Debra Moriarity, the courageous University of Alabama Huntsville professor who confronted Amy Bishop as she tried to kill everyone in the room, will replace the murdered chair of the biology department.

This year, she’s reading parts of the Sirens chapter from Ulysses — the one that begins with hoofirons and ends with farts.

The reading is open to the public and jointly sponsored by the Harvard Club of Washington and American Independent Writers. Details here.

Sirens is the most musical chapter of the novel — and the novel is full of music. Little bits of two songs are featured in UD‘s reading. The songs are:

Martha (In English.)

This version of The Croppy Boy

She will try to sing them, as Simon Dedalus and then Ben Dollard sang them.

Here’s the Washington Post announcement of the event.

Bloomsday, New York City.

Those pesky night games, during which wasted tailgaters turn the campus into a reeking dump, will go on. After all:

Athletics director Damon Evans said Wednesday that he hoped to find a healthy balance between the early kickoffs and the games under the lights …but said television contracts with CBS and ESPN would ultimately outweigh many of the school’s desires.

A new crackdown on even minor alterations of the hijab is taking place in Iran. Guards are appearing at the gates of universities. They turn away insufficiently hidden women.

“I believe Hijab is an invisible political tool for the stagnant, patriarchal politics… a view that gives priority to woman’s sexuality over her other human dimensions,” [a student said] in a telephone interview from Tehran.

“Undoubtedly, the totalitarian system’s patronising way of thinking encourages people to deny their bodies, wear unkempt clothes, and gravitate toward sadness, and it has no room for human health and development. This thinking cannot be effective in reducing abnormal behaviour in the society,” she said.

… In Italy, everyone over the age of eighteen is Dottore. Or Professore.

Even their sports journalists insist on it. A Canadian writer talks about European sports reporters:

The Italian press corps is … the most cliquish. The rest of the press is simply ignored. Like the German press gang, the media passes worn by the Italians often make for interesting reading. About half of them appear to be called “Professor” while the Germans are big on being “Doctor.” I’ve always assumed this has to do with the official title a person with a BA or MA is entitled to receive in Italy or Germany. Me, I’ve got some university education, but I wouldn’t even mention that unless there was a point, and I’d be mortified if anybody called me “Professor.” I just writes for the paper.

Professor, Doctor… They love their titles over there, earned and unearned. And they bring this ethos with them wherever they go, as Australia has discovered:

Controversial builder Luigi Casagrande has resigned as director of the Government-owned Queensland Motorways board amid allegations he faked his credentials.

Mr Casagrande, a 2009 Order of Australia recipient, had repeatedly claimed in company annual reports he had a Dott Ing, an advanced engineering degree, from the University of Padua.

The Courier-Mail reported on Monday that the university had no record of the degree and Mr Casagrande declined to clarify the issue.

Despite being on its board since 1995, Mr Casagrande’s credentials were never checked by Queensland Motorways bosses.

… The action also puts Mr Casagrande’s Order of Australia at risk if the honours panel considers his actions dishonest and disreputable.

Almost 20 recipients have lost their awards since 1975. [Twenty? Isn’t that rather a high number? What did they do?]

The Queensland Government entrusted Mr Casagrande with its most important roads projects, including the Gateway Bridge Upgrade. He chaired the committee that oversaw the $2.1 billion project.

… Mr Casagrande’s other credentials as president of the Italian Chamber of Commerce in Brisbane also are being amended…

———- The Courier-Mail broke the story. ———-

A student’s tribute to a professor who really got around.

… conflict of interest abuser chair of its department of psychiatry and behavioral sciences boasts of its “unflinching commitment to scientific integrity.”

It’s a funny world.

Summit, New York, for UD readers not yet privy to every detail of UD‘s life, is the upstate town where Les UDs have a little summer house. The house sits high on a hill all by itself, on twenty acres, with views of dairy farms, forests, ponds, and mountains. The night sky – dark, vast, and full of Perseids (we’re there in August) – is spectacular.

After decades of summers in Summit, we have our traditions – an opera at Glimmerglass; afternoons in Cooperstown; country walks to visit personal landmarks, like the small observatory our friend and neighbor (before he moved back to Poland) Woytek Fangor built. And there’s my birthday dinner at the Bear Cafe in Woodstock…

Among the oddest places on our seasonal itinerary is Sharon Springs, a constantly shifting valley town — sometimes it’s a gay resort; sometimes it’s an artist’s colony; sometimes it’s an outdoor reading room for ultra-orthodox Jews, who sit on peeling porches all day and squint over what I take to be religious texts… Sometimes it’s on the upswing, sometimes on the down. It’s like a stage set. From summer to summer, you don’t know what Act and Scene you’re going to find.

*************************************

According to this, it’s gay again. These guys, who have a mansion and a farm near Sharon Springs, and who have their own reality show, call the place “the Provincetown of Schoharie County.”

We’ll be in Summit early in August.

Sordid story out of South Korea about university corruption and one response to it: Suicide.

This particular suicide was accompanied by a long, tell-all note and is therefore receiving a lot of press coverage.

[A] portrait of Adolf Hitler at the Marblehead Arts Association was done as part of a young artists exhibit on historical characters. The show included figures from Darth Vader to Vincent van Gogh.

However, the picture of Hitler has offended family members of Holocaust survivors. Susan Fader finds the work insensitive.

“To me, it’s kind of blasphemy and inappropriate… I find it totally unnecessary that I should have to look at something that is still so raw for so many,” said Fader.

To the artist, Gage Delprete, Hitler represents negative role models…

Really, even if there’s no legal requirement that you do a couple of Google clicks on a person’s education, don’t you think you should do it anyway? When autistic children are involved?

A reader reminded me recently of this great poem, by Delmore Schwartz. The Heavy Bear bears some resemblance, I think, to what David Brooks, in the NYT piece I talked about earlier today, calls The Big Shaggy.

*******************************

The Heavy Bear Who Goes With Me

“the withness of the body”

The heavy bear who goes with me,
A manifold honey to smear his face,
Clumsy and lumbering here and there,
The central ton of every place,
The hungry beating brutish one
In love with candy, anger, and sleep,
Crazy factotum, dishevelling all,
Climbs the building, kicks the football,
Boxes his brother in the hate-ridden city.

Breathing at my side, that heavy animal,
That heavy bear who sleeps with me,
Howls in his sleep for a world of sugar,
A sweetness intimate as the water’s clasp,
Howls in his sleep because the tight-rope
Trembles and shows the darkness beneath.
—The strutting show-off is terrified,
Dressed in his dress-suit, bulging his pants,
Trembles to think that his quivering meat
Must finally wince to nothing at all.

That inescapable animal walks with me,
Has followed me since the black womb held,
Moves where I move, distorting my gesture,
A caricature, a swollen shadow,
A stupid clown of the spirit’s motive,
Perplexes and affronts with his own darkness,
The secret life of belly and bone,
Opaque, too near, my private, yet unknown,
Stretches to embrace the very dear
With whom I would walk without him near,
Touches her grossly, although a word
Would bare my heart and make me clear,
Stumbles, flounders, and strives to be fed
Dragging me with him in his mouthing care,
Amid the hundred million of his kind,
The scrimmage of appetite everywhere.

*******************************

When you study the humanities, you encounter poems like this one. Here’s another one. They’re all about one’s inability to understand oneself, as well as one’s inability to communicate with other people. Although a word would bare your heart and make you clear, you find yourself unable to speak, mute in the mouthing care of the beast.

These sorts of poems are meticulous considerations of the many barriers that stand between you and non-chaos. The heavy bear and the big shaggy are you, after all — they’re the intense, often twisted, enigmatic, deepest core of your being, a core from which emanate what Brooks calls “upheavals of thought,” a core whose operations perplex and affront you with your own darkness.

Let’s shed some light on all of this by doing a closer reading of Schwartz’s poem.

************************************

The heavy bear who goes with me,
A manifold honey to smear his face,

[So far pretty innocuous – indistinguishable from Poohbear. Amusing. Face smeared with lots of honey.]

Clumsy and lumbering here and there,
The central ton of every place,

[The theme of weightiness, though, already takes on unsettling force. There’s something in me uncontrollable, unavoidable, and incredibly oppressive.]

The hungry beating brutish one
In love with candy, anger, and sleep,

[Hunger — appetites — will be a central theme of this poem, which clearly wants to note the bifurcation in all of us between the civilized cerebral higher being and this other being, fleshly and massive and clumsy and greedy. I like the list Schwartz provides here: candy, anger, and sleep. It’s funny. You can sort of see the lumbering infant or the drunk, first at a tit, then in a tantrum, then snoring.]

Crazy factotum, dishevelling all,
Climbs the building, kicks the football,
Boxes his brother in the hate-ridden city.

[A sort of insane, all-purpose servant you can’t fire, the heavy bear in you is the principle of chaos, risk, and meaningless aggression.]

Breathing at my side, that heavy animal,
That heavy bear who sleeps with me,
Howls in his sleep for a world of sugar,
A sweetness intimate as the water’s clasp,

[The sweet shapeless world of infantility, a world devoted to the instant gratification of your animal desires…]

Howls in his sleep because the tight-rope
Trembles and shows the darkness beneath.
—The strutting show-off is terrified,
Dressed in his dress-suit, bulging his pants,
Trembles to think that his quivering meat
Must finally wince to nothing at all.

[But the infant is gone; you’ve grown up and you know that you’ll die. Your response to this knowledge, however, remains infantile: trembling terror. In the daylight, you’re a big old bear, a big old egotist, showing off to the world; but alone in your bed you know how perilous existence is, how all your bulk – your quivering meat, your bulging flesh – will fall off the tightrope your just-barely-balanced life is and become “the darkness beneath.”]

That inescapable animal walks with me,
Has followed me since the black womb held,

[That “black womb” is a strange and unsettling image. The womb carries a life, but a life which will end in death; it is as much a death chamber as an anteroom to existence. And of course the womb is a darkness… ]

Moves where I move, distorting my gesture,
A caricature, a swollen shadow,
A stupid clown of the spirit’s motive,
Perplexes and affronts with his own darkness,

[I cannot control myself. There is something inside me which distorts my intentions, seeks to undermine me, makes me laugh obscenely at my most sincere efforts to transcend mere physicality, mere bestial greed.]

The secret life of belly and bone,
Opaque, too near, my private, yet unknown,

[It’s undeniably me, this ugly, subversive energy, but I don’t understand it. It is the animal life that underlies my human life, the profane that smirks at the sacred; and its power is immense.]

Stretches to embrace the very dear
With whom I would walk without him near,
Touches her grossly, although a word
Would bare my heart and make me clear,
Stumbles, flounders, and strives to be fed
Dragging me with him in his mouthing care,
Amid the hundred million of his kind,
The scrimmage of appetite everywhere.

[The hundred million of his kind. The heavy bear squashes individuality itself; he reduces me to the identical primal creature everyone else is. There’s no differentiation here: We’re all the same howling wordless wanting animal. The poet returns in his last line to the football image in the first stanza. We’re stuck for life in a Hobbesian scrimmage for sweets.]

In her place has appeared a garter snake.

Garter snakes, like all snakes, are meat eaters. Their diet consists of almost any creature that they are capable of overpowering: slugs, earthworms, insects, leeches, lizards, spiders, amphibians, birds, fish, toads and rodents.

Toads!

… who regularly link me to items of interest, I’ve got three things — a poem, and two opinion pieces — rattling around my headlet this morning. They all seem to have to do with the humanities, defense of. Let us see if we can organize them in order to make a point or two.

First, here are the items:

1.) A David Brooks column in today’s New York Times.

2.) A Stanley Fish column in the same newspaper.

3.) A poem by Delmore Schwartz called The Heavy Bear Who Goes With Me.

*******************************

Brooks wants to “stand up for the history, English and art classes,” even though few students are interested in taking them. (Students only get excited about econ and related fields that will make them rich.) The Brooks defense of the humanities rests on this:

… Over the past century or so, people have built various systems to help them understand human behavior: economics, political science, game theory and evolutionary psychology. These systems are useful in many circumstances. But none completely explain behavior because deep down people have passions and drives that don’t lend themselves to systemic modeling. They have yearnings and fears that reside in an inner beast you could call The Big Shaggy.

… Technical knowledge stops at the outer edge. If you spend your life riding the links of the Internet, you probably won’t get too far into The Big Shaggy either, because the fast, effortless prose of blogging (and journalism) lacks the heft to get you deep below.

But over the centuries, there have been rare and strange people who possessed the skill of taking the upheavals of thought that emanate from The Big Shaggy and representing them in the form of story, music, myth, painting, liturgy, architecture, sculpture, landscape and speech. These men and women developed languages that help us understand these yearnings and also educate and mold them. They left rich veins of emotional knowledge that are the subjects of the humanities.

… If you’re dumb about The Big Shaggy, you’ll probably get eaten by it.

Here we get the humanities as cautionary tale. Know thyself. If you don’t, you’ll make terrible mistakes in life.

Brooks cites a couple of recent, representative mistake-makers: “[A] governor of South Carolina [who] suddenly chucks it all for a love voyage south of the equator, or …a smart, philosophical congressman from Indiana [who] risks everything for an in-office affair.”

Who says these were mistakes? Maybe they were true love for all Brooks knows. Was the Tipper/Al marriage a mistake? It failed. Did it fail because they failed to understand the big shaggy?

UD doubts this. She proposes that the Gores understand the big shaggy pretty well.

***************************************

We all know people with very highly educated emotional knowledge who are fuckups.

We’re all fuckups of one sort or another, no?

So what if he has led a stupid life? Anyone with any brains knows that he is leading a stupid life even while he is leading it. Anyone with any brains understands that he is destined to lead a stupid life because there is no other kind.

Go ahead and disagree with this statement from Sabbath’s Theater, by Philip Roth. I’ll press on.

Here is a comment from Adam Phillips, a British psychoanalyst: “There are parts of ourselves – that don’t want to live, that hate our children, that want ourselves to fail. …[T]here is something strange about humans: they are recalcitrant to what is supposed to be their project.”

I mean, this is your emotional knowledge, no? Part of it? Not that you won’t get eaten by the big shaggy, but that you won’t be entirely assimilated into it when it starts chomping? That you might get a little leverage over it, eventually?

In his defense of the humanities, Fish cites Martha Nussbaum.

[Nussbaum writes that] “abilities crucial to the health of any democracy” are being lost, especially the ability to “think critically,” the ability, that is, “to probe, to evaluate evidence, to write papers with well-structured arguments, and to analyze the arguments presented to them in other texts.”

Here we shift to a humanities defense based not on mental health, but on civic health.

Developing intelligent world citizenship is an enormous task that can not even begin to be accomplished without the humanities and arts that “cultivate capacities for play and empathy,” encourage thinking that is “flexible, open and creative” and work against the provincialism that too often leads us to see those who are different as demonized others.

Nussbaum, like Brooks, defends the humanities as a force toward the creation of an organized and critical mind. I’m with them on this, although I think that some science and social science courses do the same thing. But as with the humanities as a pipeline to better mental health, I’m less convinced by the argument that a deep knowledge of Henry James will make you anything as grand as an intelligent world citizen. I think it’s liable to make you more tolerant and less provincial, because it will make you feel the vulnerability, variety, and complexity of human beings. But I also think that a true immersion into the humanities will make you very cautious about making big claims about outcomes. Many of the meanings we derive from deep humanistic study, after all, are quite disturbing, and even demoralizing.

Remember what William Arrowsmith wrote (I’ve already quoted him on this blog):

[The] enabling principle [of the humanities is] the principle of personal influence and personal example. [Professors should be] visible embodiments of the realized humanity of our aspirations, intelligence, skill, scholarship… [The] humanities are largely Dionysiac or Titanic; they cannot be wholly grasped by the intellect; they must be suffered, felt, seen. This inexpressible turmoil of our animal emotional life is an experience of other chaos matched by our own chaos. We see the form and order not as pure and abstract but as something emerged from chaos, something which has suffered into being. The humanities are always caught up in the actual chaos of living, and they also emerge from that chaos. If they touch us at all, they touch us totally, for they speak to what we are too.

Note that Arrowsmith’s understanding of the humanities is far more modest than that of Brooks or Nussbaum. For him, a prolonged encounter with the humanistic tradition amounts to a more and more sensate anguish at the recognition of our own chaos (this chaos is what Roth calls stupidity, and Phillips recalcitrance). The form and order of a great poem or a beautiful argument, we come to understand, suffer into being, emerge from the chaos of another consciousness. Which is to say that these accomplished objects, these solid touchstones, are not touchstones at all, but fragile occasional formal gatherings… The form and the order of literature and philosophy, in other words, can be thought of as a thin crust lying atop a deep fault line. We value many literary works precisely to the extent that they manifest the fault, the underlying chaos.

I’ll turn to the Schwartz poem in a moment. Time to post this.

Background on Bobby Gonzalez here. He’s been fired and is suing.

On admissions standards at Seton Hall:

Every one of those kids that I brought in, I’m not the admissions director. I’m not the administration. They were very well aware of all of their backgrounds. They admitted every one of them. There was a process with every one of those young men, they knew every kid there academically. They knew every player we brought into the program.

On his future:

Star Ledger: Do you feel that, given everything that has happened, you’ll have another shot to coach again?

BG: Absolutely. If you look around the country — and I’m certainly not going to name any names of coaches or schools — but there’s been guys right now currently (coaching) that have had sex scandals. There have been guys that have had DWIs that are coaching. There have been guys that have had major NCAA violations that are coaching.