… would definitely be weird and embarrassing, but this is America, where anything is possible.
On the other hand, this is also the land of evil elites who might try to deny bogus degree-holders the right to represent legitimate universities in state politics…
Carol Ammons is running in Illinois to be the Democratic nominee for the House of Representatives in the 103rd District, home of the University of Illinois. Ammons is quite sure all this talk about her Walsingham University degree being bogus amounts to “the elites” smearing her for being a woman of the people, but so far, try as he might, Erik Jakobsson has not been able to find any evidence that Walsingham is anything other than a scam.
“When I thought about the relationship between what she had done and the possibility that she would represent the district that has Parkland College and the University of Illinois in it, that seemed to me to transcend politics as usual,” he said.
… “One of the reasons I feel so strongly about this is because I’ve spent my whole career at the university, and diploma mills totally undercut and undermine and devalue what real institutions of higher education do, like Parkland and the University of Illinois. We just can’t have someone in Springfield who doesn’t value that.”
… interpreter.
Jeet Thayil’s The Heroin Sestina.
***************
What was the point of it? The stoned
life, the chased, snorted, shot life. Some low
comedy with a cast of strangers. Time
squashed flat. The 1001 names of heroin
chewed like language. Nothing now to know
or remember but the dirty taste
of it, and the names: snuff, Death, a little taste,
H — pronounce it etch —, sugar, brownstone,
scag, the SHIT, ghoda gaadi, #4 china, You-Know,
garad, god, the gear, junk, monkey blow,
the law, the habit, material, cheez, heroin.
The point? It was the wasted time,
which comes back lovely sometimes,
a ghost sense say, say that hard ache taste
back in your throat, the warm heroin
drip, the hit, the rush, the whack, the stone.
You want it now, the way it lays you low,
flattens everything you know
to a thin white line. I’m saying, I know
the pull of it: the skull rings time
so beautiful, so low
you barely hear it. Itch this blind toad taste.
When you said, “I mean it, we live like stones,”
you broke something in me only heroin
could fix. The thick sweet amaze of heroin,
helpless its love, its know-
ledge of the infinite. Why push the stone
back up the hill? Why not leave it with the time-
keep, asleep at the bar? Try a little taste
of something sweet that a sweet child will adore, low
in the hips where the aches all go. Allow
me in this one time and I’ll give you heroin,
just a taste
to replace the useless stuff you know.
Some say it comes back, the time,
to punish you with the time you killed, leave you stone
sober, unknowing, the happiness chemical blown
from your system, unable to taste the word heroin
without wanting its stone one last time.
*****************
Let’s walk (drift?) through it, thinking about heroin.
First: a sestina! Note the repeated final words from stanza to stanza (with a few variations): heroin, taste, know, low, time, stone. Circling around again and again to those words conveys the obsessive ritual nature of the addiction dance itself, the getting-nowhere, time squashed flat, everything you know flattened to a thin white line recurrency of using. But also: Our sense as we read of the mental burdens the form imposes gives us access to the oppressive intellectual puzzle that generates the poem itself: Why would anyone inject heroin? Low, dirty, Death, junk, wasted…
Or, as Jeff Deeny writes:
The addicting substance is characterized as “cunning, baffling and powerful.” It sounds like a cliché until someone with more than two decades clean, with a beautiful family and a career that is the envy of the world trades it in for a glassine envelope of dope and a set of works.
The speaker of the poem, a former user still drawn – by the mere invocation of the word heroin – to the drug, poses the question. Why trade death for life? So the poem is a typical lyric in that it represents one musing consciousness questioning (insistently, repeatedly, and not very productively; hence the sestina choice) itself. Why did I do that? Why do I still want to?
The bizarre but familiar answer the poem provides is that a lot of people really like – adore – feeling dead. They find irresistibly seductive the idea of Stop the World I Want to Get Off. If you are astounded by something as massive as propofol – a drug “used exclusively by anesthesiologists” being in Michael Jackson’s blood, you should consider that fatal doses of propofol are the logical extension – given enough money and the capacity to find ways around rules – of the I Want to Be Dead idea.
Time squashed flat. Wasted time.
the way it lays you low,
flattens everything you know
to a thin white line. I’m saying, I know
the pull of it: the skull rings time
so beautiful, so low
you barely hear it.
… When you said, “I mean it, we live like stones,”
you broke something in me only heroin
could fix. The thick sweet amaze of heroin,
helpless its love, its know-
ledge of the infinite. Why push the stone
back up the hill?
Sisyphean life is one damn thing after another. Pushing the stone up the hill. A meaningless suffering that simply persists – deepens – until time ends it with our physical deaths. But if we end time? Heroin takes us into a strange micro and macro reality: It reduces everything in the world to itself, its thin white line, the immediacy for the user of the particular works he’s manipulating when he’s using. But heroin at the same time expands the universe out to infinity. It takes away our small painful one stone after another wretchedly individual lives and gives us instead a skull in which the flame of time and the self has been radically lowered, to the point where, subdued as specific suffering time-bound beings, our immortal souls (if you like) rise to the ether of the cosmic, the infinite, the non-human. Heroin isn’t death; it’s the glorious sensation of liberating oneself into non-being. As in Doris Lessing’s story To Room Nineteen:
delightfully, darkly, sweetly, letting herself slide gently, gently, to the edge of the river
So sweet is the thick amaze, the user risks being
unable to taste the word heroin
without wanting its stone one last time
[T]he fiasco over locker-room bullying between the Miami Dolphins’ Jonathan Martin and Richie Incognito reminded everyone this season how eccentric football now is culturally — not because of a hidden health problem, but just in its explicit, inherent violence. The battle fought in the press between the players’ “sources” unveiled football as a dark, subterranean hive of old-school warrior values and character-building sadism. Taunts and racial imprecations were openly justified, the way military floggings once were: as salutary hide-tougheners.
It’s funny to watch jock schools like Colorado and Chapel Hill hyperventilate about their integrity when football, in all its dark subterranean hiviness, is such an important part of their institutions.
This blog has duly chronicled several sadistic university football coaches (basketball too, of course, but we don’t want this post to get too long) – men who, with each new revelation of their treatment of players, get fired and then passed off to a new school.
Maybe football should be spun out and – in accordance with its actual nature – made just one more non-academic bloodsport:
It is interesting how the increasingly popular spectacle of mixed martial arts (MMA) competition so quickly secured a perimeter of social acceptance for itself. MMA is not only violent; it is violence. But the risks are blatant enough for us not to pity the competitors. (Their locker rooms are probably pretty crude places, too.) Football players, by contrast, are not supposed to be pure, uncivilized instruments of brutality. They are supposed to be technicians, strategists, artists whose work involves only a limited element of cruelty.
Moreover, they are nurtured in a system of universities as “student-athletes,” and a corrupt, increasingly bizarre system at that. The game grew out of educational establishments in the first place. No one is trying to integrate MMA with the curriculum at Notre Dame or Harvard; MMA was invented too late for that.
Think of this observation when you read (as you often read) commentators arguing that the solution to the problem of corrupt university football is to make football an academic major. As the game gets more and more purely violent, its claims to intellectuality, disciplinarity, grow.
Really?
Yet another b-school guy (read UD’s LONG category on this blog titled Beware the B-School Boys) wrings his hands about the criminogenic nature of some of America’s business schools… Which is to say that many MBA programs (in particular Wharton) seem to groom and then graduate real bad asses. What to do? What to do?
Like most of the other hand wringers, this guy’s introducing another whole new revolutionary approach to taking men in America’s most hyper-capitalist educational settings and turning them into women.
See the headline on the guy’s article?
CAN YOU TEACH BUSINESSMEN TO BE ETHICAL?
Forget businesswomen. Either they don’t exist, or if they exist they’re … ethical …? The whole article is men men men.
I guess businesswomen are ethical because they’re not businessmen.
So then the point would be to make businessmen businesswomen. No competitiveness here! We’re collaborative. And if you fuck up and act assertive in class…
MBA programs could ditch their heavy reliance on class participation when assigning grades – a standard that unfairly rewards extroverts and fosters competition among students to impress the professor. Instead, students could be asked to grade each other on their level of professionalism in class. A few of us at NYU-Stern have begun doing this, and we find that it discourages grandstanding and encourages students to build on each other’s comments.
Shh! Don’t say anything, Susie! Just keep your eye on Babsie and tell me whether you think she’s been abnegating herself…
********************
Ecoute. Collaboration in b-school means Raj Rajaratnam meets his co-conspirators there. B-school brings like-minded criminals together.
It’s embarrassing, but
The daily scandals that expose corruption and deception in business are not merely the doing of isolated crooks. They are the result of an amoral culture that we — business-school professors — helped foster.
Look at the dean of Columbia University’s business school, for goodness sake.
B-school people seem to think that if they keep producing worried rhetoric and new ethics institutes we’ll forget the nature of the amoral culture their schools reflect and many of their graduates inhabit.
Down she swoops, from the emerital ether, to speak the truth to the new management team at this year’s scandal-plagued darling, the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
Scandal-management-wise Chapel Hill has done the thing, the thing that every jock school does when the shit truly hits the fan – it has dumped its previous management and put in a team of deer-in-the-headlight innocents who can say
Well we weren’t here for the long Nyang’oro Nightmare so we don’t really know what’s going on but we’re pure-hearted people doing our best in a bad situation, etc etc etc.
UD applauds the move, it’s a fine move, it’s an obvious move.
*****************
But, as Orwell wrote:
‘He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.’
You can bring in the deer to try to control the present, but it’s the pesky past …
Madeline Levine swooped in from the past, and (so far at least) the deer have not been able to herd her.
“During the year that I served as interim dean I was made aware of the serious academic deficiencies that some of our newly recruited athletes would have to overcome if they were ever to succeed at UNC,” Levine wrote. “From what I was told … I thought it highly probable that one of these students was functionally illiterate.”
She wrote that she went to the university provost, who was then Bernadette Gray-Little, now chancellor at the University of Kansas.
She said she was “told what I already knew – that the decision had been made to grant special admission to this student and there was nothing to be done about it by then. That was true, but I still feel guilty that I let the matter drop and did not publicly express my dismay.”
One likes Levine’s continued guilt – it sounds right, it sounds real. One believes Levine.
Levine … accused the university of resisting efforts to get to the bottom of a long-running academic fraud scandal that is drawing sustained national attention since it made The New York Times’ front page on New Year’s Day. She said Dean took the wrong tack two weeks ago in publicly lambasting whistle-blower Mary Willingham, a former learning specialist in the athletes’ tutoring program. Willingham said her research found that more than half of 183 athletes specially tested for learning deficiencies over an eight-year period could not read at a high-school level.
“Mary Willingham was courageous in speaking out about her experience as a reading specialist and academic counselor for such students,” Levine wrote. “It is appalling that the highest officials at UNC – before it became clear that attacking a whistle-blower is not a smart PR move – mounted a concerted public attack on the accuracy of Ms. Willingham’s statistical analysis and, by implication, against her personally, while steadfastly refusing to engage with the core issue that concerns her: the exploitation of student-athletes and the concomitant abuse of the academic values by which a great university should live.”
I plan to title my editorial response to the WSJ’s editorial Journalnacht.
If they come back at me hard and I have to escalate things, I’ll title the next round Wallstreetjournalpurgisnacht.
I am hoping a Mexican publication weighs in, so I can title my response Nachosnacht.
I am also hoping a fellow Rilkean weighs in, so I can title my response Gedichteandienacht.
Eventually, when all of this calms down and I write a mature summation, I will title it Stillenacht.