The professionalization of university sports proceeds (here’s a recent defense of agents on campus, for instance) as quickly as the onlining of higher education.

It’s now possible to see a future in which the only actual human activity on university campuses will be the buzz of sports: agents in negotiation with about-to-be-drop-outs; training sessions; games. Classrooms will be used for press interviews and police investigations.

Scathing Online Schoolmarm very much likes Leonard Bernstein’s lectures on music, The Unanswered Question. She especially likes the way he explains musical modernism as having introduced, among other things, a striking chromatic ambiguity into composition. Take Chopin’s Etude in Thirds:

Are we in the major or minor? Or in the Phrygian mode? Is this music tonal or modal? Are we to infer ninth chords, or diminished sevenths?

This sort of ambiguity, Bernstein remarks, is intriguing – even exciting – in art forms like music and poetry.

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But SOS is here to tell you that being up in the air like this for extended periods of time does not work very well in the essay.

Certainly readers are willing to be confused or disoriented for awhile in reading essays – the writer might be drunk or dreaming or just mentally drifting at the beginning of an essay – but pretty quickly the form needs to find its dominant, its key, its voice, its mood, its argument. If it starts with an anecdote, it has to tell us why it starts with an anecdote, where that anecdote stands in relation to the subject around which the essay is organized… If it doesn’t do this sort of thing, it’s not really an essay — it’s a prose poem, maybe, but not an essay.

A glance at Wikipedia yields, among others, this definition of an essay: A prose composition with a focused subject of discussion. We can of course think of ways in which essayists can depart from this emphasis on steady focus and dominant subject matter; but SOS would suggest the nature as well as the strength of the essay as a distinct mode of writing involves its relative non-ambiguity. It tends to want to argue something clearly, or make you see what it’s like to be inside of a particular experience clearly. And even when we’ve got the second sort of essay – call it a narrative essay – that narrative is still, almost always, in the service of some sort of cultural or spiritual or political argument.

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One of the signs of a very bad essay is indeed an unpleasant interminable ambiguity. The writer doesn’t allow you to get a foothold in the writing. You’re not sure what she’s on about. What is she urging that you believe, or feel?

Where, for that matter, is she? It’s not that bad essays lack a voice; typically they have all too many voices, a sort of confused, insecure trying on of many tones, attitudes, and dialects.

You never know what key you’re in. The feeling grows upon you, as you read, that you are in an emotionally and intellectually muddled world; and since you have entered the essay for the dual pleasures of good writing and clarified perceptions, you are eventually put off by the essay, and you probably stop reading it.

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Carlin Romano’s recent essay about Christopher Hitchens exemplifies the failure of the form.

Its title – No One Left to Pray To? – poses a question that – like the essay that follows – seems to come from a person at once insecure about his hold on his subject and boastful about his superiority to it (the subject here being a human being, Christopher Hitchens). One of Hitchens’ books – the one about Bill Clinton – is titled No One Left to Lie To, and, as that title makes clear, it’s a strong polemic arguing that Clinton is so intense and inveterate a liar that eventually no one believes anything he says.

Romano’s title is a question rather than a statement – a move that ushers us in to the vagueness and timidity of his essay’s assertions. Hitchens may be dying and doesn’t believe in God, so … he has no one to pray to. Is that it? Okay. But why put the twist on his title in the form of a question? If your essay is going to be about how sad or strange or ironic it is that Hitchens is dying and, since he doesn’t believe in God, God won’t keep him from doing that — a not very generous thought on Romano’s part, but let’s go with it — then why not put the title in the affirmative? Why the weaselly question mark?

Or is Romano simply trying to be clever? Where is his conviction in this matter? We assume, from the title on, that Romano is a religious person. We’re prepared, having been signaled by this title, for an essay in which Romano will, let us say, lament the desperation and sterility of this atheist’s last days. But we’re not fully prepared, because the tentativeness of that question mark puts us someplace ambiguous.

First paragraph:

If God occasionally intervenes in the world to shoot down an atheist—to show who’s boss, or simply to vent—it makes sense for Him to target the esophagus.

Are we being funny? Is this an effort at the folksy humor of the preacher, or is it the insouciant observation of a secular sophisticate? What’s the key?

As organs go, it’s long and conveniently placed, stretching from throat to stomach, making a good target for an elderly yet determined deity with possibly shaky hands. Its importance to speech heightens the symbolic force intended. And its connection to swallowing suggests the irony some believers think God enjoys too much: You can’t swallow me? You won’t swallow anything!

Since this last statement is about as funny as God saying to a woman with breast cancer You don’t enjoy breast feeding? You don’t even get a breast! the reader right away dismisses the possibility that this essay means to be somehow lighthearted and witty as well as serious. The vulgarity of the piece suggests that the writer wishes to be seen as… brash? We’re not sure.

For atheist apostle and recent memoirista Christopher Hitchens, who announced on June 30 that he’d cancel the rest of his Hitch-22 book tour to undergo chemotherapy on said cancerous organ, the argument for such personalized intelligent design presumably doesn’t hold. Hitch does recognize the role of vengeance and resentiment in believer/nonbeliever relations, but only in fueling institutions established by believers further down the Great Chain of Being. “Religion,” he wrote in God Is Not Great, “does not, and in the long run cannot, be content with its own marvelous claims and sublime assurances. It must seek to interfere with the lives of nonbelievers, or heretics, or adherents of other faiths.”

By this point the careful reader has stepped pretty far into that sense of reading unpleasant interminable ambiguity I described earlier. It’s not that the reader takes offense at any particular position in regard to Hitchens — she’s ready to read someone hating or pitying him or admiring or taking energetic issue with this or that position of his. It’s rather that the reader is beginning to take offense at being asked to remain within the prose world of a person whose writing is confusing rather than enlightening.

To be sure, there are many cutesy words and turns of phrase here (apostle; memoirista; said organ) that continue to make us play with the idea that this means to be a lighthearted and ultimately charitable take on the bad turn in Hitchens’ life; yet these words seem a strained effort at lightness, and when we get to the writer’s use of Hitch – a nickname – we wonder why he uses it. Yes, the Hitchens memoir (Is this supposed to be a book review?) titles itself with that name; yet Romano seems to use it in the way of an intimate. This comes across as pretentious, or at least as weird, especially since the essay is beginning to look unfriendly. Maybe.

We also note that Romano has misspelled ressentiment, which makes us wonder why he uses the French version of the word resentment. What did he think was gained by the French spelling? Since his subject is an erudite man who would not make this mistake, Romano’s foray into French makes him look inferior to Hitchens, whereas his rhetoric, to the extent that we can understand it, suggests a self-appraisal as superior. Romano also spells god is Not Great incorrectly.

One thing’s for sure—Hitch is not in great health. Indeed, he faces the possibility of not being at all if the chemo proves useless. Should believers pray for him, a man celebratedly insensitive to norms of politeness and acts of altruism?

Not being at all. Romano’s essay turns out to be a jig atop a grave-to-be.

At this point, the reader – this one at least – turns away from the prose in embarrassment.

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SOS has often said on this blog that bad writing is, among other things, writing that cannot help betraying things the writer clearly does not mean to betray to the reader. This is one of the things we mean by saying that good writing is about control.

It does Romano no good that he goes on, in his essay, to pretend a sort of even-handedness about his subject. He has betrayed his hatred. Nor is it the honestly and sometimes wittily proffered hatred of certain ideas and people for which Hitchens is notorious. It is the unpleasant inchoate passion of a writer who has not learned to master himself or his prose.

“College football is my favorite sport, and I’d rather not be ashamed of that fact.”

Although they’d have had to up that hourly rate to at least $500 to attract that faculty…

… [BP] has been “offering signing bonuses and lucrative pay to prominent scientists from public universities around the Gulf Coast” to muster a defense against inevitable litigation in the wake of the April 20 oil spill, according to a report in the Press-Register newspaper in Alabama.

At one point, BP plc “attempted to hire the entire marine sciences department” at the University of South Alabama, the report states.

The contract, obtained by the newspaper, would have barred the scientists from publishing their research, sharing it with other scholars or even talking about it.

The department did not sign…

Scientists interviewed by the newspaper told of being offered $250 an hour…

Max Brod, you recall, ignored Kafka’s request (in writing) that he destroy all of his manuscripts… Which, you know, I guess was okay since Kafka’s manuscripts were really good.

But then Brod gave all the originals plus lots of other not-yet-released stuff to his girlfriend, who was nuts and hid it away, and then she left it all to her children (now old ladies), also nuts. Nuts and mercenary.

They’ve been selling it off bit by bit (it resides in Israel and Switzerland in bank vaults) for millions. To Germany.

Israel, finding this grody to the Max, and quite certain Brod intended all of it for the state of Israel, has been suing for decades, etc.

Here’s the latest chapter of The Trial:

… Four safety-deposit boxes were opened in Zurich Monday by order of the Israeli court, revealing a wealth of Kafka-related manuscripts that now are being catalogued. In the next few days, five other safe deposit boxes are to be opened in Tel Aviv.

When the very first of the total of 10 boxes was opened last week in Israel, one of the sisters, Eva Hoffe, is reported to have burst into the bank in an effort to prevent the vault from being opened, shouting “It’s mine, it’s mine!”

Though present this week in Switzerland, Ms. Hoffe was barred from the bank vault and from the conference room where the papers were examined.

… The library has produced evidence that Max Brod intended the manuscripts for it and, in three decades of frustrations worthy of Kafka himself, found its deal to receive the papers repeatedly blocked by Ms. Hoffe.

Sure, there’s a limerick or two here. I’ll give it a whirl. Later.

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Okay. So here’s what they find in the vault.

Codicil

Dear Max, here’s my scariest thought:
That this writing, so painfully wrought,
Will fall to some bitches
Who’ll sell it for riches
And, oddly, will never be caught.

A Duke researcher’s questionable experimental methods seem to have inspired someone to look closely at his cv. On it, he claims a Rhodes scholarship he didn’t earn.

The Duke University School of Medicine has suspended a researcher and stopped patient enrollment in three cancer studies upon learning of reports that the researcher had overstated his academic credentials.

The lead researcher, Dr. Anil Potti, was placed on administrative leave, said Douglas J. Stokke, a spokesman for Duke, while it investigates allegations that Dr. Potti falsely claimed to have been a Rhodes scholar.

The article goes on to suggest that Potti has a habit of padding his cv.

Harvard Medical School tightened its policy on conflict of interest, banning faculty from receiving corporate gifts and meals and restricting them from speaking on behalf of companies…

Harvard University also adopted a campus-wide policy on conflict of interest, the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based school said on its website…

The medical school was earlier stung by criticism when Senator Charles Grassley said Harvard psychiatrist Joseph Biederman failed to disclose some payments from drug companies while he conducted research recommending their medications for treating children with mental disorders…

That’s because there aren’t any. Especially not at the University of Florida.

… and found this illustrated account of for-profit colleges in my email. Thank you, Dave.

… yesterday’s New York Times account of Elie Wiesel’s having crushed a play about him through the use of legal threats is compelling.

Wiesel and Bernard Madoff were fellow trustees of Yeshiva University. They occasionally dined together. Wiesel invested lots of his money with Madoff. There’s every reason they should appear in a play together.

But Wiesel doesn’t like appearing in a play with Madoff, and he has, with remarkable vulgarity, gone after its writer, an artist who, as she says in the article, “can’t get sued, there’s no way I could afford it.”

The word for Wiesel’s behavior is disgusting.

After UD leaves Rehoboth Beach, she goes to Upstate New York, where she has a house. Not far from that house is Stageworks/Hudson, where she and Mr UD will go to see the revised version of this play, Imagining Madoff. Unable to deal with Wiesel’s threats, the writer has removed his name from her play’s list of characters. But UD gathers that his spirit, if you will, lives on. We shall see.

Meanwhile, as is so often the case when people act in the way Wiesel has acted, Imagining Madoff is receiving far more publicity than it would have if it had run as originally written.

… At a time when LSU’s academic budget is being slashed, the fortunate athletic administrators received pay raises of better than 15 percent.

… [T]he scenario is nothing new in Louisiana. Sports and politics rule…

I

The outcome of Palmer and Figes
Lacks even a hint of surprigese:
He who seeks to defame
Plays a dangerous game
And may have to pay multiple high fees.

II

As to the campaign of McInnis:
Finis.

He’s a University of Florida dropout.

He may have done something so unethical when he was a student there that the school will have to forfeit its recent Sugar Bowl win.

UD sometimes wonders…

What’s the psychology of the reverse refudiated game? All that kee-razy school pride! That excitement! We’re Number One! … Does that vanish as if it never happened when the NCAA announces that you didn’t win after all? Do students at places like UF even give a shit about ex bribe facto dicta from distant organizations…?

… From fiscal year 2003 to 2009, the [athletic] department expenses have increased 61 percent, to $73 million.

That includes compensation for the coaches of the school’s 29 teams, which increased 70 percent, to $14.7 million, and for the department’s administration, which increased 55 percent, to $13.8 million.

… The university has been subsidizing the athletic program to the tune of $7 million to $14 million a year…

[F]ootball Coach Jeff Tedford and basketball Coach Michael Montgomery have lucrative contracts with a combined cost of roughly $5 million each year…

Nah. Not Auburn. Your one-stop on-line education spot: The University of California at Berkeley.

… said UD as she returned to her rented beach chair yesterday afternoon. She’d been away from it for two hours, first cooling down in her building’s nearby pool, then having lunch with her sister, and she’d worried that someone might have snatched the chair.

Or, far worse, someone might have lifted the big black hardback she’d set on its seat: Hitch-22, the memoirs of Christopher Hitchens.

But no, everything was here, including the book, its yellow spine blazing away in the sunlight as a high tide nipped its heels.

Having carried a headful of Hitchens to lunch, she’d burbled to her sister (who would have preferred to discuss Morrissey) about his virtues… “Dismal. Why don’t Americans much use that word? Hitchens uses it all the time, and it’s a great word… Recondite. An absurd word! I don’t use it because it sounds pretentious. But he uses it and it’s fine… Grog-blossom!

I once had a drink with an Express veteran, his face richly veined and seamed with grog-blossom…

Phrases too: One cannot be just a little bit heretical… And endless hilarious invective which always feels accurate — unlike Gore Vidal’s, which is also hilarious but feels vindictive…”

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I didn’t go into the deeper affinities I feel reading a man who adores Auden and Larkin (“I think that if I take, say, my two favorite English poets,” he said in an interview a couple of days ago, “the ones I most often recur to, are Philip Larkin and W.H. Auden. Both of them have a great understanding of tragedy, and a keen feeling of, you know, in some ways, the absurdity of the human condition. But it’s also from the absurdity that they draw things that are quite mordantly funny as well. I don’t think it’s possible to have a sense of tragedy without having a sense of humor.”) and quotes Cesare Pavese…

Actually there’s a striking and immediate affinity there, because my first week on the beach I’d reread A. Alvarez’s book about suicide, The Savage God… Beach reading à la UD… and Hitchens not only begins his narrative talking about that book (his mother killed herself); he even pulls some of its quotations from Pavese (“No one ever lacks a good reason for suicide.”). If you’ve read my latest Inside Higher Ed post about burqas, you know that I begin with a Pavese quotation pulled from last Saturday’s Alvarez reading. (“Every luxury must be paid for, and everything is a luxury, starting with being in the world.”)

UD and Christopher Hitchens: Two literary-minded children of suicides.

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To be sure there are more obvious things to interest me in Hitch-22 — people we know in common, like Peter Galbraith, praised on page 300; a love of obscene limericks; a love of Dylan and Peter Paul and Mary and the Mamas and the Papas; Jewishness; a slightly louche interest in the outer edges (“I think I wish I had not been introduced so early to the connection between obscure sexual excitement and the infliction – or the reception -of pain.”) — but what rivets UD is this odd life-and-literature affinity.

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Well, let’s bring it all together. It’s far from my favorite Larkin poem (I think the last line is weak), but anyway.

To the Sea

The rocks, the rusting soup-tins, till the first
Few families start the trek back to the cars.
The white steamer has gone. Like breathed-on glass
The sunlight has turned milky. If the worst
Of flawless weather is our falling short,
It may be that through habit these do best,
Coming to the water clumsily undressed
Yearly; teaching their children by a sort
Of clowning; helping the old, too, as they ought.