As usual, a large limb has broken off onto our front yard during this late March snowfall. UD‘s practiced eye sees this one as quite loppable. She’s more worried about traumatized early spring shoots.

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She’s just back from her first lopping.

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The Tao of Lopping.

With each clean cut yielding a core of yellow wood, there’s a good feeling: the offshoots from the main trunk give easily, and it’s pleasant to think you’re putting things right branch by branch.

With cold fingers despite your gloves (first you try rubbery garden gloves, then a rather nice pair of  leather ones), you gather a few lopped branches and toss them over the wooden fence so the town maintenance men will pick them up.

But then you wonder:  Would they prefer one large unlopped limb?  Too late to ask the question; you’ve lopped the thing… But you think of the wood chipper and wonder if you’re doing things right.

The tao of lopping:  There is no right.  There is no wrong.  There is snow falling on ‘thesda, your cold hands, your pleasure at each clean cut.

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Or, if you like:

The tao of Sheryl  Sandberg:  Lean in.

… the author shares a memory of his time there in the ‘seventies.

Assigned to [Robert] Berman for tenth-grade English, I took a seat one September morning alongside sixteen or seventeen other boys. We waited in silence as he sat at his desk, chain-smoking Benson & Hedges cigarettes and watching us from behind dark glasses. Finally, Mr. Berman stood up, took a fresh stick of chalk, climbed onto his chair, and reached above the blackboard to draw a horizontal line on the paint. “This,” he said, after a theatrical pause, “is Milton.” He let his hand fall a few inches, drew another line, and said, “This is Shakespeare.” Another line, lower, on the blackboard: “This is Mahler.” And, just below, “Here is Browning.” Then he took a long drag on his cigarette, dropped the chalk onto the floor, and, using the heel of his black leather loafer, ground it into the wooden floorboards. “And this, gentlemen,” he said, “is you.”

… takes a close look at an instance of superior writing. Superior not only in its displaying higher verbal skill than most other pieces of prose display, but also in its having the effect of elevating us, ethically and emotionally, as we read it.

Jennifer Homans, Tony Judt’s widow, wants to clarify, for readers of his last book, Thinking the Twentieth Century, “the conditions under which it was written.” These were profoundly dark, and “the darkness shaped the book, in its form but also in its ideas.” For Judt, ideas were personal as well as public; abstract laws were about bettering the living conditions of not at all abstract people, and as he gradually, humiliatingly, miserably died of ALS, he became very intimately enraged at the way people less fortunate than he were suffering with it:

[M]any of these people were younger than Tony and destitute or medically uninsured, with narrow if not ruined life possibilities. They needed help — practical social and medical services. Humiliation was a terrible feeling, but, as he felt strongly, it was also — and should be treated as — an ugly social fact. “Night,” his essay describing his “imprisonment without parole,” was partly for these new friends, and so, in another key, was the end of Thinking the Twentieth Century, where Tony mounted as fierce — and felt — a case as ever he had for our need to “think socially”: to make human rather than monetary gain the goal of social policy. This was not the politics of disability or special interest; it was about collective responsibility and the duty of us all to each other.

So that’s the basic thing, the thing Homans wants to convey as people open Judt’s book – its particular intensity about injustice and the social good derives from his having felt, viscerally, a certain unjust endgame. “Tony’s own physical hardship, and his sense of the fragility of human dignity, if anything increased his worry for the world he was about to exit.”

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But there’s so much more in this essay than its basic point…. Phrases like the fragility of human dignity, for starters, fragility and dignity having a nice brittle uncertain assonance… When interrupted by the smooth word human the phrase generates an almost graphic sense of the shaky balance we try to maintain between the ideal of dignity and the reality of, well, shakiness.

Or take the way Homans conveys the always peculiarly intense nature of Judt’s intellectuality:

For Tony, ideas were a kind of emotion, something he felt and cared about in the way that most people do about feelings like sadness or love.

This is odd – hard to understand, perhaps. How can concepts be sad or happy or passionate? Maybe one can think about it in a couple of ways. Judt spent his life raising, rearing, if you’d like, ideas – he loved to gestate ideas, expand them, argue them; and in this thinking and molding and arguing he was cherishing, maintaining, defending, growing, his sense of the world, his sense of the best ways to think about the world. Like a lot of intellectuals, he seems never to have outgrown the excited erotic fun of the adolescent bull session. So ideas were emotions in this sense, that they were always an intense part – perhaps the most intense part – of his affective life.

And in another way Judt was simply a materialist thinker, in the left tradition …

And yet that is an abstraction, and it doesn’t take into account the emotionality involved here, which I think has to do with the pathos of his lifelong effort to feel the reality of human suffering — to feel the link between that suffering and certain settled political and social ways of doing things. Think of an excerpt like this one from Orwell’s essay, Down the Mine:

Here am I sitting writing in front of my comfortable coal fire. It is April but I still need a fire. Once a fortnight the coal cart drives up to the door and men in leather jerkins carry the coal indoors in stout sacks smelling of tar and shoot it clanking into the coal-hole under the stairs. It is only very rarely, when I make a definite mental-effort, that I connect this coal with that far-off labour in the mines. It is just ‘coal’– something that I have got to have; black stuff that arrives mysteriously from nowhere in particular, like manna except that you have to pay for it. You could quite easily drive a car right across the north of England and never once remember that hundreds of feet below the road you are on the miners are hacking at the coal. Yet in a sense it is the miners who are driving your car forward. Their lamp-lit world down there is as necessary to the daylight world above as the root is to the flower.

You sense in this paragraph the same emotionally intense “mental-effort” to connect political abstraction with human suffering. One reason Judt’s brief autobiography (I reviewed it here) is so beautiful is that it breathes life into the all but moribund ‘lost illusions’ plot of so many lives — so many politically engaged lives. Judt recalls, as he lies dying, his several youthful attempts toward ideologically charged collective life – kibbutz Zionism, for instance – and how they all failed, all brought him to where “Fierce unconditional loyalties – to a country, a God, an idea, or a man – have come to terrify me.”

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As he grew sicker, he became understandably more fearful. There was too much he couldn’t control in the outside world: everything from electrical outlets for the breathing machine (batteries fail) to his wheelchair (power-operated but he had no way to steer it) and — not least — the unbearable goodwill of people who didn’t understand. He took grim refuge in his study, his sickroom, his closed, safe prison-cocoon that would house his deteriorating body and entrapped mind.

Grim refuge is something of a cliché, but never mind; the phrase that hit me here was “the unbearable goodwill of people who didn’t understand.” For a couple of reasons. Since Homans has already made vividly clear how much lucidity, clarity, and understanding meant to Judt, we now feel with a special ache just how hideous this incomprehensible, incommunicable condition must have been for him.

And then too, the writing here is so personal, I’m receiving it so strongly, she’s been able to place me so powerfully in his sickroom (“thick air and layers of dust impossible to clean, smells that seemed almost visible, of antiseptic, flowers, morphine, and the burn and buzz of electricity from the amplifier that projected his ever-weakening voice; windows thrown open for air and light and hastily shut against the unnatural chill in his static and stationary bones”), that I absolutely see myself there understanding. And then I absolutely recognize that although I want to see that – want to idealize that – the reality is that like almost everyone else I would have brought into that study an unbearable goodwill… Which has me musing yet more deeply on my empathy generally, my… humanity — a very big abstraction, but this great writing has fitted it to one particular prison-cocoon.

Ultimately this is great writing because Homans regenerates in me a powerful and immediate sense of what an abstract phrase like the life of mind really means. The life of the mind.

For Tony the incentive behind the book — and it had to be a powerful one to overcome the discomfort and depression that were his constant companions — was primarily intellectual, a matter of clarification. [W]hen his dialogue with his co-author] worked, as it usually did, Tony was transformed. Sick Tony, frustrated and anguished Tony, unable to eat or scratch or breathe properly, his body aching from inactivity, was able, with Tim and through sheer mental and physical exertion, to find some relief and exhilaration in the life of the mind… To hell with the disease, with fate, with the body, with the future and the past. He would keep the conversation going and raise the stakes; his public would fight back — and when you fight, you feel alive. Engagé. He needed that to keep going. Which is why he kept going with Thinking the Twentieth Century; it was part of the fight, from his withering comments on intellectuals who supported the Iraq war right down to his ever-prescient defense of the role of the state in public life. He had a soldier’s discipline and even though he was miserable he fought on, saying what he had to say and refining and honing his every word. That was the only kind of public intellectual he knew how to be.

In the middle of my Don DeLillo seminar this morning, a ceiling light flashed and a very loud alarm sounded.

And sounded and sounded.

“Guess we’d better get out of here,” I said to my students as a colleague popped his head into the room. “Should we get out?” he asked. Yes, said UD. Time to get out.

As we tromped downstairs from the fourth floor, we were joined by ever-swelling masses of humanity.

Everyone was thinking the same thing: It’s effing cold out there.

UD had been discussing the many senses of “plot” in Libra, and she just kept doing that — as they tromped the stairs, as her group gathered around her outside the building, and as they were told to get away from the building! by a security person. Talk, talk, talk. UD never stopped. “At $50,000 a year tuition,” she explained to her class, “I think you deserve seamless instruction.”

She’d brought her little brown leather notebook out with her. She checked her list of recurrent themes in the four novels we’ve so far read and talked and talked and talked. The class talked too.

They let us back in after fifteen minutes and we all enjoyed the feeling of warming up as we reentered the fourth floor classroom. Once everyone got settled, UD started up talking again.

… to inaugurate my new leather writing book: The roof of the Boardwalk Plaza Hotel. It’s a warm windy afternoon, just after the Pet Parade.

I left the hot tub up here to go down to the boardwalk and watch the parade (Elvis sheepdogs with black wigs and silver capes; dachshunds as frankfurters). Now I’m back on the roof, sitting with my sister as we rock ourselves into a stupor on white chairs.

British and American flags flap away on either side of us, and, on the ocean’s horizon, white container ships float. There are gulls, contrails, and white clouds in a pale blue sky.

All of which makes me nostalgic for my sabbatical year (six months, really; the rest was Key West when I couldn’t take the cold anymore) next door to this hotel, in Edgewater House.

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Strange combination of influences, this Halloween at the beach. The constantly lulling effect of the water, wind, and sun is the main thing. You feel as though you’re hovering well above the business of being mortal, skipping over the hard parts… At night there’s the infinity of the sky over the waves, and you feel part of that too… So in the hot tub I found myself singing Time Passes Slowly Up Here in the Mountains, its long calm lines covering the same all the time in the world territory.

But these are the Days of the Dead, and, like something out of Fellini, skeletons and grim reapers cavort on the beach. Halloween Week on our room’s tv features Beetle Juice (UD had never seen it!) and episode after episode of House, which takes you deeply into our decrepitude, and, in the character of its hero, asks in each segment whether life is worth living.

… she monitors the news coming out of Cobleskill, New York, the closest town to her houselet in Summit.

If you’ve been reading University Diaries for awhile, you know that almost every August Les UDs (sans La Kid, who finds their way-nowheresville place, and the coyotes who bark around it at night, boring and alarming respectively) drive north and then west to what used to be called the Leatherstocking Region (New York State has decided the name’s a dud), but which is basically an area between the Adirondacks and the Catskills, with Cooperstown the best-known part of it.

There they read, write, go to a Glimmerglass opera, go (this year) to Stageworks Hudson for Imagining Madoff, visit with friends, take long walks, scythe their way through the overgrowth on the path from their teeny houselet to their absurdly teeny other houselet on their little pond, take day trips, and, in the middle of the month, eat dinner at the Bear Cafe in Woodstock to celebrate UD‘s birthday.

The SUNY campus at Cobleskill is sleepy, and architecturally unappealing; but lookee here. It just made National Public Radio.

… It was lamb day recently at the State University of New York’s meat lab in Cobleskill, a little town near Albany. Guys in white smocks and hard hats haul carcasses out of the cooler. They slaughtered the animals the day before.

… The local food movement is driving more farmers to raise animals for meat. But between farm and table is a bottleneck — a shortage of small slaughterhouses serving small farms, especially in the Northeast.

“What we need is for that smaller operator who may have 100 acres or 150 acres — he would like to have the opportunity to take and raise a few cattle or a few hogs and be able to slaughter them and sell them locally. To do that, you have to have an infrastructure,” says Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack…

… know that UD spends part of the summer at her little house in the wilds of Upstate New York. As the academic year ends and August seems less distant, she begins to follow the news in the Leatherstocking Region — which is what her part of the state calls itself.

But maybe not for much longer.

The name has mystery, history and romance but tourism leaders say the name Central Leatherstocking Region doesn’t attract tourists.

After long discussions and a virtually unanimous vote at a recent meeting tourism leaders in that area agreed to now call the region ‘Central New York’.

The Central Leatherstocking was named for James Fenimore Cooper’s literary works ‘Leatherstocking Tales’. Cooper’s father founded Cooperstown and 4 of the 5 ‘Leatherstocking Tales’ were based out of the New York area.

“Of course Natty Bumppo was a prototype of the American frontiersman, wore leather britches. He was referred to as leatherstocking. He was Cooper’s hero in all five leatherstocking tales” says Paul D’Ambrosio who serves as chief curator for the Fenimore Art Museum.

Stephen Elliott who is the president of N.Y.S. Historical Association says the name Central Leatherstocking Region didn’t attract tourists to their area. “When people plan trips the practicality is that they know where it is so they know if they want to go there. While we may have lost that great romance connotation the fact of the matter is people know where [Central New York] is.” says Elliott.

A UD reader long ago pointed UD in the direction of Mark Twain’s essay about Cooper, which says everything I’ve thought about Cooper ever since Harold Kaplan, at Northwestern University many years ago, assigned Deerslayer in one of her American literature classes.

There have been daring people in the world who claimed that Cooper could write English, but they are all dead now… Now I feel sure, deep down in my heart, that Cooper wrote about the poorest English that exists in our language, and that the English of “Deerslayer” is the very worst that even Cooper ever wrote.

I may be mistaken, but it does seem to me that “Deerslayer” is not a work of art in any sense; it does seem to me that it is destitute of every detail that goes to the making of a work of art; in truth, it seems to me that “Deerslayer” is just simply a literary delirium tremens.

A work of art? It has no invention; it has no order, system, sequence, or result; it has no lifelikeness, no thrill, no stir, no seeming of reality; its characters are confusedly drawn, and by their acts and words they prove that they are not the sort of people the author claims that they are; its humor is pathetic; its pathos is funny; its conversations are — oh! indescribable; its love-scenes odious; its English a crime against the language.

Counting these out, what is left is Art. I think we must all admit that.

(UD‘s house is in Summit, New York. She’s therefore introduced a new category with this post: SNAPSHOTS FROM SUMMIT.)

It’s late on an April afternoon, and I’m wondering why drifts of white moths are suddenly floating by my sixth floor window at George Washington University.

Moths? This high up?

I open the window and lean out, listening to police sirens screaming away at the site of the nuclear summit, and they’re petals. They’re thousands of dogwood petals pulled up to the sixth floor by the wind.

They seem in no hurry to settle back to the ground, so I lean against the window sill and consider the cloud suspended at the level of my eye.

Usually what you see flying by here are helicopters and airplanes. Also white birds. Some sort of gull, I think.

Down at ground level, ambulances quietly enter and exit the hospital driveway. The middle of UD‘s view is all about the new skyscraper where the old hospital used to be. The university’s engineering department, down the hall from UD‘s office, follows the construction with great excitement, stapling onto a bulletin board an array of photographs chronicling each stage of the building.

Having taught her classes, UD prepares to walk to the Foggy Bottom metro and go home. She takes her soft black leather notebook in which she will continue to chronicle not the streamlined evolution of skyscrapers but the faltering progression of her life. She’s kept a diary – not University Diaries, just a diary – since she was thirteen.

She calls Mr UD from Metro Center. He doesn’t teach today and will meet her at Grosvenor, the stop closest to their house.

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And there he is, in their bright red car, the car they’ve named Walentynka (Valentine). UD washed Walentynka last weekend, and she’s looking insanely bright red at the moment.

“So David says they’re getting family physician recruitment calls from all sorts of places around the country where they wouldn’t want to live,” UD says, bringing Mr UD up to date on a friend of theirs whose wife has finished a residency. “Quoting David: Some east-bumfuck-back-of-nowhere place where I wouldn’t even want to see healthy people… But it’s a theory of mine [Mr UD cringes in preparation for one of UD‘s theories.] that there are, strictly speaking, no uninteresting places in the world. There are:

1. interesting places;
2. uninteresting places NEAR interesting places; and
3. places interesting by virtue of being uninteresting.”

“Tell me more about the third one.”

“Take Bismarck, North Dakota. Say you had to move to Bismarck, North Dakota. Flat. Underpopulated. Bad weather. Conveniently located just to the north of South Dakota. And yet its very nothingness has inspired, for instance, all those Kathleen Norris books – very interesting books, as it turns out – about the spiritual fascination of nothingness.”

“Let’s buy a house in Bismarck. I’ll check it out on the web. We know absolutely nothing about Bismarck. Right? Absolutely nothing.”

“Absolutely nothing.”

So after dinner at a new Japanese place on the Rockville Pike, we drive home and Mr UD gets to work.

I’m sitting up in bed, gazing at the rather threatening wall of green outside our picture windows (I don’t garden or even cut back very much this part of our acre – it’s the dog’s playground – and the wildlife is really encroaching.), when Mr UD bustles in with the Bismarck results.

“It’s on a river! The Missouri I think. For seven hundred thousand dollars you can get a beautiful house set right on the riverbank. We’re retiring to Bismarck.”

There are passages – certain rousing conclusions, like this one from Concerto and Fugue in C Minor, BWV 909 (doubtful) – that amaze and exhilarate me as I play them. They heat the blood.

In the morning, before I leave for campus, I play these passages again and again. My heart, my mind, my hands — everything’s sort of feverish. The spotlight over the notes on page 95 of Johann Sebastian Bach Miscellaneous Keyboard Works Toccatas Fugues And Other Pieces illuminates the little world in which I sit as long as I can, picking out sounds and smoothing them.

While I teach, while I order coffee, while I sit on the metro, these final notes flow through my mind. Not just these notes; all the variations on them that whoever wrote it worked through the piece.

Whatever else my mind’s doing during these hours, it’s also spinning harmony after harmony.

At some point I drop this game and decide to sing all parts at once of the Domine Deus duet from Mozart’s Great Mass. High low up down alto soprano strings.

Later in the evening I return to the piano.

For years I made do with my father’s Waldorf spinet. Not much point tuning it, and I didn’t much care, being a good singer and a bad pianist.

As I got better on the instrument, I wanted more sound, and I had the spinet taken away. I bought in its place a pretty good baby grand.

It’s a beautiful thing to see, this piano, in a corner of the living room, its lid propped high, light from the deck windows on its dark wood.

I bought a red rectangular leather cushion for its black bench.

The high shelves behind the piano are all about my music books. Everything’s out of order. Suzanne’s between Handel and Haydn.

I like grazing the shelves, thinking I’ll sing this, getting distracted by that.

Anyway, this is what I’ve decided to thank this Thanksgiving. The piano that takes up a spotlit corner of the living room and heats my blood.

… is SUNY Cobleskill, a dispiriting collection of ‘sixties buildings along the road into the old but not very charming town of Cobleskill, New York. The university has a cute web page, but its drab, not too well-maintained, public high schooly architecture is a downer — especially given its backdrop, the long hills and bright fields of the leatherstocking region.

This photo has done its best to emphasize autumn leaves and a few attractive buildings, but it still gives you a sense of what I’m talking about. In decades of summer driving in the region, Les UD‘s have never thought to turn onto the campus and take a stroll.

Same deal for SUNY Albany, which we drive past when we need to go to the city, an hour’s drive from our place way up in teeny Summit. There too, at SUNY Albany, we’ve never wanted to get out of the car, though we did once drive onto campus. A current graduate student describes the problem in a recent op/ed in the Schenectady paper:

… [T]he university is physically a cold place, marked by mammoth concrete structures. Few buildings on campus are warm and inviting. Unlike some universities, after four weeks on campus, I have yet to find a place where one can sit where it is socially acceptable, if not expected, that one will say hello to the strangers at the next table. Where there are picnic tables, they seem to be placed somewhere off the podium distant from one another, leaving one to feel you are the university. [Not sure what she means by this last bit — That you alone are what’s going on?]

When chairs are placed in public areas, they tend to line the walls, facing large empty spaces instead of facing other chairs. Instead of inviting those sitting to speak to those nearby, they instead force the occupant to watch others at a distance, often enforcing a feeling of loneliness.

The other evening I found myself wandering the campus accompanied by a visiting Chinese scholar of Shakespeare (whom I know from a non-university activity), hoping to sit and watch a DVD on a laptop computer. After 45 minutes we gave up. Might I suggest a few carefully placed clusters of picnic tables up on top of the podium?

The university forces people to physically be either in or out. To leave campus is literally a half-mile walk, at which point one will find oneself on the fringes of your standard suburban sprawl with little to see. By contrast, many colleges border an area specializing in goods and services for students, including clothing, books, coffee shops and cheap restaurants. Often these become tourist destinations. Might such a zone, something similar to Ithaca’s college-town neighborhood, make a good economic development project? If successful, would it add to the richness of the Capital Region, perhaps in some way resembling Albany’s Lark Street or Jay Street in Schenectady?

Lack of what architects call density makes for non-places. Things are too big, too monumental, at SUNY Albany, and the windy spaces the monuments make between themselves sharpen the sense of nothingness. Add to this the lack of any background, any physical surrounding at all outside of sky and tree, and you get existential isolation.

As I’d hoped, the weird song of the wood thrushes is all around me now, after their nesting.  I thought I’d only hear it in the morning and the evening, but they sing from the high trees in the copses around our house all the time.   According to this guy, they must be at the height of their “territorial breeding activity.”

I keep drawing everyone’s attention to it — my husband’s, my daughter’s, my sister’s; and, today, while he was visiting, my friend Jon’s — but no one cares.  No one tries to distinguish the thrush’s ee-o-lay from the enormous ambient birdnoise of Garrett Park. 

I know they don’t care, and I don’t mind, and I turn the whole thing into a joke.  Let’s humor Miss Marple…

I was just as indifferent years ago when my mother, sitting with me in her beautiful Japanese garden, hushed our conversation and told me to listen to this or that impossible-to-distinguish piping.  She held her 1980 Field Guide to the Birds by Roger Tory Peterson in her lap, and I smiled as she now and then, with a little pencil, placed an X on his Systematic Checklist next to pileated woodpecker or purple martin.  I couldn’t name the plants in her garden, and I couldn’t distinguish the birds who pulled at her feeders.

Now I take that book from the books I inherited, and I study very closely the thrushes, the plovers.  I even discover a line of poetry in a heading on page 121:  HEADS OF BELTED PLOVERS.

Boots of spanish leather, heads of belted plovers.

Heads of belted plovers is the beginning of a poem.

I’ll try to think of one.

… limns the declension of Ruth Madoff:

Before the scandal, Mrs. Madoff radiated an understated sense of taste. She favored slim black pants, fine-gauge white cotton crew necks, Susan Bennis Warren Edwards crocodile-leather flats and classic gold jewelry, according to a friend of the family who saw her regularly at gatherings.

Now Mrs. Madoff spends her days largely confined to the two-story four-bedroom penthouse on 64th Street near Lexington Avenue, dressed in jeans and an Oxford-style shirt, according to someone who is in touch with her regularly.

… in this morning’s New York Times that he insisted on reading them aloud across the breakfast table to UD.

1.) The managing director of the IMF, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, is a notorious letch. A French satirist, Stéphane Guillon, describes a recent visit of his to Radio France:

To prepare for Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s entry into the building at Radio France, Mr. Guillon said, “exceptional measures have been taken in order not to awaken the beast,” including the banning of high heels and leather pants. The head of publicity would greet him in a burqa, and “at the sound of a siren, Stage 5 of the alert system, all female workers must be evacuated.”

2.)

… Germany takes a highly regimented approach to naming. Children’s names must be approved by local authorities, and there is a reference work, the International Handbook of Forenames, to guide them. Jürgen Udolph, a University of Leipzig professor and head of the information center there that provides certificates of approval for names that have not yet made the official list, said that “the state has a responsibility to protect people from idiotic forenames.”

UD likes macho men.

She can’t help it. She was socialized into it by a sexist society and now it’s too late. Hope perhaps lies in future generations.

When pertinent, UD likes to point out on this blog instances of her attraction to academic rogues, rascals, rakes and randies, pre-impotence Hemingways swaggering the quad…

Today she likes the Harvard professor featured in this Crimson story, a med school guy going after Grassley and the other “quasi-religious” pharmascolds who worry about conflict of interest.

He argues that “physicians should be free to determine on their own if [an industry] gift is a bribe.”

How exactly would this work?

“This gift is a bribe. Great. I can use the money.”

No, no. And here’s where UD begins to pant a bit. “If people do bad things,” says her man, “shoot them.”

I also like how he describes the current turmoil over the issue: “Now there’s some skin in the game.” Meaning now doctors are getting pissed because the rules are changing and they’re losing money. Life’s a rugby match, baby, and Grassley’s pissing off the other side and he better look out!

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One editorial thing. The Crimson reporter notes that many other medical faculty believe “academic medicine has long suffered from ethical breeches.”

I think this would be trousers made with no leather products.

From the Columbus Ohio Dispatch.

A seemingly routine request by Miami University to purchase $167,000 worth of office chairs turned into a spirited exchange yesterday that ended with a rare rejection by the state Controlling Board, a legislative spending oversight panel.

In a bipartisan 6-1 vote, lawmakers slammed the door after realizing that Miami officials decided to purchase the most expensive office chairs available — the Aeron stretched-fabric brand. Of the 333 chairs purchased, 245 of them designated for staff and faculty offices cost $522 apiece. Chairs for conference rooms ranged from $397 to $446 each.

As members including Sen. Ray Miller, D-Columbus, grilled university architect Robert Keller about the purchase, lawmakers said they were not satisfied with the responses.

“They didn’t give a solid explanation as to why” they purchased the most expensive chairs, said Sen. Mark Wagoner, R-Toledo. “In a difficult financial environment, we have to be fiscally responsible.”

APG Office Furnishings of Cincinnati is providing the chairs and gave the university three options for chair styles. Two other options offered staff and faculty office chairs for $458 and $365.

Rep. Jay Hottinger, R-Newark, voted to reject the request but first reminded his colleagues that they were sitting in $2,000 high-back leather chairs.