Thanksgiving poems stink of kitsch.
I search in vain for even one which
Leaves off redemption and the kids
The wife who saved me from the skids
The mom whose deep abiding love
Gave my rear a needed shove...

Instead of thanking friends and God
I'll thank the books that showed me Odd
Kafka, Beckett, E A Poe
Their twisted landscape helped me know
That sentiment is fine and good
But most of life's in darkest wood

Both tykes and leaf blowers look like yellow-jacketed aliens.

Benjamin Allen Wemp … is not a student at [Clemson] University.

[Officers on campus] handcuffed Wemp and took [a] loaded revolver off of Wemp’s hip … [They also] removed a fixed blade hunting knife from Wemp’s possession. [University police also] found that he was wearing body armor, an ammunition belt containing several rounds and … was keeping a second loaded revolver in his pants pocket…  Wemp was at Mell ​Hall with “Visions for the World,” a religious group…

The Forbes 30 Under 30 list has become a meme in the past few years as a few of the honorees have found themselves indicted on fraud. The Forbes-to-Fraud pipeline includes FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried and Caroline Ellison, co-CEO of Alameda Research; fintech Frank founder Charlie Javice; and “Pharma bro” Martin Shkreli.

Add Joanna Smith-Griffin.

Texas is among the twenty-one states where abortion is banned or severely restricted. In Idaho, nearly a quarter of the state’s ob-gyns have left since the ban went into effect, and rural hospitals have stopped providing labor and delivery services. In Louisiana, three-quarters of rural hospitals no longer offer maternity care.

First such place UD has visited.

See this post for background.

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The University of Wyoming Board of Trustees voted 6-5 Friday against allowing concealed carry in certain areas of campus, setting up a likely future confrontation with a Legislature that’s increasingly pushed to ease gun restrictions.

The vote followed strong opposition from students, staff, faculty and other community members who cited concerns over safety, gun violence, declining enrollment, mental health issues and campus culture. 

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Well lookee there. Vote was as close as close can be, but EVEN IN WYOMING the obscenity of concealed carry is occasionally recognized.

Now you know next thang UW trustees is gonna do is GET RID OF THEM GIRLS on the BOT cuz if you look at the vote breakdown, it was them squishy ladies done did the dirty. Only one guy voted with the gals; pro-concealed was hunderd percent male. GIRLS OFF THE BOT!!

SUNRISE, MONASTERY, SHENANDOAH

The clouds move left and I move right
The moon's a relic of the night

Sunrise winkles in the sky
A long rough patch of pinkeye

Conjunctive globes along the ridge
Must be some symbolic bridge

Between rhymed verse
And universe


Cemeteries lie at left and right
One for the monks pre-flight

The other green and no embalm
Dropped in a godless bed of calm

But near Saint Benedict just in case
Heaven turns out to be a place

A natural grave on sacred land
This ambivalence I understand


The sun's now bright but the world's still eerie
Acres of Terror Management Theory

Find us walking slowly along the Shenandoah River.

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UD brought:

Graham Greene, “Under the Garden”

Malcolm Lowry, “The Garden Path to the Spring”

Camus, “Lyrical and Critical Essays’

Kolakowski, “Religion”

The attacks are everywhere now. Here’s William Deresiewicz in the Chronicle of Higher Ed.

[These fields are] intellectually corrupt. You know what I’m talking about. Any fool idea passes muster, no matter how preposterous, as long as it conforms to prevailing theoretical trends and preferred ideological positions. Nobody wants to make waves: to speak up at a conference, to undermine a colleague or colleague’s student, to invite examination of their own research. Data is massaged; texts are squeezed or bound and gagged. Jargon helps to paper over cracks in logic; countervailing evidence is tucked under the cushions. Standards are ignored to the point where no one can even recall what they are anymore. It’s no wonder that the social sciences are suffering a replication crisis. In the humanities, there is no crisis, because there is no replication to begin with, no factual claims to reproduce, only “readings,” “interventions,” “Theory.”

(The best attack on “Theory” remains Richard Rorty’s.)

For years, many of this blog’s posts were variations on this observation; and now, with the withering results of the election, we can go further than Deresiewicz and note the historical irony of a ridiculously, coercively, hyper-politicized academy (“ideological positions” trump, as it were, everything, including the aesthetic values that are, after all, the distinguishing characteristic of what we call literature) getting slapped upside the head by none other than the actual politics of this country.

Hence Deresiewicz’s stress on the unreality from which many professors continue to suffer: They just don’t get it that most people have rather conservative and traditional dispositions, and that this reality does not make people shitty reactionaries. The university is supposed to be the place where people’s traditional, inherited perceptions and beliefs are put into question (college is where you read Blake and Nietzsche); but as Todd Gitlin, a man of the left, pointed out in a defense of Allan Bloom, the academy went apeshit radical rather than humanely subversive.

Matty We Hardly Knew Ye

It’ll be a cold day in hell when Rand Paul says something that makes sense.

If we’re lucky.

Named after the anti-fascist martyr.

Red chairs are in; red tables on their way.

Wind chime from Sedona, AZ, a place Les UDs love.

Probably long dead red azalea I found discarded in the woods.