… to a group of students I don’t know (I was substituting for a colleague), a woman came up to the podium to talk to me.

I don’t know why I want to share this with you, but… A couple of winters ago, I was sitting with a friend in her house during a terrible snowstorm. The house had big windows everywhere, and the snow was falling really beautifully in all the windows and we took out Catcher and spent the whole day taking turns reading it aloud to each other. Start to finish, one sitting, with the snow falling… This is why I’ll never forget one page of that book…

I told the student that was a beautiful story and I thanked her for it (and I wondered – as I often do – why students tend to share things like this with me privately, after class, even though I’d love it, and it’d be great for discussion, if they’d tell everyone…), and she rushed off before I had a chance to tell her my story along those lines.

One summer UD was alone for a couple of weeks at the little Soltan house in upstate New York, and, over the course of a few sunny quiet days, she sat on the deck in a butterfly chair and read Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano. The solitude, the slowness with which she read, the powerful natural setting — it made it so that, like her student today, UD took in that novel for good.

… already know about Tunisia’s Manouba University (scroll down), a school under siege by Salafists. Now the readers of the Washington Post know about Manouba too.

One of the two recipients of the Nobel for chemistry describes The Phone Call.

UD suspects, though, that hearing five Swedish accents might have the opposite effect. Might make you think it’s just a more elaborate joke.

Poor fellows keep taking gambles.

And damned if they didn’t just take another bad gamble.

I know we’re all supposed to have shifted our filthy-university-sports attention from Binghamton to the University of North Carolina, but Binghamton keeps hogging the limelight.

A Fifth Law School In Indiana!
And it seems that I can see
The unemployment rate escalate
Right along with bankruptcy.
The new law school sends all its students
To a field that has no work.
When I think about the law school on the Wabash
Then I long for a state not full of jerks.

… shot to death by a campus policeman.

He had taken LSD at a concert that evening and had gone on a rampage, attacking three other people before he got to the police station.

Video taken by a surveillance camera showed Collar nude and covered in sweat as he pursued the retreating officer more than 50 feet outside the building, Cochran said. Collar got within 5 feet of Austin and the officer fired once, striking the student in the chest, Cochran said…. [The Mobile County Sheriff] said he had “serious concerns” about the killing of an unarmed student when he first heard what had happened, but he better understood the officer’s decision to open fire after watching the videotape of the shooting.

“It’s very powerful,” [he] said …

Investigators are trying to determine who provided Collar with LSD and could charge that person with murder…

… inevitable.

Local reporting of the police killing of a naked and threatening University of South Alabama student makes ye olde diffuse/defuse error. The officer did not want to diffuse – as in spread, or enlarge – the situation. The officer tried to defuse the situation.

Typical pro-laptop bs. Centuries ago, still images of Picassos and volcanoes were flashed on one screen in front of students via projectors – a cheap, perfectly adequate way of providing visual material. Waters doesn’t note in his comment that laptops are about one long endless private self-service image-stream. His comment doesn’t note that instead of occasionally drawing students’ attention to one image at the front of the room, the PowerPoint prof quite often spends the entire class session hunched over images and blocks of words, ignoring the class, which is of course in return ignoring her.

But anyway. Faculty gatherings like this one at Elon College are all about the lovely PowerPoint/laptop classroom synergy coming out of the closet.

As always, it’s honest students instructing cynical professors:

“There is no reason to use them in a discussion class,” [an Elon student] said. “That’s where they become more of a distraction, because students that use them during discussions are most likely on Facebook or Pinterest.”

And as for the massive, no-discussion lectures laptops are so terrific for — this form of education is becoming obsolete, since it makes absolutely no sense to do a class of this sort in real time. Just gather all the clickers and laptops and PowerPoints and films and cellphones that you’re dragging into the classroom and, you know, take your toys and go home. Only an idiot – or someone drawing a salary – would continue with this scenario.

The most criminalized university in America.

And we haven’t even started talking about the medical school.

… the Nobel Prize in Medicine.

The interesting thing is, nowadays my career would have been impossible in the sense that I did classics, ancient Greek and Latin, all my school time and then had to switch to science. My poor parents had to pay an extra year of private tuition to get into science. In those days they were actually short of students in Oxford, and so I received a curious letter from the admissions tutor in Oxford that said they would accept me on two conditions. One was that I came into residence immediately, in a week’s time, and the second was that I did not study the subject in which I had been examined. This is unimaginable!

So, you were being ordered not to become a classicist!

Absolutely. They said I’m not suitable for that. I later met the person socially. He was the man, [Hugh] Trevor-Roper, who later became Lord Dacre, very involved in the last days of Hitler, and he told me privately that his mind was on greater things and he’d realized he hadn’t filled the places in the college, and so he looked down the list of unsuitable people.

… “Afghan human rights activist, ex-minister and burka opponent Sima Samar is …seen as a possible winner” of this year’s Nobel Peace prize. This would be spectacular publicity for the effort to get women and children out from under this grotesque garment.

Plus of course UD‘s beloved Don DeLillo is again being shortlisted for the literature prize. He and Philip Roth always show up together on this list.

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

I thought of DeLillo’s novel Mao II tonight while reading again – for the first time in forty or so years – Catcher in the Rye. Almost at the end of that novel, Holden Caulfield has a heart-to-heart with one of his teachers, the very smart, alcoholic, Mr Antolini. Antolini recognizes Caulfield’s intelligence, sensitivity, moral rigidity, and self-destructiveness. He understands how the trauma of Holden’s beloved brother’s death has set on him on a nihilistic, existence-loathing path. He also sees how this rage, combined with Caulfield’s restless intellect, could make him some sort of dangerous fanatic. Here’s one of the things he says to Holden:

“Something else an academic education will do for you. If you go along with it any considerable distance, it’ll begin to give you an idea what size mind you have. What it’ll fit and, maybe, what it won’t. After a while, you’ll have an idea what kind of thoughts your particular size mind should be wearing. For one thing, it may save you an extraordinary amount of time trying on ideas that don’t suit you, aren’t becoming to you. You’ll begin to know your true measurements and dress your mind accordingly.”

This know-yourself haberdashery put me in mind of a very similar piece of advice DeLillo’s hero, the totally Salingeresque writer Bill Gray, recalls having read and heard growing up:

He remembered the important things, how his father wore a hat called the Ritz, gray with a black band, a raw edge and a snap brim, and someone was always saying “Measure your head before ordering” which was a line in the Sears Roebuck catalogue…”

As he’s dying, Bill repeats this phrase to himself.

Know your true measurements and dress your mind accordingly. Measure your head before ordering.

… of the Alabama university student who got naked and went to the campus police station, where he banged on windows and threatened the policeman who came outside to investigate, ended as badly as it’s possible to end. The policeman, after repeated threats from the student, shot and killed him (there’s a security tape of the incident).

It’s too soon to say anything with confidence about this event, beyond the fact that it’s heartbreaking. The student was a freshman, a wrestler, and, according to his friends, had no record of this sort of behavior. Theories abound – a psychotic break, drugs… Many observers wonder why the policeman was unable to find a non-lethal way to calm things.

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

David, a reader, reminds UD that a couple of years ago the Georgia Tech police (actually, now that I look at the link, it’s not clear they were campus police) were able to do enough roughing up and pepper spraying of a crazed student to take him down:

[S]everal officers had their handguns trained on Shrotri and were ordering him to drop the sword, according to another report also obtained by the AJC.

“You will have to kill me,” Shrotri responded.

A scuffle ensued after one of the officers squirted pepper spray at Shrotri. Officer Robert J. Turner, 29, of Griffin, had his right hand cut as he tackled Shrotri.

…UD‘s poetry MOOC, for which you can sign up here. It’s free.

The puffballs are migrating. The giant puffball mushrooms UD‘s forest/meadow produces every autumn have begun breaking through the soil (just like the first photo of this sequence), but this year they’re appearing much closer to her house — four of them, so far, in a line along a little path she cleared between the pachysandra and the woods’ edge. There are another five somewhat hidden in the woods.

UD wants to photograph all of this and put it on her blog, and in fact she’s about to have brunch with her neighbor and photographer, Tamara Trocki, in order to get some picture-taking training. She was disappointed not to get a photograph of the big beautiful spider web suspended from her dogwood tree last Sunday morning. It had rained the night before, and the water drops and the sun brought out every filament. But by the time UD began thinking about taking a picture, the web had collapsed. (It looked more or less like this.)

As the puffballs grow (this is a matter for anxiety too, since the squirrels and who knows what else scratch and eat away at the mushrooms as they enlarge) – and they get enormous (this is some of last year’s crop) – I’d like to keep taking pictures, to chronicle the grotesque size and shape of these things over the next couple of weeks.

When they reach full size they do what they’ve been waiting to do – blow their top and disperse their spore cloud through the universe. Smashing ripe puffballs is a fine old American pastime.