… about her beloved Don DeLillo and other writers gathering to protest the imprisonment of Liu Xiaobo, a Chinese human rights advocate and writer.

DeLillo doesn’t hit the protest circuit often, but when he does, he certainly chooses well. Liu Xiaobo just won the Nobel Peace Prize.

Before his imprisonment, Liu Xiaobo was a literature professor.

“I don’t think it’s a great idea to be honest with you, because I have the one class tonight. I’m not a big football person. I’m here for the education,” student Jackie Fulco said.

A student at the University of Central Florida fails to get on board for the half-day-because-of-football thing.

… Mario Vargas Llosa.

Excerpts from his essay, Why Literature?

Literature has even served to confer upon love and desire and the sexual act itself the status of artistic creation. Without literature, eroticism would not exist. Love and pleasure would be poorer, they would lack delicacy and exquisiteness, they would fail to attain to the intensity that literary fantasy offers. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that a couple who have read Garcilaso, Petrarch, Gongora, or Baudelaire value pleasure and experience pleasure more than illiterate people who have been made into idiots by television’s soap operas. In an illiterate world, love and desire would be no different from what satisfies animals, nor would they transcend the crude fulfillment of elementary instincts.

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I cannot accept the idea that a non-functional or non-pragmatic act of reading, one that seeks neither information nor a useful and immediate communication, can integrate on a computer screen the dreams and the pleasures of words with the same sensation of intimacy, the same mental concentration and spiritual isolation, that may be achieved by the act of reading a book.

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[A]ll good literature is radical, and poses radical questions about the world in which we live. In all great literary texts, often without their authors’ intending it, a seditious inclination is present… [T]here is no better means of fomenting dissatisfaction with existence than the reading of good literature; no better means of forming critical and independent citizens who will not be manipulated by those who govern them, and who are endowed with a permanent spiritual mobility and a vibrant imagination.

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As a consequence of technology and our subservience to it, we may imagine a future society full of computer screens and speakers, and without books, or a society in which books–that is, works of literature–have become what alchemy became in the era of physics: an archaic curiosity, practiced in the catacombs of the media civilization by a neurotic minority. I am afraid that this cybernetic world, in spite of its prosperity and its power, its high standard of living and its scientific achievement would be profoundly uncivilized and utterly soulless–a resigned humanity of post-literary automatons who have abdicated freedom.

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“Spiritual mobility” is nice; akin, I think, to Richard Rorty’s notions of contingency and irony.

A California high school student understands the meaning of laptops in class.

… has died, age ninety. UD didn’t know, until she read some obituaries, that she was Grover Cleveland’s granddaughter…

TPM, The Philosopher’s Magazine, republishes a 2003 interview with her. Excerpts:

… [Foot’s] view can be summed up in the idea that moral reasoning is about practical rationality that recognises the existence of objective human needs as reasons for action. What Foot thinks most significant about this is that it stands opposed to what she calls speaker-relative accounts of ethics found in theories such as emotivism, prescriptivism and subjectivism. She explains the contrast between her view and the speaker-relative one in some detail.

“Emotivism, expressivism and so on (all of them I lump together) think that there is something special in a moral judgement in the way that there is something special about an order. It’s a special bit of language, like an avowal or a wish, or a greeting, although it isn’t any of those. These philosophers all ask what must the circumstances be for a moral word to be used by a speaker? What must he desire, what must he want others to do, what must he feel; all of which are questions about the speaker. That is the right kind of question to ask about an order or a greeting, but I don’t think that that sort of account is right for morality at all. I say that what we’ve got to dig out in order to understand a moral judgement is a particular use of the word ‘good’, and that is nothing to do with what the speaker wants. It’s not dependent on conditions in the speaker, so mine is not a speaker-relative account.

“So I’m really talking about a general concept of ‘good’ that applies to plants, animals and human beings. You can’t understand what I mean when I say I think it is acting badly to break a promise until you first understand that ‘good’ is used of living things in a particular way…”

… “People want different things and there are different cultures. But that is not in favour of subjectivity at all. It only means that you’ve got to differentiate. Certain things are absolutely certain – that the young are helpless and so are the old – they don’t just die suddenly, they get ill and infirm and need help. These are facts for all human beings. They don’t do well being very lonely. When Freud said that love and work are the only two real therapies I think that he said something quite generally true about human beings…”

…”The idea that because people have different preferences you can move to the conclusion that there must be a radical breakdown of discussion about good and bad action – that’s exactly what I deny and can’t let past. Some people care about art and some people don’t. Some people want public money spent one way and some people don’t. You don’t conclude ‘so subjectivism’.” …

UD supposes that in a rather wide range of instances that feature blatant cruelty — consider two much-discussed recent cases, Tyler Clementi and Westboro Church — Foot must be right. It’s absolutely certain that the most vulnerable and private aspects of individual human lives should not be trashed. We can argue about legal responses to their having been trashed, but I don’t think many people would argue the morality of the matter.

Hard to imagine what the world would look like today if the author of this letter had agreed to remove this phrase.

via Andrew Sullivan.

… the Sports Sites I Like on Wendy Parker’s sports blog, Wendy’s Parker’s Extracurriculars.

University Diaries! A sports site!!

… UD‘s friend (she met him through her sister, the Morrissey fanatic) Pete Dilima, with the Westboro Baptist Church people behind him.

The Supreme Court is dealing with a case against the church even as we speak.

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A scene from protests and counter-protests in front of the Supreme Court building.

… Just after 8 a.m., Jacob Phelps, 27, held up a sign that read “Thank God for Dead Soldiers.” He was surrounded by local college students such as Alex Yudelson, 18, a George Washington freshman.

“This nation will be no more once we’re gone!” said Phelps, a Target warehouse worker and grandson of the Rev. Fred W. Phelps, who founded Westboro Baptist Church.

“Where did you go to college?” Yudelson asked, as he and other students laughed.

“Washburn University,” Phelps said earnestly. “I actually graduated.”

Moments later, Sam Garrett, 18, another GWU freshman, clad in only sneakers, tight boxer briefs and flashy white Diesel sunglasses, approached Phelps. He was carrying a sign that read, “Fred Phelps wishes he were hot like me!”…

That’s my GW.

A student at the University of Manitoba describes a lecture there.

… The majority of laptops went from PowerPoint notes to anything but PowerPoint notes. Facebook.com profiles, Yahoo.com email accounts, music playlists, blogs, JUMP accounts — the list goes on.

My friend even searched Google images so she could show me how much the biology professor resembled a Bill Nye the Science Guy/Pringles mascot hybrid…

I began to wonder why so many people were so disengaged… Is it because all the notes are readily available on a student’s ANGEL account? Were the students uninterested because the teacher couldn’t possibly have made a connection with all [250] of them? And if the teacher can’t see you goofing off then you may as well goof off, right?…

… both a Nobel and an Ig Nobel:

… The [Nobel-winning] graphene creation originated in what Dr. Geim and Dr. Novoselov call “Friday evening” experiments, crazy things that might or might not work out.

In one of them, Dr. Geim managed to levitate a frog in a magnetic field, for which he won an Ig Nobel — a parody award for “improbable research” — in 2000. On another occasion they produced a “gecko tape” that mimicked the way geckos and Spider-Man can walk on the ceiling…

[Thanks, Matt F.]

… for what sounds like erotic behavior at a university residence hall — palladium-catalyzed cross coupling.

Bloomberg describes the art of appraisal.

[Two art] appraisers [attempting to appraise an Anish Kapoor work, Hole and Vessell II,] honed in on two [of his] pieces as the most comparable to [it]… One, Mother as a Ship, which looks like a blue canoe, sold for $321,600. The other, Untitled 1984, which appears to be a red, wall-mounted daisy, went for $142,400. To determine whether Hole and Vessel II was worth more or less than the two other sculptures, the appraisers resorted to their own aesthetic judgments.

The assessments, it turned out, partly hinged on their opinions of the so-called voids, or the concave holes in Kapoor’s work. While the circular opening in Hole and Vessel II is about 1 foot in diameter, similar to the hole in the middle of the daisy in Untitled 1984, the void in Mother as a Ship spans the 7-foot length of the boatlike work. After looking at photos of these sculptures, [one appraiser] surmised that Hole and Vessel II had a lower value, much like Untitled 1984, due partly to their similar voids.

[The other appraiser] disagreed. He said the void in Hole and Vessel II, which he said could be compared to a vagina, helped make the sculpture more sexy than Untitled 1984.

“Isn’t that slightly sensuous?” Brown says. “That means I think the market will go for it.”

He concluded that the cone-shaped sculpture was worth as much as three times the flowerlike work.

Everyone at SUNY Binghamton — which has had its share of scandals in the last few years — is trying to figure out why Phillip Calderon, a man in his mid-thirties, has been impersonating an undergraduate student there.

He was arrested last week for various misdemeanors (forgery, etc.); and now the many campus clubs he ran are doing damage control.

He can’t have gotten rich in these activities, so it is something of a question. Why did he do it?

I think the SUNY student I quote in my headline is probably right. It’s just such a good life.

… to schools like Harvard that already have hundreds of millions. There are far better recipients, in and outside of education, for that sort of money.

Yet she feels okay about one particular millionish gift to that university. In part this is because it’s not enormous — it’s ten million, which is a lot but not insane. In part it’s because it’s for the humanities (most of the hundred million plus gifts are for business schools, etc.). And in part because, when interviewed, the donor is eloquent on the importance of the humanities.

She’s still not thrilled that he gave so much to rolling-in-it Harvard (Now that Larry Summers is back on campus telling Harvard what to do with its endowment, the university will no doubt start losing tens of millions of dollars again. It can afford to.), but he does have his reasons.

When I went as an undergraduate, I was not permitted any foreign exchange by the [Reserve Bank of India] so Harvard gave me a full scholarship. I have never forgotten that.

And here he is on the larger reason:

I have intentionally chosen to contribute to a field that is universal, and which all students, regardless of their area of study, will benefit from. I would therefore hope that this gift will help show that India is not just concerned with parochial issues, but can give back, globally.

… The humanities encompass a spectrum of disciplines. What it does is teach you not a particular skill or technology but to think and question. Conflict resolution and creating a better world do not come from an improved piece of software or a better engine or technology but from people who can break free from their rigid points of view.

He seems to be the front runner for the Nobel Prize in Literature, so let’s look at a Tomas Tranströmer poem — prose poem — so that if he does actually win we won’t be totally ignorant.

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Madrigal

I inherited a dark wood where I seldom go. But a day will come when the dead and the living trade places. The wood will be set in motion. We are not without hope. The most serious crimes will remain unsolved in spite of the efforts of many policemen. In the same way there is somewhere in our lives a great unsolved love. I inherited a dark wood, but today I’m walking in the other wood, the light one. All the living creatures that sing, wriggle, wag, and crawl! It’s spring and the air is very strong. I have graduated from the university of oblivion and am as empty-handed as the shirt on the clothesline.

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(Madrigal poems are “serious, brief, irregular lyrics.”)

This is a brief, allegorical, philosophical, spiritual expression; it feels Blakean in its flat declarative statements and packed, strange metaphors.

Here’s one possible unpacking.

We are born into mental chaos, into the dark mystery of existence. We all inherit this dark wood, and we spend our lives fleeing it. It’s frightening; its caverns are measureless to man. We hate the dark encroachment of that old catastrophe.

Yet as we die – on that green evening when our death begins – the dark wood will be set in motion, whether we like it or not. We’ll enter it again, as we did at our birth.

Human suffering (the most great crimes) we will never understand, and never significantly lighten, despite our best efforts. Yet along with the darkness we intuit a great unsolved love…

Meanwhile, though, we continue to live, in the bright light that we fashion for ourselves out of the horror of the darkness. We adore existence! It’s spring here; everything’s passionately alive…

Yet I’ve moved forward in time far enough to be unable, now, to remain oblivious to the dark wood. Even as I love the world and electrify it with my imagination, I know I’m ultimately nothing.

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This post’s title is from another Tranströmer poem, The Clearing.