UD‘s first boyfriend – and the person she refers to on this blog as her ‘thesdan playmate, has died. He was fifty-seven.

It was sudden, “a shock to us all,” his mother Rita just said to me on the phone.

He’d been out kayaking – he loved to kayak, and wanted to live, someday, on one of the islands off Washington State. He felt, he said to his companion on the water, “strange.” They went back to the dock, and David lay down and died.

He had a history of coronary heart disease; he’d had a stent put in.

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We met in Mrs Washer’s tenth grade Latin class at Walter Johnson High School in Bethesda, Maryland. We shared, like many kids at WJ, the same ‘thesdan demographics: Jewish, children of federal government scientists.

He didn’t look anything like his well-known sister, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. She talks about this in her book A Dialogue on Love:

We are good-looking.
All Mediterranean, all with fine brown frames

and those sparkling, or
soulful, extravagant-lashed
eyes of chocolate

— all but a dorkily fat, pink, boneless middle child; one of my worst nicknames is “Marshmallow.”

Soulful, extravagant-lashed / eyes of chocolate says it. There’s a photograph of David in our high school yearbook in which he’s tutoring a student. The camera, tight on his face, captures his chocolate eyes trained with enormous soulful attention on the student.

His mother, his sister, David – all teachers.

UD was a protected conventional suburban kid, David a hyper-confident bizarro. He went to New York City most weekends, for shadowy hipster reasons… Something to do with an insanely brilliant lover up there whose mother had been Lord Buckley’s lover… A woman who used words like cathexis…

David didn’t care what anyone thought of him… We exchanged notes every day in class – crazy notes, precursors of our crazy Gchats. These notes were ironic, literary, obscene, hilarious, juvenile. We grew up, but our notes never grew up.

Although I came from a pretty cultured home, real intellectual awakening for me started with David. He was at the time an absurdly precocious Straussian; he also met once a week with a scholar of the Talmud. Neither of these particular things interested me. I was interested in David’s intellectual energy, his mental and erotic brashness, his social insolence, his outrageous openness to anything that might be exciting and provocative and difficult and enigmatic and bizarre and entirely not what other people thought worth noticing.

We had a long tortured love affair which ended in his leaving me for a woman he’d met at Telluride, the summer school at Cornell for really smart high school students. (For some reason, I have in my bookcase the madly scribbled all over paperback of The Waste Land he studied from that summer.) Wounded, I spent years angry at him. But he reappeared in my life at some point, wanting friendship.

He wrote me long letters from his exotic solo world travels. I remember in particular a photo of him in India, looking sallow. He’d gotten hepatitis.

He studied history in the honors program at the University of Maryland, and then got an MA in Comparative History at Brandeis. I read his thesis, on infanticide.

And then he went traveling the world again.

Eventually he landed in Seoul, and took a job teaching English at a university there. For twenty years he used Korea as a home base from which to explore much of Asia.

He wasn’t madly in love with Korea, but he was a born expatriate, loving the feeling of always being strange, at odds… Loving too the daily observation of intricate other realities… He wanted to be an outsider. He wanted to be permanently somewhat ill at ease, a stranger at a strange angle to the world.

When he fell in love and married, and when his Korean wife wanted to move to the United States, he did so reluctantly. As she pursued her medical education, David stayed home and raised their son, lovingly teaching this highly intelligent child all manner of things, training his soulful attention on him alone.

David wrote, in a Gchat last year:

I keep promising to take Noam to a really good limestone cave… I REALLY want to give him some rich experiences… I mean, I think I’ve done a splendid job of kindling his excitement about books and what they offer, but there is so much more to life.

Indeed while David, like his sister, was a thoroughgoing intellectual, he was also a gourmet, a kayaker, a knowledgeable lover of jazz, and a fine guitarist.

I never saw him relax. His intensity, his endless observation and analysis of every person, place, and idea he encountered, his complex and to some extent punishing self-consciousness, meant that his life would be at once effervescent and exhausting. He once startled me, in a Gchat, by saying that death seemed to him a rather tantalizing opportunity to rest.

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Pictures of David when young can be found here.

… you’ve always got to include estimated annual legal fees whenever someone tells you how profitable big-time university athletics are. Boosters routinely forget to add to their excited financial calculations that, since almost everyone cheats, and since the cheating is often discovered, high-priced attorneys come with the territory. (The other reason attorneys are an inescapable sports budget item: Buyouts of various coaching contracts when teams don’t win games.)

Take the University of Oregon. Due to some typical recruiting fuckup, UO has just hired a bunch of lawyers. Hourly rates for each of these people range from $330 all the way down to $205.

UO students and parent must be pleased to know that their student fees are being used to bail out cheaters.

Presumably they feel it’s a small price to pay for that heady feeling of winning an occasional game.

You really gotta start with the basics when you’re talkin’ Texan.

… are staggering.

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Poets like dust – the brief, lovely word itself, and the image. Dust conveys our dissolution into insubstantiality at death. Dust to dust.

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Take Dust, by Rupert Brooke:

When the white flame in us is gone,
And we that lost the world’s delight
Stiffen in darkness, left alone
To crumble in our separate night;

And faint in that amazing glow,
Until the darkness close above;
And they will know—poor fools, they’ll know!—
One moment, what it is to love.

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It’s a simple, three-part argument about the way love transcends death.

1.) When we two lovers are almost dead – immobile, each of us alone in our bed, barely breathing, but still thinking – our spirits will be released to fly about like dust to all the places we spent time in when we were living.

2.) Eventually we’ll zoom in on one place in particular – the place of our ultimate rendezvous, our final merging, with one another.

3.) This will be an enclosed garden, safe from the wind that we’ve been riding to get here, and it will be sunset in the garden. A pair of young lovers will be there, and they will witness our strange and amazing passage from earth-bound dying lovers to heavenly eternal lovers. The “shattering ecstasy” of our passion for one another will be a brief but intense lesson to those lesser, sublunary lovers as to what true love is.

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Fleetwood Mac.

I dunno.

I just like the headline.

It has contrast (sacred/profane); it has linguistic ambiguity (If English weren’t your first language, wouldn’t you have a bit of a struggle with HEART BACK?).

And then the story itself – a football player at a Catholic college in Connecticut is a pretty significant oxycodone dealer – has some good elements. He’s from Florida, for instance… And down there – Pill Mill Capital of the World – lots of folks sell pain pills… So many that universities might want to take special care with applicants from, say, Broward County (pain pill capital of the pain pill capital)…

… one of America’s greatest painters, has died.

Like Henry Miller and Terrence Malick, Twombly’s part of what UD calls the Being Brigade – an artist who above all wants to capture on canvas or on film or in prose what it feels like to exist. To exist intensely, euphorically.

Each line he made, he said, was “the actual experience” of making the line, adding: “It does not illustrate. It is the sensation of its own realization.” Years later, he described this more plainly. “It’s more like I’m having an experience than making a picture,” he said. The process stood in stark contrast to the detached, effete image that often clung to Mr. Twombly. After completing a work, in a kind of ecstatic state, it was as if the painting existed but he himself barely did anymore: “I usually have to go to bed for a couple of days,” he said.

Isn’t something like this precisely what all the reviewers of The Tree of Life are saying? It does not illustrate. It prompts in us a sensation of intense existing. A journalist asks a man who has just seen the film what it means. He says meaning’s not the point: “There are no answers to existential questions.”

Twombly, Miller, Malick – They’re not illustrating anything. They’re not even telling much of a story, or offering much of a representation. They are all, we feel, about movement, the sheer onrush of human being in time. Hence Malick’s primary use, in his film, of Smetena’s Moldau with its rapid light spiraling notes building and building through major and minor modes, more and more triumphal, more and more exuberant, exhilarated. Everything’s caught up and brought along in that strong current of sound – even sorrow, marked by dips into minor keys, is somehow assimilated into the fundamentally delighted music.

Miller’s American heroes, dragging their impoverished asses through depressed interwar Europe, are peculiarly vitalized by this dour atmosphere. They are, said George Orwell, “Whitman[s] among the corpses.”

The Being Brigade wants to bring home to us our capacity to transcend this and that life narrative and instead uncover an intrinsic flowing joy within, a ceaseless ecstatic internal movement that speaks of the imperishable bliss of simply being.

This joy is most dramatic, most defiant, when it bursts out of situations of profound negativity, as when, imprisoned in Lubyanka, Aleksander Wat finds that the darker the literature he reads there, the happier he becomes:

The more pessimistic the book, the more pulsating energy, life energy, I felt beneath its surface – as if all of literature were only the praise of life’s beauty…

For me, Twombly’s big wobbly canvases have always been precisely this body electric, this unstoppably alive, grateful soul.

Via UD‘s friend James, another – yes – heartening recruitment story, this one out of the University of Illinois. Christopher Jones is a freshman football player.

Assistant State’s Attorney Scott Larson said [two] men were walking in the 600 block of East Daniel Street holding hands when Jones drove by in a car.

He and others in the car taunted the pedestrians by calling them derogatory names, Larson said. The car stopped, Jones got out and called the men more names, Larson said.

He then hit each of them in the head with a fist. One sustained a cut to the inside of his mouth and the other had swelling around his eyes, he said.

Jones, convicted last year of cocaine possession, is now in jail for aggravated assault.

Jones said he attacked the guys because one of them jumped him last week.

“Jones weighs 320 pounds while the alleged victims weigh 140 and 165 pounds.”

The attack was recorded on a security camera.

Coach Zook was recently rewarded with a raise for being such a heartening recruiter.

He’s the highest paid public university employee in the state.

Real reason?

Because they’re hilarious.

An excerpt:

Coaches and administrators have forgotten how to cheat. These things used to be taken care of with a few hundreds rolled into a handshake and a job for mom at the tractor factory down the road from the school. Now, it’s amateur hour.

This isn’t rocket science, people. The NCAA has what amounts to subpoena power over current athletes and current university employees. That’s it. The NCAA’s rules don’t apply to anyone else. That opens an almost infinite array of cheating opportunities completely undetectable by the NCAA’s enforcement cops. If you get caught cheating, you got caught because you’re incredibly stupid.

What Harvard expert have the Australians been relying on to set their ADHD diagnosis / Ritalin use national standards?

WHOOPS. Monsieur Multiple Sanctions himself, Joseph Biederman.

Now what to do?

Nothing. In fact the committee has all this time just been sitting around waiting for the results of Harvard’s investigation into You mean I was supposed to tell you that the firms who make the drugs I research give me millions of dollars? Biederman.

And meanwhile the Australian committee had to toss its chair because “his ties with pharmaceutical companies that produce ADHD drugs were exposed.”

Yes indeed. Fellow psychiatrists rely on Biederman for more than his research results. There’s an entire ethos to be emulated here. After all, he’s the leader in the field.

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Will this committee assemble itself and get serious about protecting the health of young Australians?

I’d say the outlook is grim. There they sit, the provincials, waiting for big fancy Americans at Harvard to tell them what to do. Tsk.

UD‘s friend Philip alerts her to the emergence of a Swiss political party whose platform is simply the effort to eliminate psychologically crushing, time and money wasting, PowerPoint use as much as possible around the world.

Turns out “anyone in the world can become a member of a Swiss party.” Who knew?

Here’s where you can join (the page features Horror Slides of the Month).

Many university students are brutalized by PowerPoint on a daily basis.

PowerPoint-abusing professors tend to be described by students as boring lazy tyrants.

Other abusers may not be tyrannical so much as cowardly. They may be people who have allowed themselves to be intimidated into hauling PowerPoint into class by the tech weenies in administration.

Join the Anti PowerPoint Party. Be the change.

“The members of this movement do not accept the legitimacy of scholars and intellectual authorities.”

David Brooks on the new Know-Nothings.

It is pretty remarkable: Vegetarians, health food faddists, digestive obsessives of all sorts, blithely toss powerful anti-psychotics and anti-depressants down their gullets (and their children’s gullets) without knowing shit about what’s in them.

UD could understand it if these people were heroin addicts past caring about the ingredients of the compound someone’s handing them. But these are intelligent, watchful Americans, and it’s Down the hatch, baby!

Take the wildly popular, constantly advertised anti-psychotic Abilify, which you absolutely must try with your anti-depressant, darling. Two professors of medicine at Dartmouth write:

[Versus a placebo, Abilify scored] only three points lower on a 60-point scale, and it resolved depression for only 10 percent of patients — that is, 25 percent with Abilify versus 15 percent with just the placebo…

Abilify [caused] 21 percent of patients in the trials to develop akathisia, or severe restlessness, and 4 percent to gain a substantial amount of weight. And, as with all anti-depressants, there is a small increase in suicidal thoughts and behavior among many young adults.

The writers point out that we know far more about our sun screens than about these powerful manipulators of our brain chemistry.

More here. And here.

UC Berkeley says don’t worry: Our “new Pac-12 Media Rights Package” will make us ever so much money.

A Berkeley computer science professor responds:

[S]ince money will be distributed to all teams in the Pac-12, there will be pressure on intercollegiate athletics at UC Berkeley to continue the spiral of increased spending so that it can keep up with the other Pac-12 teams in what is a fiscal ‘arms race.’

… piercing. And it ain’t pretty.

Last summer, at just this time, my freedom to blog ended.

I lay next to my husband in bed one afternoon and said to him:

I’m going to stop. I’m going to shut the whole thing down and not write another word. This firm that has sued me – Righthaven – they could sue me again, for something else I’ve excerpted from a newspaper. Any other firm with the Righthaven business model could also sue me. Righthaven is seeking damages of hundreds of thousands of dollars from us. They’re going to take my domain name. All because I excerpted part of a newspaper article. I named and linked back to the source of that excerpt, the way millions of bloggers do every day. I got no commercial benefit from it, because my blog has no advertising. But a man just came to our door and served me with legal papers that say that if I lose this copyright infringement case they’ve filed against me we will be ruined. I don’t have any choice. I have to shut down University Diaries.

My husband looked at me and said

No you don’t. No you won’t. Do some research. Find out about Righthaven. What they’re doing sounds completely nuts. We’re talking about a total – and seemingly unfounded – threat to your freedom to express yourself. Calm down. Keep a cool head. Call a lawyer who knows something about this.

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Now that the Righthaven enterprise is collapsing – now that they’re losing all of their cases (I turned out to be one of hundreds of American bloggers carpet-bombed by Righthaven), now that their legal staff is abandoning them (The Righthaven lawyer who sued me has expressed regrets about having worked for Righthaven. If I were facing the possibility of lawsuits and sanctions because of my association with Righthaven, I’d say the same thing. Yet in our phone chats, this person was thrilled with his job. Quite the eager beaver.), now that numerous judges have said that Righthaven never had standing to sue in the first place, I can look back on this experience and see that it was a lesson, a hard lesson, for UD, in American freedom, and in the rule of law that sustains American freedom.

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It was also a lesson in trust. Having decided to settle with Righthaven rather than pay who knows how much and suffer how much protracted misery to defend myself, I could have become cynical about a legal system that can prey on people like me and chill their speech.

Instead, I’ve watched one judge after another express rage against Righthaven for what it’s done. I’ve watched public interest outfits like the Electronic Frontier Foundation take on pro bono cases for Righthaven targets and win them big. I’ve watched legal and free speech groups all over the country respond aggressively and successfully to this threat.

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Back to last summer. I talked to a lawyer – a wonderful man who told me exactly how to get Righthaven out of my life right away, which is all I wanted.

Throw money at them. They only want money. They have zero interest in going to court. Tell them you’ll give them this much (He named an amount.) and they’ll take it. Or they’ll ask for a little more…. But are you sure you don’t want to litigate? We’re eager to defend you. We’re eager to shut Righthaven down. You will without question win the case.

What would it entail?

Well, first we’d have to depose you… How much experience have you had of the law?

Okay. Send them an email. Remember to say (He told me exactly how to word it.). And if you have any questions or concerns at all as this moves forward, I want you to call me.

What do I owe you?

Nothing.

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A day later I’m at a doctor’s appointment and my cell phone rings and it’s eager beaver. We begin negotiating. I say to my doctor

I know how obnoxious it is for someone to interrupt what’s going on and talk on their cell phone. I’d never think of doing this ordinarily; but I’ve simply got to get through this conversation now.

He nodded and said he’d be back in a few minutes.

And that was it. The rest was signing and faxing and scanning, end of story.

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Of course they’d frightened me right down to the ground. Of course I was very angry. But I had the money to make Righthaven go away very fast. Many of its other targets don’t, and it’s been painful to follow their stories.

Like me, most of these people write non-commercial blogs with an interest in – as UD‘s tagline goes – changing things in American political and social life. Many are retirees, veterans, disabled people. For months now, their lives have been nightmarish, filled with fear that they will lose everything they own because they quoted a few lines from a newspaper story.

That’s pretty much over now. Although things are still ugly, and Righthaven, cornered, continues to snarl, it’s gradually being put down. Beset by people fighting back and draining the firm’s resources, and, again, currently facing sanction, Righthaven seems to have stopped filing new cases. Already filed cases are being dismissed en masse.

Yet a lot of damage has been done, and that’s damage that you don’t ever really undo, even if you compensate people.

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The upside (UD, a ridiculously obstinate optimist, always looks on the bright side) of this experience, viewed now from the distance of a year and from the knowledge of Righthaven’s likely collapse, is pretty obvious. This Fourth of July, none of it is abstract. None of it is patriotic bromides. I’ve had my run-in with unfreedom, and I’ve watched the institutions of my country take firm action against unfreedom.

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UPDATE.

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Another update.