… of The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, it’s been pretty clear that yiddishizing almost anything is liable to amuse. Even the translation of “Pumshtok” back into English is good (“On the wall of the kosher restaurant / Hangs dirty bedding / And bedbugs dance in circles. There is a stink / Of gefilte fish and wet socks. / Oy, Bashe, don’t ask questions, why bother?”).
The idea of doing this to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders is so immediately obvious, so madly self-evident, that UD can only be ashamed it never occurred to her. You can buy the whole thing here (only 74 pages, as opposed to the much more expensive, 1,000-page, totally discredited — most recently by NIMH! — other one). Or you can sample the table of contents here.
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The non-parodic DSM-5 is a funny fat man about to fall over from a speedball overdose.
Along with the discrediting, there will be more parodies.
Fun interview with Gary Greenberg about the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual controversy. Greenberg’s much more radical in his dismissal of the latest edition of America’s Icelandic psychosaga than UD‘s buddy Allen Frances (“We agree that the DSM does not capture real illnesses, that it’s a set of constructs. We disagree over what that means. He believes that that doesn’t matter to the overall enterprise of psychiatry and its authority to diagnose and treat our mental illnesses. I believe it constitutes a flaw at the foundation of psychiatry. If they don’t have real diseases, they don’t belong in real medicine. Al’s … really trying to keep scrutiny off of the whole DSM enterprise. That’s why he’s been so adamant that you don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater — he believes that the DSM-IV, for all of its flaws, its still worthwhile. I disagree.”). He has a new book attacking the DSM from many angles. It’s called The Book of Woe: The DSM and the Unmaking of Psychiatry and its cover is done up just like the posters for Psycho.
UD is mulling going to Politics and Prose bookstore to hear Greenberg talk. The guy has a sense of humor.
… alright then.
University of Texas System Regent Wallace Hall, who was criticized for not disclosing all of his lawsuits when he applied to join the board, has provided Gov. Rick Perry’s office with an updated list.
The original application contained information about two lawsuits and a bankruptcy.
In new disclosures provided to the governor’s office on April 12, Hall provided detailed information, including case numbers, on 11 lawsuits and detailed information about a complicated bankruptcy, with multiple appeals…
Can this be true?
UD has ridiculed Southern Illinois University on this blog for years. Put “Poshard” in my search engine for scads of posts about the place. But she had no idea it got as bad as this…
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Well, here’s the faculty page. All boys! ‘cept fer one girl that the dean done dumped. Laura Hatcher is suing.
I must say. It takes a special commitment to femicide to sustain absolute gender purity for over half a century. I trust the department has taken advantage of this distinction to forge relationships with its brother institutions in Saudi Arabia.
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UD thanks Wendy.
Justice is done.
A Tunisian court has convicted two veiled students of destroying public property at the office of a university dean they accused of slapping one of them.
The court dropped the case against the dean of the faculty of humanities at Manouba University, ruling on Thursday that there was no proof of an assault.
Score one for the forces opposing liars, bullies and fanatics in that country.
Not that this means things have improved all that much. But it’s encouraging.
To play for Wisconsin’s Coach Wardle
Is to bear a Shakespearean fardel.
For his temper’s quite short
When he’s out on the court.
So be sure that you’re well-stocked with Nardil.
Hilarious article in, of all places, a legal journal, by bad boy Brian Tamanaha, who has broken the decorous silence we’re supposed to maintain about the greed and hypocrisy of American law professors. Tamanaha rightly targets progressives – like the Critical Legal Studies (Crits for short) people – who pat themselves on the back for their advocacy on behalf of the world’s oppressed, but who jealously guard their own wealth and status — all the while ignoring the oppressed in their own classrooms.
Tamanaha isn’t the first law professor to go there – that would be Kristin Luker – but he’s way farther out than Luker.
As the cost of legal education rose to astronomical heights, loading more and more debt on the backs of students, erecting an enormous economic barrier to access to the legal profession with major class implications, the Crits said nothing. Like other law professors, they have been playing in the academic sandbox, enjoying the increased income and release from teaching that followed from and was funded by the immense rise in tuition.
“How,” asks Tamanaha, “could developments so contrary to progressive causes occur at a time when most law professors are progressives?”
His answer:
Why we did not resist is straightforward: we benefited personally. Tuition increases meant yearly salary raises, research budgets to buy books and laptops, additional time off from teaching to write (or to do whatever we like), traveling to conferences domestically and abroad, rooms in fine hotels, and dining out with old friends. A sweet ride it has been. After becoming accustomed to such treatment, it seems normal to desire even more pay, and not think twice about traveling to Hawaii or taking the family to the annual Southeastern Association of Law Schools conference, held every summer at a luxury resort.
He concludes with a series of questions, among them:
Can we tell our friends in [progressive legal organizations] that it is unseemly to attend a conference about the future of legal education in Hawaii when so many law students and recent graduates are struggling desperately in the here and now, and can we suggest that they should have fought the rise of tuition as hard as they fought to preserve job security for professors?
Can we ask the liberal law professors at California-Irvine how they can preach to their students that they should engage in public service when they charge $50,000 tuition, loading students with debt, while insisting on getting top dollar for their own professorial services?
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At least conservative professors, like Todd Henderson, tend less toward hypocrisy. Henderson likes money, wants huge amounts of it, and seems to resent/consider himself in competition with people who make more than he does.
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The progressive law professors’ quandary recalls, for UD, the immortal statement of one who has solved it — Fulvia Morgana, the sybaritic Italian Marxist in David Lodge’s Small World:
Of course I recognize the contradictions in our way of life, but those are the very contradictions characteristic of the last phase of bourgeois capitalism, which will eventually cause it to collapse. By renouncing our own little bit of privilege we should not accelerate by one minute the consummation of that process, which has its own inexorable rhythm and momentum, and is determined by the pressure of mass movements, not the puny actions of individuals. Since in terms of dialectical materialism it makes no difference to the ‘istorical process whether Ernesto and I, as individuals, are rich or poor, we might as well be rich, because it is a role which we know ‘ow to perform with a certain dignity.
The chair of their trustees thinks big-time sports are “integral” to universities, and ASU, a perennial game loser, spends hugely on them (expenditures have gone up 44% since 2005). Campus culture is what you’d expect – scads of drunken fuckheads. You can watch them on their latest outing here. It’s bound to be a YouTube sensation — timely publicity for ASU as it competes with Chico State for the gun toting asshole applicant pool. This 2012 article describes an alarmed populace as ASU demolishes all frat and sorority houses (why?) and allows colonization of neighboring streets. With rhetoric suited to a war zone, ABC News headlines:
Frat Party Violence Escalating at Arizona State University
Dispatches from the war zone:
At [one] point, gunshots were fired. The ensuing panic sent hundreds of partygoers running for their lives.
We sing to you, dear ASU.
Now why would you do that?
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“[T]wo of the three roomates were already in custody over immigration violations…”
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More details:
Two students from New Bedford, Massachusetts, have been arrested on charges of making false statements to investigators and conspiracy to obstruct justice, according to a federal law enforcement source with firsthand knowledge of the investigation. … The students are originally from Kazakhstan and were already in custody on immigration charges, according to another source with knowledge of the immigration case. The third is a U.S. citizen, the federal law enforcement source said.
More details. They certainly sound idiotic enough to have had some connection.
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What are friends for?
In a really spectacular instance of state corruption, a Salt Lake City justice court judge – a woman who used to chair the board of the Utah Law Related Education Project — a woman who “handles repeat DUI offenders” — has been arrested as part of a large tri-state drug distribution network.
The case of Virginia Bauskett Ward is truly remarkable, truly a piece of remarkable evidence — from one of our most self-righteous states — that the profoundly destructive opioid trade is beginning to embed itself in the country’s institutions.
… with their much-sought-after song, are back in UD‘s trees.
What they don’t tell you is that wood thrush never shut up.
You spend the first week after they’ve appeared in ecstasy.
You spend the rest of the summer wanting to throttle them.
Whatever happened to the American university? Once a quiet setting for serious thought, it’s become a shrieking sado-masochistic bedlam, captured most recently by this now-notorious SNL sketch, but really – as our latest perverted campus demonstrates – beyond parody. How do you parody a coach who reportedly made a player who felt unwell keep running in the team “boot camp” until the player lost control of his bowels? Who routinely called the same player a faggot and a pussy? Who “encouraged him to violate his religious beliefs by having sex with a girl in order to improve his play”?
Rest assured that Coach Brian Wardle makes pretty much the highest salary on campus, so the university is doing all it can to encourage his technique. If he’s made to leave, it will likely cost the university tons in buyout money.
How did things get so unspeakably sordid?
Big-time sports.
More statement of the obvious. One can only hope Melbourne University’s clueless vice-chancellor has been keeping up with the gender segregation controversy enough to have read this essay by Fiona Hill. Look sharp, man! Listen up.
[Hosting the sex-segregating group that Melbourne hosted] is analogous to permitting a right-wing Christian group to promote a Crusade to Syria to “rescue” it from non-Christians. Or permitting a radical Christian group to promote ethnic cleansing of Israel to make way for the Messiah.
Maybe before the vice-chancellor starts lecturing us about religious freedom he could check out some of the organizations his university hosts.
