… writing from a Brown University student, as he struggles with his sense of implication in the suicide of an NYU student he didn’t know.
In places this opinion piece gets too highfalutin. But who cares. It’s that rare bit of writing which sheds protective covering and just says it.
With full awareness of the mystery of the act in general, and his distance from this person in particular, the Brown student makes two suggestions:
… The first line of business I’d proffer would be Brown’s departure from the heinously overrated U.S. News and World Report rankings, with a clear statement from President Ruth Simmons that Brown is withdrawing to fight the elitism of Ivy academia. Expressing to the general public that higher education is not about exclusion would reshape the expectations of parents and students, almost certainly alleviating academic pressure.
Another measure would be an encouragement of student-faculty relationships. Bringing undergraduates closer to professors would assist in augmenting self-confidence and inclusion. My thinking is faculty dinners and coffee dates funded by the University (I do know that Brown-RISD Hillel has begun something like this through Shabbat dinners). In these more intimate settings, we can emphasize community…
Although I think the student’s right that isolation and pressure play into some university suicides, I don’t think statistics support the idea that there’s something special about the Ivies, and similar places, like NYU. The two most recent student suicides both happened at St. Cloud State University. It’s true that Caltech has had three suicides in the last few months, all Asian-American males; but my sense of the situation, from covering these events for many years, is that a feeling of intense academic and social pressure can be experienced on any campus.
The faculty-student relationships idea seems to me a good one; it’s likely that greater warmth from professors would make students happier and give them a boost. But administrators have lots of worries about inappropriate closeness; the writer’s language (“intimate settings”) might well scare them. And professors worry about fairness. If I take this bright, fascinating, charming, student in my class out to lunch, will it seem favoritism …?
Yet how can that be true? The author of this update on the nothingness of the Italian university system, a British professor who teaches in Trento, notes that the Italians have no trouble with the “buffoonish” Berlusconi, leader of their whole country. The fact that their higher education system is a black hole is a trifle.
Like the Greeks with Marietta Giannakou, the Italians have at the moment a minister of education so appalled by the country’s brain drain, and by what’s left in the country’s universities now that almost all of the smart students and professors have gone away, that she’s determined to do something. But, again like Giannakou, Mariastella Gelmini is unlikely to get anywhere. Corruption, insufficient funds, you know the deal.
The article describes what Italy has now:
… Parliament is full of superannuated professors itching to water down the proposed reforms.
[Gelmini] wants universities to be less like the Civil Service and more like businesses. To this end, she is proposing that rettori (elected vice-chancellors) should be limited to an eight-year term and be flanked by a professional general manager. The administrative council of the university will become a de facto board of directors, with at least 40 per cent of its members drawn from outside the university. It is intended that public-spirited business people will serve. University senates will occupy themselves purely with academic concerns. Given that many Italian universities have bankrupted themselves, this is no bad thing.
Second, Ms Gelmini wants to professionalise the staff. Professors will dedicate 1,500 hours a year to research and teaching, outside consultancies will be curbed, professors who do not meet standards will miss pay increments, and teaching and research assessment will be tougher. Farming out teaching to unqualified assistants will rightly be banned….
They’ve got crass cynical no-showism down to a science in Italian universities. Hard to see how, with a clown running the country, you change that.
… um… a bone to pick with this year’s finalists for the Bad Sex in Fiction Award. Most of the entries are bad, it’s true, and bad in the amusing way bad writing descriptive of sex can be — leering, embarrassing, absurdly literary and pretentious…
In fact, before I make my complaint, let’s ogle an example or two and try to be precise about why they’re bad.
The worst bad sex writer – the person who should win this year’s contest – is John Banville, a writer UD has always found, carnal or non-carnal, pretentious:
Alba has stepped out of her dress in one flowing, stylised movement, like a torero, the object of all eyes, trailing his cape in the dust before the baffled bull; underneath, she is naked. [Before the baffled bull — heavy-handed alliteration here for no reason at all other than to insist Not Cheap Porn. Here You Get Assonance With Your Ass.] She looks to the side, downwards; her eyelids are so shinily pale and fine that Adam can see clearly all the tiny veins in them, blue as lapis. [Shinily, clearly, he holds you back from the hard stuff because this is literature, man. Delicate Yeatsian simile, lapis… We’re not in just any motel. We’re in High Art Motel.] He takes a floating step forward until his chest is barely touching the tips of her nipples, behind which he senses all the gravid tremulousness of her breasts. [Wanna get me some of that gravid tremulousness.] She puts her hands flat against his chest and leans into him in a simulacrum of a swoon, [L’Artiste makes a fuck a simulacrum.] making a mewling sound. [Pregnant bullfighter goes all kitty on us.] Her hips are goosefleshed and he can feel all the tiny hairs erect on her forearms. When he kisses her hot, soft mouth, which is bruised a little at one corner, he knows at once that she has been with another man, and recently – faint as it is there is no mistaking that tang of fish-slime and sawdust – for he has no doubt that this is the mouth of a busy working girl. He does not mind. [Sawdust?]
They conduct there, on that white bed, under the rubied iron cross, [I hope you’re picking up here, with the fish and the sawdust and the oracular They conduct there, on that white bed, T.S. Eliot’s
“Prufrock;” and, in “The Waste Land”:
And I Tiresias have foresuffered all
Enacted on this same divan or bed;…]
a fair imitation of a passionate dalliance, a repeated toing and froing on the edge of a precipice beyond which can be glimpsed a dark-green distance in a reeking mist and something shining out at them, a pulsing point of light, peremptory and intense. His heart rattles in its cage, a vein beats at his temple like a slow tom-tom. When they are spent at last, and that beacon in the jungle has been turned low again, they lie together contentedly in a tangle of arms and legs and talk of this and that, in their own languages, each understanding hardly a word of what the other says.
The Paul Theroux extract is more conventionally bad.
‘Baby.’ She took my head in both hands and guided it downward, between her fragrant thighs. ‘Yoni puja – pray, pray at my portal.’
“She was holding my head, murmuring ‘Pray,’ and I did so, beseeching her with my mouth and tongue, my licking a primitive form of language in a simple prayer. It had always worked before, a language she had taught me herself, the warm muffled tongue.
Pray at my portal is just funny. Just funny gets you shortlisted, but lacks the philosophy in the boudoir haughtiness of Banville.
But here’s my complaint. This excerpt is not bad:
Let’s have sex, they think simultaneously, couples having strange mind-reading powers after months and months of trying to figure each other out. Panting, Georgie starts rubbing her hands round Bobby’s biological erogenous zones, turning his trousers into a tent with lots of rude organs camping underneath. Bobby sucks all the freckles and moles off her chest, pulling the GD bib wheeeeeeeeeee over her head and flicking Georgie’s turquoise bra off her shoulders then kissing her tits, and he’s got so much energy – plus he’s very impatient – Bobby tugs off his sweaty sweater himself and gives Georgie a helping hand with his zip. Then comes the enormous anticipation of someone putting their mitts on your cock and balls. Georgie smiles to herself and keeps him hanging on for a bit, which in a way is even better though it makes the Artist want to explode and after one or two tugs he moans ‘whoah’ then screams ‘whoah!’ and Georgie lets go giggling, then suddenly her face is all serious and Bobby pulls her polished pine legs apart and slithers a hand up her skirt where her fanny’s got a bit of five o’clock shadow like a pin cushion but her lips are nice and slippy, and he slides some lubricunt round and round, mixing clockwise with anticlockwise with figure 8 until Georgie’s shagging the air with pleasure bashing her feet about. Then, Bobby starts scrabbling frantically across the carpet for Mr Condom, sending five or six multicolour Durexes flying through the air, and he struggles getting the packet open and Georgie has to roll Mr Condom down Mr Penis for him and she has to help insert him into Mrs Vagina.
This frenzied amusing description conveys through their form of sex and their thoughts the world in which the characters live, the kind of people they are. Indirect discourse takes us back and forth between their heads and creates a silly, human, sweetness.
And for once, instead of ships entering harbors and storms quelling and flowers bursting into petals, we get fresh images — that camping thing; the five o’clock shadow fanny like a pin cushion…
This isn’t whatever 700-level literary seminar Banville and Theroux think they’re in. It’s the real world. Round these parts, when a man sees a woman’s breasts, he doesn’t say gravid tremulousness.
Frank O’Hara’s one of the few poets UD recalls reading for the very first time. She was a teenager grazing some poetry anthology, and when she got to O’Hara’s happy meanderings she laughed out loud. She wanted to be walking with him in Manhattan, noticing what he noticed, being hip and funny like him.
O’Hara never got terminally hip, like John Ashbery; his poetry always has heart.
***************************
SLEEPING ON THE WING
Perhaps it is to avoid some great sadness,
as in a Restoration tragedy the hero cries “Sleep!
O for a long sound sleep and so forget it!”
that one flies, soaring above the shoreless city,
veering upward from the pavement as a pigeon
does when a car honks or a door slams, the door
of dreams, life perpetuated in parti-colored loves
and beautiful lies all in different languages.
Fear drops away too, like the cement, and you
are over the Atlantic. Where is Spain? where is
who? The Civil War was fought to free the slaves,
was it? A sudden down-draught reminds you of gravity
and your position in respect to human love. But
here is where the gods are, speculating, bemused.
Once you are helpless, you are free, can you believe
that? Never to waken to the sad struggle of a face?
to travel always over some impersonal vastness,
to be out of, forever, neither in nor for!
The eyes roll asleep as if turned by the wind
and the lids flutter open slightly like a wing.
The world is an iceberg, so much is invisible!
and was and is, and yet the form, it may be sleeping
too. Those features etched in the ice of someone
loved who died, you are a sculptor dreaming of space
and speed, your hand alone could have done this.
Curiosity, the passionate hand of desire. Dead,
or sleeping? Is there speed enough? And, swooping,
you relinquish all that you have made your own,
the kingdom of your self sailing, for you must awake
and breathe your warmth in this beloved image
whether it’s dead or merely disappearing,
as space is disappearing and your singularity.
*******************************
[We take a closer look, ja?]
*******************************
SLEEPING ON THE WING
[He’s on an airplane, leaving New York for Europe I guess. Heading out over the Atlantic. He’s gradually falling asleep, and this poem is simply his thoughts as he nods off. Seems to be sleeping right over a wing — sleeping on the wing as he renders it in his title. But the title also suggests – on the wing – catching a quick nap in the midst of a busy life. And sleeping while flying — while thoughts, images, bits of dreams fly through your half-awake mind.]
Perhaps it is to avoid some great sadness,
as in a Restoration tragedy the hero cries “Sleep!
O for a long sound sleep and so forget it!”
that one flies, soaring above the shoreless city,
[and so forget it! O’Hara puts New York slang in the mouth of a Restoration actor because that’s what comes to the New York poet as he sits in his seat. He doesn’t remember the exact line; this is his streetwise rendering of it. Flight is escape, escape from the grounded tragedies of our lives into a special sort of sleep. Soaring and shoreless have a nice assonance to them, but there’s also the idea that the city, looked at from above at this moment, has no borders, no seashores visible, whereas, metaphorically, the tragedy of our lives is how constantly bounded they are by death.]
veering upward from the pavement as a pigeon
does when a car honks or a door slams, the door
of dreams, life perpetuated in parti-colored loves
and beautiful lies all in different languages.
[Jolted upward and away from our painful lives, from the failure of our efforts to perpetuate our lives through lots of different love affairs with their beautiful lies about, say, fidelity, we escape to the air.]
Fear drops away too, like the cement, and you
are over the Atlantic.
[The writer speaks to himself in the second person, with its odd distances and ironies.]
Where is Spain? where is
who? The Civil War was fought to free the slaves,
was it?
[A wonderful capture of the vague stupid material that floats in and and out of the floating mind…]
A sudden down-draught reminds you of gravity
and your position in respect to human love.
[You fall in love; and you will continue, in these thoughts, to ponder the treacherous nature of love.]
But here is where the gods are, speculating, bemused.
Once you are helpless, you are free, can you believe
that? Never to waken to the sad struggle of a face?
to travel always over some impersonal vastness,
to be out of, forever, neither in nor for!
[A deepening of the idea of escape from earthly sorrow, struggle. You’re up in the clouds with the gods, which means you’re above all daily human struggle, free, impersonal, untethered to tragic bounded sublunary life. But to have that condition be permanent, you’d have to be dead.]
The eyes roll asleep as if turned by the wind
and the lids flutter open slightly like a wing.
[Lovely simile, the eyes fluttering open a bit like the ailerons. The poet is not quite awake, not quite asleep.]
The world is an iceberg, so much is invisible!
[We see only the tip of things; the depth of ourselves and others and existence is invisible to us.]
and was and is,
[Always was. Always will be.]
and yet the form, it may be sleeping
too.
[It’s possible we can to some extent melt or sculpt the ice and create/perceive more depth than we have so far. If icy depth is asleep, maybe we can warm and shape it through imagination, through art.]
Those features etched in the ice of someone
loved who died, you are a sculptor dreaming of space
and speed, your hand alone could have done this.
[Even those we love the most are icebergs. We understand very little of them. Yet as we think of them, as we bring their images to mind, as we reanimate them through our specific passionate remembrance after their death, we become godlike sculptors.]
Curiosity, the passionate hand of desire. Dead,
or sleeping?
[Is the loved one dead or merely, like the speaker, asleep, or half-asleep? Maybe one way to understand love is to say that it is the power of reanimation, the power to make the loved one and oneself truly live.]
Is there speed enough?
[Can I keep going? Can this plane keep going? Can I – do I want to – keep my life airborne and godly, or should I head back to earth?]
And, swooping,
you relinquish all that you have made your own,
the kingdom of your self sailing,
[The plane swoops down; maybe we’re about to land. Returning to earth, in any case, is the only way. The only way to proceed. You have to give up your fantasies of godlike creation, solipsistic control of everything.]
for you must awake
and breathe your warmth in this beloved image
whether it’s dead or merely disappearing,
as space is disappearing and your singularity.
[Eyes open now. Flight of fancy over. The extremity and abstraction of the high-altitude cosmic iceberg gives way to the temperate specificity of this one self in need of the beloved for the breath of life. Landing, perhaps preparing to greet the loved one at the airport, the poet returns by way of conclusion to the anguish of time’s arrow, the always-transitional moment in which we find ourselves. The chill, absolute space up there now gives way. What also gives way is the poet’s spacy conviction, which he had when he was suspended mid-air (rather than rushing through a terminal crowd), of his singular omnipotent being. Restored to himself, the poet ends the restoration tragedy.]
… to be told, and we few, we happy few here at University Diaries, are settling ourselves in to a front seat. Croyez-moi, there’ll be a piece on this in the New York Times in the next few days, one of those arch little numbers observing the French and their ways with description but no comment…
But why wait for that? I’m giving the thing to you here and now. Plus I’m telling you what to think about it. So listen.
The fiftieth anniversary of the death of Albert Camus is coming up (January 4), and Sarkozy wants his remains transferred to the Panthéon. This article about it in the Irish Times (only English-language piece I’ve seen so far) duly notes l’absurde squabbling about it, right left and center, in Paris.
This Le Monde thing announces that Jean Camus, the man’s son, has in any case refused permission because Camus just wasn’t a Panthéon type…
So why did he accept the Nobel? Nobel yes, Panthéon no? Sartre turned down the Nobel, but Camus didn’t have any trouble… I doubt he would have minded the Panthéon.
But anyway. The spat guarantees plenty of publicity for the writer, and will certainly generate the sort of statements you and I love to make limericks out of.
$3,321.91 is a small price to pay to defend the integrity of a school system.
One of the frauds who passed off a diploma mill degree on a New Jersey school system and got more money because of it is suing. After all, whatever everyone else thinks, Breyer State University is an upstanding place for which this woman did outstanding work. Fuck the New Jersey Commission on Higher Education, which, on finding the school a fraud, revoked her salary increase. She wants her money back, and she’s suing to get it.
Some local residents are unhappy about the district’s court fees, but UD says that the fight against the diploma mill industry, scourge of the armed forces, fire departments, and public school systems, is worth fighting, and fighting hard. Not only is this fight worth significant expenditure; the publicity such trials attract to the degrading details of the industry and the people who exploit it is priceless.