Daktronics Inc., in conjunction with the University of Kentucky, are pleased to announce the addition of an integrated, high definition football video and sound system for Commonwealth Stadium, home of the Wildcats. The debut for the multi-million dollar system is scheduled for the Wildcats’ 2011 home opener September 10 vs. Central Michigan. … The most visible components of the system will undoubtedly be the two high definition Daktronics HD-X video displays to be installed behind each end zone. Measuring approximately 37 feet high by 80 feet wide, each display will provide live and recorded video in high definition, with picture in picture capability with multiple zones to show scores, statistics, and sponsor information. …

Yes, your Adzillatron can never get enough upgrades. There’s a lot of sponsor information to pound into your head, and students love to pay for the privilege.

… can be ugly. Some of these details may be difficult for more sensitive viewers.

But if you’re not that sensitive, read on.

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UD‘s alma mater, by the way, is getting quite the gold-plated reputation.

Remember M. Todd Henderson?

And in Ravelstein, Saul Bellow immortalized Allan Bloom:

[Nobody had ever questioned Ravelstein’s] need for Armani suits or Vuitton luggage, for Cuban cigars, unobtainable in the U.S., for the Dunhill accessories, for solid-gold Mont Blanc pens or Baccarat or Lalique crystal to serve wine in — or to have it served… [At Lucas-Carton restauarant we were] attended by no fewer than four waiters. The sommelier, wearing his badge of office on a chain of keys, supervised the filling of the glasses. For each course there was an appropriate wine, while other waiters working like acrobats reset the china and the silver.

Yeah, well. Problem is – what comes after this? First they “vacate revenues earned from using ineligible players.” Next thing you know they’ll stop giving three million dollars a year to coaches who cheat.

… believes.

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[I Believe.]

Misdeeds — from hiding study results to paying off doctors — have made Big Pharma an inviting and, frankly, an appropriate target… Antidepressants have something like celebrity status; exposing them makes headlines.

It’s not that anti-depressants have celebrity status; it’s that more Americans take them than almost any other drug. Americans of all ages, including very little children. They make headlines because they are – I and many other observers believe – massively over-prescribed.

Peter Kramer’s missing the point here, in other words. As a result, his effort, in tomorrow’s New York Times, to defend anti-depressants against Marcia Angell, Irving Kirsch, and a range of other scientists who’ve argued that they achieve only a slightly better outcome than placebos, has a vague, irrelevant feel. He complains about the limitations of the studies Angell and Kirsch cite, but these limitations aren’t particularly significant, and the studies he cites have their own limitations.

Kramer insists, for instance, that anti-depressants seem to work for “social unease.” He does not ask whether social unease is something we should think of as needing treatment. Treatment with powerful brain-altering chemicals, chemicals that have significant side effects. He does not ask what we should do about a culture in which wall-to-wall happy pill television commercials make socially uneasy people demand anti-depressant medication.

Instead, Kramer points out that “data bearing on the question is messy.” Yes, it is. But increasingly the data points toward remarkably little effect, for many of the people taking them, from anti-depressants. To say this is not to be a headline-grabber. On the contrary, it is to express a concern about the well-being of one’s fellow Americans.

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Lacking an empirical basis for his claim that anti-depressants deserve to be given to masses of people, Kramer turns to scare tactics.

[I]t is dangerous for the press to hammer away at the theme that antidepressants are placebos. They’re not. To give the impression that they are is to cause needless suffering.

No one says anti-depressants are placebos. Would that they were. People getting bad side effects from anti-depressants would be far safer taking placebos. What people are increasingly saying — and shame on the press for reporting it! — is that when it comes to lifting depression, these pills are pretty much the same as placebos. For most people, they don’t seem to do squat.

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Felix Salmon also notices the remarkably vague, not-really-there feel of Kramer’s article.

… Ohio State University needs to be bending over backwards to show the world it’s an institution of higher learning and not a football program that has students and classrooms in place to provide a fan base.

A puzzled Protestant in James Joyce’s “The Dead” tries to understand the morbid ways of monks:

He was astonished to hear that the monks never spoke, got up at two in the morning and slept in their coffins. He asked what they did it for.

“That’s the rule of the order,” said Aunt Kate firmly.

“Yes, but why?” asked Mr. Browne.

Aunt Kate repeated that it was the rule, that was all. Mr. Browne still seemed not to understand. Freddy Malins explained to him, as best he could, that the monks were trying to make up for the sins committed by all the sinners in the outside world. The explanation was not very clear for Mr. Browne grinned and said:

“I like that idea very much but wouldn’t a comfortable spring bed do them as well as a coffin?”

“The coffin,” said Mary Jane, “is to remind them of their last end.”

This phrase, their last end, returns in the final sentence of the story, as its main character suddenly feels, in a way he never has before, the reality of his own, and others’, deaths:

His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

Or say he feels not so much the physical immediacy of personal dissolution as the snowflake-like delicacy, the fragile tentativeness, of any life… So that the coffin-lying monks don’t seem all that odd, acquainting themselves in this way with the quiet dark that underlies our lives.

I thought of Joyce’s story this morning as I read about a Korean professor who offers classes in therapeutic coffin-lying. She explains:

“The top cause of death for people in their 20s, 30s and 40s [in Korea] is suicide. These people are the working age group … [The seminar] can change the meaning of one’s life and give a chance to know oneself.”

Indeed Korea has a very serious suicide problem… And since it does seem to be the case among some young suicides that they do it because they don’t really believe death is death, as it were, it might make sense to get them closer to its reality… If lying in a coffin for a few moments does anything like this…

But Professor Kang Kyung-ah clearly has a greater epiphany in mind here, a moment of clarity about the meaning of life which allows you to climb out of the coffin and live joyously and authentically.

There are other versions of therapeutic, or spiritual, coffin-lying, almost all of them carrying this same assumption that descending into being dead is a way of reascending into being alive.

It’s an intriguing literalization of Heidegger’s being-towards-death idea, the idea that we can’t live authentic lives until we’ve come to authentic grips with our last end. Simon Critchley summarizes it:

[F]reedom consists in the affirmation of the necessity of one’s mortality. It is only in being-towards-death that one can become the person who one truly is. …[T]he acceptance [of] one’s mortal limitation [is] the basis for an affirmation of one’s life… It is only in relation to being-towards-death that I become passionately aware of my freedom [and am thus enabled to live an authentic life].

There’s an excellent overview of the gruesome mental health industry in today’s Globe and Mail.

Even as the DSM tries to be more inclusive and “dimensional,” it runs the risk of sucking millions of merely unhappy and eccentric souls into the ranks of the mentally disturbed, at vast cost.

… in the case of depression would be the practice of giving depressed people multiple anti-depressants. A recent study suggests that

Combination antidepressant treatment using 2 antidepressants appears to offer no advantage over monotherapy in patients with major depressive disorder (MDD) and may even do more harm than good, new research suggests.

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A public policy group in England responds to the amazing statistics on British women and their use of antidepressants:

These shocking figures reveal an escalating crisis in women’s use of anti-depressants. We know from working with women and girls in our centres that anti-depressants have a role to play but they are too readily prescribed as the first and only remedy. Three in five women are offered no alternatives to drugs at their reviews and one in four currently on anti-depressants have waited more than a year [to be considered for psychotherapy].

UD‘s first boyfriend – and the person she refers to on this blog as her ‘thesdan playmate, has died. He was fifty-seven.

It was sudden, “a shock to us all,” his mother Rita just said to me on the phone.

He’d been out kayaking – he loved to kayak, and wanted to live, someday, on one of the islands off Washington State. He felt, he said to his companion on the water, “strange.” They went back to the dock, and David lay down and died.

He had a history of coronary heart disease; he’d had a stent put in.

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We met in Mrs Washer’s tenth grade Latin class at Walter Johnson High School in Bethesda, Maryland. We shared, like many kids at WJ, the same ‘thesdan demographics: Jewish, children of federal government scientists.

He didn’t look anything like his well-known sister, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. She talks about this in her book A Dialogue on Love:

We are good-looking.
All Mediterranean, all with fine brown frames

and those sparkling, or
soulful, extravagant-lashed
eyes of chocolate

— all but a dorkily fat, pink, boneless middle child; one of my worst nicknames is “Marshmallow.”

Soulful, extravagant-lashed / eyes of chocolate says it. There’s a photograph of David in our high school yearbook in which he’s tutoring a student. The camera, tight on his face, captures his chocolate eyes trained with enormous soulful attention on the student.

His mother, his sister, David – all teachers.

UD was a protected conventional suburban kid, David a hyper-confident bizarro. He went to New York City most weekends, for shadowy hipster reasons… Something to do with an insanely brilliant lover up there whose mother had been Lord Buckley’s lover… A woman who used words like cathexis…

David didn’t care what anyone thought of him… We exchanged notes every day in class – crazy notes, precursors of our crazy Gchats. These notes were ironic, literary, obscene, hilarious, juvenile. We grew up, but our notes never grew up.

Although I came from a pretty cultured home, real intellectual awakening for me started with David. He was at the time an absurdly precocious Straussian; he also met once a week with a scholar of the Talmud. Neither of these particular things interested me. I was interested in David’s intellectual energy, his mental and erotic brashness, his social insolence, his outrageous openness to anything that might be exciting and provocative and difficult and enigmatic and bizarre and entirely not what other people thought worth noticing.

We had a long tortured love affair which ended in his leaving me for a woman he’d met at Telluride, the summer school at Cornell for really smart high school students. (For some reason, I have in my bookcase the madly scribbled all over paperback of The Waste Land he studied from that summer.) Wounded, I spent years angry at him. But he reappeared in my life at some point, wanting friendship.

He wrote me long letters from his exotic solo world travels. I remember in particular a photo of him in India, looking sallow. He’d gotten hepatitis.

He studied history in the honors program at the University of Maryland, and then got an MA in Comparative History at Brandeis. I read his thesis, on infanticide.

And then he went traveling the world again.

Eventually he landed in Seoul, and took a job teaching English at a university there. For twenty years he used Korea as a home base from which to explore much of Asia.

He wasn’t madly in love with Korea, but he was a born expatriate, loving the feeling of always being strange, at odds… Loving too the daily observation of intricate other realities… He wanted to be an outsider. He wanted to be permanently somewhat ill at ease, a stranger at a strange angle to the world.

When he fell in love and married, and when his Korean wife wanted to move to the United States, he did so reluctantly. As she pursued her medical education, David stayed home and raised their son, lovingly teaching this highly intelligent child all manner of things, training his soulful attention on him alone.

David wrote, in a Gchat last year:

I keep promising to take Noam to a really good limestone cave… I REALLY want to give him some rich experiences… I mean, I think I’ve done a splendid job of kindling his excitement about books and what they offer, but there is so much more to life.

Indeed while David, like his sister, was a thoroughgoing intellectual, he was also a gourmet, a kayaker, a knowledgeable lover of jazz, and a fine guitarist.

I never saw him relax. His intensity, his endless observation and analysis of every person, place, and idea he encountered, his complex and to some extent punishing self-consciousness, meant that his life would be at once effervescent and exhausting. He once startled me, in a Gchat, by saying that death seemed to him a rather tantalizing opportunity to rest.

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Pictures of David when young can be found here.

… you’ve always got to include estimated annual legal fees whenever someone tells you how profitable big-time university athletics are. Boosters routinely forget to add to their excited financial calculations that, since almost everyone cheats, and since the cheating is often discovered, high-priced attorneys come with the territory. (The other reason attorneys are an inescapable sports budget item: Buyouts of various coaching contracts when teams don’t win games.)

Take the University of Oregon. Due to some typical recruiting fuckup, UO has just hired a bunch of lawyers. Hourly rates for each of these people range from $330 all the way down to $205.

UO students and parent must be pleased to know that their student fees are being used to bail out cheaters.

Presumably they feel it’s a small price to pay for that heady feeling of winning an occasional game.

You really gotta start with the basics when you’re talkin’ Texan.

… are staggering.

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Poets like dust – the brief, lovely word itself, and the image. Dust conveys our dissolution into insubstantiality at death. Dust to dust.

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Take Dust, by Rupert Brooke:

When the white flame in us is gone,
And we that lost the world’s delight
Stiffen in darkness, left alone
To crumble in our separate night;

And faint in that amazing glow,
Until the darkness close above;
And they will know—poor fools, they’ll know!—
One moment, what it is to love.

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It’s a simple, three-part argument about the way love transcends death.

1.) When we two lovers are almost dead – immobile, each of us alone in our bed, barely breathing, but still thinking – our spirits will be released to fly about like dust to all the places we spent time in when we were living.

2.) Eventually we’ll zoom in on one place in particular – the place of our ultimate rendezvous, our final merging, with one another.

3.) This will be an enclosed garden, safe from the wind that we’ve been riding to get here, and it will be sunset in the garden. A pair of young lovers will be there, and they will witness our strange and amazing passage from earth-bound dying lovers to heavenly eternal lovers. The “shattering ecstasy” of our passion for one another will be a brief but intense lesson to those lesser, sublunary lovers as to what true love is.

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Fleetwood Mac.

I dunno.

I just like the headline.

It has contrast (sacred/profane); it has linguistic ambiguity (If English weren’t your first language, wouldn’t you have a bit of a struggle with HEART BACK?).

And then the story itself – a football player at a Catholic college in Connecticut is a pretty significant oxycodone dealer – has some good elements. He’s from Florida, for instance… And down there – Pill Mill Capital of the World – lots of folks sell pain pills… So many that universities might want to take special care with applicants from, say, Broward County (pain pill capital of the pain pill capital)…

… one of America’s greatest painters, has died.

Like Henry Miller and Terrence Malick, Twombly’s part of what UD calls the Being Brigade – an artist who above all wants to capture on canvas or on film or in prose what it feels like to exist. To exist intensely, euphorically.

Each line he made, he said, was “the actual experience” of making the line, adding: “It does not illustrate. It is the sensation of its own realization.” Years later, he described this more plainly. “It’s more like I’m having an experience than making a picture,” he said. The process stood in stark contrast to the detached, effete image that often clung to Mr. Twombly. After completing a work, in a kind of ecstatic state, it was as if the painting existed but he himself barely did anymore: “I usually have to go to bed for a couple of days,” he said.

Isn’t something like this precisely what all the reviewers of The Tree of Life are saying? It does not illustrate. It prompts in us a sensation of intense existing. A journalist asks a man who has just seen the film what it means. He says meaning’s not the point: “There are no answers to existential questions.”

Twombly, Miller, Malick – They’re not illustrating anything. They’re not even telling much of a story, or offering much of a representation. They are all, we feel, about movement, the sheer onrush of human being in time. Hence Malick’s primary use, in his film, of Smetena’s Moldau with its rapid light spiraling notes building and building through major and minor modes, more and more triumphal, more and more exuberant, exhilarated. Everything’s caught up and brought along in that strong current of sound – even sorrow, marked by dips into minor keys, is somehow assimilated into the fundamentally delighted music.

Miller’s American heroes, dragging their impoverished asses through depressed interwar Europe, are peculiarly vitalized by this dour atmosphere. They are, said George Orwell, “Whitman[s] among the corpses.”

The Being Brigade wants to bring home to us our capacity to transcend this and that life narrative and instead uncover an intrinsic flowing joy within, a ceaseless ecstatic internal movement that speaks of the imperishable bliss of simply being.

This joy is most dramatic, most defiant, when it bursts out of situations of profound negativity, as when, imprisoned in Lubyanka, Aleksander Wat finds that the darker the literature he reads there, the happier he becomes:

The more pessimistic the book, the more pulsating energy, life energy, I felt beneath its surface – as if all of literature were only the praise of life’s beauty…

For me, Twombly’s big wobbly canvases have always been precisely this body electric, this unstoppably alive, grateful soul.