… Fangor.

… an EU citizen.

Well, yes. We all do.

The Bible thing allows you to differentiate between West Virginia University, where locals call Morgantown “a drinking town with a football problem,” and Baylor, which seems to have low rates of alcohol consumption, but shares UWV’s burning commitment to recruiting the best players regardless of, er, violent propensities.

At both schools there’s an unsettling conflation of football and the school’s spirit of choice (alcohol, God). And at both schools, whether they regard their players as Christian Soldiers or Frat Boys on Steroids, violence appears to be totally okay.

Goes without saying that guns and gangs (Baylor’s home, Waco, is in the headlines for biker/police shoot-outs) make up much of the rest of the social fabric at these locations.

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And don’t forget sex. Nobody competes with the University of Montana and Grizzlyville (used to be Missoula, but the football team is the Grizzlies) for broad-shouldered sexual assault. But Baylor’s in there trying.

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Anyone with the intestinal fortitude to examine the deep structure of Baylor – as in, how do you actually produce places like Baylor and Waco? – will tend to gravitate toward the school’s board of trustees, where a Bobby Lowder-like figure name of Buddy Jones seems to run the school and the town.

Buddy’s real enthusiastic about Baylor. Back in 2012, when they won a few games and all, his response was this:

“We like to use biblical analogies, and this is a year of biblical proportions,” Buddy Jones, a regent at the university, told the New York Times in 2012. “As we would say in Christendom, it’s like an early rapture.”

When his vision of the proper role of the booster was threatened by the alumni association, Jones (then chairman of the board of trustees) wrote to a fellow zealot that he couldn’t wait to

put on camp (sic) and load my weapons and go hunting for BAA game. Licking my chops.

Buddy’s official trustee statement has a rapturous boy/girl thing going to explain the nature of the school:

“Baylor’s uniqueness is her commitment to quality higher education by adapting to the 21st century, while never straying from her deep roots in God’s word and her role in his plan for mankind.”

Was Buddy the genius behind the groom’s cake at his daughter’s wedding?

[The cake was] an edible replica of Baylor’s … new stadium with a saluting bear in the middle. But perhaps the most impressive part of the cake is the video screen, which looks like it actually works. At the very least, it had a light in it that gave the illusion of working.

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So much of this comes together this Saturday night, when a match-up between two of the nation’s scummiest football schools – LSU and Bama – will feature a political candidate’s prostitutes and patriots ad. Layers upon layers upon layers.

… So blogging will be later today.

The New York Times has contacted UD for more information about Wojciech Fangor, the Polish painter who died last week at 92.

So who knows. Maybe some of her memories will appear not only on Radio Poland, but in the NYT. UD would like that.

…agogy.

“The basic rationale for [Cairo University’s] decision [to ban the face veil for its instructors] was the allegation that the niqab prevents communication with students, and in fact this claim is not scientifically true. It is known that communication depends not only on facial expressions, but there are many aspects to the means of communication, including verbal communication and nonverbal communication through … hand gestures, feet positions, standing or sitting, in addition to facial expressions and eye contact.”

… cheaters.

Beware the B-School Boys.

All the way down (and I mean way down) the line, Noah Feldman’s defense of basically accepting any applicant for law school follows the talking points of the scummy for-profit colleges.

Law school has always had a shaky time thinking of itself as flying at a similar altitude to med school, but as the profession downsizes, and schools like UD‘s own George Washington University, for instance, start stealing students from American University, while Georgetown University steals students from GW, things are really moving toward the death spiral.

Feldman’s argument against the “infantilization” of people who want to assume $200,000 in debt to law school (even though their scores and grades make it obvious they won’t be good students and will either drop out with lots of debt or will fail to get a job that will allow them to repay the debt) is just as inspiring as Corinthian College’s spokespeople who for all the years it was in existence (it was recently forced to shut down its federal-tax-syphon operation) remonstrated against us for the same thing: How dare you, in an America founded on personal liberty and Horatio Alger etc etc etc how DARE you keep every person who fantasizes that she can be a lawyer from going to law school and sticking the American taxpayer with their loans? Our law schools are heroically reaching down into non-traditional places (the for-profits, for instance, hang out at homeless shelters and sign people up) and finding the inspiring social activists of this country’s future…

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Feldman argues that “A standardized test score, taken alone, shouldn’t determine your future.” Hell yeah!

But no school accepts students merely on the basis of their scores… Jordan Weissmann is even unpleasant enough here to suggest that Feldman’s “very much arguing against a straw man” throughout his essay…

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Feldman teaches at Harvard and is very worried that schools like his will be “accused of elitism and denial of opportunity” if they don’t override the conspiratorial pope-like “infallible admissions process” with its oligarchical buttressing of this country’s evil “technocratic elite.”

Thank God this doesn’t come anywhere near describing the Harvard of today, and thank God Feldman’s right there to make sure nothing like that happens in the future.

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UPDATE: Paul Campos, a friend of this blog, adds this:

[Feldman] ignores the rules under which law schools are actually required to operate. ABA-accredited law schools have something close to a complete monopoly on qualifying American students to sit for state bar exams (California is the major exception), and in order to be an ABA law school, you at least in theory have to abide by the organization’s rules of accreditation, which both forbid schools from admitting students who don’t appear capable of passing the bar, and threaten with de-accreditation schools that have insufficiently high bar passage rates.

… Bar exams, ABA rules, and indeed law schools themselves are all designed as barriers to entry. This is especially true of law schools, which require people to invest three years and many hundreds of thousands of dollars in direct and opportunity costs after acquiring an undergraduate degree, before their graduates even have the right to try to take the bar exam. Now the public-regarding justification for these barriers is, not surprisingly, to protect the public from incompetent and/or crooked lawyers. Nowhere in his piece does Feldman even allude to this core regulatory function.

… going, plus his recent New Republic piece is a more than worthy addition to one of UD‘s most popular categories, Beware the B-School Boys. Gets a bit preachy at the end (“When a person’s worth is determined only by money, only by success as it is and can be monetized, when one has no sense of being without the BMW, the Rolex, the Armani suits, the yacht, etc, the moral flabbiness emerges. Indeed, it engulfs entire organizations and perhaps even entire societies.”), but one does tend to zoom out in one’s final paragraph…

[The idea that] the only duty of a corporation is return on investment [has now been] drilled into generations of business school graduates… [Further,] evidence suggests that not only are business students more impaired in their moral judgments in a broader sense than are those in other majors and professional schools, but that business schools themselves may be responsible.

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SCHOOL FOR SCANDAL: UD has long argued that this would be a wonderful new motto for Wharton.

The previous prime minister, ardent Monarchist Tony Abbott, reintroduced knighthoods in a shock announcement in March 2014, without consulting his cabinet colleagues, some of whom told the media, with typical Aussie bluntness, that the move was “fucking stupid”.

UD knew she’d love the Sheldon Silver trial. And this is only the first day.

… here.

Click on the icon.

But who cares? Those of us who want the obscene endowments of schools like Harvard Yale and Princeton seriously spent down will take our allies where we can. And UD thinks Reynolds is serious about these specific things:

We should eliminate the tax deductibility of contributions to schools having endowments in excess of $1 billion. At some point, as our president has said, you’ve made enough money. That won’t end all major donations to the Ivy League, but it will doubtless encourage donors to look at less wealthy and more deserving schools, such as Northern Kentucky University, recently deemed “more inspirational than Harvard” in the London Times Higher Education magazine.

We should require that all schools with endowments over $1 billion spend at least 10% of their endowment annually on student financial aid. That will make it easier for less wealthy students to attend elite institutions.

A regent here, an athletic director there, has hold of the reality of the University of Hawaii football program.

The University of Hawaii Athletics Department’s budget, which is projected to lose as much as $3 million in [2014], may not be big enough to support a Division I program, a member of the university’s Board of Regents said Thursday.

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The University of Hawaii’s football program may shut down as a result of tough financial conditions, athletic director Ben Jay said at a [2014] Board of Regents meeting Monday afternoon.

The AD was fired (at UH, they’re always getting fired) not long after he said this, and we haven’t heard a peep out of the trustee since he uttered those discouraging words.

Got to keep up the fantasy, even as UH’s last game (58-7 home loss) was played in a close to empty stadium and has issued in the expensive firing of yet another coach (at UH, they’re always getting fired).

Got to build a new stadium.

The university [recently] unveiled … renderings of a proposed 30,000-seat multi-purpose stadium to be built at an unnamed site at an estimated cost of $165 million and $190 million.

With the latest loss and the latest firing, UH’s football program, argues one observer, has hit “truly rock bottom.” But UH’s ability to dig deeper into deficit and depravity every year (watch that new stadium project take off) tells us that there are still plenty of moveable rocks above the bottom. UH can dig much, much farther before it actually encounters the abyss.

If, in the world of university football, one can even talk of an abyss.

It’s been difficult, probably because, as Nadezhda Mandelstam writes, “The fear that goes with the writing of verse is about … our mysterious awe in the face of existence.”

Frightening poems don’t typically narrate frightening things. That’s Stephen King’s job. They’re more about evoking one human being’s basic awe/terror at being itself.

And while this is scarier than a prom queen with telekinetic powers, it’s also harder to convey.

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Here’s the winner of UD‘s Scariest Poem contest. It’s by Weldon Kees.

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Homage to Arthur Waley

Seattle weather: it has rained for weeks in this town
The dampness breeding moths and a gray summer.
I sit in the smoky room reading your book again,
My eyes raw, hearing the trains steaming below me
In the wet yard, and I wonder if you are still alive.
Turning the worn pages, reading once more:
“By misty waters and rainy sands, while the yellow dusk thickens.”

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It’s a moment. A passing moment only, but one profoundly under construction for awhile, during those weeks of Seattle rain. You move through a gray mothy setting like that for weeks without responding much, but it’s working on you latently; within you the Seattle rain has been guttering and muttering, until a random moment comes when you’re sitting around reading a book and the morbid stream suddenly finds an outlet.

Since you’re recording a brief moment, a flash of fear, your poem will be brief. Since you’re conveying your flinty emotionally suppressed modern consciousness, you’re going to write casually and neutrally, as if sketching a few notes: Seattle weather: — That colon after the phrase tells the reader You’re not getting expansive descriptive lyrics out of me. If you want Romantic brooding upon damp weather, read Wordsworth.

Indeed, breeding moths and gray summer echoes T.S. Eliot’s Waste Land: breeding lilacs out of the dead land. But Kees’ later modernism will dispense even with the ironically recycled motifs of Romanticism (lilacs) that you find in Eliot.

On the poem’s title, by the way: You and I probably have no idea who Arthur Waley might be; he could be a fiction, like the fictive personality “Robinson” who appears in many Kees poems… But the poet will conclude the poem with a line apparently taken from the work of Waley, so maybe he’s real. Don’t know yet.

This poem is an homage, and on top of that, it’s a direct address to this Arthur Waley: reading your book. And reading it again. Like the Seattle rain, that book has been working on the poet. He reads its “worn pages” repeatedly.

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This is also a claustrophobic poem. Driven in by incessant rain, the poet exhibits a double interiority – he’s inside a room, and he’s inside a book. His dialogue is with a fellow writer, a specter – “I wonder if you are still alive.” He is talking to words on a page, or to a ghostly projection of whoever wrote those words. The larger nimbus of obscurity he’s evoking throughout the poem (“smoky room”) deepens yet more the sense that we’re in a mysterious and somehow malign world in which people are driven in on themselves.

“My eyes raw” – The only dry things in this poem are the poet’s eyes as he reads and reads the worn pages. The world storms without; within, the poet, in a protective, banked-in mode, reduced to mere debilitated sight, seeks repeatedly to focus on poetic fragments that seem to convey something of great value to him.

The “trains steaming” in the “wet yard” are let’s say the poet’s fevered – angry? – consciousness rolling through a hopelessly mysterious outer world.

I wonder if you are still alive. In the pulled-back, depressive, barely-there atmosphere of this poem, that line can be read not merely as a direct address to Waley’s ghost, but as self-inquiry. Am I still alive? (For readers who know about Kees’ mysterious last days – or were they his last? did he commit suicide? his body was never found – this line will be especially eerie.)

Now, with his last line, Kees quotes directly from the text he keeps rereading:

By misty waters and rainy sands, while the yellow dusk thickens.

Let’s look that up, shall we?

Waley was indeed a real person, an important translator of Asian poetry, and part of the Bloomsbury set. Ezra Pound was among the first to publish his translations. He was also a close friend, as it happens, of T.S. Eliot. (The woman with whom Waley spent his life is described, wonderfully, as “the veteran of three failed Platonic and vegetarian liaisons.”) Kees’ final line, the line that gathers up the symbolic hints of his poem and takes them to a conclusion, is taken from one of the poems Waley translated.

Doubly interiorized, intersubjective, interpoetic on three different levels (Waley is himself translating the work of yet another poet), intercultural (west and east), intertextual… Homage to Arthur Waley‘s got it all if you’re looking for ontological creepiness, for a fully evoked sense of the frightening convolution of the world, the self, and other selves. (Want more? Don’t even go there…) With great recurrent effort, the poet begins to sense and admire (“homage”) the capacity of Waley’s rendering of his own ghostly poetic precursor’s effort to articulate the horrible ominous fact of the curtain of the world becoming more, not less, occluded (“My eyes raw” – those rainy sands making the yellow dusk are throwing sand in the poet’s eyes) as we mature toward the end of our existence. The yellow dusk thickens. Life narrows. The veil of rain darkens.

There’s nothing like the prison experience! And once you’ve bribed your way there, you’re going to want the inside scoop on la vie carcérale!

Fortunately, a special seminar is available on “prison conditions and correctional issues,” and one of New York State’s scads of political criminals wants to delay serving his sentence so he can attend this seminar and be as academically prepared for jail as possible. However:

A federal judge in suburban White Plains has rejected Malcolm Smith’s request to delay his seven-year sentence so he could attend a seminar on living behind bars.

Bummer. He’s going to have to go in there without any training.

Maybe they have an online version of the course!