If they were just sports programs – and not also universities – there wouldn’t be any problem here. You’ve got a certain sort of conduct – verbally violent… sometimes physically violent… – but that’s the norm, that’s how you motivate the little buggers. That’s how you make them angry motherfuckers like you so they want to kill the opposing team. But there’s this teeny vestigial sense at some American universities that qua university they shouldn’t be seen countenancing this sort of thing – that the ethos of a university…

I mean… not that the university itself will ever interfere with its coaches! Noho. But when coaches get so vile that large numbers of players leave the school rather than endure them… Or – God forbid – when players or coaching assistants go public with their complaints… Well then! Ahem! Yes! We’re a university, not a BDSM club (in all of these cases, including the latest one at in-some-obscure-and-actually-no-longer-discernable-way-Jesuit Georgetown University, there are multiple masochists on the team ready to defend their sadist)… We’ve got standards of behavior here…

Congressional progressive caucus; against the government shutdown. If a crazy person with a gun shoots me, I become an icon of the far left.

Maybe Bernie Sanders, only Senator in the caucus, will engage me in conversation.

“Any chance you’re a Vermonter?”

“No, but I’m an old friend of Peter Galbraith’s.”

“He’s not popular in the State Senate.”

“Tell me about it.”

The nutty right has royally fucked the country; I will stand with the nutty left against it. I will stand in the rain (it’s raining) and scream crazy shit with the crazy ass progressive caucus.

I don’t know what the p.c.’s platform is. I’m sure I’m opposed to most of it. But a student in my mo/pomo seminar told me about the rally, and I’ve been spouting off in class about postmodern political passivity (in my weaker moments I tell myself this blog, this daily attack on corrupt elements of the American university, constitutes…) and… I dunno. Sometimes there’s no unpacking motive. I’m on the train. I’m going.

Maybe they’ll cancel it due to inclement weather. Optimal outcome. I get points for going without having to listen to the crazy ass progressive caucus say dumb shit. Without having to worry about Our Polarized Nation.

UD‘s wearing her uniform (boots, jeans, black turtleneck, scarf). The other day she attended a meeting of GWU’s highest administrative team, and the contrast between their suits and her jeans was stark. Thready old hippie UD. Representing the humanities faculty whether they like it or not.

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

Postlude. Wow, it’s wet out there. Chilled damp UD takes her place on the red line train back to Garrett Park. She carries a red sign with white letters that read

END THE SHUTDOWN!

Capitol trees, bushes, and grasses trembled beautifully around UD as she walked from Union Station to the rally. One tree in particular, planted in circular groves on the grounds of various buildings, had a complex birch-like peeling bark (maybe the tree was a river birch?) and a thick coat of reddening green leaves with black berries. Blue jays shrieked and crows called out from lamp tops. Panicled pampas grass was paired with humpy mums – not a good look.

Employees at various federal entities streamed in to a park at the foot of the Capitol. They banged pots and chanted WORK NOT HURT. One of them gave UD the sign. T-shirts were also available, but who was going to put one on over her poncho? The rain flooded down, and the air was cold.

One guy tromped through the crowd trying out various chants. “We’ve got a Norma Rae,” said one attendee to another, and they laughed.

Police and their dogs were everywhere. At one point a bunch of them converged on an oddball wearing sunglasses, but he was just an oddball.

“Are you on furlough?” a reporter asked UD.

“No.”

He walked away.

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

Jesse Jackson spoke. He sounded drunk and old. He offered a halting potted American history. We won in 1862… and… uh… in 2012… Now it’s 2014 and we won’t forget… He didn’t even bother coming up with one of his famous rhyming couplets.

… wins the literature Nobel.

“I would really hope this would make people see the short story as an important art, not just something you played around with until you got a novel.”

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

INTERVIEWER

Was the community you grew up in pleased about your career?

MUNRO

It was known there had been stories published here and there, but my writing wasn’t fancy. It didn’t go over well in my hometown. The sex, the bad language, the incomprehensibility . . . The local newspaper printed an editorial about me: A soured introspective view of life . . . And, A warped personality projected on . . . My dad was already dead when they did that. They wouldn’t do it while Dad was alive, because everyone really liked him. He was so liked and respected that everybody muted it a bit. But after he died, it was different.

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

There are parts of a story where the story fails… The story fails but your faith in the importance of doing the story doesn’t fail. That it might is the danger. This may be the beast that’s lurking in the closet in old age—the loss of the feeling that things are worth doing… Of course it wouldn’t matter if you did give up writing. It’s not the giving up of the writing that I fear. It’s the giving up of this excitement or whatever it is that you feel that makes you write.

As in that scene in The Great Gatsby when Wolfsheim explains to Nick –

“He’s an Oggsford man.”

“Oh!”

“He went to Oggsford College in England. You know Oggsford College?”

“I’ve heard of it.”

“It’s one of the most famous colleges in the world.”

– so today another Oggsford man is unmasked as a pretender.

[T]op barrister Dennis O’Riordan … was this week suspended for having claimed to have two first-class degrees and a doctorate from Oxford and a master’s from Harvard…

Unlike Gatsby, O’Riordan really piled it on – two from Oxford, and a Harvard cherry on top. I guess he’s taking into account inflation since 1925…

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

UD thanks Jon.

…in free fall.

Yeshiva University apparently has not had its fill of sex scandals for the year.

This story just appeared on the news; it’s much too soon to know what’s going on. I’ll follow it.

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

It seems to be over, with no gunshots having been fired. Ezra Klein was giving a lecture at the time; everyone was evacuated to the basement of the building.

Oh Giunchigliani really. Go back to Italy or get with the program. You live in Las Vegas, not Parma, man. When your local university has a football program this successful, you spend hundreds of millions on a new stadium. Get it?

Of the panel’s 11 members, only Clark County Commissioner Chris Giunchigliani addressed whether there was a need for the stadium. Nearly everyone else in the room — from UNLV President Neal Smatresk to the stadium board chairman Don Snyder — appeared to be poised to build some type of venue… Stadium board member Cedric Crear, a Board of Regents appointee, even went as far to say that a new stadium would “revolutionize our football program. This city wants a winning, big-time football team. I don’t want to be shy about saying that.”

Don’t be shy, Cedric. Say it loud and say it proud.

Even though some Strip casino companies such as MGM Resorts International said the previous stadium proposal of $900 million was too much, Snyder told the Review-Journal after the two-hour meeting that there is no price ceiling.

“Why not?” Snyder said when asked if the new stadium proposal could match the price of the old one.

… “The temptation is to cut out the bells and whistles. When you start cutting costs, there’s a tendency to look like all the other stadiums across the country. Then you get mediocrity and I don’t think mediocrity is acceptable in Las Vegas,” [another booster] said.

The last thing I’d associate with the Las Vegas public education system is mediocrity. The Las Vegas public education system is way, way, below mediocre.

The parents argued that the restrictions limit their freedom to educate their children according to their beliefs and asked the court to fine the government $6,780 per child for every day that the limitations are in place …

The haredim of Belgium don’t just want to keep their children ignorant; they want to get rich off of suing the Belgian government for the state’s efforts to educate their children.

It’s a novel, ballsy approach. For every subtraction problem my child comprehends, $6,780 from the government in penalties! Did she learn that the earth revolves around the sun today? That’ll be six thousand seven hundred and eighty big ones.

We’ll see how the Antwerp district court rules on the injunction. Maybe it’ll up their asking price. Each day a haredi child learns something, ten thousand from the government.

The Lions’ big center Raiola
Went off to collect his payola.
His manner was blunt
He called everyone cunt
And signed his own name with Crayola.

… Dominic Raiola embodies college and professional football.

Of course Raiola never bothered graduating, leaving as soon as the professional leagues beckoned, but he’s still a legend at Nebraska because… uh… because not graduating… probably not even taking any real classes… is legendary!

With all the academic value he’d derived from his attendance at the University of Nebraska, Raiola hit the Detroit Lions, where his non-stop viciousness has earned him millions.

But UD can’t help thinking there’s something tragic about this seeming winner – a man who’s made it to the big leagues and the big money and big acclaim. Because although football is a spectacular outlet for murderous hostility against the world, games are brief, and vicious plays even briefer. There are practices, to be sure, but these too are fleeting. Football is no match for Raiola’s rage, and he’s always getting in trouble as a result.

Take his latest thing – Screaming at the University of Wisconsin marching band that they’re all fat fucks and cunts and faggots. No one knows why Raiola did this. The band did nothing to provoke him.

But we know. Raiola is exactly the sort of disturbed person universities like Nebraska make legends out of and professional football makes millionaires. For them, he’s a hero, and he’s a skill set. For everyone else, he’s a deeply troubled human being.

Once he gets his head sufficiently concussed, Raiola’s problem will become even more acute. Not that anyone gives a shit as long he gives Americans some really terrific hits to look at.

You wonder sometimes what it really comes down to, the sort of people and customs it creates. You wonder about the actual daily nitty gritty of university life at schools where nothing matters but sports.

I’m not talking about the big public stuff, the big five-part Sports Illustrated feature on T. Boone Pickens’ Oklahoma State University and its multidimensional pigswill. I mean the microculture – the way people talk to each other; the way they dress; the way they interact, one on one.

For that, you need two types of stories that routinely hit the news:

1. the sadistic coach; and

2. the sadistic hazer.

These two highly placed boosters carry the microculture in a way we can see, a way chronicled – since it maims people and generates trials and lawsuits – by the local and national press. Oklahoma State’s macroculture is the five-part series; OSU’s microculture is the secretary of the Interfraternity Council who pulled a loaded gun on pledges when they said they wouldn’t take a bullet for their brothers. He didn’t shoot them, but in his rage he shot out the window of the pick-up in which they were sitting. Because they obviously had no idea how serious the brotherhood of boosters was at OSU.

My post’s headline comes from a voice mail the women’s lacrosse coach at the University of Louisville sent to one of her players. The university’s system of spies had spotted a player wearing a shirt with the name of a competing university on it.

Darby, change your clothes, don’t bother coming to practice today. Do you know that I just got a phone call about you wearing a Michigan State shirt? You obviously have no idea how serious athletics is at the University of Louisville. I do not want to see your face today until after practice, but your butt better be up in my office with a Louisville shirt on your chest when practice ends.

Winston Smith would have no trouble recognizing this message. It is the functional equivalent of mandating burqas for university women.

The University of Louisville – read about its vile, all-enveloping sports culture here (scroll down) – is now enjoying national coverage of this coach and her alleged abuse of the students on her team.

Are you beginning to see how twisted these all-American settings are? Looked at from both macro and micro perspectives, the nation’s sports sluts get sicker by the day.

… is back! It’s hooting like mad in my backyard.

… the full film, on YouTube, of DeLillo/Cronenberg’s Cosmopolis. UD, a DeLillo fanatic, found Cosmopolis so disappointing she could barely finish it. And then this novel, of all DeLillo’s novels, gets filmed…

She avoided the film, especially when bad reviews started coming in. But of course she has been curious about it. And here is an easy way for her to see it.

So she’s been watching it today, between lawn mowing, pumpkin gathering, and car washing.

The curious thing is, she’s also been watching, over and over, the trailer for Gravity; and these two films together have her thinking about their rather strange similarities. Both films feature the cuttingest-edge postmodern American technology along with the new sorts of people this technology spawns. Both films put these new sorts of Americans in conditions of absolute surreal silence.

Outside of this silence, in its background, revolves a very real world. The background in Gravity is Earth, and as I watch the trailer my homing eye is always moving away from the astronaut and instead following Sri Lanka and Florida and Chad… The revolving stage of beloved bluegreen Earth …

Manhattan’s the background in Cosmopolis, and the anarchic city churns and churns behind the deeply tinted, armored, windows of Eric Packer’s stretch limo.

The films share, that is, this perennial dual focus, this inside/outside, silence/noise, technologically mediated environment/natural (or semi-natural/semi-cultural) environment. Both really allow one to think about mediation, about the odd estranged relationship many contemporary Americans are able to have with actuality. DeLillo’s best-known novel – White Noise – is all about this, from its title onward… our white-noisy electronically mediated daily experience…

Yet Cosmopolis is the work of a moralist; indeed, for me, its weakness is precisely its moral hectoring about the psychopathology of great wealth, and in particular the way great wealth immunizes itself from the pain of humanity. I love the theme – but in most of his novels DeLillo approaches the theme subtly, satirically. Here there’s a grim sermonizing that forces the film’s actors simply into one anti-capitalist screed after another.

Gravity’s trailer (good name for a film in itself) suggests that this film uses the dual focus bit in a much more human and (I hate the word, but it fits) poignant way, conveying our new yearning for a life of embeddedness and proximities and raggedy no-tech imperfections in the wake of all that shiny mediation.

It’s like what Stephen Dedalus says in Portrait when he realizes he’s an artist:

He smiled to think that it was this disorder, the misrule and confusion of his father’s house, and the stagnation of vegetable life, which was to win the day in his soul.

It is rather degrading – I mean, being a British woman who discovers that her taxes are going to schools that mandate veiling even for little girls, and that make the girls sit in the back of schoolrooms behind the boys. Etc. Etc.

UD wonders why the British stand for it.