I woke up this morning from the following dream, strikingly similar, it seems to me, to this one.

Mr UD and I are driving on the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, gradually climbing toward its highest point. A voice on a loudspeaker repeats the following instructions:

“Like Evel Knievel,” I say to Mr UD, who gets ready.

As we approach the break, Mr UD accelerates. The car flies over the gap.

I look down while we’re up in the air, and see several vehicles in the water.

“It’s not fair,” I say. “You have to understand English.”

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I clearly have some transportation infrastructure issues.

… a Google News search for TEA is no longer steeped with Tea Party stories. As the Tea Party dissolves, UD trusts it will no longer overpower the articles about new American tea rooms and luxury tea tours and how if you drink jasmine tea you’ll live forever that UD used to feature on her blog.

Longtime readers know UD loves tea and has even written poems about it. (Click on this post’s category: TEA.)

Already, as the Tea Party weakens, stories about the actual drink are beginning to reappear. Like this one, about a New York City tearoom:

It’s been 10 years since Alice’s opened on West 73rd Street, shortly after 9/11, transforming tea time from old-lady fustiness to shabby urban chic, serving it all day long (as well as breakfast, brunch and lunch) on mismatched eBay china, against a backdrop of brightly painted walls inscribed with passages from Lewis Carroll.

UD‘s favorite tea is Marco Polo, which she served at her Thanksgiving meal (it was really her friend Kim’s Thanksgiving meal, though it took place at UD‘s house – Kim is a gourmet cook and did all the work), and which seemed to go over very well with her guests. UD didn’t serve the tea on mismatched eBay china, but she did have mismatched chairs.

… weary unto death if you ask me, produces one farcical story after another.

Insistent on an organic rather than psychiatric basis for their syndrome, some British CFS people make it a point to harass university researchers who fail to find said organic basis.

Professor [Myra] McClure [,tormented for having eliminated one viral candidate, the XMRV retrovirus,] says she will not be doing any further research in this area, and that may be the single most important consequence of this campaign of abuse and intimidation.

CFS is equally farcical on the other side, among scientists. The chick who claimed the now-discredited XMRV viral basis – she was associated with a lab at the University of Nevada – is now under arrest for “possession of stolen property and unlawfully taking computer data and equipment.”

Because… let’s see here… ach, my muscles ache from trying to piece this Keystone Kops plot together… Okay so like after she published her thing about yes there’s this viral basis the paper was retracted because no one can replicate the thing and people in her lab said the result might have just been “contamination” or maybe outright data manipulation or omg whatever.

So the university institute fired her and she apparently tried to steal all her data so she could take the NIH-sponsored work someplace else. Only NIH doesn’t let you do that, you know … just up and decamp with your shit… Plus bigger problem is that you’re not supposed to steal things.

On 22 November, [Judy] Mikovits posted $100,000 bail after spending four nights in jail in Ventura, California, as a “fugitive”, according to a county-court docket. She is accused of possessing stolen lab notebooks, a computer and other material belonging to the Whittemore Peterson Institute for Neuro-Immune Disease (WPI), a private research centre in Reno, Nevada, where she was research director. Mikovits faces extradition to Nevada, while the WPI is seeking the materials’ return in a separate civil suit.

… tampering with visual stuff in metro stations and cars. She doesn’t seem to mind just a little tampering on occasion. Not all-out defacement! But – you know – say you take out your black pen and fill in just one of a big smiling set of teeth. Is that so horrible?

So a couple of college students in New York, depressed by a poem prominently installed in a subway tunnel (it was meant stay up there for a year, but never got taken down) climbed a ladder last week and rewrote it. They didn’t write a whole new poem; with great care, they used the poem as written, but tweaked it to be upbeat.

Here’s the original poem. A draggy little ditty about the miserable working life of the commuter. A major downer inside a derelict subway tunnel. Makes the Russians look giddy.

Is it so horrible that these two felt moved to subvert its words? UD applauds their literary ingenuity, and she notes that the new poem, as of this writing, remains on the wall.

Plagiarism being a big, destructive, and mysterious problem, one welcomes plagiarist-testimonies, first-person efforts to explain Why They Did It.

But there are some obvious problems. Did the plagiarist plagiarize her mea culpa? Even if she didn’t, can we trust anything she says?

Q.R. Markham, plagiarist-du-jour, titles his tell-all Confessions of a Plagiarist. There’s a reckless no-holds-barred feel to the word confession (Confession box. Confessional poetry. True confessions.). But the guy’s been a liar for twenty years.

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Markham makes the mistake of pathologizing what he’s done. It’s not that success and fame are so important to him that he’s willing to cheat to get there — which has always seemed to UD a pretty plausible explanation for the James Freyesque plagiarism in which Markham indulged. Like Frey, he blames it all on his addictive personality – a disorder beyond his control.

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Markham starts out not too badly:

We’ve all heard in meetings the description of the alcoholic as the egomaniac with an inferiority complex. That was — is — me in a nutshell. I wanted recognition, I wanted praise, but I had no faith in my own abilities. I had grown so used to being thought of as a wunderkind that a kind of false self emerged, one that was confident and hard-working and thrived on adulation and encouragement. It was an image that was completely at odds with the fear, self-doubt, and dishonesty that occupied my skull… My whole identity had become that of an aspiring writer. I wanted to be famous. [The writers I plagiarized were] satellites in my monomaniacal orbit… There was some kind of built in death wish to the whole process.

Yet this doesn’t describe mental disorder — just garden-variety narcissism.

Markham really begins to slip when he writes, of the people who have stood by him:

The realization that I was loved already and didn’t have to fight to earn that love was mind-boggling. It was quite the opposite of my notion that I had to struggle to show the world I was worthy.

Cutting and pasting from your favorite writers is not struggling to show your worthiness. It’s easy to plagiarize. People do it in part because it’s quick and simple. Their narcissism convinces them that they’re not subject to the same rules as everyone else. Their narcissism also makes them feel happy when they get one over on large numbers of people. Confirmation of their superiority.

Now for the pathology.

It’s easier to make moral pronouncements rather than see human flaw or human weakness. I was that way before I knew I was an alcoholic. Before I knew this was a disease, I saw myself purely as a screw-up. Morally weak. Perhaps one day plagiarism will be seen, if not as a disease, at least as something pathological.

We’re not allowed to give Markham a hard time for what he did because he didn’t do it. He was in the grip of a disease.

The problem is that plagiarism isn’t really the sign of a weak, troubled person. If you read over the many plagiarism posts on this blog, you find that it’s typically the behavior of a very ambitious person who doesn’t mind scheming and cutting corners to get what he wants. That doesn’t sound weak to me; it sounds rather strong. Lots of very high-profile powerful people (Joe Biden, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Charles Ogletree, Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg) plagiarize. They’re busy and important and they figure they can get away with it. They certainly don’t have the trembling self-loathing personality Markham claims to have.

UD isn’t denying that there might be some degree of pathology in a high-risk act like plagiarism. She’s simply noting that most of the recent authors of plagiarized books and theses and speeches – at least the authors that have hit the news and been featured on this blog – seem to be successful, well-adjusted people.

… a bunch of oldies so the rest of us can avoid their fuckups. From the hundreds of accounts he received, he concludes a bunch of things about how to live happily and well.

One theme that runs through his list is drift. You don’t want to sit around vaguely thinking about yourself all the time; you don’t want to think of time as an aimless flow; and you don’t want to be a “rebel and …outsider. The most miserable of my correspondents fit this mold. They were forever in revolt against the world and ended up sourly achieving little.”

UD thinks that Brooks must mean drifty outsiders, people sort of meaninglessly at odds with their culture. To be meaningfully at odds is to be D.H. Lawrence, George Orwell, Norman Mailer, Morrissey, Christopher Lasch, Christopher Hitchens, Doris Lessing, Lenny Bruce and tons of others who achieved much. Were/are these happy people? Recall what Adam Phillips says:

Sanity involves learning to enjoy conflict, and giving up on all myths of harmony, consistency and redemption… A culture that is obsessed with happiness must really be in despair, mustn’t it? Otherwise why would anybody be bothered about it at all? It’s become a preoccupation because there’s so much unhappiness. The idea that if you just reiterate the word enough … we’ll all cheer up is preposterous… The cultural demand now is be happy, or enjoy yourself, or succeed. You have to sacrifice your unhappiness and your critique of the values you’re supposed to be taking on. You’re supposed to go: ‘Happiness! Yes, that’s all I want!’ But what about justice or reality or ruthlessness – or whatever my preferred thing is?

The reason that there are so many depressed people is that life is so depressing for many people. It’s not a mystery. There is a presumption that there is a weakness in the people who are depressed or a weakness on the part of scientific research and one of these two groups has got to pull its socks up. Scientists have got to get better and find us a drug and the depressed have got to stop malingering. The ethos is: ‘Actually life is wonderful, great – get out there!’ That’s totally unrealistic and it’s bound to fail.

Darwinian psychoanalysis would involve helping you to adapt, find a niche and enable you to reproduce. Freudian psychoanalysis suggests that there is something over and above this. There are parts of ourselves – that don’t want to live, that hate our children, that want ourselves to fail. Freud is saying there is something strange about humans: they are recalcitrant to what is supposed to be their project. That seems to me to be persuasive.

One of the things I value about psychoanalysis is that it acknowledges that there are real difficulties in living, being who one’s going to be, and that no one’s going to be having a lobotomy. There isn’t going to be a radical personal change, which doesn’t mean that people can’t change usefully, but really that psychoanalysis is against magic. Ideally it enables you to realise why you’re prone to believe in magic and why you shouldn’t, because to believe in magic is to attack your own intelligence.

[S]uffering is not essential. It’s just unavoidable. All forms of suffering are bad but some are unavoidable. We need to come to terms with them or be able to bear them. …[Y]ou really did have those parents, you really did make of it what you made of it, you really did have those siblings, really did grow up in that economic climate. These are all hard difficult facts. Redescribed, they can be modified, things can evolve. But it isn’t magic.

Happiness is fine as a side effect. It’s something you may or may not acquire, in terms of luck. But I think it’s a cruel demand. It may even be a covert form of sadism. Everyone feels themselves prone to feelings and desires and thoughts that disturb them. And we’re being persuaded that by acts of choice, we can dispense with these thoughts. It’s a version of fundamentalism. [H]appiness is the most conformist of moral aims. For me, there’s a simple test here. Read a really good book on positive psychology, and read a great European novel. And the difference is evident in one thing — the complexity and subtlety of the moral and emotional life of the characters in the European novel are incomparable. Read a positive-psychology book, and what would a happy person look like? He’d look like a Moonie. He’d be empty of idiosyncrasy and the difficult passions.

…happy, here’s a list of the saddest cities in America.

The listmakers simply checked out suicide, unemployment, and antidepressant-use statistics.

UD‘s Washington DC ranks high for sadness (they give it a D-), which, despite the low unemployment rate here, doesn’t surprise her. If you look at the list, two sorts of cities stand out, sadwise: rich ones, and poor ones.

Of course Detroit and Baltimore are sad!

But rich people in well-heeled cities take oodles of antidepressants and spend tons of time with psychiatrists and will probably if asked report that they’re sad. (The listmakers also checked out “the number of people who report feeling the blues all or most of the time.”)

The Talibanization of Israel proceeds. There are signs that the government might finally be ready to react against it.

Any significant measure will catalyze violent riots.

… have an inside track on how government economic policy is made.

… America’s latest trash-education rage, will be discussed here.

UD thanks Dirk.

… a writer attempts to convey to British people the madness and squalor of big-time American university sports.

Along the way, he quotes Charles Clotfelter:

“Sport is in a way the connection with people that offsets the idea of the forbidding ivory tower of intellectuals,” Clotfelter says. “To think of the institution as purely an academic enterprise is probably to misconstrue it. It’s more than that. It’s also a social thing. We’re in both of those worlds.”

An odd statement, no? First of all – forbidding tower of intellectuals? Where? Name an American campus to which this description corresponds. UD‘s George Washington University – atypical in some ways, typical in many others – is mainly about guys in suits teaching public relations or law in the morning and heading off to their consultancy at the IMF or their gig at Brookings in the afternoon.

Second: Yes, a university is also a social thing. And it features huge numbers of sports to enhance its sociable atmosphere. Swimming, wrestling, volleyball, track, tennis …

Oh, whoops. Universities are dumping those sports to pay for football.

… and (gevalt) Justin Bieber at this year’s Christmas in Washington concert. She’s in a gospel choir.

TNT, December 16, 8:00.

No, that’s not right.

UD has known for years about online Scrabble.

She has shunned it as one shuns heroin, sensing its life-sucking flow…

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UD is an extremely good, intensely competitive Scrabble player who almost always scores well over three hundred points.

At Scrabble clubs and tournaments, experts average between 330-450 points per game… A better measure of skill is determining the “average points per turn” score. If [you] average 30 or more points per turn, not counting tile exchanges, then [you] may very well be a Scrabble expert. The very top Scrabble players average 35 or more points per turn, not counting exchanges.

UD plays very quickly, rarely waiting more than a minute to put a word down, and routinely putting a word down right away. Her impatience with opponents who actually take time to make a move, and with opponents who shuffle their tiles around on their tile holder (UD sees her words, whatever the configuration of the tiles) is notorious. In short, though UD would never win anything at a truly serious Scrabble tournament, she’s an expert.

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So far UD‘s meaningful Scrabble life has consisted of regular matches with her similarly ferocious older sister; but Barbara lives in upstate NY and they don’t see each other too often. UD‘s last game was a few weeks ago, in ‘thesda, with Rita Kosofsky (Eve and David’s mother). Rita and UD sat side by side on Rita’s couch and played on her iPad.

Maybe it was Rita’s iPad that began the insidious process of UD‘s undoing… UD had tried to build a break-water of order and elegance against the sordid tide of Scrabble and to dam up, by rules of conduct and active interest and new filial relations, the powerful recurrence of its tides within her.

But now… Two words: MANUMITS. SPEEDING. Triple word score. Last night.

The game allows players to chat. After she made speeding, at the very end of a game in which UD had been down by a few points, her opponent wrote

I LOVE IT WHEN THAT HAPPENS

and UD realized that in virtual opponent land (this one was from Vancouver) many serious players prefer exciting competition to simply winning (UD‘s all about winning).

That chatting is another thing. It makes UD a little nervous. How friendly should you get? These are total strangers, etc. Yet how strange can they be when they are exactly like you Scrabblewise?

WE’RE EERILY WELL-MATCHED

wrote UD toward the end of this game, during which our scores tracked one another extremely closely… Could this be my long-lost soulmate? Perhaps my life with Mr UD has been a horrible mischancing (he sucks at Scrabble) and I’m meant to be with the Vancouver person…

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Yes, it all has to end. It must be nipped in the bud and I will try to do that.

UD could feature some new happiness study every week on this blog.

Manically, university researchers pursue the condition, the question, the mystery, the much-sought-after Thing. It’s especially much talked about in these thanksgiving days.

Most recently, a Princeton economist and psychologist teamed up to analyze data that allowed them to announce the exact most-happiness-inducing yearly salary: $75,000.

As a lifelong ‘thesdan, UD assumed this referred to personal income, but in fact family income is meant. Lower than this, you’ll be less happy; higher, you won’t be any happier.

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There’s other stuff. Consider this article about the happiest woman in America (the happiest man in the world is apparently Matthieu Ricard, a Buddhist monk). She’s in her fifties, has a meaningful job, an intact marriage, just one kid, takes long walks along the beach, has friends, is spiritual, is active in her walkable, close-to-a-city community, lives in the same smallish house she’s lived in for decades, and locks away the tv.

(Oh, and on Ricard: Here’s a hilarious article in the Independent about him – or, rather about the journalist interviewing him.)

The article about the happiest woman cites a much-cited recent statistic: One in four American women is on antidepressants or antipsychotics or something along those lines. This remarkable number has generated the sorts of headlines you’d expect (‘ONE IN FOUR WOMEN CANNOT POSSIBLY NEED MENTAL HEALTH DRUGS’), as well as the equally easy to anticipate defensive reactions from depressed people (‘MENTAL ILLNESS IS ILLNESS.’)

No one denies mental illness is illness; people are skeptical about that many American women really being mentally ill. Marcia Angell and others are skeptical about the utility and safety of all those potent, side-effect-rich drugs.

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Surely there’s too much vagueness in the matter of happy and sad for us to conclude anything with much firmness. OTOH, UD takes from years of thinking about this (she’s the daughter of a suicide, and suicide marvelously concentrates the mind) at least the following suggestion: To be happy, you have to be a human being with longings, as Ravelstein / Allan Bloom puts it in Saul Bellow’s novel: ‘A human soul devoid of longing was a soul deformed, deprived of its highest good, sick unto death.’

But the longing needs to be in the direction of love – for one other person, for humanity, for the earth, for ideas, for aesthetic experience, for God – rather than, say, money or status. Recall that $75,000 family income figure. If you’re a hedgie for whom anything less than twenty million a year is a disgrace, this model anticipates that you’re not a terribly happy person because of your, well, money worries.

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UD will venture another little point about sadness and happiness. In a review of Blue Nights, by Joan Didion – an iconically anxious and unhappy – and extremely wealthy – person – Meghan O’Rourke takes note of Didion’s regrets about how she and her husband raised their daughter.

The couple assiduously [built] a vision of Quintana as “the perfect child,” with John urging Didion to come watch their daughter — “a towhead in that Malibu sun” — descend the hill toward the glowingly blue Pacific on her way to school. “How could I not have had misconceptions?” Didion writes now…. “I had been raising her as a doll.“

Outsized fantasies – of the perfect life, the perfect child, the perfect portfolio – are real downers.

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And yet, having said all that — let’s be scrupulously fair, and remind ourselves of what shits happy people can be. Let’s do it prettily. Poetically.

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The Happy Ones are Almost Always Also Vulgar

Those stilled by pain don’t mix
with the cheerful, self-assured runners
but with those who walk at the same slow pace.
If one wheel locks and the other’s turning
the turning one doesn’t stop turning
but goes as far as it can, dragging the other
in a poor, skewed race until the cart
either comes to a halt or falls apart.

So why are the big sports killing the small sports?