His sins trickled from his lips, one by one, trickled in shameful drops from his soul, festering and oozing like a sore, a squalid stream of vice. The last sins oozed forth, sluggish, filthy. There was no more to tell. He bowed his head, overcome.

Sluggish. It’s kind of like that at USC, only it’s not sins – it’s lies. The president, the provost … sluggishly, sluggishly, sluggishly, they begin to ooze the truth about their protection – nay, their celebration – of a (probable) drug addict, a man for quite some time notoriously disengaged from the responsibilities of his $1.1 million a year job. They seem more or less to have let Carmen keep doing his drug- and sex-addled thing and ignoring his job until those extremely annoying Los Angeles Times reporters couldn’t be brushed off anymore.

So okay. Okay! You wanna know what really happened? Not the blahblah we told you last week, but the actual stuff that happened? OKAYOKAYOKAYOKAYOKAY. The Times should be grateful, by the way. If it weren’t for our stonewalling, its reporters wouldn’t be getting a Pulitzer for investigative reporting this year. So you’re welcome.

The president’s letter was released hours after The [LA] Times provided USC with findings about Puliafito’s behavior during his tenure heading the medical school.

Fine. We’ll only stop lying when totally cornered. We’re totally cornered. So here’s the deal. Here’s the letter where the soon to be ex-president of USC finally coughs it up. (Not that ol’ UD thinks that even now he’s entirely coughed it up. Ol’ UD is sure there’s more even than this. But this is certainly something.)

[The prez] revealed late Friday that the university had [in fact] received complaints and imposed disciplinary measures against the then-dean of its medical school…

… Puliafito had [in fact] been the subject of “various complaints” during nearly a decade as the dean of the Keck School of Medicine. … Puliafito [had in fact] received [obviously toothless] “disciplinary action and professional development coaching.”

Nikias also provided new details about Puliafito’s final months in the job before he resigned in the middle of the Spring 2016 term.

In 2015, USC Provost Michael Quick put Puliafito “on notice for being disengaged from his leadership duties,” the president said.

UD would have loved to be in the room for the professional development coaching. CARMEN PUT DOWN THE BUTANE TORCH …

Oh, read the article. Feast your eyes on the USC receptionists, committees, provosts, and presidents who couldn’t be bothered checking up on whether the person in charge of medicine – you know, patient care, doctor education – at the university was as fucked up as he, well, yes, now that I look at him, certainly seemed to be. Consider an entire university leadership treating the local newspaper of record like a worthless piece of shit.

And sit tight – the producers of the film probably haven’t even starting thinking about casting it yet — they’re waiting out the story before they do that. Al Pacino should be finished doing Joe Paterno by then; he’d make a great Carmen Puliafito. For prez: John Waters.

… this story … for UD to share with you one of her favorite ads.

So when eminent Stanford med school professor John Borchers staggered onto his private plane and flew himself into the side of a mountain in 2008, Stanford could get away with saying nothing when reporters tried asking the school about the fact that the body of the busy teacher/clinician was loaded down with so many drugs it took like a page and a half to list them all. He’d been a known addict for ten years.

In addition to cocaine and Prozac, toxicology tests by the FAA turned up opiates, mood stabilizers and anti-psychotic drugs. One of the drugs, buprenorphine, was among those Borchers prescribed to patients suffering from heroin addiction, according to his own online business profile.

John Borchers didn’t know how to fly very well, and he was maybe finally close to losing his license to practice medicine, so this was arguably a carefully prepared (#1: swallow the medicine cabinet; #2: pilot your plane alone at night through mountains) suicide. Yet Stanford has never said a word about having maintained this dangerous wreck of a man in a responsible and visible position on its faculty, though given his long record of addiction and attempted detox Stanford must have known about him.

UD drags up this ancient history because if you put aside the difference that Carmen Puliafito is still alive (though from his total silence in response to all efforts to talk to him you wouldn’t know it), his is a similar story of pretty overt fuckedupness determinedly ignored by a university that already has quite the history of ignoring fucked up high-level people.

USC faculty members I’ve been in touch with are incensed that a doctor was allowed to take patients for more than a year after his drug-fueled behavior was reported to the university, and they’re not buying the administration’s claims of ignorance.

Puliafito engaged in behavior (partying with meth-head friends in his campus office) that seemed designed to dare the University of Southern California to do something about him. Even after the LA Times told USC’s president that Puliafito had spent an evening lying through his teeth to the police about his relationship to a young woman found overdosed beside him in a Pasadena hotel room littered with drug paraphernalia (if you enjoy this sort of thing, you can listen to the police interview), the president simply wouldn’t hear what he was being told. In effect, he still won’t.

What we have here is a cover-up. Systematic cover-ups, as Steve Lopez notes. And you know what? Cover-ups exist to cover up not just a specific triggering event (Puliafito/Pasadena/Police), but, one has to assume, related, and possibly worse, stuff. What is USC hiding?

… in a burqa.

What?

Me worry?

Sing it.

I could have done better with a boy like you
But I loved everything that you do
Wish I knew, hey hey hey, wish I knew

So I should have realized a lot of things before
The LA Times is feeling pretty sore:
“Give me more, hey hey hey, give me more.”

This one is about the world’s richest person.

At an early age, he displayed mechanical aptitude — as a toddler, he dismantled his crib with a screwdriver.

She’s come tearing through her daughter’s new school, threatening lawsuits because the school won’t let her run free and fully veiled on its property. (Background here.)

It’s been a pleasure for UD to watch how attitudes toward the burqa/niqab have changed all over Europe. The Guardian, a left-leaning paper, publishes two letters in response to the lawsuit threat, neither the slightest bit sympathetic:

As a Muslim woman, the case of Rachida Serroukh (Mother sues daughter’s school over face veil ban, 21 July) fills me with dismay. It has been widely documented that there is no religious obligation, in the Qur’an, for a woman to wear a face veil, burqa or niqab, but simply to dress modestly.

I wonder if she thought the staff at the school (or the children) would look at her suggestively. I very much doubt they would. The face veil can be intimidating and frightening for children. Ironically, the countries that encourage women to wear a burqa or niqab are those where women’s education is thought to be unnecessary and dangerous.

We all need to respect the culture in which we live; although Rachida Serroukh wants her children to have a good education in a top school in Holland Park, she seems to neither like nor respect the culture in which she lives…

***************************

The school should not have to deal with this issue – this is a provocative action and the local authority should be supporting the school. Rachida Serroukh is importing a 12th-century custom which discriminates against women into 21st-century Britain. This country has to adhere to its commitment of equality, as France does, and the law should not be used to undermine our way of life.

***************************

Hadn’t thought of that. It’s a simple and persuasive point: An adult entirely covered in black (this includes, for most wearers, not just the face, but, for instance, the fingers), speaking through black mesh, would be for most children pretty grotesque. Traditional nuns might have been somewhat scary, but at least they let you see their face.

Many of us find something deeply unsettling in the self-annihilation of the burqa, and the fact that it is fully and exclusively associated with women tells us all we need to know. It’s even ickier to contemplate the messages little children (especially girls) get, seeing women done up like that.

The French philosopher, who wrote about the importance of accepting risk and living a truly alive existence, died fearlessly, attempting to rescue children from choppy waves in Saint-Tropez. They survived; she did not.

Risk and fear: From water, and from fire: As we speak, Saint-Tropez is directly menaced by a massive forest fire in the region.

***********************

Here is a famous sentence from Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925) — a rivulet of Clarissa’s consciousness:

This has the balance and beauty, the well-observed ‘interior’ feel, of the great modernist’s sentences. That is, this is not speech; it’s the intimate candid mulling mind, the mind observing London in motion and talking to itself about it. Woolf never forgets to meld the objective world and the subjective, to cast subjectivity as always in response to the world outside itself. All those repetitions – out, out, out; very, very – are the squirreling mind circling its deep familiar themes, its odd, personal, peculiar obsessions and dreads. The ever-circulating cabs function as an objective correlative for, a provocation in the direction of, nihilistic despair: They go in and out, in and out, around the taxi stands and the streets, perpetually, conveying the pointless fever and fret of existence (hence Clarissa’s sympathetic apprehension of what the frightened, shell-shocked Great War veteran Septimus Smith has communicated in killing himself).

The word perpetual, with its religious undertones, comes to this aggressively secular woman (“love and religion would destroy that, whatever it was, the privacy of the soul”) from what has inevitably clung to her from having grown up in a religious (though itself rapidly secularizing) culture. Lux perpetuam, in traumatized godless post-war London, becomes the infernal machinery (tanks, cabs) of perpetual motion. (And perpetual, paired with sense, offers Woolf the assonance that gives her sentences their poetic feel, just as a routine assonantal phrase like taxi cabs does.)

In this sentence’s reference to the sea, we get three crucial elements of human awareness and engagement: nature, culture, consciousness. If you look at the sentence in isolation, it doesn’t make much sense: Why, in the midst of intense city life, would one feel oneself alone and adrift at sea? Why would one say such a silly thing as that it’s very very dangerous to live for even one day?

At sea: Well, that one’s not too hard. The phrase to be at sea conveys confusion, bewilderment, displacement to a wilderness; and the vast formless sea rising up in Clarissa’s mind in the midst of the sharply delimited city of forms communicates her psychic distance from the ongoingness of life, her preoccupation with the majesty and stupendousness and vacancy of death itself. For, having no religious frame (heaven; hell) in which to place, narrate, furnish the event, she can only summon up the strongest image possible of nothingness and separation from all people and things.

The day is like wide water, without sound.

***************************

And why does it feel exceedingly dangerous to live even one day?

Two reasons come to mind: First of all, very simply, life is in fact quite treacherous, moment to moment. Read Robert Louis Stevenson’s spectacular essay, “Aes Triplex,” for the best evocation of our ridiculous and noble denial of this reality. You are lazing on an elegant beach in Saint-Tropez. Just behind you fires rage in its beautiful forest, and in front of you the placid ocean is also a devourer.

But every day is dangerous as well because life is so seductive: “Heaven only knows why one loves it so.” But one does; almost everyone desperately loves life. So the danger life extends toward us as we rush to embrace it every day is the danger of being caught up in the lie that it never ends. (Freud: “To endure life remains, when all is said, the first duty of all living beings. Illusion can have no value if it makes this more difficult for us.”) Both Woolf and James Joyce set their novels (I have Ulysses in mind) in one day; we follow their characters through one morning, afternoon, and night, and then the novel ends with the night. This is fiction allowing us access to the truth of our brevity.

In Ulysses, at the graveside of his friend Paddy Dignam, Martin Cunningham laments: “In the midst of life…”

In the midst of life, we are in death.

At the end of the same episode, Joyce’s hero, Leopold Bloom, inverts this: “In the midst of death we are in life.”

Coming soon.

A small group of Kenyan girls will soon go to Google’s California headquarters, where “they hope to win $15,000 for I-cut, an app to end Female Genital Mutilation. The five teenagers, aged 15 to 17, are the only Africans selected to take part in this year’s international Technovation competition.”

[They] call themselves the ‘Restorers’ because they want to “restore hope to hopeless girls”, said Synthia Otieno, one of the team.

***********************

I-cut connects girls at risk of FGM with rescue centres and gives legal and medical help to those who have been cut.

Its simple interface has five buttons – help, rescue, report, information on FGM, donate and feedback – offering users different services.

UD will be rooting for them.

*****************

A similar app for England, where at least 20,000 girls are at risk.

The practice of female genital mutilation is part of the story. Onyesonwu undergoes FGM and her powers are severely impaired. Steven Barnes, an African-American science fiction writer, criticized this element in the book. In a review for American Book Review, he said Okorafor made traditional African culture look bad and should have used her book to celebrate the good aspects of the culture. Okorafor responded:

“Culture is alive and it is fluid. It is not made of stone nor is it absolute. Just because I believe that aspects of my culture are problematic does not mean I am ‘betraying’ my people by pointing out those problems.”

Only after The Times published its report Monday did USC address the matter publicly.

The University of Southern California not only ignored – for a year – well-sourced questions from the Los Angeles Times about deadhead supreme Carmen Puliafito; the office of its president went to the trouble of returning by courier, unopened, a letter requesting an interview.

Kids, can we think of a better way to say fuck you? I don’t think we can.

And now USC is trying to make us believe that they’re just getting wind of Carmen’s… uh… is there one word into which we can bundle what the $1.1 million a year head of the Keck medical school has been up to after hours – during hours – for years?

*********

How can we explain USC’s suicidal behavior? Carmen’s almost certainly gonna bring down the president and some trustees. Probably lots of USC patients are going to be suing the school, since – I don’t know – if you found out that your suspicions about the madman checking your eyes – the guy everybody told you was fine – the dean of the med school for chrissake! – were in fact accurate, wouldn’t you be a little pissed? How much money did you spend to get treated by a meth head?

USC sure likes to make fools of people – reporters, patients. On the other hand, it serves and protects people like Carmen Puliafito.

*********

Again, then: Why? Why did President Nikias and his provost, the wonderfully named Quick, not only do nothing as their million dollar man drugged his way into oblivion on screen, but ignore and insult anyone who tried to tell them what was going on?

Well, remember they did the same thing with the last high-level highly-compensated, high-profile, high-as-a-kite campus hero: Steve Sarkisian. So we’ve got a pattern here; we’ve got a culture here. Let me suggest what that culture is.

USC is Hollywood. The school is in (roughly speaking) and of Hollywood. School song:

Nothing is real and nothing to get hung about

Living is easy with eyes closed
Misunderstanding all you see
It’s getting hard to be someone but it all works out
It doesn’t matter much to me

Suburb Acting, Singing and Dancing Brings ‘Good News!’ to The Shedd

… in UD‘s backyard.