Time to build a $173 million basketball arena!

Interview with Timothy Delasandro, Republican candidate, Texas House of Representatives.

Q On your website, you offer a chance to win an AR-15 in exchange for a $12 contribution. Even in a culture pretty heavy into guns, isn’t this a little over the top, pretty close to pandering?

A I wouldn’t say pandering, but we do want to put our credentials on the Second Amendment out there. So, yes, we’re trying to make a statement. If you want to talk about Second Amendment issues, I support open carry, which the current incumbent didn’t co-sponsor during the last session. I support campus carry. And while the incumbent did vote for that, since then he’s had a couple statements where he’s been more ambiguous about that and says he wants to listen to the presidents of the universities more. So I wouldn’t say we’re pandering, we’re just trying to make a statement.

Q It’s a pretty wild website of yours, with you firing that AR-15.

A Well, that’s the point. And you’ve got the incumbent who is in Texas Monthly for saying that ping pongs kill more people than guns. We are trying to show there is a difference in records.

Q Are you getting lots of feedback?

A We are getting lots of feedback. We have it on Facebook as well. What we hear the most is, “Is that legal?” If you click on it and look at the small print, you can do an entry by mail for free, so you don’t have to contribute to enter. We gave a 12-gauge shotgun away earlier. One of the Baylor University students won it right before Christmas. It was actually funny. The day he won it, his dad posted on our Facebook page that “This is so cool. My son doesn’t have to figure out what to get me for Christmas now!”

Tajikistan wigs out.

… James Joyce.

Higgledy piggledy
Natalie Higley’s
Wanted for theft
Of unusual things.

Hand saws and tractors and
Lumber extraneous…
And they’ve charged her with RICO
‘Cause she worked in a ring.

(UD thanks polisciprof.)

… at the University of Nebraska, where he continues to be lionized online. You’d think that university would rouse itself to remove their we love richie page – not only because he was a vile bully while at Nebraska, but because he’s now an international object of contempt. (They let him play there for two years before – under the pressure of his incredible behavior – letting him go. But if you Google his name and the word Nebraska, you find that the university cannot bring itself to take down his official hagiography.)

(A walk down memory lane with Nebraska’s “little puppy” and his similarly “intense” fellow Husker, Dominic Raiola.)

And here’s Richie today:

It’s tempting to say something far-reaching and wide-ranging about The Game and how its structure and mores retard human development. It’s tempting to indict the league and the Dolphins for continuing a tradition of slipshod treatment of mental-health issues through their lack of follow-up after [Jonathan] Martin was treated for depression last spring. It’s more than tempting to take one last run at excoriating Incognito for his seemingly sociopathic behavior and its ability to flow seamlessly through the daily routines of NFL life.

… Incognito was the “team” guy, right? Member of the Leadership Council, bell cow for the offensive line, self-appointed hardener of the soft, he comes across in the report as a terribly divisive man whose bizarre and disgusting behavior cost the team a starting offensive lineman and subjected it to a phenomenal amount of unwanted scrutiny.

… [Jonathan] Martin’s feelings of inadequacy seemed to stem in large part from his academic success. An upper-middle-class black man with a run of good schools in his background, he was looked upon skeptically, as someone who might commit the unforgivable offense (in Incognito’s world) of having more than one thought running through his head at any given time. Martin wrote, “I mostly blame the soft schools I went to, which fostered within me a feeling that I’m a huge p—y, as I never got into fights.”

Martin’s upbringing stifled him, rendered him speechless amid the hypersexual, hypervulgar, hyperracial world of the Dolphins’ locker room, and it underscored a point worth considering: Education is not always a valued commodity in the NFL. It can be looked upon with derision, as a sign that its owner lacks a certain desperation needed to succeed. Martin might be the first person to express shame at having a Stanford education.

Nebraska will never truly repudiate its Jim Jones, the Dolphins “team guy” who brought to a university everything that “retards human development.”

As this professor quickly discovered, Nebraska, like Sandusky’s Penn State, is a cult. It continues its masochistic worship of mad sons of bitches. It is a university dedicated to blitzing the capacity to think.

Only in America.

Commentary on the release of the Richie Incognito investigation’s results.

What did you think you were watching all these years? What did you think football was?

… The report over and over again mentions the workplace, and what is appropriate in the workplace. Well, what do these men do for work, at their workplace? “Not an ordinary workplace,” as the report’s conclusion, doesn’t quite cover it. The employees slam into people running at them, over and over again. Sometimes they slam into someone’s upper body, and sometimes they go for the legs. In their free time, when they’re not slamming into others, they train, so that they can weigh more, with more muscle and less body fat, for the next time they slam into others.

Of course UD has no objection to American football. People like freak shows. Let them have them. Just get it out of our universities.

LOL. Only the best writers manage to make their point in this elegant off-hand final phrase of the sentence way. Scathing Online Schoolmarm says: BRAVO.

**********************
Perkins, by the way, has the floor (post-Kristallnacht) and clearly intends to use it. Here is his latest proposal.

In order to vote, he proposed, everyone should have to have paid at least $1 in taxes.

“And those who have paid a million dollars in taxes,” he continued, “should have a million votes.”

He said later he was just kidding, but the comment has hit the airwaves hard (sample headline: TOM PERKINS CALLS FOR END TO UNIVERSAL SUFFRAGE).

This idea of his – a million points of votes – for some reason reminds me of a proposal UD herself has put forward for years, but no one will listen to her. It came to her one summer morning as Les UDs were crossing the long, long Chesapeake Bay Bridge on their way to Rehoboth Beach.

Instead of each car paying whatever it is – ten, fifteen dollars – to cross the Bay, UD proposes that each car pay fifty thousand dollars. During the time the car is on the bridge, this money will be invested. (High-speed computers.) When the car gets to the end of the bridge, if the investment has paid off or broken even, all the money will be returned to the driver. Any profit will go toward maintenance of the bridge.

… turns into homicide.

… Ohio State.

… Male Homosocial Desire.

(UD wrote and posted this poem a few years ago. She thought she’d re-post it.)

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

THE ABSOLUTE

“Listen – I love you in the most absolute sense possible.”
– Iris Murdoch, letter to Raymond Queneau, 1952.

Listen! Of all the senses of love, the most absolute
Is this one, where I’m young and you’re older, married,
And we drift through cities foreign to us both,
Cities still ruined, and speak French,
And stand on bridges trembling over foul water.

After you die, I affect a calm farewell:
He was a natural, absolute philosopher –
Some statement of the sort was expected of me.
But listen. In the most absolute sense possible,
Love pulses and pulses and pulses.

What? Sweet winsome university football a commercial enterprise?

So the National Labor Relations Board hearings on the Northwestern University football team’s proposal to form a union have just gotten under way, and we already have our first howler.

Here it is, from the mouth of Northwestern’s vice president for university relations, Alan K. Cubbage: “We do not regard, and have never regarded, our football program as a commercial enterprise.” OK, Alan, but you may be the only ones who don’t. How, exactly, is an entity that sells tickets to its events — not to mention the national TV rights to broadcast those events — not engaging in commerce?

The University of Mississippi keeps discovering mass graves on its property. They seem to have been the unmarked burials of various groups of people. For instance, inmates at a mental asylum that used to be on the land.

“[T]hose buried on the plot could [also] include tuberculosis patients, former slaves, and Civil War casualties.”

It’s a complex, delicate, and expensive problem. The university had wanted to build a parking lot on this land (that’s why they’d been digging); those plans are now shelved as administrators consider how to deal respectfully with the bodies.

Before we look at a very good
snow poem, by G.E. Murray,
here’s a picture La Kid
just took of UD‘s morning
handiwork: A path through the snow
from our house to the street.

(She took it through a window,
etc., etc., so it’s a bit vague.)

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

The poem is from his Sequels to an Uncollected Winter.

4. The Certainties

Coon Rapids, Minnesota. January 1976

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

Point One, pretty much all poets say the same thing about snow. Wind they’re divided about; rain can be new life or dreadful dullness, sunlight happiness or oppression… But snow for most is clearly death, the world whited out to reveal whether we like it or not “what’s really always there / Unresting death,” as Philip Larkin writes (not about snow, but same idea).

“All poems are elegies at their core, [Maxine Kumin] often said.”

So Murray’s poem, with its long lines drifting like the cattle, drifting like us into dangerous thoughts while we look at the snow, does that same death thing, follows the snow as it snakes toward a truth about the certainty of our oblivion. We’re kept animals, set adrift by the weather in the direction of morbid thoughts. The real animals, sad things, are indeed adrift, doomed to starve or freeze as they wander; we are figuratively driven from warm complacent ordinary thoughts by what’s happening outside. We get to stay in – truly kept animals – and from our windows watch the merest “residue of soul” that shows itself in expelled breath. And this tells us how at any moment we are, whatever the weather, barely existent, hanging on by a thread.

the hung
Bellies of cows lunge through drifts forming whale tracks, inching
Ahead, the beasts hopeful as drifters at the hiring gate.

Hung and lunge: This is an unrhymed but lightly metered poem with plenty of internal rhyme or near rhyme. Its mood is the ominous feel of being unmoored, so tight exact rhyme wouldn’t do; but on the other hand the poem’s not ultimately about random drift. It has both a nuanced parallel between animals and human beings to express, and a familiar trajectory to trace toward a familiar conclusion. So despite its snow drifts, the poem exhibits a certain solidity of form – all those long lines, more or less the same length.

The famous final paragraph of Joyce’s “The Dead” is the prose cousin of “The Certainties.”

A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, on the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

Murray writes:

Night-hammered,
Blizzard-ripe, we wait by the window with house plants, our fears
Nearly realized, a salt lick of faith turning to stone in our bowels.

Wonderful final lines, pulling forward the parallel with the beasts. We wake up having been hammered all night with snow, and we wait by the window with house plants and I ask myself why is house plants so brilliant? Why is that little phrase the genius, the elegiac core of this poem? Why in the world does it make me think of that song from Hair that starts

We starve, look at one another, short of breath
Walking proudly in our winter coats

I guess it’s one of those existential status lines – We, we, we. Let us look starkly, in the clarifying snow, at us, the human race, in a corporate, spiritual, sense. Our fragility, isolation, transience, efforts to continue to exist. Our cattle-like hopefulness despite our doom… On we walk, proudly, in our winter coats, despite gasping, starving…

The house plants are the perfect pathos-example. The poignant pathetic way we bring small doses of nature in, keep these teeny therapeutic helpings warm so they thrive. Kept things for kept us. They keep our delusions of safety alive. Except that now, with so much snow, our fears are very close to realized.