… in the medical profession.

Carlo Rotella, Boston College, writes a column in the Boston Globe.

… I teach at [Boston College], where a year’s tuition, fees, room, and board currently add up to $52,624. What are the students paying for? What can’t they get online for free?

In my end of the academy, the humanities, it comes down to one thing, in essence: the other people in the room, teachers, and fellow students. … [Y]ou’re paying for the exclusive company of fellow thinkers who made it through the screening processes of admissions and faculty hiring. That’s it. You can get everything else online, and you can of course do the reading on your own.

Your money buys you the opportunity to pay attention to the other people on campus and to have them pay attention to you — close, sustained, active, fully engaged attention, undistracted by beeps, chimes, tweets, klaxons, ring tones, ads, explosions, continuous news feeds, or other mind-jamming noise. You qualify for admission, you pay your money, and you get four years — maybe the last four years you’ll ever get — to really attend to the ideas of other human beings, thousands of years’ worth of them, including the authors of the texts on the syllabus and the people in the room with you.

You can spend the rest of your life surfing the web, emailing, texting. You’ve got one shot at college. So, at least until the novelty wears off (probably not in my lifetime), that means no laptops in my classroom.

Rotella might have added that most universities are all too happy to follow the logic of this to its money-saving conclusion and put more and more of their courses online…. And it’s not just about saving money. Many classroom professors, faced with techno-ghosts instead of students, take to Powerpoint. If they keep their heads down for fifty minutes, reading slides, these professors don’t have to look up and suffer the grief and humiliation of being ostentatiously ignored by almost every student in the room.

Thus is created the peculiar symmetry of the postmodern classroom: A professor lost to the world via Powerpoint stands in front of a classroom of students lost to the world through the internet.

It can’t last. Increasingly, both sides are seeing the absurdity of it, and going online. Online, there’s no need, ever, to acknowledge the existence of another human being.

“Because they kill so many other people, it would be a favor to kill them, understand? Why don’t people in power and in the elite die?” he asked.

Gil Vicente, a Brazilian artist, explains his series of charcoal sketches featuring Vicente assassinating the Queen of England, the Pope, George W. Bush, Ariel Sharon, Kofi Annan, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and his country’s leader, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.

Various groups in Brazil are unhappy that the series currently hangs in a prominent location as part of a high-profile biennial exhibit in Sao Paolo.

… has a good take on Suicide Note. (Background here.)

Christine Smallwood, PhD student, Columbia University, gets it said. It’s in today’s New York Times.

When you leave your room for class, leave the laptop behind. In a lecture, you’ll only waste your time and your parents’ money, disrespect your professor and annoy whomever is trying to pay attention around you by spending the whole hour on Facebook.

You don’t need a computer to take notes — good note-taking is not transcribing. All that clack, clack, clacking … you’re a student, not a court reporter. And in seminar or discussion sections, get used to being around a table with a dozen other humans, a few books and your ideas. After all, you have the rest of your life to hide behind a screen during meetings.

Oh, and entire online classes! Quelle joie.

… wins the PEN Saul Bellow Award.

Excerpts from a PEN interview with him:

I still have my old paperback copy of Herzog (Fawcett Crest, $0.95), a novel I recall reading with great pleasure. It wasn’t the first Bellow novel I encountered—that was The Victim, whose opening sentence (“On some nights New York is as hot as Bangkok.”) seemed a novel in itself…

The theme that seems to have evolved in my work during the past decade concerns time—time and loss. This was not a plan; the novels have simply tended to edge in that direction. Some years ago I had the briefest of exchanges with a professor of philosophy. I raised the subject of time. He said simply, “Time is too difficult.” Yes, time is a mystery and perhaps best examined (or experienced by my characters) in a concise and somewhat enigmatic manner…

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So…. maybe we make a little mixed cocktail? A little Bellow, a little Mitchell Heisman, author of Suicide Note [details here].

In Herzog (UD‘s got the same old Fawcett Crest edition DeLillo’s got, and she’s been pawing through it), our seriously fucked up hero, Moses Herzog (his name taken, as you may already know, from a very minor character in James Joyce’s Ulysses) is visiting his seriously fucked up friend Luke, a University of Chicago scientist who can’t deal with people at all, but who so loved his recently deceased monkey that as the monkey was dying he gave it mouth to mouth resuscitation.

Since the monkey’s death Luke has been deeply, dangerously depressed.

“It really threw me into a spin. I thought that palling around with Rocco was a gag. I didn’t realize how much he meant to me. But the truth is, I realized that no other death in the world could have affected me so much. I had to ask myself whether the death of my brother would have shook me up half as much. I think not. We’re all some kind of nut or other, I realize. But…”

He finds a psychotherapist who tells him to imagine himself dead, in a coffin, with all the people who meant something to him in his life passing by his body. He’s supposed to think of what he wanted to tell them in life, what the real truth was between them, within him, etc.

But it doesn’t work. All he can think about are memories of farcical events involving fat aunts and cornfed showgirls from his urban youth…

Herzog says to him:

A man may say, ‘From now on I’m going to speak the truth.’ But the truth hears him and runs away and hides before he’s even speaking. There is something funny about the human condition, and civilized intelligence makes fun of its own ideas…

Human life is far subtler than any of its models. …

Do you have to think yourself into a coffin and perform these exercises with death? As soon as thought begins to deepen it reaches death, first thing. … I really believe that brotherhood is what makes a man human…. When the preachers of dread tell you that others only distract you from metaphysical freedom then you must turn away from them. The real and essential question is one of our employment by other human beings and their employment by us. Without this true employment, you never dread death, you cultivate it. And consciousness when it doesn’t truly understand what to live for, what to die for, can only abuse and ridicule itself.

… provides updates through the day on the mass shooting at a fraternity party near its campus. Students from Seton Hall and the New Jersey Institute of Technology are among those shot.

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Update: One student has died.

… are about to drive to Baltimore to see:

1. the Frank Zappa statue; and

2. the Katyn Memorial.

I’ll blog about it, of course.

Every day’s going to be Bloomsday.

Ireland may be on its way to elect a gay president after the first opinion poll in the race showed Senator David Norris, a Dublin-based gay activist, well-ahead.

… The size of the Norris lead is surprising. The Joyce scholar and gay rights campaigner is an independent senator representing Trinity College in the Irish senate and has never been considered a candidate for national office…

A protestant, he was actually born in what was then the Belgian Congo in 1944 but came to Ireland a few years later…

[Norris] has also played a major role in popularizing Bloomsday, now celebrated on June 16th every year.

If they want to go even further and elect a Jew and a Joyce freak, there’s always UD.

FLORIDA SAYS FOOTBALL ARRESTS
SHOULDN’T DEFINE ITS PROGRAM OVERALL

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headline, usa today

Answer: It doesn’t.

… after a few too many.

Mr UD read this New York Times article to UD yesterday, over breakfast. One of UD‘s readers, David, also sent it to her. As if its content weren’t moving enough, there’s the photo.

UD instantly thought of the David Hare play, Plenty.

From the Chicago Trib:

… Even a [University of Chicago] colleague, former law school Dean Geoffrey Stone, had something pointed to say. [About this.]

“People are reasonably focused on the view that this is absurd for somebody who lives a relatively privileged life to define himself as not rich because there are people who are richer,” Stone said. “The way he wrote it opened himself up to that. If Todd had shown me a draft of it, I would have told him that this is going to call for scorn or derision, and that is not what you are trying to achieve here. You better think of another way to make the point.”

Scathing Online Schoolmarm says: He could have made the point. But the only way he could have made it was through humor, and the guy does not strike SOS as a natural comedian. Self-deprecation would probably be the best subcategory of humor with which to make the point, and here again the guy does not strike me as having the gift of self-deprecation.

Even Stone, I’m afraid, ain’t quite there when he calls Henderson’s life “relatively privileged.” SOS grasps the point that Americans more privileged than Henderson exist. This does not make his life relatively privileged. It is absolutely privileged.

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Add the recent focus on legacy admissions to the Henderson mess, and America’s privileged will need to look sharp for awhile. Incoming.

… to want to read Margaret Soltan’s monthly articles in the Garrett Park Maryland Bugle. She covers the Town Council meetings.

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Link doesn’t seem to be working at the moment. I’ll try to fix it.