Jane Brody reminds UD to mention that the magazine of New Yorker cartoons she read on her flight to Phoenix featured at least six cartoons whose punch line depended on the fact that zillions of Americans are taking antidepressants.

And the next edition of the DSM will guarantee that the few of us left in this country who are not dependent on these pills will soon be taken into the fold.

… a spectacular target.

… insist on some grand meaning and seem to satirize human efforts at grand meaning. So here, on the upper edge of Courthouse Rock, is the Sphinx, only more massive and ruined and mysterious, its face high to the sun. And here at the rock’s base is a caryatid, only far more flowing and classical than anything on the Acropolis. Openings onto Petra, and long lines of inscribed stelae, are everywhere.

The rocks say We’ve condensed into ourselves all the monumental constructions of humanity. All of your monuments are imitations.

But of course it goes the other way. In my mind are all those places, spiritual and civic monuments, and I bring them with me to this place, and see them all around me.

A Picasso profile of Jacqueline appears on a rock next to the famous chapel. The same rock grins with rows of Notre Dame gargoyles.

One rock is a pile of clay from Rodin’s studio.

… hit close to home for UD last year, with one of her colleagues in the econ dept (here’s the post about him) (and here’s the original article about the conflict of interest) failing to note that a paper of his offering “a strong argument for shrinking the role of the Federal Housing Administration in insuring mortgages… was at least partially underwritten by the private mortgage insurance giant Genworth Financial Inc., which stands to benefit from a pull back in the market by FHA.”

Turns out this sort of thing is all in a day’s work for a lot of economists, who, like some scientific researchers at universities (led in the enterprise, until recently, by Charles Nemeroff and Joseph Biederman), don’t see why it’s anyone’s effing business which corporation or interest group pays for (and maybe ghostwrites) their research.

The American Economic Association has now adopted a few COI rules.

… un peu ivre (Prickly Pear Cactus Margarita) so this isn’t the best time to introduce this idea, but how about this:

There are three kinds of hills or mountains.

1.) Soft, sweet, reassuring, domesticated. Every August, on our drive back to our wee upstate NY house from UD‘s birthday dinner at the Bear Cafe, UD likes to watch the sun slip behind the low round green-to-the-top Catskills. It’s a calm, bucolic, verdant sort of deal, a world of cows and dogs and maple sugar candy.

2.) Wildly, elaborately, sculpted; strange, exhilarating, massive, unsettling. The red rocks of Sedona are all these things, but at the same time you feel you can have a human relationship to them. They don’t seem the same utterly natural part of the landscape the Catskills do (the Catskills can feel kind of backgroundy), yet they do seem earthly… We might not know exactly how these formations formed, but we rather easily claim them as part of our world. People give them homely names – Coffee Pot, Chimney – and ride their bikes along their rims. For all their massiveness, the eye can take each one in entirely, hiking along to a point of great closeness to particular rocks and examining their curves and lines and tracings.

It’s even perhaps easier to have a human relationship to the Sedona rocks than to the Catskills. The Catskills are a rather undifferentiated massing of green; each Sedona rock is strikingly different from the other. So you can fixate on one particular outcropping with great intensity.

3.) Cold, unworldly, “element bearable to no mortal,” as Elizabeth Bishop says of frigid ocean water. These are the Himalayas – inconceivable in altitude, impossible to take in fully with the human eye, crushing our lungs with the thinness of their air…

I’m suggesting that the Sedona rocks are a kind of aesthetic ideal – both beautiful and sublime (if you agree that something can be both of these things), while the Catskills are only beautiful, and the Himalayas only sublime.

… appeared in the desert along Long Canyon Trail this morning as we walked, very quietly, so as to see things like Gambel’s Quail.

The soft dry air here is amazing to a swampy DC denizen like UD. She’s always taking deep breaths. And who knew she’d develop, in a matter of days, a deep interest in desert fauna?

Les UDs are both getting hooked on this place.

Sort of like this.

On our walk back from dinner in Sedona.

… sometimes to an outrageous extent. The guy who greeted us at the Sedona Chamber of Commerce information desk spilled coffee on his shirt in his excitement. Sit down at a cafe and you’re sure to chat with the person at the next table. The sun, the blue sky, the red rocks in every direction – it excites you, makes you happy and emotional.

Les UDs are just back from a jeep trip through the rocks. Here’s a sample of the Pink Jeep fun they had. Major bumping, major jumping out of seats, with stops to crawl over smooth brown rocks and gaze at the celestial view.

… but it’s lighting up a large formation to the right of the balcony. This outcropping looks like the Taj Mahal with a bunch of Taj Mahals behind it; or maybe it looks like Red Square. With binoculars, I can trace the light and shadow, the striations, the grays and greens and reds and whites (there’s some snow high up).

It’s chilly but not cold on the balcony. After a half hour there, watching the whole line of rocks slowly light up, and watching various bright pink contrails, I’m warming up by the fireplace.

Off to breakfast.

An Eastern Kentucky University professor resigned Friday after being arrested on a drug charge.

Dr. Larry Belknap, a tenured professor in EKU’s Department of Recreation and Park Administration, was arrested Thursday for trafficking in marijuana over five pounds.

… about where I’m sitting right now – a balcony high up in the red rocks, a full moon rising, the sky a cloudless blue over the reds, church bells ringing through the hills (it just turned five o’clock), and the setting sun shedding light and shade through all the outcroppings – is that it keeps bringing me to tears.

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Another thing: Les UDs thank UD reader Bill R. for his recommendation that they drive to Sedona via Payson. How right you were.

Let’s not go overboard about Arizona, UD. Phoenix in January at eight in the morning still has a chill in the air. Yet the innkeeper just escorted me from one of the inner courtyards (huge red and orange ceramic containers full of madly thrusting agave, thick fruit trees heavy with yellow fruit, triangular shade sails) to the front of the inn (solar heated pool, shrieking birds in the bushes, black burbling fountains) which is directly in the sun, and damned if it hasn’t already warmed up.

… says a high school student in one of our most depressed states — a state that, like some others, has cynically decided to deal with its education budget by buying a bunch of computers and shoving them in front of students.

Hey, they can shove computers in front of themselves at home and fuck the whole get up in the morning / be with other people / deal with a teacher thing! Remember Irving Berlin:

Sure, you’ve got a little grousing – from a few teachers, a few students – but gradually everyone’s going to get on board. The teachers will still be paid — only they’ll be paid not to show up. They’ll stay home, just like their students, and be what this blog has long called distance teachers: air traffic controllers. The students will watch films and play games on their laptops and cheat their way through the courses. A win/win situation, and it costs the state vanishingly little.

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UD thanks Taylor for the link.

… said the woman sitting behind me as our plane gently touched down in Phoenix. She’d talked throughout the flight about what a bad flyer she was, and this made UD happy because UD is a bad flyer but not as bad as that woman.

At Baltimore Washington Airport, UD had bought a magazine of New Yorker cartoons, and a magazine with glossy photos of the world’s best spas, to distract her from the ordeal, and it worked. She was distracted from thoughts of how beyond-belief surreal and depressing it would be to perish inside of a flying can with a bunch of strangers.

Mr UD, who claims to have slept through a landing at the Baghdad airport during the Iraq War, had no sympathy at all for UD‘s nerves and said all the obvious stuff about how safe flying is blahblah.

Phoenix appeared out of the black night, a plain of golden lights.

We’ve settled into our hotel, had dinner, had several friendly conversations about what to see and do, and are now ready for bed.

I’ll get back to regular blogging tomorrow.

… for Sedona, Arizona. UD has always wanted to see the red rocks. She’s also never been to the Grand Canyon. Weather for the week seems to be sunny and in the fifties.

UD‘s a Baltimore girl (born in Johns Hopkins Hospital, when her father was a JHU grad student in biochemistry); when she was eight, her parents moved the family to England for a year, and then when they returned to the States, home was Bethesda, Maryland (UD‘s father had a long career at the National Institutes of Health). They had a little weekend house on the Chesapeake Bay.

Although, growing up, UD went to Europe a lot, she seems to have neglected the area west of Skyline Drive. A few trips to California; a stay in Park City, Utah, a stay in Telluride, Colorado …

In short, UD‘s a real east coaster (well, undergrad and grad in Chicago…) and it’s way past time for her to go out west.

Blogging will continue.