Home again, home again, jiggity jig.

Heading south in the Quiet Car (having gotten there via the Alewife Greenway, the Red Line T, and South Station), gazing at the moment (we’re stationary) at a black car on the next track on which big white letters say DO NOT HUMP, UD considers how she got herself comfortable in this seat. First she fiddled with chargers; then she put in her ear plugs and listened to Schubert songs (her discovery of Lezhneva’s Im Frühling has her rooting around in Schubert); then she leaned back for a light nap, during which she listened to the Four Horsemen of the New Atheism, Hour Two, kept at a gentle grumbly baritone (UD finds deep male voices deliciously soporific, and the more the merrier).

At one point, Richard Dawkins woke me up and made me laugh:

When [the liturgy] becomes intelligible, the nonsense becomes more transparent. If it’s in Latin, it can survive much better because the nonsense is camouflaged. It’s rather like a camouflaged insect; it can get through the barriers because you can’t see it. When it’s translated into not just English but modern English you can see it for what it is.

Later, Dawkins said that he once listed among the six pieces of music he’d take to a desert island Bach’s Mache dich mein Herze rein, so I switched over to that.

Make yourself pure, my heart
I want to bury Jesus himself within me,
For he now within me
Forever
Shall have his sweet rest.
World, depart from my heart, let Jesus enter!

A long New Yorker essay about madly proliferating stem cell research fraud reminds us of PhD protocols at some of the world’s prominent universities:

Cut – Paste – Pass Without Reading

… of a state of the art brain surgery recovery ICU room – one of her relatives is there. That’s why she took the train up to Boston — to drive each morning through dreary streets to one of the world’s great medical centers and sit quietly while someone she loves tries to pull herself together after a surgeon removed a benign tumor. (The surgeon’s name – Ekkehard – means brave sword…) The room seems to totter under the weight of its technology, much of which, in the form of tubes and drains and cuffs, covers the patient’s body.

Intensivists is the name for the doctors who treat ICU patients, and UD likes this word, thinks it should title a poem about something. Those who deal in the intensities. Specialists in over the top events.

The drama is conducted quietly; technology also means the end of the old hospital of pings and pages – the occasional “code” announcement sounds, but the hallways are subdued, courteous, featuring many lobbies furnished with deep couches and soft lights.

UD, a fictivist, has long said of herself I can handle anything except reality. Poems, novels – these sidlings up to reality have been her vocation.

Yet it is also true that Mama Reality seems unable to leave her unmolested. UD is doing her best with it.

… a big UD favorite, is Julia Lezhneva, singing Rachmaninoff’s Daisies to accompany UD on her train ride up to Boston. I like almost everything Lezhneva performs, but this small song in particular always gets me. And that’s odd, because it’s not the sort of music I generally like — “art” songs, sentimental, with titles like Daisies, drawn-out atonalities… I ask myself why I like this piece so much and here’s my list of possible reasons:

1. There’s a close-to-perfect feel to the performance – one Russian singing another, a perfect match of singer and song in terms of language and sensibility. It’s what a critic would call a “gem.” (Lezhneva won this competition, by the way – youngest singer to do that.)

2. The performance showcases what I find so amazing about Lezhneva – the way her voice always seems part of the score. Know what I mean? She’s so smooth, so inside the music, that there’s a seamless connection between piano and voice. Her sensibility is slightly self-abnegating – she’s no prima donna – and this deepens the sense of her fidelity to the music above all rather than her personal dramatic projection. (This is probably why I’m not put off by the sentimentality of the song.) Yet her voice as instrument is so remarkable that this never means she disappears inside the score.

3. Her voice as instrument? To my ear she has a piercing clarity and accuracy with her notes – not just the basic acrobatic fact of a soprano who can hit something really high, but the smooth ease with which she does that … The way her high notes aren’t like — deep breath! hit that sucker! — (and that’s a feeling I sometimes get with Joyce DiDonato, despite my deep respect for her singing). There’s something sedate and, as I say, undramatic about Lezhneva, which seems just right for this small Rachmaninoff piece – the ability to set a mood and sustain it, explore it a bit, resolve it.

Interestingly, the only Lezhneva stuff I’ve heard/seen that I haven’t liked is her operatic stage stuff. The same gestalt that makes her no Maria Callas makes her… no Maria Callas. There is something neat, self-contained, delicate, bird-like, about Lezhneva, with her modest height, her slight body, her small features, her paleness, her wispy light brown hair — she is the anti-Callas. Her effect is powerful in part because of the contrast between her unremarkable physical presence and the vocal power she generates; quietly faithful to the score, she gives you space to respond and not over-respond. She holds things back, which in my aesthetic experience tends to mean that the power of the expression is heightened.

I guess another way of saying this is that she ain’t very sexy – can’t see her getting much traction with this ditty.

Bravo, Theresa Hayden. She teaches Human Trafficking at the U of Smell, and since a form of HT is happening right under her nose (one of many smells emanating from the U of Smell), she has decided to add to her syllabus the book chronicling the provision of women for campus basketball players and recruits and the recruits’ fathers in the players’ now-notorious dorm.

The book’s co-author is the madam who, in association with an assistant basketball coach no longer (ahem) at UL, coordinated the buying and selling.

Because it’s a required class text, Breaking Cardinal Rules: Basketball and the Escort Queen does not appear as one slender singular upright copy among many other texts in the store; multiple copies loll sideways in the course stacks, making a striking statement…

From lemons Hayden has made intellectual lemonade; within a culture of smutty conspiratorial silence (similar to the silence that hushed up Peyton Manning‘s university past and the more recent rapes at Baylor University) she has taken a principled stand that will help her students absorb with dispassion the enormity of what the president of their university has allowed the institution to become. She has done what professors do.

… for UD‘s April poetry lecture series at the Georgetown Public Library.

Register! Via email: [email protected]

Poetry Lectures April 2016apdf(1)

Three Saturdays in April at 2:00:

April 2, 9, and 16.

Address:

Georgetown Library
3260 R Street NW
Washington DC

UD might teach at the University of Macau next semester, and if she does… Well, what a typically UDesque introduction to China — There’s ol’ UD, toughing it out on an island whose hyper-opulent spas and casinos “make Las Vegas look like a dump.”

Yes, should UD actually venture out to meet market Leninism in the flesh, it really will be in the flesh – as in the fleshpots of Egypt, Macau being a distillation of every vice the outsized human brain can conceive…

No one wrote about American kitsch better than Eco. This is from his 1975 book, Travels in Hyperreality. He’s describing Hearst Castle.

The striking aspect of the whole is not the quantity of antique pieces plundered from half of Europe, or the nonchalance with which the artificial tissue seamlessly connects fake and genuine, but rather the sense of fullness, the obsessive determination not to leave a single space that doesn’t suggest something, and hence the masterpiece of bricolage, haunted by horror vacui, that is here achieved. The insane abundance makes the place unlivable, just as it is hard to eat those dishes that many classy American restaurants, all darkness and wood paneling, dotted with soft red lights and invaded by nonstop music, offer the customer as evidence of his own situation of “affluence”: steaks four inches thick with lobster (and baked potato and sour cream and melted butter, and grilled tomato and horse radish sauce) so the customer will have “more and more” and can wish nothing further.

An incomparable collection of genuine pieces too, the Castle of Citizen Kane achieves a psychedelic effect and a kitsch result not because the Past is not distinguished from the Present (because after all this was how the great lords of the past amassed rare objects, and the same continuum of styles can be found in many Romanesque churches where the nave is now baroque and perhaps the campanile is eighteenth century), but because what offends is the voracity of the selection, and what distresses is the fear of being caught up by this jungle of venerable beauties, which unquestionably has its own wild flavor, its own pathetic sadness, barbarian grandeur, and sensual perversity, redolent of contamination, blasphemy, the Black Mass. It is like making love in a confessional with a prostitute dressed in a prelate’s liturgical robes reciting Baudelaire while ten electronic organs reproduce The Well-Tempered Clavier, played by Scriabin.

But then the New York Post is a mean old tabloid… It headlines a story about the latest woman puncher at the University of Tennessee

TENNESSEE FOOTBALL CESSPOOL
YIELDS ANOTHER SHOCKING ARREST

But if the University of Tennessee and what its scholar/athletes do amounts to a cesspool – and it does; we’ve followed UT for years on this blog – how can the latest thing, which isn’t even all that violent by UT standards, be, as the Post goes on to say, “shocking”?

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

Peyton Manning shoving his anus and testicles in a woman’s face – now that’s shocking. That’s UT-grade shock. This latest thing is just a lil ol hiccup. By UT standards.

… getting brutal.

… has died.

Details of her life – spent with her sister, who “practiced law in her 90s, and died in 2014 at 103” – here.

The first few minutes of this YouTube show you the restaurant down the street from UD‘s house. The rest of the clip features two distant acquaintances of UD‘s – her neighbor, Nancy Floreen, and Chris Van Hollen (UD last met up with him at one of Peter Galbraith’s birthday parties).

The Peruvian presidential field (great overview here) includes a plagiarist/copyist. That is, César Acuña not only plagiarized the bulk of his PhD thesis; he also removed the author’s name from a book on educational theory and replaced it with his own.

Commentary.

Some universities – like some doomed airline flights – generate one little disaster after another until the whole place crashes.

True, most universities don’t actually crash; football games and fraternities endure, and classrooms have people in them. But we all know the universities that have sort of had it, like the University of Louisville, whose embedded brainless good ol’ boyism dooms it to scandal after scandal for all eternity. (Put “Louisville” in my search engine if you can stomach it.) The U of Smell, as it’s now known, has become a smutty joke.

The latest news out of Texas A&M, aka Rancho Manziel y Perry, is maybe a smallish story, maybe even a routine story about routine racism at a school known for it. The latest thing is a bunch of Texas A&M students harassing some non-white high school kids who were visiting campus to see whether they might want to attend a school that seems to boast a significant number of people who really really dislike people who look like those high school kids.

Texas, Oklahoma, Mississippi … It’s real out there down there. They don’t, like, hide it, or talk in code or anything. Sing, sing a song, sing out loud, sing out strong, seems to be the approach.

… new app alerts Iranian women to the proximity of the morality police. Know hope.