Israel’s haredim.

Kent State athletics must be majorly pissed with the student journalist who discovered that a guy about to donate a million dollars to the program stole from his investors. Of course KSU already knew the guy was a scam artist, but didn’t care, since money is money and fuck the university’s reputation. KSU’s athletic director explained to the student reporter that the donor’s run-in with the SEC “was 12 years ago, and it was fully litigated and he abided by the letter of the litigation.” If, after paying his multimillion dollar penalty, this guy still had enough investor money left over to assist KSU in its basketball ambitions, what the hell? Where’s the problem?

Well, turns out the guy rescinded the gift. The guy got offended.

Poor KSU! All ready, arms outstretched, to take the leftover fraud bucks, and here comes this student journalist digging up ancient history and offending the donor! Maybe they can approach Bernie Madoff.

I’ve been reading Joan Didion’s Blue Nights – her chronicle of her daughter’s death and her own aging – on this flight from Phoenix to Baltimore. It’s kept me occupied. We land in fifteen minutes.

I like Didion’s mournful chant, her brief, much-repeated litanies. She plays the “blue night” idea (we want to think of our lives as long summer nights that never darken) beautifully through the text. Her constant rounding back to painful motifs and memories cuts a deeper and deeper circle of implication, the prose grinding down until we’re surrounded by very dark canyon walls.

It’s poetic prose, stating and restating its symbols, making them a dirge. She’s troubled, in the text, by her technique of indirection, but she needn’t be. Solemn poetic dance is the best way to get at this stuff – in particular, the ridiculous tendency to believe in the permanence of life and health and happiness, “this refusal even to engage in such contemplation, this failure to confront the certainties of aging, illness, and death.”

Returning, as I am now, from seven blissful days in Sedona, Arizona, I could almost assume this ridiculous tendency myself. The sweet spot: Didion’s eye travels over that long moment when her life achieved the sweet spot: Love, vocation, money, friends, glamor, fame, seaside Malibu in bloom… It’s rare for anyone that things turn out that well, and that they turn out that well for any length of time. Didion had this; and inevitably her book dwells on that delight, wonders if the recollection of the delight can sustain her.

She doesn’t think it can.

UD will cop to sharing with her a failure, so far, to confront certain certainties. She does, though, Didion-style, circle around them a lot.

The darkening to black of the blue night. It’s happening just outside UD‘s window right now. Maybe it’s not so much about not confronting it as not knowing how to play it (play it as it lays) – this bizarre concurrence of sweet and dark.

I know what I do. What I do is – like Didion – keep moving, keep feeling gratitude and love and excitement. The red rocks shine in the short blue night and I passionately respond.

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

The sun cannot change, writes James Merrill to his just-born nephew in Little Fanfare for Felix Magowan:

It’s earth, it’s time,
Whose child you now are, quietly
Blotting him out. In the blue stare you raise
To your mother and father already the miniature,
Merciful and lifelong eclipse,
Felix, has taken place;
The black pupil rimmed with rays
Contracted to its task –
That of revealing by obscuring
The sunlike friend behind it.
Unseen by you, may he shine back always
From what you see, from others.

For-profit universities – a class act.

Les UDs were very unhappy to leave Sedona. Both loved its tranquil, thrilling setting, the clear dry air, the red-earth trails among the rocks. Although exhausted (she packed too much in), UD feels joy and gratitude that she was able to see and explore this strange and beautiful place. Soon she’ll be hemmed in by trees in Garrett Park – no spectacular Arizona night sky – and while the beauties of her town’s forest setting are undeniable, she suspects that the vast landscapes of the high desert correspond more closely to her heart’s core.

Longtime readers may recall UD‘s encounter two summers ago with a Las Vegas law firm or company or whatever they were (they don’t seem to exist, much, anymore).

The guy who did her was Coons.

[Dave] Spence, 53, has a degree in home economics from the University of Missouri-Columbia. But the biography on his campaign website originally omitted the word “home” while describing his economics degree …

… and a man found on the scene is arrested.

Update: Much more here. The man arrested was a colleague and friend.

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

Another Update: Maybe it wasn’t murder. The dead man appears to have had mental trouble recently. Perhaps the man arrested had tried to prevent his friend from committing suicide?

No one told UD about Buddha Beach.

No one told her that, as she followed Oak Creek beneath the red rocks, she’d come to a clearing full of stacked stones.

First you see this – gatherings of mainly gray stone on top of a large red slab. You think nice pretty cute sweet and move along. A few steps later the whole silver-tree forest is cairns – endlessly, beautifully, everywhere. Not just on the ground around you. Along tree trunks, inside tree hollows. The sculpture’s base is often a large smooth red river rock, on top of which smaller gray, black, white, mottled, and volcanic rocks have been balanced.

You can’t help adding to this spell-binding human offering. With the creek washing along beside you, you begin scouting stones to top off a tower here and a tower there.

Thousands of these little formations lie just under massive Cathedral Rock. They feel like a loving, adorably absurd, affirmation of our connection to Cathedral.

Because anyone can do it!

Hey. New year and all. You’re going to read tons of these articles and opinion pieces in 2012, as the evidence pours in about placebos. The other side has all the money and will keep bombarding you with ads, just the way do-nothing, charge-everything for-profit online schools do. Resolve to think seriously about these come-ons.

Don’t forget. When found to have plagiarized, always blame it on a graduate student.

UD‘s been following plagiarism stories for years, and this is far and away the most popular move.

… the research fraud beat goes on. Diederik Stapel and Dipak Das share a protocol: Just make the shit up.

… with friends who live there. Will blog later in the day.

But if you think they’re going to go down without a fight, you don’t know LSU.