Gotta recoup what the prez is costing them.

My mother, a gardener, had a book in her library with a pleasantly old-fashioned title: Plants That Merit Attention.

Certain sentences merit attention, and over the life of this blog I’ve featured and talked about quite a few. These are sentences that rather leap out at you, little poems amid the prose.

Rereading, last night, the prose of Marjorie Williams, I found these two sentences. In the first, she’s describing her mother on her deathbed:

There she was in the hospital bed that had been brought in and set up in the corner of her bedroom, comatose some of the time and the rest of the time small and frail with an avian air of confusion.

In the other – I’ll give you two sentences for this one – she’s talking about the depression she and her husband felt as they tried living a normal life after Williams’ cancer diagnosis:

We don’t have to be actively thinking about the wild uncertainty of our future together to be pulled by its undertow. Sometimes, when either of us comes out of it and manages briefly to raise from the ocean floor the graceful wreck of our old, normal life, we can be happy for days or weeks or even a month.

Avian, yes? And the graceful wreck, yes? These are moments amid the prose when the eye stays on that part of page a bit longer, idles in the unexpected beauty of an image. An avian air. It’s not just that she found the bird metaphor, though that’s already spectacular, a way of making the rather abstract words that precede it (small, frail) suddenly take on physical specificity. It’s that an avian air is a poetic phrase, richly alliterative, delicate to the mind’s ear like a bird, landing with the mother’s frailty on the very end of the sentence.

And the word air! It breathes meanings, associations… Song, manner, atmosphere. When I first encountered this phrase, I heard a song I sing: The Lass With the Delicate Air. It played through my mind.

Graceful wreck of course is something of an oxymoron, the sort of phrase that lets us do the work we like to do when we read, lets us work out the ambiguities of an idea or argument or situation…

Or not so much work them out as recognize and accept them in their unworked essence. This prose doesn’t instruct. It makes nothing explicit. It gives voice to the almost-unutterable enigmas of life.

Harvard has finally, after years, said something official about the Marc Hauser scientific research scandal. Yes, he committed fraud in eight articles, three of which were published, and they’re being retracted as we speak. No, we don’t want to talk about what punishment he’ll receive. Don’t expect him to be fired. Now shush.

… writing an Inside Higher Education post. Title: LEMONIZING THE UNIVERSITY.

No, not demonizing. Lemonizing. Should be up in a few minutes.

…Ooh. Just checked. It’s up.

… remarkable candor.

Joan Gussow, locavore, is interviewed in the New York Times about reconstructing her garden along the Hudson River after floods.

The NYT writer quotes from one of Gussow’s memoirs, in which

[Ms. Gussow writes] that, to her surprise, she did not miss her husband [after he died], or even grieve for him.

“I kept experiencing it as a strange liberation from things I hadn’t known I was imprisoned by,” she writes.

… a great love poet, has died.

UD finds this YouTube of Scots reciting some of his poems beautiful and moving.

Pictures too.

… bad.

From an opinion piece in the Washington Post. The author, a sports lawyer, calls for the privatization of university football.

… [T]he sole focus for many star college players is getting ready for pro ball … [C]oaches are looking for financial security on the backs of teenagers … There isn’t anything inherently wrong with these goals…

True, true. Mr UD and I have always sought financial security on the back of La Kid. And people with full scholarships to American universities should certainly spend that money getting ready to play pro ball. Yes.

… for UD is receiving review copies of books on subjects of interest to her and her readers. UD knows that truly fancy people find getting these things annoying.

[click on the image for a larger view]

Indeed one of UD‘s memories from a long-ago weekend in John Kenneth Galbraith’s Vermont house involves her coming across, on a table by his bed, an enormous pile of review copies of all sorts of books. UD sat down in an ecstasy and lost herself in these just-published goodies, but it was clear that JKG himself didn’t feel as happy about it.

UD just picked up, at the Garrett Park post office (remember that her town doesn’t get home delivery), a review copy of White Coat Black Hat: Adventures on the Dark Side of Medicine, by Carl Elliott. She’s reading it now.

… eloquently defends the fundamental principles of universities against forces of reaction.

Background on Menachem Mautner.

… it’s about good actors and bad actors.

Miami Today:

… When [Florida International University] got into big-time football in 2003 it charged all students $30 a year in athletic fees to help shoulder the load. By this year, an FIU student taking 15 credit hours per semester is paying more than $435 a year in athletic fees.

For all of that sports zeal, FIU’s conference ranks near bottom on sports — and academic — spending. The Sun Belt Conference was spending $41,895 per athlete per year in 2008, but just $9,691 for all students for academics…

A tamarin monkey named Wowzer
Worked closely with Dr. Marc Hauser.
Her lifestyle was fab
She had run of the lab
But nothing he did could arouse her.

A Perth judge has ordered that a Muslim woman must remove a full burqa while giving evidence before a jury in a fraud case.

Judge Shauna Deane today ruled that the witness must remove her niqab, or burqa face covering when she gives evidence to the jury…