UD finds the best writing – so far – on Francois Hollande.

It’s all good, but the writer has in particular a way with phrases:

While still a student at the Ecole Nationale d’Admininstration, the elite college that turns out France’s bureaucrats, Hollande met Ségolène Royal, a glossily-coiffed fellow political obsessive…

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wobbly-chopped socialist… glossily-coiffed fellow political obsessive…

Wonderfully pithy. But the whole thing is good.

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A side-note on all this: UD argues that the photo of Hollande wearing a big macho motorcycle helmet (in order to hide his identity as he enters his love nest) is the functional equivalent of the photo of Michael Dukakis wearing a big macho military helmet during his presidential election. Not a good look for them.

… over the great plains has the word “bountiful” buzzing in UD‘s brain. This obviously bountiful land, even under patches of snow.

Bountiful Chicago, where a glowing plaid-clad Burberry store appeared in UD‘s hotel window – and behind the Burberry was the lake, ice-blue, iced-in, beautifully silent behind the city noise. How can it be said that UD still knows this city, so generous to her with adventure and love many years ago? This is America, bountiful and changeable, and you can walk down Michigan Avenue and gaze at the ice chunks in the Chicago River, and, except for the Trib Tower, you can find the streetscape entirely strange.

The strangeness is fine with me – it does me good to feel the nervy vitality Saul Bellow described… And didn’t I once find myself driving next to him (I still drove then), north from Hyde Park on Lake Shore Drive? He was in a derelict little BMW – green, as I recall – and I kept glancing over at his thin white hair, his hard-set lips. A Chicago moment – chronicling my life in that city while racing next to perhaps its greatest chronicler. That was sweet.

… is a great blog written by someone rather like UD – a Washington-area English professor. Marilee Lindemann was in the audience last night at UD‘s MLA panel and afterwards we got to talking. She lives in Garrett Park’s sister city, Takoma Park (both are Nuclear Free Zones) and teaches at the University of Maryland, where Mr UD (himself just back from a conference in New Orleans, where he talked about civic studies) teaches. So they had a lot to talk about, and it was a pleasure.

Altogether, the small tight nuclear Les UDs unit has been out and about lately – La Kid is here in Chicago with UD (she spent time yesterday with friends in Ukrainian Village), and Mr UD is just back in Garrett Park from the “almost uncomfortably hot” streets of New Orleans.

She’s at National Airport (she’s too ancient a Washingtonian to use its new name) on a drippy dreary morning. Her flight to Chicago leaves soon.

La Kid slumps in a chair next to her (UD‘s taking part in an MLA panel; La Kid‘s visiting a friend at the University of Chicago).

Airports make UD morbid. They make her spiritual in a tedious and neurotic way.

For the last half hour, with deep melancholy sighs, she’s been humming Panis Angelicus to herself.

She will blog from Chicago, of course.

… cet obscur objet du désir.

Penn State turns the page.

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A professor at Penn State has started a petition. Well done.

This just in.

As I’ve said repeatedly on this blog, Yeshiva University’s financial collapse was not the work of a day. (Go here for background.) It took a special mix of trustees Bernard Madoff and Ezra Merkin, decades of indifference to the sexual abuse of students, and, more recently, a useless, self-righteous, and highly compensated president, to kill the school. Yeshiva’s board of trustees remains dominated by outstanding moral specimens like Zygmunt Wilf (“the judge decided that the Wilfs showed ‘bad faith and evil motive’ in a case she said was unlike any she had ever seen in New Jersey.“). Wilf and his fellow trustees have been so riddled with conflict of interest that the board seems to have been little more than “an investment club.”

How much lower can Yeshiva go?

Yeshiva, UD feels confident, is capable of falling much farther. Indeed, she anticipates that the school will have to close.

… in my heart!”

Sleazy, deluded, Chapel Hill.

… Cormac McCarthy’s third ex-wife.

Definitely the best headline so far.

See post just below this one for details.

Don’t mess with… Whatever the fuck this guy’s name is. Is he even a guy? The beauty of online courses is that the York University student complaining about having “to meet [just once, I presume] in person with a group of classmates [some of whom may be women] for a mandatory assignment” could be a woman, a child…

Let’s say he’s a guy. His thing is, he didn’t sign up for an online course in order to rub up against the Whores of Babylon.

The professor and his department – sociology – rejected the student’s request outright, correctly noting that bigotry against women is a no-no at a public and secular university like York. Remember the humongous dust-up last month after efforts to allow gender apartheid at British universities? Same deal.

J. Paul Grayson, the heroic professor at the center of this mess (higher-ups at York told him and the department that they had to give in to the student’s demand), makes the same point they made in England:

“You have to nip this in the bud, because what you’re dealing with here is a basic hornet’s nest,” Dr. Grayson said in an interview. “What if … I said, well, my religion really frowns upon my interacting with blacks?”

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The irony of this latest effort to make universities bow to fanatics is that the student, told that his request was rejected, immediately caved. Although he had initially insisted that – as Grayson paraphrased him – “due to my firm religious beliefs … it will not be possible for me to meet in public with a group of women” – he now said

he would “respect the final decision” to deny the request, was pleased with the way it had been handled, and has since met with his learning group.

Of course, the higher-ups at York are still on their high horses, insisting that the university’s all set up to respect people who refuse to interact in the physical world with women.

And the sociologists at York who stood their ground are, I certainly hope, laughing in their faces.

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UD thanks Ian.

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Update: UD‘s pleased to say that it gets better:

In an October 18 email, the Dean specifically told Mr. Grayson that if he was worried about the “course experience of our female students” he would make sure they “are not made aware of the accommodation.”

What they don’t know won’t hurt ’em, dude. Just shut up!

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And just so we’re clear: Events like these help us understand and know how to respond to the idiocy of statements like this one from Katha Pollitt:

[R]eligion is what people make of it.

Grayson, just to be absolutely sure, consulted orthodox Jewish and Muslim religious leaders on this, and both expressed astonishment that anyone would conclude that these religions call for no appearance in the public realm for men if there are any women also in that realm.

Religion, Katha, is not what people make of it. Religion is many things, but not all things. (“What is disturbing is an apparent increasing tendency to view each claim for accommodation as legitimate and worthy of support. Indeed, the notion that not all claims should be accepted would come as a shock to the morally relativistic fingernail biters that roam the hallways in some academic buildings.”) A university dean, gripped by litigation fears when he reads the word religion in an email from a student, may believe that the mere invocation of the word religion constitutes religion; Pollitt may believe that if I happen to “make of” religion the removal of infants’ sexual organs this constitutes religion. The rest of us must follow Grayson’s lead.

It’s … good news, I guess, that Bill Clinton is not involved with Trump University. But this is just the latest example of the land mines Clinton has been planting in his wife’s path for the presidency, should she indeed decide to run. As the [NY] Times reported in a major investigation, there are a lot of questions and there is not a lot of transparency about how the Clinton Global Initiative operates. And that’s the nonprofit Clinton arm of Bill Clinton’s post-presidency. His other business dealings have been profuse and often murky, and every single one of them is going to be investigated by the press if a Hillary Clinton campaign goes forward. The Bloomberg piece [on Clinton’s heading up a for-profit ed venture] does not find any illegality in this instance, but the sleaze factor is considerable. Clinton serving as the “Honorary Chancellor” of a diploma mill that rips off young people — and doing it in a financial partnership that includes the hedge-fund titan Steve Cohen, whose SAC Capital Advisors is ground zero for insider-trading criminality — does not pass the smell test.

Trump, Laureate, and Brown University’s highest-profile trustee, Steve Cohen. The story of today’s university, all in one short paragraph.

… UD‘s beloved Henry Purcell’s Cold Song.

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Its meaning? The long-dead – frozen-dead – Spirit of The Cold has been called back to life by Cupid (the song appears in Purcell’s opera King Arthur, first performed in 1691). Having been comfortably dead for a long while, however, The Cold finds thawing into life again excruciating. Having enjoyed

A Quartz contentment, like a stone

The Cold is not at all sure he wants to “rise unwillingly and slow from everlasting snow.” He’s no longer “fit” to bear the “bitter cold” of human life; he prefers to “freeze again to death.”

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Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow

Same deal.

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Or, as Adam Phillips more prosaically says:

The reason that there are so many depressed people is that life is so depressing for many people. It’s not a mystery.

Headline of the day.

(Don’t just read the transcript; watch the video.)

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A related article, and an expression of Okie pride:

[Y]ou don’t have to be literate to play and graduate from OSU.

Fighting in the public realm for your right to have no presence in the public realm is a conundrum.

The Frenchwoman appealing her conviction for wearing a burqa sent her husband to court, or her husband insisted on going in her place or whatever…

This seems to have annoyed the judge, who was apparently ready to hand down a much lighter sentence (the woman – or rather the group of males acting on her behalf – lost the appeal) if the complainant had demonstrated even a faint personal commitment to her own case.