And, Christopher Hitchens might had added, you don’t even have to go that far. Dave Bliss, notorious head basketball coach at notorious Baylor University, has been hired by yet another Christian school.

He broke rule after rule at the college level, even dragging the reputation of a murdered player through the mud, but none of that seems to matter … What are the students at Calvary Chapel Christian School supposed to think about all this? You can break every rule in the book and become synonymous with disgrace in coaching, but as long as you say you love Jesus, none of it matters?

No. They’re supposed to think that you have to say you love Jesus PLUS be a great basketball coach and none of it matters.

UD anticipates that with each new Bliss scandal and firing he’ll be hired by a Christian school with a longer name. He’s up to three adjectives at the moment – Calvary Chapel Christian – but UD has noticed that the scummier the diploma mill (these places exist to provide fake high school graduation records for athletes so they can be admitted to jockshops like Baylor), the longer and more feverishly pious its name.

So Bliss’s next stop will be Consecrated Calvary Chapel Christian School. Then Celestial Consecrated Calvary Chapel Christian School. Then Chosen Celestial Consecrated Cavalry Christian School. Then Charismatic Chosen Celestial Consecrated Cavalry Christian School. Then Chaste Charismatic Chosen Celestial Consecrated Cavalry Christian School. Then Canaan Chaste Charismatic Chosen Celestial Consecrated Cavalry Christian School.

… fall semester.

So UD woke up this morning and, thinking how she might frame this second part of her account of her visit yesterday to the grave of a person she never met (see post immediately below this one for Part One), she decided to let her musical mind focus hard on the visit.

To what music would her consciousness, subconscious, unconscious, take her if she set all her pistons firing in the direction of Laurie’s grave, broad sunlight, the fallen city, forgiveness, suffering?

Well, here’s where she went, instantly.

And in particular to the song’s first verse:

All of the riverboat gamblers are losing their shirts
All of the brave union soldier boys sleep in the dirt
But you know and I know there never was reason to hurt
When all of our lives were entwined to begin with

Maybe it’s not surprising that she went to that song and that singer. Steve Goodman was, like Laurie, a brilliant Jew who suffered and died before his time. And the question the song poses – Why do people hurt each other so much when their lives after all are entwined to begin with? – is right on the money. Plus of course there’s the morbid business of the brave soldiers sleeping in the dirt…

UD found herself thinking also about the “mystery” vs. “muddle” business in E M Forster’s Passage to India. If you don’t visit the grave, if you settle on all that personal history being a muddle and not a mystery, you are enabled to avoid, all your life, confrontations with that past and your part in it, and the question of whether you’ve made any progress beyond hurting and being hurt. After all, who knows. It’s all a muddle.

But if one hot summer afternoon you find yourself actually standing at the grave, reading aloud the two things that your Israeli friend Janet suggested you read, and placing on top of the gravestone one of your prized calcite-lined beach stones on which you’ve taped a thin piece of paper with these words on it —

One evening she surprised us by belting out “Amazing Grace,” every note pitch perfect.

— taken from a memorial essay two old friends of hers wrote… If you find yourself doing all of that, trying to puzzle out not only the story of this brilliant and thwarted life, this over-richness lying in a plot for the poor, but also your weird feeling that you are somehow implicated in the story (when the only thing that ever happened between me and Laurie was her replacing me in the affections of David Kosofsky), things have obviously progressed from muddle to mystery.

It wouldn’t be a pilgrimage without obstacles,
mysteries and wrong turns, and my sister and I
had all of these today in our search for this grave.

The trip from the Beltway to Capitol Heights
in Prince George’s County Maryland was without
incident, but we missed the turn into the cemetery,
so hidden and overgrown was its entrance.

We didn’t know about the several adjacent Jewish
cemeteries in this rather forsaken corner of the
metro region, so when we took a few more turns and
came upon the National Capitol Hebrew Cemetery,
we thought this might be the place.

The layout was all wrong, though, and after
a short walk in the blazing sun we began piling
back into the car. As we left, we photographed
the back of a gravestone:

One of the caretakers there –
very nice guy in a red pickup –
asked if we needed help.

“Is there another cemetery near
here?” UD asked. “For indigents?”

He said yes and told us to follow his truck.

Seconds later, he escorted us through the gates.

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

Immediately the place jibed with the instructions
Phil Goldman had given me:
A hill on one side, flat land on the other, and
Laurie was buried on the left, on flat land.

This cemetery was much prettier and better kept
than the first one we saw. The ugly urban streetscape
outside its gates unsettled one, but this secluded
little space, with its rows of identical headstones
framed by oaks whose rounded crowns mirrored the
tops of the stones, instantly created a hush within and without.

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

All photographs Frances Eby.

At the University of Southern California, it’s about illusion, and maintaining illusion. As in the top secret executive committee, composed of selected top secret trustees, that will review the illusion that was Carmen Puliafito:

“There will be a fair number of board members who are not engaged in serious decision-making,” [an experienced observer noted]. “The problem with empowering the executive committee in that manner is that a great number of trustees … are more or less in the dark. They become decorative backdrop rather than actually filling the fiduciary role. That is not a healthy situation in governance.”

To make the situation all the more absurd, the university’s president, who seems primarily responsible for maintaining Puliafito way past his unmasking as a world-historical degenerate, is himself a voting member of this committee. PAY NO ATTENTION TO THAT MAN BEHIND THE CURTAIN!

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

Another observer writes:

“A healthy board [which this one, she strongly implies, is not] is going to ask itself: ‘Have we participated in the creation of a culture where the most egregious ethical lapses are ignored because the money is coming in?’”

Very delicate of her to state the matter in the interrogative.

Perhaps most concerning about this board is their inability to come up with more than one member (out of many) willing to respond to the Los Angeles Times’ request for a comment like a real asshole son of a bitch:

I have no interest in talking to the L.A. Times. … Just draw a line through my name.

Ronald N. Tutor! May your name be inscribed in the book of life as a blessing, for lo! Of more worth is one honest man to society and in the sight of God, than all the crowned ruffians that ever lived. Amen.

Not an old friend.

Never met her in fact.

She was a (triumphant) rival for an old boyfriend’s love. Wee UD spent some years feeling hatred for her.

And then all that youthful passion and rivalrous intensity was over and we both grew up and married (neither of us married the old boyfriend) and she became a scientist at NIH and ol’ UD, well, you know…

But though she was a golden girl with everything going for her – blistering beauty, intellectual as well as artistic brilliance, Bronx-bred cockiness – she got only half a life, and she suffered a lot. Family and health woes beset her, she died barely into her sixties, and her end was seen to by the Hebrew Free Burial Society.

It has gradually become important for UD to make a pilgrimage to her grave.

To – I suppose – make amends for the hatred UD felt for her, and to honor her exuberance and her suffering.

The man who runs her obscure resting place responded to UD‘s email and gave her directions to the place, and to her old rival’s gravestone. So that is what UD will try to do tomorrow (try, because the place is open only on Sundays for a few hours and UD suspects no one ever goes there and so maybe although it says it’s open it won’t be open) and she will write about it here.

They tend to be unable to stop doing stuff, saying stuff, creating keepsakes of their itinerary, as they – in principle – try to put more and more distance between themselves and the police. The Northwestern University microbiologist who seems to have stabbed a guy to death is on the lam; but while on the lam he has made an apology video (intended for his family, but now, one presumes, in the hands of the authorities), and has stopped by a library in Wisconsin to make a donation in the name of the guy he allegedly killed. I’m gonna guess that his next move will be suicide.

A non-academic would have made a beeline for a trailer park in upper Temagami and hunkered down there silently smoking and drinking until everyone forgot about him. He wouldn’t have made everything such a production already!

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

UPDATE: Both suspects have surrendered in San Francisco.

[The] associate director for research in the Regional Primate Research Center [at the University of Washington] … created a hostile work environment for a woman under his direct supervision because he “persistently, and for an extended period of time, made unwanted sexual comments and jokes,” and reminded her often that he could fire her. The investigator also found that [he] had a sexual relationship with another woman under his direct supervision, and that he viewed pornography on his work computer even when he was warned not to. … [He also] asked employees to solicit a prostitute for him…

The university had received complaints about [his] behavior on six separate occasions, as far back as 2006…

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

UD thanks Seelye.

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

And if you want to know absolutely everything the big adorable lunkhead did, go here.

A public protest – now in its second day – outside a mosque with an FGM-friendly leader.

This is the only way you’ll end it – a combination of public protest, and punishment in the courts.

(See post below this one for details.)

You have made the mastiffs bleed out
You have made the pit bulls die
Our honored Michael Vick
Makes these innocent creatures cry.
Worthy football hero!
We honor you today
May our sons and daughters
Imitate your ways.

[Interlude]
OH, YECH!
OH, BLECH!
Y!O!U!D!I!S!G!U!S!T!M!E!
YOU DISGUST ME

I noted in this recent post our country’s almost total amorality when it comes to football heroes. This is what I mean:

Virginia Tech is so impressed with animal torturer Michael Vick it’s putting him in its hall of fame.

To the shock of seemingly everyone involved in this decision, numerous anti-Vick petitions are gaining tens of thousands of signatures. After all, Vick graduated from Virginia Tech!

Haha I mean he failed to graduate – another point of honor I guess… Executes non-performing dogs, college dropout… convicted felon… If that’s not a man of honor, what is?

The honor will go through despite the petitions, believe me. We’re talking virtually total amorality when it comes to football.

But it doesn’t hurt to sign them.

For John Ashbery’s ninetieth birthday, the Guardian’s poetry critic reproduces and discusses this late-career poem of his:

Life is a Dream

I know I’ll have a chance to learn more
later on. Waiting is what’s called for, meanwhile.
It’s true that life can be anything, but certain things
definitely aren’t it. This gloved hand,
for instance, that glides
so securely into mine, as though it intends to stay.

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

In her telling, it’s bristling with homophobia, Auschwitz, coming of age, and love; UD on the other hand reads it as a mildly anxious gloss on Yeats’s similar late-career poem, Circus Animal’s Desertion.

Both poems, IMHO, feature old poets reflecting on the process of aesthetic creation, on the way some people – people like them – are sort of both blessed and cursed with the ability to take the random broken stuff of the world and transform it into art. In Yeats, the poet mucks around in the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.

Those masterful images because complete
Grew in pure mind but out of what began?
A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street,
Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can,
Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut
Who keeps the till. Now that my ladder’s gone
I must lie down where all the ladders start
In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.

Ashbery’s in the same trash- and lumber-yard:

A talent for self-realization
will get you only as far as the vacant lot
next to the lumber yard

Same point, no? A capacity for transforming the vague fallen dross of the world into meaningful formal beauty is only a capacity – all your poetic life you must try to get farther than the vacant lot (note the nice internal contradiction of that phrase, the word “lot” meaning not only enclosed place, but many – so again the rag and bone shop, the lumber yard, is full of things; there’s a lot in or near that lot; but since nothing has been done to transform any of its objects and make it meaningful, it is vacant, expressionless). The vacant lot is the abundant object-nothingness, the object-silence, of the world that confronts the poet again and again as he attempts to write a poem and give the world words. At this late stage in their poetic lives, both Yeats and Ashbery are feeling some degree of panic, let’s say, as their imaginative powers wane (What can I but enumerate old themes) and their profoundest images begin to look old.

Letters, being “read off,” the beginning of the line: The rest of Ashbery’s first stanza expresses – in his typical oblique vague dreamy way – the difficulty of beginning a poem — beginning an Ashbery poem, with a capital A. This poem self-reflexively elaborates upon the perennial gnawing anxiety of the poetic vocation, the creative imperative; and the surrealistic introduction of the nasty urging rodent-like man in the next stanza would, in this account of the poem, be the poet’s own anxious impatient self-punishing insistence on a life of continued artistic productivity: Don’t just muck around inside this dream, you fool – you’ve learned how to make anything “real” – that is, you’ve learned how to give anything persuasive aesthetic shape and life – and your vocation is to continue to do so. Take whatever you like from the lumber yard/rag and bone shop. Take

The corner of the stove,
a cloud of midges at dusk-time.

And fashion it into poetic form.

Or maybe Ashbery’s poem/poetic dream is the temporal inverse of Yeats’s – maybe this is the old Ashbery remembering himself as a young poet, a poet just beginning to be “schooled” in poetry. If so, his last stanza is the old poet reflecting on his subsequent decades of education in world-transformation:

I know I’ll have a chance to learn more
later on. Waiting is what’s called for, meanwhile.
It’s true that life can be anything, but certain things
definitely aren’t it. This gloved hand,
for instance, that glides
so securely into mine, as though it intends to stay.

What is life, and what is a dream? Both dream and life are dream, and if you are a poet “It was the dream itself enchanted me.” Dream is anything, but sly life slips in things that boast of solid empirical real life, like the sudden feeling in your hand of a gentle, guiding, and loving gloved hand that slips so easily into yours and seems destined to stay by you permanently — that’s a certain thing that definitely is not life. That is the poet’s writing hand gloved into a false comfort and ease which amounts to an evasion of the artistic imperative. Think of the complex invitations and evasions of the painterly hand that dominates Ashbery’s most famous poem; “Life is a Dream” is yet another enumeration of the theme of poetic consciousness and poetic procedure:

Dreams prolong us as they are absorbed […]
Something like living occurs, a movement
Out of the dream into its codification.

It’s rare that a university professor kills; when he does (it’s almost always he), it’s almost always a husband or boyfriend killing a wife or girlfriend in a rage.

This much-covered case of a Northwestern University professor allegedly stabbing a young man to death in the professor’s apartment sounds like something similar, although this might have been a gay relationship.

To the newsworthiness of a professor killing (and a professor from a major university), we can add the fact that the guy specialized in the plague!

Oxford College Treasurer and
Black Death Professor
Sought in US-Wide Murder Manhunt

Here’s hoping he didn’t arm himself with a few bacilli on his way out of town.

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

He’s on the run. Maybe I saw him last Wednesday.

I was on the metro, the red line, from Bethesda into the city to have lunch with a friend, and across from me on the train sat a guy who looked somewhat like the description and photo the police provided. He was probably in his forties, athletic, on the tall side, and what really struck me was the t-shirt he had on: It said VASSAR on it, and the guy graduated from Vassar.

He had a lot of luggage, but lots of people on the DC metro carry lots of luggage.

And – yeah, I hear you – would a smart guy like this one wear a shirt that had Vassar emblazoned on it?

Athletics and the med school: At many universities, these are the big ticket items, featuring massive salaries and high-profile staff, plus smarmy rhetoric about teamwork and making the world a better place through selfless scientific discovery and character-driven winning traditions.

So what if these same two locations may be shot through with conflict of interest, other forms of personal and financial corruption, and even criminality?

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

And… I dunno… On the eve of the anniversary of Woodstock — (Has UD already told you she’ll be in Woodstock for her birthday later this month, at the Bear Cafe, and as her carful of family and friends approaches that hippie town she will slide this into the CD player and make everyone sing along?) — on this sacred anniversary, UD will simply echo Janis and say Get it while you can... Honey, get it while you can.

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

Your basic Five Million Dollar Man don’t have no truck with hippies. When Hugh Freeze coached women’s high school basketball, he was so incensed at a player wearing a Grateful Dead shirt that he had to stay in the room while she took it off. That’s how dedicated he was to Just Say No.

One woman [says that] Freeze forced her to change shirts in his office, claiming her Grateful Dead shirt violated the school dress code because it “represented drugs.” At the time, [she] was in eighth grade; according to her, Freeze did not leave the room while she changed.

“Coach Freeze pulled me in his office and told me that my shirt represented drugs. … I said, ‘I’ll go change in the bathroom,’ and when I said that he said, ‘No, you’re going to change in here so I get the (Grateful Dead) shirt and you can’t have it back.’

He didn’t do anything sexual. But I stood in the corner and faced the wall when I did it and I changed out of my shirt. No privacy.”

Five mill and free nubile body viewing… And all the while you’re being billed as a saint and a miracle man. Get it while you can! Over in the med school, Carmen Puliafito’s also getting his… As long as he can… And both Ole Miss and Southern Cal are dumbfounded at what the heads of their football program and med school are up to…

UD could care less about sports of any kind (exception: competitive Scrabble), but she’ll say this: Her need to read about athletics for this blog at least led her to Deadspin. Who knew some of the best writing in America would come out of this funny, subversive, knowledgeable, source? Deadspin has taught UD much of what she’s learned about the lingo and lunacy of the jock shop, and along the way it has delighted her not only with its literacy, but also its amused embrace of the ultra-loucheness of this thing that has taken over – of all places – our universities.

Nobody notices or cares when professional soccer, football, and basketball are disgusting. We only pay attention at the very grossest margins, as when an NFL player tortures his dog to death. Moral monstrosity on the level of mere money registers not at all, as in the failure of the FIFA story, or the related story about the apparently universal tax evasion of international soccer players, to get anywhere at all. Who cares. Put a bunch of guys together with a lot of money and surprise.

But the university. Ah the university. Little streamers of seriousness continue to flutter ‘pon it. Wilted garlands of gravitas shake aloft their dying buds. The Sacred Groves of Academe! When a university reveals its true rot, as in the moral desert of (in effect) all-male Baylor, the extremity of response – A new woman president! Who, asked why she took the job, says “I love Jesus.” – tells you all you need to know about the effort required to keep stray wisps of legitimacy flying.

But I don’t want to overstate the matter…

So people do indeed tend to notice the truly debauched campus. Whorehouse-for-teens-and-their-parents proprietor University of Louisville is the higher ed scuzz-meme of the moment, cited in a kind of shorthand in many articles about other athletic scandals; indeed, it’s mentioned in a wonderful Deadspin piece about Hugh Freeze, a guy who has a lot in common with the miscreants at Baylor, being both a superduper Christian and a (reportedly) twisted piece of shit.

Ole Miss, ex-haunt of football coach Freeze [background here], has many advantages when it comes to ultra-louche supremacy on a university campus, the most important of which is its location in the most corrupt, most benighted, state in America. Nobody much cares what goes on down there, and this includes the people who run the state. So the tired business of boosters giving impermissible benefits to players, and similar venerable forms of corruption, continue to thrive at Ole Miss, which means the NCAA’s always sniffing around. The general air of loucheness in a steamy south that time forgot, plus William Faulkner having lived in Oxford, means that people often reach in the direction of his novels (with special attention to the Snopes family) to, er, contextualize some of the goings on, as Deadspin notes in a wonderful summarizing paragraph:

The revelation of Freeze’s possible sex-having brought its fair share of confused hilarity [to observers], but did little to outline the future of either of Ole Miss’s ongoing, convoluted [legal] cases with [former former Ole Miss coach suing Freeze for defamation Houston] Nutt and the NCAA. There were (are) still a number of questions to be answered — namely, how Nutt and [his lawyer Thomas] Mars knew exactly where to look [for dirt on Freeze]; whether anybody comparing this case to a William Faulkner novel actually read a William Faulkner novel; how long Freeze was possibly using school technology and school funds to maybe fuck; how far back into his career Freeze’s general misbehavior extends; whether Freeze was even the one doing the fucking; whether Ole Miss know about Freeze’s extracurriculars beforehand; and how Nutt’s legal team will use this information moving forward.

That one about whether Freeze was actually doing the fucking: There’s a theory that the calls on his phone to an escort service might have been on behalf of a recruit…

UD does think the Faulkner comparison works, since he wrote convoluted stories like this one, about vague imperishable grudges among unsavory people, like these people.

The phrase about how far back Freeze’s misbehavior extends: The Deadspin piece includes some way-twisted testimony about the way Freeze behaved when he coached a women’s high school basketball team.

One woman [says that] Freeze forced her to change shirts in his office, claiming her Grateful Dead shirt violated the school dress code because it “represented drugs.” At the time, [she] was in eighth grade; according to her, Freeze did not leave the room while she changed.

“Coach Freeze pulled me in his office and told me that my shirt represented drugs. … I said, ‘I’ll go change in the bathroom,’ and when I said that he said, ‘No, you’re going to change in here so I get the (Grateful Dead) shirt and you can’t have it back.’

He didn’t do anything sexual. But I stood in the corner and faced the wall when I did it and I changed out of my shirt. No privacy.”

Another student, remaining anonymous, claimed Freeze was “hyper attentive” when it came to making sure the girls’s skirts adhered to school policy. She also claimed that on one occasion, when she was late getting back to class from her lunch period, Freeze obliged her request to be paddled rather than sit in detention; instead of fetching a female administrator to complete or at least proctor the punishment, Freeze paddled her himself.

“(Freeze) did some bizarre warm-up taunt before actually making contact,” said the woman, who spoke to USA TODAY Sports on the condition of anonymity because she said she fears reprisal. “I was humiliated that he didn’t have a female in the room. I don’t know if the acts were intentionally sexual or if he was really that oblivious to the inherently sexual nature of his approach to discipline.”