Then – thunder.

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

Exactly.

Just now, with thin innocuous drifts.

I’ll watch the show from a bedroom whose sliding doors give me all I’d like of the white as it falls on the forest.

UD‘s been down with bronchitis for a couple of weeks anyway, so settling in’s no big deal. She’s in a warm bed with tightly layered blankets and a heating pad and her dog Emilia. Three eucalyptus soy candles rest on a small Tunisian plate in front of the window. Eucalyptus is good for the lungs.

My soundtrack: The mad madrigals of the mad Gesualdo (“the highest expression of pain in music”). Eerie chords for eerie snow.

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It’s sticking to the holly leaves and coming down more thickly. They tell me this snowfall’s in it for the long haul. Okay.

Although we worry about outages and treefalls, we’re basically calm. And why not? The setting is sedate to the point of morbid. Our lives are calm, settled lives. Settled far away from peril. The inside/outside contrast puts this protection in high relief.

There’s a poem for that, by Hayden Carruth. Read it here. Read my commentary below.

The Curtain

[The poem will compare the curtain of snow now obscuring and now revealing the reality of the world to the poet’s troubled conscience as he lives his comfortable life, fitfully aware of a world of atrocities.]

Just over the horizon a great machine of death is roaring and rearing.
We can hear it always. Earthquake, starvation, the ever-renewing sump of corpse-flesh.

[From their easeful bed, the poet and his lover can figuratively hear – cannot intellectually escape – the perennial actuality of human suffering.]

But in this valley the snow falls silently all day, and out our window
We see the curtain of it shifting and folding, hiding us away in our little house,
We see earth smoothened and beautified, made like a fantasy, the snow-clad trees
So graceful.

[Suffering is way up over the hill; in their snug valley the lovers now experience the smoothing and silencing of even the sound of suffering by the blanketing snow, which makes the world a beautiful fantasy.]

In our new bed, which is big enough to seem like the north pasture almost
With our two cats, Cooker and Smudgins, lying undisturbed in the southeastern and southwestern corners,
We lie loving and warm, looking out from time to time.

[The camera gradually moves in more intimately on the lovers, placid, with cutely-named cats, on their massive “undisturbed” bed. They watch the snow.]

“Snowbound,” we say. We speak of the poet
Who lived with his young housekeeper long ago in the mountains of the western province, the kingdom
Of cruelty, where heads fell like wilted flowers and snow fell for many months
Across the pass and drifted deep in the vale.

[Maybe a reference to John Greenleaf Whittier, author of “Snowbound,” which narrates a snowbound family passing the time telling each other stories. The lines perhaps also allude to Whittier’s many anti-slavery poems; that is, Whittier was the sort of poet Carruth would like to be – someone whose writing might have some impact on human suffering. “We felt that if we could get enough people to read T. S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens and e. e. cummings and William Carlos Williams and other great poets of that period, then something good would happen in American civilization. We felt a genuine vocation, a calling, to try and make this happen. And we succeeded. Today thousands of people are going to colleges and attending workshops and taking courses in twentieth-century literature. Eliot and Stevens are very well known, very well read; and American civilization has sunk steadily, progressively, further and further down until most of the sensible people are in a state of despair. It’s pretty obvious that good writing doesn’t really have very much impact on social events …”]

In our kitchen the maple-fire murmurs
In our stove. We eat cheese and new-made bread and jumbo Spanish olives
Which have been steeped in our special brine of jalapeños and garlic and dill and thyme.
We have a nip or two from the small inexpensive cognac that makes us smile and sigh.

[They can stay warm amid the cold; their cozy woodburning stove is softly, aromatically doing its thing. Plenty of food, too, and all their exotic spicy (hot: another form of heat) favorites. Alcohol too of course will warm them, calm them.

This evocation of the delightful private small habits of their private life reminds UD of this passage, from Paul Monette’s essay collection, Last Watch of the Night:

In the moving premonitory memoir of his approaching death from cancer, Donald Hall discovers that what he will miss the most are the dailiest of things. Padding out onto his porch to retrieve the morning’s Globe; a quiet cup of coffee as he peruses the headlines; the dozen small nesting motions that bring him at last to his desk. Finally the picking up of his pen to start afresh. The things of life are so ordinary, the habits so engrained, that it’s stupefying to think of them taken away. One wonders that the universe would bother to kill off such a modestly focused life, circumscribed by hours of quiet on every side.]

For a while we close the immense index of images that is our lives — for instance,
The child on the Mescalero reservation in New Mexico sitting naked in 1966 outside his family’s hut,
Covered with sores, unable to speak.

[The deeply interior, deeply comfortable scene, the doubly deep warmth inside all that cold, temporarily suspends their awareness – via indexed image rather than personal experience – of the suffering over the horizon.]

But of course we see the child every day,
We hold out our hands, we touch him shyly, we make offerings to his implacability.
No, the index cannot close.

[The poem is an offering to the implacability of suffering; the poem is written out of the poet’s inability to close the index.]

And how shall we survive? We don’t and cannot and will never
Know. Beyond the horizon a great unceasing noise is undeniable. The machine,
Like an immense clanking vibrating shuddering unnameable contraption as big as a house, as big as the whole town,
May break through and lurch into our valley at any moment, at any moment.

[Why don’t we die of our anguish at what human beings do to one another? Not only don’t we die; we live for the most part quite comfortable lives. We survive our knowledge of the suffering of others quite nicely. Maybe someday suffering will spread to the point where it has no other place to go but our own quiet little valley.]

Cheers, baby. Here’s to us. See how the curtain of snow wavers and then falls back.

The genial – even self-celebratory – self-absorption of private life prevails. The snowy curtain that had been drawn aside to give the poet a glimpse of how stark things really are has fallen back, leaving him comfortably numb, with cognac.

Scathing Online Schoolmarm knew there was something she didn’t like about this guy.

America’s FIFA.

“[H]e’s appearing with someone who’s viewed as one of America’s most astounding morons.”

[F]or many Republicans — the ones not living in fantasyland — the current battle for the party, between the nihilistic forces of Trump and Cruz on the one hand and the uninspiring conventional politicians on the other, feels like something deeper… It feels like the party is on the brink of breaking apart.

Applying chocolate to your football concussion is a surefire way to treat it, but only if you apply one specific make of chocolate, according to a University of Maryland study paid for in part by the maker of the chocolate.

Given that university’s recent move to a much rougher football league, these findings couldn’t be better timed. In fact it’s one of those win-win-win sort of things, making everyone happy – the chocolate manufacturer, the study’s author (the study has drawn national attention), the university, and chocolate-loving, concussion-prone Americans everywhere.

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

Sure, there are naysayers. There were naysayers when the University of West Virginia, with money from Coca Cola, produced research that showed sugary drinks have almost nothing to do with obesity.

Scientists like those at the University of Maryland must simultaneously publish their research (well, the Maryland research hasn’t exactly quite yet been actually what you’d call published) and endure the disconfiture caused their institutions by a cacaophony of critics.

It’s a dark, bittersweet chapter in the history of the University of Maryland.

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UD thanks Elizabeth, a reader.

Specially if he’s got a whole bunch of other good ol’ boys watching out for him. But whether he’s at Yeshiva University, where somehow somebody finally made the head honcho get the hell out, or the University of Louisville, where nobody’s managed it yet but they’re working on it, you’ve eventually got to find a way to give fulminatingly bad university presidents the heave-ho. If you don’t, the attention of the nation – and a legion of auditors – will eventually be so riveted to the institution that donors will stop donating and students will stop attending.

UD trusts that the governor plus some of the trustees will eventually be able to do the job at Louisville. But it will be bloody. UL’s president has anger issues.

A sweet disorder in the prose
Kindles in me oohs and ohs:—
A plagiarism has me thrown
Into a fine distractión,—
An erring line, which here and there
Enthrals the happy reader fair —
A quote neglectful, and thereby
Prose that flows confusedly,—
A shocking theft, deserving note,
From something that was ‘fore that wrote —
A careless word-string, in whose sense
I see fantastic fraudulence,—
Do more bewitch me, than when prose
Is too precise in every pose.

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

Can UD be the only person who thrills to tales like these?

An elected member of the Nevada Board of Regents is amending his 1995 University of Nevada, Reno dissertation following the discovery that more than four pages of it were copied from an uncited California report.

The Las Vegas Review-Journal reported in late August that Regent Jason Geddes, who has defended the Nevada System of Higher Education against allegations it plagiarized a think tank’s report, had copied material in his own academic work.

Geddes has a doctorate in environmental sciences and health and has been a member of the Board of Regents since 2006.

Geddes’ adviser Glenn Miller was adamant Geddes did not plagiarize — despite pages of paragraphs being copied exactly, with the exception of an occasional word change and conversions to the metric system. Miller said it wasn’t plagiarism because dissertations aren’t widely read, the copied work was accurate and the copied language wasn’t creative …

Breathes there the soul which aren’t widely read fails to quicken? The copied work was accurately copied! The copied work was not creative! Please tell UD she’s not the only person bewitched not merely by plagiarism, but by (recalling this classic) excuses for it!

Yet for all the delight one takes in the defenders, there is nothing like the audacious copyists themselves. Recall, merely among professors, the selfsame University of Nevada’s Mustapha Marrouchi, who had apparently been plagiarizing (from hundreds of sources) for decades. Think, more recently, of Arizona State’s Matthew Whitaker, whose “resignation” will cost that university hundreds of thousands of dollars.

But if you ask UD, hundreds of thousands of dollars is a bargain. These guys and their shenanigans (note what Whitaker’s got going on with the City of Phoenix) might be fun for UD to follow, but when you get down to it, they’re really embarrassing.

… in memory of C.D. Wright, who died yesterday. The uninterrupted poem can be found here, read by Wright.

The title, “Provinces,” refers on a literal level to provincial places far away from urban centers, and to the remote and – as times passes – frustrated lives lived there. It refers more obliquely to the sensually distant and unused “places” of the aging, lonely, and unloved human body. The poem will be an extended indirect discourse meditation about a speaker’s relationship to his or her sexless and increasingly useless body, shrunken from the world of other people, and shrunken even from the speaker. The poem is maybe also about the speaker’s useless life.

Where the old trees reign with their forward dark
light stares through a hole in the body’s long
house.

Morning breaks, and the old and isolated speaker, sunlight in her eyes, awakens. The old trees will return at the end of the poem.

The bed rolls away from the body,
and the body is forced to find a chair.

Motion and agency belong to the natural, extra-human world, not the speaker’s body. Trees reign, light stares, the bed rolls. (Note also how the sad slow and somewhat creepy feel of the poem is accomplished in part through its simple monosyllabic words, coupled with short lines.) The speaker does not rise from the bed; the bed rolls away from the speaker, who is “forced” by this action to find another object on which to assume motionlessness.

At some hour
the body sequesters itself in a shuttered room
with no clock.

See also her poem, “Privacy” (“Stiller than water she lies / As in a glass dress // As if all life might come to its end / within the radius of her bed”). Wright is interested in the body at rest, alone in some sequestered out of the way (provincial) unchanging (no clock) setting; she is interested, let’s say, in the self in its full starkness, unmixed with the social world, with worldly activity. She wants to examine what we most deeply, most starkly, are, when all of the activity and distraction of life falls away.

When a clean sheet of paper floats by,
the head inclines on its axis.

Again the sense of the self reduced to a passive almost mechanical (axis) being, reflexively swiveling up to look at a sheet of paper floating by… This is a surrealistic, imagistic, symbolic poem, composed of a series of strange descriptions that somehow add up to an existential truth, or to a persuasive existential mood. That piece of paper carries the possibility of life’s meaninglessness, being “clean” and without writing.

It is one of those
common bodies that felt it could not exist without loving,
but has in fact gone on and on without love.

Once more you see the ambition to speak for the destiny of all of us (a common body) as we move away from youthful passion and toward a passionless solitude whose starkness allows us to see the truth of existence. This body is now not merely passive but ghostlike in its persistence despite the end of its affective life.

Like a cave that has stopped growing, we don’t call it dead,
but dormant.

Now we begin a series of lines comparing the “dead” human to a hibernating bear in a cave; but again – weirdly – it’s the inanimate thing that has being (the cave has stopped growing and become dormant). That image of the cave is continuous somehow with the poem’s first lines, which describe light finding a hole in the body as light will fill the hole of a cave. That “long house” of the body aligns it with the long deep habitation that is the cave. The speaker’s body has housed her for a long time in its (increasingly dormant) depths.

Now the body is on all fours, one arm
engaged in pulling hair from a trap, an activity
the body loathes.

Have we moved from the bed to the morning shower, where we get down to pull hair out of the drain? Are we also the bear, caught in a trap and trying to free itself? A loathsome activity either way, reminding the speaker how caught in the private/visceral life she is – no lover, no higher, non-material nature (there’s nothing in the poem to suggest that this solitude has a spiritual component).

When the time comes, the body
feeds on marinated meats and fruits trained to be luscious.

So we move on to lunch, as our human creature “feeds” on highly prepared, highly artificial food — an image that deepens our sense of her passivity. She lies in bed, or sits in a chair, waiting for the meats and fruits provided for her…

Once the body had ambitions — to be tall and remain
soft. No more,

Tall – stretched beyond mere materiality, mere grubbing passivity. Soft – permeable by the world of other people. But that’s over – it’s curled asleep/dead in hibernation.

but it enjoys rappelling to the water.

Every now and then the dried out sterile old body makes its difficult way to natural sources of replenishment.

Because the body’s dwelling is stone, perched over water,
we say the body is privileged.

How lucky we are not to be mere nature! To be able to distance ourselves, protect ourselves from, nature red in tooth and claw. We can look at water; we can rappel down to it when we need it; but we need not be drowned by it. We need not be drowned by passion. (Remember the old Paul Simon song: I am a rock. I am an island.)

Akin to characters
in Lawrence books, its livelihood is obscured.

Then what is the body for? If you are Gerald Crich, you can actually die of not knowing – or denying – your body’s vocation.

It owns
a horse named Campaign it mounts on foggy morns.
That was the body’s first lie. It has no horse
and wouldn’t climb on one.

A send-up of a culture that boasts endless best-selling books called things like The Purpose-Driven Life.

Because the body lives
so far from others, it likes reading about checkered lives
on the metrópoli.

I have my books and my poetry to protect me, sings Simon. I keep my distance in my simple animal existence, but I access the complex (checkered) lives of others through art.

It likes moving around at night under its dress.

Autoeroticism is better than no eroticism at all.

When it travels, bottles of lotion open in its bags.

All hell breaks loose as it threatens to become “soft” (see earlier line about the speaker’s earlier ambition to be soft, to not be stone) when it nears the world of other people.

Early in March the big rains came — washing all good thoughts
from the body’s cracks and chinks.

You can’t stop the cycles of nature from happening. The world is going to wake up and destroy all of your nice fortifications (see the famous opening lines of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land: Winter kept us warm...) and to some extent you’re going to have to wake up as well — to the world as it is.

By now the body admits
it is getting on, and yet, continues to be tormented
by things being the way they are.

Who is ever really reconciled to the human condition? You can try living as far away as possible from it, even in a cave, but the light of the world will find you and madden you.

Recently the body took
one of the old trees for a wife, but the union has broken down.

Try the pagan approach; make yourself one with nature. Yet your possession of a mind and a soul and a passion-seeking body will make this an impossible match.

The light has bored out of the body’s long house.

In the first lines, light “stared” into the body; by now – the end of the day – it is boring its way out of the body. This is not merely a mechanical image; it is pretty sadistic. It is painful to be invaded, and then abandoned, by the light of the world, the touch of other human beings.

Fog envelops its stone flanks.

Once more, time for (quoting Yeats) stony sleep.

Still the body
enjoys rappelling to the water.

But this would be the enjoyment of a dream, the unconscious climbing down each night into the realm of fertility, passion.

And it likes the twenty four-hour stores,
walking up and down the aisles, not putting a thing in its basket.

Or you could wake up, any old time, and sleepwalk along the aisles of the stores where your luscious pretend nourishment marinates forever.

In the years of running this blog, UD has become familiar with the local booster angle in the local press. As various hideously and cynically mismanaged university sports programs get worse and worse, their provincial scribes visit the latest miracle AD who’s got a miraculous new formula to fix it all. The provincial scribes then report back on their amazing visit with this amazing person. Scathing Online Schoolmarm takes a look at an exemplary piece out of one of America’s most scandalous universities, Rutgers.

Here’s its first sentence.

When it comes to bleeding money, Rutgers University has long had one of the worst-performing athletic departments in the country.

The writer means the opposite of what she has written. She means that when it comes to bleeding money Rutgers has long had one of the best-performing athletic departments in the country. Greedy stupid addled Rutgers, with its constantly shifting, constantly scandalous, athletic staff (its last football coach “was fined $50,000 by the university and suspended for three games after contacting [an] instructor about [a player’s] grade. He was later fired [cost of his buyout to the kiddies at Rutgers: $1.4 million] after a losing season that was also marred by the arrest of seven players for violent crimes in and around New Brunswick.”), is possibly the best-performing American athletic department when it comes to bleeding money.

The writer proceeds to take down, unchallenged, every bullshit statement the new miracle guy gives her, inviting us to be excited about what her headline calls his “new plan.” Her big piece of news is that “after years of financial troubles, Rutgers athletics may be poised to get out of the red.”

So what’s the new genius plan?

Try to get supporters to give the program more money.

Sit on our asses until 2021, when Rutgers gets full membership in its conference.

Wow. Why didn’t the last forty ADs think of that.

Due to this amazing new formula, “we will,” promises the new AD, “be in the black.”

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

Buried deep in this article is the economist on the faculty who points out that even with the thrilling new payments just around the corner it’s quite likely that anyone telling you the department’s going to be in the black is a fool or a liar (“They haven’t gotten rid of [the deficit] because they don’t want to and don’t need to.”)

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

And speaking of getting rid of: When, in a year or so, they get rid of this latest miracle worker under pressure from students and alumni and faculty appalled at his real plan (dismantling most components of the university for the sake of the football team), the next Amazing Kreskin will assure this same reporter that victory is just around the corner. And she will faithfully transcribe what he says.

[H]is early run-ins with the law, instead of provoking interventions by the football coaches who comprised the adult authority figures in his life, only brought cover-ups, aimed to protect their golden goose: a kid who coaches and who, scouts said in hushed tones, ran the ball like a future MVP. In listening to a series of interviews with old teammates, you hear stories of violence conjoined with mental illness: of someone who “didn’t have all the tools in his tool box,” who could turn from kindness to anger on a moment’s notice, lash out, and then be consumed with regret. This was someone who needed counseling. Instead, he had people just hoping he would win the big game before his next arrest.

That took place most notoriously at Nebraska, where Phillips dragged his ex-girlfriend, Kate McEwen, a basketball player, down a flight of stairs. After pleading “no contest” to charges of misdemeanor assault, he was suspended for just six games. As for McEwen, she had her athletic scholarship taken away. An abhorrent message had been sent to not only Phillips but to a team that collected gender-violence charges like they collected conference titles.

Phillips’s coach, the legendary Tom Osborne, said at the time that he took Phillips back onto the team without further punishment because the young man needed “structure” and stability that only Cornhuskers football could offer. That “structure” was a college football program that, like so many others, was built on rank exploitation, with little care for the person under the helmet.

It’s even more insidious than that, isn’t it? Is it that hard to imagine a coach perceiving the twisted violence in a player, perceiving it play out astonishingly against women, perceiving the very same quality playing out against men on the field, and saying: Wow. Great. Let’s tap the football part of that violence… We only need it for a few seasons… Responsible people at the University of Nebraska must have known that wildchild Richie Incognito had a pretty empty toolbox too. I’m sure there have been plenty of other similarly exploited student athletes on that campus. Why hasn’t anyone at that campus proposed a serious investigation, conducted by an outsider, of its coaching and academic ethics over, say, the last two decades, in regard to its football players? I know that plenty of other universities behave the same way, but given the current spotlight on Nebraska, I think that school would be a good place to start.

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

A similarly harsh attack on the University of Nebraska.

… GlaxoSmithKline has stopped doing it, UD notes this lament for the end of the practice.

But, of course, [people will say,] these experts are being PAID. How can they be trusted?

Well, can we really expect experts to do this on a pro bono basis? I doubt that any of us would agree to take time to do this sort of work for free.

How in the world can you expect to find one doctor or researcher in the United States willing to review – FOR FREE! – the data on a new drug that might benefit millions?

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

More on GSK’s decision:

Neil Barnes, head of respiratory medicines for GSK, says the days of drug companies paying for doctors to attend conferences to listen to doctors paid to speak are coming to end. “It is going to be like smoking on aeroplanes. People will look back and say ‘did we really used to do that?’”

But of course the scandal is what pharma continues to do.

Adriane Fugh-Berman, associate professor of pharmacology at Georgetown University in Washington and an activist for more transparency in drug marketing, says that while GSK’s reforms remove the conflict of interest for individual doctors they do not remove the wider problem of industry influence over medics. “I would be much more impressed if they were getting out of medical education altogether,” she says.

… VP.

1946-2016

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Disturbing resemblance to Spiro T. Agnew.