A former Temple University student killed himself the other day, shot himself in the head, in the busiest part of campus. Plenty of students saw it happen, or saw the immediate aftermath.

UD readers might remember Mitchell Heisman, who shot himself in the head in the middle of Harvard Yard a few years ago, on a busy morning. Or Nora Miller, who, on another busy morning, immolated herself on the Wesleyan University running field where she (a track star) practiced.

Most suicides are private; UD remembers a GW woman going across the river to a hotel room in Virginia to kill herself. The main character in Doris Lessing’s famous story, “To Room Nineteen,” similarly chooses an anonymous hotel room for her death. Many suicides are committed in hotel rooms.

Public suicides literally want to make a spectacle of themselves. It seems important to their conception of their deaths that they be seen, that people be riveted to and disturbed by their charred or bloodied bodies in the public square. Heisman distributed, just before his death, a long manuscript about the meaninglessness of life. His public gesture seems to have been the endpoint of an elaborate argument to which we were meant to pay attention.

Private suicides seem a reckoning with private demons; public suicides often feel like an angry message.

I met this guy, Antonio Tapies, in the Spanish Pyrenees, when I was, what, fifteen? My parents had arranged a summer for me in Barcelona, the Pyrenees, and Ibiza, with the family of a Catalan colleague of his. The family lived in all three places.

These people had been very close to Joan Miro, and on a wall near their Barcelona apartment’s dining room table was one of his canvases, squiggly black objects against a lot of emptiness.

Tapies came for an evening visit to their Pyrenees farm (their acres of strawberries were gathered by villagers and then put into pies for us). I remember thinking it odd or pretentious or whatever that he wore sunglasses all evening, sitting on the dark patio and talking softly. I remember being told by the family what an honor it was to meet this eminent man, but his name meant nothing to me.

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And as long as I’m writing about Artists I Have Known:

An exhibition [at the National Museum in Krakow] of the works of Wojciech Fangor is bound to strike a chord with a multitude of devotees. Set to run from 12.10.2012 to 6.01 2013 in the Main Building, the concept of the show is tightly linked to the artist’s biography. 2012 sees Fangor’s 90th birthday. The first of his pieces to command attention in studies of his work was created at the easel whilst he was a pupil of Tadeusz Pruszkowski. He was fifteen years old at the time and the exhibition will thus also celebrate the seventy-fifth anniversary of the working life of one of Poland’s most significant 20th century artists.

UD knew Fangor when he lived next door to her little upstate New York house. His house was big, with a big studio in which hung big unfinished canvases. A substantial man with a booming voice and enormous hands, he spent a lot of time, those summers (we only go there in the summer; he and his wife lived there all year), chopping wood for the winter. He loved his many cats, all of them strays. He built himself an observatory, in which we’d gather to gaze at the amazing sky. In the evenings, he and Magda curled up on their big country bed and laughed at American television shows.

I’ve been pretty bed-bound — recovering from bronchitis. My bed faces a wall of windows overlooking open forest, and it’s a real bird theater out there. All day long, robins, wrens, blue jays, mourning doves, and crows fly through. The mourning doves pick among the dry leaves on the forest floor.

Both yesterday and today, I’ve seen a falcon! The female American kestrel.

A distinguished Australian scientist says what those of us who have giggled through Don DeLillo’s White Noise know: The smarter we get, the dumber we get. The Age of Information is The Age of the Idjit. “The greater the scientific advance,” one of DeLillo’s characters explains, “the more primitive the fear.”

So universities have to be careful, because millions of highly advanced people believe all sorts of bullshit, especially about medical therapies (“chiropractic, homeopathy, iridology and reflexology”) that don’t belong in university degree programs because no empirical basis exists for them and because they divert resources from legitimate therapies. This blog has chronicled the efforts – often successful in the US – of reputable scientists to keep reputable universities from starting chiropractic programs in particular. A group of concerned international scientists is now “urging the vice chancellors [of Australian universities] to review the teaching of these courses and come up with a statement on the issue when they meet in March.” Quite a number of Australian universities – many of them public-funded – are handing out degrees in pretty whacked-out stuff.

As faithful readers know, UD designated the University of Massachusetts Amherst one of her first ‘Online Makeover’ schools – schools so violent, such a direct threat to their neighborhoods, such an insult to the word university, that they should be shut down as physical entities, and reopened as exclusively online institutions. The U Mass student’s comment in this post’s headline says it all, as does the long review, in this article, of the history of student riots there.

At U Mass the drunken shits have won; it’s their traditions that dominate and define the campus. The school has proved incapable of taking itself back from a powerful bloc of vicious fools, which means that it’s no school at all. For the sake of public safety, the image of the state, and the reputation of the university as an institution, the legislature should put it out of its misery.

Big intellectual property lawsuit brewing, with the president of the Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center accused of using research generated at his prior lab – the U Penn’s Leonard and Madlyn Abramson Family Cancer Research Institute – to start up a potentially very, very, profitable pharma outfit.

What a pleasure for UD, on this quiet Sunday (in bed, recovering from bronchitis), to follow, in the wake of Dorothea Tanning’s death, her life. What a pleasure, having just returned from that same landscape, to bask in photographs of Tanning and her husband Max Ernst in surrealistic Sedona.

The iconic artist’s life – how strong its pull. How one wants to be there – in the house they built beside the hills, or in the squatter’s shack on the British Columbia coast where Malcolm Lowry lived with his wife and wrote Under the Volcano…

Creative intensity and beauty and freedom – it’s all there in the photographs: the ocean, and the hills like white elephants, shining in the background.

Tanning lived for more than a century and had time to reflect on the artist’s life.

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

Sequestrienne

Don’t look at me
for answers. Who am I but
a sobriquet,
a teeth-grinder,
grinder of color,
and vanishing point?

If it isn’t too late
let me waste one day away
from my history.
Let me see without
looking inside
at broken glass.

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

The brilliant portmanteau title – sequestrienne. The famous artist’s semi-famous widow is sought after in her elderly semi-sequestered life, consulted for her wisdom about iconic times. She rides – an equestrienne – those times, rides them in memory, mounts them, relives them for herself and for those who come to her and want her to cover that territory again. But she begins her poem with a warning:

Don’t look at me
for answers. Who am I but
a sobriquet,
a teeth-grinder,
grinder of color,
and vanishing point?

I’m just wife-of, after all. Just an old woman who grinds her teeth at night and grinds her paints as she still tries to paint, even as her life vanishes. Why assume I have any wisdom? I’m still caught up, in my very latter days, in the daily grind, the ongoing anxious business of trying to understand, and trying to create.

There was a time
of middle distance, unforgettable,
a sort of lace-cut
flame-green filament
to ravish my
skin-tight eyes.

What I can tell you is that there was this past, this undeniable, authentic stretch of time during which I was alive in every conceivable way: erotically, aesthetically. That sharp green incandescent stem – it was actually there, the force that through the green fuse drives the flower, as one of Tanning’s Sedona guests put it. It ravished me, and I saw the world as one great true thing, not as fragments.

I take that back—
it was forgettable but not
entirely if you
consider my
heavenly bodies . . .
I loved them so.

My love keeps that sense of fulfillment – full-filament – from disintegrating entirely; I’ve tried to keep the bodies of my loved ones aloft in the heavens.

Heaven’s motes sift
to salt-white — paint is ground
to silence; and I,
I am bound, unquiet,
a shade of blue
in the studio.

Yet everything reduces and sifts down and fragments. My beloved becomes a mote, fading to the salt-white of death, just as our paintings eventually withdraw into silence. Only I, still alive, remain in the studio, restless, anxious, earthly blue, sadly blue.

If it isn’t too late
let me waste one day away
from my history.
Let me see without
looking inside
at broken glass.

Let me sequester myself away, let me ride away, from history, from the temporal realm with its incoherences and failures and anxieties, and yes, from its mystifications, with which you come to me, wife-of, expecting wisdom. Let me lose this self-consciousness, this always looking inside, this play with fragments. Give me a clear day and no memories.

A Clear Day and No Memories

Today the air is clear of everything.
It has no knowledge except of nothingness
And it flows over us without meanings,
As if none of us had ever been here before
And are not now: in this shallow spectacle,
This invisible activity, this sense.

They don’t give a rat’s ass where the funds to shovel millions and millions of dollars in the direction of retired football coaches come from. The fact that the university somehow has money to do that, but lacks money for its academic programs bigtime “will hurt the U when President Kaler comes crying poor to the Legislature for money for our students.” As one of many unhappy legislators puts it.

Get it? Pick up on the hostility in the “comes crying” bit? No? How about this, from another legislator:

“How badly do they need money if that’s how they’re handling it?”

Maybe further comments from legislators would help President Kaler.

“I think it is definitely a direct legislative issue, because these kinds of salaries make legislators think, ‘Does the U really need money and why don’t they ever put it toward students when we give it to them?'” [Mindy] Greiling said. “Once again, it looks like the university is putting students last in terms of their budgets when we see things like this.”

Rep. Alice Hausman, DFL-St. Paul, who serves on the Capital Investment Committee and whose district includes numerous university employees, said she has become almost immune to university decisions that she believes show the wrong priorities.

“I don’t think any of us buy the argument [that foundation money makes it acceptable], but they give the argument with a straight face,” she said.

Straight face. I think university presidents should be smart enough to pick up on these teeny linguistic nuances, don’t you? Coming from the state legislature?

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

UD thanks Michael.

UD calls it technolust, a sudden humping action at the sight of a screen.

UD and this guy in the LA Times think “the nirvana sketched out by Duncan and Genachowski at last week’s Digital Learning Day town hall was erected upon a sizable foundation of commercially processed claptrap.”

As you know, UD just a few days ago attended a small gathering that featured Genachowski, a genial man promoting not really education but American riches via exploitation of technology. UD‘s all for that as a broad sentiment, but she, like the LA Times guy, has actually read the research on technology and classroom learning, and it ain’t pretty.

… for the nation.

Journals are rated on their “impact factor.” A high-impact journal is defined as one that’s quoted by many other researchers in their own later studies. That’s called citing the journal.

The higher the impact factor, the more the journal’s prestige grows.

Now two business professors say journal editors are “coercing” those who wants to publish in them, especially younger professors. For instance, your psychology journal tells Professor Smith: We’ll publish your new study, but only if you add a lot of pointless citations from our journal, in order to inflate our impact rating and help us sell advertising.

“Gentler language may be used, but the message is clear: Add citations or risk rejection,” says the study by the College of Business Administration at the University of Alabama.

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

I’m pickin’ up good citations
She’s giving me excitations
I’m pickin’ up good citations
(Oom bop, bop, good citations)
She’s giving me excitations
(Oom bop, bop, excitations)
Good good good good citations
(Oom bop, bop)
She’s giving me excitations
(Oom bop, bop, excitations)
Good good good good citations
(Oom bop, bop)
She’s giving me excitations
(Oom bop, bop, excitations)

… sue my alma mater,” Strauss says.

[Sung to the tune (roughly) of I am the very model of a modern major general.]

I thought I’d face the world with quite enormous wealth and hauteur
I’d supper out at Sotheby’s and breed Italian Trotters
But now my only clients are malodorous old trottoirs
It’s with a heavy heart that I sue my alma mater.

(Yes with a heavy heart does he sue his alma mater.)

Who wins? Nice plot twist: The professor!

… are set to start. On Monday, George Huguely goes on trial for the murder of Yeardley Love; and next month Amy Bishop will be tried for killing three, and injuring another three, of her colleagues at the University of Alabama, Huntsville.

UD suspects the Huguely trial will be straightforward, and that he will be convicted on the charge. Amy Bishop appears to be a madwoman, and that makes her sentence harder to anticipate (she will certainly be found guilty).

UD will follow both trials.

No comment. Just wanted to put that out there.