Sunrise blogging begins…

… now, with a pink horizonal swelling that tells me and the person in a folding chair on the beach that the thing is about to pop. I’m watching, jammied, on the balcony.

The burning circle rises – fast – over the pewter sea. A container ship glides across the path the sun’s making on the water.

All the way up. Took less than a minute.

There’s the usual cheering section: Gulls, crows, joggers, policemen in light blue shorts. Praying section? I figure the guy on the beach is at the very least meditating…

Me? I’m thinking I will never really believe the universe of which the burning circle is apparently a teeny teeny teeny teeny part… Ever since I was eight everybody’s been showing me diagrams of the solar system, and I don’t really believe that either… Everybody’s been impressing on me the awesome massive violence out there while giving this particular place a pathetic spin… And as to spin: I’ve never really been able to feel the rotational breeze, as it were, on my face… If you know what I mean.

I mean, as Buck Mulligan puts it in Ulysses:

When I makes tea I makes tea… And when I makes water I makes water …

Squinting my brain to see The First Three Minutes is one thing; leaning my arms on a railing and feeling the sufficiency of sun earth and moon is another. Gimme that old time cosmology. It’s good enough for me.

… is now up at Inside Higher Education.

I’ve seen it year after year, this Atlantic beach, and maybe for various reasons I’m especially grateful this summer to be here, but I can’t recall a time, in the last four decades, when it’s been so beautiful. The clear mild air sharpens the green horizon. Also extremely precise are the white clouds gathered above the green line. Above the clouds there’s nothing but opal sky and contrails from jets out of Dover.

The deep blue sky clashes with the deep green water (darker and lighter green as the clouds drift), and you think of the palette of nature, so pleasing to us here on the sand.

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

The beach is a hospital ward. We lie under blue umbrellas that lean on their sides against the wind. This is the quiet floor. We watch the tidal ribbon wash toward us and we say nothing. The ocean makes us mute. The sun, readying itself for the transit of Venus, stuns us. We feel its heat on our arms, our faces. It makes our eyes heavy.

The sleeping, on and off, of the quiet room. We wake up stunned again into submission. Human voices wake us and we drown.

What can it mean that it’s this beautiful, and that when it tips over into this beautiful all we can do is fall asleep again?

It’s too much for us, the shadows on the field of water as the clouds go overhead. Elemental earth with umbrellas at the edges. How can that be? What are we, if not lovers of the earth – so full of love we can’t bear it? Once in the midst of our passion, we shut our eyes and let the atmosphere – air, sky, water and sand – drug us. Nature’s palliative palette.

Shall we gather at the river? The beautiful, the beautiful river. But that assembly prays, praises, implores; here we assemble to disassemble, to break apart under the sun into clouds that blacken the dreaming mind. Blacken, deepen… Anyway, discolor each blue serene with the mind’s own shades.

Let us all nod off. Let part of the beauty of this scene be the sight of our bedmates’ eyes in rapid dream movement. The sight of their bodies circled by gulls.

….. Chronicle of Higher Education.

Enjoy.

Go OSU!

… in Turkey. She has no idea why, but her referral log has lit up with tons of readers from there, all of them interested in her analysis of the Don DeLillo story, “Midnight in Dostoevsky.”

The scandal at Ohio State further fueled perceptions of a tail-wagging-the-dog culture at major universities, where administrators look the other way as long as the golden goose athletics program is reeling in wins and dollars.

Edit this sentence.

Hopefully this serves as a reminder to not only Stoneburner and Mewhort, but the entire team, that they must conduct themselves properly 24/7 because they are held to such a higher standard than the average college student.

Two Ohio State football players learn the hard way that while average college students can piss freely all over town, players are held to a higher standard.

… will appear at Inside Higher Ed tonight.

Read carefully, because there are many nuances.

A head football coach who says:

“I’ve been saying it for a long time, I will not hire an assistant coach until I’ve seen his wife,” Franklin said. “If she looks the part, and she’s a D-1 recruit, then you got a chance to get hired. That’s part of the deal.”

A passion so strong he was ready to kill for it!

Watch as his passion for a middling school with an overpaid president drives him over the edge!!

That would be UD‘s
cousin-in-law,
Andrzej Soltan,
an astronomer.

Something about
dead quasars.

… really knows how to pick ’em.

[Kenneth] Rall quietly resigned as chairman of the [University of Missouri] radiology department in December shortly before word got out that the radiology department [was] under scrutiny [for Medicare fraud].

His past was marked by trouble.

Rall was convicted of misdemeanor stealing in the 1980s for signing over Medicaid refund checks to himself while working at a Columbia radiology company. He had faced steeper felony charges, but the prosecutor lost evidence days before the trial. Rall also paid back nearly $1 million from a check-kiting scheme that used lag time between banks to inflate one account balance with non-existing funds from another account.

Rall left town in the midst of the controversy in the mid-80s but returned and went to work for the University of Missouri School of Medicine in 1998. When the school recruited him back, administrators knew about his past legal issues, spokesman Rich Gleba previously told the Tribune.

Virginia Tech has a once-in-a-millennium opportunity to enhance its football recruiting strategy by building a practice facility whose conveniences will attract the attention of our best high school players. Cutting down a rare old growth forest is a small price to pay for a shot at a national championship.

A bunch of eco freaks have some damn fool petition up about saving the trees, and if we give in to them the high schoolers will see what pussies we are and maybe not come. If our university doesn’t stand for giving all we’ve got to impress high school football players, it doesn’t stand for anything.