… wins the George Washington University
Battle of the A Capella Bands.

Here’s a photo from the GW newspaper,
of that night’s soloist, Laura Scuderi.
La Kid conducted two of their three songs.

They perform again tomorrow night
at GW’s Jack Morton Auditorium, at 8.

And here’s a photo of the group
going nuts because they’ve just won.

La Kid has her back to the camera;
she’s got a pink headband on.

Here’s a photo also taken last night,
outside Lisner Auditorium, as the group
celebrated its victory. La Kid
is in the back row, all the way to the
right. (Click photos to enlarge.)

UD was a few feet away from
all of this, hyperventilating.

Hitch-22 was a title born of the silly word games we played, one of which was Titles That Don’t Quite Make It, among which were A Farewell to Weapons, For Whom the Bell Rings, To Kill a Hummingbird, The Catcher in the Wheat, Mr. Zhivago, and Toby-Dick…

Salman Rushdie remembers a fun word game he played with Christopher Hitchens.

Over breakfast, Les UDs have started coming up with some of their own:

To Have and Not Have
The Siblings Karamazov
Pride and Prejudgment
Darkness at Eleven-Thirty
The Way of All Skin

The son of a disgraced Chinese leader Bo Xilai received three traffic tickets while driving a Porsche [costing around $80,000] in the United States, the Wall Street Journal reported Friday.

Bo Guagua, son of the ousted Communist Party chief at the center of a widening corruption scandal, had earlier this week sought to downplay his allegedly lavish lifestyle as a student at Harvard University.

Harvard must be pissed. If they’re ever going to begin growing their endowment – currently an anemic 32 billion – it’s going to have to come from guys like Bo.

France’s socialist presidential candidate says that, if elected, he won’t seek to overturn a law banning face-covering Muslim veils enacted by President Nicolas Sarkozy’s conservatives.

… and I hear them when I spend time in the Shenandoah and it’s always thrilling to hear them… So UD is happy that Washington State University is going to so much trouble to save a bunch of Great Horned babies whose nests were destroyed.

Not only are they being hand-fed, three times a day, “cut-up mice soaked in water” (WSU veterinary students must spend all their time slicing mice), but “People working with the baby owls are instructed not to talk when feeding them.” Lest they imprint.

Bear-bolstering at the University of Colorado.

Or, if you’re just joining us, my Massive Open Online Course on poetry has just enrolled four hundred people from around the world.

Onward and upward. This Saturday, I’m recording a lecture on Elizabeth Bishop’s poem, At the Fishhouses.

Mona Eltahawy pulls no punches in this spectacular essay, one of the few UD‘s seen worthy to be read alongside the essays of George Orwell. Eltahawy and Orwell share an incandescent anger which lies unsteadily under hyper-controlled prose. This latent, labile, anger sustains the riveting tension and clarity of their unsettlingly poised voice. After you read Eltahawy, read Orwell’s How the Poor Die. The same outrage, the same strange, meticulous composure; and of course the same focus upon a large segment of hated humanity.

(Eltahawy makes me think, too, of D.H. Lawrence, for she begins her essay with an excerpt from a modern Egyptian short story that captures the crushing nihilism of a cruel marriage; and that same thing plays out in Odour of Chrysanthemums)

What hope can there be for women in the new Egyptian parliament, dominated as it is by men stuck in the seventh century? A quarter of those parliamentary seats are now held by Salafis, who believe that mimicking the original ways of the Prophet Mohammed is an appropriate prescription for modern life. Last fall, when fielding female candidates, Egypt’s Salafi Nour Party ran a flower in place of each woman’s face. Women are not to be seen or heard — even their voices are a temptation — so there they are in the Egyptian parliament, covered from head to toe in black and never uttering a word.

And so women able to utter speech must utter it with a vengeance.

Notre Dame’s Most Revered Father Jenky
Made its faculty members quite crenky:
“This embarrassing shmoe
Called the Prez Uncle Joe.
We are going give him a spenky.”

Not knowing you don’t have a PhD is the academic equivalent of not being able to find your ass with both hands, thinks ol’ UD.

It’s not as if you can overlook having to write a long manuscript over a number of years and then go to a room full of people and defend its arguments over a number of hours. It tends to concentrate the mind.

Yet the University of Pennsylvania has (had) a dean, a vice-dean of education, who (see this post’s title) has made just this claim. He’s been calling himself doctor for years based on his incorrect assumption that he has a PhD.

It’s like all those German politicians (and one Hungarian) (and millions of Korean) assuring us that they didn’t know they plagiarized their dissertations. It’s just really odd.

Anyway, Penn has put this guy on leave while they untangle the web he weaves.

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

UD thanks Ian.

From an interview with Brishkay Ahmed, who made the documentary film Story of Burqa: Case of a Confused Afghan.

“The older people my father’s age or the experts I interviewed, oh my God, they’re dying to get rid of this cloth. Over and over they make that statement.”

Ahmed supports women’s choice to dress modestly and wear the hijab to cover their hair, but she believes the burqa should be banned everywhere.

“I have never met a woman in Afghanistan who has said she has worn the burqa because she likes it – never,” Ahmed said. “The fear associated with it is why it’s still hanging in the closet because [women] have been killed for not wearing it… The entire world needs to ban the burqa and I’m not scared about saying this and there is one reason: I’m a filmmaker and I’m not supposed to be politically correct. It’s not my job,” Ahmed said.

The moving memorial ceremony for Christopher Hitchens reminds me to link to his defense of burqa bans.

LOL. Well, the lawyer for the three California professors suing to keep a valuable set of very ancient bones above ground isn’t diplomatic, but my sense is that he’s pretty much got it right. Strictly legally, the Kumeyaay tribe may be able to bury the two skeletons, though they don’t seem to be ancestors; but “No other set of New World remains… holds such a high degree of research potential.” They’re way old.

UD thinks a compromise is in order, maybe involving a ceremony that would not involve, or that would delay, burial.

Don’t ban conflicts of interest; manage them, say universities and journals, which means disclosing such conflicts. Yet there’s “ritual ignoring of disclosures,” writes one observer, which makes them public-relations terrific and actual-world pointless.

Harvard’s Eric Campbell notes that

A lot of medical schools have made the decision that speakers bureaus are inappropriate and they have banned them… A lot of institutions have said our doctors are not going to take tickets to football games, go out to eat with drug companies, or accept other incentives.

But there’s the business of whether pharma-compromised researchers should be able to publish in reputable journals. That, and perks beyond football and dinner, continue to be worked out, one campus at a time.

But do not forget the larger context of these debates. They’re not just about the obvious fact that you’re more likely to skew evidence in the direction of people shoveling money at you; they’re about a zillion dollar industry that takes regular multi-million-dollar judgments against it for manifold violations of the law totally in stride; direct-to-consumer advertising that creates stupendous pressure to substantiate claims about this or that disorder; institutional rewards that are all about prolific publishing; pharma-paid ghostwriting agencies that may write the entire article for you, etc., etc. Conflict of interest is not simply a particular problem for particular American universities. As Art Caplan’s comment in this post’s title suggests, it’s a structural problem that has occurred because pharma is now so rich it can buy entire university departments.

Well, spring. The massive, massed, multicolored azaleas all over UD‘s town, Garrett Park, are hallucinogenic.

They are, like UD lately, manic.

UD‘s baseline affect is happy. Add exercise and healthy eating and you get borderline hebephrenia.

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

Bouncing off the walls has its advantages. It’s the last week of class, a crazy time, and UD finds she’s got more than enough energy for it. University committees, exams, independent studies, office hours, honors theses – she’s up for it. Her endorphins make all things possible.

Yet they also, undeniably, make her a little nuts. She’s done an EXCESS WELL-BEING Google search and gotten nowhere…
Patient presents with striking amor vitae. Seasonal Affective Disorder diagnosis based upon patient’s compulsive rendition of When It’s Springtime in the Rockies.

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

UD giggles while lecturing on The Waste Land. “‘April is the cruelest month.’ Are you kidding?”

“Is the American Psychiatric Association getting carried away?” as Christopher Lane asks, in an interview about the notorious DSM.

“The risk is that the drug companies will seize on the milder conditions [listed in the DSM] and hype and exaggerate them through very canny marketing to the point where they’re basically represented as an under-reported problem…. The thresholds are [regularly] lowered for these disorders… and consequently vast numbers of the public are suddenly eligible for a diagnosis that they wouldn’t have been before.”

He notes that if the current version of the DSM gets published, children as young as four will be eligible for powerful anti-psychotic drugs, and people still grieving the loss of someone after two weeks will also be eligible for a mentally disordered diagnosis and powerful drugs.

Next month, activists plan to stage an “Occupy the APA” protest in Philadelphia during the organization’s annual conference to show their disdain.