… as a result of a deadly athletic scandal.

Like Graham Spanier, he’ll probably be facing charges.

…chlodnik?

UD now walks to Whole Foods in Somerville Massachusetts in search of things that go with chlodnik. Twin infant girls, and one of their grandmothers, accompany her.

UD has been way maternal this week. Much dandling.

… can now be yours for just under a million dollars.

Read it here.

And here, as I sit in an air conditioned bedroom in Arlington, Massachusetts, is my take on the poem.

Morningside Heights, July

By William Matthews

The title, like the name of a painting, merely sets place and time, which makes sense, since the poem will be a quick impressionistic sketch of a few moments that pass on a hot city street in the summer. The quick-cut, free verse, sheerly descriptive technique makes sense for the evocation of an urban setting, an urban consciousness. Here, bits and pieces of conversation and action rush by in a blur, a blur thickened by layers of superheated air. But this poem will rise from mere description into meaning by subtly elaborating a connection between the feverish confused setting and the speaker’s inability to make emotional sense of his life.

Haze. Three student violists boarding
a bus. A clatter of jackhammers.
Granular light. A film of sweat for primer
and the heat for a coat of paint.

A rill of chill air
in the leaves. A car alarm. Hail.

On an intensely hot day, a rill of chill air — the speaker, let us say, suddenly shivers with a sense of his non-existence, his death, or deathliness amid this horribly teeming life. The car alarm announces the full expression of the pending disaster, and sure enough hail now falls. Hail here also has the dark suggestion of a twisted welcoming – he hails and greets the official arrival of the storm.

… the thriving Chinese diploma mill industry.

The morbid, bizarre, hilarious story of T. Boone Pickens and Oklahoma State University cries out for the David Lynch treatment. Only he, among American artists, can capture the twisted pathos of this death-haunted titan and his football team.

No one noticed. If you believe that, you’ll believe anything .

In Garrett Park, Maryland, UD lives under heat and huge trees – a jungle setting, with the branches of a derecho treefall pressing against her windows. The treefall has brought wildlife closer as animals explore the dead limbs. Loud animal noise deepens the jungle feel.

Here in rural New York, it’s about big sky and cool air, a bowl of blue-and-white swirl above, and, around your shoulders, a morning breeze that almost makes you tremble.

The only tea in the house is green. UD puts two bags in her cup in a vague effort to make it taste more black, but basically she’s after the warmth of it.

Of course you could argue it’s wilder here than in suburban Maryland – Garrett Park doesn’t have bears, and Summit neighbors warn us to make loud noises when we take walks – but sitting on the gray deck of our house on top of a hill overlooking small green mountains sloping into farm valleys, you’d think this the more settled place. The dawn chorus is pips and clicks, not the shriek of grackles. We’ve kept the front acres of our hill down to Seven Ponds Road a wildflower field, so no trees press against our windows. A sweet smell comes off the field.

And it’s almost silent here, without the trains and planes and people and dogs of Garrett Park. Down the hill in back of me, past our pond, the Sousias have a lumber yard, and you can sometimes hear them cutting. But for miles around it’s thinly settled. We see no houses from our deck, and are ourselves invisible from the road.

You could say Garrett Park lacks hunters and guns, but, precisely because of this, herds of deer live inches from our houses, while, at least in this part of Schoharie County, the population is under control.

The only wild part of my immediate setting is our little house, empty almost all the time, and so host to hordes of critters. They make themselves scarce when we turn on lights, but they come back when we leave.

While Garrett Park’s always protecting itself from the massive development of boom town Bethesda, Summit New York is a particularly depressed part of generally depressed upstate. The tiny main street has since our last stay closed the general store, a restaurant, and a church. Four miles from town, the Summit Shock Facility, a long-shuttered juvenile detention center, is one of many pieces of local real estate the state is trying to unload.

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

So here is a woodpecker, which does shriek a bit coming in for a landing in the maple next to me. It taps a central limb for a few seconds and flies off.

In the evening and early morning you hear pond frogs.

There’s tree removal to be done here too – some dead cypresses (I think they’re cypresses) and a grouping of firs that blocks part of the view. Planted decades ago to give a sunning platform privacy, these got so big they dominate the foreground.

It’s late morning now, and with the sun comes the sleeping problem. The setting is so tranquil – butterflies in the grass, only a faint wind for sound – that life becomes variations on light napping. “You need amphetamines to stay here,” I said to Mr UD. “Even if I had the world’s blackest tea, I don’t think I could stay awake.” I sketch an entrepreneurial future in which we retrofit the place as a yoga lodge. Deep in the most distant part of our view – the blue tips of the Catskills – lie many spiritual retreats.

We have calming the mind down to a science at our house; but what about awakening?

Maybe ours could be the place where you calm your mind, and then you’d move on to one of the Catskill retreats for the next step.

… where readers who’ve been reading UD for awhile know she’s got a little house. No internet connection, however. This place is way, way out of the way.

I’m in a cafe at the moment. So there won’t be much blogging for the next day or two. I’ll be in Boston soon – serious blogging will resume there.

Does it? Does the University of Georgia community grow more and more impatient with its homegrown mafia?

I don’t see the slightest shadow of the faintest possibility of that. On the contrary, they seem extremely excited by these guys.

USC’s fit to burst with pride over Drew Pinsky, graduate of its med school and now on its faculty. He was last year’s commencement speaker!

Some say he’s a pharma whore. Some say… well…

The government alleges that Pinsky was paid a total of $275,000 over just two months – March and April 1999 – to deliver messages about Wellbutrin SR, a Glaxo antidepressant, “in settings where it did not appear that Dr. Pinsky was speaking for GSK.”

USC’s dean says “we know he will inspire [our students] as they take the next step in their medical careers,” and if you don’t think making close to three hundred thousand dollars for pushing a drug for a couple of months isn’t inspiring…! Here indeed is a role model for our students as they embark on their careers as healers.

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

USC’s guy is not just a mouthpiece… He’s a truly dedicated, truly enthusiastic – I might almost say over the top – mouthpiece.

[Pinsky appeared on a radio show that] began with a clip from a woman who said she had 60 orgasms in a row, “just nonstop.” When asked if this was even possible, Pinsky replied, “Oh yeah. For some women. What I think she was amazed about was it just suddenly started and that kind of thing most typically happens from medication, frankly.” He then segues into saying that that is what he is on the show to talk about. Soon he’s talking about … Wellbutrin …

Sure, you can say this is a low number. Most women start at around a hundred orgasms in a row and move up from there. But sixty ain’t too shabby, is it? For someone on an anti-depressant?

A dear deer, because it’s so hot outside, and I pity it in the heat.

This deer, lying a few feet from my bedroom window, watches me through the grapes and hollies. Its black eyes watch me lying in my cool bed, laptop on my belly.

Things have swung back to some normality. We now have both power and the internet. Every day, for as long as I can bear it, I move my lopper through branch after branch of downed walnut, slipping over yellow fruit as I go. I hatchet through thicker limbs.

So far I’ve regained the side path to my backyard — my backyard, where the walnut was split clean in the middle by a massive tulip poplar that fell on it. The woodpeckers can’t believe their luck.

Now that my lopping has revealed convoluted tree bones, my neighbors tell me what I’ve got is artistic, eco-art. I contemplate saving the money it will cost us to have big stuff removed… Just give the pile a title and let it be… Soltan 2012… No… Sultan 2012. Donald Sultan is a famous artist… I think over the Buddhist metaphysics I was reading last night… Change, the insubstantiality, immateriality, of all seemingly stable things. No shit.

COLLEGE FOOTBALL NEEDS A LITTLE GUN CONTROL

University Diaries has chronicled scads of professors and students caught on security camera stealing, taping harassment notes to themselves on their doors, scrawling swastikas on their doors… The most spectacular case of this was Pomona professor Kerri Dunn (http://articles.latimes.com/2004/aug/19/local/me-dunn19), although in that case it wasn’t a security camera. A bunch of guys saw her spray painting her car with racist slogans.

Only a few days ago I wrote about the occupational therapy professor filmed returning some amazing products he’d gifted himself out of his university’s endowment (http://www.margaretsoltan.com/?p=36404). He’d been tipped off that university officials suspected him of theft.

Now there’s this:

http://www.courant.com/news/connecticut/hc-new-britain-ccsu-bias-made-it-up-0703-20120702,0,4275448.story

This variety of campus story has become, over the years I’ve written this blog, incredibly common. A student reports a hate crime against herself. Once again security cameras film her staging it.

It seems to be about drawing attention to oneself – like Dunn, you get to address big rallies of students and faculty outraged on your behalf.

Sometimes, as allegedly in the Madonna Constantine case

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madonna_Constantine

people do hate stuff to themselves in order to deflect attention from other problems they’re having.

But this is usually about pathetic love-me motives.

I’ll report this three billion dollar settlement because it’s part of an issue this blog follows – corrupt pharma and the professors on your campus who collude with it – but three billion is nothing to Glaxo, and the settlement changes nothing.

(I’m blogging at a local hotel – no internet connection post-storm – and the linking function isn’t working here.)