…whose last few lines echo – uncannily – Don DeLillo’s 1985 novel White Noise.

Go here for the poem unaccosted; what follows is the poem plus UD‘s commentary in brackets.

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JANUARY

[By Alfred Corn.
Written in 1977.]

[January can be a month of renewal — or a cold dark drag, a calendrical crystallization of every warm and vital thing frozen within you. Corn’s poem is like that. The frozen thing.]

Night swallows up everything but doesn’t
Alone cast the shadow inside, this sense
Of incompleteness, lack
Of echo…

[No, not night alone. My own despair helps cast the shadow.]

I expect
Too much? Too little?

[The poet grapples with his poetic ambition. At the moment he is, like Shelley in “Ode to the West Wind,” writing a lyric about being unable to write a lyric.]

My undetailed season
Only appears in the bright particulars
Of paired headlights flooding an avenue,
It seems, at cross-purposes with Number.

[I’m like an aimless car at night, turning on the floodlights but illuminating no meaningful location – no detail; no Number.]

If the worst certainties were skill – but now
The mind goes begging, words crumble, refuse
To render anything at all, except
The barrenness their failure parallels.

[Maybe I could at least – being a skilled wordsmith – write a kind of empty but stylish tour de force… Just to get something verbal out there… But my wintry despair is such that even words now fail me, revealing only my existential barrenness.]

People, like a people, do have slumps, when
Nothing wants to be said, and what is,
Hardly worth anyone’s staying awake for –
A satire for unaccommodated men.

[The world fails to accommodate my mind, my heart, my soul, the enormity of my desire for completeness, my desire that the world outside reverberate with – echo – my inner world.]

Best, they claim, to remount the horse that threw
You (in the present case, a horse with wings)

[That’s Pegasus – poetry – there. That’s the particular horse the demoralized poet must get back on. Did it throw him, indeed, because he tried to fly too high for his mundane times? Wanted too much, that is?]

So as to demonstrate –
To show that you are … what?
I’ve forgotten. Given that I can do
Only as well as my times, just how much
Will they sustain?

[Another statement of the same idea: How high can I fly, given where and when I live?]

Or the doubtful subject
Of a self in neither sense exemplary?

[There is moral as well as aesthetic judgment here. The problem is not perhaps in our unpoetic stars as in ourselves.]

[Corn will close – as so many lyricists do – by shifting his focus from himself to his setting, his city.]

In those doorways several will freeze tonight,
Disappointment’s victims, failures at love,
Dazed benumbed – but this is self-description.
Pure perversity, I guess, leads me to search
The mirror of my self-imposed city for
What, if anything here, holds a promise,
The gift of speech that comes to those who hear
A word sounded through the white noise of the world.

[Very DeLilloesque, that. The novel White Noise is about the very same thing – listening so intently to the empty background noise of the world (“white” here has a nice extra symbolic resonance, since we’re January and that’s about benumbing and even killing white snow) that you begin to discern something other than white noise. A word sounded through the white noise of the world. Only the poet’s ear can catch that hidden resonance, which inevitably has to do with suffering (here, the homeless in the doorways) outside of you which somehow “accommodates” the suffering within you. The writer at the center of DeLillo’s novel Mao II has always made a point of listening very closely to the things ordinary people say – because if you listen closely enough, they are saying something extraordinary:

It’s cold out there. In there. Gotta get the old ticker shaking again.]

Anyone who blogs about universities – ‘specially university athletics – has the very same task Samuel Beckett describes. How do you make room for – make sense of – the mess? For the theater of the absurd production that schools like New Mexico State (and let NMSU stand for myriad others like it) stage every single day? Go here for background on this clown school with its budget-killing big sports program and its vast empty stadium. Then go here for an update, as the state of New Mexico pulls funding from the school and lets the big thinkers on campus figure out how to keep their players rolling around in a huge vacant shell.

But that’s just one state school, from a notoriously anti-intellectual state. Consider the sporty devolution of the University of Minnesota, of all places, where they pay coaches millions of dollars to preside over endless sickening drug and sex scandals. People are now officially worried that the state legislature might be too grossed out to approve UMN’s funding requests. You’ve even got some restive citizens wondering about – wait for it – whether athletics might compromise a university’s mission. They seem particularly upset about coaches’ salaries.

But UMN to the rescue! They’re about to appoint this guy as one of their regents. Good optics.

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The Washington state senate shows you what can happen to a university’s autonomy when it keeps fucking up its athletic budget.

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At least we’ve got the very top of university football, with packed stadiums and plentiful revenues, to admire. Dave Zirin describes these lucky schools.

[Clemson’s] head coach in 1981, Danny Ford made $50,000 that year (adjusted for inflation, that would be $140,000 today). Dabo Swinney takes home a base salary of $4.55 million. He also made $1.4 million in bonuses for a total salary of just under $6 million. As for players, their lot in life is the same as in 1981, except now they receive a $388-a-month stipend.

[Clemson coach Dabo] Swinney was asked about the idea of actually paying players, given the dramatically transformed economic landscape of the game, and he said that if players are ever paid, “I’ll go do something else because there’s enough entitlement in this world as there is.” To call the desire to end this rank exploitation “entitlement” is Orwellian in the extreme. He might as well write “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.” on the locker-room walls.

If anyone has expressed an obscene amount of entitlement, it’s Swinney. Here is someone working on a refurbished plantation who makes millions of dollars off the sweat and head injuries of overwhelmingly black, unpaid labor, and yet when asked about the Black Lives Matter movement in September, he said, ”Some of these people need to move to another country.”

… College football is a septic tank of entitlement. It’s a fungal culture created by the head coaches of Big Football. Dabo Swinney is the very embodiment of that culture: adrift, clueless, and filthy rich.

Yuck. Another fine mess.

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

UD thanks John and Carl.

She’s been following – vaguely, because she doesn’t like posting on sexual harassment stories – the increasingly icky case of Gabriel Piterberg, a UCLA history professor who seems to have sexually harassed two graduate students. (UD shies away from these stories because they are typically insanely complicated, with claims and counterclaims galore, and everything grows into intricate lawsuits which spawn further lawsuits… I mean, of course, UD does post on quite a few such stories – they’re obviously important. But you often feel the ground shifting uncomfortably under you as you try to make sense of them.) They sued, and the university settled. Piterberg got some financial and other punishments (required seminar in foundations of not sexually harassing women; keep the office door open), and is now, at the beginning of spring semester, back at work.

But lots of people aren’t happy about that (38 of his colleagues wrote this protest letter), and they’ve been protesting/disrupting his classes. He hasn’t really been able to teach.

The story has jumped to major media outlets, and, in the context of plenty of recent California-university-based sexual harassment incidents, looks bad for UCLA.

Making matters worse is the notorious anti-Zionism of Piterberg, who grew up in Israel and came to regard the Zionist project as rank colonialist folly. One of Piterberg’s colleagues, the father of Daniel Pearl, has not hesitated to condemn him:

“Piterberg belongs to a group of extreme left so-called historians who see their role as the reinterpretation of history to fit their political agenda,” Pearl said.

Pearl said that Piterberg has greatly damaged UCLA and its history department by trying to legitimatize anti-Israel movements on campus and “demoralizing Jewish students.”

Let’s face it: Not a popular guy on campus. Students figure he’d be happy to get the hell out if UCLA gave him a good severance.

What they’re forgetting is that he probably has nowhere else to go.

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Anyway, in reading about Piterberg and his work, UD came upon this comment, from someone reviewing one of his books.

While he knew all about the contradiction in “religious Zionism”, [Chaim] Bermant was more indulgent towards his Labour friends, and overlooked that other contradiction – what George Steiner has perceptively called Zionism as a secular-political movement invoking a scriptural-mystical justification “to which it could not, in avowed honesty, subscribe.” Or as the Israeli writer Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin, cited by Piterberg, puts it, “There is no God, but He promised us the Land”…

UD likes this very much – “There is no God, but He promised us the land.”

Economizing, in UD‘s world.

The [$23 million] home [Jeff Bezos has just bought in Washington DC] is expected to be an East-coast pied a terre for the family — allowing him to avoid hotel bills.

The University of Michigan’s urology department shares its leadership history, marking without comment the curiously short reign (he left in ’97) of Joseph Oesterling. But here’s a comment, from a local journalist recalling her most important story:

In the early 1990s, I got a tip from an insider at the University of Michigan that Dr. Joseph Oesterling, chief urologist, had scammed the university on expenses and pocketed money from prostate cancer foundations he created. He used the money to build himself a mighty fine mansion. Through FOIA, I and reporter Maryanne George, who was a cub reporter I edited while we both were at the Michigan State News, got reams of information about his expense records showing he double- and triple-billed the university for expenses drug and medical device companies gave him. He resigned in disgrace but only served a brief stint of community service.

We ran a big story including a photo of the house that my newspaper got by hiring a helicopter (with our lawyer’s OK) and shooting it from above. (The house was on a private road with a chain fence that said no trespassing). Turns out the picture we ran was of the back of the house, but that entrance looked so posh it was taken as the front entrance. I used the photo in speeches and the back entrance comment always got good laughs.

The story opened my eyes to the poor oversight of medical professionals by most states.

Poor oversight? You mean just because Oesterling was – until a few days ago – still practicing medicine?

I mean, yes, twenty years after the Michigan thing, plus a 2005 misconduct charge, plus an arrest at the end of December for running a chain of pill mills, Oesterling’s license has finally been suspended… Not taken away, mind you… Wouldn’t want to act hastily…

But – wait for it – he’s still prescribing!

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… Oesterling’s clinics, including one in Caro, prescribed a total of “some 330,000 dosage units of Norco, a (Schedule II) controlled substance, within a 16-month period.

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If you’re anxious about your fix, you’ll be relieved to know he’s out on bond, and with all his money he’ll almost certainly be able to beat these latest charges.

Shakespearean Limerick About Monica Crowley

Now Harper and Collins, most growly,
Suspend their edition of Crowley.
“You blackguard! Whoreson!”
Crieth vilified Mon.
“Thou playest against me most foully.”

… for ol’ UD. Sick as a dog with bronchitis plus, she lies abed and watches bits of snow settle on the garden. The world in the new year continues to shower UD with wondrous tales of serial plagiarism and quarter billion dollar football expenses, yet she can’t quite gather her thoughts about it… Whereas her efforts not to gather her thoughts about the upsetting political situation in her country are thwarted by unsettling and unignorable forms of protest. UD knows she has to draw some deep breaths and dive into everything again, but at the moment her lungs are weak.

“It’s going to continue to drain money from the core mission of the university. And there’s no end in sight. How many years do we do this?” keens a University of Massachusetts professor as the school’s ignorant padded armies clash by night…

It’s gotten quite lyrical, this national chorus of professors lamenting the tragic infinitude of university football — or, as the latest installment in Bloomberg’s series on the subject has it, “Football is Forever.” The author of the series points out that

Once a school fields a top-division football team, it’s nearly impossible to reverse the commitment.

I can’t go on, I’ll go on would be the more modern, tragicomic, version of this classic truth: The morally and financially rancid circus of big-time university football (toss in basketball, of course) cannot be dismantled. Eight times a year an addled elephant will be made to balance on its back legs in front of four rich drunks in the luxury suites and forty poor drunks in the bleachers, plus there’s the police and the littering tailgaters and the clean-up crew and that’s all folks. That’s the show. It struts its stuff forever and forever, signifying nothing, but royally fucking over your university.

Minnesota: Not just rape: Gang rape!

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Well, UM used to be a respectable school, and now that it’s going down the tubes the wise men are gathering (see this article and its various theories) to explain what happened.

The short version is of course reputational death by football. Like this:

ICK FACTOR ——-> INSTITUTIONAL FINANCIAL COLLAPSE

That is, your scummy team and its scummy coaches generate such massive alienation/disgust that the school hemorrhages money and reputation in every direction – ticket sales, coach buyouts, athletic facility debt repayment, lawsuits, SNL skits, declining enrollment, declining alumni support (see the comment in this post’s headline), blahblah.

Problem is, you can get this outcome in two wildly different ways: Through a president who’s nothing but a football coach, and through a president who is simply appalled to discover that a person of his or her cerebral delicacy is at a jock school, and who refuses to sully him or herself with the brainless assholes at Athletes’ Village. You can be Ken Starr of blessed memory (Ken’s still playing the last down); or you can be UM’s Eric Kaler. You can be President Booster (Oklahoma’s David Boren has held on the longest with this unremittingly nauseating approach) or President I’m Better Than This, Dammit! and you will still run an extremely high risk of implosion. Forces that transcend your provincial world (see this Bloomberg series) are in play, and only a genius tactician (like coach, president, chancellor, head trustee, and reincarnation of Jesus Christ Nick Saban) is going to be able to thread his way through the blockers.

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UD thanks Keith.

The guy writes an opinion piece in the school’s newspaper wondering about this – in particular, he wonders about Yeshiva’s … curious …board of trustees, recent haunt of Bernard Madoff and Ezra Merkin… Current haunt of the notorious Wilfs… And all-’round, COI-infested, $500 million-losing risk-taker…

You really think these big-money boys wanna talk to a pipsqueak like you? Bugsy Siegel maybe they’d talk to. Only he’s dead. You they won’t talk to.

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Update: The Forward takes note.

Here is a long New Yorker profile of him. UD’s favorite part is not about Parfit, but about one of his friends.

If [Bernard Williams] had a highest value, it was authenticity. To him, the self was, in the end, all we have. But, in most cases, this wasn’t much — most people were stupid and cruel. Williams enjoyed his life, but he was a pessimist of the bleakest sort. He told a student that the last stanza of Matthew Arnold’s poem “Dover Beach” summed up his view of things:

Ah, love, let us be true

To one another! for the world, which seems

To lie before us like a land of dreams,

So various, so beautiful, so new,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain . . .

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What [Parfit] found most disturbing was Williams’s view of meta-ethics. Williams believed that there were no objectively true answers to questions of right and wrong, or even to questions of prudence. To him, morality was a human system that arose from human wants and remained dependent on them. This didn’t mean that people felt any less fiercely about moral questions—if someone felt that cruelty was vile, he could believe it wholeheartedly even if he didn’t think that that vileness was an objective fact, like two plus two equals four. But, to Parfit, if it wasn’t true that cruelty was wrong, then the feeling that it was vile was just a psychological fact—flimsy, contingent, apt to be forgotten.

It’s a beautiful thing.

What’s even more beautiful is that, the way things are going on this country’s campuses, next year the cheer will be volleyed back and forth from one side of our universities’ stadiums and arenas to the other. Call and response.

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But hey maybe not. Maybe when you’re down to He Hits Women cheers, you begin asking yourself whether you want to be there.

Chicago State University.

Words fail me.

[There’s] the question of the board of trustees, the school’s accreditation, Foundation problems, including a forensic audit. Two football players were shot Saturday night at an off-campus party…

Then the athletic director issues a statement about a surreptitiously obtained game plan and the university again is back on the front burner, with the heat turned up.

This blog excitedly looks forward to 2017!