In reviewing its art collection, Yale discovers that it might have an early Diego Velázquez instead of the unexceptional whatever it had stashed in the basement.

The painting’s not in good shape. It’s not Yale’s fault; the damage seems to have been done long before a couple of wealthy alumni gave it to the school in the 1920’s. On the other hand, since the piece didn’t seem all that important, Yale had, as I say, sort of stashed it.

Here’s a big reproduction.

… in the coming days, but she doubts she can do better than this remarkable one from David Brooks in today’s New York Times. Brooks says all the right things. Excerpts:

… Hitchens’s model is Orwell, who combined left-wing politics and economics with traditionalist morality.

Starting in the ’60s, academic specialization and sobriety came to dominate intellectual life. But Hitchens writes more like the educated generalists of the previous generation — people like Isaiah Berlin, Malcolm Muggeridge and Raymond Williams. He makes a quick mention of Bob Dylan in his book, but by the first few pages of his memoir, he has already cited his key sources: W.H. Auden, James Joyce, T.S. Eliot and so on — the literary paragons of an earlier time.

When Hitchens came to the U.S., he brought a style that was at once more highbrow, more ribald and more conversational than is normal here…

Dictatorship, religion and censorship against literature, irony and free expression. There were no shadings; he judged everybody by whether they passed this test of moral courage.

His literary perspective has made him a more fully rounded person than most of the people one finds in this business. Unlike many Americans, he seems to completely trust his desire for pleasure, and has been open about his delight in sex, drink, friendship and wordplay.

… Most of all, his is a memoir that should be given to high school and college students of a literary bent. In the age of the Internet and the academy, it will open up different models for how to be a thoughtful person, how to engage in political life and what sort of things one should know in order to be truly educated.

Especially because of his excesses, it seems important that Hitchens make a speedy recovery.

Bravo.

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

Wow. Just found an appreciation I wrote back in 2005. I’d forgotten about it.

… libraries. From the point of view of the blogger at The Librarian’s Commute.

La Kid and I took Mr UD out to dinner last night for a belated Father’s Day (we were in Utah on the day itself).

It was one of those strange outings during which absolutely everything goes absolutely smoothly.

We drove down Wisconsin Avenue to Bethesda on a beautiful mild summer evening with full sun and no humidity. Traffic moved well. We cracked ourselves up quoting lines from Borat.

Walentynka (our bright red car) purred into a parking spot right off Wisconsin and La Kid hopped out, her hand overflowing with quarters for the meter.

She wore a light blue summer frock. Her very blond hair was pulled back by a white headband. She looked like Grace Kelly with glasses.

Mr UD wore one of his Father’s Day presents – a beige Polo shirt. He gave off a gated community aura.

I’d never been in a Ruth’s Chris Steak House before, but I chose it because Mr UD is a raw steak man. The place is effusively friendly and very beautiful. It has dark wood and heavy crimson drapes, like the Harvard Club. Unlike the Harvard Club, though, it’s very light inside. The Harvard Club is dark, like a massage parlor.

Our server was crisp and bubbly and attentive and spoke at serious length about the meat. Mr UD enjoyed this.

When he left, though, we felt adrift, all of us flipping though the big heavy menu full of history and meat lore and complex ordering strategies. The only thing I knew for sure was that I wanted a pomegranate martini.

As the server served my drink — loud crashing of ice as he shook it and shook it before pouring it into a triangular glass with lemoned sugar on its brim — he helped us make sense of the menu. Mr UD settled on a rib-eye with the tonnage of a cargo ship, while La Kid and I chose delicate petite filets.

It was a Thursday night, and the place was full. I’d figured this as a business lunch spot, all the denizens of ‘thesda’s skyscrapers pulling in at around one; but it did a hell of a dinner business too.

So our steaks were high and fluffy just like the bread pudding La Kid and I shared for dessert… Pretty much everything in the room looked like steak with sauce running off of it, or maybe that was just how it seemed to me, under the influence of so much steak… But look at this photo of their bread pudding, taken from the restaurant’s website. (Click on the image.)

After dinner we took a walk in the little park behind the restaurant and everyone was extremely happy in every conceivable respect.

Just one of those rare totally smooth outings.

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

HOLD THE PRESSES!

Mr UD points out two rough, not smooth, moments last night:

1.) The server swept by at one point and complimented me on having ordered the salad with blue cheese. “BUT you had ordered the salad without blue cheese.”

2) Although Mr UD ordered cappuccino, “he brought me espresso.”

… has never done much for UD. Many of his poems seem to her mere statements, and rather self-righteous ones at that. No humor, no wit, no surprising emotions. Wholesome poetry for right-thinking people.

I think William Logan’s appraisal is more or less right: Dreary, a village explainer.

[H]is poems are a species of prose … In his poems the writing is … wordy and lifeless … This run-on, the-sentence-is-everything-that-is-the-case style (like Molly Bloom on Prozac) is an aesthetic decision, not mere laziness. It just looks like laziness.

Merwin and Wendell Berry (about whose withdrawal of his papers from the University of Kentucky I’ve written here) are often written of together as ecopoets, and it’s true that they do a similar sort of agrarian nattering. Berry is a fine prose stylist, but his poetry, if you ask UD, doesn’t come across….

Here’s a Merwin poem dedicated to Berry.

Bread

to find themselves alone
before a wheat field
raising its radiance to the moon

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

This seems to UD a very sketchy sort of narrative, a little pit stop at Epiphany. Its main emotion is condescension toward people who can’t transcend a life of physicality, can’t lift themselves up to the radiance of the wheat field. They just stand there clutching a piece of bread.

They’ve lost touch with their own depths, with the source of their bread. They’ve abandoned the rigors of the search for the sacred.

Perhaps the dark mysteries of spiritual life frighten them. Perhaps they’re conformists, more comfortable in the crowd than in the challenging aloneness of the radiance.

It’s a distinction UGA works to maintain.

Apparently, head coaches need to worry about their bosses dipping their toes into legal hot water this time of year as well as their players.

According to the FOX affiliate in Atlanta, Georgia athletic director Damon Evans was arrested Wednesday night following a traffic stop and charged with DUI.

The station reports that Evans’ 2009 BMW was pulled over at 11:55 p.m. Wednesday. Evans was given a field sobriety test, and then later refused to take a breathalyzer test.

(It also apparently took police officers quite some time to set the camera up for Evans’ mug shot as the athletic director appears to have nodded off at some point during the process.)

From the Boston Herald. A dean responds to the Russian spy story.

But a former Kennedy School dean poo-poo’d the alleged spy operation.

“Basically they were going after information that any good reporter could have gotten,” said Joseph S. Nye, a former chairman of the National Intelligence Council. “It doesn’t seem that it was a very impressive operation.”

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

Update: Dean Nye doesn’t go poo-poo anymore.

The reporters excreted it.

… continues the fight against reactionaries on campus.

… Christopher Hitchens, who has been diagnosed with esophageal cancer.

Hitchens is one of our best stylists. He learned much of what he knows about writing from one of his heroes, George Orwell.

Let’s be precise about what he learned by starting our salute with the first three paragraphs of one of Orwell’s typically intense and brilliant essays, “How the Poor Die.”

Note first the title itself — Blunt, brisk, short, monosyllabic, pragmatic… And yet hardly a simple pragmatism. The very cut and dried feel of the language, applied to vulnerable human beings, already hints at the horror and indignation Orwell feels. I mean to say that the title is as much as a conclusion as it is a beginning; the essay will after all narrate Orwell’s education in how the poor die, how the Parisian poor are so obscenely mistreated in welfare hospitals that they are killed en masse and in the same ways by the doctors and nurses there (the essay was written in 1946). The title signals Orwell’s achieved emotional education – from naivety to shock to horror to rage to something beyond rage, a hard-won detachment that allows him to write about what he has experienced and learned in a way that gives the unanswerable physical and moral reality of the atrocity he’s describing full verbal expression.

The emotion, I mean, is still there; but it is intricately leashed. We pick up on that suppressed intensity; we sense that it might spring out with violence at any moment, and this makes reading Orwell exciting, tense…

This will be one of the tricks Hitchens learns: Understatement is almost always the way to go, especially when you are describing extremities of suffering, of injustice. Also when you are describing extremities of passion, of joy. Dial it back, make your language, not your feelings, powerful, and let the reader find her own way through your sentences to the emotion you want her to feel.

This will of course only work if your writing voice, your social approach to the reader, has been so welcoming as to create in the reader a strong identification with you.  Once you’ve locked on to your target, as it were, once the reader is with you — I really want to say once the reader is you — you’re free and clear.  If you can sustain that fellow feeling, your essay is liable to work brilliantly.

Mainly what you want to do is describe, with acute precision, the aspect of the world you want your reader to see, feel, and understand. Artfully you will thread, throughout that description, little words and phrases that intimate how strongly you feel; but you will never bluntly, emotionally, manipulatively, tell your reader how you feel. Basically your tone throughout should be stoic, rational, observant, perhaps philosophically amused. When you do decide to break that even tone, you will do it sparingly, and it will likely have immense impact on the reader.

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

Here’s the beginning of George Orwell’s essay, “How the Poor Die.” My bracketed comments are in blue.

In the year 1929 I spent several weeks in the Hôpital X, in the fifteenth arrondissement of Paris. [No emotion at all.  Mere reportage.  The point is to work slowly up to emotion, as occurred in the actual course of events Orwell narrates.] The clerks put me through the usual third-degree at the reception desk, and indeed I was kept answering questions for some twenty minutes before they would let me in. If you have ever had to fill up forms in a Latin country you will know the kind of questions I mean. For some days past I had been unequal to translating Reaumur into Fahrenheit, but I know that my temperature was round about 103, and by the end of the interview I had some difficulty in standing on my feet. At my back a resigned little knot of patients, carrying bundles done up in coloured handkerchiefs, waited their turn to be questioned.  [Note that the tone is casual, friendly, confiding, conversational.  He addresses you directly:  You will know the kind of questions… Clashing, though, with this ordinary speech is the already extraordinary circumstance of the writer’s ill-treatment at the hand of the clerk.]  [Note too the careful choice of figurative language, here stressing already the dehumanized aspect of the other patients:  The line behind Orwell is described as a knot, and then immediately their bundles – knotted handkerchiefs – are described.  Of course the reader doesn’t consciously register the implied equivalence here between bundles and people, but a hint of their objectification has been planted.]

After the questioning came the bath — a compulsory routine for all newcomers, apparently, just as in prison or the workhouse.  [Apparently carries the semi-amused observing consciousness here, the Brit surveying with mild astonished disdain French ways.] My clothes were taken away from me, and after I had sat shivering for some minutes in five inches of warm water I was given a linen nightshirt and a short blue flannel dressing-gown — no slippers, they had none big enough for me, they said — and led out into the open air. [Very, very precise description, this.   Orwell identifies no specific people interacting with him — were taken away, was given, led out — because the nurses are interchangeable indifferent automata…  One could certainly miss, in visualizing all of this, Orwell’s elegant assonance, his repeated use of one particular sound:  shivering, minutes, inches, given, slipper, big…. Just a dull bland almost soundless sound in that deeply hidden letter I, but it somehow conveys the total drabness, the deadness, the claustrophobia, of his setting.  This writing doesn’t exactly sing.] This was a night in February and I was suffering from pneumonia.  [Note how long he waited to tell us this dramatic fact, to explain why he’s in the hospital.  Stoic, selfless, hits you up with it at the end of the sentence and shocks you.] The ward we were going to was 200 yards away and it seemed that to get to it you had to cross the hospital grounds. [Seemed.  Does the same job as apparently.  I was in a crazy, mad, world, slowly attempting to assimilate the madness… It was like a bad dream — this seemed to be the case; that apparently was the case… Orwell is dramatizing not his emotions, but the minute by minute actuality of his efforts to make sense of what is gradually revealing itself to be a nightmare. He brings the reader along with him in that immediacy.]  Someone stumbled in front of me with a lantern. The gravel path was frosty underfoot, and the wind whipped the nightshirt round my bare calves. When we got into the ward I was aware of a strange feeling of familiarity whose origin I did not succeed in pinning down till later in the night. It was a long, rather low, ill-lit room, full of murmuring voices and with three rows of beds surprisingly close together. There was a foul smell, faecal and yet sweetish. [Strange, ill-lit… Our sense of nightmare, of the terror of the half-known, grows.  What’s the smell?  What’s the origin of the feeling? And don’t forget how controlled, how oddly beautiful, Orwell’s prose remains, with his lilting repeated L’s:  long, rather low, ill-lit room, full… This stylish self-consciousness may seem a small thing, but it’s conveying something very important amid this manifestly out of control experience.  It is conveying control.  So even as we follow the writer into this helpless fear, we sense, in his masterful prose, a kind of eventual triumph over it…  Maybe prose for Orwell – and Hitchens – ultimately comes to convey what we have to fall back on in our efforts to retain our dignity and lucidity in a difficult life.  In this sense, writing – language – really, really matters.]  As I lay down I saw on a bed nearly opposite me a small, round-shouldered, sandy-haired man sitting half naked while a doctor and a student performed some strange operation on him. First the doctor produced from his black bag a dozen small glasses like wine glasses, then the student burned a match inside each glass to exhaust the air, then the glass was popped on to the man’s back or chest and the vacuum drew up a huge yellow blister. Only after some moments did I realize what they were doing to him. It was something called cupping, a treatment which you can read about in old medical text-books but which till then I had vaguely thought of as one of those things they do to horses.

The cold air outside had probably lowered my temperature, and I watched this barbarous remedy with detachment and even a certain amount of amusement. The next moment, however, the doctor and the student came across to my bed, hoisted me upright and without a word began applying the same set of glasses, which had not been sterilized in any way. A few feeble protests that I uttered got no more response than if I had been an animal. I was very much impressed by the impersonal way in which the two men started on me. I had never been in the public ward of a hospital before, and it was my first experience of doctors who handle you without speaking to you or, in a human sense, taking any notice of you. They only put on six glasses in my case, but after doing so they scarified the blisters and applied the glasses again. Each glass now drew about a dessert-spoonful of dark-coloured blood. As I lay down again, humiliated, disgusted and frightened by the thing that had been done to me, I reflected that now at least they would leave me alone. But no, not a bit of it. There was another treatment coming, the mustard poultice, seemingly a matter of routine like the hot bath. Two slatternly nurses had already got the poultice ready, and they lashed it round my chest as tight as a strait-jacket while some men who were wandering about the ward in shirt and trousers began to collect round my bed with half-sympathetic grins. I learned later that watching a patient have a mustard poultice was a favourite pastime in the ward. These things are normally applied for a quarter of an hour and certainly they are funny enough if you don’t happen to be the person inside. For the first five minutes the pain is severe, but you believe you can bear it. During the second five minutes this belief evaporates, but the poultice is buckled at the back and you can’t get it off. This is the period the onlookers enjoy most. During the last five minutes, I noted, a sort of numbness supervenes. After the poultice had been removed a waterproof pillow packed with ice was thrust beneath my head and I was left alone. I did not sleep, and to the best of my knowledge this was the only night of my life — I mean the only night spent in bed — in which I have not slept at all, not even a minute.

Humiliated, disgusted, and frightened — When the visceral emotion comes out, it really comes out. But having held it back, leashed it for so long, slowly created the conditions for its release, Orwell now produces an especially intense result …

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

I don’t say Hitchens is as a great a prose stylist as Orwell. But he is quite, quite good. Even people who detest particular positions of his often delight in his writing. He has that same gift Orwell had, that ability to draw you in, to make you be like him, or want to be like him, or feel you are him, for the duration of your lodging in his prose.

Part of what draws you into Orwell and Hitchens is, strangely, their insolence. They speak bluntly and don’t particularly care who they hurt. When we read naughty insouciant people – add Oscar Wilde and Gore Vidal — we intuit a wildly attractive world of looseness, relaxation, wit, and laughter; we intuit a subversive, seductive, knowledge.

On one level this knowledge is the knowledge of brats, and we connect with it because many of us were to one extent or another brats, and that was fun. Yet the childish, I’ll-say-anything aspect of all of these writers is wedded to a very mature erudition. Orwell, Wilde, Vidal, Hitchens — all are or were first-class literary scholars, deeply informed and sensitive readers of the western aesthetic tradition. This immature/mature combination gives their prose a high burnish and a low scrawl. Both at the same time. Which keeps you guessing. Keeps you off balance. Makes you burst out with laughter.

I’ll post this much now. More on Hitchens in a moment.

UD‘s friend James sends her this article from the Chicago Tribune about Steve Diedrich, who for years organized Ulysses readings in that city.

He was too sick, with non-Hodgkins lymphoma, to take part this year. He died a few days after the reading.

When June 16 arrived this year, he was in the hospital. He insisted that the Bloomsday reading at the Cliff Dwellers Club downtown go on without him. His friends sent him a videotape.

Two days later, he lost consciousness, but not before he videotaped a reply, mustering a smile and the words “Thank you.”

A business school dean can’t help but notice the scandalous business model at the for-profits.

… Annually, about 25 percent of for-profit colleges’ government-subsidized tuition revenue is spent on aggressive student recruitment programs. Taxpayers are thus financing not just educational expenditures but expensive advertising campaigns and sophisticated call centers.

The University of Phoenix spends nearly $1 billion annually on promotion. It used its federally subsidized profits to purchase naming rights to a sports stadium. Bridgepoint Education reported spending 28 percent of this year’s first-quarter revenue on promotion, compared with only 25 percent spent on instruction costs and services.

There are many lessons traditional colleges can learn from the successes of the for-profits. But imagine taxpayers’ reactions if traditional schools decided to divert a quarter of their already constrained budgets away from the classroom to carry out massive self-promotion campaigns.

UD always wondered what sort of people pay ridiculous sums for conferences like these.

Russian spies.

… no university president comes anywhere close to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s president, Shirley Ann Jackson. An article in Bloomberg about presidents sitting on corporate boards reviews Jackson’s steely focus on personal enrichment.

Jackson … sits on five corporate boards, more than most college presidents, after stepping down from a sixth in April. She traveled to Milwaukee and Houston to attend shareholder meetings for International Business Machines Corp. and Marathon Oil on two successive April days.

Shareholders at IBM, Marathon Oil, FedEx Corp. and NYSE Euronext filed proxy statements this year or in 2009 questioning Jackson’s ability to juggle jobs.

“Nobody should be sitting on that many boards,” said Emil Rossi, the trustee for shares who filed a proxy statement with his son to protest Jackson’s board nomination at Armonk, New York-based IBM, the world’s largest computer-services provider. Of 14 candidates, Jackson placed 11th in the voting and retained her seat. While getting the fewest votes for election at Public Service Enterprise Group Inc., a Newark, New Jersey-based utility, she also held her board post there.

Founded in 1824, RPI is the nation’s oldest technological university, according to its website. Jackson earned $1.6 million from RPI in the year ended June 30, 2008, making her the highest-paid leader of a nonprofit private college in the U.S., according to the latest rankings by the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Jackson also reaped $982,628 in fees and other compensation such as stock awards from IBM, Public Service, New York-based NYSE Euronext and Marathon Oil in 2009, plus $403,823 from FedEx and Medtronic Inc., a Minneapolis-based medical-device maker, for their latest completed fiscal years, proxy statements show.

Faculty members said Jackson isn’t devoting enough attention to RPI’s endowment losses and credit issues. In May 2009, RPI had its debt downgraded to A3 from A2 by Moody’s Investors Service. While retaining the rating, Moody’s in March changed RPI’s outlook to “stable” from “negative.” RPI’s endowment fell 23 percent in a year, to $612.8 million on June 30, 2009, according to the National Association of College & University Business Officers, based in Washington.

“Her first priority needs to be this university,” said Jim Napolitano, a professor of physics at RPI since 1992.

… Jackson declined to be interviewed…

There’s lots of other stuff in the article about people like Brown University’s Ruth Simmons, who as a Goldman Sachs director “approved a $67.9 million bonus, still a Wall Street record, for Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Lloyd Blankfein.” It’s worth reading in full.

The Bloomberg writer notes that corporate board sitting takes presidents away from their campus responsibilities, makes them vulnerable to lawsuits, and poses many ethical hazards. So why do presidents do it?

An expert in the field says: “Universities are feeling the pressure for fundraising, and [presidents] think creating these linkages will bring them more philanthropy, although there’s no evidence to suggest that actually happens.”

The philanthropy theory is a very nice way of trying to account for why corporate boards are so irresistable… But as this observer notes, there’s no evidence things work like that.

The simplest explanation seems to UD the best: Sitting on corporate boards is the easiest, pleasantest way in the whole wide world to scare up enormous sums of money for yourself.

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

Update: Muckety provides a map.

UD, a fervent amateur pianist, plays a modest baby grand at home. This unassuming instrument seems right for UD‘s skill level.

But she can’t help be excited about the news that an anonymous donor has just given 28 big Steinways to George Washington University’s music department — located on the first floor of the building that also houses, on the sixth floor, UD‘s office.

Six floors down from my desk! 28 beauts!

Of course I’m not worthy of them. Of course it would be an obscenity, UD tromping down there with her Baroque for Babies books…

But I can dream…

The Grassley Report on pharmaceutical marketing masquerading as science is here.