The street in front of UD‘s house.

Early sunset.

Seen from a screened window.

on a shiny black table
after a little rain.

UD‘s garden, November.

Just outside UD‘s office window (she’s not on campus today), one of the many food trucks along GW’s main drag is on fire.

Social media means that there are many excellent photographs of the smoke and flames. Apparently it’s the Falafel Bus. Lots of smoke – visible across the river in Virginia.

One student tweets:

Currently a falafel food truck on fire on campus and I just really feel like this is somehow something that would happen.

Yesterday UD had Indian food for lunch from the truck parked next to the Falafel Bus … There are food trucks everywhere, and maybe the student’s right that midday, with tons of students lined up for a meal, the situation is a grease fire waiting to happen.

Three injured people are at GW Hospital.

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

A 2012 New York City fire de­part­ment study on food trucks found sev­eral com­mon fire haz­ards that could cause ex­plo­sions, in­clud­ing the pres­ence of mul­ti­ple pro­pane cyl­in­ders, hot fryer oil and grills, com­pressed gas­ses, high volt­age elec­tric­ity and bio haz­ards from un­safe san­i­tary con­di­tions.

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

Taken by a student from his dorm across the street.

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

UPDATE: The likely cause:

A fire that destroyed a food truck Wednesday at George Washington University, leaving three workers injured, started when an employee tried to fill a gas generator while the vehicle was running and food was being prepared and served, according to the D.C. fire department.

A spokesman for the department said the fire started on the outside of the Falafel Bus and quickly spread to the interior, where fuel feeding hot stoves added to the fire’s intensity and helped it quickly spread…

Safety guidelines prohibit mobile vending trucks from refueling while engines are running and while still open to the public. Ideally, the fire department says, the trucks are shut down and driven to a gas station where generators can safely be refilled. At least, officials said, the trucks should be shut to the public, turned off and allowed to cool down before refueling.

As Oberlin College finally rids itself of a really florid Jewish-conspiracy devotee on its faculty, as we deal with yet another (there have been several in the last few years) serious embarrassment to a respectable institution — is there actually much of use to be said about this?

A racist conspiracy theory powered the political career of our president-elect. These things are apparently mainstream and can get you places. If some professors at our universities believe Jews brought down the World Trade Center and the New Town massacre was a federal government simulation meant to undermine gun rights, so what? For forty-two years a professor at Northwestern who seems to be a Nazi-symp has been (in the words of NU’s president) a “reprehensible… contemptible… embarrassment” to the place, and assuming the guy is hardy enough to continue teaching past his current eighty-three years of age, NU will continue being embarrassed for some time.

No doubt people with sociopathic and inane beliefs and belief systems crawl the woodwork of plenty of universities. Most are with-it enough to figure out that they should keep their views – at least in their most overt forms – out of their classrooms; but social media and other forms of publication betray them, for eventually some student or colleague is going to discover the place where they park their deepest, most delirious, convictions. Then the press, which is under the impression that professors have something to do with rational and responsible teaching/scholarship (no one cares if the dude bottling vitamins next to you in the vitamin factory writes Facebook postings blaming the Waco biker shoot-out on Muslims), will talk it up, and in seconds a university’s got one hell of a bimbo eruption on its hands.

But what is to be done? How can we avoid it? How should we think about it?

Well, as to the selection and cultivation of faculty on the fringe… Look to your recruitment committees, o ye sinners, and repent. Everyone knows that America has universities that pass all the way to the PhD people whose views move them from the provocative subversive margins (see Trump supporter S. Zizek) to flat-out beyond the pale, and it’s not that hard for hiring groups to check these people out. I mean, they’re not shy about putting what they think about the CIA, the Zionist conspiracy, and black presidents out there. Just take a look. Decide how important it is for your students to understand the links among the Trilateral Commission, King Edward’s abdication, and fluoridation.

As to how we should think about it – well, UD can offer this. People do not like evidence. They really do not like evidence. Americans have just elected an evidence-execrator. More than a few American colleges and universities teach their students that the earth is six thousand years old. Anything goes, and, as Don DeLillo points out in his hilarious novel White Noise, the more sources of information Americans enjoy, the stupider and more credulous they become. Why should one person with a vicious racist conspiracy get to be president, while another person with a vicious anti-semitic conspiracy have to lose her job? Just because, as one of her colleagues correctly points out, her arguments about the world lack evidence?

[Y]ou don’t generally hear such things being espoused by scholars with PhDs. That is because such unsubstantiated, unfalsifiable, speculative hypotheses are not only overwhelmingly wrong, but are also the opposite of research.

But nobody much cares about substantiation – including, on occasion, PhD and hiring committees. In fact a lot of people, inside and outside of universities, have a strong preference for big ol’ crazyass bullshit.

His student’s plea on behalf of the school superintendent who has spent his tenure plagiarizing from everyone says it all.

LOL. We’re counting down from November 2!!!!!

GO DUCKS

In 1906, Kakuzo Okakura told us what we’ve got to live through now, and how tea of all things can help us endure it. The Book of Tea paints the tea room and the tea ceremony within it as a refuge of stillness, simplicity, freedom, and meditation in a frenzied and convoluted world. In Don DeLillo’s novel Players, both of the main characters worry repeatedly that they have “become too complex” – incapable of a reflective inner life, and equally incapable of navigating the dizzying postmodern city outside themselves, a city full of egotistic pleasures, but at the same time oppressive and threatening. DeLillo’s postmodern city is Okakura’s early modern city greatly elaborated, and both writers seek ways to escape or at least distance themselves from it.

Starting with the roji – the garden to the tea room – one is meant

to break connection with the outside world, and produce a fresh sensation conducive to the full enjoyment of aestheticism in the tea-room itself. One who has trodden this garden path cannot fail to remember how his spirit, as he walked in the twilight of evergreens over the regular irregularities of the stepping stones, beneath which lay dried pine needles, and passed beside the moss-covered granite lanterns, became uplifted above ordinary thoughts. One may be in the midst of a city, and yet feel as if he were in the forest far away from the dust and din of civilisation. Great was the ingenuity displayed by the tea-masters in producing these effects of serenity and purity.

Irregularities matter; one seeks to avoid the modern cityscape’s inhuman and destabilizing tendency toward massive symmetrical perfection (one of the characters in Players works in one of the twin World Trade towers, but she often gets lost and can’t figure out which one) by creating a small, imperfect, unsymmetrical space. The core value and central gesture here is much like the one Roland Barthes finds in the paintings of Cy Twombley: “a blur, almost a blotch, a negligence.”

The simplicity of the tea-room and its freedom from vulgarity make it truly a sanctuary from the vexations of the outer world… Nowadays industrialism is making true refinement more and more difficult all the world over. Do we not need the tea-room more than ever?

Does true refinement sound too ladidah? Consider the real-world importance of the tea ceremony for Vaclav Havel during his years of imprisonment:

What comforted him most, almost to the point of obsession, was the ritual he made in preparing tea. It was, as he wrote Olga, a pleasure, an extravagance of a sort, something he could control in a thoroughly uncontrollable situation.

“When I was outside, I didn’t understand the cult of tea that exists in prison,” he writes. “…I wasn’t here long before grasping its significance and succumbing to it myself…Tea, it seems to me, becomes a kind of material symbol of freedom here: It is in effect the only fare that one can prepare oneself, and thus freely: When and how I make it is entirely up to me. In the preparation of it, I realize myself as a free being, as it were, capable of looking after myself.” …I schedule (tea) carefully, so it does not become a formless and random activity…”

Well, all of this is a variation on the currently fashionable business of “mindfulness,” which can be undertaken with varying degrees of formality and spirituality; but especially now that so many of us are in a sort of vexatious fog about the fate of our shared world, ol’ UD thinks it makes sense to think about/indulge in the strange formal/informal, ritualized/negligent gestures that somehow calm and focus and even transport us.

And equally special is this Deadspin update on that… peculiar institution.

Headline:

Baylor Confirms [Head Fooball Coach] Art Briles Knew About Alleged Gang Rape And Chose Not To Report It

Puke.

Former Baylor head football coach Art Briles and former athletic director Ian McCaw knew about an alleged group sexual assault and chose not to report it, according to a statement issued yesterday by the university.

A woman at the university, a student, told whoever would listen that five football players attacked her. At the highest levels, Baylor University did nothing.

This confirmation also indicates that the assistant coaches who spoke out last week in defense of Briles weren’t being truthful about his role in the scandal.

Moral squalor in defense of football is no vice.

Retch.

The majority of the football staff (including offensive coordinator Kendal Briles, son of Art) pushed back on [the claim about Briles] with a statement laying out an alternate version of events where the allegations were reported to the judicial affairs department. Now, the university has released a statement confirming that Briles and McCaw were both aware of the alleged group sexual assault and neither chose to report it.

Family values, university football.

Heave.

Baylor says that McCaw initially denied knowledge of the allegations when first asked about them in 2015, after other reports of sexual assault involving the football team began to surface. He then backtracked to tell the university that he had in fact been made aware of the allegations in 2013. The university’s statement does not say whether McCaw had any contact with the female athlete, but he said he chose not to report because he did not believe she wanted a report to be filed. This is not how university employee reporting responsibilities work.

AD leadership, Baylor-style. First lie through your teeth. Then when too much raping makes it impossible to continue to lie, tell the truth. Then lie again and say that your understanding, as AD, about reporting responsibilities, was that if someone doesn’t want you to report (itself almost certainly a lie) you don’t report.

Hurl.

Gag.

Spew.

A noise complaint led to the arrest of seven University of Albany students for hazing, police said.

Police said they arrived at an off-campus sorority house and found four young women being forced to eat mud and garbage.

Sorority members were also accused of pour[ing] fowl smelling liquids onto the women.

… in McSweeney’s.

***********

UD thanks Wendy for the link.

The article itself couldn’t be more ordinary and banal; yet another American university football player has beaten the shit out of one of his fellow students. Yawn.

This player, on being kicked out of a bar, “deliberately shoved a ladder, knocking off [a fellow student who is an employee of the bar], who fell headfirst onto the pavement.” The student’s a senior; he had almost managed to get out of Miami U without getting his brains knocked out by a sports hero. (As you know, UD has proposed that big-sports universities should issue protective helmets to all of their students for just this sort of eventuality.)

What makes this article interesting is that in an earlier draft the writer seems to have spent a good deal of time recounting all the schools that wanted to recruit the bruiser, and sharing his stats on the field. Commenters gave the reporter hell about this.

Not sure how being told which colleges recruited him is relevant in an article on alleged felonious assault.

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

You had 4 people overseeing this article and not one of you thought, “huh, maybe we shouldn’t glorify a soon-to-be felon with 4 paragraphs of his athletic achievements”???

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

This article is horrific and indicitive of a mindset focusing on sports stats of a felon vs. empathy for his victim. What about the victim who had brain swelling and bleeding? This is his second arrest for assault and the Miami coach couldn’t even mention care or concern during his press conference? This is sickening.

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

And how is the man who fell from the ladder and landed on his head?????

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

Glorifying felonious assault article with a pitch about a guy’s stats and recruiting history is why this paper is a joke around campus.

But of course the larger local booster press writes these things up precisely in that way: Five paragraphs describing the power and skill of the player, and how it’s going to be missed if he’s suspended, and then one final paragraph updating the victim’s condition. Why should student publications be any different?

So, in honor of Leonard Cohen, who has died, and with UD‘s new tea series in mind, she features his great song, Suzanne.

The real Suzanne “would invite Cohen to visit her apartment by the harbour in Montreal, where she would serve him Constant Comment tea…”

I’ve sung this song, with guitar when I was a tyke, and on the piano post-tyke, for forty years. Its lack of dynamics, its few, unchallenging notes for the singer (no high notes), and its strange lyrics, give it a soft hypnotic insistence, a whispery chanting truthful feel. A religious song, it sounds like a litany. It lulls you like a child’s lullaby, yet its words are charged with enigmatic-but-feels-importantly-meaningful power.

Like Henry Purcell’s great song Music For Awhile, Suzanne (and many other Cohen works) gets its simple/complex, lulling/enigmatic, balladic/liturgical mix from Cohen’s use of counterpoint as much as from its lyrics. “[T]he counterpoint lines — they give a celestial character and melodic lift to every one of his songs,” says Bob Dylan. “As far as I know, no one else comes close to this in modern music.”

The unsettling independence of Cohen’s two musical lines has, UD thinks, the same effect as the same technique in the Purcell piece, where the singer calmly and simply and affirmatively sings above a dark and complex ground bass; we are in a harmonic and at the same time disharmonic location in these sorts of songs, where manifest human assertions about the world are latently undermined and complicated by a subterranean countervailing pure-musical insinuation. This beautiful but corrosive pure music seems to come from some tragic, obdurate, humanly unavailable, realm of metaphysical power. Cohen’s songs, says Suzanna Vega, are “a combination of very real details and a sense of mystery, like prayers or spells.” Cohen himself at the end of his life said “You hear this other deep reality singing to you all the time, and much of the time you can’t decipher it. Even when I was healthy, I was sensitive to the process.”

Cohen describing his lifelong struggles with depression could be describing the dynamic of many of his songs. There were “periods when I was fully operative but the background noise of anguish still prevailed.”

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

There’s a gentle waltzy circularity to Suzanne, underscoring its theme of willing but confused erotic/spiritual entrapment by Suzanne/Jesus. One keeps going back to her. You want to travel with her, and you want to travel blind. That is the travel of everyone through this seductive song – it’s the sort of song whose two reconcilable/irreconcilable lines somehow reconcile you to the impossible truths of mortality.

I’m describing here a variant of great art’s cathartic power.

Of its many versions, I like Judy Collins’ best, because her very breathy, low-vibrato, balladic voice (you take in, almost pruriently, her intakes of air before many lines) is a perfect match for the drifty, openly musing, openly sexual content of the piece.

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

Suzanne takes you down to her place near the river
You can hear the boats go by, you can spend the night forever
And you know that she’s half-crazy but that’s why you want to be there
And she feeds you tea and oranges that come all the way from China
And just when you mean to tell her that you have no love to give her
Then she gets you on her wavelength
And she lets the river answer that you’ve always been her lover

And you want to travel with her, and you want to travel blind
And you know that she will trust you
For you’ve touched her perfect body with your mind

And Jesus was a sailor when he walked upon the water
And he spent a long time watching from his lonely wooden tower
And when he knew for certain only drowning men could see him
He said all men will be sailors then until the sea shall free them
But he himself was broken, long before the sky would open
Forsaken, almost human, he sank beneath your wisdom like a stone

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

[Wisdom’s the killer – the divinity killer. Wisdom understood as the refusal to travel blind, the refusal to trust Suzanne as she takes your hand.]

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

And you want to travel with him, and you want to travel blind
And you think you maybe you’ll trust him
For he’s touched your perfect body with her mind

Now, Suzanne takes your hand and she leads you to the river
She’s wearing rags and feathers from Salvation Army counters
And the sun pours down like honey on our lady of the harbor
And she shows you where to look among the garbage and the flowers
There are heroes in the seaweed, there are children in the morning
They are leaning out for love and they wil lean that way forever
While Suzanne holds her mirror
And you want to travel with her, and you want to travel blind
And you know that you can trust her
For she’s touched your perfect body with her mind

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

This last verse skirts sentimentality (children in the morning); yet it’s also true that whenever she sings the words And the sun pours down like honey (with melisma on sun and a soft/explosive release of air on the h of honey), UD finds forming in her eyes what she’d called triumphant tears. For her, that is the true climax of the song, the cathartic payoff where the natural/metaphysical world finally drops its dark counterpoint against us and opens up a world so unproblematically bright that we can suddenly see everything with a Blakeian double vision that makes the counterpointed world finally (fleetingly) harmonic: flowers in the garbage, heroes in the seaweed.

With a nod to Robert Nozick, this post’s title announces UD‘s decision to shift her attention away – temporarily – somewhat – from the public political world (she’ll still write about poems, universities, sports, pharma scandals, burqas, FGM, crooked business school professors, etc.) and tend her own tea garden.

That is, she will revisit the much-neglected University Diaries category TEA, writing about all aspects of the phenomenon of tea’s incredible popularity in the world. Fine tearooms, complex new brews, the Japanese tea aesthetic and philosophy (Kakuzo Okakura was telling us long ago that the tearoom is where you go to get away from Donald Trump), poems about tea, high-end tea tourism, and even the graphics of tea – all interest UD. By graphics, she means all visual aspects of tea, from the shape of pots to the interiors of tearooms.

Does tea, as Okakura believes,
have a meaning? Although both
drinks have caffeine, coffee
seems to be about rush, tea
about calm.

UD will explore all of
this in a series of posts.

Sent to me by my German friend Chris.

Yvonne, a character in Malcolm Lowry’s novel Under the Volcano (1947), talks to Hugh, the brother of her alcoholic husband, about her plan to take her husband, Geoffrey, out of Mexico, and move with him to a farm in Canada. She is also hoping to escape, there, the oncoming European war.

She and her husband’s brother are riding horses together near Cuernavaca.

*********

‘Well… What’s to stop us going to Canada, for instance?’

‘… Canada?… Are you serious? Well, why not, but… ’

‘Perfectly.’

They had now reached the place where the railway took its wide leftward curve and they descended the embankment. The grove had dropped behind but there was still thick woodland to their right (above the centre of which had appeared again the almost friendly landmark of the prison watchtower) and stretching far ahead. A road showed briefly along the margin of the woods.

They approached this road slowly, following the single-minded thrumming telegraph poles and picking a difficult course through the scrub.

‘I mean why Canada more than British Honduras? Or even Tristan da Cunha? A little lonely perhaps, though an admirable place for one’s teeth, I’ve heard. Then there’s Gough Island, hard by Tristan. That’s uninhabited. Still, you might colonize it. Or Sokotra, where the frankincense and myrrh used to come from and the camels climb like chamois my favourite island in the Arabian Sea.’

But Hugh’s tone though amused was not altogether sceptical as he touched on these fantasies, half to himself, for Yvonne rode a little in front; it was as if he were after all seriously grappling with the problem of Canada while at the same time making an effort to pass off the situation as possessing any number of adventurous whimsical solutions. He caught up with her.

‘Hasn’t Geoffrey mentioned his genteel Siberia to you lately?’ she said. ‘You surely haven’t forgotten he owns an island in British Columbia?’

‘On a lake, isn’t it? Pineaus Lake. I remember. But there isn’t any house on it, is there? And you can’t graze cattle on fircones and hardpan.’

‘That’s not the point, Hugh.’

‘Or would you propose to camp on it and have your farm elsewhere?’

‘Hugh, listen – ’

‘But suppose you could only buy your farm in some place like Saskatchewan,’ Hugh objected.

An idiotic verse came into his head, keeping time with the horse’s hooves: Oh take me back to Poor Fish River, Take me back to Onion Lake, You can keep the Guadalquivir, Como you may likewise take. Take me back to dear old Horsefly, Aneroid or Gravelburg…

‘In some place with a name like Product. Or even Dumble,’ he went on. ‘There must be a Dumble. In fact I know there’s a Dumble.’

‘All right. Maybe it is ridiculous. But at least it’s better than sitting here doing nothing!’

[…] At this moment the best and easiest and most simple thing in the world seemed to be the happiness of these two people in a new country. And what counted seemed probably the swiftness with which they moved. He thought of the Ebro. Just as a long-planned offensive might be defeated in its first few days by unconsidered potentialities that have now been given time to mature, so a sudden desperate move might succeed precisely because of the number of potentialities it destroys at one fell swoop…

… He all but shook her horse with enthusiasm. ‘I can see your shack now. It’s between the forest and the sea and you’ve got a pier going down to the water over rough stones, you know, covered with barnacles and sea anemones and starfish. You’ll have to go through the woods to the store.’ Hugh saw the store in his mind’s eye. The woods will be wet. And occasionally a tree will come crashing down. And sometimes there will be a fog and that fog will freeze. Then your whole forest will become a crystal forest. The ice crystals on the twigs will grow like leaves. Then pretty soon you’ll be seeing the jack-in-the-pulpits and then it will be spring.

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

Canada is the perennial place, the sanctuary which draws you into a crystal forest. Yet Point One wherever you go there you are. And Point Two

Life is, in fact, a battle. Evil is insolent and strong; beauty enchanting, but rare; goodness very apt to be weak; folly very apt to be defiant; wickedness to carry the day; imbeciles to be in great places, people of sense in small, and mankind generally unhappy. But the world as it stands is no narrow illusion, no phantasm, no evil dream of the night; we wake up to it, forever and ever; and we can neither forget it nor deny it nor dispense with it.

And Point Three (intimately related to Points One and Two):

There may be useful reconsiderations and redescriptions, but you really did have those parents, you really did make of it what you made of it, you really did have those siblings, really did grow up in that economic climate. These are all hard difficult facts. Redescribed, they can be modified, things can evolve. But it isn’t magic.

You’re a problem; and now your president is a problem too. Okay. But this place is where you really are. Dig your heels in and put up your dukes.