[M]y fraternity brothers and I walked over to our plot in Greek Bowl to … sing [a] hymn. When we got there, the music was so loud and the marijuana smell was so thick that you could have confused it for Woodstock. We couldn’t even see our plot.

We turned around and walked back to our RV.

About 15 minutes later, the first round of shootings occurred. 

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Finally someone’s writing a general piece about the recurrent phenomenon of shootings – sometimes mass shootings – at HBCU homecomings. The writer doesn’t go beyond vivid descriptions and handwringing, but it’s a start.

This year, [North Carolina A&T University] officials reported 131,000 people attended events throughout their homecoming weekend, pumping millions of dollars into the Greensboro economy.

Getta loada that. A school with 14,000 students, and this is their homecoming, with tens of thousands of strangers there getting high and getting excited and getting trigger-happy. Some schools are responding with closed campuses and mandatory i.d. cards, etc. Some are happily continuing to walk into bloodbaths year after year. But all must know that when you concentrate enough people and enough partying in one space, there’s a good chance some stupid fucker’s gonna haul out the AR15 just for the hell of it.

Datz gunny America, folks, and denial only kills more people.

To the long list of shootings/mass shootings during homecoming festivities we can now add Tennessee State University, whose parade fireworks turned out to be – natch; it’s Tennessee – guns. Various celebrants are currently bleeding out in local hospitals.

This blog has long followed the way gun-mad America has ritualistically gunnified more and more of our public events, especially those involving parties and football/baseball/basketball games. Gather large numbers of excited people pretty much anywhere now. Make some of them drunk or high; piss some of them off because they lost a game or an object of sexual interest or indeed any sort of competition/argument.

Or hey maybe just make one of them plain ol’ celebratory and what better way to express your exuberance than to shoot your AK into the air, or into a crowd? Once guns are always and ever there, and once they take on massive symbolic/expressive significance, it seems pretty obvious that Morgan State and many others will, year after year, feature gunfire as a crucial part of homecoming.

And the logic of escalation/tradition means that by the third gun-year, five people will be shot (five people were just shot at Morgan State’s homecoming) rather than one or two. It also may mean groups of shooters: Baltimore’s mayor has announced that “It’s believed there were three shooters firing into the crowd, none apprehended or ID’d at this time.”

Getta loada that! THREE shooters.

Hysterically racing away from the shots; lockdown; weeping with your loved ones when lockdown’s over and you’ve survived — it’s a full-grown postmodern metanarrative now, self-defining and even somehow cathartic. We’ve come through! We’ve cheated the reaper again this year. On to next year.

This tweeter expresses surprise (smh: shake my head) that one of America’s most violent campuses – Virginia State University – features violence. It was homecoming; there was a hiphop concert; the evening featured gunfire, injury, and a bunch of fights.

[At Bethune Cookman University’s] homecoming game, [Senior Associate AD Tony] O’Neal approached officers in his golf cart near the south gate entrance, yelling at them to help with parking tickets. Authorities said a sergeant approached O’Neal to find out what he needed and that’s when the arrest report showed O’Neal became irate and “jumped out of the golf cart, ran up to the Sergeant Morford and banged his forehead against his,” according to a report.

The sergeant backed away from O’Neal but police said he became more irate and “reached out and grabbed the Sergeant Morford with both hands in an aggressive manner, pushing Sergeant Morford backwards.”

Authorities said they were forced to take O’Neal to the ground after refusing to comply with their commands. O’Neal … was charged with battery on a law enforcement officer…

No wonder he gets pretty much the highest salary on campus.

So after the latest bloodletting at the school’s 100th homecoming a few days ago, officials have closed the campus, and everyone’s gotta wear an i.d. at all times. The tyke who likes to shoot his machine guns into crowds at events like homecomings has been arrested, while sixteen people try not to die of the wounds he inflicted. One person has already died.

Ooh, wonder what his motive was! I’m thinking someone inadvertently shoved him. It was crowded and all.

This blog, recognizing that fatal shootings are standard at university homecoming events, now calls homecoming guncoming, that special time of year when young Americans gather, get excited, and do what they do when lots of them are armed.

For Tuskegee’s all-important one hundredth guncoming the other day, bang went the weapons and down went the students, faculty, alumni, and other celebrants. One dead, multiple serious injuries. And of course PLENTY of raw footage from various vantage points for you to enjoy. “The amount of bullets shot last night in Tuskegee amidst their homecoming weekend celebration is terrifying,” writes one audience member. “I couldn’t even finish the video.” (Reminder from SOS: The correct word is NUMBER, not AMOUNT.)

The world’s press is covering this latest guncoming. American rituals are so interesting.

See you next year, Golden Tigers! Crouch low.

It’s happening at Albany State!

Background on Guncoming here.

It’s impressive to see Americans finally perceive the reality of much of the amazing bloodshed around here. Literary types like UD know this as a variant of Chekhov’s Gun Principle:

“If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired. Otherwise don’t put it there.”

If you’re going to hang weapons in every corner of your state, the weapons are going to be fired. We tend, like traditional playwrights, to affix motives to this firing, but the world has moved well past Chekhov and Ibsen, into Beckett and post-Beckett, and this is a world in which people just do things. No reason.

“Vladimir: What do we do now?
Estragon: Wait.
Vladimir: Yes, but while waiting.
Estragon: What about hanging ourselves?
Vladimir: Hmm. It’d give us an erection.
Estragon: (highly excited). An erection!
Vladimir: With all that follows.
Where it falls mandrakes grow.
That’s why they shriek when you pull them up.
Did you not know that?
Estragon: Let’s hang ourselves immediately!”

What about shooting into a crowd of people?

All of America is way gunny, but certain areas (Balto MD, larger Shreveport, Macon, and Richmond, among others) are just totally insanely gunny. Colleges in these areas are getting all shot up, especially during big, open, outdoor/evening events like Homecoming, which UD, for these campuses, calls Guncoming.

Morgan State has now indeed announced it’s building a wall around itself.

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And look – its not very college-y — everyone knows that. Which is why so many shot up schools are postponing the inevitable. It’s a mark, a stigma, a plain admission that your school sits in a shooting gallery. And so – parents and applicants ask – what does that say about the experience of going out at night to get a pizza? Do we really want to choose this school?

This is a partial list of schools where homecoming features (sometimes year after year) mass shooting on campus. Bowie State’s the latest. I think it’s time to call this a trend.

To call it a trend and think about it. Why is Guncoming (seems a better name for it) a thing?

Here are a few observations.

1.) These are already notoriously shot up locations: Baltimore, Shreveport area, Macon area, Richmond area. The gun crime rate in these locations is astounding; these campuses are unsafe.

2.) I don’t think the campuses quite acknowledge/realize how badly shot up things are around them. I recall Grambling’s president’s comment: “Why would someone come to dear old Grambling and commit an act of violence?” His campus sits in one of the most murderous metro areas in the US, but he thinks he’s in Arcadia.

I mean, UD gets it that you’re profoundly disinclined to characterize the local bloodletting correctly if you want your institution to survive. Let the murder/injury rate get bruited about, and parents are going to be reluctant to entrust their children to you. I’ve made this point also about whacked out Waco, where parents still send their kids to Baylor, despite knock your socks off gun violence all over town. (Plus some, er, on-campus issues.) When will Guncoming locations become so infamous that people won’t want to go to school there? Things are definitely going to get bloodier.

3.) Big, open, often late-night homecoming events are just asking for it. Penetrate the crowd with ease and find the guy/group that has dissed you in some way and let it rip. Maybe you don’t know your victims, but someone jostled you and you’ve been itching to give your Glock a test run. Don’t make it easy for the gunnies: Close your campus, and I mean seriously close it. Don’t do late-night events.

Just got back from the object of my pilgrimage: The Cy Twombly collection at the Menil in Houston. As I entered the Analysis of the Rose as Sentimental Despair room, I found myself weeping – not knowing why, not caring why, but weeping. As if that moment – all alone in the beautiful building dedicated to his work, no one else anywhere, the sound of complete silence – were the reason, the real reason, the full reason, UD hauled herself onto a plane from DC and came down here. And – listen up!

After a long stretch of years, I found myself drawn to re-visit the Cy Twombly Gallery in Houston this past spring. It felt like a homecoming. I stood in the room containing the polyptych in five parts, “Analysis of the Rose as Sentimental Despair” (1985), for hours, observing the subtle shifts of light and shadow with tears streaming down my cheeks. Twombly’s inimitable handwriting was so familiar, although the colors—burgeoning wine-drunk purples and devastating orange-reds—had been so hard to hold in the mind and the realization that they would slip away from me again was heartbreaking. This has been the one group of works about which I’ve been unable to write. These tender pink blushes and bruised blooms always struck me as too achingly beautiful, almost embarrassingly so, to put into words. They contain all that they need in phrases drawn from Leopardi, Rilke, and Rumi (“In drawing and drawing you, his pains are delectable. His flames are like water.”). More text, it would seem, could only serve [to] diminish them.

That’s a whole other human being, tears streaming in front of the exact same work that brought on my waterworks! Listen to what else Claire Daigle has to say about UD’s way-favorite artist.

It has become something of a cliché to call Twombly a painters’ painter, but with his charmed bookishness, he is foremost, in my mind, a writers’ painter. His gestures move between those of writing and drawing, between drawing and painting. Signs perch on the verge of manifest expression, often evading, occasionally gratifying legibility. His [art] partakes of Hermes’s signs, gathering in force as they range from mark to word to quotation through redaction and negation to clamor and quietude. The chromatic incidents—from tiny gem gleams to full blown detonations—and the extraordinary range of types of mark are felt only by the body, Dionysian. They remind us of all in art that escapes the verbal clutch that would hope to seize that which exists only in moments when the attentive gaze is fully present.

It was Roland Barthes’ essay on Twombly that got me going on the man, and I’ve never stopped loving him

Grambling’s head football coach hires his mass rape and assault enabler buddy to be part of the coaching staff at his school, and the entire civilized world – including Grambling icon Doug Williams – says You and your school can go fuck yourselves.

In response to this devastating rejection, Jackson issues a mad slew of lies, boasting in particular that Grambling – a university so out of control as to have produced a mass shooting, with one murder, at its last homecoming event – has in its sports program – almost always the most violent location on campus – “well-developed programs… in place” to avoid the Art Briles-generated catastrophe at Baylor.

Both Putin and Jackson are self-immolating. Let us see if either can be stopped by any sane people that might be around them.

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UPDATE: Does Art Briles know how to save money? Until a few years ago, he was earning over six million a year as a football coach; Baylor settled over fifteen million on him when he left in disgrace. That’s an awful lot of money, and now that Briles is out of yet another job – he ended up staying at Grambling for four days before public opinion made it impossible for him to remain – UD figures he can use that money – I mean, assuming he saved any – to live quite a nice life surrounded by the many Americans – Hue Jackson is only one of them – who don’t care about what he did at Baylor.

I’ve seen cynical desperate college athletics hires in my time, but nothing beats what Grambling – site of two very recent on-campus murders – has done in hiring coach Art Briles. At Baylor, Briles “repeatedly cover[ed] up allegations of assault, sexual and otherwise, perpetrated by multiple Baylor football players.” “[H]e presided over a culture with rampant sexual violence toward women, including a former student’s lawsuit alleging at least 52 acts of rape committed by 31 football players from 2011 to ’14.” Many of them were players he recruited, though he knew before he recruited them that they were very dangerous people.

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So maybe what’s going on at Grambling is a kind of unprecedented college product-placement. Lots of people like violence, and some of those people, while being violent, would also like to be educated. At Grambling you’re guaranteed to be living near one of America’s most outstanding murder capitals, with a mass shooting not long ago at one of the school’s homecoming events; you’re also guaranteed an ethos – embodied by Coach Briles – of tolerance of sexual violence and physical assault more broadly.

… a group of American universities where gun massacres coincide with their homecoming festivities. We’ve already covered Grambling’s celebrations; only a few days later, Fort Valley State in Georgia struts its stuff.

Stay tuned! It wouldn’t be homecoming without a spray of flowers and a spray of bullets.