Although they’d have had to up that hourly rate to at least $500 to attract that faculty…
… [BP] has been “offering signing bonuses and lucrative pay to prominent scientists from public universities around the Gulf Coast” to muster a defense against inevitable litigation in the wake of the April 20 oil spill, according to a report in the Press-Register newspaper in Alabama.
At one point, BP plc “attempted to hire the entire marine sciences department” at the University of South Alabama, the report states.
The contract, obtained by the newspaper, would have barred the scientists from publishing their research, sharing it with other scholars or even talking about it.
The department did not sign…
Scientists interviewed by the newspaper told of being offered $250 an hour…
Max Brod, you recall, ignored Kafka’s request (in writing) that he destroy all of his manuscripts… Which, you know, I guess was okay since Kafka’s manuscripts were really good.
But then Brod gave all the originals plus lots of other not-yet-released stuff to his girlfriend, who was nuts and hid it away, and then she left it all to her children (now old ladies), also nuts. Nuts and mercenary.
They’ve been selling it off bit by bit (it resides in Israel and Switzerland in bank vaults) for millions. To Germany.
Israel, finding this grody to the Max, and quite certain Brod intended all of it for the state of Israel, has been suing for decades, etc.
Here’s the latest chapter of The Trial:
… Four safety-deposit boxes were opened in Zurich Monday by order of the Israeli court, revealing a wealth of Kafka-related manuscripts that now are being catalogued. In the next few days, five other safe deposit boxes are to be opened in Tel Aviv.
When the very first of the total of 10 boxes was opened last week in Israel, one of the sisters, Eva Hoffe, is reported to have burst into the bank in an effort to prevent the vault from being opened, shouting “It’s mine, it’s mine!”
Though present this week in Switzerland, Ms. Hoffe was barred from the bank vault and from the conference room where the papers were examined.
… The library has produced evidence that Max Brod intended the manuscripts for it and, in three decades of frustrations worthy of Kafka himself, found its deal to receive the papers repeatedly blocked by Ms. Hoffe.
Sure, there’s a limerick or two here. I’ll give it a whirl. Later.
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Okay. So here’s what they find in the vault.
Codicil
Dear Max, here’s my scariest thought:
That this writing, so painfully wrought,
Will fall to some bitches
Who’ll sell it for riches
And, oddly, will never be caught.
A Duke researcher’s questionable experimental methods seem to have inspired someone to look closely at his cv. On it, he claims a Rhodes scholarship he didn’t earn.
The Duke University School of Medicine has suspended a researcher and stopped patient enrollment in three cancer studies upon learning of reports that the researcher had overstated his academic credentials.
The lead researcher, Dr. Anil Potti, was placed on administrative leave, said Douglas J. Stokke, a spokesman for Duke, while it investigates allegations that Dr. Potti falsely claimed to have been a Rhodes scholar.
The article goes on to suggest that Potti has a habit of padding his cv.
Harvard Medical School tightened its policy on conflict of interest, banning faculty from receiving corporate gifts and meals and restricting them from speaking on behalf of companies…
Harvard University also adopted a campus-wide policy on conflict of interest, the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based school said on its website…
The medical school was earlier stung by criticism when Senator Charles Grassley said Harvard psychiatrist Joseph Biederman failed to disclose some payments from drug companies while he conducted research recommending their medications for treating children with mental disorders…
… yesterday’s New York Times account of Elie Wiesel’s having crushed a play about him through the use of legal threats is compelling.
Wiesel and Bernard Madoff were fellow trustees of Yeshiva University. They occasionally dined together. Wiesel invested lots of his money with Madoff. There’s every reason they should appear in a play together.
But Wiesel doesn’t like appearing in a play with Madoff, and he has, with remarkable vulgarity, gone after its writer, an artist who, as she says in the article, “can’t get sued, there’s no way I could afford it.”
The word for Wiesel’s behavior is disgusting.
After UD leaves Rehoboth Beach, she goes to Upstate New York, where she has a house. Not far from that house is Stageworks/Hudson, where she and Mr UD will go to see the revised version of this play, Imagining Madoff. Unable to deal with Wiesel’s threats, the writer has removed his name from her play’s list of characters. But UD gathers that his spirit, if you will, lives on. We shall see.
Meanwhile, as is so often the case when people act in the way Wiesel has acted, Imagining Madoff is receiving far more publicity than it would have if it had run as originally written.
He’s a University of Florida dropout.
He may have done something so unethical when he was a student there that the school will have to forfeit its recent Sugar Bowl win.
UD sometimes wonders…
What’s the psychology of the reverse refudiated game? All that kee-razy school pride! That excitement! We’re Number One! … Does that vanish as if it never happened when the NCAA announces that you didn’t win after all? Do students at places like UF even give a shit about ex bribe facto dicta from distant organizations…?
… From fiscal year 2003 to 2009, the [athletic] department expenses have increased 61 percent, to $73 million.
That includes compensation for the coaches of the school’s 29 teams, which increased 70 percent, to $14.7 million, and for the department’s administration, which increased 55 percent, to $13.8 million.
… The university has been subsidizing the athletic program to the tune of $7 million to $14 million a year…
[F]ootball Coach Jeff Tedford and basketball Coach Michael Montgomery have lucrative contracts with a combined cost of roughly $5 million each year…
Nah. Not Auburn. Your one-stop on-line education spot: The University of California at Berkeley.
… said UD as she returned to her rented beach chair yesterday afternoon. She’d been away from it for two hours, first cooling down in her building’s nearby pool, then having lunch with her sister, and she’d worried that someone might have snatched the chair.
Or, far worse, someone might have lifted the big black hardback she’d set on its seat: Hitch-22, the memoirs of Christopher Hitchens.
But no, everything was here, including the book, its yellow spine blazing away in the sunlight as a high tide nipped its heels.
Having carried a headful of Hitchens to lunch, she’d burbled to her sister (who would have preferred to discuss Morrissey) about his virtues… “Dismal. Why don’t Americans much use that word? Hitchens uses it all the time, and it’s a great word… Recondite. An absurd word! I don’t use it because it sounds pretentious. But he uses it and it’s fine… Grog-blossom!
I once had a drink with an Express veteran, his face richly veined and seamed with grog-blossom…
Phrases too: One cannot be just a little bit heretical… And endless hilarious invective which always feels accurate — unlike Gore Vidal’s, which is also hilarious but feels vindictive…”
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I didn’t go into the deeper affinities I feel reading a man who adores Auden and Larkin (“I think that if I take, say, my two favorite English poets,” he said in an interview a couple of days ago, “the ones I most often recur to, are Philip Larkin and W.H. Auden. Both of them have a great understanding of tragedy, and a keen feeling of, you know, in some ways, the absurdity of the human condition. But it’s also from the absurdity that they draw things that are quite mordantly funny as well. I don’t think it’s possible to have a sense of tragedy without having a sense of humor.”) and quotes Cesare Pavese…
Actually there’s a striking and immediate affinity there, because my first week on the beach I’d reread A. Alvarez’s book about suicide, The Savage God… Beach reading à la UD… and Hitchens not only begins his narrative talking about that book (his mother killed herself); he even pulls some of its quotations from Pavese (“No one ever lacks a good reason for suicide.”). If you’ve read my latest Inside Higher Ed post about burqas, you know that I begin with a Pavese quotation pulled from last Saturday’s Alvarez reading. (“Every luxury must be paid for, and everything is a luxury, starting with being in the world.”)
UD and Christopher Hitchens: Two literary-minded children of suicides.
*********************************
To be sure there are more obvious things to interest me in Hitch-22 — people we know in common, like Peter Galbraith, praised on page 300; a love of obscene limericks; a love of Dylan and Peter Paul and Mary and the Mamas and the Papas; Jewishness; a slightly louche interest in the outer edges (“I think I wish I had not been introduced so early to the connection between obscure sexual excitement and the infliction – or the reception -of pain.”) — but what rivets UD is this odd life-and-literature affinity.
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Well, let’s bring it all together. It’s far from my favorite Larkin poem (I think the last line is weak), but anyway.
To the Sea
To step over the low wall that divides
Road from concrete walk above the shore
Brings sharply back something known long before —
The miniature gaiety of seasides.
Everything crowds under the low horizon:
Steep beach, blue water, towels, red bathing caps,
The small hushed waves’ repeated fresh collapse
Up the warm yellow sand, and further off
A white steamer stuck in the afternoon —
Still going on, all of it, still going on!
To lie, eat, sleep in hearing of the surf
(Ears to transistors, that sound tame enough
Under the sky), or gently up and down
Lead the uncertain children, frilled in white
And grasping at enormous air, or wheel
The rigid old along for them to feel
A final summer, plainly still occurs
As half an annual pleasure, half a rite,
As when, happy at being on my own,
I searched the sand for Famous Cricketers,
Or, farther back, my parents, listeners
To the same seaside quack, first became known.
Strange to it now, I watch the cloudless scene:
The same clear water over smoothed pebbles,
The distant bathers’ weak protesting trebles
Down at its edge, and then the cheap cigars,
The chocolate-papers, tea-leaves, and, between
The rocks, the rusting soup-tins, till the first
Few families start the trek back to the cars.
The white steamer has gone. Like breathed-on glass
The sunlight has turned milky. If the worst
Of flawless weather is our falling short,
It may be that through habit these do best,
Coming to the water clumsily undressed
Yearly; teaching their children by a sort
Of clowning; helping the old, too, as they ought.
UConn lost roughly $280,000 in football, according to the numbers. Only three BCS programs lost more…
How can UConn football lose money with an advertising deal with IMG that pays the school $7 million annually? And UConn, through apparel and merchandise sales, can almost count on another $2 million every year.
[The U Conn athletics director comments that] “[F]ootball, men’s basketball, women’s basketball is a tremendous source of pride for our university and the state of Connecticut and for 200,000 alumni….”
From Cambridge News:
An ancient piece of rock art – unlike anything previously found in Eastern England – has been unearthed in a Cambridgeshire village.
The hand-sized artefact is thought to be 4,500 years old, and it was found by a woman taking part in a weekend geological course run by Cambridge University at Over.
It is a slab of weathered sandstone, with two pairs of concentric circles etched into the surface – a motif which, according to archaeologists, is typical of “grooved ware” art from the later Neolithic era, in 2,500 BC…