Shite! Things are so bad at the University of Montana that they’re not just going to gut their liberal arts — THEY MIGHT GO AFTER ATHLETICS TOO.

… if it weren’t soul-crushing, budget-crushing, brain-crushing, and university-crushing football.

… to remind you that crazy all over the place figurative language makes for ugly and clotted prose.

Critics of the hit documentary The Hunting Ground – which illuminates in damning detail the prevalence of sexual violence at American universities – are ramping up their attacks just in time for The Hunting Ground‘s prime time debut on CNN this Sunday, November 22. And if they aren’t careful, their aspersions might dovetail with the massive audience CNN commands to result in a spectacular backfire: For the film’s central premise is that whistle blowers on campus sexual violence are demonized and delegitimized by the very same universities who are going on the offensive in advance of Sunday’s screening.

I’ve bolded the figurative words, which I’ll get to in a minute. But note also the wordiness of this paragraph, with its repetition, in the first sentence, of the film’s title (just write the film’s), and its strange coupling of demonized and delegitimized … If you’re demonizing, you’re certainly (but more weakly) delegitimizing… and delegitimized is an ugly mouthful. Just stick with “demonized,” which goes well with “damning.” I mean, if you’re going to start out with that very strong rhetoric, “delegitimized” takes all the air out of your argument, or at least makes it look as though you’re backing down from it. It would also be stronger to drop dovetail with the massive audience CNN commands to result in a spectacular backfire and simply write backfire. Backfire is your strongest word: go for it, and end the sentence with it.

Note also all the “to be” verbs in here: are ramping; aren’t careful; premise is that; are demonized; are going on the offensive. This feels plodding, when we want agile. Use stronger verbs and less repetition. And drop who are: Write universities going on the offensive. We’re trying for punchy concise language here, so that the reader grasps the argument quickly and can go from there through the piece.

And okay, look at all the metaphorical stuff she’s got going, all of these images fighting against one another and making comprehension difficult: Aspersions, for instance, dovetail and then backfire. When you add figurative words like whistle blowers to the weird scene this language has already called up in our minds, chaos ensues. Steady as she goes on the figurative language – use it, but use it sparingly, and make sure your metaphors make sense together.

Basic point here from SOS: SIMPLIFY. Speak directly.

… and the New York Times (again with UD‘s help – she most recently provided the same writer, William Grimes, with information about the Polish painter Wojciech Fangor) has written a good obituary about this odd and complicated man who painted elaborate metaphysical, visionary works.

UD found him too odd for close friendship (her sister-in-law Joanna – who was also consulted by the obit writer – understood Paul with far greater depth and sympathy), but year after year, when they met at Soltan Christmas celebrations, UD would watch Paul with special interest, and with compassion. She was not interested in his impossibly convoluted and at the same time rather shallow and adolescent (he never got over the science fiction of his youth) theories of consciousness and the universe. She was interested in the man himself, his pale face and bald head and strangely serene demeanor out of place in the hectic business of gift opening in front of a fire. He stayed chilly amid that warmth, a wanderer above the mists down from altitude for a day, his pale face and labored breaths (in his later years heart failure made it hard for him to breathe) somehow conveying his inability to adapt to temperate climates.

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

Or not a wanderer above the mists — a Rocket Man above the mysteries, an icon, for UD, of the terrible human desire to know everything. Aliens, Paul believed, had implanted something in his brain that made him a conduit of cosmic truths, and his artwork was the materialization of those truths. There was no irony that I could see, no humor or teasing evasion or bet hedging here. Either his flatly literal messages from beyond beguiled you with their astonishing plausibility or they made you draw back somewhat from the man and the canvases, unsettled by their Bartleby-like remoteness from the human realm.

The human realm, after all, is where – far from knowing everything – we know shit, and where the vocation of the artist, usually, is to reconcile us to knowing shit by aestheticizing both our cloud of unknowing and the suffering and beauty it generates. For UD, people like Paul represent a refusal of the human condition.

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

Paul, Christmas in Cambridge.

Jerzy Soltan in the background.

… the amazing greed, hypocrisy and incompetence of Yeshiva University’s president, Richard Joel. The financial and moral ruination of that university at his and his friends’ hands (these include the current board of trustees and some former trustees, like Bernard Madoff and Ezra Merkin), its reduction to a Moody’s basket case, represents one of the most stunning university stories of the decade. Berger has been right on top of it throughout.

This is a university that has named one of its campuses after the Wilfs. Its Entrepreneurial Institute bears the storied name of Ira Rennert.

The latest dispatch from Berger captures two out of three Joel attributes: greed and hypocrisy.

As his college’s finances continued to crumble last year, Yeshiva University’s president, Richard Joel publicly took a pay cut. Then months later, he privately pocketed a deferred compensation payment of $1.6 million.

That payout took Joel’s total compensation for 2014 to $2.8 million, among the highest packages for college presidents nationwide.

… In the year that Joel received the $1.6 million payment, Y.U. ran an operating deficit of $150 million, according to recently released tax records.

That same year, Y.U.’s endowment fell by $90 million, the school was forced to sell $72.5 million in real estate, and Y.U. entered into negotiations to spin off its prestigious but money-losing medical school, the Albert Einstein College of Medicine.

The investor ratings service Moody’s demoted Y.U.’s debt rating to junk status in January 2014 and it has not been raised since.

When you think of the various sorts of noise students and faculty are making at universities across America lately, it’s staggering to consider the almost-total silence at Yeshiva, where people who care about things like spirituality, ethics, and the value of serious study have allowed themselves to be ruled by cynical hedgies for years and years. UD feels confident Yeshiva’s next president (Joel retires soon, with full honors) will maintain its legacy of robbing the school’s mouse-like professors and students.

… killed at Bataclan.

… in the sky above UD‘s house
right now. At the end of a rainy day.

… seems to have drawn more than a few eyes to itself. Its description of universities across America making their financially struggling students pay through the nose for football games they don’t attend is apparently compelling enough to have caught the attention of people.

The Washington Post, for instance, cites the article, and goes on to note that more and more schools are

requiring students who have few discretionary dollars to pay for something that has zero impact on their classroom experience. According to the Chronicle/Huff Post analysis, the 50 institutions with the highest athletic subsidies have many more financially needy students than those universities with the lowest subsidies.

What’s more, nearly all the growth in Division I athletics during the past decade has come at public universities. At the same time these university leaders were obsessed with conference realignments and big television deals, taxpayer support for public universities has fallen to unprecedented levels.

But what’s most devastating in the Post piece is the long memory of its writer. We all know that when it comes to the bullshit promises that university presidents make about football, a good memory – to quote Elizabeth Bennet – is unpardonable. Yet Jeffrey Selingo goes there.

Nearly 20 years ago, I wrote an article about a group of universities that had recently joined the elite of college athletics: the NCAA’s Division I. They included California Polytechnic State University at San Luis Obispo, Hampton University, Norfolk State University, and the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

Ok kiddies so before I reveal the fate of those schools, go ahead and guess how well they fulfilled their presidents’ promises of huge revenue and huge increase in applications and huge prestige. Go ahead! Or – you don’t have to guess, do you? Because the names Cal Poly San Whatever, Hampton, Norfolk State and Whatsizface at Greensboro just come racing to your mind when you think of revenue and enrollment and renown and prestige… And all because of Div I football!

What’s more, look at the attention they’ve drawn to their sports programs!

[All] have been relegated to the backwater of college sports, with games on weekday nights on obscure cable channels. The only way many of these universities make it to the big time is to have their name appear on the stream of scores on ESPN’s ticker or as blowout fodder for elite programs.

That’s right. Not only did their elite Div I status do nothing (probably less than nothing) for their academic status, it didn’t even do anything for their athletic status. All at huge cost to their students.

Indeed Selingo is impolitic enough to trace the outcome of Greensboro’s Div I promises even more closely:

[Twenty years ago,] its student fees paid for 80 percent of the subsidy provided to the athletic department. Officials told me they expected the share of student support to fall over time as their teams established winning records and garnered more outside support… Greensboro students today provide 81 percent of the subsidy. In other words, nothing has changed except that the department’s budget has quadrupled since the late 1990s and the student fee for athletics has almost doubled, to about $700 a year per student.

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

People wonder why universities keep doing this. I mean, eventually, as Selingo concludes, their students are going to leave in order to attend a school where they’re not “paying for someone else’s [child-like] dreams.” So why?

If you read this blog with any regularity, you know how UD answers that question. Her answer is very simple, and you will probably resist it, but she thinks she might be right.

They do it because they can’t think of anything else to do.

I mean, of course, some presidents – like the hack running notorious Florida State University – are anti-intellectuals whose animus against thought processes as such will always mean a teeny mouselike teaching staff and a titanic athletics program. And some big sports schools, such as the University of Montana, have scared away so many potential students with their rape statistics that they have nothing left but games and a few vocational courses. (Remember: Just as, at the end of life, hearing is the last sense to go, so at the end of a university’s life, football is the last activity to go.)

But most of the universities doing themselves in via football are simply overseen by people – academic leaders, trustees, even faculty (remember the many loyal faculty foot soldiers at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill) – for whom football (and sometimes basketball as well) is the very definition of a university. Their job is to worry about naming rights, beer sales, how many classes they can cancel around game days, cleaning up campus after tailgates, preparing for NCAA investigations, covering up crimes committed by athletes, building new stadiums, recruiting faculty who will help athletes cheat their way through their courses, and so many other things. They find these activities totally engrossing, and they will pursue them until vanishing state appropriations and vanishing enrollees force them to call it a day.

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

UD thanks Prof. Mondo.

… or watch UD in the orchestra section kvelling, or listen to Walt Whitman’s words put to music by Ralph Vaughn Williams… Behold, the Sea is a very boffo sort of thing — as demonstrated here. Starts with a bang and stays pretty wild from there on in.

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

La Kid sneaks a blurry shot of
yesterday’s rehearsal in a

cavernous Kennedy Center.

… feature the object of UD‘s sister’s affection, Morrissey. He is the front-runner.

Yet having looked at all the contenders, UD will put her money on Joshua Cohen. And she will tell you why Cohen should win.

Cohen probably won’t win, because the Bad Sex Award people will get far more attention if they give the award to Morrissey.

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

Here is Cohen’s passage, from his novel Book of Numbers.

Her mouth was intensely ovoid, an almond mouth, of citrus crescents. And under that sling, her breasts were like young fawns, sheep frolicking in hyssop – Psalms were about to pour out of me.

In UD‘s opinion, the best bad sex writing is pretentious (intensely ovoid), self-consciously literary (Psalms), richly figurative (like young fawns), alliterative (citrus crescents, fawns frolicking), and gamely but unsuccessfully comical (Psalms were about to pour out of me).

The problem with some of this year’s other contenders is that they’re rather simple. They lack the biblical, metaphorical, simile-tudinous, and would-be humorous, elements of this passage. I’ll show you what I mean.

She reached up and brought him to her, then rolled over on top of him and began softly to move down. When she took him, still a little flaccid, into her mouth, he moaned, ‘Oh, lover.’

This isn’t bad sex writing. It’s just blah workmanlike oral sex description. Oh lover is amusing but a bit too plausible as something a person might indeed say under these circumstances. (The statement Pray at my portal in a recent Paul Theroux novel is a much better instance of bad sex dialogue.)

Glorious, he was made to do this. There was cracking all around and a blistering sunlike heat, and Gwennie was shuddering beneath him, and one-two-three, he burst within her.

Again, while this ain’t great writing, UD doesn’t see what makes it award-winning bad sex writing. The first sentence is very simple, and the second moves rather nicely from all those ing words (denoting immediate action) to the sudden bang of an ending. In no way is this notably bad.

She presses him to the ground, pins his hands to the floor. She kisses his face and licks it. She bites his lip. She bites his cheek. She pants in his ear, shouts his name in his ear, she whips his face with her hair […] she rides above him the way she’d imagined that one day she’d ride a boy, a man, a beast; she grasps his long hair with both her hands and rides him as if he were a horse…

First of all, this one’s a translation. I think this alone disqualifies it. But as writing, it simply adopts the dull as dishwater relentless present-tense of writers from Joyce Carol Oates on down, and it doesn’t even do it all that badly. Of course one doesn’t like it; but this is indeed how it’s done.

I pulled her to me. I took her band off, and her hair fell free about her shoulders. I cupped my hand around the back of her neck, and we made out standing beside my bed. It felt good to both of us, pressed together, her body lush, soft, and hot against mine. She was a good kisser; our mouths fit.

Same as above, only in past tense. Could have been written by Mickey Spillane. Neither here nor there, and certainly not a winner of anything.

Far in the back of whatever was left of his mind, the light of reason was struggling against being finally extinguished and he was aware that wearing a condom would’ve been a good idea, but there was no way that he was getting out of her, because she took him in and he was with her in every move, in every gasp, kiss, and lick.

Gasp kiss and lick sucks; but “there was no way that he was getting out of her” is rather good. And again the whole passage is very straightforward, lacking the baroque Fine Dining madness of Cohen’s.

I am swept away with waves of anticipation that blank out my mind and let me focus only on pleasure, releasing the painful past, releasing the desire to return there and be young and beautiful again. Fuck young and beautiful – this is worth everything – and I come with fierce contractions that seem to go on and on endlessly.

This (Erica Jong) is just utterly shitty prose. The sexual content disappears behind the subliteracy. This is not a subliteracy contest.

And Morrissey? Here tis.

Eliza and Ezra rolled together into the one giggling snowball of full-figured copulation, screaming and shouting as they playfully bit and pulled at each other in a dangerous and clamorous rollercoaster coil of sexually violent rotation with Eliza’s breasts barrel-rolled across Ezra’s howling mouth and the pained frenzy of his bulbous salutation extenuating his excitement as it whacked and smacked its way into every muscle of Eliza’s body except for the otherwise central zone.

A lot of writers take this approach to writing about sex. Sex is a silly frenzy, so you produce a long funny wild and crazy rollercoaster of a sentence. People are making special fun of bulbous salutation, but at least Morrissey has looked at the object of his descriptive efforts with care and given it a new and amusing spin.

We can, in short, discern three approaches to writing about sex in the novel.

1. The Craftsman.com approach reflects the author’s dread at having to write these passages. He or she grapples painfully with how to do the thing and ultimately, sensibly, decides to toss off a bland neutral efficient acceptable descriptive passage.

2. The Let’s Go There! approach takes sex on its own terms and chases it down on its merry zany way.

3. The This is ART, Damn You approach is, in UD‘s humble opinion, always the winner among the annual Bad Sex Award finalists. Cohen’s got that going, as did John Banville, also a recent finalist:

They conduct there, on that white bed, under the rubied iron cross, a fair imitation of a passionate dalliance, a repeated toing and froing on the edge of a precipice beyond which can be glimpsed a dark-green distance in a reeking mist and something shining out at them, a pulsing point of light, peremptory and intense.

I’m sure. All he ever wanted was to help educate underprivileged you. That’s all he and his company ever want – to help make the world a better place. You’ve seen their tv ads.

If Education Management Corporation is running into a little trouble, I’m sure Mr Blankfein and that other nice man, the one from KKR, will get together (don’t they look nice?) and take care of things.

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

Me, I can only skim this.

Maybe you’re made of tougher stuff.

… is making remarkable strides at the University of Montana, where tanking enrollment rates (due in part to the school’s team-induced rape crisis – the subject of a new best-selling book) are emptying the campus and driving it into deeper and deeper deficit. Will the state increase its support of the school?

Since the state largely understands the school as a football playing entity, and since the school’s team remains mired in naughty players and emptying stadiums, UD isn’t sanguine about legislators’ and taxpayers’ continued generosity. Here’s a recent snapshot. Ain’t pretty.

[F]ootball is built on large men running into each other at great speed. That creates dramatic moments — and creates constant risk of head injuries, too. And football wouldn’t be football without it.

You’ll never get anywhere with university football until you focus with laser-like clarity upon the Major Kongs riding their schools to oblivion; and the Chronicle of Higher Education knew it had a winner when it decided to feature in particular the head of Georgia State University. This frenetic delusional man will go on bleeding his indifferent-to-football students for more and more sports fees until they all decide to drop out and attend schools run by sane people.

Meanwhile, though, Mark Becker will build the world’s largest empty football stadium.

Mr. Becker’s bold idea to reduce the [escalating student] subsidy: Spend even more on athletics. He wants to build a football stadium for his team about a mile from the campus. He envisions a modern, 25,000- to 30,000-seat facility that offers a lively game-day environment. He also wants a baseball field and a soccer field, retail shops, and student housing.

Don’t imagine anything can be done to stop the madness. GSU’s trustees no doubt consider the man a genius, and no one else is in a position to do anything about him.

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

With this win Fresno State solidifies Hawaii’s last place position in the West Division Standings.

A school like Hawaii is an even more interesting case. Hawaii proves that even a team with no fans, a virtually unblemished loss record, and a school-bankrupting budget, will keep playing.