UD‘s exciting Bloomsday last year, where she sang and read from Molly Bloom’s soliloquy in front of a packed gathering at the Irish embassy, is followed by a quiet one now, beachside.
Beachside like Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses, Chapter Three, where, in despair, he walks along a beach near Dublin. A young ambitious writer who’d gone soaring off to the continent to write his great books, he’s come crashing to earth – and Ireland – in the guilty, grieving aftermath of his mother’s death. The whole chapter’s his interior monologue on themes of soaring life, haunting death, sex, love, family, and ambition, as he broods along the beach.
His feet marched in sudden proud rhythm over the sand furrows, along by the boulders of the south wall. He stared at them proudly, piled stone mammoth skulls. Gold light on sea, on sand, on boulders. The sun is there, the slender trees, the lemon houses.
proud rhythm/sand furrows: You see the matched pair, the metered poetry, mirroring his metered walk. Also the subtle assonance of it all: the f‘s and the v (feet/over/furrows), the monosyllabic, final d of sand and proud, taking along with them for good measure the d of sudden. The poetry too of those liquid l‘s in along/boulders/wall; the yet more poetry in all those long lovely open ah’s: march/along/wall. This is gentle prose, echoing the gentle setting of sand and waves and wind on a summer afternoon, the quietness of a solitary man walking and thinking. The storm is inside his mind; when we come to his monologue’s content, to the thoughts themselves, the prose will take a much harsher turn. But here we are still in third person, the consciousness of indirect discourse picking up on externalities.
Proud means bold means our genius is going to choose boulders, and gold , but never bold; he won’t say bold, but while we read, inside our own internal monologue, the word bold, the idea of boldness aligned with pride, will somehow bubble up, somehow subaquatically accompany all of this — haunt it, if you like, the way Stephen’s mother’s death will haunt his thoughts, present, and even insistent, but not quite there on the page. And that is the mind, that is the way it is, as our feet march in proud rhythm. Under the rhythm there’s another rhythm, deeper and always insinuating and complicating and – for Stephen, right now – dead calming, keeping him, despite his full-of-beansness, his amazing libidinal energy – from soaring.
(For an American analogue, there’s this famous passage, from A River Runs Through It:
Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world’s great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of those rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs. I am haunted by waters.
James Joyce can actually capture these underflows verbally. Norman Maclean wrote a great book but like virtually all other writers, he can’t do that.)
He stared at them proudly, piled stone mammoth skulls.
Stephen’s morbid set of mind perceives the boulders as massive skulls, a collective grave all piled up, and of course he’ll think much more directly in those everything-I-see-is-death terms in this chapter — Omnis caro ad te veniet he will say to himself a few moments after this passage; all flesh shall come unto thee. From a requiem mass.
The beach is a graveyard of all manner of things tossed up after being spun forever in the underworld. Much of this chapter will be Dedalus describing the washed up dead things he sees. But the narrative of this short paragraph, like the narrative of his long day and night, June 16, 1904, will be an effort to rouse himself from his dead calm, to defy death and the guilt and fear and despair it occasions, so that he can live and love and write:
Gold light on sea, on sand, on boulders. The sun is there, the slender trees, the lemon houses.
It’s high summer, mid-June, a very sunny day; the world bids him notice the buzzing above the oceanic cemetery. As it bade him in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, just before he left for the continent:
A soft liquid joy like the noise of many waters flowed over his memory and he felt in his heart the soft peace of silent spaces of fading tenuous sky above the waters, of oceanic silence, of swallows flying through the sea-dusk over the flowing waters.
A soft liquid joy flowed through the words where the soft long vowels hurtled noiselessly and fell away, lapping and flowing back and ever shaking the white bells of their waves in mute chime and mute peal, and soft low swooning cry; and he felt that the augury he had sought in the wheeling darting birds and in the pale space of sky above him had come forth from his heart like a bird from a turret, quietly and swiftly.
Joy; the sky above the waters. So Dedalus will, in this slender Ulysses paragraph, go with the sun, with the brightness that illuminates a rickety but real world – the slender trees, frail but lit up; the lemon houses, lemoned for a moment by the sun. It’s just a moment, but it’s real enough. It’s even poetic, with slender and lemon making another assonantal pair.
Soon enough, Dedalus will meet up with our man of the moment, Leopold Bloom, the two of them making a pair that poeticizes and makes bearable, makes legible, and lovable, the world of the living.
Yet another Pravda (this one The Coloradan) pumps out propaganda about a university’s athletic program. What a wonderful world it will be when the Colorado State University football team makes us an intellectually great, financially profitable institution! Comrade Jack (the article refers to the latest AD by his first name – ‘Under Jack’s Watch’ – because he is your friend, your buddy, one of you…) and his vast new $250 million stadium (that’s the cost estimate — we know how that goes) and plentiful new administrative assistants will make everything better. Although our attendance figures are pretty pathetic, he will make them perfect by increasing the number of available seats and raising ticket prices. He will bring a “new way of looking at college athletics,” in which athletics is the front porch of the university (you’ve never heard that one before!) and the AD spends the university’s money like a drunken sailor (also unprecedented!).
Mike MacIntyre doesn’t care that University of Colorado athletics has a $7.5 million deficit, much of it buyouts — buyouts, you know? totally totally wasted payments to former coaches who didn’t win enough games and pull in enough fans.
Mike’s heavily into interior design, so along with his own obscene salary (including buyouts for when he’s the next loser coach) he’s insisting — and the university’s fellatial president has said yesssssirrrr mr mac!!!! — on shiny new offices for him and the boys.
The interim athletic director (at Boulder you’re interim, fired, or making interior design demands before being fired) is on top of the situation.
“We need to look at efficiencies,” [she] said.
… are pretty remarkable. Les UDs head over there today for a couple of weeks of who knows what sort of weather… Though it’s one of UD’s convictions that with very few exceptions there’s no such thing as bad weather at the beach. It’s all good there – vast sky, vast water, and a chance to watch the convoluted things they do together. The stars, the sun, the contrails and the cargo ships. What’s not to like? The way it feels on your skin is whipped up wind and warmth. Long fields of gulls sit there when you walk the beach in the morning. There’s the business of spotting dolphins. You can keep your head down and look for striated stones – a particular mania of mine. Between the quiet hours of early morning and late evening there’s of course the main show, the blue-umbrella’ed broilers, among whom Les UDs sit, reading, squinting, broiling.
In our little apartment overlooking the boardwalk, there’s the setting up of the mini-domesticity of the short vacation – the one big trip to the supermarket, the exploration of the apartment’s towels and sheets, the phone call to our old friends the Elkins (they’ve bought an apartment across the street from the one we rent) to arrange some socializing. If the weather’s truly bad, we’ll play a lot of Scrabble, pausing mid-game to stare together at the witchy sky.
Naturally, blogging continues apace, whatever the weather.
I dunno. UD likes this bucolic/high tech image, this meld of Outer Lafayette and a crop of keyboards…
But as ye sow so shall ye reap. This grotesque dumping is what you’re reduced to when you’ve been caught breaking into your professors’ offices and into their computers and changing the grades you got in their courses.
F grades were changed to As or Bs, Cs were changed to As, and even As were changed to A-plusses.
What the hell. Go all the way.
*****************************
If this sort of thing catches on, maybe some local farm can advertise itself as a keyboard dump. Set aside a field. Charge twenty dollars a keyboard.
“[S]tudent fees and direct university support of the [Marshall University] athletic department’s budget nearly doubled since 2006.” “[T]he athletic budget has increased by almost $13 million, or nearly 75 percent, since 2005… [F]rom 2006 to 2012, the biggest growth in money to shore up the [athletic] budget was in direct university support, going from about $3 million in 2006 to $7.44 million last year.”
The faculty – compensated way below market, and in some cases up to thirty percent below market – have made bold to complain a little. That complaint has revealed something about Marshall that UD‘s not seen before at any American university. For significant segments of the Marshall community, professors as such represent a politically offensive barrier to the school’s true, exclusively athletic, identity. One of the highest profile local columnists ridicules and excoriates the professors and concludes
The radicals … just want a raise.
Much of the commentary on his column (and related columns) similarly dismisses professors as liberal scum, etc.
Reading around in the local press on the issue, UD thinks she has for the first time identified an American university willing to be honest about itself: Marshall sees no reason to sustain a faculty. A close look at the place points to the possibility that West Virginians are not educable. They can, however, be kept comfortable at large sports events. We can see Marshall, year by year, acting more decisively on this knowledge.
A combination of sports events and rocket-shot-out-of-anus lawsuits will keep the Marshall University administration rolling along nicely.
… of pharma-compromised universities, to which we in the US have become accustomed. As is almost always the case in these scandals, only because a medical student at the University of Toronto bothered to look into both the financial interests of one of his professors, and the origin of the pain management textbook the professor used in a mandatory course, did it become clear that even as “Canada’s opioid addiction epidemic took root,” he and his classmates were being encouraged to prescribe arguably the most dangerous of prescription opiates. Although more powerful than morphine, oxycodone was consistently described, in the book and by the professor in his lectures, as among the safest of this class of pills in terms of addiction.
The student, now a doctor, discovered that the professor was a consultant to Purdue, the drug’s maker, and that “quotes [in the book] that endorsed the drug never actually existed.” That is, the professor (who wrote the book, presumably with help from the manufacturer) apparently made up positive statements about the drug and put them in the book.
The professor protests that he did the lectures “for free.” Which UD guesses means he’s boasting that the university didn’t pay him. Why should it? I’m sure Purdue paid him far more than the university ever could.
Anyway. What’s done is done. “In 2000, less than 4 per cent of the opiate addicts in withdrawal treatment at Toronto’s Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) were addicted to oxycodone, the primary ingredient in such prescription drugs as OxyContin, Percocet and Percodan. By 2004, that figure had climbed to 55.4 per cent.”
One assumes plenty of other pharma consultants remain in teaching positions in other Canadian universities. How often does the odd whistle-blower among the students come along and discover how foully he and his fellow students are being corrupted? Almost never.
… relentlessly unmasks that university’s sports lies (background here). Like Reed Olsen at Missouri State University, Killingsworth is part of a special breed of university professor: A smart economist able to detect all of the bs universities put out about how lucrative big-time sports on campus are (or will be; it’s almost always got to be will be). So for instance, in a recent opinion piece, Killingsworth writes:
Its report to the NCAA shows that the subsidy to [Rutgers] athletics is $28 million: $18.5 million from discretionary university funds and another $9.5 million from student fees. None of these funds are earmarked for athletics — the university is free to spend those dollars on anything it wants, or even hand them back to students and their families as tuition reductions. All told, the subsidy amounts to almost $1,000 for each undergraduate. The student fees alone work out to almost $330 per undergraduate.
Nevertheless, Rutgers officials from [President] Barchi on down repeatedly refer only to the $18.5 million in discretionary funds as a subsidy. They never mention student fees. Sayonara! $9.5 million in subsidies conveniently disappear.
Killingsworth barely touches on the reputational costs to Rutgers of its absolutely endless athletics scandal. He doesn’t need to.
It’s the hydra-head problem again. When the head of the group that assembled the upcoming report on the impoverished state of the humanities in America is herself way over-compensated (plus – reportedly – the daily user of a chauffeured limo) it makes it easy for enemies of funding to say Hey well humanists seem to be doing right well for themselves. When the person responsible for the report is alleged to have been an inhumane boss, it makes it easy for enemies of funding to ask In what way do the humanities as presently carried out make you more humane?
The problem has things in common with university presidents who have chauffeured limos and private jets and first-class travel – American University’s Benjamin Ladner being the highest profile example of this in the last few years. The problem is also related to university presidents who use up a good deal of their time and make hundreds of thousands of extra dollars sitting on the boards of places like Goldman Sachs; shady hedge fund guys on boards of trustees; and schools with multi-billion-dollar endowments. It’s just hard to keep aloft the Beautiful Suffering Misunderstood Humanities banner when high-profile people very publicly making the case for them are making out like bandits.
It’s a very similar hypocrisy to the over-compensated law professor at the public interest law school.
Everyone gets hypocrisy. Hypocrisy is one of the easiest things to understand.
I’m sure next season will be much, much better.
And if it’s not, fire the latest coach and coordinators and hire another new batch.
Keep doing this long enough, and you’re gonna start to win!
The school’s governing body for athletics, the University Athletics Committee, voted in favor of a $12.5 million budget increase from the $91.9 million in 2012-13, a number the department actually exceeded by $4.2 million due largely to capital projects such as new track, softball and soccer complexes. Most notable in the new budget: projected football expenses are up 32.6 percent, from about $9.5 million last year to $12.6 million for ’13-14.
Roughly $2.4 million of that $3.1 million increase is to cover the higher salaries of the new football staff. Just counting head coach Mark Stoops and his two coordinators, that trio makes a combined $874,000 a year more than predecessor Joker Phillips and his coordinators. At Tuesday’s meeting, athletic director Mitch Barnhart said those numbers reflect the school’s strong commitment to a football program that last year suffered through a 2-10 season before firing Phillips.
And wow. As always, a big-time athletics program benefits the university academically. UK’s US News and World Report ranking has gone from 112 in 2007 to 125 today. With those numbers, no wonder UK is devoting hugely increased resources to sports.
… and the SEC is full of shit! They say our guy is an insider trader; but you know what we did? We talked to him, and he said he wasn’t! So hahaha. Shut up!
University of Richmond luminary and all-around first-rate researcher, teacher, and human being Rick Mayes has proposed that the university end its football program.
What? What? Are you fucking kidding me?
Well, you know, this sort of thing will happen when you choose a reflective, principled person to be your faculty athletics representative. That and that alone is where UR went wrong. The faculty athletics representative is supposed to be an old jock desperate for free game tickets and occasional face time with the players. Rick Mayes is all wrong for faculty athletics representative.
Gory details, from his recent email to faculty:
I have come to the conclusion that it’s hard-to-impossible to consistently make DI-level sports conform and submit to the primary institutional focus on academics, because there’s just too much money and ambition involved… [A]fter three years of watching and studying sports up close, I believe UR’s long-term academic interests lie with D3-level sports and football being phased out over time due to legal, liability, and safety reasons. [Given the likelihood of concussion lawsuits,] this big-team sport and significant financial commitment could conceivably become extinct within the next two to three decades. Might it not be desirable to get out ahead of that potential outcome for the sake of our student athletes’ health and our institution’s financial long-term interests, not to mention our consciences?
Consciences the guy is talking about! And jeez – Watch his Last Lecture! He’s all about Dietrich Bonhoffer and shit! Who appointed this character??
Still – don’t sweat it. UR’s prez and athletic director and everybody else has come down on Mayes like a ton of offensive linemen. Of course we’re keepin’ football! Are you kidding me? Pay no attention to the man behind the conscience.
The world’s poster child for academic conflict of interest will soon arrive on your shores to grant his blessing to your new research center! You went right to the very top – the US of A’s own Charles Nemeroff – for the inaugural lecture. Perennial object of United States Senate interest because of his fascinating use of taxpayer money, Nemeroff promises to bring to you Brits, as you set out on your own research programs, the same … fascinating ethos he has brought to his own… peripatetic career.
As an American, I can’t hide my pride in the way England, once our ruler, has now summoned one of us for inspiration and advice on how best to pursue scientific endeavors.
Naturally, given Nemeroff’s record, there are nay-sayers at your institute.
Derek Summerfield, honorary senior lecturer at the Institute, wrote in the BMJ, formerly called the British Medical Journal, last week that the Institute of Psychiatry’s lauding of Professor [Charles] Nemeroff as “one of the world’s leading experts” showed how psychiatric academe “sails blithely on as if such revelations beg no broader questions about its associations and supposed scientific independence.”
Yes, sail blithely on! You have much to learn from Charles Nemeroff about grantsmanship. Good show!
Veteran UD readers know of her fascination with nihilism nada nothingness (“Some lived in it and never felt it but he knew it all was nada y pues nada y nada y pues nada. Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name thy kingdom nada thy will be nada in nada as it is in nada. Give us this nada our daily nada and nada us our nada as we nada our nadas and nada us not into nada but deliver us from nada; pues nada. Hail nothing full of nothing, nothing is with thee.”) (“No-one is anything.“). She is particularly fascinated by the very expensive nothingness of certain American universities.
In the comment I’ve quoted in the headline to this post, a citizen of North Carolina grapples with the fact that her taxes pay for the University of North Carolina, a location she’s watching shrink into nothing. Entire instructorless, contentless, and evaluationless departments! By definition nothing should cost nothing. It’s an unimpeachable tautology: Nothing comes from nothing. Yet here she’s dishing out dough to underwrite nada nada nada. She feels like an idiot, a fool, a dupe. Shouldn’t a university be… something? Yet here’s the fuck-up ex-chancellor of UNC proclaiming that the most important job of the school’s leader, the thing that takes up virtually all of his time, is sports — sports, which has nothing to do with academics, and the ceaseless scandals that sports generates – the nothingness classes, the $500,000 to coach university leaders in scandal-talk… Where, she wonders, did the university go?
Here it is.
Here’s her university – one
robed figure clinging to the
book that’s survived
the nothingness.
Expect, in a few years,
to see this image on the
cover of UNC’s course catalog.
