Excellent on possession, bad at avoiding tackle.

The more you look at a law school’s ledgers, the more life in the legal academy seems a sweet deal. And it’s been getting sweeter. Course loads have shrunk in the last couple of decades; the pay scale is high and has been rising. Median salaries are in the $120,000-to-$150,000 range, but superstars can earn $300,000 or more and the best of the best get pretty special housing deals. Over the summer, the New York University School of Law spent $5.6 million on two apartments in the West Village. A spokesman for the school said it had yet to determine whether the units would be combined and who would live there.

“It’s a wonderful life,” says Nancy Rapoport, a professor at the Boyd School of Law at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and author of an article for the Indiana Law Journal, “Eating Our Cake and Having It Too: Why Real Change Is So Difficult in Law Schools.”

“You’ve got a lot of happy law professors, who don’t want to change anything,” Ms. Rapoport said. “They may not realize how precarious legal education is, and the legal market is, right now. That’s human nature. Everything is going well. Let’s keep it the way it is.”

More here.

Merry Christmas from your one-course-a-semester, $200,000 a year law school professor!

Too bad there aren’t any legal jobs for the students she — now and then — teaches.

…says Palin.

Harvard’s Marc Hauser (background here – scroll down) didn’t like people monkeying around in his lab.

In an important essay on Hauser, and on research fraud in general, Charles Gross concludes the obvious:

[I]rreversible damage has been done to the field of animal cognition, [and] to Harvard University…

Robert Zelnick likes to go fast.

La Kid, last night, in front of the
Quincy Market Christmas Tree, Boston.

… early this evening was the final trick of a long day of tricks the winter sky performed as Les UDs trudged northward from ‘thesda. From morning on, mixed clouds and sun and grey/black threads and occasional rain and occasional black-as-the-grave darkness made the view over the solid brown of the trees quite a thing.

Last year at this time, UD was blizzarded in. Boston was immobile under snow. This year’s weather is mild – just right for last minute late night shopping in Cambridge after a family dinner.

The West Hazleton Pennsylvania Perkins is a lot like the Harrisonburg Virginia Denny’s. Both are just off the freeway, both sell cakes, cookies, and pies, and both greet you effusively.

While Perkins is a mite more upscale, it does not, like Denny’s, offer internet access.

Les UDs were seated at a comfy booth, where Mr UD ordered steak (very rare) and eggs, and UD had the grilled chicken salad.

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During the ride from DC, UD had religion on her mind (probably the death of Hitchens got her thinking about it), so Les UDs talked about that.

When they drove near Fort Dietrich, UD interrupted the conversation with a little nostalgia. “I went to high school with kids whose parents worked on poison gas there.”

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

At the next booth, a woman wore a knitted cap made to resemble a pile of vanilla ice cream with a cherry on top.

As Les UDs batted around their well-established Thing on religion (He: Mystical experience suggests the existence of a personal god. She: The mystery of the cosmos is so immense that I’m not comfortable with anything except maybe deism.), a priest sat down alone at an adjacent booth and took out a book. “Let’s ask that guy,” said UD, but she was kidding.

UD acknowledged that religion gave her something to do with, gave her a way to think about, the odd love and heartache she felt for people generally — specifically, at the moment, for the vaguely physically and mentally damaged young man who seated them, and for the coffee-, whiskey-, and cigarette-voiced woman who took their order.

After dinner, while UD waited in line to pay, she talked to a little boy about the baked goods at which they were both staring.

“What’ll it be?” UD asked him.

“My sister likes the chocolate chip cookies. I’m getting a sugar cookie.”

“I’m thinking about buying a sticky bun for breakfast tomorrow.”

The man who seated them took her card and rang her up and asked if everything had been okay and UD said it had been.

… for a Polish Christmas (oplatek-breaking, straw under the tablecloth, and, the next day, a small lunch with cold vodka).

Blogging continues unhampered through all of this.

At first, the FBI considered sending an agent to work undercover at one of the suspected hedge funds …

“We couldn’t get in. It was such a closed industry — much like an organized crime family — that it was difficult for the FBI to either introduce an undercover agent or recruit a cooperator.”

Corrupt traders relied upon secret alliances, longtime friendships and even sexual relationships.

… [Raj] Rajaratnam relied on Anil Kumar, a former McKinsey partner, and Rajiv Goel, a former managing director at Santa Clara, California-based Intel, whom he’d known for decades. All three attended the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.

Havel’s anti-communist critique contained little if any acknowledgement of the positive achievements of the regimes of eastern Europe in the fields of employment, welfare provision, education and women’s rights. Or the fact that communism, for all its faults, was still a system which put the economic needs of the majority first.

Neil Clark, The Guardian.

Via Andrew Sullivan.

With a millionaire paying burqa fines in Europe, and a consortium of Israeli millionaires proposing to pay for private buses in which women will be forced to enter by a back door and to sit in the back, an intriguing new market in oppression seems to be opening up.

In the burqa model, governments stand to make huge sums; the Israeli model is pure free market capitalism.

Crucial to the success of both models is the enforcement of laws against the oppression of women, as well as a continued enthusiasm for crushing women.

The future looks bright.

David Brooks includes, among this year’s winners of his Sidney Awards, an essay by Robert Boyers, editor of the quarterly Salmagundi.

Many years back, Boyers published an essay UD wrote, about living in Warsaw, and she’s always remembered his kind letter (“lots of good stuff in here”).

Boyers’ winning essay is about the novelist Charles Newman, with whom UD had dinner decades ago, in Chicago.

Boyers, in his memoir of Newman, makes much of his physical beauty, as do a number of people who, after his death in 2006, wrote about him.

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

From the long desk where she’s sitting now, at 2020 K Street, Washington DC, UD tries to summon Newman, across the table from her as he was that night in the ‘seventies. She tries to put him right over there, facing her, as he was then.

She remembers the restaurant, remembers thinking it was over-lit. The long dinner table had to do with several other people taking part in the event. UD remembers Elliott Anderson, also a writer, and Gerald Graff, an English professor. She’s thinking maybe eight people finally gathered.

Finally. The main thing UD recalls of that evening is Newman and his companions arriving incredibly, unapologetically, late. Since it was a dinner, UD and a number of others arrived only a little late; Newman rolled in two and a half hours after meeting time.

Although she must have just graduated from Northwestern, and therefore have been both young and quite junior to Newman, UD showed him her anger. She didn’t say anything. Saying anything would have been uncool, and this was a cool group. But she let her eyes register surprise, mild contempt.

In response, Newman let his eyes register an indifference that was at once indifference to UD‘s feelings (what she felt was that he was a celebrated novelist and she a nothing not worth showing up for) and indifference to UD as someone he might bed.

That part UD vividly recalls, because she didn’t respond to the beauty Boyers and others describe. Newman was a tall, strapping, all-American boy from the midwest. UD‘s taste ran to neurotic Jews and tormented Europeans. UD was attracted to her Rilke professor – a rotund, irritable, 65-year-old displaced Czech Jewish homosexual.

Plus, Newman was drunk and sleepy – he must have been late because he wanted to tank up – and sleepy drunks didn’t turn her on either.

Having piled on top of his lateness a pointless sexual diss, Newman at this point kind of shriveled up. UD viewed him for the rest of the evening through the mist (quoting Humbert Humbert here) of her utter rejection of him.

It was strange how quickly UD disliked Newman, because she’d entered the restaurant primed for admiration and sympathy. She liked his writing, fiction and non-fiction; she knew his wife had committed suicide. But whatever humanizing struggles he’d had in his life, Newman chose to show UD only the Stepford chill that went with his looks.

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Stepford’s the wrong reference. This is a story about the ‘sixties, even if it took place in the ‘seventies.

A post-coital, post-chemical languor, a give-a-shit hipness, was the currency of the day. Chet Baker singing My Funny Valentine. Amy Winehouse singing anything. That was the mood. I care less than you care. My transgressions are more self-destructive.

Erich Heller, UD‘s Rilke professor, offered a different model – modernism instead of postmodernism. In Heller’s world, it was all out there; the angst was on the boil and you were actively trying to do something about it. In Newman’s world, which was the real world UD then moved in, the angst persisted, but you boiled it down with irony and a raggedy sense of the futility of it all. She preferred Heller’s way.

… UD’s monthly reportage from her hometown, Garrett Park, Maryland. (Hers is the article headlined Attention!).

It’s the 200th anniversary of the notorious death of the great story writer Heinrich von Kleist (1777-1811), precursor of Kafka and assorted absurdists.

Like Kafka, Kleist (who early in life sat down on the shore of Wannsee Lake, shot a suicidal friend, and then shot himself) has this weird combination of clear, calm, confident, very expository-feeling prose, and brutally meaningless content. The stories are typically told from an extremely detached, affectlessly rational point of view – the narrator is simply a set of lucid eyes setting down what they see. Indeed sometimes the Kleist narrator, with his long paragraphs of diligent, painstaking description, is tiresome… Yet what these eyes see, as in Kleist’s greatest short story (if you ask me), “Saint Cecilia, or the Power of Music,” is pointless sadistic hatred, sudden communal psychosis, obsessive demented ritual unto death…

Four viciously anti-Catholic brothers, outfitted with weapons to destroy a church, hear, as they prepare to attack, the music of its mass – music so beautiful that it bears the congregants’ “souls, as if upon wings, through all the heaven of harmony” – and instantly the brothers throw down their weapons and become hysterical religious fanatics for life.

[T]he young men had led [a] ghost-like life [in the local insane aslyum] for six years… [T]hey slept little and tasted little, …no sound usually passed their lips, and …it was only at the hour of midnight that they rose from their seats, when, with voices loud enough to shatter the windows of the house, [in the most hideous and horrible voice] they sang the Gloria in excelsis.

Their mother finds them years later in the madhouse, where, overwhelmed by despair and confusion, she examines the score of the music played and sung that day:

She looked at the magical unknown signs, with which, as it seemed, some fearful spirit had mysteriously marked out its circle, and was ready to sink into the ground, when she found the “Gloria in excelsis” open. It seemed to her as if the whole terrors of music, which had proved the destruction of her sons, were whirling over her head; at the mere sight of the score her senses seemed to be leaving her, and with an infinitely strong feeling of humility and submission to the divine power, she heartily pressed the leaf to her lips, and then again seated herself in her chair.

Inside of a story whose authoritative narrator renders the world as a setting of utterly known signs sits a woman collapsing under a whirling, utterly unknown language. Her disharmonic sons’ first encounter with harmony (“beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror which we are barely able to endure”) has undone them…

See, I think writers like Kleist and Kafka want to evoke what happens when our quotidian efforts to make sense of earthly meaninglessness and suffering are interrupted by epiphany — by entries into a fully meaningful world. Only our epiphanies aren’t beautiful and transcendent; they’re nightmarish. Like all epiphanies, they suddenly disclose to us what is really there; we see that there is a hand creating and directing our lives. But it is a hand whose absolute power is matched by its absolute, and seemingly malign, mystery. We can only agree to subjugate ourselves to that crushing enigma.

Or not. We can go on living the way we always have, suspecting now, however, that life is a crushing, sick joke. This is a guy option, as Christopher Hitchens makes clear in his essay about why women aren’t funny:

Male humor prefers the laugh to be at someone’s expense, and understands that life is quite possibly a joke to begin with — and often a joke in extremely poor taste. Humor is part of the armor-plate with which to resist what is already farcical enough… Whereas women, bless their tender hearts, would prefer that life be fair, and even sweet, rather than the sordid mess it actually is.

I mean, what’s all that Bach doing on the soundtrack of Shame, a film about sexual addiction? Aren’t Bach’s surpassing clarities, his you-could-weep harmonies, there as a counterpoint to the main character’s embroilment in ugliness, arbitrariness, and futility?

Always, Kleist and Kafka seem to say, we are at play between these two forces – the force of ugly visceral embroilment in a world that hurts and confuses us, and the counterforce of heavenly harmony whose voice is the voice of music, beauty. Their brilliance as writers is to retain narrators who dwell in the heavenly-harmonic even as the events they tell come from hell.

The absolutely contrary principle to the work and philosophy of Kleist, Kafka, and Hitchens is that of absolute confidence that the world has meaning, and transcendent meaning at that:

The sadness is that there is a hell for Hitch to go to. He was granted a long farewell, with the opportunity for reconsiderations and reconciliations with those he hated and those he hurt. He declined to take advantage of it. Mother Teresa is fine, and no doubt prays for her enemies, including that Hitchens would be delivered both from hell and the nihilistic oblivion, which he thought awaited him.