… Jesus… to…

… oh, Jesus….

… (see the post directly below this one), its highest-profile honorary degree recipient, its 2010 commencement speaker, has been running one hell of a public relations campaign. Ask me anything! Ask my bank anything!

These are some of the tweets J.P. Morgan received (before hurriedly shutting the account):

“What’s your favorite type of whale? #AskJPM,” said The Atlantic’s Matt O’Brien.

“Is your “Chief Compliance Officer” alive? Has anyone checked to see if he’s in his office? #AskJPM,” said Salon’s David Dayen.

“Does Jamie Dimon pet a small cat and laugh ominously while he’s ruining poor people’s lives? #AskJPM,” said blogger Tim Donovan.

Some others:

Did you have a specific number of people’s lives you needed to ruin before you considered your business model a success?

If it came out Jamie Dimon had a propensity for eating Irish children, would you fire him? What if he’s still “a good earner”?

Is it the ability to throw anyone out of their home that drives you, or just the satisfaction that you know you COULD do it?

How many homeless people did you create in ’08?

Will the firm explore new markets, like selling candy-backed securities to babies w/o disclosing the lack of chocolate in the bonds?

Did you not realize that The Smartest Guys In The Room was a cautionary tale, not a blueprint for mass theft?

Sure. There’s more.

Quick! You’re in a room with no key, a chair, two paper clips, and a lightbulb. How do you defraud investors?

Sorry we ruined your hashtag event, if you could just apologise for your plunder of the global economy, I think we’d be even.

Given the # of reg violations + scale of fines paid across the bank, please explain why the board hasn’t been replaced by livestock?

Enough already!

What’s it like working with Mexican drug cartels? Do they tip?

How do you decide who to foreclose on? Darts or a computer program?

As a young sociopath, how can I succeed in finance?

And:

why did u think this would be a good idea

It’s because of the intellectual luster he lends the place. Challenged on the pathetic graduation rates of the students for whose progress he’s responsible, he explains:

“If everybody stays, our graduation rate is great… But some guys just don’t stay. If somebody had an answer, I’d love to hear it.”

Boeheim earns close to two million dollars a year for his policy of saying

1. If they would graduate, they would graduate; and

2. Fuck if I know.

… and fine sunrises too, like the one I enjoyed early this morning, walking to the commuter train steps from my house (Mr UD usually drives me to the metro, but he’s out of town).

I’ve been so busy from morn ’til night these three days that it’s been hard for me to blog… I watched last night’s sunset from an incredibly well-appointed meeting room on the top floor of a fancy building at George Washington University, where I sat listening to sales pitches from online vendors who’d like to run programs at GW. Yes, GW is exploring all sorts of online initiatives, and UD has been asked to be part of this exploration because of her modest MOOC acclaim.

Yet if you read this blog with any care, you know that despite her online poetry lectures, UD is way skeptical of online education. So she is an oddball, a misfit, a brother from a seriously other mother, on this particular committee… Though she thinks she may be of some use to it, since her elaborate resistance to what these vendors represent is perhaps representative of a certain slice of the professorati, and GW might as well know what to expect by way of trouble as it tries to get some of this stuff up and running.

Still, UD is reflective enough (though just barely) to wonder, as she squints paranoiacally at this techie parade, whether she herself is sort of like totally well like over. Hopelessly twentieth century. Apparently everyone’s supposed to want to learn things by sitting by yourself and playing Sesame Street-like games and watching coached professors on a screen. Or on a phone or whatever. Everyone’s supposed to be dying to have a university-level discussion that’s organized like the opening of the Brady Bunch except that instead of the Brady Bunch it’s your fellow discussants. Students want this. Students demand this. Said the techie parade.

And actually there’s a lot to like if you’re a certain kind of professor. UD gathers that some online teaching will appeal to the self-important among us – displaced German university professors who enjoy being fussed over by a team of people whose job it is to sense what they will like and do that thing for them… Who will, let’s be honest, actually write and even sorta teach the course for them if they would like… Who’d run interference in such a way that they’d never have to get all down and dirty with, well, students… Bothersome things like that…

And, you know, it’s like that Monty Python thing… I s’pose I’m very old-fashioned… very old-fashioned… (Did I make that up? I can’t find the source of it.) But I just can’t wrap my head around it.

… once again cracks the whip. You recall its directive to faculty last year:

In an email sent March 22 to faculty and staff, Sabrina Land, the university’s director of marketing and communications, wrote that all communications must be “strategically deployed” in a way that “safeguards the reputation, work product and ultimately, the students, of CSU.”

The policy applies to media interviews, opinion pieces, newsletters, social media and other types of communications, stating that they must be approved by the university’s division of public relations. “All disclosures to the media will be communicated by an authorized CSU media relations officer or designate,” the policy says.

Failure to follow the rules “will be treated as serious and will result in disciplinary action, possible termination and could give rise to civil and/or criminal liability on the part of the employee.”

And they meant it, baby. Chicago State has a 10% graduation rate, and much else besides, to protect; and now you’ve got some faculty undermining the peace-loving progressive masses of CSU by starting a blog!

A blog written by Chicago State University faculty members that has been critical of the school’s administration was sent a “cease and desist” notice by university lawyers …

[CSU] said the blog “violates the University’s values and policies requiring civility and professionalism of all University faculty members.”

Cage demanded that site administrators “immediately disable” the blog and provide written confirmation of that no later than Friday to “avoid legal action.”

UD trusts free speech advocates are all over this one. I’d say it’s an outrage, but everything about CSU is outrageous and it still syphons huge tax dollars from the poor citizens of Illinois. So it’s wasted breath.

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Scott Jaschik takes note.

New to teaching, I was proudly gazing at a sign on my office door proclaiming “Assistant Professor Grossman,” when the department secretary knocked.

“Would you like seasons tickets for the faculty cheering section in the football stadium?” she asked.

“No thank you,” I said, effectively ending my social life at the University of Nebraska. I didn’t realize it wasn’t a question but an imperative. Faculty members were expected to wear sweaters with the school colors and hold up colored pieces of cardboard to spell out, in giant letters, eternal verities like: “Hold That Line!”

Ron Grossman, Chicago Tribune

“Narrow” is an adjective the academy should not shun but embrace, for if academic activity cannot be narrowly defined, it loses its shape and becomes indistinguishable from political rallies and partisan exhortation. This of course is what the [Israel] boycotters want. [Extremely broad definitions] do not enhance the academic enterprise or add a heroic gloss to the concept of academic freedom; rather they destroy both by emptying them of any specific content.

… where Richie Incognito spent two years as a university student.

Every powerhouse recruited him. His old man wanted him to go to Miami, but Junior felt at home during his visit to Nebraska. “I don’t want to go anyplace else,” he told his father. “There is nothing to do there. It’s just football.“

LOL.

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‘Course, they’re way past Incognito problems now.

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Oh, why be coy:

Incognito was suspended (twice) at Nebraska, and you know it’s not easy to get suspended at Nebraska, where character-building coach Tom Osborne let a cornerback play while awaiting trial for second-degree murder. Osborne also retained a defensive lineman who was arrested eight times, convicted four times, and left the heartland accused of multiple sexual assaults, before his induction into Nebraska’s Hall of Fame in 2006. Not to mention Nebraska’s current leader of young men, Bo Pelini, who is still apologizing for an epic carpet-bombing of F-words, an attempt to say exactly what he thought of Nebraska’s fans.

… The Incognito rap sheet includes a note that his peers voted him the NFL’s second-dirtiest player. No. 1 in a Sporting News poll last year was another Nebraska worthy, Ndamukong Suh.

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

All of which confirms for the millionth time that if you want true surreality, the really actually deeply bizarre, you don’t go to America’s big cities. As David Lynch knows so well, if you seek America at its most scarily twisted, head for the rural heartland.

… with fixed bayonets, for the order to go over. My mind was a blank, except for the recurrence of S’nice S’mince S’pie, S’nice S’mince S’pie… I don’t like ham, lamb, or jam, and I don’t like roley-poley…

‘Of course it’s murder, you bloody fool,’ I agreed. ‘But there’s nothing else for it, is there?’ It was still raining. But when I sees a s’nice s’mince s’pie, I asks for a helping twice…'”

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

For Veterans’ Day, an excerpt from Goodbye to All That, the World War I memoir by Robert Graves.

[Incognito’s drunken] assault [on a woman] at an annual team event happened in view of sponsors. [Head coach Joe] Philbin knew it happened yet continued to preach about the quality of the men in his locker room. He got rid of Chad Johnson after a domestic violence incident but kept Incognito after a sexual abuse incident.

The National Football Post on Friday reported Incognito called offensive line meetings at a strip club and fined players if they didn’t show up…

But the Dolphins allowed Incognito to be a member of the leadership council, which empowered him as a leader.

A coach, aware of the sexual assault and Incognito’s penchant for drinking and past drug use, overrides the player vote for leadership council. Philbin this week instead hid behind that vote, saying it was players, not him who made Incognito a team leader.

Look, the people within the Dolphins’ organization claiming complete ignorance of the apparent tension in Martin’s mind over Incognito and others are either lying – which makes them complicit – or out of touch, which makes them incompetent.

Either way, it is grounds for dismissal.

Some fans see what’s going on. And they’ve had enough. Fans have been writing to me and telling me they’re through with the franchise. Others say they’ll never buy a ticket again until major changes in leadership are enacted.

Consider that the Dolphins had 70,660 people at Sun Life Stadium for the season home opener. Then 68,342 for the second home game. Then 60,592 for the third home game. And 52,388 for the fourth home game.

Notice the trend?

Fans were abandoning this team in droves before the current scandal. You think any part of the last week is going to convince them to return?

The Dolphins failed to get public funding for upgrades to their stadium before this happened. Who’s going to vote to give them public money now, and what brilliant politician is going to champion the cause?

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

Though college and professional football detests – to the point of seeking and destroying it – any form of thinking, it might be time for the sport to do some reading in the extensive literature on disgust. (The New York Times provides a reading list of some recent works here.) If American football fails to understand the nature and effects of the stupendous revulsion it generates even in its fan base, it might not be able to save itself.

America’s wholesome, family-friendly tailgate culture claims another victim.

This blog regularly features tales from the tailgates. Just type tailgating in my search engine and scroll down.

My, my. The University of Nebraska. Don’t let your kid go to school there. Dangerous. Nebraska’s very keen on violent people. Will keep them on until they charge the school’s football coach.

When he wasn’t suited up, he was still getting into brawls — found guilty of misdemeanor assault in after “one of those parties in a Van Wilder movie” in February 2004, a former [Nebraska] student told The Post.

“I had to use the bathroom, and I knocked, and heard there were two people in there — and they weren’t happy I was knocking,” recalled the former student.

“I waited, and then suddenly, out comes Richie and his girlfriend. He was irate.”

Eventually, Incognito, like an uncaged beast, “tried to pin me on the bed,” as Cornhusker pals joined in, he continued. “I felt something hit me on the side of my face and my head went into a wall — it was Richie taking a cheap shot. “At that point he was threatening to kill me.”

The 6-foot-3, 320-pound lineman — who was punching holes in the walls when he couldn’t find a chin — finally left the party, but not before cold-cocking a poor sap who happened to be standing by the door. “He took his cell phone, threw it, and then punched him on his way out,” the former student said.

Incognito was set to play his junior year for new coach Bill Callahan, but was unceremoniously suspended from the nationally ranked squad, a move thought to be precipitated by the February brawl.

The Daily Nebraskan, the school newspaper, applauded the news…

“He was one of the worst people I ever interacted with,” [a student] told The Post. “It was just so extreme and unrelenting. There was no sense that he learned from anything when he got in trouble.”

[The student] said he nearly came to blows with Incognito …

“We were both in line at Wendy’s and he was standing over me . . . staring at me, ” he recalled. “He eventually just grunted and walked away.”

Officially, Callahan said at the time, “We have team rules. They’re very simple to follow. If they’re not followed, and they’re not complied to, then (you) suffer the consequences, unfortunately.”

But a former student told The Post the reason he heard from “inside the locker room” was that Incognito “tried to charge Bill Callahan.”

Callahan could not be reached for comment.

Meanwhile, the Incognito family made excuses for their son.

“Richie won’t take crap from anyone. He’s a hard-nosed kid, and Nebraska doesn’t want hard-nosed kids anymore,” his father told the Lincoln Journal Star.

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

The article ends with an extremely weird statement from one of Incognito’s friends.

“He got kicked out of two universities. Guys like that don’t make it in the NFL. They usually float off to oblivion.”

Uh, getting kicked out of a university – or, more typically, flunking out – is the royal road to the NFL. Don’t know what this guy is thinking.

Some of Gore Vidal’s family members are irritated that he willed his fortune (almost forty million dollars) to Harvard University. The New York Times interviews various confused friends, like the one in my headline…

It’s not just that Harvard already has close to forty billion dollars in endowment money; it’s that Vidal spent a lot of his life presenting himself as a man of the left who despised the gilded establishment and was mad for the radical redistribution of wealth. People at the very least expected him to set up a foundation in support of free speech and other rights; some expected him to establish his Italy house as a writers’ colony.

So there’s a lawsuit now, with family members making as ugly a spectacle of themselves as Vidal often did toward the end of his life. (“I have no wish to commit literary patricide, or to assassinate Vidal’s character — a character which appears, in any case, to have committed suicide,” wrote Christopher Hitchens in 2010.)

There’s a 2012 essay here, at Inside Higher Ed, about Vidal’s history with Harvard. It features a curious little clip of him portraying a pompous Harvard professor.

Of course for old UD the principle here is simple: He wrote and signed the will; he wasn’t in great shape, that’s true; but giving it to Harvard is a plausible thing for someone as complex in his motives to have wanted, and it should be respected.

From a New York Times column:

“It is a fair thing to point out,” said Shannon Hale, a Mormon who writes young adult fiction, “that there have been very prominent Jewish writers that have received a lot of accolades, and worldwide the number of Mormons are comparable to the number of Jews, so why hasn’t that happened?”

Ms. Hale’s theory is that literary fiction tends to exalt the tragic, or the gloomy, while Mormon culture prefers the sunny and optimistic.

“When I was an English major, then getting a master’s, most of the literary fiction I read was tragedy,” said Ms. Hale… The books she was assigned treated “decline and the ultimate destruction of the human spirit” as necessary ingredients for an honest portrayal of life.

UD‘s not sure she’d put it like that. Take a novel always ranked Number One and unlikely (if the NYT column is correct in its descriptions of Mormons) to generate enthusiasm or writerly inspiration among most Mormons. Take James Joyce’s Ulysses. It’s not a tragedy; as Joyce Carol Oates points out here, it’s a comedy.

The highest and most spirited comedy is by necessity democratic — even anarchic. It celebrates life: the livingness of life, not its abstract qualities. Where [T.S.] Eliot saw the contemporary world as futile because disruptive of the past, Joyce, the realist-fantasist, the unparalleled mimic, gave life to these clamorous voices without passing judgment on them.

True, the novel follows dispirited Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom as they drag their asses through Dublin; yet although both men feel themselves to be in decline, there’s nothing destructive about their shared fates this particular day: They are fortunate enough (thanks to Bloom’s kindness) to meet each other, and to forge a compassionate and perceptive fellowship. They celebrate the livingness of life, singing, gazing at stars, reciting poetry, telling jokes, sharing memories, and of course going outside and peeing together:

At Stephen’s suggestion, at Bloom’s instigation both, first Stephen, then Bloom, in penumbra urinated, their sides contiguous, their organs of micturition reciprocally rendered invisible by manual circumposition, their gazes, first Bloom’s, then Stephen’s, elevated to the projected luminous and semiluminous shadow.

Similarly?

The trajectories of their, first sequent, then simultaneous, urinations were dissimilar: Bloom’s longer, less irruent, in the incomplete form of the bifurcated penultimate alphabetical letter who in his ultimate year at High School (1880) had been capable of attaining the point of greatest altitude against the whole concurrent strength of the institution, 210 scholars: Stephen’s higher, more sibilant, who in the ultimate hours of the previous day had augmented by diuretic consumption an insistent vesical pressure.

What different problems presented themselves to each concerning the invisible audible collateral organ of the other?

To Bloom: the problems of irritability, tumescence, rigidity, reactivity, dimension, sanitariness, pelosity. To Stephen: the problem of the sacerdotal integrity of Jesus circumcised (1st January, holiday of obligation to hear mass and abstain from unnecessary servile work) and the problem as to whether the divine prepuce, the carnal bridal ring of the holy Roman catholic apostolic church, conserved in Calcata, were deserving of simple hyperduly or of the fourth degree of latria accorded to the abscission of such divine excrescences as hair and toenails.

I don’t think it’s the gloomy aspects of modernist novels like Ulysses that seem at odds with Mormonism; rather, I suspect it’s precisely these novels’ non-abstract, non-judgmental, earthbound, ongoing livingness – their straightforward and candid capture of the way we actually think and feel and act from moment to moment – that’s jarring.

How important is this sport — about whose head-shattering vileness everyone, post-Incognito, is talking — to our universities?

The New York Times reviews the Incognito years – the glory years – at the University of Nebraska and the University of Oregon.

After a whistle at one [Nebraska] practice … he was accused of hitting a backup lineman, Jack Limbaugh. “He did that kind of thing to a lot of his teammates,” Limbaugh said. “I just walked off the field. A fight is what he wanted, but I wasn’t going there.”

Incognito was suspended for fighting in practice during 2003, and Nebraska sent him to the Menninger Clinic in Topeka, Kan., which treats psychiatric and behavioral problems. He was reinstated and was named an All-Big 12 Conference All-Star. But before the 2004 season, Incognito was found guilty of a misdemeanor assault charge. He was still on the roster until he fought a teammate in the locker room that summer. The new Nebraska coach, Bill Callahan, dismissed him.

He was quickly accepted into Oregon as long as he sought anger management therapy.

Incognito’s stay was less than two weeks, not long enough to even participate in a full practice. He never registered for any courses, according to the registrar’s office.

From an article written during his time at Nebraska:

“I don’t ever want to reduce anybody’s aggressiveness, ” [said] Barney Cotton, Nebraska’s new offensive line coach…

… Incognito is considered the brightest young star on the offensive line and has been mentioned in the same breath as former All-Americans such as Dominic Raiola…

Oh yeah RAIOLA!

Remember the Lions’ Dominic Raiola, another Nebraska offensive lineman by the way, verbally attacking the University of Wisconsin marching band before Detroit’s game in Green Bay earlier this season?

Ohio University currently enjoys the coach responsible for Raiola and Incognito – Frank Solich – and does it ever enjoy him!

Nothing sends a message of discipline to a college football team quite like its coach being passed out, drunk, at the wheel of a car pointed the wrong way on a one-way street.

Yes, that was ol’ Frank just a few years ago…

Incognito, Raiola, Solich…

Cornhuskers must be mighty proud! We need more of their All-American heartland values out here in cynical Washington DC.