UD anxiously follows the tweets chronicling the situation in Oregon.

What’s not to like?

Good Christian school rejoice!
With heart and soul and voice.
Give ye heed to what we say:
News! News!
Settlement is reached today.
Lots of cash has been dispensed
Ukwuachu won’t play defense.
Settlement today! Settlement today!

Although he never played a game
He’s brought our school yet more infame
Than we endured with Elliott.
News! News!
We covered up as best we could
Til justice caught us up but good.
Smile, Smile and silent be!
Wait out this ignominy.

Of course a poem. A Philip Larkin poem. Your blogeuse is mad about poetry (Speaking of which: She’ll be giving a series of lectures this April at the Georgetown Public Library on the subject. Dates TBA.), and she agrees with Christopher Hitchens that it’s strange and amazing, the way

[Somehow from Philip Larkin’s drab, resentful life he evolved] his own sour strain and syncopation of Words­worth’s “still, sad music of humanity.”

But let’s not stop at strange and amazing and somehow. Let’s analyze one of his poems! “New Year Poem.” Written not just from the ruins of his life, but from the ruins of Coventry, 1940. The poet has come home for a visit, and he surveys the bombed out city.

Just look carefully at the first few lines to see some of the ways Larkin distills his sour music.

The short afternoon ends, and the year is over;
Above trees at the end of the garden the sky is unchanged,
An endless sky; and the wet streets, as ever,
Between standing houses are empty and unchallenged.

The first thing to notice is the endless use of “end” and variants on associated sounds. Ends, and, end, garden, endless, wet, ever, empty. Eh! That drab shoulder shrugging barely there eh sound resounds in these lines, their mushy muddiness of mood conveyed in the vagueness of that eh, whose opposite can be found in a happy Romantic poem like Wordsworth’s Daffodils, with its bright open vowels, sharp consonants, and exact rhymes. Note that Larkin’s submerged mood can only manage half rhymes, their not-quite-thereness conveying the poet’s self-protective evasion of clarity and sharpness in the face of an emotionally devastating landscape. This is not only the short-afternooned end of a year but the end of an entire humanly constructed world (and there’s more bombing to come). The sky to be sure is “endless,” but this isn’t the visionary firmament of the Romantics. It’s the infinite nothingness that hangs indifferently over an eviscerated, barely standing streetscape.

From roads where men go home I walk apart
–The buses bearing their loads away from works,
Through the dusk the bicycles coming home from bricks–
There evening like a derelict lorry is alone and mute.

“Men” sustains the eh music as this quatrain leads us further into the city, the poet maintaining his safe sense of non-implication in the distress of Coventry (“I walk apart”) as he observes the city’s demoralized unrushed rush hour. And note that the only “I,” the only human with agency in this stanza, is the poet. For the rest, objects – buses, bicycles, lorries – rather than human beings have presence and agency. People are merely the “loads” coming back from a day at the destroyed factories (or are the buses being used not for human transportation, but to transport fragments from the shattered works?), just as the poet in the vague dusk sees “bicycles coming home” from fallen bricks rather than people riding bicycles. The strange simile in the final line (evening is like a derelict lorry) puts one in mind of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land.

At the violet hour, when the eyes and back
Turn upward from the desk, when the human engine waits
Like a taxi throbbing waiting

This hideously mechanized world, with its armaments factories and its bombs raining down on the armament factories, reduces everything to faltering idling machines. And here the poet is implicated; he and the evening and the lorry are “alone and mute.”

These houses are deserted, felt over smashed windows,
No milk on the step, a note pinned to the door
Telling of departure: only shadows
Move when in the day the sun is seen for an hour,
Yet to me this decaying landscape has its uses:
To make me remember, who am always inclined to forget,
That there is always a changing at the root,
And a real world in which time really passes.

I’ve said so many times on this blog that poetry is our dreamworld, poetry marks the fact of our passing so much of our lives in dream, fantasy, unreality. The vista of Coventry forces upon the poet a salutary recognition of, a bracing awakening to, a real world in which time moves forward and dereliction happens. In a Paris Review interview, Larkin says:

I suppose everyone tries to ignore the passing of time: some people by doing a lot, being in California one year and Japan the next; or there’s my way — making every day and every year exactly the same. Probably neither works.

Larkin famously stayed in Hull most of his life and never married and never had children and held onto the same job – and this was his way of trying to make time stop. Instead of doing a lot, he did very little – and correctly noted that neither approach works.

So the coincidence of the big shift into a new year and the shock of a new, blasted Coventry has jolted the poet into recognitions he tries to avoid, and this is useful.

For sometimes it is shown to me in dreams
The Eden that all wish to recreate
Out of their living, from their favourite times;
The miraculous play where all the dead take part,
Once more articulate; or the distant ones
They will never forget because of an autumn talk
By a railway, an occasional glimpse in a public park,
Any memory for the most part depending on chance.

Simply an elaboration upon the dreamlife we live, in which time dies away and the dead are restored and even all the small random unforgettable encounters one has had over one’s life are reassembled and rehearsed.

And seeing this through that I know to be wrong,
Knowing by the flower the root that seemed so harmless
Dangerous; and all must take their warning
From those brief dreams of unsuccessful charms,
Their aloof visions of delight, where Desire
And Fear work hand-in-glove like medicals
To produce the same results. The bells
That we used to await will not be rung this year.

Like the poet who tries to maintain apartness as he walks through a setting that shrieks TIME CHANGE DERELICTION, we elaborate throughout our lives “aloof visions of delight,” where things never change (“the same results”). But this is “wrong.” Coventry Cathedral’s bells will not ring this year. It is a mute ruin.

So it is better to sleep and leave the bottle unopened;
Tomorrow in the offices the year on the stamps will be altered;
Tomorrow new diaries consulted, new calendars stand;
With such small adjustments life will again move forward
Implicating us all; and the voice of the living be heard:
“It is to us that you should turn your straying attention;
Us who need you, and are affected by your fortune;
Us you should love and to whom you should give your word.”

Forget the bubbly – no champagne this year. Just sleep. Changed time doesn’t need us to mark it – all the small, and all the large, alterations will happen regardless.

And now, in his final stanza, the poet admits his implication in all of this, the impossibility of aloofness: “life will again move forward / Implicating us all.” Very much like Derek Mahon’s famous “A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford,” Larkin will end by turning not to buses and lorries and bicycles and phantoms but to the actual people all of these things convey. Don’t evade us, with your straying attention, your “intricate evasions of as.” Write about us as we suffer time and dereliction – give us your word.

… joins UD in wishing
you a happy new year.

“[One female sexual desire questionnaire] consists of five yes-or-no questions that ‘…may be filled out by patients in the waiting room’. A scoring guide is provided. [Another] contains a long list of questions and a scoring system, but no information on interpreting the scores. It is apparently up to the clinician to determine who passes or fails. The researcher who published the questionnaire confirmed that there are no cut-off scores (Raymond Rosen, Ph.D., Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, personal communication).

The first question in [one] questionnaire asks, ‘Over the past 4 weeks, how often did you feel sexual desire or interest?’ and the patient is given options that range from ‘almost never or never’ to ‘almost always or always’. A woman who feels sexual desire for about 50% of her waking hours scores only 3 out of 5 on the first question. To score a 5, one must feel sexual desire ‘always or almost always’.”

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

Manfully they mount me, the pharma bros.

“Are you sure you feel the thrill
From the top of your head to your toes
Every moment? Take this pill
That we made for you, and no more know
The shame of two seconds that pass
Before you crave another piece of ass.”

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

“Treatments developed to enhance female libido, including the testosterone patch, Viagra (sildenafil), Libigel (a testosterone gel) and flibanserin, have all failed to obtain Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval.

Of these three, only flibanserin is still in the running. Flibanserin has been rejected twice. A failed antidepressant developed by Boehringer Ingelheim, flibanserin was recast as a treatment for hypoactive sexual desire disorder. In October 2010, after an FDA advisory committee concluded that there was little evidence that flibanserin increased libido and that the drug caused an unacceptable level of adverse effects, Boehringer Ingelheim abandoned developing the drug and sold it to Sprout Pharmaceuticals in 2011. In October 2013, the FDA denied Sprout Pharmaceuticals permission to market flibanserin. The company has resubmitted its application … ”

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

Manfully they mount the FDA, the pharma bros.

“How to lift the stigma of frigidity
From your drug approval committee?
We will mount and mount and mount
Until you grant approval to Sprout.
Nothing in your total rejection
Dims our lust for our disease-confection.”

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

“Fourteen [Continuing Medical Education] modules on hypoactive sexual desire disorder in women were identified. All were fully accredited CME modules, approved by a provider accredited by the Accreditation Council of CME. All 14 CME modules disclosed funding through educational grants by [the drug maker]. Additionally, 12 of 14 modules had at least one author with financial ties to [the drug maker].”

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

Manfully they mount the CMEs, the pharma bros.

“There is nothing we so adore
As your basic pharma whore.
With UD and the FDA
We put on a bogus display:
Compassion, social justice, fake research…
Ha! You’d ne’er besmirch
The essence of our pharma-fucks:
Pharma-lies for pharma-bucks.

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

(Great news! It’s been approved! A grateful nation breaks down the doors at Valeant ((that Valeant?)) to get it.)

[Trevone] Boykin was so aggressive that officers had to threaten use of a stun gun for him to calm down.

Texas Christian’s quarterback is totally ready for the Alamo Bowl day after tomorrow!

We can put a person on the moon, but we cannot figure out a way to revoke a medal.

In a July press conference, President Obama said he could not revoke the medal, which President George W. Bush awarded to Cosby in 2002. “There is no precedent for revoking the medal,” Obama said. “We don’t have the mechanism.”

But… Yes We Can. I just know we can.

For instance, here’s one possible mechanism which UD arrived at after hours of deep thought.

Send a letter from the President to Bill Cosby asking him to return the medal.

UD‘s nephew Andrew sends her this John Oliver clip about the NCAA.

The clip ends with the March Sadness video game, which features not only players, but coaches and administrators (the title of this post comes from the administrators part of the game).

A Jewish Week writer thinks about end of year charitable giving.

Yeshiva University president Richard Joel received a $1.6 million deferred compensation payout on top of his $738,180 salary despite the university’s $150 operating deficit…,

… I’m sure [Joel thinks he] is underpaid and doing the Lord’s work, but how many of [Yeshiva’s] contributors realize that their donations are going to pay salaries they could only dream of and bonuses that probably exceed their own income for at least this year if not more?

… UD proposes that George Washington University’s last president, Stephen Trachtenberg, volunteer to appear at his trial as a character witness.

In arguing that GW should not revoke the honorary degree it gave Cosby a few years ago, Trachtenberg wrote:

What good would it do to void Mr. Cosby’s diploma? Who actually celebrates it today? He is revealed and reviled… There is a rough charm to the proposal that we should recall our degree from Mr. Cosby, but it is a blunt instrument that does not do real justice to the dreadful challenge it seeks to address. It does not actually get to right. It provides no real comfort to the abused.

Mr. Cosby knows that we no longer esteem him. Everybody knows. He is down. He is out. The degree is as null and void as it can be. It is self-executing. However much he may deserve it, I am disinclined to kick him again to underscore our own virtue. It’s too easy.

And now some district attorney is about to kick him yet again! It seems to UD that the same language Trachtenberg has used to attack self-righteous people only interested in underscoring their own virtue can be used to attack the court for having arrested Cosby.

What good does it do to arrest Mr Cosby? Who actually celebrates him today? He is revealed and reviled… There is a rough charm to the proposal that we should haul the courts into this situation, but they are a blunt instrument that does not do real justice to the dreadful challenge [they seek] to address. It does not actually get to right. It provides no real comfort to the abused.

Mr. Cosby knows that we no longer esteem him. Everybody knows. He is down. He is out…. However much he may deserve it, I am disinclined to kick him again to underscore our own virtue. It’s too easy.

… you’d hit the bottle too.

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

[Darrell] Griffith’s boss, Dr. David Dunn, the executive vice president for health sciences and U of L’s top doctor, was placed on leave earlier this month pending the outcome of an FBI and campus investigation into whether he misused university funds.

What’s the craziest school in the world?
Clemson U Clemson U
What’s the nuttiest nut in this wonderful world?
Clemson U

Captain of US News
Lord of the fifty-yard line
Flyer of private planes
To get football’s finest to sign

Who’s the slimiest rat in the pack?
Clemson U Clemson U
Who’s unthinkable
(U!)
Who’s unsinkable?
(U!)
Whose existence is totally stinkable?
(U!)

… chronicled in this book, are entertaining places, and no doubt this new year we’ll continue following them at their most efficient, at the nation’s for-profit colleges.

But this country’s Centers for the Absorption of Corporate Funds deserve equal attention. Indeed these are arguably even more entertaining places, because while the federal government simply acts the well-meaning idiot as it dispenses hundreds of millions of dollars to hedgies pretending to run schools, corporations are often brilliant operators with bad motives — and it’s always more fascinating to watch the strategic villain than the bumbling good guy.

UD doesn’t claim that corporations looking for academic respectability in order, for instance, to hook America on opioids, always exhibit strategic brilliance. Crucially, they must identify research units within American universities able to balance compromised data (papers and presentations must uncover the urgent necessity plus the safety of massively increased pain pill intake) with the continued appearance of scientific integrity, a scheme fraught with difficulty. It’s not uncommon for reporters, and even politicians, to notice that a place like the University of Wisconsin’s Pain and Policy Studies Group is an almost wholly owned subsidiary of pharma, as it stashes away more and more OxyContin money while pumping out more and more Oxy Rocks! research.

Coca Cola, fast food, over-prescribed anti-depressants, over-prescribed anti-psychotics for toddlers, Dr. Shkreli’s Miracle Elixirs… All of these substances need whitewashing, and the university is where that happens. When things get too obvious, or when from the start they’re mishandled (remember what brought down Virginia’s last governor), the Centers suddenly shut down, or suddenly announce they’ve decided to stop taking corporate money…

More than this.

More on ASU.