Vancouver’s Dead Poet’s Slam takes place tonight at the Cafe Deux Soleils.

All hallow’s eve is almost upon us so that means it’s time for the Dead Poet’s slam. Come dressed as your favorite dead poet. Read some Sylvia Plath with an oven on your head. Perform some Al Purdy or some Charles Bukowski with some beer in your hand. All dead poets are welcome. And as a feature we have–back from the dead–Janis Joplin.

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[First in a series of UD Halloween posts.]

Sue Marcum, an accounting professor at American University here in DC, has been found dead in her Bethesda house; police are calling it a probable homicide.

The comment about her in my headline – taken from Rate My Professors – is typical. She was apparently able to make a pretty dull subject interesting. Almost everyone agrees that she was a great teacher.

The few details about her death that have been released suggest a robbery that turned deadly — a shocking event for her safe, affluent neighborhood.

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The AU newspaper describes her students, some of them in tears, leaving her empty classroom this afternoon.

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Update: A break in the case.

“We were down in the alumni section and we were watching the step show with our kids and it was great because nobody was drunk,” said Lori Stratton.

The University of Arizona experiments with a no-alcohol zone at homecoming.

… no morality without religion.

Unesco embarrasses itself.

From an interview with the poet laureate, W.S. Merwin:

Q: You write, in the poem “First Sight,” about “late blessings.” What are some that you appreciate?

Merwin: I love my wife, and I love my life here. I’m happy to be alive. I feel very lucky to be able to write sometimes and to work in the garden. That’s quite enough.

… Q: You seem continually astonished by nature, love, and words. What else astonishes you?

Merwin: What else is there?

… at 91.

Indomitable is one of those words, like poignant, that always seems to end up in a cliché; yet Spender was that sort of person, able always to rise up again from downfall.

Natasha Spender’s courage was never more severely tested than when, two months after her … book [in praise of the Spenders’ restored house and garden in France] came out, [the house, Mas St Jerome,] was completely destroyed in a forest fire. Luckily [friends] were staying with her at the time and woke up in time to rescue her and raise the alarm, or she would almost certainly have been killed. The fire not only destroyed the house and the garden but also Spender’s library, a loss his widow felt particularly keenly. But she remained philosophical and typically down-to earth. “I lived through the Blitz and this is remarkably similar,” she told an interviewer. “I must buy some secateurs … and start work cutting back in the garden.”

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I don’t know if this poem of Spender’s (my parents loved Spender, so I grew up reading his poems) was written for Natasha, but since they had a long and happy marriage, I wouldn’t be surprised:

The Trance

Our angel with our devil meets
In the atrocious dark nor do they part
But each forgives and greets,
And their mutual terrors heal
Within our married miracle.

[The separate trance somehow transfigures into a mutual terror, a true meeting place of selves stripped of disguise, their mortal agony unmasked. The eye of love sees even into this atrocious dark (note the origin of the word atrocious). Indeed love brings angelic light to it; and, in a specifically married miracle, frees, wakens, the loved one from nightmare.]

U PRESIDENT VOWS PUSH FOR STADIUM LIQUOR SALES

(Headline, Pioneer Press, Minnesota.)

Look at this article about MSU’s budget problems and its fierce defense of an unpopular, financially killing sports program. Read the comments top administrators there make about keeping football going. Textbook provincialism… or why Missouri State will always be Missouri State.

Board of Governors Chair Elizabeth Bradbury said athletics help to make the school a destination-place locally, regionally, nationally and internationally.

“When you look at being that kind of a university, typically you are looking at schools that have good, strong athletic programs,” Bradbury said.

“Student-athletes are some of our best ambassadors,” Bradbury added.

MSU ain’t any sort of destination place.

A commenter on the article lists a bunch of schools that have dropped football, and notes that most of them are better schools than MSU. Another commenter makes the obvious point that athletes – especially football players – tend to be the worst ambassadors.

The vp for student affairs makes the pro-football case yet more astutely:

“If we didn’t have football, what would happen to our band program? If band isn’t as vibrant … those musicians also are involved in orchestra, ensembles and all that goes with that.”

A commenter responds:

Those football players are just a support group for the band! I will send this statement to the National Academy of Sciences to prove that football is very important to the academic pursuit of musicianship.

Then there’s the university’s president:

Asked if athletics teams could be on the chopping block in the future, Cofer said, “I don’t answer hypothetical questions.”

You can see why Cofer’s skittish about answering future-oriented questions. MSU’s last president was way bullish on the money the new basketball stadium would make.

The [recent state] audit … pointed out that JQH Arena operated at a loss in its first two years and, according to the current budget, is projected to operate at a loss for 2010-11, as well.

As a result, operating transfers from the athletic fund were needed to cover losses.

Cofer said he’s working on a plan for improving finances for JQH.

Yessiree Bob we’ve got that plan in the works fer sure.

… in swimming, has died in a World Cup race. He lost consciousness during the last leg of the open water event.

People are stunned, and it’s too soon for any official theories. But the water was very warm, and “several swimmers were treated for heat exhaustion at a nearby hospital after the event.” Maybe he had a heart attack.

Crippen’s sister is a senior at Virginia, and also a swimmer.

Two (three?) freshmen at Washington’s Jesuit university make meth in their dorm room.

Police discovered a methamphetamine lab inside a freshman residence hall on the Georgetown University campus early Saturday.

Everyone evacuated. (Meth labs have a tendency to explode.) Police are interviewing the meth makers.

You’ll recall that UD featured the same story not long ago, this time at the University of Central Florida.

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Some cross-town rivalry in the comments section of Vox Populi:

A meth lab? Who’s trashy now?

Love,
GWU

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God never closes a door without opening a window: Because of this story, UD has discovered the GW Ratchet.

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This one, back in ’05, was discovered via security camera. He was making meth in the San Diego State chem lab.

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Some background from Inside Higher Ed.

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In case you think there might be one in your dorm.

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Meth meet and greet. (Photo of evacuated Georgetown University students.)

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If you really can’t get enough of this.

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Update on the Georgetown University story: The drug lab seems not to have been making meth; instead, it manufactured DMT, a hallucinogen.

If UD‘s experience with these sorts of stories is anything to go by, however, police will find more than one drug being made or sold in the dorm room. The cookers (I learned this word from the Frontline documentary I just watched) usually offer a larger menu.

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Regaining a sense of perspective: From a Georgetown University comment thread:

At least DMT is a safe highbrow drug suitable for use by educated elites, unlike the crude trailer trash stimulants originally suggested.

… surfing in the morning before class is killed by a shark.

… for Apollo.

… as Nina Martyris nicely calls it, in an article about censorship at an Indian university, always identifies intellectuality as the enemy. Reflective people who value unemotional deliberation and an openness to the complexity of human life and thought are intellectual snobs – as Michael Gerson calls President Obama in a recent opinion piece – unable to appreciate the higher wisdom of plain-spoken people. Gerson joins Sarah Palin here, who in her speeches relentlessly uses the word professor to condemn Obama.

In his response to the scandal of the University of Mumbai having dropped a novel from its syllabus in response to political pressure, the author of The Lost Flamingoes of Bombay reminds us that “it’s one thing to be scandalous but quite another to be scandalously stupid.” Stupid is influential people in the world’s largest democracy choosing repressive parochialism over free thought.

In response to Sarah Palin and Michael Gerson and others, who insist that a president who openly values ambiguity, intellectual depth, and the free play of the mind — a president who voices his belief that there are stronger and weaker uses of reason in thinking about civic life — threatens the country, Michael Kinsley writes:

If an intellectual snob is someone who secretly thinks he’s smarter than the average Joe, we’ve probably never had a president — even Harry Truman — who wasn’t one. It’s true, I think, that Obama hides it worse than most. But having a president who thinks he’s smart, and shows it, is a small price to pay for having a president who really is smart. Or would people really rather have a stupid president?

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UD thanks Jack, a reader in Ontario.

… the cane.