The little theater where UD just listened
to a couple of guys talk about why
Ulysses is great.

**********

The day is overcast – typically Irish… But Joyce’s novel takes place on a freakishly sunny and warm June day in Dublin.

Chestertown’s old and charming and set along a river. After the lecture, UD strolled the waterfront (full of gray geese and black vultures), and now relaxes with a chai at Play it Again Sam. There’s an open mic (five minute limit) Ulysses reading next door in about an hour. Maybe UD will take part. Something morbid, she thinks; from the Hades chapter.

UD listened to the guys talk very intelligently about why the novel’s worth is far above rubies. Wearing her James Joyce sweatshirt, scribbling in her Essential James Joyce (she met the editor, Harry Levin, at the home of Wiktor Weintraub‘s widow), UD wrestled down her impulse to comment on virtually everything they said… When she did finally say something (about the nature of artistic genius and artistic originality), one of the guys said “That person is clearly a plant.” — meaning to suggest that somebody must have custom-ordered a commenter who would sound like an English professor who teaches James Joyce.

But really it’s hard to say why Ulysses reigns supreme. One spends a lifetime with the book, trying to figure out how Joyce was able to write like that. You feel like Salieri gazing at a Mozart score. Ultimately it doesn’t seem possible that a human being could write so well. Think and feel so well. If it were only beautifully written, dayenu. If it were only beautifully written and brilliantly descriptive of social life in a city, dayenu. If it were only wise and humane and hilarious and deeply accepting of our vileness and pathos, dayenu. If it were only steamy dreamy streams of consciousness, dayenu.

Your head it simply swirls.

Bloomsday exists because the peculiar over-excitement you feel reading this book is deep and specific and shared by others.

… Chestertown Maryland to celebrate Bloomsday.

Naturally UD will instablog the experience. And take pictures.

UD‘s had a lot to say about Bloomsday over the years. If you’d like to read some of it, Google BLOOMSDAY MARGARET SOLTAN.

[The University of] Tennessee hosts the mighty Appalachian State Mountaineers on Thursday, September 1st. Big things are expected of the Volunteers this year, and to ensure a raucous crowd the alleged university has cancelled classes on that day.

… What, if anything, do you do when you’re a socially conscious sociologist whose professorship turns out to have been endowed by a man who “cheated on virtually all of his various tax obligations,” Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara said. “To top it off, when the IRS auditors examined his returns, Zukerman allegedly schemed to defraud and obstruct the IRS auditors who were examining his false tax returns.”

Morris Zukerman faces 28 years in prison. If guilty, he stole almost fifty million dollars from the United States. (Probably stole more than that. There’s a limit to what governments can do by way of identifying stolen goods and getting them back.) A veteran, contemptible, big-time criminal.

You are Harvard’s M.E. Zukerman Professor of Sociology, your professional name ever-emblazoned with, your children fed and your articles underwritten by, a man alleged to be one of America’s most socially destructive liar/thieves. This man’s wife is a “Trustee of Earthwatch Institute, an international environmental volunteer organization, which engages people worldwide in scientific field research and education to promote the understanding and action necessary for a sustainable environment,” and you better believe her family knows how to sustain environments. For itself.

Among the false deductions claimed by Zukerman on his Forms 1040 were those based on the fraudulent claim that Zukerman had contributed a total of $1 million in 2009 and 2011 to a conservation charity whereas, in truth and fact, Zukerman made no charitable gift and instead used the $1 million to purchase for himself and his family over 240 acres on an island off the coast of Maine.

See how the understanding and action necessary for a sustainable environment goes? Lie on your tax form and say you made a charitable land gift and then just take the land for the wife and kiddies! Sustain that sucker in the family!

So okay that’s just one teeny example of the beneficence of Mary Waters’ benefactor.

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

So what’s a person with that, er, ironic name on her professorship to do?

Let’s see.

1. Nothing. Who gives a shit. If Harvard really cared about the provenance of gifts, it would never get anywhere. So a larcenous piece of shit endowed my professorship. So what. How do you think these people made all their money, anyway? As Fran Leibowitz says, “You don’t earn a billion dollars. You steal it.”

2. Tell sardonic jokes. Assuming Waters has a sense of humor, she can respond to the raised eyebrows her title provokes by saying “Best I could do. It was a choice between that and the Enron Professor of Economics.”

3. Wait til he’s in jail (he’ll be found guilty but won’t go to jail – but anyway…) and mutter that he’s paying his debt to society.

4. Ask Harvard if it can strip his name from your professorship. Can the school keep the stolen goods and lose the Zukerman? Or will Waters be in the embarrassing position of having the federal government seeking to claw back her salary?

A Song of Praise to Harvard
Overseer Morris Zukerman
And the Ghost of Finn Caspersen
And Countless Other Harvard
Benefactors Like Them —
From the American Taxpayer

Dodge fiercely, Harvard,
Dodge, dodge, dodge!
Demonstrate to us your skill.
Albeit you possess the cash,
Nonetheless we foot the bill!

Endowment’s almost up to forty bill
Tax breaks plus tax evasion filled the till –
How jolly!
Caspersen and Zukerman
Dodge, dodge, dodge!

Caspersen stole one hundred mill
Zukerman forty five
How many of those gains got-ill
Helped Harvard U to thrive?

We payers love to play our part
To keep you tax exempt
The thought of helping donor-thieves
Makes all of us verklempt.

… her friend Colm.

Foreground, pretend bull.

Background, real deer.

Click for details.

… at least once.

If the model of “the buck stops here” applies to this situation, then the buck stops not at the president’s office but at the board level. Yet I have not heard one board member state in effect, “I offer my resignation,” in order that Baylor might move forward from this with integrity and transparency. Instead, they tarnish the reputations and accomplishments of others and point the finger of blame in other directions while the truth lies buried beneath hidden agendas, cliques and power struggles. And they then cloak their language in theological piety, while their very actions suggest otherwise.

As it happens, he’s describing the board at Baylor.

In both cases, not only does no one resign. Everyone plays the theological piety bit to the absolute hilt. Only card they’ve got.

… football.”

Uh-huh. And also

The company’s drivers expressed safety concerns that FedEx trucks were being stopped on the road by online pharmacy customers demanding packages of pills and that the delivery address was a parking lot, school, or vacant home where several carloads of people were waiting for their drugs, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office.

…

Student [game] attendance would likely drop off [without a new stadium] and the tailgating experience would be compromised.

Now the school’s in darkest deficit doodoo, game attendance is tanking, and the UW trustees, whose job it is to be trustees, are sniping at the ex-athletic director onaccounta he didn’t tell them how he was spending the students’ money.

UW trustees want to know: Who’s the steward of student and state money around here anyway?

… before the United States bans assault weapons? We’re up to fifty killed in – what? – sixty minutes? Probably less time than that. (“It was done very quickly also.“)

UD bets we’ll need at least 300 killings – say roughly the contents of an airliner – in thirty minutes before something begins to happen.

I mean, multiple events with that body count/time frame, of course.

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

There are those who refuse to wager.

“Sandy Hook marked the end of the US gun control debate,” Dan Hodges, a British journalist, tweeted in June of last year. “Once America decided killing children was bearable, it was over.”

… an AR-15-style assault rifle.

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

[G]iven permissive U.S. gun laws, even someone like Mateen who allegedly abused his spouse and was repeatedly investigated by the FBI, could legally purchase an automatic weapon because he had not yet openly supported a terrorist group.

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

“He had an automatic rifle, so nobody stood a chance.”

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

Florida’s love affair with it.