Willie Ann, 81 … has a routine for gunshots. She reaches for her cane, tries to rush toward a carpeted floor near her bed and gently lies down on her right side, where her arthritis does not flare up. When the shooting stops, she reaches for the top of the bed and hoists herself up.
****************************
And remember: Always have more than one sofa.
During drive-by shootings, neighbors wedge themselves between sofas.
This passage from Love’s Work, Gillian Rose’s meditation on love and death, comes to mind as I read about the creeping, escalating de-creation of the island of Santorini, where “homes break apart” in the earthquakes.
Rose’s own disaster – the cancer that would kill her at 48 soon after she finished Love’s Work – generated her argument that life was best lived as an agon, an unceasing passionate losing heroic beautiful struggle toward clarity, justice, and bliss, against the forces of if you like subduction — error/fault, leading to destruction and death.
*****************************
UD’s favorite poem, James Merrill’s Santorini: Stopping the Leak, dances just this passionate expiring dance on the most beautiful of the world’s islands (Santorini is insanely beautiful because of its history of unimaginable natural catastrophe) at the very end of the long verse. The poet/poem dances
a grave dance - as if catastrophe could long be lulled
A grave dance – serious, but also morbid, a dance danced over the centuries of bodies that lie under the island’s volcanic catastrophes. Merrill, visiting the island just having had his own radiation therapy for a cancer on his foot, is dancing on his own grave, and he is as much aware as Rose that the special spiritual passion ignited by the aesthetic bliss of being on gorgeously morbid/passionate Santorini merely damps for a time the subterranean fires. “No foothold on the void,” writes Merrill.
Or not really merely. If Rose and Merrill are right, that lulling dance over one’s grave is the finest expressive substance of our lives, the best that existence has to offer.
***********************
Merrill’s poem is obsessed with the business of boundaries, of avoiding both the crippling madness of what he calls “psychic incontinence,” when you let too much of the world in and are overwhelmed, and “cemented boundaries,” when, in terror of the fires that underlie, you close off the self in self-protection. [Tante] Taube, a veteran survivor, … had fought the grave to a standstill, balking death itself by her slowness, Saul Bellow’s Herzog thinks as he regards his aunt’s non-life balking death through sheer inactivity. Between the madness of too much and the deathliness of too little you find most of us working our way toward how much of our aliveness – to quote the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips – we can bear:
[E]verybody is dealing with how much of their own aliveness they can bear and how much they need to anesthetize themselves… We all have self-cures for strong feeling. Then the self-cure becomes a problem, in the obvious sense that the problem of the alcoholic is not alcohol but sobriety. Drinking becomes a problem, but actually the problem is what’s being cured by the alcohol. By the time we’re adults, we’ve all become alcoholics. That’s to say, we’ve all evolved ways of deadening certain feelings and thoughts. One of the reasons we admire or like art, if we do, is that it reopens us in some sense — as Kafka wrote in a letter, art breaks the sea that’s frozen inside us. It reminds us of sensitivities that we might have lost at some cost. Freud gets at this in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. It’s as though one is struggling to be as inert as possible — and struggling against one’s inertia.
Santorini is always reconstituting itself amid the undermining that is its own violent, beauty-making dissolution, and this is the ideal the poet pursues for himself and for us. The poet “tighten[s] by a notch/The broad, star-studded belt Earth wears to feel/Hungers less mortal for a vanished whole.” This is Rose again: Stop hungering for a vanished whole; you and Santorini are nothing but gorgeous fragments, and that contingency is all you ever will be. Be like the poet and stud the earth with aesthetic jewels:
Our lives unreal Except as jeweled self-windings
The poet’s words on windy Santorini are
bellowed to recycle The bare, thyme-tousled world we’d stumbled on
We bejewel the bareness; we break what’s frozen, or quench the fires. Silent Santorini can only live in
imbecile Symbiosis with the molten genie
Our symbiosis is verbal. Ours are self-windings – they emerge from our human individual expressive battles between stasis and agon; and what our noblest battles produce will be the spoken truth of the broken beauty of being.
Not only did no one at a New Haven area abattoir report a bloody shooting there to the police; even the owners are refusing to talk to authorities.
UD is aware that she needs to adjust her brain cells — Guns are everywhere and shootings boringly routine. Why report them. Why be surprised when no one reports them.
Here’s another Canadian woman who has totally fucked up her career as a teacher because wearing a religious veil is not an option for her. Nuns have the option not to wear habits. But not this woman, a member of no religious order. She’s being asked to take it off only during public-facing public-sector working hours, because she lives in a secular state. But her commitment to expressing her identity – every single non-negotiable hour of the day – is so overwhelming that she’d rather be unemployed.
I mean, UD has to respect her obstinacy. Presumably many women in Quebec who might prefer to display their piety decide not to do it while engaged in public sector work. They are less obstinate. Perhaps they appreciate the appropriateness of sensitivity to prevailing values in the region in which they have chosen to live. This woman has chosen to have no choice in the matter: She MUST veil herself every waking hour of the day.
Her only hope is the Canadian Supreme Court’s incipient review of Quebec’s secularism laws.
UD thinks that ongoing definitional and fairness issues (degrees of testosterone suppression, etc.) warranted waiting on trans participation until greater clarity/consensus emerged. “There are good, non-transphobic arguments for fairness in sports… ” But that’s all behind us now; going full-throttle trans deeply upset many people and no doubt contributed to Trump’s victory (“The Trump campaign spent nearly 20 percent of its overall ad budget on transgender attack ads.”).
Angry fellow athletes have sued Harvard (which hosted the Lia Thomas blowout) and others, and the language of their suit is fierce. “[T]he Ivy League and its leadership ‘labored for months behind the scenes to engineer a public shock and awe display of monolithic support for biological unreality and radical gender ideology by America’s oldest and most storied educational institutions.’”
Bill Bock, the plaintiffs’ attorney, wrote in a statement that “the Ivy League believed that if America’s oldest and most storied educational institutions led the way, Americans would suppress common sense and submit to radical policies that steal young women’s cherished sports opportunities and obliterate biological reality.”
“This lawsuit exposes the behind the scenes scheming that led to the attempt by Harvard University, UPenn, the Ivy League and the NCAA, to impose radical gender ideology on the American college sports landscape,” he added.
The plaintiffs seek “damages for pain and suffering, mental and emotional distress, suffering and anxiety, expenses costs and other damages against the NCAA, Ivy League, Harvard, and UPenn due to their wrongful conduct.”
Harvard has ended its transgender inclusion policy.
The reason why the state got involved [in hasidic education] is because of the extraordinarily high [number] of welfare recipients in the hasidic community. This is [partly] a result of large families, but mostly [a] lack of basic education… [This is] about communities that refuse to give their children any secular education that will prepare them to enter the workforce, receive higher education needed to achieve and contribute economically, or even to interact with the wider population… [As a] result, [the hasidic community denies] their children basic social and economic opportunities and condemns many of them to living on welfare.
Plenty of lefties find a $53.2 billion nonprofit intellectual community (Harvard) a little hard to grasp qua concept; read Robert Reich and many others. Indeed the graphic and grotesque injustice of superfatcat money-hoarder Harvard amid hundreds of struggling meritorious schools is a far leftier… visual... than right. The right is where no-ceiling-on-personal-and-institutional-wealth people like Greg Mankiw, Eric Cantor, and Lawrence Kudlow hang out; it’s predominantly the left that cares about wealth inequality.
Gregory Conti acknowledges that “skepticism” (I’d call it revulsion) in regard to small singular institutions hoarding billions and billions of dollars is not “an intrinsically right-wing proposition.” Nor should it be. But he correctly notes that, in the last few years, most democratic politicians, to their shame, have left the Ivies alone to play with their money, and that it’s the right which has pushed for endowment taxes. Indeed there’s a weird inversion here – the lawmaker lefties who should militate against the degenerate and destructive greed of some of our universities don’t give a shit, while the lawmaker righties who have no problem with greed and don’t like taxes do give a shit. Hm.
************************
Conti will go on to argue that left-dominated elite universities have no one to blame but themselves for their impending tax doom; if they’d been high-quality, neutral seekers after wisdom rather than woke noisemakers they wouldn’t have raised the hackles of conservative, vindictive legislators.
Go to any of, say, the 20 private colleges with the largest endowments and just look at the signage posted throughout campus for events, programs, services: You will find that at every one they convey a near-identical blend of culturally progressive presuppositions, identitarian appeals, and therapeutic argot.
Okay so I spent years teaching at GW (I know; not rich and elite enough; but hear me out) and years tromping around Harvard (father-in-law was a Harvard prof), and I’ve been visiting/writing about universities for decades. Here’s what you’re likeliest to see posted around most elite schools: Information about campus worship services. Dates/locations of standardized tests. Rentals near campus. Political signage from all sides – pro-Israel, anti-Israel, etc. Cultural event/lecture notices. Lowkey appeals to use campus health services if you are feeling down. Student suicide is a serious problem, and I’m not sure what “therapeutic argot” is bothering Conti, but the phrases I can recall are things like you’re not alone and talk to someone.
Nothing is more exactingly identitarian than fraternities and secret societies and houses, but these cliques are, by definition, not going to plaster statues of Elihu Yale with come-ons.
And as to the quality argument: Ivies have long handed down gentlemen’s C’s and welcomed Jared Kushners; they’re famous for it. Legacy admits are quite a thing, and they’ve watered down quality bigtime forever.
**************************
No, for ol’ UD the only real argument in favor of taxing endowments in the many billions has nothing to do with right or left. It’s socially destructive for outrageous wealth to lie in the exclusive hands of small entities, personal or institutional. Are you okay with Elon Musk romping through the federal government, firing everyone and shutting everything down? Should have thought of that before you let him accumulate 420 billion dollars. Do you think it’s weird that one of Harvard’s recent presidents fucked its endowment to the tune of one billion dollars because no one was able to stop him from using it for high-risk credit default swaps? And that he freelanced for a hedge fund while president? Way woke, babe.
Dr. Bernard Carroll, known as the "conscience of psychiatry," contributed to various blogs, including Margaret Soltan's University Diaries, for which he sometimes wrote limericks under the name Adam. New York Times
George Washington University English professor Margaret Soltan writes a blog called University Diaries, in which she decries the Twilight Zone-ish state our holy land’s institutes of higher ed find themselves in these days. The Electron Pencil
It’s [UD's] intellectual honesty that makes her blog required reading. Professor Mondo
There's always something delightful and thought intriguing to be found at Margaret Soltan's no-holds-barred, firebrand tinged blog about university life. AcademicPub
You can get your RDA of academic liars, cheats, and greedy frauds at University Diaries. All disciplines, plus athletics. truffula, commenting at Historiann
Margaret Soltan at University Diaries blogs superbly and tirelessly about [university sports] corruption. Dagblog
University Diaries. Hosted by Margaret Soltan, professor of English at George Washington University. Boy is she pissed — mostly about athletics and funding, the usual scandals — but also about distance learning and diploma mills. She likes poems too. And she sings. Dissent: The Blog
[UD belittles] Mrs. Palin's degree in communications from the University of Idaho... The Wall Street Journal
Professor Margaret Soltan, blogging at University Diaries... provide[s] an important voice that challenges the status quo. Lee Skallerup Bessette, Inside Higher Education
[University Diaries offers] the kind of attention to detail in the use of language that makes reading worthwhile. Sean Dorrance Kelly, Harvard University
Margaret Soltan's ire is a national treasure. Roland Greene, Stanford University
The irrepressibly to-the-point Margaret Soltan... Carlat Psychiatry Blog
Margaret Soltan, whose blog lords it over the rest of ours like a benevolent tyrant... Perplexed with Narrow Passages
Margaret Soltan is no fan of college sports and her diatribes on the subject can be condescending and annoying. But she makes a good point here... Outside the Beltway
From Margaret Soltan's excellent coverage of the Bernard Madoff scandal comes this tip... Money Law
University Diaries offers a long-running, focused, and extremely effective critique of the university as we know it. Anthony Grafton, American Historical Association
The inimitable Margaret Soltan is, as usual, worth reading. ... Medical Humanities Blog
I awake this morning to find that the excellent Margaret Soltan has linked here and thereby singlehandedly given [this blog] its heaviest traffic... Ducks and Drakes
As Margaret Soltan, one of the best academic bloggers, points out, pressure is mounting ... The Bitch Girls
Many of us bloggers worry that we don’t post enough to keep people’s interest: Margaret Soltan posts every day, and I more or less thought she was the gold standard. Tenured Radical
University Diaries by Margaret Soltan is one of the best windows onto US university life that I know. Mary Beard, A Don's Life
[University Diaries offers] a broad sense of what's going on in education today, framed by a passionate and knowledgeable reporter. More magazine, Canada
If deity were an elected office, I would quit my job to get her on the ballot. Notes of a Neophyte
