A Yale graduate student in biology commits suicide. A fellow student, who worked with her in the cell biology lab, reacts.

Obscene yearly increases in student fees, a stadium whose construction they keep postponing because fund-raising efforts are for shit, a fourth-tier university … Florida Atlantic has it all.

Its athletic director explains:

He said with FAU’s planned stadium, the university is working to create a model where athletics is supported more from outside sources than student fees. But he said the fee increases just help the university maintain the status quo.

“If there needs to be a discussion of whether universities think it is time to devalue or downgrade their athletic programs, that is another story,” he said. “However, with athletics many times being the ‘front porch’ to the university and arguably the most visible, it may be a tricky exercise.”

Working to create… You know, that new stadium (the current, much smaller FAU stadium sits more than half empty at most games) was supposed to have opened years ago; this guy insisted it’d all get done with outside money, only it didn’t, blahblah…

But this front porch thing… The only idea coaches ever learn is this thing about the porch and they’re always sharing it with journalists… And the guy’s right – football and basketball are the most visible…

The most visible what? He doesn’t say. Let’s complete the idea.

For most American universities, and quite notoriously for FAU, big time sports are the most visible manifestation of their moral, intellectual, and financial failure. They are the ‘front debtors’ prison’ to the university.

The IRS is examining the University of Texas at Austin for executive compensation and matters related to taxable income, preliminary offering documents show. Mack Brown, head football coach, the highest-paid state employee at $5.1 million per year, earns almost seven times more than Francisco Cigarroa, who’s paid $750,000 as chancellor of the University of Texas System.

… The IRS mailed questionnaires to 400 nonprofit colleges and universities in October 2008, seeking data on endowments, compensation and income from businesses unrelated to their missions of teaching and research. It picked more than 30 institutions to audit on the basis of answers…

UD thanks Corey, a reader, for sending her this important article from a writer we’ve already seen at University Diaries — Sergio Sismondo. With Mathieu Doucet, Sismondo broadens his attack on the repellent and dangerous practice of ghostwriting among university professors of medicine.

Here’s their abstract:

Link to the full article.

I’ve been considering a summer poem by Mark Strand.

Go here for the compete poem and a discussion of its first two stanzas.

Here’s the poem’s final stanza.

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

My mother will go indoors
and the fields, the bare stones
will drift in peace, small creatures –
the mouse and the swift — will sleep
at opposite ends of the house.
small creatures –
the mouse and the swift — will sleep
at opposite ends of the house.
Only the cricket will be up,
repeating its one shrill note
to the rotten boards of the porch,
to the rusted screens, to the air, to the rimless dark,
to the sea that keeps to itself.
Why should my mother awake?
The earth is not yet a garden
about to be turned. The stars
are not yet bells that ring
at night for the lost.
It is much too late.

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

My mother will go indoors
and the fields, the bare stones
will drift in peace

The very simple narrative of this poem begins to conclude. His mother stands outside her farmhouse, smokes a cigarette, looks at the night sky… Then she goes inside. The sleep she will soon enter finds a correlative in the stones and fields that now “drift in peace.” But that phrase, given the death-hauntedness of this poem, drifts awfully close to rest in peace, especially when the poet makes them bare stones, so close to bare bones.

And there’s been a subtle temporal anxiety throughout the poem as well. Our lives seem peaceful drift, but actually, as the mother reflects in the second stanza, they are “the soundless storms of decay.”

small creatures –
the mouse and the swift — will sleep
at opposite ends of the house.

Again, note that though there’s little end rhyme in the poem, exact rhyme embeds itself in various lines (here mouse and house, drift and swift). And note that in a typical poetic move Strand veers away, as his mother prepares for sleep, from the mother herself, and instead projects her hiddenness and frailty onto the small creatures nesting in her house along with her.

Only the cricket will be up,
repeating its one shrill note
to the rotten boards of the porch,
to the rusted screens, to the air, to the rimless dark,
to the sea that keeps to itself.

Like the bay, with “its loud heaving,” the cricket adds a clear, loud, disturbing voice to this otherwise drifty tranquil scene. These repeated sounds toll the bell of time and confusion and futility… Think of Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach” — we are here as on a darkling plain… I mean, read the whole thing. Very similar to Strand’s poem, including the sound of the ocean stirring thoughts of the turbid ebb and flow of human misery…

And now see how Strand, through the simple device of a repeated letter, hushes his poem towards its end, one soft R after another soothing us off to sleep:

the rotten boards of the porch,
to the rusted screens, to the air, to the rimless dark…

The sea that keeps to itself – Could we be any closer to Arnold’s lament? The sense of a strict separation between the natural and the human world, the natural world which almost seems to taunt us with its enigmatic subsistence, its arrogant sense of superiority, let’s say, to our poor passing selves… This takes us back to a phrase earlier in the poem: She will not know why she is here.

And the poet, fully in control of his dominant metaphor throughout, returns to the parallel between the slow invisible deterioration of the physical world, and the slow, increasingly visible deterioration of his mother. Rimless dark reminds us of the vast nothingness of the starlanes, and of his mother’s loss of firmness and presence as she ages.

And now we come to the paradoxical last lines of this poem:

Why should my mother awake?
The earth is not yet a garden
about to be turned. The stars
are not yet bells that ring
at night for the lost.
It is much too late.

The poet makes his morbid meditation explicit. Let her sleep. She sleeps, through life, in vague veiled ignorance, and let her. After all, she is not yet dead, she does not yet have to anticipate with dreadful immediacy her death: The earth is not yet a garden about to be turned. The fields lie flat and tranquil, unshoveled yet for a grave. Let her be. The churchbells don’t yet ring for her. She’s like most people — occasionally chilled by long starlanes, but for the most part contentedly, dumbly, in the world.

It is much too late feels, as I say, paradoxical. Shouldn’t this be it is much too early? Too early for her to worry about her death?

But it’s the same paradox, I think, that we get at the famous conclusion of Eliot’s Prufrock:

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

The true waking, for lives lived in a fog, undersea, adrift, sleeping, is death itself. It is too late for the poet’s mother to awake to life; what she will awake to is death. She will awake from her rimless life into the stringency of death.

This one in Canada. All because agencies tasked with defending the welfare of children can’t be bothered to check the legitimacy of professional degrees.

From the Toronto Star:

… [Gregory] Carter has been charged by Durham Regional Police with fraud, perjury and obstruction of justice…

Andrea Maenza, a spokesperson for Durham [Children’s Aid Society], says that the agency ended its relationship with Carter in early 2009 when it learned that “he did his Ph.D. but the school was bogus.” [Weird formulation. Should be “He didn’t do his PhD. because the school is bogus.”]

Carter says he has a doctorate from Pacific Western University, which was investigated by the U.S. government in 2004 and found to be a diploma mill.

“We accepted his community reputation. In retrospect, we should have questioned it,” Maenza says, noting that Carter was called a “doctor” by lawyers and judges and relied upon in cases as an expert witness. [Everybody called him a doctor. That was good enough for us.]

He did more than 300 assessments for the agency, which has already conducted a preliminary review into them…

Meanwhile, the case against Steven Feldman (scroll down) proceeds.

As always, I’ll first give it to you straight. Then I’ll present it again, with my comments.

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

My Mother on an Evening in Late Summer

by Mark Strand

1

When the moon appears
and a few wind-stricken barns stand out
in the low-domed hills
and shine with a light
that is veiled and dust-filled
and that floats upon the fields,
my mother, with her hair in a bun,
her face in shadow, and the smoke
from her cigarette coiling close
to the faint yellow sheen of her dress,
stands near the house
and watches the seepage of late light
down through the sedges,
the last gray islands of cloud
taken from view, and the wind
ruffling the moon’s ash-colored coat
on the black bay.

2

Soon the house, with its shades drawn closed, will send
small carpets of lampglow
into the haze and the bay
will begin its loud heaving
and the pines, frayed finials
climbing the hill, will seem to graze
the dim cinders of heaven.
And my mother will stare into the starlanes,
the endless tunnels of nothing,
and as she gazes,
under the hour’s spell,
she will think how we yield each night
to the soundless storms of decay
that tear at the folding flesh,
and she will not know
why she is here
or what she is prisoner of
if not the conditions of love that brought her to this.

3

My mother will go indoors
and the fields, the bare stones
will drift in peace, small creatures —
the mouse and the swift — will sleep
at opposite ends of the house.
Only the cricket will be up,
repeating its one shrill note
to the rotten boards of the porch,
to the rusted screens, to the air, to the rimless dark,
to the sea that keeps to itself.
Why should my mother awake?
The earth is not yet a garden
about to be turned. The stars
are not yet bells that ring
at night for the lost.
It is much too late.

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

This is a classic lyric. First-person. A private poignant moment evoked through many metaphors.

Yet despite its almost over-rich metaphorical content, the poem feels minimalist, its thin fraught lines conveying the poet’s impulse to say many things even as something holds him back.

The first stanza is one long sentence. It begins:

When the moon appears
and a few wind-stricken barns stand out
in the low-domed hills
and shine with a light
that is veiled and dust-filled
and that floats upon the fields,

The title tells us we’re in late summer, and the first lines tell us we’re in a beautiful rural setting in the evening. Already the feel is decidedly elegiac – end of the brilliant season (autumn approaching), end of the long summer day… Stricken inaugurates the parade of metaphors that stride this poem.

Indeed the poem, from the title on, is painterly, descriptive. Like many poems, it is essentially a list of physical features which, as the poem progresses, take on metaphysical implication. Elizabeth Bishop, UD thinks, does this sort of poem better than anyone else.

In this particular case, stricken (and similar words that succeed it) brings us to think about the mother’s increasing physical frailty, her growing proximity to death.

A note on style: There are few end rhymes in this poem (We do see hills and filled in this stanza.), but it’s nonetheless musical, lilting, a sort of chant, by virtue of assonance (moon, few), an almost constant recourse to monosyllabic words, and alliteration (few, filled, floats, fields).

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

I’ll post this much. More on its way.

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

Okay, I’m back. Those few stricken barns standing out amid the low-domed hills — This, let’s say, is his fragile mother standing out amid the world on this particular night, shining forth in her singularity to her son.

Yet her shine has dulled – veiled, dust-filled, floating already seem not merely words descriptive of the hazy summer night, but also figures for the mother’s indistinctness, her loss of firmness, as she ages.

my mother, with her hair in a bun,
her face in shadow, and the smoke
from her cigarette coiling close
to the faint yellow sheen of her dress,
stands near the house
and watches the seepage of late light
down through the sedges,
the last gray islands of cloud
taken from view, and the wind
ruffling the moon’s ash-colored coat
on the black bay.

Notice, first of all, how the poet has buried his mother in the middle of the stanza. This isn’t Poe, beginning his poem, “To Helen”

Helen, thy beauty is to me
Like those Nicean barks of yore,
That gently, o’er a perfumed sea…

Yadda yadda. The first word of the poem is Helen; it’s all about Helen. Mark Strand doesn’t even address his mother — the poem’s really, after all, about the poet’s distress at his sudden realization of her perishability — and he certainly doesn’t put her at the beginning of his lyric. She’s half-hidden in the middle of the first stanza, as if to acknowledge from the outset her low-domed, dust-filled, dimming existence.

And the rest of this stanza merely intensifies the theme of her dwindling, all shadow and smoke and faintness and seepage. The gray island of his mother will be taken from his view in the “seepage of last light.”

Although a summer poem, this writing is dominated by the gray moon, a lifeless pallid light.

Soon the house, with its shades drawn closed, will send
small carpets of lampglow
into the haze and the bay
will begin its loud heaving
and the pines, frayed finials
climbing the hill, will seem to graze
the dim cinders of heaven.

Carpets, finials, graze – light and trees take on modest domestic and agrarian values in this poem about a plain country woman. The haze remains in this stanza, but now there’s a shift to images of nature’s power – the loud heaving of the bay, and the pines so lifted up as to reach the stars.

That loud heaving intimates the suffering of the mother, to which the poet will now turn.

And my mother will stare into the starlanes,
the endless tunnels of nothing,
and as she gazes,
under the hour’s spell,

Starlanes is a neat neologism, sharing with finials and carpets the poet’s trick of almost comically domesticating the vast, powerful, and mysterious natural world. But there’s nothing funny about what comes next: the endless tunnels of nothing. Oldest poetic theme in the book, of course — grappling with your transience and insignificance in the cosmic scheme — but what matters is what poets bring to it. Strand, I think, brings something new.

she will think how we yield each night
to the soundless storms of decay
that tear at the folding flesh,
and she will not know
why she is here
or what she is prisoner of
if not the conditions of love that brought her to this.

It’s not merely the nothingness into which we disappear that the mother contemplates; it’s the idea of life itself as silent ongoing physical decay.

Worst of all is the not knowing — living out an entire life in ignorance of its meaning; and aware of having been trapped into a certain sort of existence, but not understanding how that entrapment took place. Maybe all we can say is that we’re here because our parents “clasped and sundered, did the couplers’ will.”

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

Final stanza tomorrow morning.

The New York Times covers Pakistan’s ban on a play called Burqavaganza.

The article and film clip make clear that the play’s writer recognizes not merely the repressive nature of the garment, but its power as a “metaphor for hypocrisy in a ‘hidden nation.'”

… Salt Lake City behind us, we drove up
Little Cottonwood Canyon yesterday,
until we got to the end of the road, Alta.

We parked, then hiked the closed extension
of the road. Footing was okay, though some
mud, and snow patches, remained. Also a
few abandoned snowmobiles.

Water powered down the mountain from
loud alleys. In quieter trailside creeks, it
curled over stones.

While Mr UD went further up
the slope, I did two things: I stood
next to the biggest, loudest brook and
sang If Music Be the Food of Love.

Tripping and sunny like the buck himself!

Wanted to compete with the sound of the water.

Then I turned to the quieter rivulets along the
road, knelt down, and examined the stones.
If you go way back with UD,
you know she likes stones. She found a
smooth white one, like her beach stones,
but most were dark and sharp, and even
if they looked promising under the water,
the moment you took them out in the sun
they dulled.

Disgusted with the vileness of Southeastern Conference-type university athletics, and embarrassed for his alma mater, the University of Southern California (current target of one of the NCAA’s random sanctioning fits), a professor proposes a new league:

Stanford and Notre Dame could take the lead in establishing a national conference of first-rate academic institutions that offer athletic scholarships only to true student athletes, as defined, largely, by an iron-clad commitment to graduate with their classmates in four years. An invitation to join this conference could be extended to other private institutions with both high academic standards and proud athletic traditions – such as Northwestern, Duke, Boston College, Pittsburgh and Brigham Young (which could substitute a suitable variation on the four-year graduation policy to accommodate Mormon missions). The three United States service academies might also be asked to join.

University of Minnesota.

Thanks for the link, Bill.

The suicidal subject matter is far from uplifting and it is unlikely to become a World Cup theme tune any time soon.

Yet none of these things appear to have dented public affection for the lovelorn lament When I am Laid in Earth, by the English composer Henry Purcell, which has triumphed against the odds to to be named the nation’s favourite aria.

The 321-year-old composition was the surprise winner of a poll for Radio 3, beating far better known compositions by Mozart, Wagner and Puccini. The aria features at the end of the opera Dido and Aeneas, Purcell’s only fully sung stage work and one of the earliest English operas.

It is a tragic lament, sung by Dido, Queen of Carthage, who flings herself on a funeral pyre after being abandoned by the Trojan Prince Aeneas. “Remember me,” sings the heartbroken queen, to the lover who has left her. “But ah, forget my fate.” She then commits suicide in despair…

UD, a Purcell fanatic, ain’t surprised. She plays and sings it all the time. Stately, with Purcell’s genius for putting English words to flowing and expressive tune, the piece concludes with Remember me! — a command that, for UD, has all the power of this mememormee at the end of Finnegans Wake:

And it’s old and old it’s sad and old it’s sad and weary I go back to you, my cold father, my coldmad father, my cold mad feary father, and I rush, my only, into your arms. I see them rising! So. Avelaval. My leaves have drifted from me. All. But one clings still. I’ll bear it on me. To remind me of. Lff! So soft this morning, ours. Yes. Carry me along, taddy, like you done through the toy fair! If I seen him bearing down on me now under whitespread wings like he’d come from Arkangels, I sink I’d die down over his feet, humbly dumbly, only to washup. First. We pass through grass behush the bush to. Whish! A gull. Gulls. Far calls. Coming, far! End here. Us then. Finn, again! Take. Bussoftlhee, mememormee! Till thousendsthee. Lps. The keys to. Given! A way a lone a last a loved a long the

Jurgen Habermas is in Ireland to receive the James Joyce Award.

An Irish journalist covers his address at University College Dublin and summarizes his view of the public intellectual.

The intellectual’s sole remaining ability in an age when television has reinforced an iconic turn from word to image is an “avantgardistic instinct for relevances”, he writes in a book of recent essays published last year, Europe, The Faltering Project. “They have to be able to get worked up about critical developments while others are still absorbed in business as usual”. That includes a mistrustful sensitivity about any damage to the normative foundations of politics, or threats to its mental resources. More positively it requires “the sense for what is lacking and ‘could be otherwise’ ”, including “a spark of imagination in conceiving of alternatives” and “a modicum of the courage required for polarising, provoking, and pamphleteering”.

Along similar lines, there’s this, from a review of Christopher Hitchens’ memoir:

In 1987 Russell Jacoby published a mournful elegy to untamed public intellectuals. He argued that the unruly, iconoclastic thinkers that had dominated the New York intellectual scene well into the 1950s were a disappearing species. They had a literary cast of mind; they knew how to write about large scale questions in a way accessible to an educated public without obfuscating their texts with unintelligible academic lingo. They were not domesticated by the perks of academia, think tanks and public grants. They were irreverent and value driven.

Well, there is good news. The above is a perfect description of Christopher Hitchens. Gifted with a phenomenal memory, with the ability to form sentences that give the reader the pleasures of linguistic precision combined with watching a good knock-out punch, Hitchens is exactly the untamed public intellectual that Jacoby mourned.

Mr UD continues to get his “real
mountains” fix in places like this.

It’s Silver Lake, where we hiked yesterday.

A Boston University professor of music is about to retire.

From BU Today:

… [Joel Sheveloff] reflects on nearly half a century as not just a teacher, but a thorn in the side of the administration and a beloved but incorrigible nudge. With his gravelly, Mailer-esque voice and old-fashioned suspenders, Sheveloff has a way of wresting control of a room and holding forth on just about anything. He may grouse about everything from his department’s curriculum to the traffic on the BU Bridge, but if he criticizes his students at all, it is with affectionate bemusement. He likes them.

They like him back: “I was in Dr. Sheveloff’s class in 1973, and I remember him to this day as one of those rare people who inspire your life on all levels,” writes an alum on Ratemyprofessors.com. “Of course his knowledge is awesome,” writes a student, “but what makes Dr. Shev one of the best is his insight. He understands the paradoxes of the human condition and how music expresses the full range of this experience.” And from another student: “Professor Sheveloff is hilarious. He makes each lecture immensely enjoyable by joking, dancing around, and just creating a pleasant class atmosphere.”

… All of Sheveloff’s complaints are major, from whether BU’s orchestra and choir directors should be full-time (they are now, he says, thanks to him) to an increase in course credits from three to four (“they make the candy bar smaller and charge you more for it”) to what he believes is the pandemic misinterpretation of Bach’s Musical Offering.

… His passion for, and encyclopedic knowledge of, the Cole Porter, Duke Ellington, and Rogers and Hart songbooks are part of what fueled his friendship with John Daverio (CFA’75,’76, GRS’83), a CFA music professor and renowned Schumann expert, who drowned in the Charles River in 2003, at the age of 48. The loss devastated Sheveloff, who spoke in a eulogy for Daverio of how “for more than a quarter of a century, John and I discussed issues, shared intimacies, and otherwise interacted by employing strategically placed song lines in our dialogue. We both enjoyed finding relevant lines — this game belonged to the two of us.”

… When it comes to J. S. Bach, Sheveloff serves up a feast of superlatives. Bach, he asserts, is “our Shakespeare, our Pushkin, the greatest mind ever to write music.”

As he expounds on a quirky meter in a passage from Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 6, the Pathetique, an assistant pops her head in the room to tell Sheveloff he has a phone call from his wife, whom he refers to as “She who must be obeyed.” He’s been married 48 years. “Feels like 75,” he says.

… Where they once scrawled in spiral notebooks, students now sit in class tapping away at laptops. “Students think they can get anything they need from Google,” he says, an arm swiping the air in the universal sign for oy vey. “My colleagues are concerned about kids sitting in class e-mailing and looking at Facebook. In my class I say, go ahead — I’m not your mother.” …