… soon, for two weeks. She’ll be there with her sister and her daughter while Mr UD is in Boston at the Tufts University Institute of Civic Studies.
Her blogs, University Diaries, and University Diaries at Inside Higher Education, continue, in the salt sea air.
UD‘s earlier stays in Rehoboth are chronicled here.
Here are few lines from Rehoboth Beach.
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A Few Lines from Rehoboth Beach
by Fleda Brown
Dear friend, you were right: the smell of fish and foam
and algae makes one green smell together. It clears
my head. It empties me enough to fit down in my own
skin for a while, singleminded as a surfer. The first
day here, there was nobody, from one distance
to the other. Rain rose from the waves like steam,
dark lifted off the dark. All I could think of
were hymns, all I knew the words to: the oldest
motions tuning up in me. There was a horseshoe crab
shell, a translucent egg sack, a log of a tired jetty,
and another, and another. I walked miles, holding
my suffering deeply and courteously, as if I were holding
a package for somebody else who would come back
like sunlight. In the morning, the boardwalk opened
wide and white with sun, gulls on one leg in the slicks.
Cold waves, cold air, and people out in heavy coats,
arm in arm along the sheen of waves. A single boy
in shorts rode his skimboard out thigh-high, making
intricate moves across the March ice-water. I thought
he must be painfully cold, but, I hear you say, he had
all the world emptied, to practice his smooth stand.
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An elegantly outfitted seaside poem. The writer sends a few lines to a friend, presumably a rather concerned friend, since the writer seems to have gone to the beach off-season in order to recompose herself after a trauma.
The engrossing drama, power, and simplicity of the setting distracts her from herself, and clears her head. She wants to be like a surfer, alone, balanced upright on troubled waters, and concentrating on nothing but balancing, on nothing but negotiating the waves. She’s after a brave and redemptive form of simplicity, one that gathers up the fragments of the self into one “smooth stand.”
But she’s not there yet – the tired jetty, the frail egg sack, these convey the writer’s exhaustion and frailty on her first dark March day at the beach. In the darkness, she walks off – tries to walk off – her suffering, all the while deriving some sense of inner order from hymns. Singing to the waves, like the singer in The Idea of Order at Key West, she tries to generate a kind of counterpoint to her inner discord.
And indeed the next day is much better; the sun’s come out, and the gulls don’t even need two legs to stay upright. making / intricate moves against the March ice-water is a gorgeous line, with its alliterative M’s and its use of the greatly poetic word “intricate.” (“Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring / In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring / Intricate rented world begins to rouse.”) And it carries the point of the poem as well, this line, the idea that her emptied, simplified, calmed self is the start of her mending, and that eventually she may become, like the surfer, capable not merely of simple balance, but intricate moves over the perilous surface of life.
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I like everything about Rehoboth, but
especially, as longtime readers know,
its beach stones.
Since virtually “all of our sports figures eventually get arrested,” Clay Travis offers “a summer course in the etiquette of arrest.” His negative example throughout is Damon Evans, the University of Georgia athletics director who did everything wrong. An excerpt:
… Since SEC athletes are always being arrested for a variety of reasons, I thought we should use Evans’ arrest as a teachable moment.
… [D]on’t keep a woman’s panties in your possession for any longer than it takes to remove them. This is really hard to explain otherwise. Who are these men who keep the panties? It’s not like the panties are some great jewel. They cost $12 at Victoria’s Secret.
Don’t hold on to them or you’ll end up sounding like an idiot explaining why you have them.
Witness, Evans’s explanation of the panties: “She took them off and I held them because I was just trying to get her home.”
This explanation alone proves Evans was drunk. That actually sounded good to him...
Bill George, Harvard professor, specialist in corporate leadership, author of the sentence that heads this post, is a Goldman Sachs director.
Under conditions of profound challenges at Goldman, he has so far set no tone at all because he has said and done absolutely nothing.
In an article in Bloomberg titled Goldman’s Silent Board, Richard Teitelbaum reviews the “storm of criticism, government investigations and an SEC suit” that continues to rage around Goldman, and notes that the bank’s “outside directors have failed to speak out.” As “regulatory and legal entanglements escalate — the firm’s nine outside directors, who aren’t Goldman employees, are keeping mum.” He quotes several informed observers, all of whom are amazed at “the board’s somnolence in the face of so much controversy.”
… The board members said nothing publicly, for instance, when on April 16 the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filed a civil suit alleging Goldman had committed fraud in underwriting and marketing a mortgage-related security called Abacus 2007-AC1 without disclosing to clients that a bearish hedge fund customer, Paulson & Co., was involved in creating it.
… Nell Minow, co-founder of the Portland, Maine-based Corporate Library, a governance research firm, says that when the SEC suit was filed, the outside directors should have immediately set up a committee to investigate, hired independent counsel and announced that they would make the results of their probe public.
The board should also have been riding herd on its members’ stock trades, says Cornell University Law School Professor Robert Hockett, who specializes in financial regulation from his office in Ithaca, New York. Goldman spokesman Lucas van Praag says directors are periodically informed of such trades. The bank received a Wells notice dated July 28, 2009, notifying the firm that it was the target of an SEC fraud investigation.
… “The outside directors haven’t been visible on any of this,” says Patrick McGurn, special counsel at RiskMetrics Group, a New York adviser to shareholders. “You have to ask if it’s setting the correct ethical tone.”…
Keep in mind that Leader Bill’s silence doesn’t come cheap. Like the other board members, he gets handed hundreds of thousands of dollars every year to keep his trap shut.
A group of 15 monkeys at Kyoto University’s primate research institute in Aichi prefecture escaped from their forest home, which is encased by a five-metre electric fence. The monkeys made their break for freedom by bending and releasing tree branches to fling themselves one by one slingshot-fashion over the high-voltage fence.
… Despite the intelligence demonstrated by their great escape, the primates then appeared unsure what to do with their freedom: They remained by the gates of the centre and were lured back by scientists with peanuts.
The big news out of Texas is that Southern Methodist University’s admissions committee has apparently begun reviewing the applications of football players. Two recruits have been turned down.
[Jeremy] Hall, who signed a football scholarship with the Mustangs in February, was informed by SMU Thursday that he would not be admitted to the university despite being an NCAA qualifier.
The Dallas Morning News reported online Tuesday that another SMU commit, offensive lineman Darryl Jackson from Long Beach, Calif., had also been denied admission despite being an NCAA qualifier.
See, they’re recruited and they sign and they show up and all, and then whammo. Turns out you’ve actually got to be admitted to the university.
The coach at Hall’s high school is appalled.
“At the very least, I can say this is an injustice to Jeremy Hall. He did not do one thing wrong. He did everything he was asked to do and to his knowledge, he was packed and moving up there. To his knowledge, it was done.”
Visitors to a castle were left trapped in its walls after its drawbridge was damaged in a freak accident involving a cherry-picker.
The crane was making its way up the drawbridge of Castell Coch, Tongwynlais, when the walkway gave way and tilted upwards, catapulting the machine further inside the entrance of the Victorian landmark.
It then became wedged against a wall between the portcullis and gate, leaving around 20 people stranded inside the castle.
The 2.9 tonne machine was being used to carry out repair work on roof tiles.
[Guests were] treated to a sword-fighting demonstration while they waited.
We’ve already done NYU, Larry Rivers, and the breast videos. Might as well make a day of it with a couple of other items.
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1.) Because an Oklahoma State University employee used her OSU credit card to bill the university for sex toys (she’s been fired), “OSU officials have held training sessions to make sure employees understand how to use [their cards] properly.”
Question #9: Dildos may/may not be billed to the university.
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2.) As an homage to the Nobel prize-winning Portuguese novelist José Saramago, who died recently, the Portuguese edition of Playboy features Jesus (Saramago wrote about Jesus) in a variety of poses with naked women.
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UD thanks James.
NYU has bought the Larry Rivers archive, which includes
films and videos of his two adolescent daughters, naked or topless, being interviewed by their father about their developing breasts.
One daughter, who said she was pressured to participate, beginning when she was 11, is demanding that the material be removed from the archive and returned to her and her sister.
… N.Y.U. has agreed to discuss the matter and has already, at the urging of the foundation, pledged to keep the material off limits during the daughters’ lifetimes. Two years ago [one of the daughters] asked the foundation to destroy the tapes, but it declined…
… [Nature Publishing Group], which is owned by the German publishing house Georg von Holtzbrinck, …[is] trying to impose a 400% increase in its online access fee for [the University of California], a hike the university says would come to more than $1 million a year. The result is talk of a systemwide boycott of Nature publications unless the firm becomes more accommodating.
… “Why are we paying to read the results of our own research?” asks Patrick O. Brown, a biochemist at Stanford’s School of Medicine. In 2000, Brown co-founded the Public Library of Science, or PLoS, which today publishes seven journals on the open access model. That model charges researchers for publication of their accepted papers, but allows them to retain their copyrights and makes their work available to all users for free.
… [B]ecause of the rise in fees for scientific and technical journals, “we’ve had to decrease what we spend on books for the humanities, and that trade-off is very stark,” Farley says. “Ultimately it hurts the whole institution.”
The libraries let the academic community know that Keith Yamamoto, the executive vice dean at UC San Francisco Medical School, was willing to launch a boycott of Nature if necessary. That’s meaningful because Yamamoto was an organizer of a 2003 boycott of Reed Elsevier that resulted in that technical publisher’s rolling back a rate hike.
Yamamoto says a new boycott would look very much like the old: He would call upon faculty members to stop submitting papers to Nature publications, resign from Nature editorial and advisory board, decline to peer-review papers for the journals, and of course suspend their subscriptions.
… The UC system says it pays an average of $4,465 a year for each of the 67 Nature journals it subscribes to, a fee Nature proposes to raise to an average of $17,479…
Trump University’s leader is unhappy with real estate decisions made by Columbia University’s leader:
Trump said Columbia came close to buying land from him on the Upper West Side near Lincoln Center before Bollinger’s appointment to the university presidency in 2002. Trump said he had been working on a deal with businessman and Columbia trustee Alfred Lerner, when Lerner fell ill.
Bollinger, formerly president of the University of Michigan, had different ideas for the university’s expansion and said he wanted to stay closer to the university’s home in Harlem. And, according to Bollinger and the expansion’s Environmental Impact Statement, the nine-acre Trump property was too small and too far from Columbia’s Morningside Heights campus.
Years after the deal fell through, Trump is still irate. “They could have had a beautiful campus, right behind Lincoln Center,” he said in a phone interview.
Here is an excerpted version of Trump’s recounting of events, as stated in a letter he wrote to the Columbia Spectator’s Eye magazine:
Columbia University had a great opportunity to build one of its finest and most spectacular campuses anywhere in the world…It would have given Columbia large acreage, fronting the Hudson River between 59th and 62nd Street directly behind Lincoln Center. It was [Alfred Lerner’s] vision to build Columbia’s Business School and School of Performing Arts there, and what a vision it would have been…
The new President of Columbia, Lee Bollinger, who came in from the University of Michigan, didn’t like the idea. Instead, he wanted to build Columbia’s new buildings in a lousy location on land which, in certain instances, he did not even own. Once the project was announced, it became virtually impossible to acquire the holdings because everybody wanted top dollar. He actually announced his project before buying the land—dummy!
If that wasn’t enough, Trump added a hand-scrawled comment at the bottom: “Bollinger is terrible!” And in a phone interview with The [Wall Street] Journal, Trump continued his invective, calling the university president a “total moron.”
… Is [UK basketball coach John] Calipari shady? No question. Everybody knows that the two college programs he coached prior to Kentucky — Massachusetts (1996) and Memphis (2008) — both had their Final Four appearances vacated by the NCAA. And, yes, there are already TMZ reports that NCAA investigators are snooping around Kentucky.
Who knows what the NCAA might find.
Agents paying players?
Players with bogus SAT scores?
A university administration that admits athletes who don’t have the academic credentials or desire to be in college?
Sounds about like every other big-time program to me.
The only difference is John Calipari understands that his program is nothing more than an NBA developmental league.
He is at least honest about the dishonesty that contaminates college athletics.
… and pretty soon you’re talking about real money.
John Smalls, the guy in charge of finance at South Carolina State University, a public institution, says the school “can definitely account” for it… The 25 million dollars from a federal grant (the entire grant was 50 million) they got over a decade ago to start a transportation research center (nothing’s been done). “The problem is how much detail do you want to see.”‘
How much detail do I, the American taxpayer, want to see?
Well, let’s do it this way. This
is an enormous pile of money.
Imagine, John, that this pile of
money is the 25 million dollars
I and my fellow Americans gave
your school.
I want you to take every single
bill in this pile, hold it aloft, and
say out loud what you did with it.
