Perimortem

Dying beside your folding kayak
After four good hours on the bay
You finally felt your thoughts collect
Then pump frantically away.

Your blood pooled inside your mind
A mind so fine all ideas violated it
A mind for the last time
Immersed in thought.

Thought about the water, the dock, the history
Of your wanting to live near a bay,
Your wanting islands in a bay.
A settlement off the coast of Washington.

You always kicked things to the next level.
Thoughts about thoughts about thoughts.
A kind of cerebral prinking, it seemed to me.

Now you can barely take in the gray plank
By your head. The shaking hand
Of your companion, cupping your neck.

Uri Simonsohn fails to get the postmodern simulacrum memo.

I hope they have good security. We’ll see whether Tunisia’s government will even let them hold this conference.

… you might upset the delicate balance that’s made the University of Tennessee one of America’s most pathetic sports factories.

… when a University of Southern Mississippi professor working on a lesson plan learned real quick that living near football players meant fights and gun play in the neighborhood.

That was 2009. Since, then USM’s budget has collapsed (here’s the school in 2010, defending continued use of a private jet and continued stoking of the football program at the expense of academics) (here – also 2010 – it’s defending cutting faculty while giving the coach a big raise) (and here’s a 2012 piece about how their totally losing team will not even hold games on campus – USM makes a bit more money having them take place hundreds of miles away in different venues, and, as the faculty senate president says, “We need to think about solvency, rather than the fan base.”).

Now, as the team finishes its winless season and fires the coach, those students and faculty who have been missing fights and guns can take heart that that USM sports tradition is alive and kicking: Its freshman quarterback has been charged with aggravated assault, and another student, brandishing a handgun at the scene, has also been arrested, after a fight on campus involving at least four people.

This article says two guns were recovered at the scene.

UD feels sure her beloved August Kleinzahler was mistranscribed here; but on the other hand there’s something head-scratchingly poetic about it.

… is currently flashing red, as trustee Steven Cohen’s firm gets official deep-shit notification from the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Cruddy feds. UD proposes that unlike Texas, which can’t afford it, SAC secede. SAC has 13.3 billion or so in capital. It can be another Liechtenstein.

Just some amusing stuff in here.

When does a university start tipping over into Auburn territory? When does it accumulate so many scandals of so many kinds – athletic, research, financial – that it begins to get that University of Kentucky smell?

When you add the current insider trading scandal in the University of Michigan’s medical school to the psychology department scandal … when you throw in long-established questions about the university president’s extensive, lucrative, and possibly conflictual corporate board activity… and when you add years of high-profile athletic scandals, including the president’s recent very own Rich Rodriguez debacle… Well, UM’s heading into the red zone.

The University of Kentucky distinguishes itself not merely in football and basketball. The federal Office of Research Integrity has singled out one of its highest-profile professors for a decade of research fraud.

Eric J. Smart, a former UK professor of pediatrics and physiology, pediatrics vice chair of research and the Barnstable-Brown chair in diabetes research … falsified data that was included in at least 10 published papers and numerous reports and applications.

… Among the falsified data … were five grant applications and three progress reports about nonexistent “knockout” mice, which have been genetically engineered to have at least one gene turned off, or “knocked out,” through a targeted mutation.

The ORI found many of Smart’s published findings to be falsified also. In more than 33 instances the office found Smart to be guilty of manipulating “western blots” — an analytic technique that allows scientists to find a specific protein in a sample of tissue — to falsify data in publications and reports in order to complete his research.

Vice chair of research! As with their coaches, UK really knows how to pick ’em.

Smart’s now teaching high school at the wonderfully named Bourbon High; but the county superintendent says Smart has assured her “there is no evidence to base their (the ORI’s) allegations on.” Whew! You wouldn’t want someone who’s been systematically lying about the results of medical research for over ten years teaching your kids.

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By the way, Scathing Online Schoolmarm will point out that the article about Smart in UK’s paper says his research has now been “censored.” I think they mean “censured.”

It’s wild. When you’ve got enormous concentrations of drunks, as at Chico State and environs, and at Washington State, your school becomes impossible to distinguish from Skid Row. Same mass public intoxication; same injury and death stats. At Washington State, students are constantly falling out of windows; at Chico things run more toward choking on your own vomit.

You truly have to wonder at a town, long famous for attracting drunks from hundreds of miles away, deciding that a great holiday tradition would be to put them all on the local river at the same time.

… at the University of Windsor was, after three days, released. It was lured out with a pigeon.

Hawk, in poetry, is always so relentlessly male – always their figure for — remember the last poem UD considered on this blog — for “primitive simplicity” and “savagery” and “rage,” as set against the elaborated civilizing order of women. As in this poem, “The Untamed,” by R.S. Thomas:

My garden is the wild
Sea of the grass. Her garden
Shelters between walls.
The tide could break in;
I should be sorry for this.

But not for long, windows,
Opening in the trees
Call the mind back
To its true eyrie; I stoop
Here only in play.

The vast perilous nothingness of the world – windows, opening in the trees – calls the man back to the truth, to the mind’s true eyrie, the hawk’s roost, the savage place from which he does his serious work of predation. Here, in the pretty little garden tarted up by pigeon-woman, who seeks to seduce untrammeled man into her trap and reduce him to her condition, to the condition of the pathetic men in Nemerov’s poem – he only plays at life.

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A variant.

I’m going to assume this woman – she’s only eighteen – has a psychiatric history. She seems to have taken breaking up with her boyfriend hard, since she loaded up her car with lots of weaponry and went to Elon, where he’s a student. Her parents notified the boyfriend, he notified Elon, they notified the police, and she was arrested as soon as they spotted her on campus.

How, though, does an unstable eighteen-year-old manage to load up on all those armaments?

Well, this British university is hosting a talk by Abu Usamah at-Thahabi, a preacher who preaches that all homosexuals should be killed.

Drop in the bucket don’t worry about it!

The NCAA’s investigating the program. Don’t worry about it!