… shows you how it’s done.
Yes, well, word is getting around about semi-literate medical school professors credited with having published 2,785 scholarly articles. It just doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.
Scientific American describes the phenomenon and summarizes a recent study of the subject:
Scientists credited for research articles that were secretly penned by ghostwriters from pharmaceutical companies often are not reprimanded for their misrepresentations; rather, their ranks and career trajectories often improve.
Although this practice of undisclosed authors (with undisclosed commercial interests) writing articles under the pretense of unbiased scientific inquiry raises serious concerns about academic integrity, few institutions have policies to discourage it.
… Once medical publishing’s “dirty little secret,” ghostwriting is no longer under wraps, thanks in part to a 2009 federal court decision to release 1,500 documents describing the strategic placement of marketing messages into peer-reviewed medical literature. In their article [the authors] say these cleverly crafted advertisements from pharmaceutical companies shape the literature in subtle but important ways, and can even affect how clinicians perceive and prescribe treatments.
“Your typical family practice physician is bombarded with glossy reprints,” [one author] explains. “The more prestigious the university and the researcher’s name on it, the more weight that’s going to carry with the doctor.”
Ah yes. If Cardinal Newman were writing The Idea of a University today, he’d write The idea of a university is to gain enough prestige to make its medical faculty worth ghosting.
From the Bowdoin College obituary for professor of mathematics Steve Fisk, who died at the age of 63:
Fisk’s love for mathematics… continued to the very end of his life.
“He was a person who loved mathematics more than anybody I know,” said [a colleague]. “And I know a lot of mathematicians.”
When [this colleague] visited Fisk at the Gosnell Memorial Hospice House in Scarborough, Maine on Friday afternoon, Fisk asked [him] for a particular math book called “Roots to Research.”
“I came back and I tried to get a copy—I didn’t have one myself, and couldn’t find any copy anywhere. Amazon could send it, but it wouldn’t arrive until Monday, and I sensed that was too late.” …
Instead, [he] called Visiting Lecturer in Mathematics Leon Harkleroad, who drove two hours from Brunswick to deliver the book early Saturday morning.
“Steve did read from it that day,” [he said]. “His wife told me later that he actually had left it bookmarked on the fourth or fifth page, where the authors describe the concept of length of game.”
Fisk’s obituary, written by his family, considers the concept of length of game symbolically.
“While Steve’s length of game may have been shorter than most of us would wish, the numbers he chose along the way gave him—and all of us—great joy,” it reads.
UD‘s buddy Jon sends her this ‘thesdan dispatch:
[Bethesda resident] Paul Pickthorne [hosts bondage and discipline parties] … in the castlelike, 3,600-square-foot McMansion he rents… The cost: $20 for a basic ticket, $50 for VIP treatment.
… [His neighbors] convened a meeting in someone’s living room last week, then fired off indignant e-mails to county council member Roger Berliner (D), whose district includes their Merrimack Park subdivision.
“I share your sense of outrage that a sex club is operating in your lovely neighborhood,” Berliner wrote back. “I want you to know that my office has been advised that our County has moved aggressively to put an end to this blight on your community.”
The county moved all right. Pickthorne got a written warning from a zoning inspector Monday. But hold on. Suppose Pickthorne stops charging admission, as he says he might? Suppose he complies with the inspector and hosts all future BDSM gatherings as strictly noncommercial functions in accordance with Section 59-C-1.31? What then?
“Well,” says Berliner on the phone, hesitating. “Certainly one has to respect everyone’s constitutional rights.”
In other words, if no money changes hands, and the kinky people don’t cause a noise or traffic nuisance, the First Amendment would ring clear: Party on!…
… at Portland State.
It’s early in the story, but apparently an economics professor there, in class a few days ago, suddenly launched a long and elaborate verbal attack on one of his students.
… John Hall, who has taught at PSU for 24 years, began the class with a lecture relevant to the course material but about halfway through the two-hour long class, he began to describe his experiences with law enforcement in places including Eastern Europe, according to a student who wished to remain anonymous.
Hall claimed to have been surveilled at times throughout his life and then told the class that an FBI informant and agent provocateur was in their midst. Hall said this person served as a sniper in the Israeli army and called him a killer with access to a personal arsenal.
He then pointed at Bucharest and identified him as the informant in question, according to the unnamed student.
Bucharest, a student at PSU since the fall of 2006 … sat silently throughout the ordeal, according to students in the class.
… Hall accused Bucharest of trying to organize students to participate in violent acts against the university, according to the unnamed student.
Hall also said he believed that Bucharest is at times armed while on campus. He then put a letter on the document projector that he wrote to the FBI’s Portland Field Office. In the letter, Hall claims to know Bucharest’s identity as an agent. He then handed Bucharest a copy of the letter and told him to give it to his superiors.
After a time of silence, Bucharest got up and said that some of Hall’s claims about his military background were true, but that other claims the professor made were not. Bucharest left the classroom after being told by Hall to leave and not to come back to PSU, according to students…
Let’s pause there for a moment.
One of many strange aspects of the story is that this account, published in the PSU newspaper, is no longer available. I got it from a blogger who reproduced it on his site. Why did the paper take it down? Is the student on whom the reporter relied for the account in fact not reliable? Bucharest apparently has a lawyer – does the paper fear legal action? Has it been asked by the university’s administration to take the piece down?
Anyway. Here’s something we can say with some confidence, assuming we’re getting something reasonably close to what went on. Whatever the background of this student, the professor’s behavior is paranoid and outrageous.
Hall, who has been removed from the classroom — indeed, from the campus — while PSU investigates, has issued a comment to the newspaper (again, I’m assuming the comment indeed came from him, etc.) which does nothing to weaken suspicion that he’s paranoid:
“I decided to take a stand. I observed the situation becoming extremely dangerous, not only for me but for about eight of my very finest students…. I felt that what I had to do should not have been my responsibility. …I understand the students’ privacy is to be respected, as defined by the codes governing PSU… I felt the level of danger had grown to such an acute level that I felt it fully in order to engage in an ‘emergency exemption’ of student privacy.”
This is nuts. The student might be malsain, might talk violence, might even carry a concealed weapon, but you respond to all of that, if it scares you, by going to the administration. Worst case scenario, you go to the police. You don’t stage a tribunal in front of the class.
So here we go again – D.A. Powell’s poem.
My first post about this poem is directly below this entry.
Click on the link over Powell’s name – or look at the post below – for the poem unhampered by UD‘s commentary.
**********************************
coal of this unquickened world
[We’ve already talked about the source of this title in Philip Larkin’s poem, Night-Music. But while Larkin’s focus is mainly on the natural world, with subtly gathering implications for humanity, Powell’s will turn out to be very personal. The coal is himself, his mind, his spirit, a dead, dull, blackened substance unable to lend itself the least bit of brightness. This is a poem about depression.]
midnight slips obsidian: an arrowhead in my hand
[Midnight gradually establishes itself as total blackness. The poet, let us say, sadly holds his head in his hand as one would hold an obsidian arrowhead. His bleak thoughts – painful, sharp glass is what an obsidian arrowhead amounts to – wound him.]
pointed roofs against the backdrop, black and blacker
three kinds of ink, each more india than the last
[Notice how the word india is almost embedded in the word obsidian – the poet plays with words, with near rhymes.]
must be going blind: eyes two pitted olives on a cracker
a draft of bitter ale, a kind of saturated past
poppy seeds: black holes large as my head. my head
[The poet tries this and that metaphor to convey his reduction to a burned-out deadhead; his olive eyes are empty (pitted) and share the shiny inexpressive blackness of the obsidian arrowheads. His past is pitted – saturated – with black holes. These holes designate the memory hole of bitter recollections.]
dirty as a dishrag, crudely drawn imp, a charcoaled dove
disappearing down alleys with a pail from the chimney
[The self-hatred of the depressive. My worthless mind, once innocent as a dove and now filthy with bad thoughts and motives, blackens itself.]
this carbon: no graphite or diamond it’s ordinary soot
[I’m nothing. Nothing special. No diamond in the rough. I’m plain old soot, animated dirt. Carbon of the lowest form.]
dress it up: say “buckminsterfullerene” or carbon 60
but it’s just common, the color of a boot
[“A fullerene is any molecule composed entirely of carbon, in the form of a hollow sphere, ellipsoid, or tube. … The first fullerene to be discovered, and the family’s namesake, was buckminsterfullerene C60 … The name was an homage to Richard Buckminster Fuller, whose geodesic domes it resembles.”]
a slate on the ground. a petroleum bubble above
smothering in the walrus suit,
[He describes himself as a bubble of crude covered in a walrus suit — a ridiculous, but also catastrophic image, since – I suppose – once the bubble bursts, the oil spill will destroy the walrus. This is a very endangered, on the edge, person.]
the cloud of smoke
the shroud and the deathmask. blitzkrieg black sun choke
[Well, there you go. The bubble bursts in a cloud of smoke, and the black liquid chokes the poet to death. He’s blitzed.]
Notice a couple of fascinating things about Powell’s style here. Though you don’t really register it, this is an exceedingly formal poem, a fourteen-line sort of sonnet complete with end rhymes and a final couplet. You don’t register this formality because of the very loose graphic style of the poem, which plays against the tightness of its rhyme scheme. There’s no capitalization, little punctuation, and sometimes there’s just guttering unrelated words: blitzkrieg black sun choke.
These final words suggest a concluding explosive chaos, everything blown to bits; yet the hyper-controlled structure of the poem works against total disintegration…. In other words, there’s an exciting tension in a poem like this one between a content which conveys flat-out clinical melancholia, and a form which shows the creative mind working at full capacity.
… is the author of
Tea, D.A. Powell.
From the New York Times Arts, Briefly blog:
In its continuing unofficial mission to prove that a poetry career need not condemn an author to a life of destitution, Claremont Graduate University has announced the winners of its highly lucrative Kingsley and Kate Tufts poetry awards. The Kingsley Tufts Award, which comes with a prize of $100,000, will go to D. A. Powell for his [latest] collection “Chronic” (Graywolf Press), the university said in a news release. Mr. Powell, a poet from the San Francisco Bay Area, is a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle’s poetry award, also for “Chronic”; his previous collection “Cocktails,” was also a finalist for that honor….
Let’s look up close at one of Powell’s poems from Chronic, coal of this unquickened world.
Powell got his title from Philip Larkin.
In 1944, early in his writing life, Larkin wrote this poem.
Night-Music
At one the wind rose,
And with it the noise
Of the black poplars.
Long since had the living
By a thin twine
Been led into their dreams
Where lanterns shine
Under a still veil
Of falling streams;
Long since had the dead
Become untroubled
In the light soil.
There were no mouths
To drink of the wind,
Nor any eyes
To sharpen on the stars’
Wide heaven-holding,
Only the sound
Long sibilant-muscled trees
Were lifting up, the black poplars.
And in their blazing solitude
The stars sang in their sockets through the night:
`Blow bright, blow bright
The coal of this unquickened world.’
*******************************
Powell will hyper-literalize Larkin’s coal and turn out, as we’ll see in a moment, quite an amazing poem – a poem without the sad formal measure Larkin gets with his TS Eliotish short, short lines (Wallace Stevens gets an effect like Larkin’s here, in Domination of Black.)
Larkin’s pulled back lines let him express the pulled back midnight world, very silent except for the sound the sibilant poplars make in the wind. The poplars are green of course when it’s day; at night, they become, like everything but the stars, black.
It’s a wiped-out world. No one’s awake, except the poet recording the silent world with its bit of song from the trees. Everyone’s asleep, ushered out of consciousness into the weakly-lit theater of dreams. The world of the dead too is meager, thin. They lie “untroubled / in the light soil.” No eyes are open to “sharpen on the stars’ / Wide heaven-holding.” (In After Greece, James Merrill’s ancestors are “anxious to know / What holds up heaven nowadays.”)
Larkin in many of his poems loves to record the ghostly insinuating life of the world that goes on without us, while we’re sleeping or while we’re dead. His most famous rendition of this weird activity appears in An Arundel Tomb. “Pre-baroque” lovers are buried beneath a stone sculpture of the two them lying side by side, hand in hand. The poet imagines the long centuries during which the world’s life has revolved around their motionlessness:
Snow fell, undated. Light
Each summer thronged the glass. A bright
Litter of birdcalls strewed the same
Bone-littered ground
Thronged is wonderful.
*************************************
Back to Night-Music, and the way Larkin conveys with all of his images the perilous delicacy, the fragile contingency, of earthly existence.
We have no eyes, but the stars have eyes; the song they sing “in their sockets through the night” is a magical invocation to the wind to wake us and our world up again:
`Blow bright, blow bright
The coal of this unquickened world.’
This black cinder globe with yet a bit of fire in its ash — blow on it, bring it back to life, quicken it. Our time here is brief and perilous, but, pray, make our cheeks ruddy…
Those three hard k sounds are gorgeous – coal, unquickened – but it’s more than this that drew Powell to the line. Here’s his poem.
*****************************************
coal of this unquickened world
midnight slips obsidian: an arrowhead in my hand
pointed roofs against the backdrop, black and blacker
three kinds of ink, each more india than the last
must be going blind: eyes two pitted olives on a cracker
a draft of bitter ale, a kind of saturated past
poppy seeds: black holes large as my head. my head
dirty as a dishrag, crudely drawn imp, a charcoaled dove
disappearing down alleys with a pail from the chimney
this carbon: no graphite or diamond it’s ordinary soot
dress it up: say “buckminsterfullerene” or carbon 60
but it’s just common, the color of a boot
a slate on the ground. a petroleum bubble above
smothering in the walrus suit, the cloud of smoke
the shroud and the deathmask. blitzkrieg black sun choke
***************************
Let me take a break from this post and then return to talk about Powell’s poem.
… for a longer, more existential view.
Don DeLillo, in the New York Times.
****************
DeLillo’s getting sketchy: The NYT review of Point Omega.
At 5.38pm on 29 January, the German social theorist and philosopher Jürgen Habermas apparently tweeted the following: “It’s true that the internet has reactivated the grass-roots of an egalitarian public sphere of writers and readers.” At 5.40, he tweeted again: “It also counterbalances the deficits from the impersonal and asymmetrical character of broadcasting insofar as . . .” At 5.41: “. . . it reintroduces deliberative elements in communication. Besides that, it can undermine the censorship of authoritarian regimes . . .” At 5.44: “But the rise of millions of fragmented discussions across the world tend instead to lead to fragmentation of audiences into isolated publics.”
Had the 80-year-old doyen of the Frankfurt School for social research joined the twitterati?’
… [O]n 1 February, the blogger Jonathan Stray (jonathanstray.com) revealed that he had contacted the real Habermas at his home, and asked him if he was on Twitter. “No, no, no,” he was told. “This is somebody else. This is a misuse of my name.” …
Plus there’s about four inches of it on the ground.
But George Washington University’s open, so UD‘s currently attempting to get to campus in order to teach her class on James Joyce.
Later.
A university registrar who offered forged degrees to two women in return for spanking sessions has been given a suspended jail sentence.
Bristol Crown Court heard that Karl Woodgett filmed himself caning the women at a Bristol hotel.
The 37-year-old, of Ewell Minnis, Kent, worked at the University of Bath at the time of the offences.
He was given a nine-month sentence suspended for a year after admitting conspiracy to make fake degrees…
A resident physician at a Long Island, N.Y., hospital apologized to faculty members over the weekend for posting a photograph of a former classmate giving two thumbs up next to a cadaver as state health officials said they would be looking into the matter.
In three separate e-mails, Erica Katz, who works in the emergency medicine unit at Stony Brook University Medical Center, told faculty members that posting the photo on her Facebook page was a mistake.
… Dean Richard Fine on Monday met with faculty members, who referred the matter to the committee on academic standards. That panel will make recommendations to Fine on what, if any, disciplinary action will be taken against Katz.
… The photo, which features [the classmate] wearing purple gloves and smiling over a cadaver with both of [the classmate’s] thumbs up, was taken during an anatomy class.
… Dr. Todd R. Olson, professor of anatomy at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and president of the American Association of Clinical Anatomists… [asked:] “Don’t you think … one has every reasonable expectation that you’re not going to show up with somebody holding two thumbs up over Uncle Dick on Facebook?” …