… or they’re about to – sacks of mulch lie scattered about the boxwood and lirope, and two men with little black rakes are evening the ground in preparation for opening the sacks and raking some more.

I’m watching this from my office window on a cloudy but not too cold (first day of spring!) morning in Foggy Bottom. The gardening goes on in front of The President, a bland student residence with a grand name.

Wow. The sun’s up and way out already. The day’s suddenly not cloudy at all but robin egg blue without anything but blue – not a cloud in the sky.

Making my coatless way to the car (a silent teeny Prius with multiple computer screens) earlier this AM, I saw the daffodils bursting out of the lirope beds I stuck them in – and yesterday there was snow on the ground! But the aconites and snowdrops have been out for weeks – I’ve had to shoo the deer away from them.

I’m about to teach Charles Wright – his sad dusty unredeemed verses… But the mood at my office desk is light-hearted — La Kid comes back from Ireland today, the weather’s turning mild…

… are the subject of this post.

Michael Milkin, as Ryan Chittum points out in the Columbia Journalism Review, “pleaded guilty to six counts of securities fraud, paid $600 million in fines, was sentenced to 10 years in federal prison, and spent 26 months behind bars. He was also banned for life from the securities industry…”

“SAC Capital Advisors L.P., the hedge fund of Steven A. Cohen… was fined a staggering $1.8 billion by the federal government for insider trading activities,” notes Adam Asher. “Eight of the fund’s former employees have been slapped with criminal charges, all of whom have either pleaded or been found guilty. SAC Capital — recently rechristened Point72 Asset Management — is no longer allowed to manage outside money …”

Milken has just given UD‘s George Washington University fifty million dollars for its school of public health; Cohen remains on the board of trustees of Brown University. Chittum is annoyed that Milkin’s history is being “airbrushed.” He thinks “journalists shouldn’t deep-six who Michael Milken was, no matter what he’s done since.” Asher, a Brown University student, thinks Cohen should be off the board. “I find it hard to imagine there isn’t at least one other person on Wall Street who can offer comparable financial counsel — someone who hasn’t been fined nearly $2 billion by the federal government.” But “I have no illusions about the impact of this piece.”

I think Chittum’s right to be indignant that a man who hurt many people and profited handsomely from it, a man who significantly damaged the public’s trust in our financial system, gets a pass because, years later, he has become a major donor to excellent causes. But I don’t (as I said in an earlier post) think GW should turn his money down. I think that routine acknowledgement of Milken’s misdeeds should accompany – however subtly – his presentation to the world.

As to Cohen – lordy, lordy. I’ve been for ages amazed at his retention on Brown’s corporation. Asher writes:

Since the investigation first became public, it has always been taken as a given that Cohen would remain on the Board of Trustees so long as he wasn’t sitting in a jail cell — and even then, I’m not sure he would have gotten the boot.

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UD thanks Roy.

Kind of a defensive headline, that. Why, when sleazeman Bobby Petrino (put “petrino” in my search engine) has again (this is a return gig) graced the University of Louisville not only with his presence, but with open practices, is everybody staying away?

[L]ess than [Scathing Online Schoolmarm says: Make that Fewer than] 100 fans were on hand for Petrino’s first open practice inside Papa John’s Cardinal Stadium.

Do you have any idea what one hundred people look like in a stadium built for 55,000 people?

Whoa. What? A university professor is being served a subpoena because of his research, and he rams the server’s car?

Let’s try and unpack this…

Back in ’12 you find this article, in which an economist dumps all over a paper Dismukes (a director of Louisiana State University’s Center for Energy Studies) wrote. The paper purports to demonstrate that so-called legacy lawsuits, where individuals sue oil companies for damage they may have done to their land, cost citizens of Louisiana “30,000 jobs and $1.5 billion in wages over the past eight years.” The paper is waved all over the state by the oil companies as they seek to make it more difficult for people to file these sorts of lawsuits.

Testifying in front of the state legislature on the question of amending filing procedures, the economist, W. Ed Whitelaw, said:

[T]he analysis omits a relevant variable. Dismukes included data from 2005 and 2006, when the Louisiana energy industry was battered by two hurricanes, and stops his analysis in 2007.

“He fails to mention Hurricane Katrina or Hurricane Rita anywhere in the report,” Whitelaw said.

“In our opinion, the Dismukes document fails to meet … professional standards. And this failure matters to the degree that the Dismukes document is fatally flawed, both theoretically and empirically. Nowhere does Dr. Dismukes present a coherent economic model linking legacy lawsuits and decisions to drill in Louisiana.”

Ah c’mon. Just a couple itty bitty hurricanes…

And turns out not only do the oil people really like this study; it’s their study.

Dismukes’ emails, obtained through a public records request by the state and the Vermilion Parish School Board, show a study he authored in 2012 used data given to him by Exxon Mobil, distorted facts to support his thesis and purposely concealed oil companies’ involvement in his research… The emails show the involvement of the Exxon Mobil and Chevron Corporation in Dismukes’ research, and he said in an email given to The Daily Reveille that he was under pressure to produce the report. In another email, he said he wasn’t sure how he would “fess-up” to where some of the information used in his study came from because it was provided by an oil company.

If the server comes at Dismukes again, will he ram again? Stay tuned.

I love this article about MHU. I read it going home on the metro yesterday and loved it. Its strange, comic, and morally questionable subject matter is rendered in an appropriately flat descriptive tone; it features an amusing all-American main character (Frank Rolfe); and it evokes the exotic (to me; probably to you) world of the American trailer park (more delicately, the manufactured home community).

“I don’t drink, I don’t smoke, I don’t gamble,” [Rolfe] says. “I don’t travel, I don’t restore cars, I have no hobbies. I don’t do anything.” Trailer parks are his world, and after nearly two decades in the business, he can entertain his students with a near-endless repertoire of tales. One of the class’s favorites was the tenant who tried to drown his girlfriend — and then nearly became a murder victim himself when the same woman tried to saw off his head.

[He] duly provides a résumé listing an imaginary master’s thesis (“The Bergsonian Conception of Time in the Contemporary Novel”) and an “interrupted” doctoral dissertation (“Introduction to a Phenomenology of Aesthetic Consciousness”). On a separate form, he describes his service [he was in fact a fascist collaborator] in a resistance group during the war…. When his transcript arrives, from the Free University of Brussels, he doctors it to appear that he got his degree…

University Diaries is always interested, as you know, in academic frauds – diploma mill grads, credentials-conjurers, etc. – and no one fits the bill better than Paul de Man. (UD was his student at the University of Chicago, and writes about it here.)

But Youth Wants to Know – What the hell? Why was he an academic God?

I don’t think it was his essays on literature, although the essays very cleverly reveal the way poetic assertions and poetic structures always seem uncontrollably to contain their own idea- and coherence-dissolving refutations. The essays very cleverly reveal the way this inescapable linguistic dissolution-operation applies just as much to the critic who thinks she’s interpreting literature as it does to the writer who thinks she’s creating literature. We think we’re using language to create meaningful fictive worlds and meaningful interpretations of those worlds, but we are being used by language. We are always trapped inside interminable sign-play, and all we can do is fashion more or less self-aware and intricate verbal fabulations, little mythic narratives about what’s going on in literature, the world, and our minds — narratives that reassure us that the world exists, we exist, beauty exists, meaning exists, moral conflict exists, consciousness exists. But we must be self-aware about all of this futility; we must never, as Peter Brooks puts it in describing de Man’s approach, take “the seductions of rhetoric as something in which to believe.” We must, indeed, de Man’s work and life seem to suggest, believe in nothing.

These essays were part of de Man’s immense charismatic appeal, in that they were the written address, if you will, of de Man’s broader, all-out assault on human consciousness. You could look it up there. You could go to the essays and delectate what Harold Bloom called de Man’s “serene linguistic nihilism.”

But de Man’s real appeal, I think (and I’m thinking about it because a new book full of evidence of de Man’s moral degeneracy has just come out and is being widely discussed) lies in his having embodied, for his time, first-rate absolute unswerving nihilism. Not just linguistic nihilism. Everything nihilism. Like America’s current wildly popular nihilist, the tv show True Detective‘s Rust Cohle, Paul de Man seems to have believed that, as Cohle puts it, “human consciousness is a tragic misstep in evolution.”

Let’s be clearer about “consciousness.” We assume that we have a quality of self-reflective cerebral aliveness which can be trained to understand the world in clarifying and useful ways. We acknowledge that along with being clarifying and useful, consciousness can be a source of obfuscation and evil and false consolation and many other bad things. Yet few among us assume that because human consciousness can be monstrous as well as illuminating and transformative we must dedicate our lives to loathing it as tragic, and to revealing again and again its absurd insidious pointlessness.

And yet – all reflective people rightly take an interest in nihilism because all reflective people know what it feels like to have – at one point or another in your life – all of the supporting structures in your life collapse. We are drawn to – even seduced by – people we rightly identify as true nihilists or nihilistic in appearance (Amy Winehouse, Chet Baker) because we have room in our consciousness for the possibility that their brutal flattening of value and meaning might be right. A philosopher discusses Rust Cohle’s

meditation on the eyes of murder victims. The idea that they would have welcomed it, that they were being released, [chimes] well with many pessimists. [Rust’s take on the murdered is] a visualization of what the pessimist ultimately holds — that death is to be welcomed…

Adam Phillips, a psychoanalyst, channels everyone’s nihilistic capacity when he says

These are parts of ourselves – that don’t want to live, that hate our children, that want ourselves to fail. Freud is saying there is something strange about humans: they are recalcitrant to what is supposed to be their project.

Cohle and de Man represent and represented true detectives of our collective latent nihilism; they’re on the case in our rats’ alleys where the dead men lost their bones, and they are taking notes.

In the latest New Yorker, Louis Menand quotes one of de Man’s colleagues calling him “a connoisseur of nothingness.” In an article written in 1989, when the dimensions of the de Man mess were just emerging, Frank Kermode describes critics influenced by de Man as “connoisseurs of the symmetry between the impossible and the necessary.” (Impossible to use language to posit meaning in a meaningless world; necessary to keep using and positing anyway.) UD would suggest that connoisseurship is the right way to enter into an explanation of de Man’s intellectual appeal. A good wine; a good nihilism. One wants to delectate this endgame. One should want to delectate this endgame, because it is a very serious and real thing. You can do it via Paul de Man quite adequately, and throughout his American adventures people excitedly intuited this about him.

Hide under that veil, university girl, or be punished for having provoked men to attack you… here in that big ol’ democracy, Egypt.

“The scandal over [Vladimir] Putin’s [plagiarized] dissertation led nowhere. But because the head of state’s deed had no repercussions whatsoever, a new trend emerged in the country: plagiarism in the writing and defense of dissertation works began on an unprecedented scale.”

Mechanically reproducing the labor of others is all the rage in the post-communist world. Romania’s prime minister, another plagiarist, just got off the hook too.

Rick Cohen, in Nonprofit Quarterly, notes the unfortunate background of the soon-to-be-namesake of George Washington University’s new Milken Institute School of Public Health. It is undeniably embarrassing; and it invites questions about the source of some of the money Michael Milken is donating.

GW was, I think, right to take the money from a man who has spent many years trying to repair his name; but it would also be a good move if GW, in a lengthy alumni magazine article, say, wrote a comprehensive review of Milken’s life and openly discussed his criminal years.

The saga of Trump tromps on. The American for-profit university par excellence.

… votes against demolishing the Ormond Hotel, where Simon Dedalus so beautifully sang “Martha” in the front room, while, in the back room (having told a waiter to keep the door between the rooms open so he could hear), Leopold Bloom so feelingly listened. (To hear more or less what Simon Dedalus would have sounded like singing that afternoon, go here and click on Play Music Clip.)

In its plans [the developer] argued that the original fabric of the hotel no longer existed and that the literary associations would be best preserved through the retention of the name of the hotel, the erection of a tourism plaque, and the use of the name ‘Sirens’ for the bar.

The James Joyce Centre was among several objectors [there was also a petition] to the development on the site of the hotel which was the setting for the Sirens episode of Ulysses.

A city preserves a real hotel because an imaginary character sang in it while another imaginary character listened to the singing. UD finds this civic act more moving than, say, New York City preserving the site of the Algonquin Room, where real people met…

Fictive realer than real. Aristotle. Plausible, and free of the need to be faithful to what actually was. In the hands of a genius read by all and then … percolates over time into the real city. Seeps. Visitors see the city through the mist of its genius-recreator…

There. A little Leopold Bloomesque stream of consciousness to try to get at why a room with Dorothy Parker in it may mean less to us than a room with Blazes Boylan in it.

Here’s some of what was said and thought about music in the bar of the Ormond Hotel on June 16, 1904. This is from the Sirens chapter of Ulysses:

[An unidentified narrator admires and somewhat ridicules Simon Dedalus’s sentimental rendition of a sentimental song.] It soared, a bird, it held its flight, a swift pure cry, soar silver orb it leaped serene, speeding, sustained, to come, don’t spin it out too long long breath he breath long life, soaring high, high resplendent, aflame, crowned, high in the effulgence symbolistic, high, of the etherial bosom, high, of the high vast irradiation everywhere all soaring all around about the all, the endlessnessnessness …….

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[Bloom thinks about Simon’s voice as he sings the sad Martha song.] That voice was a lamentation. Calmer now. It’s in the silence after you feel you hear. Vibrations. Now silent air.

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[After he sings “Martha,” Simon gets excited, recalling, with one of his friends at the bar, how he first heard Italians singing.] It was the only language Mr Dedalus said to Ben. He heard them as a boy in Ringabella, Crosshaven, Ringabella, singing their barcaroles. Queenstown harbour full of Italian ships. Walking, you know, Ben, in the moonlight with those earthquake hats. Blending their voices. God, such music, Ben. Heard as a boy. Cross Ringabella haven mooncarole.

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

[Bloom’s thoughts as he ponders the omnipresence of music.] Sea, wind, leaves, thunder, waters, cows lowing, the cattlemarket, cocks, hens don’t crow, snakes hissss. There’s music everywhere. Ruttledge’s door: ee creaking. No, that’s noise. Minuet of Don Giovanni he’s playing now. Court dresses of all descriptions in castle chambers dancing. Misery. Peasants outside. Green starving faces eating dockleaves. Nice that is. Look: look, look, look, look, look: you look at us.

That’s joyful I can feel. Never have written it. Why? My joy is other joy. But both are joys. Yes, joy it must be. Mere fact of music shows you are. Often thought she was in the dumps till she began to lilt. Then know.

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

[Later, the narrator writes this, as another person performs The Croppy Boy.] The voice of dark age, of unlove, earth’s fatigue made grave approach and painful, come from afar, from hoary mountains, called on good men and true.

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

[Ultimately:] And deepmoved all…

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

Vibrations sustained almost a century now over silent air.
Strings plucked again each moment a lover of art opens the novel.

Rape, rape, rape, go the fraternities; and now some of the complainants are coming out from anonymity, naming themselves (Wesleyan’s latest allegedly raped student is Cabri Chamberlin) and speaking directly to the media. That can be very compelling. A young woman telling her story can be very difficult for a frat to go up against in the court of public opinion.

And there have been two recent frat rapes at Wesleyan! Plus one almost-rape!! (Scroll down to this long article’s next to last paragraph.) This definitely goes against the school’s rep as a sylvan progressive civilized sort of place… People are saying that Wesleyan’s going to go the way of some other schools and shut down its fraternity system.

To which UD says: ATTENTION Dartmouth College Admissions Committee: HOLD ONTO YOUR HATS. For those east coasters for whom Zoo Mass simply won’t do – class-wise – you are kind of it now, if you know what I mean… The other Ivies either don’t feature your famous “intoxicating nihilism,” or they try and fail. No one does it like Dartmouth, and word’s getting out, especially after that Rolling Stone piece and all. An avalanche of applications for admission is on its way!

… who cynically and with arrant disregard recruit violent and troubled men to their campuses and then make them sports heroes until they kill someone… UD is fascinated by the ways these universities do damage control. It’s especially intriguing to watch, er, repeat offenders deal with the body count.

Take nice little University of Maine. A pleasant inoffensive sort of place, except that their coaches are really unlucky in love. Jovan Belcher, and now “[Zedric] Joseph is the second former UMaine football player in just over a year to be linked to a murder.” Yes, two in a row, and of course in both cases there was evidence – in their pre-college past, and in their college behavior – that they were dangerous people. But, you know, exposing your undergraduates to people like Belcher and Joseph is all part of the game. Students at the University of Nebraska knew that risking standing in a line behind Richie Incognito was the price you paid for winning games. It’s all part of winning games.

But okay let’s see how you mop up the mess if you’re U Maine. First, as Deadspin’s Sean Newell points out, you take a page from Joseph Stalin’s book and unperson him. You just rub him out. You literally – as Yeshiva did with trustee Bernard Madoff – erase him from all real and virtual university surfaces. What… Belcher? Who…?

Almost one year to the day after he shot and killed his girlfriend before driving to the Kansas City Chiefs’ facility where he shot and killed himself in front of his coach and general manager, Jovan Belcher is no longer on the banner.

You know, the banner. The BIG banner that hangs in U Maine stadium boasting about their guys now in the NFL.

Newell then notes some of the guys still on the banner:

… Maine and Steelers lineman Justin Strzelczyk … drove 15 miles of a 40-mile high speed chase on three wheels, flipping off and throwing beer bottles at state troopers along the way. The chase, which began because of a hit and run, ended when he sped into oncoming traffic and collided head-on with a tanker, killing him instantly.

Strzelczyk, 6 feet 6 inches and 300 pounds, was a monstrous presence on the Steelers’ offensive line from 1990-98. He was known for his friendly, banjo-playing spirit and gluttony for combat. He spiraled downward after retirement, however, enduring a divorce and dabbling with steroid-like substances, and soon before his death complained of depression and hearing voices from what he called “the evil ones.”

It was later determined Strzelczyk’s showed signs of CTE.

Among the less-troubled on the banner are Stephen Cooper, Lofa Tatupu and Daren Stone. Cooper, a former San Diego Charger, was found holding 1,000 anabolic steroid pills during a traffic stop while at UMaine. He was later suspended four games by the NFL when he tested positive for ephedra. Both Lofa Tatupu and Daren Stone had their own minor scrapes with the law and were charged with DUIs.

The other classic response ingredients (this goes on at all schools where this sort of thing happens) involve focusing on

1. the shock and anguish of the coaches (How could anyone have seen this coming? They were like sons to me. etc.)

2. the tragic loss to the team’s win record (Defense is going to have trouble recovering from this absence from the lineup…)

3. the tragic nature of life in general (the school’s most articulate and sad-faced administrator blinks in front of the cameras and talks of the essential wounded enigma of being as such)

4. the remarkable compassion and competence of the school’s mental health professionals as they rush to deal with traumatized students

5. the way this has made the school a stronger place by bringing us all together through adversity.

Yes, yes, that’s how it’s gone, and no one’s surprised that John Junker, someone affiliated with universities and their use of public money, is now routinely referred to as a “kingpin.”

Criminal, university-affiliated, public money gangs being what they are, we shouldn’t expect only game fixing, gun violence, DUIs, theft of public funds for running decades-long pretend-class scams, and all the other low-level stuff to be the only news we get out of big-time university sports in America, the place where Richie Incognito got his education. We should also expect, at the highest level, at the level of the most powerful men in college football, to hear about bribing politicians, breaking campaign finance laws, diverting millions of dollars of public funds for strip clubs and all that other sex stuff that Nevin Shapiro made even more famous than it already was. As all of these guys will explain to you if you’ll only sit down and listen, there’s a certain culture associated with university football, see… A certain world that’s being admitted to the country’s universities… And coaches and boosters and university presidents (here’s looking at you, Graham Spanier) have to play to it.

Junker will go to jail for a bit, but don’t make no nevermind.

“There’s something about [the] society [of other people] and useful short-term distractions that takes your mind off [the fear of death],” remarks Julian Barnes, author of a whole book about the fear of death.

UD thinks that the people of Allen, Texas have much to teach us in this regard, having produced a gigantic, expensive, communal, engrossing distraction in their sixty million dollar high school football stadium that, two years after construction, has had to be shut down because of structural flaws.

One needs to look past the cruel verdict by one observer (see my headline) in this article’s comment thread and instead appreciate – even marvel at – the way an entire town has figured out how to do an end run around the whole timor mortis conturbat me thing by creating a massive unsound edifice around which the town will be able to rally and fight and pray for decades to come.

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

Centuries from now The Allen Stadium will have become the state’s sphinx, its obelisk, its omphalos, its ultima thule, around which, in seasonal rituals, people will gather and chant Who built this? Why?

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UD thanks John.