… Wendy Taylor, whose 43-year-old sundial sculpture stands on the banks of the River Thames near London’s Tower Bridge, told British news outlet The Independent that a holidaying art aficionado alerted her to the apparent replica [of the piece in Shanghai].
… The Chinese version, by an unspecified artist, has stood in a park next to the Huangpu river, which courses through the commercial hub, since 2006, Shanghai media reports said.
It has since been removed and [a] journalist saw park workers filling its circular base with plants and flowers on Thursday.
At the same time [journalists watched] workers removing two other statues, one of which resembled “Lute Being Played by Evert Taube”, which stands in the Swedish capital Stockholm.
The other bore a striking similarity to the centrepiece statue of the Gloucester Fisherman’s Memorial in Gloucester, Massachusetts.
Might as well get all our spring cleaning done at the same time.
UD finds this statement, at the end of an article in the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill’s student paper, refreshing. It states the truth, bluntly. When you do this grotesque thing – when you import professional sports to universities, of all places – you’re going to have to prostitute the universities. That’s the cost of playing the game. Many of your players are going to play, and nothing else. Somehow you’re going to have to solve the problem of that pesky – even embarrassing – “university” identity, and it’s going to mean tutors who write papers for players, online classes ostensibly taken by players but actually taken by designated online-class-takers, and the creation of bogus departments with bogus courses designed to allow everyone to pretend that players have studied something.
Many of the players have already been admitted in bogus ways – they graduated from fake high schools (usually with reassuringly fervent Christian names) designed to produce legit-looking diplomas for sports guys. Your job, at Chapel Hill, is to figure out how to retain your recruits even though they’re not doing any schoolwork. Your biggest challenge is not the NCAA, which doesn’t give a shit, but rather the rogue tutor or investigative reporter.
A university like Chapel Hill – a community like Chapel Hill – sees itself above all as a professional sports team. Everyone, from the president down, has a role to play on the team. The president issues high-minded language about the glorious nexus of physical and mental achievement on campus. Professors pass the players along no matter what they do. Tutors do the players’ schoolwork. Local reporters are slavish panting boosters.
It all holds together very nicely – UNC’s bogus courses sailed along for decades – until, as most recently at the University of Missouri – someone has a crisis of conscience or something, and the ship goes down.
And then it comes up again. I mean, the scandal costs the school (taxpayers, often) zillions, and getting rid of a coach or two (this is de rigueur post-scandal: dump some coaches) is also expensive (you’re breaking a contract; plus these guys are liable to sue), but in the end none of these jock school academic scandals amount to anything. Even if you decide to dump the president, she’ll just move to another jock school, and you’ll have all the time and expense of finding another person able to talk about your rigorous academic program with a straight face.
Cost of playing the game.
… gets right back up on his Champions for Christ mount after the … unpleasantness at Baylor.
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And do you think the New York Post went out of its way to choose a photograph of McCaw that’s a dead ringer for this one?
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UD thanks a number of readers for linking her to this story.
In 2001, [Richard B. Spencer] received a B.A. with High Distinction in English Literature and Music from the University of Virginia and, in 2003, an M.A. in the Humanities from the University of Chicago. He spent the summer of 2005 and 2006 at the Institute Vienna Circle. From 2005-07, he was a doctoral student at Duke University studying modern European intellectual history…
More on Spencer.
And more.
The writings of Friedrich Nietzsche made a lasting impression; Spencer found his critiques of equality and democracy darkly compelling. He identified with the German philosopher’s unapologetically elitist embrace of “great men” such as Napoleon Bonaparte and the composer Richard Wagner. Yet Spencer found little in Nietzsche about the organization of the state; it was only after entering the humanities master’s program at the University of Chicago that he discovered Jared Taylor, a self-proclaimed “race realist” who argues that blacks and Hispanics are a genetic drag on Western society. [Taylor has nothing to do with U of C; Spencer discovered him online.]
… He was attracted to the writings of the late University of Chicago professor Leo Strauss, a Jewish German-born philosopher who had been accused by some of supporting fascism. Spencer’s master’s thesis was an analysis of German philosopher Theodor Adorno, who he argued was afraid to admit how much he loved the music of Wagner because Wagner was an anti-Semite championed by the Nazis. “If you looked at what I was doing, there was a clear interest in radical traditionalist right-wing German philosophy, a semi-fascist type thing,” Spencer says. “But there was always plausible deniability to it all.”
By the time he entered Duke as a Ph.D. student in European intellectual history in 2005, his views were on his sleeve. Fellow students recall Spencer openly sharing his opinions on biological differences between races and endorsing books such as Harvard professor Samuel Huntington’s Who Are We?, which argues that Hispanic immigrants are less suited than Europeans for assimilation. One Caucasian woman who was a student at the time recalls Spencer saying that people with her level of education needed to bear more children. Yet Spencer was charming enough to maintain collegial relations with his peers; an official graduate student party that he hosted at his spacious apartment was well attended. “Not many of us had ever come across as an out-and-out fascist,” says a college professor who studied in the same history Ph.D. program as Spencer. “We didn’t know how serious he was.”
… “In this weird way that Trump is trying to give mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to America, [Spencer says,] he’s also, like, bringing America to an end in the sense that he is a first step to white identity politics, which will bring about fragmentation… This is where I am kind of a Hegelian. Whenever you see a phenomenon, you see its negative aspect. There is a dark side to something that is happening, and I think that is Trump’s dark side, that he is reviving America and accelerating [the end of America]… That’s why I love him…”
CASTRO MOVES INTO THE HAVANA HILTON
BY SANDRA M. CASTILLO
[To mark his death, UD looks at this poem, which reflects on the ironies of history and the disastrous tendencies of revolutions. The title alludes to Castro having in victory taken over and reclaimed the very Batista-esque Hilton Hotel, renaming it Free Havana.]
“History always dresses us for the wrong occasions.”
—Ricardo Pau-Llosa
[Scruffy guerrillas from the hills crowd into the plush Hilton.]
Camera Obscura
[The whole poem will concern itself with obscurity, enigma — the ungraspability of the meaning of historical events and world-historical figures. Part of the problem, it will suggest, is precisely the images through which we try to take in the real world.]
The afternoon lightening his shadow,
Fidel descends from the mountains,
the clean-shaven lawyer turned guerilla,
his eyes focused on infinity,
El Jefe Máximo con sus Barbudos,
rebels with rosary beads
[History once again seems to dress us wrong – anti-clerical revolutionaries retaining their rosary beads.]
on their 600-mile procession across the island
with campesinos on horseback, flatbed trucks, tanks,
a new year’s journey down the oldest roads
towards betrayal.
[Towards betrayal. The revolution will be betrayed. Betray itself.]
Ambient light. Available light
[We always have very partial knowledge. We move by what’s available to us in terms of understanding, but it’s never enough.]
Light inside of them,
nameless isleños line El Malecón to touch Fidel,
already defining himself in black and white.
The dramatic sky moving in for the close-up
that will frame his all-night oratory,
he turns to the crowd,
variations on an enigma,
waving from his pulpit with rehearsed eloquence,
a dove on his shoulder.
[First the references to the rosary, and now, in this stanza, many suggestions that this “faith” (Fidel) revolution is really a slightly transposed religious event – variations on an enigma – with people lining up to touch their deity, who dresses like a priest in black and white. He speaks from a “pulpit” and sports a dove.]
This is a photograph. This is not a sign.
[People stubbornly “symbolize” reality, a process by which a revolutionary leader becomes a god.]
Flash-on camera. Celebrity portraits.
1. Fidel on a balcony across the street
from Grand Central Station,
an American flag above his head,
New York, 1959.
2. Fidel made small by the Lincoln Memorial,
Washington D.C., 1959.
3. Fidel learning to ski,
a minor black ball against a white landscape,
Russia, 1962.
4. Fidel and shotgun,
hunting with Nikita,
Russia, 1962.
Circles of Confusion
Beyond photographs,
Havana is looted and burned.
Women weep at our wailing wall,
El Paredón, where traitors are taken,
and television cameras shoot
the executions, this blood soup,
the paradoxes of our lives,
three years before I am born.
[Random photographic images trace Fidel’s reduction to a celebrity – or, if you like, the process by which the revolution’s strongman becomes a kitschy version of god – while the rest of the religious story plays out as well: The wailing wall where we mourn the loss or theft of the original faith; the devolution of divine passion into inquisition. But it’s a modern inquisition – it’s all photographed and filmed.]
Photoflood
[A photoflood is a lamp that sheds intense illumination in order to produce artificial light for photography and filming. The only form of true lucidity available to us is the artificial brilliance we rig up in order to “flood” the world with yet more images.]
But it is late afternoon,
and a shower of confetti and serpentine
falls from every floor of the Havana Hilton,
where history is a giant piñata,
where at midnight, Fidel will be photographed
eating a ham sandwich.
[This final stanza returns us – after the poem’s meditation on history and revolution – to the narrative immediacy with which the poet began. We are back at the Hilton, and celebrations of the revolution’s victory take place. Of course, given the treacherous and enigmatic nature of such events, they are “serpentine.” The last lines make everything explicit: history is a nightmare of chaos and grief, a great violent shaking up which nonetheless can be seen to smuggle back in precisely the cultural realities that inspired the revolution in the first place. Its final image has Castro – at midnight, the darkest hour – fully reduced by the camera and celebrity culture: he is pictured eating a ham sandwich.]
A Clear Midnight
by Walt Whitman
This is thy hour O Soul, thy free flight into the wordless,
Away from books, away from art, the day erased, the lesson done,
Thee fully forth emerging, silent, gazing, pondering the themes thou lovest best.
Night, sleep, death and the stars.
It’s that old devil called shame again
Hits a tutor and starts fucking up our games again
Puts a wrench in our plans, tears up our fans,
And just breaks our heart.
It’s that sly old son of a gun again,
He keeps telling her that she’s the naughty one again.
But we still have our coach, still have our teams,
And those jocks in my class.
… every day is a challenge. Ken Starr, Art Briles, gang rape and cover-up galore… All in the context of a very self-righteous, very Christian campus…
It would be a challenge for anyone [“Uh we’re pleased to announce we have the final numbers… Let’s see… ’17 women [have] reported 19 sexual or physical assaults involving football players since 2011, including four gang rapes…'”] , but Heath Nielsen is really struggling with it. Maybe it’s something in the Waco water supply, but (paraphrasing Tammy Wynette) sometimes, in Waco, it’s hard to be a man.
A sportswriter was photographing a football player after a game, see.
[The writer] had received permission from a football player to take [the] photograph, and after the picture was taken “Nielsen walked up to [the writer] on the right, grabbed [him] by the throat with his right hand, squeezed and pushed him away from the football player,’ an arrest warrant affidavit … says.
When [the writer] and the player asked Nielsen what the problem was, he replied, “He’s abusing his privileges,” the affidavit said.
To review: This is the guy in charge of managing the team’s public image.
… on the absurdity and evil of Richard Rorty, one of her heroes (along with Albert Camus, George Orwell, Christopher Lasch, Iris Murdoch, and Christopher Hitchens). He was simple-minded, non-transgressive, jingoistic, a stick in the mud. Dull, naive, like his pragmatist hero, John Dewey.
You should read way-transgressive Slavoj Zizek, Margaret, and get out of the Rorty rut.
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Slavoj Zizek has announced that he would, if he were an American citizen, vote for Donald Trump.
Like the West Coast Straussians who come at the problem from the right, Zizek’s so disgusted by what he imagines “liberal democracy” to be, he wants someone – anyone – to fuck it up but good.
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Rorty? In his naive chauvinistic way, Rorty spent his career defending liberal democracy as the best thing we’ve got and utterly worth defending with all our heart.
Here he defends it against — Zizek.
Zizek starts off from a Lacanian account of desire and says that ‘The problem with this liberal dream is that the split between the public and the private never comes about without a certain remainder’ and that ‘the very domain of the public law is “smeared” by an obscure dimension of “private” enjoyment.’ He goes on to ‘locate in a precise manner the flaw of Rorty’s “liberal utopia”: It presupposes the possibility of a universal social law not smudged by a “pathological” stain of enjoyment, i.e. delivered from the superego dimension.’
I do not see that political liberalism need presuppose anything of the sort. I imagine that ressentiment, as well as the mild form of sadism which is intrinsic to Kantian notions of obligation, will go on forever – or at least as long as there are judges, police, etc. But I should think the question is whether anybody has any better ideas for a legal and political system than the liberal, constitutional, social democratic one. I can find nothing in Freud, Lacan, Zizek, Derrida [and others on the radical left] which persuades me that anybody does.
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Rorty’s enjoying quite the posthumous vindication. Post-Trump, his name is everywhere. He is widely seen as having anticipated and analyzed more clearly and compellingly than most the rise of Trumpian conditions in the United States. In particular, people are citing these three paragraphs:
[M]embers of labor unions, and unorganized unskilled workers, will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported. Around the same time, they will realize that suburban white-collar workers — themselves desperately afraid of being downsized — are not going to let themselves be taxed to provide social benefits for anyone else.
At that point, something will crack. The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for — someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots. …
One thing that is very likely to happen is that the gains made in the past 40 years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will be wiped out. Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion. … All the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet.
Jennifer Senior, in the New York Times, rightly notes that, like Lasch, Rorty looked with dread upon the emergence of a “cosmopolitan upper class which has no …sense of community with any workers anywhere,” but lives instead in an exceedingly pleasant, totally insulated, white-noisy bubble.
This group included intellectuals, by the way, who, [Rorty] wrote, are “ourselves quite well insulated, at least in the short run, from the effects of globalization.”
No current group of academics embodies this truth better than those law professors who continue to enjoy high salaries, low course loads, and assorted perks despite so deep a crisis in their profession that astonishingly few people are applying to law school. Critics like Brian Tamanaha and Paul Campos have had a field day with these professors.
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In the book of Rorty’s everyone’s talking about lately – Achieving Our Country (1998) – he makes his critique of what he calls ‘spectatorial’ radicals in the academy more explicit:
When one of today’s academic leftists says that some topic has been ‘inadequately theorized,’ you can be pretty certain that he or she is going to drag in either philosophy of language, or Lacanian psychoanalysis, or some neo-Marxist version of economic determinism. Theorists of the Left think that dissolving political agents into plays of differential subjectivity, or political initiatives into pursuits of Lacan’s impossible object of desire, helps to subvert the established order. Such subversion, they say, is accomplished by ‘problematizing familiar concepts.’
Recent attempts to subvert social institutions by problematizing concepts have produced a few very good books. They have also produced many thousands of books which represent scholastic philosophizing at its worst. The authors of these purportedly ‘subversive’ books honestly believe that they are serving human liberty. But it is almost impossible to clamber back down from their books to a level of abstraction on which one might discuss the merits of a law, a treaty, a candidate, or a political strategy. Even though what these authors ‘theorize’ is often something very concrete and near at hand – a current TV show, a media celebrity, a recent scandal – they offer the most abstract and barren explanations imaginable.
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Dissolve enough agency and you end up marooned on Slavojnia: the most abstract and barren island imaginable.
