… essay? Opinion piece? Indictment? Not sure what to call it.
It appears in ESPN, of all places, and expresses a strange emotion – hopelessness, I guess. There’s something religious, something sinners-in-the-hands-of-an-angry-God about it. It recalls some of the most disgusting scandals in college football in the last few months, missing quite a few of them but touching on enough to make the tired point about the stinking corruption of the enterprise.
But this is a routine rhetorical strategy, beginning your article about the vileness of all aspects of university football by reviewing five or six of the most recent you-could-pukes. Usually the next step is to point out that even by those standards the Miami story startles; or people are getting upset but really the latest Chapel Hill vomit isn’t chunky enough to count… (Here’s a good example. Typical sentence: “After the last 12 months, which were filled with scandal and cover-ups and lies and payouts and allegations of child molestation and motorcycles and mistresses, The Ohio State recently reported something like four dozen secondary violations and we didn’t bat an eye.”)
Instead of this, the author goes all Ballad of Reading Gaol:
We make a monster of what we love, and to make a point about what our society honestly values, a writer might post here a comparison of the state-by-state salaries of head football coaches and governors… In the end we remain helpless against ourselves.
Each man kills the thing he loves, it turns out. As in the endlessly anthologized poem by James Wright about the beginning of football season in American towns:
In the Shreve High football stadium,
I think of Polacks nursing long beers in Tiltonsville,
And gray faces of Negroes in the blast furnace at Benwood,
And the ruptured night watchman of Wheeling Steel,
Dreaming of heroes.
All the proud fathers are ashamed to go home.
Their women cluck like starved pullets,
Dying for love.
Therefore,
Their sons grow suicidally beautiful
At the beginning of October,
And gallop terribly against each other’s bodies.
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We who are about to die for you losers salute you. Our mothers lie abed wondering why instead of fucking them our fathers want to watch us concuss.
Has another year of scandal and revelation and condemnation finally undone the sport? Are Petrino, Tressel, Paterno, Miami or Montana the beginning of the end?
C’mon. Does any casual fan, any casual reader, any casual viewer, any reasonable person anywhere at the beginning of the 21st century think of “big football schools” as anything other than big football schools?
As it was in 1905, it was another tough year for fans. How do you root for what’s on the helmet without worrying about what’s in it?
Yet we remain helpless against not merely our indifference to what’s in it but indeed to what’s on it. What fan really gives a shit whether it’s Auburn or Alabama? What you’re after is gladiatorial gore good enough to get you going.
I Dreamed That in a City Dark as Paris
By Louis Simpson
I dreamed that in a city dark as Paris
I stood alone in a deserted square.
The night was trembling with a violet
Expectancy. At the far edge it moved
And rumbled; on that flickering horizon
The guns were pumping color in the sky.
There was the Front. But I was lonely here,
Left behind, abandoned by the army.
The empty city and the empty square
Was my inhabitation, my unrest.
The helmet with its vestige of a crest,
The rifle in my hands, long out of date,
The belt I wore, the trailing overcoat
And hobnail boots, were those of a poilu.
I was the man, as awkward as a bear.
Over the rooftops where cathedrals loomed
In speaking majesty, two aeroplanes
Forlorn as birds, appeared. Then growing large,
The German Taube and the Nieuport Scout,
They chased each other tumbling through the sky,
Till one streamed down on fire to the earth.
These wars have been so great, they are forgotten
Like the Egyptian dynasts. My confrere
In whose thick boots I stood, were you amazed
To wander through my brain four decades later
As I have wandered in a dream through yours?
The violence of waking life disrupts
The order of our death. Strange dreams occur,
For dreams are licensed as they never were.
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Many poems and songs recount dreams – I Dreamt I Dwelt in Marble Halls, I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine, I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill, I Dreamed that I Was Old – and this poem about remembering and forgetting wars also casts itself as a dream. How else really to reach the war dead? If you are, like the poet, a war veteran, you will make contact with those dead in subconscious, flickering, tumbling, wandering moments…
I mean, UD has always loved Siegfried Sassoon’s Prelude: The Troops – especially its last verse, which pretty reliably makes her cry:
O my brave brown companions, when your souls
Flock silently away, and the eyeless dead
Shame the wild beast of battle on the ridge,
Death will stand grieving in that field of war
Since your unvanquished hardihood is spent.
And through some mooned Valhalla there will pass
Battalions and battalions, scarred from hell;
The unreturning army that was youth;
The legions who have suffered and are dust.
Yet this is direct, formal address, wide-awake sorrow and homage. Simpson’s night visitation feels more likely to be the way actual people make contact with the war dead, which is to say by being haunted by them.
Both poets use blank verse, with Simpson occasionally using end rhyme (unrest/crest; occur/were) but mainly featuring unrhymed lines (all of Sassoon’s lines are unrhymed); both poems derive from this form a stately hesitant gait, a queer little funeral march. The absolutely strict measure of Sassoon’s final two lines is at spectacular odds with the explosive rage and despair behind them, and this is what we typically expect in a poem, the poet asserting at least linguistic control over emotional and intellectual chaos, over outcomes too grotesque and vast really to be comprehended, much less assimilated.
Simpson’s poem is all subliminal, all, as he says, a strange dream, its strangeness extreme, but somehow licensed by the beyond-strange atrocities of our century (his poem’s speaker is – assuming he’s Simpson – a Second World War veteran communing with a soldier of the First World War). And as dream, it is free to invert and invent…
So its first line seems immediately all wrong. Isn’t Paris the city of light? A city dark as Paris… Paris during the war? War blasting even the city of enlightenment back to violet (the word one letter short of violent) night… Well, and it’s a dream after all with all the shifty inchoate imagery of the sleeping mind. Rumbling guns pump color – you hear the assonance, the repeated uh a vague menacing sound. And things are vague because the poet stands alone and a distance from them; there is the Front, and the poet is in the back, in the shadows, left behind. All he can see are the edges of war; and this is his mind struggling to get to the Front, to apprehend that reality directly. Restless, he stands alone in a Paris square, and finds himself – bizarrely – to be a poilu, a French World War One infantryman, an ordinary sort from the countryside.
I was the man…
reminds us of Walt Whitman’s line:
I am the man, I suffered, I was there.
Whitman celebrates here his powerful capacity to empathize, to feel exactly what are others – especially suffering others – are feeling; and Simpson is after something similar, his dreaming persona literally taking on the identity of “my confrere.” Yet as to really remembering: The wars are too great (there’s an echo here of course of The Great War), too vast, once again, for us to grasp; they become historical abstractions, like the ancient and vast Egyptian dynasties:
These wars have been so great, they are forgotten
Like the Egyptian dynasts. My confrere
In whose thick boots I stood, were you amazed
To wander through my brain four decades later
As I have wandered in a dream through yours?
I thought of you, that’s all; I didn’t really commemorate you, as Sassoon commemorates, or feel with you, as Whitman feels with you; it’s just that you, poilu, wandered through my brain at some point while I was awake; and then that wandering presence inhabited, solidified, stood stock still, in my dreaming mind — ghosts inhabit a house; this ghost inhabits the speaker’s mind.
The violence of waking life disrupts
The order of our death. Strange dreams occur,
For dreams are licensed as they never were.
Things are out of joint; our war-torn world upends everything, makes everything weird, so that my (dead; dreaming) life propels itself backwards to your still-living, still-dreaming being in the darkness of the eternal war zone. The new global world of conflict – a world in which any behavior is “licensed” – is so grotesque that it infects our dreams in unprecedented ways. We are losing orderly ways of commemoration; we risk flattening our wars into abstraction. Yet we remain open to inhabitation.
… Andrew Scull titles his latest essay in the Times Literary Supplement. It looks to be a good summary of the ongoing scandal of the next edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, but you and I can’t read it without a subscription. Here’s an excerpt (from a post about it in Commonweal):
As diagnostic criteria were loosened [in DSM III], an extraordinary expansion of the numbers of mentally sick individuals ensued. This has been particular evident among, but by no means confined to, the ranks of the young. “Juvenile biopolar disorder”, for example, increased forty-fold in just a decade, between 1994 and 2004. An autism epidemic broke out, as a formerly rare condition, seen in less than one in 500 children at the outset of the same decade, was found among one in every ninety children only ten years later. The story for hyperactivity, subsequently relabelled ADHD, is similar, with 10 per cent of male American children now taking pills daily for their “disease”. Among adults, one in every seventy-six Americans qualified for welfare payments based on mental disability by 2007.
If psychiatrists’ inability to agree among themselves on a diagnosis threatened to make them a laughing stock in the 1970s, the relabelling of a host of ordinary life events as psychiatric pathology now seems to promise more of the same. Social anxiety disorder, oppositional defiant disorder, school phobia, narcissistic and borderline personality disorders are apparently now to be joined by such things as pathological gambling, binge eating disorder, hypersexuality disorder, temper dysregulation disorder, mixed anxiety depressive disorder, minor neurocognitive disorder, and attenuated psychotic symptoms syndrome.
Yet we are almost as far removed as ever from understanding the etiological roots of major psychiatric disorders, let alone these more controversial diagnoses (which many people would argue do not belong in the medical arena in the first place). That these diagnoses provide lucrative new markets for psychopharmacology’s products raises questions in many minds about whether commercial concerns are illegitimately driving the expansion of the psychiatric universe – a concern that is scarcely allayed when one recalls that the great majority of the members of the DSM task force are recipients of drug company largesse.
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New pathologies are breaking out all the time.
There’s a whole other category for Kim Kardashian.
(UD thanks David.)
UD reads these so you don’t have to.
UD reads the mainly indignant but occasionally explanatory (see this post’s headline) comments from University of Kentucky fans in response to an article that notes a faculty group’s objection to Kentucky’s basketball schedule. The notorious John Calipari’s insistence on “neutral sites” for games means “a geographic separation of entities which already can have a tenuous coexistence: athletic programs and the student body/campus community.”
In short, who gives a shit whether his team’s games have anything to do with whatever sports factory gives them a home? These are NBA men, not wussy college boys. As for that faculty group…
…who gives a rats opposite end orafice…They can say what they want…and make all the accusations they want…
I think he means Orafix.
Maybe what they ought to do…is have no college sports at all…maybe that would thrill the no life, calculus formula discussing intellects of the ever so popular and important entity as the faculty coalition….
Calculus formula discussing is nifty.
Most students take five years to move from academia to their chosen profession. We should celebrate those that are gifted enough to do it in one.
But they can do it in zero! We should celebrate that by shutting down Kentucky basketball.
… this is excellent writing.
Yes, there’s one mistake.
After getting caught on tape repeatedly using the heliport on the weekends — when it’s supposed to be closed because of noise pollution — a reporter for ABC 7 confronted the mayor, who explained…
This makes it look as though the reporter got caught, not the mayor.
But otherwise this piece is terrific satire, snark, irony, sarcasm, whatever.
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And you can relax. Ira Rennert, who used to be one of Yeshiva University’s fabled trustees (that great religious institution also had Bernard Madoff and Ezra Merkin running the place), will continue to break the rules and use the heliport on the weekends. “Being an entitled plutocrat just isn’t what it used to be,” complains the Gothamist writer. But it is. Rennert’s holding down the fort.
During one of ‘thesda’s bad snow storms a couple of years ago, Les UDs moved into a nearby hotel (no power at home) and took meals mainly at Panera (UD wanted to do room service, but Mr UD considers room service decadent). Thus UD discovered the phenomenon of café squatters, people who conduct their work day at the local coffee shop, “effectively setting up their entire office at a table: laying out their laptop, smartphone, iPad and bag, ordering a large skinny latte and then staying there for the afternoon.” As the commenter in my headline notes, it’s pretty obnoxious. And try making money when your bistro is full of people spending three dollars and then chatting on the phone with their clients for the rest of the day.
A new place, Filter, has opened in Foggy Bottom, down the street from UD‘s office, and they’re no-laptop. UD hasn’t been there yet, but she’s thinking about the irony or whatever it is of cafés beginning to look like her laptop-free classrooms… One of the commenters suggests that the squatters use public libraries instead, but this location lacks the pleasant human buzz, the soft North African music, and the aroma that squatters (and the rest of us) are after.
I’ve noticed squatters in the Starbucks at George Washington University’s library (I go there a lot to pick up lunch) – always the same people, always there, at tables bristling with computers and phones.
Hal Scott is the director of the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Committee on Capital Markets Regulation, an “independent and nonpartisan 501(c )(3) research organization dedicated to improving the regulation of US capital markets.” Though tax records show he spends 30 hours a week on CCMR business – for which he is paid $342,840 annually, he is also employed as the Nomura Professor and Director of the Program on International Financial Systems at Harvard Law School, where he has taught since 1975. (Scott’s Harvard income has not been disclosed, though the New York Times pegged the average full-time Harvard professor’s salary at $191,200 in 2010 — substantially less than what he earns running the CCMR.)
Scott, a crony of Jamie Dimon’s who uses those amazingly generous outside hours (what’s he give Harvard? ten? fifteen?) to fight the Volcker Rule and other attempts to regulate the banking industry, is the very model of a modern law professor.
This blog has followed the remarkable multitasking of Harvard University’s last president (while president of Harvard, Summers did “consulting work for [a] hedge fund, Taconic Capital Advisors.”) Frank Rich writes:
That the highly paid leader of arguably America’s most esteemed educational institution …would simultaneously freelance as a hedge-fund guy might stand as a symbol for the values of our time. At the start of his stormy and short-lived presidency, Summers picked a fight with Cornel West for allegedly neglecting his professorial duties by taking on such extracurricular tasks as cutting a spoken-word CD. Yet Summers saw no conflict with moonlighting in the money racket while running the entire university.
But this is nothing, really. What Charles Ferguson, in his book Inside Job (based on the film) documents is the way in which
Over the past 30 years, significant portions of American academia have deteriorated into “pay to play” activities. These days, if you see a famous economics professor testify in Congress, or write an article, there is a good chance he or she is being paid by someone with a big stake in what’s being debated. Most of the time, these professors do not disclose these conflicts of interest, and most of the time their universities look the other way.
Half a dozen consulting firms, several speakers’ bureaus and various industry lobbying groups maintain large networks of academics for hire for the purpose of advocating industry interests in policy and regulatory debates. The principal industries involved are energy, telecommunications, healthcare, agribusiness – and, most definitely, financial services.
What tends to get attention are medical school professors’ conflicts of interest, and of course political science professors shilling for people like Gaddafi. Time to pay a little attention to econ.