Maitre: Tragically, not well-connected enough.

“The oldest rule of thumb in journalism is quote the source and quote it accurately,” said Marvin Kalb, director of Harvard University’s Joan Shorenstein Barone Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy.

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

de Screengrabe: Happily, very well-connected!

“…[I]t comes to a certain point in [Arnaud de Borchgrave’s] life, I believe he’s 85, and he makes a mistake, you can be sure once he’s called out on it he’s not going to do it anymore,” [said Marvin Kalb].

Ironically, [Vladimir] Medinsky’s credentials as an historian were seriously questioned when it emerged early this year that his doctoral dissertation, “The Problem of Objectivity in Elucidating Russian History From the Second Half of the 15th through the 17th Centuries,” which he successfully defended in 2011, was extensively plagiarized. Medinsky has denied the charges, claiming that he simply used general phrases that happened to have been used by others, but a textual analysis posted on a Russian website for historians makes it clear that the plagiarism was substantial.

But then, of course, Medinsky’s mentor, Vladimir Putin, also lifted chunks of his doctoral thesis directly from other sources. According to Clifford Gaddy at the Brookings Institute, several pages of Putin’s dissertation, “The Strategic Planning of Regional Resources Under the Formation of Market Relations,” which he completed at the St. Petersburg Mining Institute in 1997, were copied directly from the Russian translation of a 1978 business textbook written by two American professors. (It is common practice in Russia for officials to pay researchers to ghost-write their dissertations, so Putin and Medinsky might not have been aware of the plagiarism. But this of course puts them in even worse light.)

What? You mean thousands of people aren’t attracted to meetings featuring Charles Nemeroff and Alan Schatzberg?

Allen Frances goes on to say that “Psychiatric diagnosis has become too important to be left in the hands of a small, withering, cash-strapped, incompetent association that feels compelled to regard its bottom line as a higher priority than having a safe, scientifically sound, and widely accepted diagnostic system.”

… didn’t plagiarize after all (background here). Alex Pareene, in Salon, explains:

The Unification Church and his think tank pay him money for little weekly columns that no one will ever read; he gets to pretend he is still an important journalist, and they get to be associated with a respected old man who has very powerful friends. [Arnaud] De Borchgrave is — understandably — confused as to why anyone would accuse him of plagiarism. He’s an award-winning D.C. fixture with a long and storied career, not some undergrad journalism major! Plagiarism is what unimportant people do. Friends of Marvin Kalb make minor attribution errors.

It’s exactly Roy Cohn’s explanation, in Angels in America, of why he’s not gay.

Roy Cohn: Your problem, Henry, is that you are hung up on words. On labels. “Gay”, “homosexual”, “lesbian”; you think they tell you who a person sleeps with, but they don’t tell you that. Like all labels, they refer to one thing and one thing only: Where does a person so identified fit in the food chain? In the pecking order. Not ideology or sexual taste, but something much simpler — clout. Who owes me favors. Not who I fuck or who fucks me, but who will pick up the phone when I call. To someone who doesn’t understand this, homosexual is what I am because I sleep with men, but this is wrong. Homosexuals are not men who sleep with other men. Homosexuals are men who, in 15 years of trying, can’t get a pissant anti-discrimination bill through City Council. They are men who know nobody, and who nobody knows. Now, Henry, does that sound like me?
Henry: No.
Roy Cohn: No. I have clout. Lots. I pick up that phone, dial 15 numbers, and guess who’s on the other end of the line? In under five minutes, Henry.
Henry: The President.
Roy Cohn: Better — his wife.
Henry: I’m impressed.
Roy Cohn: I don’t want you to be impressed, Henry — I want you to understand. This is not sophistry, and this is not hypocrisy. This is reality. I have sex with men; but, unlike nearly every other man of which this is true, I bring the guy I’m screwing to Washington, and President Reagan smiles at us and shakes his hand. Because what I am is defined entirely by who I am. Roy Cohn is not a homosexual. Roy Cohn is a heterosexual man who fucks around with guys.

Somehow the soccer stadium has remained the last bastion of unmitigated maleness. You can behave badly and be proud of it, the way you can’t in virtually any other venue in Europe.

Analysis Terminable

My love, the dead rearise in our dreams.
Even you, ease-seeker. A summer camp,
Fifties era, background volleyball teams,
Was the setting where my sleeping headlamp
Found you. Through clear and warming August air
I watched you raise your arms and approach me
In a gesture loving and, in life, rare.

Rare because direct, without subtlety,
Nothing to interpret or erase
With universal solvent intellect.

Don’t you see why you put me in that place?
He was there … My poor son… His summer wrecked…

My love, your voice still rises in my ear;
Still misses, with analytic skill,
The obvious, preanalytical embrace.

… when you have absolutely no arguments, and cannot write, it’s better to remain silent.

… and again and again because it happens all the time: Beware the B-School Boys. That’s a whole category of its own on this blog. And why? Because business school professors constantly run afoul of the law.

The latest finance-professor-gone-wrong is this guy, at Bocconi University. Says on his university page that he’s been “voluntarily suspended (‘How can you be voluntarily suspended?’ asked Mr UD) since November 16, 2012.” (‘Isn’t that in the future?’ asked Mr UD). He’s been way busy lying about the value of his hedge fund, destroying investors, and dealing with the Financial Services Authority.

UD‘s summer begins; ‘thesdan days are hot, with evening thunderstorms. Here’s this moment’s weather report:

Flash flooding is occurring or is imminent in your area. Immediately go to higher ground if quickly rising water is about to impact your location. If you are in a vehicle, drive away from flooded areas. If on foot, do not attempt to walk through flood waters.

Rumble rumble rumble. Big time thunder.

At the end of a long, busy day, UD‘s been at the baby grand (backdrop for my Faculty Project lectures), playing Little Prelude BWV 938 in E minor. You know the one! Mr UD was on the couch reading and, as almost always happens when I play Bach, he’s now out like a light.

Only a few spotlights are on in our house; and despite Garrett Park having installed tons of forest green old-timey street lamps, things out there are very dark. UD‘s town is a well-established arboretum, with enormous trees everywhere. Not much light, not much sky.

But UD leaves for the beach soon (blogging of course continues apace), where for a change she’ll get nothing but sky and water and a bit of boardwalk. She’s got a date there with the supermoon (June 4) and the transit of Venus (June 5). Later in the summer, at her little house in upstate New York, she’ll lean back in butterfly chairs at night looking for perseids.

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

UD‘s neighbor Tamara
was over yesterday afternoon
to take UD’s photo.

The Chronicle of Higher Education
interviewed her about her MOOC,
and wants to run a picture
with the article.

Here it is.

Look at the Pope over there in Vatican City taking a star turn in What the Butler Saw as his city state fails to “shed its reputation as a scandal plagued tax haven.”

Look at the big happy family of University of Texas scientists who just went ahead and gave the family a huge state grant, without bothering to check with the provost or anything.

And look at another huge bureaucracy, the place UD‘s father spent his entire scientific career: the National Institutes of Health. The NIH just went ahead and gave America’s own tête d’affiche pour conflit d’intérêts (Charles Nemeroff has been called poster boy for conflict of interest so many times, I thought I’d jazz it up by putting it in French) another big grant, since you want to encourage his sort of behavior… or whatever…

I mean, it’s about bureaucracies, isn’t it? In all three cases? You’ve got cronies and histories of you do me and I do you and all… Everybody’s in everybody else’s pocket…

But eventually, as in all three of these cases, things get so brazen that the media notices; and then, if the money involved comes from taxpayers, politicians get all het up about it. As in this what the fuck? letter from Senator Charles Grassley to NIH. Grassley sends a copy to the notorious Donna Shalala.

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

More coverage of the nettlesome Nemeroff.

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

The latest University of Miami scandal jumps to the Miami Herald. Shalala and Nemeroff are trying out the no comment option, but I don’t think it’s going to work.

… to follow UD‘s career as a reporter for the Garrett Park Bugle, here’s her latest.

… set the pace here** – and as for bohemoth endowment losses based on interest-rate swaps, no one will ever outpace Harvard’s Larry Summers .

But Dartmouth is certainly doing its bit, with “the investment of $550 million in interest-rate swaps with now-defunct Lehman Brothers that [a faculty and alumni group] says are now worth $250 million.”

A lot of people at Dartmouth are unhappy about university trustees who are also money managers, and they’ve written a letter about it to the governor and attorney general of New Hampshire.

The letter calls for an investigation into money managers who have invested the Hanover, N.H.-based college’s assets while members of the investment committee… The letter accuses the money managers of “enriching themselves” through private equity, venture capital and hedge fund investments made by the endowment.

——————————————

**

In an official letter distributed to alumni, students, faculty, and administration, Yeshiva University President Richard Joel stated that Merkin, who was Chairman of the University Investment Committee, managing its endowment of almost $1.8 billion (as of about 2 years ago), had invested about $112 million in his own hedge fund, Ascot Partners, which was almost solely invested with the [Bernard] Madoff fund. In actuality, it was an initial investment of $14 million that became falsely inflated to $112 million over time. As such, Merkin collected an initial fee of one percent and later 1.5 percent, standard for all of Yeshiva’s money managers on whose Board of Trustees he sat. He collected over $2 million in fees, almost $1 million for Ascot alone. In fourteen years, the fund grew 9 percent a year, even after subtracting losses for Madoff and expenses. He made at least $10 million from Yeshiva over his tenure. Although Joel implicitly acknowledged that the university’s charter lacked a conflict of interest restriction on the management of school funds, Merkin resigned from all of his positions at Yeshiva that day.

… essay? Opinion piece? Indictment? Not sure what to call it.

It appears in ESPN, of all places, and expresses a strange emotion – hopelessness, I guess. There’s something religious, something sinners-in-the-hands-of-an-angry-God about it. It recalls some of the most disgusting scandals in college football in the last few months, missing quite a few of them but touching on enough to make the tired point about the stinking corruption of the enterprise.

But this is a routine rhetorical strategy, beginning your article about the vileness of all aspects of university football by reviewing five or six of the most recent you-could-pukes. Usually the next step is to point out that even by those standards the Miami story startles; or people are getting upset but really the latest Chapel Hill vomit isn’t chunky enough to count… (Here’s a good example. Typical sentence: “After the last 12 months, which were filled with scandal and cover-ups and lies and payouts and allegations of child molestation and motorcycles and mistresses, The Ohio State recently reported something like four dozen secondary violations and we didn’t bat an eye.”)

Instead of this, the author goes all Ballad of Reading Gaol:

We make a monster of what we love, and to make a point about what our society honestly values, a writer might post here a comparison of the state-by-state salaries of head football coaches and governors… In the end we remain helpless against ourselves.

Each man kills the thing he loves, it turns out. As in the endlessly anthologized poem by James Wright about the beginning of football season in American towns:

In the Shreve High football stadium,
I think of Polacks nursing long beers in Tiltonsville,
And gray faces of Negroes in the blast furnace at Benwood,
And the ruptured night watchman of Wheeling Steel,
Dreaming of heroes.

Therefore,
Their sons grow suicidally beautiful
At the beginning of October,
And gallop terribly against each other’s bodies.

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

We who are about to die for you losers salute you. Our mothers lie abed wondering why instead of fucking them our fathers want to watch us concuss.

Has another year of scandal and revelation and condemnation finally undone the sport? Are Petrino, Tressel, Paterno, Miami or Montana the beginning of the end?

C’mon. Does any casual fan, any casual reader, any casual viewer, any reasonable person anywhere at the beginning of the 21st century think of “big football schools” as anything other than big football schools?

As it was in 1905, it was another tough year for fans. How do you root for what’s on the helmet without worrying about what’s in it?

Yet we remain helpless against not merely our indifference to what’s in it but indeed to what’s on it. What fan really gives a shit whether it’s Auburn or Alabama? What you’re after is gladiatorial gore good enough to get you going.

… on poetry is now up.

Title: What Are They Trying to Tell Us?

I Dreamed That in a City Dark as Paris

The violence of waking life disrupts
The order of our death. Strange dreams occur,
For dreams are licensed as they never were.

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

Many poems and songs recount dreams – I Dreamt I Dwelt in Marble Halls, I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine, I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill, I Dreamed that I Was Old – and this poem about remembering and forgetting wars also casts itself as a dream. How else really to reach the war dead? If you are, like the poet, a war veteran, you will make contact with those dead in subconscious, flickering, tumbling, wandering moments…

I mean, UD has always loved Siegfried Sassoon’s Prelude: The Troops – especially its last verse, which pretty reliably makes her cry:

O my brave brown companions, when your souls
Flock silently away, and the eyeless dead
Shame the wild beast of battle on the ridge,
Death will stand grieving in that field of war
Since your unvanquished hardihood is spent.
And through some mooned Valhalla there will pass
Battalions and battalions, scarred from hell;
The unreturning army that was youth;
The legions who have suffered and are dust.

Yet this is direct, formal address, wide-awake sorrow and homage. Simpson’s night visitation feels more likely to be the way actual people make contact with the war dead, which is to say by being haunted by them.

Both poets use blank verse, with Simpson occasionally using end rhyme (unrest/crest; occur/were) but mainly featuring unrhymed lines (all of Sassoon’s lines are unrhymed); both poems derive from this form a stately hesitant gait, a queer little funeral march. The absolutely strict measure of Sassoon’s final two lines is at spectacular odds with the explosive rage and despair behind them, and this is what we typically expect in a poem, the poet asserting at least linguistic control over emotional and intellectual chaos, over outcomes too grotesque and vast really to be comprehended, much less assimilated.

Simpson’s poem is all subliminal, all, as he says, a strange dream, its strangeness extreme, but somehow licensed by the beyond-strange atrocities of our century (his poem’s speaker is – assuming he’s Simpson – a Second World War veteran communing with a soldier of the First World War). And as dream, it is free to invert and invent…

So its first line seems immediately all wrong. Isn’t Paris the city of light? A city dark as Paris… Paris during the war? War blasting even the city of enlightenment back to violet (the word one letter short of violent) night… Well, and it’s a dream after all with all the shifty inchoate imagery of the sleeping mind. Rumbling guns pump color – you hear the assonance, the repeated uh a vague menacing sound. And things are vague because the poet stands alone and a distance from them; there is the Front, and the poet is in the back, in the shadows, left behind. All he can see are the edges of war; and this is his mind struggling to get to the Front, to apprehend that reality directly. Restless, he stands alone in a Paris square, and finds himself – bizarrely – to be a poilu, a French World War One infantryman, an ordinary sort from the countryside.

I was the man…

reminds us of Walt Whitman’s line:

I am the man, I suffered, I was there.

Whitman celebrates here his powerful capacity to empathize, to feel exactly what are others – especially suffering others – are feeling; and Simpson is after something similar, his dreaming persona literally taking on the identity of “my confrere.” Yet as to really remembering: The wars are too great (there’s an echo here of course of The Great War), too vast, once again, for us to grasp; they become historical abstractions, like the ancient and vast Egyptian dynasties:

These wars have been so great, they are forgotten
Like the Egyptian dynasts. My confrere
In whose thick boots I stood, were you amazed
To wander through my brain four decades later
As I have wandered in a dream through yours?

I thought of you, that’s all; I didn’t really commemorate you, as Sassoon commemorates, or feel with you, as Whitman feels with you; it’s just that you, poilu, wandered through my brain at some point while I was awake; and then that wandering presence inhabited, solidified, stood stock still, in my dreaming mind — ghosts inhabit a house; this ghost inhabits the speaker’s mind.

The violence of waking life disrupts
The order of our death. Strange dreams occur,
For dreams are licensed as they never were.

Things are out of joint; our war-torn world upends everything, makes everything weird, so that my (dead; dreaming) life propels itself backwards to your still-living, still-dreaming being in the darkness of the eternal war zone. The new global world of conflict – a world in which any behavior is “licensed” – is so grotesque that it infects our dreams in unprecedented ways. We are losing orderly ways of commemoration; we risk flattening our wars into abstraction. Yet we remain open to inhabitation.