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

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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.)

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The poem is from his Sequels to an Uncollected Winter.

4. The Certainties

Coon Rapids, Minnesota. January 1976

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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.

Lunch.

Is authentic tragedy, as George Steiner has argued, dead in the modern world? Do we overuse the word, attaching it to routine or random bad events, etc?

Scathing Online Schoolmarm says: Say what you will about the fate of the tragic in our time — When you happen on a headline that truly does describe, with chilling concision, a tragedy, you’re called upon to take note.

From today’s LA Times:

Euripides! Thou should’st be living at this hour.

Et in terra Pax homes in on us.

Mr UD‘s out panic shopping with the rest of ‘thesda; UD is au Metro on her way back from a meeting in Foggy Bottom; La Kid is at work. We’ve all got that vague hunched feeling that goes along with anticipating lost power and falling trees.

Of course for UD this is all ultimately about racing over to the nearest hotel, pulling multiple sheets blankets and throws from a kingsize bed, jumping in, ordering room service, and firing up the MacBook.

Mr UD will be all disapproval: Life is for meeting strenuous character tests like staying in dark cold houses with falling trees.

… says Buck Mulligan of troubled, brilliant Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses.

Robert Trivers, who describes himself as “one of the greatest social theorists in evolutionary biology alive, period,” seems a pretty impossible person, and his restless, aggressive ways with the world seem to be getting worse as he gets older. To the point where his employer, Rutgers University, has now suspended him (with pay, but they might be on their way to suspending him without pay). His department asked him to teach a course he did not want to teach, and he complained about this – to his class – so unpleasantly that he was removed.

This fascinating 2005 profile in the Guardian recounts Trivers’ long struggle with mental illness; his self-wounding insistence on picking fights with other people in the various fields in which he works; and his Morrissey-like self-regard.

He reminds UD – based on the little she’s read about him – of Larry Kramer. Both seem permanently pissed off moral purists. And although it’s not much fun for anyone – the purist or the purist’s targets – to be around people like this, they sometimes turn out to make enormous contributions to the world by being the way they are.

Trivers is seventy, and Rutgers no doubt decided they could wait him out. Rutgers no doubt figured that by the time Trivers got really problematic, he’d be on the verge of retirement. But – again, like Kramer, who has, against immense odds, made it to 78 – Trivers continues rolling along nicely. His belligerence-flame burns brightly.

Guys like these – guys like Kramer and Trivers – are powerful rebukes to Buddhism. Apparently you can thrive on anger.

As are many sexual harassment lawsuits, complaints, stories… This is one reason UD tends not to report them… They’re often a real mess.

This one at Northwestern now has a suit (against the university) and another suit (against local news outlets), and what actually happened between this student and the professor she claims harassed her? She does not seem to have filed a report with the police.

I cover this latest NU mess because I covered (a little) the Colin McGinn mess, and because there’s another mess in the philosophy department at the University of Colorado right now, and a larger messy discussion being carried on nationally about philosophy as a particularly sexism-ridden academic field.

Because it’s a major American university, and Ludlow’s an important philosopher, and the student’s lawsuit is a real whopper, this story will probably be pretty big. University Diaries will have to take note.

In a scientific culture that values quantity over quality charges of plagiarism should be neither surprising nor unbelievable. The obsessive drive to publish, to garner as many references and citations as possible, is extremely unhealthy. Quantity has become the enemy of quality and individual responsibility. I am always amazed when scientists and authors boast (or have others boast for them) about their CVs containing hundreds of publications. In my opinion this should be considered a badge of shame. The author is, essentially, admitting that he or she is willing to take credit for work for which he or she has had no involvement.

But big guns like Thomas Luscher are western culture’s last true heroes! Onward they ride, on the backs of their lessers, to glory!

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The Charge of the Write Brigade

Half a league, half a league,
Half a league onward,
All in the valley of Theft
Wrote the six hundred.
“Forward, the Write Brigade!
Ghost for the big guns!” he said:
Into the valley of Theft
Wrote the six hundred.

Yet another professor allows himself to be reduced to a low-level Stasi operative.

From the extensive official directives issued to students in a class at the University of Santa Clara:

(b) When in class, you may not disturb me or your classmates with irrelevant computer or phone activities.
(c) Examples of violations: watching videos, checking Facebook, texting, playing games, doing anything related to your phone, or walking in late yet talking loudly while getting settled.

L.R. 4.1 Penalties for violation:
(i) For each violation of L.R. 4, points will be deducted from the 200 “professionalism” points available this term. (That is the same value as your revised CF2 memo.)
(ii) I dislike public shaming, but to encourage professional behavior, when I observe impermissible conduct I will announce a reminder about the problem. I will also note the student(s) involved, and later email notice of how many points were lost.

It’s pretty clear that this professor spends most of his prep time drawing up class conduct contracts, and most of his actual class time calculating demerits. The simple expedient of banning laptops and phones seems not to have occurred to him. As it is, he’s well on his way toward becoming a higher-level operative.

The talk is called “The Effects of Sins” by an external lecturer called Ustadh Abu Ibrahim. He appears to be no firebrand, espousing moderate views that wouldn’t sound out of place in any mosque, church or temple. At the end, he stresses that the women at the back should be allowed to ask questions. “You have to be fair to the sisters,” he tells his audience.

So generous of him. All the way in the back, the sisters… They should be allowed to talk.

… bag.

The Oshkosh campus of the University of Wisconsin is number one among the nation’s colleges and universities, according to this guy, for alcohol-related arrests among its students.

The schools of the state of Wisconsin – famed for its hearty drinking culture – do well across the board for drug and alcohol related naughtiness (see the last chart on this page).

The rector of Kosovo’s state university Ibrahim Gashi resigned on Saturday following protests by students over reports [that Gashi and other] professors had forged academic works.

This is how it works; this is how hugely corrupt countries and their institutions slowly become less corrupt. Those students hit the streets every day and got tear gassed for one reason: They were disgusted to live in a country where mindless political hacks get jobs running universities, where the position of head of a university is nothing but a political perk.

I mean, they might as well be living in Alabama.

So — under immense pressure from outraged students the hack has fled. Bravo.