[See this post for background.]

… Smith College graduates will be deprived of the thoughts of Christine Lagarde, chief of the International Monetary Fund. She withdrew this week, under pressure from people who object to the I.M.F.’s role in the “strengthening of imperialist and patriarchal systems.” So, one of the world’s most powerful women will not share insights with one of the nation’s most prominent women’s colleges because of a concern about patriarchy. Evil men — that’ll show ’em.

Instead of Lagarde, the intrepid people at Smith will get arguably the most parochial speaker available: An ex-president of their own school. As for her advice on resisting patriarchy: Be Lloyd Blankfein’s toady…?

Growing? As the Rugrats would put it, Nike University is all growed up. Take a look around at the place. The New York Times says that the University of Oregon’s palais des sports (whose walls do not – yet – say RAPE YOUR ENEMIES, but do say EAT YOUR ENEMIES) is “enough to make an NFL team jealous.” To me, that doesn’t sound like a growing sports culture. It sounds like an accomplished sports culture.

The University of Oregon is, in the particular case, a basketball culture which seems to be fostering a troubling rape culture. Aggression above all.

… State U.

When your football team boasts Richie Incognito and… so many others…

Incognito was suspended (twice) at Nebraska, and you know it’s not easy to get suspended at Nebraska, where character-building coach Tom Osborne let a cornerback play while awaiting trial for second-degree murder. Osborne also retained a defensive lineman who was arrested eight times, convicted four times, and left the heartland accused of multiple sexual assaults, before his induction into Nebraska’s Hall of Fame in 2006. Not to mention Nebraska’s current leader of young men, Bo Pelini, who is still apologizing for an epic carpet-bombing of F-words, an attempt to say exactly what he thought of Nebraska’s fans.

… The Incognito rap sheet includes a note that his peers voted him the NFL’s second-dirtiest player. No. 1 in a Sporting News poll last year was another Nebraska worthy, Ndamukong Suh.

… it’s maybe hard to get worked up about the team currently – allegedly – harboring a linebacker who’s a very professional bicycle thief… I mean, a linebacker who’s part of a very professional bicycle theft ring, made up of himself and fellow hometown-boy-made-good (they met in high school) Lucas Keifer. Both are two of the university’s finest – Keifer is a long-distance runner. So both of these heartlanders are excellent runners… Maybe they should have fled the scene of their theft on one of the bikes – that’d be faster than running, even given their terrific running ability…

I’m not sure why the nation never focuses its attention on teams like Nebraska’s. People seem more comfortable thinking about thugs in Florida or New Jersey schools. Americans are very sentimental about the heartland. But actually Nebraska is one of the most disgusting teams out there. And that’s saying a lot.

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UD thanks Dirk.

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Here’s the local press, featuring the writing style Scathing Online Schoolmarm calls coacha inconsolata:

Here is a problem Husker football Coach Bo Pelini certainly doesn’t need or didn’t count on this off season…

Poor Bo! Poor put-upon Bo! Only months removed from the revelation of his own shitheadery/paranoia, Bo must now suffer the slings and arrows of his highly recruited bicycle thief. Dear God! What can we say at this point of this great and good man?

How about… BO‘DIED BUT UNBO‘D…

Sure, these reviews are pretty easy to write. Still, they’re often fun to read.

… which people will be rereading when Penn State’s latest Dear Leader, James Franklin, implodes, taking already-imploded Penn State with him.

Already trailing moronic sexism and the Vanderbilt scandal, James Franklin

feels very much like a modern football coach. He is a walking TED talk. His is the language of a pitchman rather than a professor. He readily admits to being a perfectionist, and he says things like this about coaches, according to Blue-White Illustrated’s Nate Bauer: “They’re control freaks, they’re maniacs, and I’m one of them.”

And that’s the issue: I have no idea if, given the contours of this system, it is possible to be all these things and still maintain one’s ethical framework. I have no idea if a college football coach can be both a control freak and a model citizen, and I don’t think anyone else knows, either. This is, after all, the subtext of the debate Penn State people been waging amongst themselves for the past three years: Was the Paterno mythos inherently flawed? (Hell, you might say that this is the central question inherent to the existence of college football itself.) And this is the same question that lingers now, as the James Franklin era takes hold.

Is the Kim Jong-un mythos inherently flawed? Not if you revel in total control by maniacs. Weinreb cites a recent interview with a Franklin fanatic:

A few weeks ago, Penn State played its spring football game, and Harrisburg Patriot-News columnist David Jones conducted some interviews with fans, and during one of them, he expressed to a young man his thoughts that Penn State would have been better off hiring someone else. The young man was incredulous; the young man said, Have you seen the way this guy recruits? And Jones said yes, and Jones said he worried that Franklin, for all his seeming good will, might cause Penn State trouble at some point down the line. And the response he got weighed heavily on me for days after I read it.

“Yeah, I know,” the young man said. “But I don’t care.”

Instead of the evil head of the IMF (Christine Lagarde is also “the first woman to lead a global law firm, [and the first] to be the finance minister of a major industrial country.” She is, as well, a top candidate for head of the European Commission and is talked about as a viable candidate for president of France.), Smith College will get as its commencement speaker the woman who, as a member of the Goldman Sachs “scandal-prone” board, approved Lloyd Blankfein’s notorious multimillion dollar bonuses. (“There’s no indication in [a recent Simmons] interview that Simmons takes her fiduciary responsibilities to Goldman’s shareholders particularly seriously,” wrote Felix Salmon of Simmons’ embarrassing, “snowed by Lloyd,” tenure.) They will get the woman who was rewarded for that approval by getting paid

$323,539 [in 2009] for her work on the [Goldman Sachs] board… [She] will soon leave her position at Goldman with stock that is currently worth about $4.3 million. That was on top of her salary at Brown, which was $576,000 [in 2010].

Yes, the protest against Christine Lagarde has worked! The witch is dead; three cheers for Dorothy.

Here at University Diaries, we never tire of quoting that thing beloved of university football boosters: Give the sport more money because it’s the university’s front porch.

Too true. Every outlet from the New York Times on down today features astoundingly violent (coaches and players) Rutgers University, and you obviously can’t put a price on publicity like this. It’s one thing to become a national laughingstock because of your mad sadistic basketball coach (who can forget the SNL sketch?). You’re moving to a whole other level when you recruit a quarterback who a few nights ago allegedly inflicted permanent brain damage on someone. Someone he seems to have left to die on the streets. Someone currently fighting for his life.

The quarterback, who’s from Minnesota, was named “Minnesota’s Mr Football in 2011.” Too right.

UD‘s not sure how she missed Australia’s Troy Buswell (my headline comes from a 2011 story about his ex-marriage), but along with having committed “11 traffic offences … in one night,” he seems to have plagiarized a report justifying the extreme expense of a taxpayer funded trip he recently took to Europe and Asia.

… campus in the country to start doing some marketing. If you read through these posts about Rutgers, you’ll discover that the school subsidizes its athletics program to the tune of millions and millions of dollars, so the place should be receptive to revenue-generating ideas.

Now that their quarterback-to-be has been arrested for beating a guy possibly to death (the guy is still alive, but in critical condition, having apparently been kicked twice in the head while down, etc.), Rutgers, with its notoriously violent coaches and players, would be a fool not to take advantage of the cachet its name now carries.

What UD is getting at is that the school should market a muscle car, or boxing gloves, or some sort of weapon (not a gun, because the Ruger is a gun, and that sounds too much like Rutger), and call it The Rutger. The name Rutgers is at the moment synonymous in the public mind with brutality; if Rutgers wants to make money, it’s going to have to strike while the iron is hot. There’s always another school (feast your eyes) vying for most sports-related assaults, rapes… And though Rutgers has a little breathing room here, given the sheer volume of violent incidents it has maintained over the last couple of years, you can’t let your guard down.

Get behind the wheel of a Rutger and own the road, baby.

… when you live, as UD does, in the heavily wooded Washington suburbs, hard by Rock Creek. UD’s town, as longtime readers know, is Garrett Park, an arboretum, so all the birds hounded out of high trees by Bethesda development flock to our prolific, carefully tended, big old forest. Predators like owls love the birds, not to mention the rabbits and voles and snakes etc. The orange cat who shows up every afternoon and stands very still on a log alongside one of our woodland paths loves the birds too.

Spring means that all of this and much more (I just had to interrupt my writing to shoo a raccoon away from the trash container – I’m outside) is bursting. It’s Grand Central Nature on the acre around our little brown house, and I’ve spent today observing it.

At five AM we woke to the creaky song of the catbirds. They seem to have reproduced recently, and they and their offspring are buzzing the house big time. They were soon joined in song by the thrushes, whose voice is lovely and famous (one is supposed to feel privileged to have thrushes in the garden) but, as I’ve mentioned in seasons past on this blog, never-ending. Thrushes are loud and they don’t quit.

To my immediate right, in the upper branches of a honeysuckle, is a very active thrush nest, so we will be getting yet more thrush song.

All day rabbits have strewn the lawns front and back. I seldom see solitary rabbits anymore; it’s all coalitions.

Midday I was clearing one of the paths, and I heard a close-by and unfamiliar bird call. Suddenly a few feet away from me was a pileated woodpecker tapping a poplar.

Pleased to see a vine twining along one of our fences, I snipped a group of three leaflets to take them inside for identification. Good thing I was wearing gloves. Poison ivy.

Rotund bees press into the white azalea blossoms.

As I was cutting back the front yard azaleas this morning, one of my neighbors walked by. “Happy Mother’s Day, Margaret!” he called.

“Thanks, and the same to you!” trilled idiot UD. “I mean the same to your wife.”

… is a stranger and more difficult poem than Moritz’s (see the post below this one), but it says similar things about mothers. Both poets go restlessly in search of reality, essence, the thing in itself, imperishable being — hypostasis. Moritz sees its traces in his inexplicable deathless adolescent journals; with the advent of a new year, Gizzi finds himself set on a similar search – for true foundations that might free him into a new bold authentic life.

But his first stanza notes his cowardice:

For why am I afraid to sing
the fundamental shape of awe
should I now begin to sing the silvered back of
the winter willow spear
the sparkling agate blue
would this blade and this sky free me to speak
intransitive lack –

Why is he afraid to be full-throated in his expression of the basic bliss of being? Could he use the blade, the spear, of the willow leaf to cut himself free from repression? Is it just a matter of launching his poem, his song, in praise of nature? If he trusts the poetry, will it lead him to the light?

Of what am I afraid
of what lies in back of me of day
these stars scattered as far as the I
what world and wherefore
will it shake free
why now in the mind of an afternoon is a daisy
for a while
flagrant and alive

Yeah well and if I do happen to gain access to the world of light, to essential being, what if it scares the shit out of me? “What world?” the poet quite reasonably asks. The mind has mountains, says Gerard Manley Hopkins, and it also has light years in it (“stars scattered as far as the I”), and maybe we don’t want to know our own capacities, our deepest and most distant possibilities. What will access to essences “shake free”?

For every icon of flagrant aliveness, there’s this:

Then what of night
of hours’ unpredicated bad luck and the rot
it clings to
fathomless on the far side in winter dark

Hey shadow world when a thing comes back
comes back unseen but felt and no longer itself
what then
what silver world mirrors tarnished lenses
what fortune what fate
and the forms not themselves but only itself the sky
by water and wind shaken
I am born in silvered dark

Maybe all I really evoke when I boldly gain access to awe is the felt disappearance of me from the world, my transformation from a living human form to a thing, an object. The forms not themselves but only itself. I am earthy material; for the moment life is breathed into me; but I am ultimately earthy material only. What I live in this life is not really light but dark occasionally “silvered” by shafts of light.

between the hypostatic scenes of breathing
and becoming the thing I see
are they not the same

You got your basic death anxiety here, babe; courage to poke into the truth is courage to reckon with your ultimate permanent thinginess.

So like Moritz Gizzi will spend the rest of the poem remarking upon the shabby unreadable enigma of the material world, a world whose (again post-industrial) rusting speaks of some once-vibrant, once-lofty world-infancy from which the poet has fallen away.

Things don’t look good on the street today
beside a tower in a rusting lot
one is a condition the other mystery
even this afternoon light so kind and nourishing
a towering absence vibrating air

The tower is an object, part of our conditioned, transitive (see his first stanza; he’s after the intransitive) world; our “rusting lot” (our fortune, our fate, is to rust) is an unconditional mystery, one particularly hard to fathom and tolerate given the flagrant and alive afternoon daisy, not to mention whatever invisible force is making the afternoon light so glorious. How can we handle this impossible duality?

Shake and I see pots from old shake
and I see cities anew
I see robes shake I see desert
I see the farthing in us all the ghost of day
the day inside night as tones decay
and border air
it is the old songs and the present wind I sing
and say I love the unknown sound in a word

Shake yourself into the truth and you see the truth: One’s own transient, insubstantial being, everyone’s brief afternoon (the farthing in us all the ghost of day). So okay, the poet will try to sing both: the old songs and the present wind; and meanwhile why not rest, as the Buddhists say, in the mystery? Why not – instead of restless hypostasis-seeking – find a way to love the unknown sound?

Okay, and finally la mama:

Mother where from did you leave me on the sleeve
of a dying word
of impish laughter in the midst my joy
I compel and confess open form
my cracked hinged picture doubled

I can’t remember now if I made a pact with the devil
when I was young
when I was high
on a sidewalk I hear “buy a sweatshirt?” and think
buy a shirt from the sweat of children
hell
I’m just taking a walk in the sun in a poem
and this sound
caught in the most recent coup

Somewhat querulous question, that. But anyway the target here would be the speaker’s mother, because she gave him life into this weird world of joy and dying, this place where the poet does indeed find the courage to confess, openly, his hopeless entanglement in blissful being and hideous anticipatory thinginess.

The specific, daily place where the poet’s truest consciousness resides is in a kind of lifelong auditory sensitivity to the way in which the tragic night-ghost-decay truth sidles – it’s a humane tolerable pun-like way – into the poet’s high-noon walk. (The hell of the sweat of children.)

I’ll start with the easier one. Home Again Home Again by A. F. Moritz describes a person at a comfortable remove from his mother (and father); they’ve become “unchanging,” part of a “long slow time.”

So father, mother, the small shabby town,
its patch of earth going on as though forever: you
forgot them there, where they’d been since you started out
and where you could find them again — as anyone
forgets what he has to lean on
so deeply and heavily that it wounds his side
and the pain seems only himself.

His life isn’t about them anymore; it’s about him. They exist only as the past he “lean[s] on / so deeply and heavily” that he feels it simply as his own present reality – “only himself.” He has accomplished a sort of full absorption of his parents into himself, so that they themselves, as flesh and blood people existing in a specific history, are forgotten.

He lives with this attitude toward them happily enough, until one day he wakes up feeling guilty, ungrateful, as though he’s crushed them in their human particularity for the sake of his own selfish being in the world. So he travels back to their old shabby town in an effort to remember them, to as it were reanimate them, give them their due.

The buildings had leaned still farther
toward the dusty weeds and crumbs of old machines
littered everywhere inexplicably. And now
who will explain them?

The scene is one of enigma and abandon, a ruined post-industrial landscape that can’t explain itself because no one who lived it is alive. People – his parents – had worked here, worked hard, for themselves and for their children. But the meaning of it all – the human motive of it – remains inexplicable.

And check the records:
what is written down says nothing.
The volumes all avoid the one question you have.
They’re like the notebooks you kept in adolescence:
you turn the endless pages and you wonder,
what did I know or feel, how did I live then,
what was this violence and love, this utter newness,
invention that could sing water and light, raging
at the first touch of dying, never mentioning death?
You went back and the bones of your native town
were like that, records from which something had escaped:
a skeletal mill that roofed ghostly technologies
where men once worked, coughed, burnt, bled.

History books don’t help, because they don’t tell you what you’ve come to find out, which is what our deepest, most alive, impulses mean. Returning to the town is like rereading your adolescent journals. In both cases, you just don’t get it. You see ruins of youth, so this means there must have been youth. You see skeletons, smudged marks, faded papers of youth and industry and intensity, now-dead locations where once a certain hyperactivity prevailed:

violence and love
invention that could sing water and light, raging
at the first touch of dying, never mentioning death

But what was this frenzy? What was its cause? Where did it go?

And that way they had permitted the long pageants
of the children. And their mothers — whose images,
vague, identical, stalk by in the nights,
each one sorrowing and serene, her starved, enamelled,
hard flesh torn, her dress the blue of late dusk,
the heaven behind her a work of flat blinding gold.

Well, they worked like dogs for their children, to permit their long pageants, their happy lives. Children who now, like the speaker of the poem (notice that his “you” gradually slides into “I”), find their dreams stalked by iconic sacrificing mother images – mothers who starved themselves into early deaths (blue of late dusk) in order to “work” a golden heaven for their children.

And that was the personally “inexplicable” vibrancy of the adolescent poet himself; it was a pageant purchased for him by the ghostly industry of his father and mother.

Poem #2 coming up.

… win-hungry pigs.”

The University of Oregon gang rape case rocks on.

Wow, finally things get SO bad at the University of Louisville that a trustee squawks. UL is one of the very worst universities this blog has chronicled over the last few years. (See my University of Louisville posts here.) It’s sort of got everything wrong with it: gross-out athletics, of course; but mismanagement, employee crime, Medicare fraud, low graduation rates, Bobby Petrino, Marius Ratajczak, Robert Felner, outrageous dean turnover, medical school on probation, strangely generous separation agreements…

PLUS, it turns out

The University of Louisville’s program to provide continuing medical education for doctors has been placed on probation by its accrediting body less than two months after a different agency put UofL’s medical school on notice.

I say it turns out because the complaining trustee, who understandably tried to resign from this disgraceful school’s BOT but was basically forced to stay on by the governor of the state (!), said that the last straw was finding out about the latest UL unit to go on probation from the newspapers. Wouldn’t want to tell your trustees what’s going on. Not when it’s this bad. And UD‘s betting that a lot of people have a lot of money invested, as it were, in UL’s continuing to operate as – it seems to her – a kind of quasi-criminal enterprise.

Indeed, there must be a lot of raised eyebrows at UL today. You expect trustees, of all people, to just sit there.