… contemplating with pleasure the number of people at the Harvard Allan Bloom event who know her as UD. Who, that is to say, are readers of her blog. This list includes Alan Wolfe and William Kristol. UD is delighted.

To be well-treated is as unnerving as to be badly treated.

When you call room service at the Inn at Harvard, the person who answers says, “Good morning, Professor Soltan!”

The bed you’re lying on has gold-wrapped chocolates on it and is big enough to share with, at the very least, the cheating contingent of the Harvard basketball team.

Two nights ago, UD left her massive bed for a spanking new in-the-round lecture hall down the street, where Harvey Mansfield spoke about science, non-science, wisdom, and damn hippies. UD liked the talk, but as an old hippie disliked the claim that hippies are anti-scientific. “Hippies,” UD informed Mansfield later as they headed for his car, “are very serious about empirical science. Especially chemistry.”

The walled garden in front of Mansfield’s house has curved paths of ivies and rhodies and liriopes — all lit with white lights. This was a fine house with a Harvard-heavy crowd, but any anxiety UD might have felt about the snoot-factor lifted as soon as she began chatting with this genial, funny group. Several Straussians were there, all of them perfectly happy to try to explain this thing UD‘s been hearing about since her high school boyfriend, David Kosofsky, began describing it in 1968.

Stories like this one always remind UD of the university administrator who, at a conference on university athletics, insisted that the way to overcome the separation between faculty and coaches was to make coaches professors. “Coaches are just like professors,” he said. “Essentially they are professors – people paid at universities to teach students. They should be regular tenured faculty.”

It’s intriguing to think about the Rate My Professors page of Billy Gillispie, Bobby Knight, Mike Leach, Mark Mangino… Instead of the Helpfulness category, you’d have Abusiveness (Physical) and Abusiveness (Mental).

Maybe you’d reserve those categories for certain classroom professors too, but only if, during discussion, they had a tendency to shout You worthless piece of shit and Hey pussy pussy at students; and, when seriously annoyed, concussed them.

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

As to lecture content:

Football is violent by design. It became a sensation because of television, yes, but also because it expressed certain truths about American life: the dangers of the mines and mills, dirt, struggle, blood, grime, the division of labor, the all-importance of the clock. But we’ve changed, which is why white middle- and upper-middle-class fans recoil at the cascade of injuries that can make ESPN resemble the surgery channel…

When UD was growing up, there were a few books in her parents’ library that always caught her attention. Even before she could read.

The Uprooted, by Oscar Handlin,
was one of them.

Its cover was rather strange

which may be why it caught little UD‘s eye.

She read it a little, over the years… took it down
from the shelf now and then… She came to realize
that it was a very important book, a definitive account
of the experience of immigration.

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

This morning, looking for the Center for European Studies at Harvard, where the conference on The Closing of the American Mind was taking place, I saw a woman holding the same piece of paper I was, and she too was looking about. We began to chat. She had some sort of accent.

We found the place and went on chatting in the lobby. Lilian, she said was her name. Lilian Handlin. Handlin? said old UD. Any relation to Oscar? My husband, she said.

And I don’t know. I don’t know quite how to say it, but to meet the wife of the man who wrote that book, the book my parents so admired and cherished… My parents wrote their names on a little brown book plate they pasted onto its first page… And to see how happy Lilian was for me to evoke how much the book meant… Too wonderful.

Farewell to the most famed member of our academic community.

[D]angerously myopic … self-aggrandizing … [a Mussolini] in wingtips …
“I’d wake up every day and be afraid,” [one of Billy Gillispie’s players] says… [A] lunatic who has them running the stadium steps, barking like a mad dog at the moonlight… Six months after being fired at Kentucky, he received his third DUI in a 10-year span.

Texas Tech. A community of scholars.

… lying on both sides of us. We’re somewhere south of Boston, and the Quiet Car is a laptop monastery of strict observance. You don’t dare cough.

The calm water, the pale sky, the thin clouds, the soft train rocking — it’s one hell of a tranquillizing setting. The thing, the custom, the routine, the practice, is to nod off at your screen, to gaze at your computer until your eyes deaden and you zone out.

When you reenter the cloister, the open water’s gone. It’s swamp now, with scruffy trees fronting industrial sheds.

I feel intimate enough with the guy across the table from me – a big guy, young, with an OLD GUYS RULE baseball cap and a CAPE COD BASEBALL SUMMERTIME TRADITION t-shirt – to have, post-nap, elaborately adjusted my bra in front of him. We’ve shared this corner of the library for hours. He has plugged my computer in for me. He has told me to expect that when the train slows down our wi-fi connection will get messed up.

Speaking of connections — some strange and unsettling ones for UD among the people at this Harvard event. Straussianism, the University of Chicago, and Allan Bloom are not exactly unknowns for ol’ UD.

In 1979, or 1980, my friend Kevin, a fellow literature grad student at the University of Chicago (now a big shot lawyer) said I had to take a course with Allan Bloom. “You’ll love him. I promise. You will absolutely love him.”

Bloom’s course on Rousseau fit my schedule, but I knew nothing about him, and, unlike another course that I’d taken outside the English department – the philosopher Paul Ricoeur’s course on metaphor – Rousseau wasn’t that interesting to me. I decided to sit in on a class and check it out.

I sat midway up in a white lecture theater on a bright afternoon and waited in a roomful of men for Bloom to appear. He did, right on time, preceded by a cloud of smoke and the sound of hacking.

There was such chaotic energy to him that right away the students in the room seemed statues and Bloom the only living thing.

Once I got a good look at him, I realized Bloom was the man I’d seen one cold afternoon last semester at The Point, a lakefront park near the university. This man was big – very broad, very tall – and wore an absolutely amazing coat of gleaming brown fur all over his body, down to the ground. He looked haunted. A haunted seal.

I thought of the Henry James story, “The Beast in the Jungle,” of its main character John Marcher on his way to visit his friend May Bartram’s grave. Maybe Marcher’s name came to me because this man, with his massive, somehow military coat, and his heavy gait, seemed a sort of soldier on a march.

I’d also seen Bloom, I realized, one beautiful afternoon on campus when I was sitting on a little hill in front of the Divinity Building and Saul Bellow walked by. I sat up to get a good look at the person who wrote Herzog, a book that from the first time I read it (I must have been fourteen) had a terrifically strong impact on me. This man, the brown seal, John Marcher, was Bellow’s walking companion.

So, no more glimpses; this was the real thing, front and center, all lit up by the sun and the bright white lecture hall.

I sensed the high-strung attentiveness in the men around me, but eh. For me, it wasn’t working. For me, Bloom was all neurotic foreground, and I couldn’t work my way to the background. Maybe if the subject matter had already drawn me to it… But I wasn’t a political philosopher. Ricoeur’s course on metaphor worked perfectly for me (though I didn’t do very well in it) because much of it was ultimately getting at what made literary language weird and powerful. But Rousseau, especially in the hands of this strange man, wasn’t doing it for me.

… for as long as I’ve been following it. But now that they’re on a losing streak, the crowds are pissed.

I mean, they’re always pissed. But now they’re also pissed.

University of Kentucky police will increase their presence at the next UK home football game as a result of fights among tailgaters outside Saturday’s game against Western Kentucky.

Police are getting wounded as they try to break things up.

More police will be patrolling at future games. So.

That will be expensive. Great use of money for a university.

And that will be hyper-surveillance. Always fun at a sports event. But if your fan base is made up of jerks …

Of course a lot of these people aren’t students. They aren’t even fans. Why watch a shitty team play? They’re there because violent drunks love a tailgate. Any tailgate.

… where she will talk, at a Harvard conference, about Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind 25 years after its publication. William Kristol will introduce her; Thomas Pangle is a fellow commentator. Other speakers include Paul Cantor (whose essay on White Noise I always assign when I teach Don DeLillo) and Nannerl Keohane.

UD will blog throughout this experience.

This year, our team’s opening game against William & Mary drew the smallest crowd for a season opener since 1997. A staff editorial on Sept. 14, “Win or lose, root for the home team,” commented on this disappointing turnout, saying fans need to amp up their school spirit if they want the Terps to play better. I say, why?

One of the many degradations of being a student at a jock school is that people are constantly after you to show enthusiasm for the team.

From the school’s point of view, you’ve got keep the spirit amped because the school has invested zillions of dollars and taken out insane loans to keep the sports thing cranked, and if you fail to be the sort of person who pees his pants at the prospect of paying tens of thousands for luxury boxes and season tickets the school is fucked.

From your fellow students’ point of view, the growth of a party of unamped peers provokes cognitive dissonance, the alienation effect, a crisis of bad faith, acedia, ennui, dark nights of the soul, and nihilistic panic. They are like the people on this tourist bus.

… her town, Garrett Park, Maryland. (“Waiting for a Rain Garden.”)

… writes one of many articles in the student press about the gradual delaptation (gotta find a word for it) of the university classroom.

… the American poet, has died at 89. UD recently wrote about one of his poems here. Simpson’s sensibility was odd, original; the language of his poetry is less interesting than its moods, the things his eye notices. As in his poem titled There Is.

Nice title, There Is. It strips the propositional, look at this, feel of poetry right down. The poet writes that there is this, and there is that; the poet names things… Yet in this particular poem (I’m reprinting most but not all of the stanzas), the poet can’t get it together to say there is anything. He’s in one of those moods… the city’s getting to him…

Look! From my window there’s a view
of city streets
where only lives as dry as tortoises
can crawl — the Gallapagos of desire.

Look! There is… an island of dry hardbacked tortoises crawling about. The dynamic city’s gone — at least I don’t see it. I see aridity, paralysis.

There is the day of Negroes with red hair
and the day of insane women on the subway;
there is the day of the word Trieste
and the night of the blind man with the electric guitar.

It’s a city, full of charged, fraught moments. All these there ises I need to tell you about: the red hair, the insane women, the day I encountered and was haunted by the word Trieste, and what about that blind musician… These things mean something, add up to something…

But I have no profession. Like a spy
I read the papers — Situations Wanted.
Surely there is a secret
which, if I knew it, would change everything!

A silent flaneur, the poet ranges the city, reads the paper, looking for the situation, the secret, the word (Trieste?), that will crystallize into a there is worthy of our attention – a scenery of meaning.

I have the poor man’s nerve-tic, irony.
I see through the illusions of the age!
The bell tolls, and the hearse advances,
and the mourners follow, for my entertainment.

The problem seems to be self-consciousness, sophistication, cynicism; even the serious essentials – death, for instance – seem mere entertainments.

I tread the burning pavement,
the streets where drunkards stretch
like photographs of civil death
and trumpets strangle in electric shelves.

The mannequins stare at me scornfully.
I know they are pretending
all day to be in earnest.
And can it be that love is an illusion?

The flaneur poet walks the arid tortoise street in search of inspiration, waiting for the real to come at him and cut through irony. But like the red-heads and the insane women and the blind man with the guitar, the surreal, poignant, belligerent city visions he now experiences (drunkards, trumpets) instantly become photographs, shelved silences. The guitar was electric; the trumpets strangle in electric shelves; actual suffering human beings on the streets are mechanical snaps — Part of the problem is the alienating and distancing technology of the modern city, and the way our embroilment in that technology makes us see things as pictures, as already-aesthetically-messed-with elements. Which leaves the poet with nothing to do.

O businessmen like ruins,
bankers who are Bastilles,
widows, sadder than the shores of lakes,
then you were happy, when you still could tremble!

All locked up now, the city dwellers, like the poet, once had an erotic past (“the air is filled with Eros” at night on the streets), an innocent and avid receptivity to the wonder of being. Out of this trembling life might come the poetic inspiration the poet – arid, ironic, disillusioned – lacks.

But all night long my window
sheds tears of light.
I seek the word. The word is not forthcoming.
O syllables of light … O dark cathedral …

God knows the world still expresses itself, still beckons the poet to his window so that he can see it. This light that comes through is the sorrow of the world, a word for which he seeks. But the word is not forthcoming. Trieste is nice – so close to triste. But Trieste was another day, and he’s lost it. All he can do is listen to the syllables as they strike his window, as they murmur from the dark cathedral where irony is forever silenced.

The university has permitted drinking in the football stands, and the results may surprise you.

We had beer spilled on us three times; a fight broke out in the row behind us over the unspeakable sin of wearing a nonmaroon visor, and those of us who spent the better part of the entire game trying to keep the peace received multiple offers to have our faces rearranged.

Whoda thunk it?

The man who – until his recent firing – presided over endless sports, academic fraud, and sports-related misuse of funds cases at the University of North Carolina was a saint. A saint. He did his best. He was powerless.

Big-time college athletics have long been a minefield for university administrators. They often find themselves at the mercy of highly paid coaches under intense pressure to recruit top players – who may struggle academically – and wealthy boosters who want successful teams.

… A 2009 Knight Commission survey of university presidents and chancellors found many of them feel powerless to stop or slow the financial arms race in athletic departments that has often brought scandal.

“(P)residents would like serious change but do not see themselves as the force for the changes needed,” the report said.

As poor little David Boren of Oklahoma University says of the coaches’ salaries there, “We can’t control the marketplace.”

These guys can’t do anything! They’re only the president.

The clouds are gathering at the University of Texas medical school, as its new corporate acquisition, Ronald DePinho, president of the cancer center, produces yet more bad publicity.

DePinho, the very model of the modern money man, does not see why conflict of interest should apply to him (since it would mean temporarily giving up certain income flows), or why his wife – hired on his faculty – shouldn’t get special treatment…