Ah, now we’re getting to it. Now we’re getting to the bottom of the scum bucket.
The head of an organization representing the online for-profit schools, pissed that a congressman is opening hearings on their executives’ compensation, asks why the government isn’t going after six million dollar a year coaches.
Why should the feds harass zillionaires who pocket government money while destroying the lives of poor people, when the feds don’t harass zillionaires who pocket the same public money (through non-profit tax breaks, etc.) while destroying the country’s universities?
After all, both zillionaires take the noble cause of higher education and grind it down, down, down, down until it’s so dirty decent people avert their eyes. Why single out our whores and not theirs?
Yet the reason is simple. University football coaches give their students money and sex and great cars. For-profit school presidents give their students nothing.
… the more pretentious you are, the more words you’ll misuse.
Take the very pretentious Washington guy, Lanny Davis. He’s trying to say that he thinks it’s wrong to impute anti-semitic motives to people who disagree with you on Israel. This is what he says.
Impugning motives of people at the Center [for American Progress] and impugning [that] those motives are driven by anti-Semitism is, in my opinion, wrong.
The first use of impugning is okay, if mushy; impugning the motives would help a little. Imputing anti-semitic motives to people… would be much better.
The second use of impugning is incorrect. Implying would be correct. Implying that these motives are driven…
Pretentious people never speak or write clearly, being too grand for clarity.
Third from the top left. Glasses, blond hair.
“It went well. I met Conan O’Brien.”
Blurry. But it’ll do.
Required classes in Personal Wellness — known to the miserable students at the University of Northern Iowa as Personal Hellness — are a classic way to maintain the backwater label.
UNI students have a choice – they can sit in a 200-person auditorium and sleep through guest lecturers reading PowerPoints about STDs, or they can take Hellness online.
Student advice via Rate My Professors: Definitely take it online.
My favorite comment:
Can go through the power points just as you would in class, but without someone talking in the background.
Someone talking in the background. That would be the professor. If you take the course online you remove the static.
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It’s weird to think of your high school health class as part of a university’s liberal arts core. What was Cardinal Newman thinking when he left it off his list of the forms of knowledge a human being must have?
A couple of years ago the student body president described his own personal hellness and called for the end of the requirement.
Apparently his and other voices are beginning to be heard, because Northern Iowa’s liberal arts steering committee has recommended that the required personal wellness class be dropped. This has
provoked displeasure from current Personal Wellness instructors as well as faculty and staff in the UNI Department of Health, Physical Education and Leisure Services.
The personal wellness team has pulled out all the stops, jargon-wise, to defend the intellectual centrality of personal wellness:
“We feel very strongly about providing our students with health and wellness information, which we feel is imperative for lifelong good health… Including individual teaching days in some classes regarding health issues is a disservice to our students and would not provide adequate information for them to make appropriate healthy life decisions… College is the time for students to form lifestyle behavior patterns that strongly influence the rest of their life….
Just as the college years may usher in life-long risk behaviors in some students, these years also provide an opportunity for students to begin patterns that lead to life-long health improvement… A college health course addressing the current needs of college students, while also looking to their future health, can have an impact… Education has been shown to be the best strategy to empower college students to improve their health behaviors and decision-making skills.”
UD looks forward to more of this sort of writing as the personal wellness wars heat up.
When Allen Frances and thousands of others in the field of mental health scream about the next, even heftier, edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, they have in mind, among many other forms of psychosprawl, learning disorder psychosprawl.
When the manual that university mental health people rely on to confirm a learning disorder in a student has a page like this – in which, as it appears to be saying, you can have the learning disorder known as Not Otherwise Specified (i.e., not captured by the DSM’s already immense number of diagnostic categories) – you know that universities are screwed. Virtually any student who wants special accommodations for tests and papers and projects can go to the campus disability office and come out with a diagnosis.
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A medical student at UD‘s George Washington University was flunking courses and had been told that expulsion was imminent. Off she went to the disability people who duly
concluded that [she] had a reading disorder — dyslexia — as well as a mild processing-speed disorder. [The disability office] recommended a number of academic accommodations, psychotherapy, investigation of the appropriateness of psychostimulant medication…
The whole enchilada. Psychotherapy, powerful stimulants…
GW Med was unimpressed with the disability office’s generous alarm and reiterated that the student was expelled, at which point she sued.
And sued. And sued. Tenaciously, the student has dragged her disability from court to court, only to lose again and again.
She has now lost yet again.
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This post’s headline is from a Scott Jaschik piece in Inside Higher Education. Scott links to a friend of the court addition to this case, brought by a number of university organizations. Basically, they argue that universities have had it with the costs imposed (let’s not even talk about how unfair this scheme is to other students) by increasing numbers of students taking advantage of an air-tight combination of the anything goes DSM and disability offices.
These organizations point out that among the accommodations universities have had to make are “comfort animals.”
How far does this go? What if you’re someone whose learning disability can only be comforted by masturbation?
Sure, we can laugh now. GW prevailed. But it’s not funny. These cases impose enormous burdens on schools. They make already obscene tuitions rise. Allen Frances is right to be angry about the DSM‘s crucial contribution to this scam.
… belting out Hark the Herald Angels Sing.
She just called to say the concert went well.
Watch UD‘s kid singing with the American Family Choir at Christmas in Washington this Friday, TNT, 8:00.
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Update: Backstage at La Kid‘s latest gig.
… of la vie en sports factories.
… La Kid is going through a final rehearsal, at the National Building Museum, for tonight’s Christmas in Washington concert.
Biebermania made it a little difficult for her to get in the building for yesterday’s rehearsal. Shrieking fans everywhere.
Jennifer Hudson is “very nice. She chatted with us a lot [La Kid‘s in a gospel choir singing with Bieber and Hudson] and we took a bunch of pictures.”
Conan O’Brien will preside. The Obama family will be in the audience.
It’s university life as a Beckett novel for Western Carolina, with its years and years of football losses, its massive deficits, its massive buyouts as the university tries desperately to find winning coaches, its through-the-roof student athletic fees, and its big empty stadium. One coach “received $940,000 from WCU in return for an 8-36 record.” Can’t argue with those numbers! It’s like what they always say: Philosophy professors don’t put butts in seats — coaches do!
Does WCU have a president? Guess not.
… the University of Georgia the worst university in America (scroll down). But the grotesquely violent University of Massachusetts Amherst – a sort of baccalaureate Beirut – certainly holds the number two position. Do they have gang-legacy admissions? UD wonders how they manage to score, every year, the biggest baddest bandits among the country’s undergraduate pool.
It’s not merely the drunken riots – a staple of many large state schools. It’s things like this – home invasion, assault, and robbery – that distinguish U Mass. How many universities boast groups of hardened criminals among their undergrads?
It’s a simple, homespun truth, but seldom has it been brought home so powerfully as in the history of the online for-profit education sector of the United States. Rich people have enormous amounts of money invested in these schools … and why not? The schools take the wretched of the earth and make them more wretched, which after all is the destiny of the wretched. The poor we will always have with us. But along the way the hedge funds behind these schools collect billions in federal education dollars for their investors. When students default, which because a lot of them are losers they often do, investors are untouched. Only the wretched are responsible for repayment.
Expenditures at these schools are insanely low, since teaching is for shit and it’s all online so you save all that infrastructure money. Your main costs are advertising and getting the students to take the bait which, though many of them are ill-educated and gullible, is hard to do, since even if you’re real ignorant you might could see what shit the online for-profits are.
Anyway. The main point is to protect the rich people who’ve invested in this can’t-lose model, and their lobbyists have done a beautiful job of that. Check out how they did it here.
… which UD, marooned on the east coast, will not be able to see (she saw one last December), Sylvia Plath’s The Moon and the Yew Tree. Since I’m interrupting the poem with commentary, you might want to read it first unmolested, at the link in the sentence before this one.
The Moon and the Yew Tree
[OO. Moon and yew will propel the poetry of this piece from the very start with their shared long vowel. The title perhaps announces some sort of relationship throughout the poem between these two objects: moon, tree. Yew tree — poisonous, slow-growing, planted in cemeteries because it symbolizes in some cultures – despite its toxicity – the transcendence of death. Moon — for centuries a symbol of (among other things) a cold enigmatic staring lifelessness that haunts the earth.]
This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary.
The trees of the mind are black. The light is blue.
[The poet looks up at the moon’s white cold light and compares it to the state of her consciousness, the actions of her mind. The mind is lit up with thoughts, but the thoughts are disconnected from the world, and from other people, moving in an orbit all their own. The actual content of the mind, the nature of the mind- is melancholy: pure black.
Calling the light of the mind blue not only links it to the frigid light of the moon, but also starts to suggest turning blue in death, or, less dire than this, the blue mood of the psychic death which is depression.
Note the delicacy of Plath’s music in these opening bars: All those liquid Ls lull us into a fugue or trance state.]
The grasses unload their griefs on my feet as if I were God,
Prickling my ankles and murmuring of their humility.
[The poet walks barefoot at night under the moon – a surreal, dreamy scene. The wet grass weeps its water onto her feet in some sort of gesture of cosmic propitiation — The earth, like the moon, is all despair. It depends upon humanity, with its vital, redemptive energies, to make it live.]
Fumy, spiritous mists inhabit this place
Separated from my house by a row of headstones.
[Notice the consistency of the moon’s long oo – humility, fumy. Also the oddly obsolete or unreal or Macbethy feel of words like fumy and spiritous, a feel that sustains the surreal, dislocated mood of the poem.
Maybe a principle opposite to the moon’s morbidness and the earth’s despair can be found here, in the cemetery to which the poet’s night walk has brought her. Maybe here, among the spirits of the dead, we can, paradoxically, sense some life.
But the word headstones, in a poem which has already described the mind as well as the moon as literal head-stones, stony heads, deadheads, doesn’t inspire confidence.]
I simply cannot see where there is to get to.
The moon is no door. It is a face in its own right,
White as a knuckle and terribly upset.
It drags the sea after it like a dark crime; it is quiet
With the O-gape of complete despair.
[One of the things that gives poems like this power is that it doesn’t insist on I, me, my presence. It will certainly invoke the subjectivity of the poet, but that will not dominate. Instead, the main deal here feels like a series of authoritative, objective-feeling statements about the world. This I think accounts for the credibility of this poem. Somehow it makes us receptive to its nihilistic philosophy, even though with other sorts of writing arguing the same thing we might be inclined to resist. Its psychic power resides in its having found in us our own nihilistic latency.
But anyway here is a very simple first-person statement: I can’t see where there is to get to. That’s partly about the mist, the night, but mainly about a conviction that we inhabit a world of no openings onto enlightenment or salvation.
So the moon, part of this nihilistic cosmos, finds its tidal life-powers as humiliating as the grass finds its capacity to “feed” life. It’s merely a perversion, a dark behavior the moon can’t help, that it sets going a life-force on the earth. The cosmic reality is death.]
I live here.
Twice on Sunday, the bells startle the sky ——
Eight great tongues affirming the Resurrection.
At the end, they soberly bong out their names.
[Her home adjacent to the churchyard, the poet has a ringside seat for churchly reassurance, for the tolling that disturbs the sky’s sleep with the good news of life now and in the world to come.]
The yew tree points up. It has a Gothic shape.
[Hokay. Finally we get the yew tree. Poem’s almost over.
Why do so many poets like the yew?
Well, first of all, they probably like the fact that it sounds exactly like you. The you tree. I mean, just as we’re probably not consciously taking in all the connotations of headstones, so we’re unlikely to say Yew! Right – you. But much of the point of poetry involves the poet’s sly diligent verbal building toward greater and greater implication, echo, effect, significance. The world and its possibilities are made bigger by great poems like this one. Words take on multiple, fumy, maybe disturbing meanings, and as they do we perceive existence’s deeper backgrounds.
But Plath presumably also likes the yew’s ambiguous, at-odd, values – literal poison, figurative transcendence… So the yew’s stiff branches point up, toward the transcendent realm, as in the architecture of a gothic church. Let us say – recalling the poem’s title – that they point toward the moon, suggesting a relationship between the earth (nature) and the cosmos (the moon). Rather than feeling upset and humiliated by its relationship to the earth, the moon, in this gothic pointing up business, beams godly radiance down upon us.]
The eyes lift after it and find the moon.
The moon is my mother. She is not sweet like Mary.
Her blue garments unloose small bats and owls.
[So the poet looks up toward the moon, at which the yew branches point, and enters into a concluding lunar meditation. She pauses in her walk and really looks.
The moon is a kind of mother, but she is not the mother of God. There is nothing benevolent or transcendent about her frigidity, which is entirely a phenomenon of the night, and the creatures of the night (bats, owls).
Moon/blue/unloose — see how she brings her words moon and blue back to the poem again and again, not only heightening, in this way, her poem’s hypnotic effect, but with each invocation broadening the range of meanings these words contain.]
How I would like to believe in tenderness——
The face of the effigy, gentled by candles,
Bending, on me in particular, its mild eyes.
[Is the world hard or soft? Is the moon an icon of love, placidity, the kind all-seeing eye of Mary? Or is it a mere chunk of matter in a harsh and unforthcoming universe? Why not try to see its face as the face of a saint, its light not harsh but soft, like the light of candles? Why not see its canyons as compassionate profundities?]
I have fallen a long way. Clouds are flowering
Blue and mystical over the face of the stars.
Inside the church, the saints will be all blue,
Floating on their delicate feet over the cold pews,
Their hands and faces stiff with holiness.
The moon sees nothing of this. She is bald and wild.
And the message of the yew tree is blackness — blackness and silence.
[The poet, directly under the moon’s complete despair, is able to take the measure of her own depression’s depth. She tries, one last time, to animate the earth and the heavens with beauty and ultimate meaning: Clouds are like blue flowers softening the sharp harsh points of the stars, making the cosmos not cold and empty but mystically abundant… But no. Inside the church, the statues of saints come to life and drift, as the poet has been drifting, not among the yews, but among the pews, prayer seats formed from the trees, human objects derived from nature and fashioned into locations of rest and repair from our cold journeys outside under the moon.
No sanctuary here, though. The saints are blue, cold and stiff — dead as doornails — and their dead drift is the poet’s own depressive, deathward movement.
And the moon couldn’t give a shit. She sees nothing of this – the poet’s anguish, the world’s efforts to warm itself by a god… The yew tree points upward at the moon to make a statement: This is your reality, both earthly and cosmic: A vast, empty blur, inside of which the mind moves with its empty, anguishing, meaningless thoughts.]
Scathing Online Schoolmarm has told you and told you and told you that good writers have their prose and their emotions under control. Helen Vendler cites Yeats:
Yeats, in “The Fisherman,” thought a poem should be “cold/And passionate as the dawn” — that it should embody, along with the rising passion of inception, the cold inquisition of detached self-critique.
Passion and chill: You might say this about any good piece of writing, as in, most lately, this consideration of body radiation by Christopher Hitchens.
But I do remember lying there and looking down at my naked torso, which was covered almost from throat to navel by a vivid red radiation rash. This was the product of a month-long bombardment with protons which had burned away all of the cancer in my clavicular and paratracheal nodes, as well as the original tumor in the esophagus. This put me in a rare class of patients who could claim to have received the highly advanced expertise uniquely available at the stellar Zip Code of MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. To say that the rash hurt would be pointless. The struggle is to convey the way that it hurt on the inside. I lay for days on end, trying in vain to postpone the moment when I would have to swallow. Every time I did swallow, a hellish tide of pain would flow up my throat, culminating in what felt like a mule kick in the small of my back. I wondered if things looked as red and inflamed within as they did without. And then I had an unprompted rogue thought: If I had been told about all this in advance, would I have opted for the treatment? There were several moments as I bucked and writhed and gasped and cursed when I seriously doubted it.
Hitchens learned how to write from the master, George Orwell, here describing his own encounter with pain:
[T]he doctor and the student came across to my bed, hoisted me upright and without a word began applying [a] set of [cupping] glasses, which had not been sterilized in any way. A few feeble protests that I uttered got no more response than if I had been an animal. I was very much impressed by the impersonal way in which the two men started on me. I had never been in the public ward of a hospital before, and it was my first experience of doctors who handle you without speaking to you or, in a human sense, taking any notice of you. They only put on six glasses in my case, but after doing so they scarified the blisters and applied the glasses again. Each glass now drew about a dessert-spoonful of dark-coloured blood. As I lay down again, humiliated, disgusted and frightened by the thing that had been done to me, I reflected that now at least they would leave me alone. But no, not a bit of it. There was another treatment coming, the mustard poultice, seemingly a matter of routine like the hot bath. Two slatternly nurses had already got the poultice ready, and they lashed it round my chest as tight as a strait-jacket while some men who were wandering about the ward in shirt and trousers began to collect round my bed with half-sympathetic grins. I learned later that watching a patient have a mustard poultice was a favourite pastime in the ward. These things are normally applied for a quarter of an hour and certainly they are funny enough if you don’t happen to be the person inside. For the first five minutes the pain is severe, but you believe you can bear it. During the second five minutes this belief evaporates, but the poultice is buckled at the back and you can’t get it off. This is the period the onlookers enjoy most. During the last five minutes, I noted, a sort of numbness supervenes. After the poultice had been removed a waterproof pillow packed with ice was thrust beneath my head and I was left alone. I did not sleep, and to the best of my knowledge this was the only night of my life — I mean the only night spent in bed — in which I have not slept at all, not even a minute.
Do ye nae see that great writing – prose or poetry – is not the shriek, but the shriek mediated by consciousness? The mind at the same time registering and reflecting on experience? Compiling the metaphors and physical details that will generate in the reader the mood of the writer — the world of the writer? Not simply shrieking I HURT MAN but patiently, perceptively, gathering in the details of the material and social and psychological world in which consciousness moves?
I am offered a final scratch on any of a dozen itchy spots from hairline to toe; the Bi-Pap breathing device in my nose is adjusted to a necessarily uncomfortable level of tightness to ensure that it does not slip in the night; my glasses are removed…and there I lie: trussed, myopic, and motionless like a modern-day mummy, alone in my corporeal prison, accompanied for the rest of the night only by my thoughts.
The late Tony Judt, describing the bondage of his last illness.
I could go on. But note in all of these great writers a sedate, almost stately, pace; an embroilment in the world around them rather than in their feelings; a stoical disposition that takes anguish for granted and sets about getting some leverage over it by thinking and writing about it…
One may be tired of the world — tired of the prayer-makers, the poem-makers, whose rituals are distracting and human and pleasant but worse than irritating because they have no reality — while reality itself remains very dear. One wants glimpses of the real. God is an immensity, while this disease, this death, which is in me, this small, tightly defined pedestrian event, is merely and perfectly real, without miracle — or instruction. I am standing on an unmoored raft, a punt moving on the flexing, flowing face of a river. It is precarious. I don’t know what I am doing. The unknowing, the taut balance, the jolts and the instability spread in widening ripples through all my thoughts. Peace? There was never any in the world. But in the pliable water, under the sky, unmoored, I am traveling now and hearing myself laugh, at first with nerves and then with genuine amazement. It is all around me.
Yes, yes, I’ll stop. I wanted to toss Harold Brodkey into the mix. This was written days before he died.
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In the recent dust-up between Rita Dove and Helen Vendler over what good poetry is, we see what happens when you go with the shriek rather than the mediated shriek. In choosing poems with lines like
We want poems
like fists beating niggers out of Jocks
or dagger poems in the slimy bellies
of the owner-jews. Black poems to
smear on girdlemamma mulatto bitches
whose brains are red jelly stuck
between ‘lizabeth taylor’s toes. Stinking
Whores!…
Setting fire and death to
whities ass.
for the poetry anthology she’s edited, Dove prompts the question of poetic standards. In including this poem, she has given me access to an angry consciousness. Poems should be blades and fists with which to kill people; but they are also smears, which confuses me. The enemy is smears – red jelly, slime. To call the poem also a smear is to mix up the low sliminess of the enemy with your side’s high slashing quality. You’re hard; they’re soft. If you’re also a smear, the sides get mixed up.
This isn’t a surprising outcome, because when your writing is a spew, it’s likely to be a mess. Ralph Ellison’s narrator in Invisible Man is equally rageful, but the writer chills the passion with his prose… which has the effect of making Ellison’s rage far more powerful and disclosing than Baraka’s. The very fact that Ellison has gone to the trouble of removing the rage from one singular consciousness, and placing it a larger, accessible world, makes his writing ramify out to an audience in a way Baraka’s simply cannot.
So this, Vendler points out, is a bad poem, and there are too many others like it in Dove’s anthology – flat, propositional, linguistically dull statements of rage and suffering and celebration and love.
“One wants the contemporary poets of Dove’s collection to ask more of their language, to embody more planes of existence,” writes Vendler; and this is because readers of poetry want the same “more capacious regard for the world” that everyone engaged in aesthetic experience wants, not an encounter with a singular shriek.
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What about the umbrage in this post’s title?
That’s Dove’s, in her unfortunate response to Vender’s dislike of her anthology.
See, raw emotion doesn’t cut it. Writing is a cool medium, and if you can’t be cool, you make a hash of things.
