjoyment of the complex technical and analytical steps it would take to carry out a perfect murder, to kill a local boy.

If it’s true that one of the cameras Paddock placed in his room was positioned for him to film himself (this hasn’t been confirmed), this would complete UD‘s picture of a narcissistic game-player (he was a compulsive high-stakes gambler) at the very end of his distracting, engrossing pastimes, a man who never grew up (two divorces, no children) and who decided to leave, at the end of his maddeningly empty life, the ultimate roomful of a bad boy’s toys.

Paddock died surrounded by more guns than he could possibly fire.

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

Since what I’ve written reminds one of my readers of Don DeLillo, here he is:

This is World War III. It’s a fact. It’s everywhere. Innocent people are being slaughtered everywhere. It’s terrorism that is expanding … almost geometrically. What’s left? What happens next? We have our lone shooters, our individual terrorists. Where do they come from? What motivates them? I think in many cases the gun is the motive as well as the weapon itself. A gun makes it possible for an individual, a man—a young man, usually—to make sense of everything that’s happening to him, either in three dimensions or in his mind. It gives him a motive. It gives him a sense of direction. It’s a substitute for real life and it’s the way he will choose to end his life, as well as the life of innocent people, of course.

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

UPDATE: Not quite the same, but an affiliated theory.

Stephen Paddock very well may have contemplated mass murder as a sensualist exercise.

Again, recall Leopold and Loeb: “They did it to see what it would feel like.”

[University of Louisville Athletic Director Tom] Jurich’s pay was essentially ill-gotten gains taken directly from players such as first-round NBA Draft pick Donovan Mitchell, whose television appeal and jersey sales produce the revenue. Yet Mitchell must be content with whatever crumbs the school illicitly tosses him? Throw open the market. Let’s see who clamors for Jurich’s jersey. Or whether the public would rather see him in prison clothes.

… says everyone this morning, after the Las Vegas bloodbath.

There’s a simple … well, it’s not entirely a solution to some of America’s many massacres, but it’s something that could perhaps be effective in certain situations.

For all public outdoor events in urban settings, require the presence onstage of at least one rocket-propelled grenade. At least one speaker/performer would have to demonstrate competence in its use before the event could take place. A child could do it.

These things are reasonably portable and can be positioned to hit pretty high up, so once you detect the source of the gunfire, you could blast the RPG in that direction.

Serious damage will be done to the building, and to some of the people in it. But this is war.

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

James Melton [whose son was killed] described other “angels” who helped his son and daughter-in-law in “that killing field that must have resembled the Marines landing on Omaha Beach.”

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

“At one point I looked up and I thought, ‘are we at war?’“

Anyone really setting out to chronicle the endless history of filthy athletics at the University of Miami would have to use as their model the 200,000 verse Indian epic. But given modern journalism’s space constraints, the task instead is to summarize as briefly as possible the long venerable ages of trashiness that are UM.

UD thinks Jerry Iannelli does a respectable job in this New Times piece, written in anticipation of an FBI indictment against UM’s basketball program.

… goes to Oxford.

SONG OF THE TRUSTEES

We’re off to dump Pitino
The god of our campus that was.
We knew he was a bit of a scuzz
If ever a scuzz there was.
And now that he’s going to jail one day
We’ve got to make sure he goes away
For cause for cause for cause for cause for cause!
Because of the terrible things he does.
We’re off to dump Pitino
The god of our campus that was.

Great headline.

Interim Louisville president Gregory Postel sent a letter to suspended coach Rick Pitino last month saying the FBI investigation into college basketball corruption clearly implicated him and the program…

“The allegations contained in the complaint … insinuate a scheme of fraud and malfeasance in the recruitment of student-athletes involving you and multiple members of your coaching staff in violation of federal law and NCAA Division I Bylaws.”

The one time that I saw him up close, he was delivering the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, at Harvard. Eminences of the faculty had gathered in Memorial Hall, possibly laboring under the illusion that in such august company Cage would finally drop his games and explain himself. Unease rippled through the room as Cage began reciting a string of mesostics—acrostics in which the organizing word runs down the middle instead of the side:

Much of our
of borEdom
Toward talks in
it misled Him
diplOmatic skill to
place to place but Does it look
at present Most
fivE Iranian fishermen
cuTbacks would not

It went on like that, for six lectures, the verbal material generated randomly from Thoreau, Wittgenstein, and the Times, among other sources. Later, when Cage was asked what he thought of being a Harvard professor, he commented that it was “not much different from not being a Harvard professor.”

Motto of Auburn University: NEVER ENOUGH.

How is one of this country’s major jockshops going to shake off its latest thing – the FBI bribery fraud and conspiracy thing? Decades of institutional misconduct have done nothing to blunt their teams’ championship ways; and if Auburn’s long history of corruption has destroyed any vestige of academic integrity, who gives a fuck? It’s a jockshop.

Still, when the DOJ and FBI come calling, it’s definitely a problem, and UD‘s gonna tell you Auburn’s short and long game in dealing with it.

They have a brand new president – hard-landing macho man Steven Leath, who did a bang-up job at major jockshop Iowa State – and Leath’s short game (very short – it’s kind of a placeholder until the other conspirators confess) is to deny that the bribery fraud and conspiracy is the work of anyone other than one singular bad person.

But UD sees a far more interesting long game here, involving Alabama’s next senator, Roy Moore.

UD thinks that if Auburn sits tight and doesn’t do much of anything, Moore will step in and solve its latest problem for it. As a United States senator, he will launch an all-out attack on the FBI and DOJ and their apostate assault on the twin pillars of faith down south: football and basketball. With Roy on their side, the University of Alabama and Auburn University are going to be just fine.