Click on the images
for a good view.

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[Courtesy UD‘s sister.]

The Rand Paul Plagiarized Speech Song

That speech:
Isn’t it Rand? Isn’t it great?
Isn’t it swell? Isn’t it fun?
Isn’t it… plagiarized…

Isn’t it, Rand? Isn’t it great?
Isn’t it swell? Isn’t it fun?
Nowadays…

… that the government pay them tens of thousands of dollars every day as punishment for having mandated that they teach their children the country’s core curriculum, a court in Atwerp has not only refused to pay them anything, but has reiterated that they must teach their children that curriculum.

UD‘s poetry MOOC now has more than four thousand students. She’s thrilled. Not just by that number, but by the thoughtful questions and comments her students regularly add to the course’s main page.

[Perhaps] reading Kafka or Woolf or Naipaul does make you a better, more empathic person. (Though what about your hardline literary misanthropes, by the way — your Bernhards, your Houellebecqs, your Célines? Do we gain anything in moral aptitude by reading these dreadful old bastards, and, if we don’t, is doing so somehow less worthy of our time?) But even if it didn’t, even if reading made you a worse person … reading would be no less vital an activity. I don’t know whether all those boxes full of books have made me any kind of better person; I don’t know whether they’ve made me kinder and more perceptive, or whether they’ve made me more introspective and detached and self-absorbed. Most likely it’s some combination of all these characteristics, perhaps canceling each other out. But I do know that I wouldn’t want to be without those books or my having read them, and that their importance to me is mostly unrelated to any power they might have to make me a more considerate person.

UD said something similar, a few weeks back, to what Mark O’Connell says. (“Reading novels like Lolita and The Tropic of Cancer and The Elementary Particles will have God knows what impact on your personal morality and your engagement as a citizen. These are funny, nihilistic, cynical works, and I’d hate to have to be the one to determine their moral or character-building potential. As Georg Lukacs long ago pointed out about Kafka – and what serious education in the humanities is without Kafka? – great writers of our time have a tendency to maunder on inconclusively about the hopelessly alienated consciousness; or they sketch a world with very little collective action in it… Writers like Don DeLillo, America’s greatest living novelist, routinely get called bad citizens.”) O’Connell’s responding to the same thing UD was – yet another report or study proving scientifically that reading serious literature makes you a better person. There’s always another such study coming down the pike, and they’re all silly things, attracting yet sillier self-aggrandizing commentary from teachers and writers.

August Kleinzahler points out that “Multivitamins are good for you. Exercise, fresh air, and sex are good for you. Fruit and vegetables are good for you. Poetry is not.” The same is true – maybe even truer – of serious non-poetic literature. Reading this sort of stuff is, as O’Connell writes, an intense and “vital” experience. Its language tends to excite us in rather obscure ways; its disclosure of usually hidden human depths may thrill us. Perhaps we want to say that great literature tends to reconcile us to the truths of our shared condition. But force feeding yourself George Eliot because you want to be a more empathetic person will only make you hate George Eliot.

It’s cold and sunny on the hot tub deck of our hotel. Les UDs are swinging gently on a padded porch swing overlooking the boardwalk. Across from us, on the other side of the boardwalk, people have lined up plaid, hunter green, and American flag-lined folding chairs. Directly across from me, a beefy sixtyish man with a face red from the wind off the ocean is clutching a tiny white dog and wearing a baseball hat that says somethingsomethingsomething (this part is in small letters and I can’t make it out) and then (in very big letters) SHIT. The parade begins in ten minutes.

The event is overseen by friendly people wearing orange vests that read MONSTER POLICE.

“I think it’s coming! I see a banner!” UD‘s sister gets excited.

Here comes a phalanx of people in maroon jerseys. The Rehoboth Beach Animal Hospital brigade.

Now – uh – men wearing yellow cardboard hats? The effect is knights-who-say-ni-ish. Fronted by a banjo player and then by a crazed old drunk who might or might not be part of their group. He engages parade-viewers in surrealistic conversation. “AH SEE YOU AH LOVE YOU AH LOVE YOU AH SEE YOU.”

Now human jesters lead bull dogs done as devils through the throng.

Irish setters as bumblebees. Yorkies as witches. A strange female humanoid all in white – polar bear?

VIVA DOGS VEGAS is an elaborate float with bad sequined dogs; the Miley Cyrus float features a dog with a chained naked Barbie on its back. The Miley Cyrus float is a huge hit when people finally figure it out.

Many pirate dogs; many skeleton dogs. CHICAGO BLACKHAWKS DOGBONI. What does it mean?

Extremely beautiful Collie Zorro; extremely beautiful large white poodle on which gray circles have been charcoaled. Really nice effect.

“A predominance of micro-dogs,” says Mr UD, disapprovingly.

RETIRED HOOTERS DOGS. No one really gets it, but the word hooters is always a guaranteed laugh-getter.

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I’ll instablog it, assuming
the wifi connection in our hotel
room cooperates. It’s been ornery.

La Kid holding a puppy.

… the deep structure, if you will, of a situation. Example: Jockschool Louisiana State University is jacking up game ticket and parking prices because the program loses millions every year, and will lose more with every year, into the foreseeable future.

A few comments on the article:

Jesus H. Christ, ALLEVA. [Alleva is the athletic director.] You pay 4.6 million a year to ONE guy [- Les Miles, football coach -] and your ENTIRE DEPARTMENT is in the whole half of his salary? So whats your grand idea? Make the thousands of fans pay more instead of cutting elsewhere? … Ask [Les Miles] to take a pay cut to keep LSU football alive without going into the fans’ pockets. Asking 1 man to sacrifce or 100,000 men? You wanna bet on what the answer will be? Pathetic.

—————-

[I]t’s bad enough you make loyal fans pay a kick back for the RIGHT to buy a ticket …. now you charge for parking that has been free for years … I could take my family to eat at Ruth’s Chris [Steakhouse] for less then what a coke and hot dog cost … Les Miles makes more then probably the rest of his coaches combined and the man can’t tell time … he recruits thugs and benches kids because he has his favorites… costing us national championships …

—————–

the real issue is where is all the tv money, merchandising money, ticket money, bowl game money, etc etc ???? would love to see a breakdown of expenditures to see where the WASTE really is going.

[Time] to grab hold of the third rail of Arkansas politics — athletic spending at the [University of Arkansas]. It’s a good time to do it. When the Hog football team is winning, no one dare utter a word about the sloppy, secretive and sometimes shady practices in the athletic kingdom… A big chunk of its money is laundered through the secretive Razorback Foundation… The money wouldn’t exist but for the university and its athletic department. But it is often spent in ways out of reach of public inspection. And sometimes, the numbers don’t match up.

By the way: The Razorback Foundation rarely responds at all to questions about its business…

… University Bloomington. Odd hour and day for a sighting, a lockdown. Five, six, on a Sunday morning.

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Students fighting; one had a knife and used it. Non-lethally.

Les UDs arrived at the beach in time to see the end of the boardwalk costume parade (the dog parade is tomorrow). As always, UD found inexplicably moving a foreground of goblins, a background of ocean. All on an astoundingly sunny and clear October day.

This is our sitting room, complete with a telescope we’re a little afraid to use. None of us knows quite what to do with it. But we are going to give it a whirl as soon as it gets dark. The night sky should be full of stars.

… is interviewed in The Daily Californian.

Background here.

Squirrels are always gnawing at UD‘s terracotta pots (she’s heard two theories: they like the salty taste, and they’re whittling down their long teeth)… In Iowa, a squirrel has been eating a math professor’s bicycle.

–pseud.

… for the dog parade

at Rehoboth Beach.

(UD‘s friend Tamara
took this photo two
years ago.)

Of course she will
blog from there.