In the winter of 2012, we met up in Dublin, where he received an Honorary Doctorate of Letters from Trinity College. He was often embarrassed by accolades but embraced this one, coming from the same institution where Samuel Beckett walked and studied. He loved Beckett, and had a few pieces of writing, in Beckett’s own hand, framed in the kitchen, along with pictures of his kids. That day, we saw the typewriter of John Millington Synge and James Joyce’s spectacles, and, in the night, we joined musicians at Sam’s favorite local pub, the Cobblestone, on the other side of the river. As we playfully staggered across the bridge, he recited reams of Beckett off the top of his head.

As you know, Saudi Arabia has announced the launch of a massive new tourism initiative, and UD – whose first job out of Northwestern was copywriter at Kenyon and Eckhardt – has some advertising ideas.

Possible print ad copy, men-only, appears in this post’s headline.

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Overall concept and tagline, men and women:

Saudi Arabia: LIVE THE STORY OF O.

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Girls: “[F]emale travellers are warned they must meet their ‘sponsor’ on arrival into the country.” OOOH. Shiver me timbers…

Observers estimate 12.5 million American women lie somewhere on the Masochism Scale, with roughly one million women outright masochists. Saudi has something for all of them: Infantilization, restraints, imprisonment, degrading clothing.

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S and A — S and M: LIVE THE DREAM.

Step into the pages of Pauline Reage’s classic novel when you enter our magic kingdom. Revel in the freedom to take your bondage and discipline out of the bedroom and onto the ancient winding streets of our beckoning desert towns. You will never want to go home!

Yeah, yeah, it makes your brain mush... But it also pays for four years of a fine college education!

… talented as he was in so many directions, has died.

True American. True West.

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From a 1997 Paris Review interview.

Alcoholism is an insidious disease; until I confronted it I wasn’t aware that it was creeping up on me. I finally did AA in the hardcore down on Pico Boulevard. I said, “Don’t put me in with Elton John or anything, just throw me to the lions.”

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Violence and conflict are part of the music… There’s no way to escape the fact that we’ve grown up in a violent culture, we just can’t get away from it, it’s part of our heritage. I think part of it is that we’ve always felt somewhat helpless in the face of this vast continent. Helplessness is answered in many ways, but one of them is violence.

… Don DeLillo. Just discovered it. Haven’t yet read it. But UD loves Don DeLillo and considers the appearance of any new writing of his to be worth mentioning.

It’s called “The Itch.”

Gaelic football? Something of
that sort.

I mean, you can watch it.

All well-provisioned universities need access to an Emergency Title Reserve, a list of names they can immediately slap on a professor with a named chair when the original name on the professor’s chair suddenly becomes… well…

Take Mary Waters, the socially conscious Zukerman Professor of Sociology at Harvard until it turned out Zukerman had stolen around fifty million dollars from the United States government. When it looked likely Zukerman would go to prison (that is in fact his current primary residence), Harvard was able to scrounge around in its ETR and come up with the name of some schmuck willing to sit there until he or she was needed (Theirs not to reason why/Theirs but to do or die).

Zukerman stole from the poor to give to the rich, as did the fascinating Esformes family, long one of the filthiest nursing home operators in Chicago, but now, in the person of Philip Esformes, “charged … in what has been touted as the nation’s biggest Medicare fraud case.” These named chair donors don’t think small – if you’re going to steal from America’s struggling taxpayer, steal tens – hundreds? – of millions! Then spread it around among the deserving rich so you can get your name emblazoned in some hoitsy-toitsy joint like Harvard, the University of Chicago…

Nothing says whitewashing like a university chair. If Bernie hadn’t suffered a reversal, hands down there’d have been a Madoff chair at Yeshiva University.

So Nir Uriel, once touted as the Esformes Chair in Medicine at Chicago, has been re-named the Block Professor.

UD of course has nothing against universities scrambling to dump crooks and replace them with saints. She has only two comments to make about this.

1. Better make sure the second-in-command is pure as the driven snow. It would be positively Rube Goldberg to have to keep giving their professors new names.

2. Instead of just quietly doing it, UD thinks universities should announce the change. Disclosure matters, and there’s a way of writing this sort of news release that makes it honest and unembarrassing.

For many years the University of Chicago has been pleased to be the recipient of financial generosity from the Esformes family, which endowed a professorship in our medical school. We have, however, now removed the Esformes name from that chair, because members of the family have been accused of Medicare fraud.

His sins trickled from his lips, one by one, trickled in shameful drops from his soul, festering and oozing like a sore, a squalid stream of vice. The last sins oozed forth, sluggish, filthy. There was no more to tell. He bowed his head, overcome.

Sluggish. It’s kind of like that at USC, only it’s not sins – it’s lies. The president, the provost … sluggishly, sluggishly, sluggishly, they begin to ooze the truth about their protection – nay, their celebration – of a (probable) drug addict, a man for quite some time notoriously disengaged from the responsibilities of his $1.1 million a year job. They seem more or less to have let Carmen keep doing his drug- and sex-addled thing and ignoring his job until those extremely annoying Los Angeles Times reporters couldn’t be brushed off anymore.

So okay. Okay! You wanna know what really happened? Not the blahblah we told you last week, but the actual stuff that happened? OKAYOKAYOKAYOKAYOKAY. The Times should be grateful, by the way. If it weren’t for our stonewalling, its reporters wouldn’t be getting a Pulitzer for investigative reporting this year. So you’re welcome.

The president’s letter was released hours after The [LA] Times provided USC with findings about Puliafito’s behavior during his tenure heading the medical school.

Fine. We’ll only stop lying when totally cornered. We’re totally cornered. So here’s the deal. Here’s the letter where the soon to be ex-president of USC finally coughs it up. (Not that ol’ UD thinks that even now he’s entirely coughed it up. Ol’ UD is sure there’s more even than this. But this is certainly something.)

[The prez] revealed late Friday that the university had [in fact] received complaints and imposed disciplinary measures against the then-dean of its medical school…

… Puliafito had [in fact] been the subject of “various complaints” during nearly a decade as the dean of the Keck School of Medicine. … Puliafito [had in fact] received [obviously toothless] “disciplinary action and professional development coaching.”

Nikias also provided new details about Puliafito’s final months in the job before he resigned in the middle of the Spring 2016 term.

In 2015, USC Provost Michael Quick put Puliafito “on notice for being disengaged from his leadership duties,” the president said.

UD would have loved to be in the room for the professional development coaching. CARMEN PUT DOWN THE BUTANE TORCH …

Oh, read the article. Feast your eyes on the USC receptionists, committees, provosts, and presidents who couldn’t be bothered checking up on whether the person in charge of medicine – you know, patient care, doctor education – at the university was as fucked up as he, well, yes, now that I look at him, certainly seemed to be. Consider an entire university leadership treating the local newspaper of record like a worthless piece of shit.

And sit tight – the producers of the film probably haven’t even starting thinking about casting it yet — they’re waiting out the story before they do that. Al Pacino should be finished doing Joe Paterno by then; he’d make a great Carmen Puliafito. For prez: John Waters.

… this story … for UD to share with you one of her favorite ads.

So when eminent Stanford med school professor John Borchers staggered onto his private plane and flew himself into the side of a mountain in 2008, Stanford could get away with saying nothing when reporters tried asking the school about the fact that the body of the busy teacher/clinician was loaded down with so many drugs it took like a page and a half to list them all. He’d been a known addict for ten years.

In addition to cocaine and Prozac, toxicology tests by the FAA turned up opiates, mood stabilizers and anti-psychotic drugs. One of the drugs, buprenorphine, was among those Borchers prescribed to patients suffering from heroin addiction, according to his own online business profile.

John Borchers didn’t know how to fly very well, and he was maybe finally close to losing his license to practice medicine, so this was arguably a carefully prepared (#1: swallow the medicine cabinet; #2: pilot your plane alone at night through mountains) suicide. Yet Stanford has never said a word about having maintained this dangerous wreck of a man in a responsible and visible position on its faculty, though given his long record of addiction and attempted detox Stanford must have known about him.

UD drags up this ancient history because if you put aside the difference that Carmen Puliafito is still alive (though from his total silence in response to all efforts to talk to him you wouldn’t know it), his is a similar story of pretty overt fuckedupness determinedly ignored by a university that already has quite the history of ignoring fucked up high-level people.

USC faculty members I’ve been in touch with are incensed that a doctor was allowed to take patients for more than a year after his drug-fueled behavior was reported to the university, and they’re not buying the administration’s claims of ignorance.

Puliafito engaged in behavior (partying with meth-head friends in his campus office) that seemed designed to dare the University of Southern California to do something about him. Even after the LA Times told USC’s president that Puliafito had spent an evening lying through his teeth to the police about his relationship to a young woman found overdosed beside him in a Pasadena hotel room littered with drug paraphernalia (if you enjoy this sort of thing, you can listen to the police interview), the president simply wouldn’t hear what he was being told. In effect, he still won’t.

What we have here is a cover-up. Systematic cover-ups, as Steve Lopez notes. And you know what? Cover-ups exist to cover up not just a specific triggering event (Puliafito/Pasadena/Police), but, one has to assume, related, and possibly worse, stuff. What is USC hiding?

… in a burqa.

What?

Me worry?

Sing it.

I could have done better with a boy like you
But I loved everything that you do
Wish I knew, hey hey hey, wish I knew

So I should have realized a lot of things before
The LA Times is feeling pretty sore:
“Give me more, hey hey hey, give me more.”

This one is about the world’s richest person.

At an early age, he displayed mechanical aptitude — as a toddler, he dismantled his crib with a screwdriver.

She’s come tearing through her daughter’s new school, threatening lawsuits because the school won’t let her run free and fully veiled on its property. (Background here.)

It’s been a pleasure for UD to watch how attitudes toward the burqa/niqab have changed all over Europe. The Guardian, a left-leaning paper, publishes two letters in response to the lawsuit threat, neither the slightest bit sympathetic:

As a Muslim woman, the case of Rachida Serroukh (Mother sues daughter’s school over face veil ban, 21 July) fills me with dismay. It has been widely documented that there is no religious obligation, in the Qur’an, for a woman to wear a face veil, burqa or niqab, but simply to dress modestly.

I wonder if she thought the staff at the school (or the children) would look at her suggestively. I very much doubt they would. The face veil can be intimidating and frightening for children. Ironically, the countries that encourage women to wear a burqa or niqab are those where women’s education is thought to be unnecessary and dangerous.

We all need to respect the culture in which we live; although Rachida Serroukh wants her children to have a good education in a top school in Holland Park, she seems to neither like nor respect the culture in which she lives…

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The school should not have to deal with this issue – this is a provocative action and the local authority should be supporting the school. Rachida Serroukh is importing a 12th-century custom which discriminates against women into 21st-century Britain. This country has to adhere to its commitment of equality, as France does, and the law should not be used to undermine our way of life.

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Hadn’t thought of that. It’s a simple and persuasive point: An adult entirely covered in black (this includes, for most wearers, not just the face, but, for instance, the fingers), speaking through black mesh, would be for most children pretty grotesque. Traditional nuns might have been somewhat scary, but at least they let you see their face.

Many of us find something deeply unsettling in the self-annihilation of the burqa, and the fact that it is fully and exclusively associated with women tells us all we need to know. It’s even ickier to contemplate the messages little children (especially girls) get, seeing women done up like that.