… finally steps down from the Penn State board of trustees. Steve Garban – a real throwback – quits.

Geoff Dyer’s excited appreciation of his favorite novel – Don DeLillo’s The Names – inspires UD to share some notes from her final lecture, last April, in her George Washington University course devoted to DeLillo’s work.

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DeLillo today is arguably America’s highest-profile, most-respected writer of serious fiction. He has the status of Hemingway, Faulkner, Mailer, Bellow. Every new novel occasions much attention and discussion. A big new film about Cosmopolis (a novel so weak I didn’t assign it to you) is about to come out; a play of DeLillo’s – about climate change, and it sounds quite dreary – will soon open in London. DeLillo is also politically engaged – as a free speech and human rights advocate.

He is, in other words, a significant force in the culture.

Although unlike Hemingway and Mailer DeLillo is the opposite of a self-promoter, much less a self-mythologizer (he’s a small, soft-spoken man) he has gained a huge audience for his work, and he is the major influence on many important younger American writers.

He is the opposite of the restless neurotic macho writer – only ever married to one woman, long-resident in one town – and though he shares some of Mailer’s anger at American culture and American foreign and domestic policy, his novels reveal a profound love of America, an anguished and profound love of New York City. The son of immigrants, he seems to share the appreciation of American freedoms and opportunities that such families often exhibit. His post-9/11 essay, “In the Ruins of the Future,” is a love song to the diversity and democracy of New York.

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If asked to name the core value I associate with DeLillo, I’d say seriousness. You see it in his affect, his photos. He’s not grim, but his brow is always knit, and he always looks thoughtful and concerned. He has the sly satirical humor we see in White Noise, but it’s hard to imagine him writing a broad farce or a psychedelic romp.

It’s equally hard to imagine DeLillo writing a romance. Unlike, say, the author of The English Patient, who makes a love affair the center of a serious historical novel, DeLillo doesn’t, I think, have the disposition to create and follow passionate lovers. Can you think of any in his work? As we’ve noted, DeLillo seems rather embarrassed and inept in his sex scenes; his characters tend to be divorced or estranged, in a fog of pained confusion about erotic relationships. His most intense relationships are father and son, or friends.

This reflects, I think, his belief that the postmodern American landscape, with its sense of unreality and menace, makes it enormously difficult to trust other people, let alone open your intensest and truest self to them. The verbal and emotional transparency we might imagine for real lovers seems invisible in DeLillo’s world, where even the children are prematurely old, self-conscious, and skeptical (like Heinrich, in White Noise) even of natural events, like rainfall.

One of our few young married couples, Lyle and Pammy in Players, are a horror – self-hating, cynical, “too complex,” tempted – as so many DeLillo characters are – toward withdrawal from the world and from one another. Both move in the career world of Manhattan with seeming success, but both actually hate their lives, one drawn to pointless terrorist violence, the other to what she sees as the nothingness of Maine, which is the setting for her best friend’s self-immolation.

Indeed, far from living vivid passionate lives, the characters of Don DeLillo always seem on the verge of self-immolation or implosion. Many seem to have desperately unfurnished, unfinished selves, their time taken up with the search for a cult or a cult figure whose charismatic personal energy might somehow vitalize them.

This parasitic half-life cannot be sustained, and at some point DeLillo’s barely-there characters must either disappear like a puff of smoke or reckon with the half-life they’ve assumed. The combination of high intellect and low identity generates the minimalist characters we’ve particularly seen in his most recent novels: post-9/11-traumatized Keith in Falling Man, catatonically guilt-ridden Elster in Point Omega. Everyone’s sort of autistic, standing in a silent room all day watching a version of Psycho that takes 24 hours to play, or sitting in the desert quietly thinking.

The entropic tendency in DeLillo has things in common with Teilhard’s own omega point theory, in which we’re reaching levels of complexity we can’t sustain, and are heading toward nothing less than the end of the world. One critic calls DeLillo’s writing “pre-apocalyptic” — it’s elegiac, but the elegy seems increasingly to be for the earth itself, as in the film Melancholia, as if the proper attitude – emotional, philosophical, spiritual – to take toward our very planetary life is a kind of awed, observant love at what we were as we vanish. Think of the bizarre and beautiful sunset scene at the end of White Noise.

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But you can understand this posture in simple, human, non-apocalyptic terms. Reflective people reflect on the transience of all separate lives; even more reflective people on the transience of all cultures (hence Owen Brademas, anti-hero of The Names).

And yet all the reflection takes place within the cloud of unknowing – it doesn’t endow you with sharper Being, move you toward a life of greater, more meaningful action. The American malady in all of DeLillo, writes one critic, “is one of spellbound fixation.” Voyeur-culture, looking, gazing, staring, indeed seems at the center of DeLillo’s work, in which the traditional “plot” and “action” and “characters” elements of the novel have thinned, because, DeLillo suggests, we have thinned.

[W]hen it comes to discussion of timely controversies, slash-and-thrust debates, and other forms of writing that people actually go out of their way to read, there’s no doubt where talented legal academics are headed: to blogs and other shorter-form online publications.

Much of the intellectual groundwork for the Supreme Court’s ObamaCare rulings was laid at blogs like Volokh Conspiracy (for libertarians and conservatives trying to overturn the individual mandate) and Jack Balkin’s Balkinization (for liberals defending it). Elizabeth Warren became a national figure in part through her clear and hard-hitting online writing about the problems of consumer debt. Professionally edited web outlets (including The Atlantic) allow law professors to get their arguments before an intelligent audience in hours rather than weeks or months. As online law writing has taken off, readers are rewarding qualities like clarity, concision, relevance, and wit, and steering clear of pedantry and mystification.

… at Penn State, and what to do about it. The institution has been stained by so many and so much, the question of whether its former president should retain his faculty tenure is a small one. But given how much the taxpayers of Pennsylvania are about to chalk up in lawsuit awards against the university, the school probably would prefer not making them even angrier when they realize they’re paying Graham’s salary for as long as he feels like hanging around.

Given Sandusky’s conviction and the Freeh report, Donald Heller, dean of the College of Education at Michigan State University, predicted Penn State would rather negotiate with Spanier for his resignation than revoke his tenure.

“I don’t think they’re going to want to fight that battle with everything else that’s going on,” said Heller, who was director of the study of higher education at Penn State for 10 years until he left in January.

Throw a lot of money at him to make him go away. That comes out of the taxpayers too, but at least it’s a one-shot deal.

Moral indignation, university football style.

… the Oklahoma State University newspaper’s front page to get a sense of the rich culture of university football.

A brilliant young physics professor at Rice dies during a mountain climbing trip. He was found dead in his base camp tent.

Oxygen deprivation? Heart attack? Edema? It’s not yet known. He was only thirty.

A student at UD’s alma mater discusses America’s sleaze-positive culture.

The chipper!

I’ve just heard the sound of a chipper!

And suddenly that name will never be the same to me.

UD awakes to the sound of the guys finally getting to work on her downed trees.

Ah. And there’s the sound of a big-ass saw.

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What it’s like here right now.

(Warning: Not Safe for Work.)

Ask around Poznan and residents offer all sorts of different explanations for [Poland’s] recent [economic] success. Some say history has inured Poles to such drastic turns in their fortune that they enjoy life while they can, spending their hard-earned zlotys. Others say they learned to be resourceful under the hardship of Communism, where a company like Apart once had to buy old gold jewelry and melt it down before it could make a new ring or bracelet.

Mr. Niespodziany attributed it to a positive form of incompetence. “Even the crisis doesn’t work in Poland,” he joked.

… in high places.

… big mo.

… the farce was just beginning.

… They’ve made a school that you’ll adore

But freedom’s on a distant shore

From Singapore.

… name.

It still adorns the head of the Modern Language Association.