Sherry Chandler

from Cindy Chang at the NYTimes this morning:

LOS ANGELES, Jan. 23 - A 24-year-old conservative alumnus who announced earlier this month that he planned to pay students at the University of California, Los Angeles, to tape-record the lectures of left-leaning professors backed down after U.C.L.A. officials informed him on Monday that he would be violating school policy.

The alumnus, Andrew Jones, said he abandoned the plan to save his student supporters from possible legal action by the university, even though he believed they would be engaged in a “newsgathering” effort protected by the First Amendment.

Mr. Jones says he is confident that students will volunteer to tape lectures or take detailed notes in an effort to expose their professors as liberal partisans who do not tolerate dissent in their classrooms.

…

Mr. Jones worked briefly during and after college for the conservative activist David Horowitz, who has been lobbying state legislatures to pass an “Academic Bill of Rights” to protect students with minority viewpoints from partisan professors.

Mr. Horowitz says he fired Mr. Jones, accusing him of pressing U.C.L.A. students to file false reports that they had been physically attacked by leftist activists.

…We seem to grant to our high-speed roads and our airlines the rather thoughtless assumption that people can change places as rapidly as their bodies can be transported. That, as my own experience keeps proving to me, is not true. … The landscape has been subdued so that one may drive over it at seventy miles per hour without any concession whatsoever to one’s whereabouts. … Though one is in Kentucky one is not experiencing Kentucky; one is experiencing the highway, which might be in nearly any hill country east of the Mississippi.

— from Wendell Berry, “An Entrance to the Woods” in Of Woods and Waters, originally from Recollected Essays 1965-1980 (Northpoint Press, 1981)

from Christopher Stern’s article, The Coming Tug of War Over the Internet:

Do you prefer to search for information online with Google or Yahoo? What about bargain shopping — do you go to Amazon or eBay? Many of us make these kinds of decisions several times a day, based on who knows what — maybe you don’t like bidding, or maybe Google’s clean white search page suits you better than Yahoo’s colorful clutter.

But the nation’s largest telephone companies have a new business plan, and if it comes to pass you may one day discover that Yahoo suddenly responds much faster to your inquiries, overriding your affinity for Google. Or that Amazon’s Web site seems sluggish compared with eBay’s

The changes may sound subtle, but make no mistake: The telecommunications companies’ proposals have the potential, within just a few years, to alter the flow of commerce and information — and your personal experience — on the Internet. For the first time, the companies that own the equipment that delivers the Internet to your office, cubicle, den and dorm room could, for a price, give one company priority on their networks over another.

Read the whole article for details and subtleties.

[Update: No wonder you're bored at work! One of my correspondents has alerted me to this front-page article on today's Lexington Herald-Leader:

LONDON - Having a bad day? Well, no wonder. According to one scientist, Monday, Jan. 23 is the gloomiest day of 2006.

Cliff Arnall, a health psychologist at the University of Cardiff in Wales, has devised a formula that combines personal and seasonal factors to calculate the year's emotional low point.

Arnall said January is a time when people are simply working and don't have a lot of events, parties or holidays to look forward to.

People are struggling to cope not only with the bleak weather, but also with the debts they amassed by spending too much over the holidays.

It's also when people start to feel like failures because they've broken resolutions so quickly.

Follow the link to view the formula. I'm too depressed to try to convert it into html.]

Surely not on Monday. The week is just beginning.

Still, maybe these items will cheer you up on this rainy Monday that may bring another January flood, at least here in Kentucky.

Try the Give Bush a Brain game. Warning: Loud music. Probably don’t want to do this one if the boss is in the office.

For softer music, try the Doo Wop Horses. Click on each horse to cue him to join the song.

Both of these have probably been around a while but no harm revisiting old friends.

As usual, thanks to Donna, currently appearing with Kentucky’s own Rude Osolnik, for these links.

Meantime, one of my correspondents has me know about a new search engine that has much to recommend it. It’s called Patriot Search, and I suggest that you give its Mission Statement and Privacy Policy a close look before using it.

Why did man, or God, or whoever it was, bother to write the Bible anyway? We get the answer at the very end, in Revelations: the real Bible is a sealed book, an apocryphon, a book not to be opened (mentally) until its time has come…The Bible is largely a book of catastrophes, of the disasters caused by the determination of God to interfere in the pattern of human life. It is also a book of refuge and exile, a book of absence, and to that extent a book of comfort. Those poor bastards of Jews and Christians who insist on taking up its burden of the presence of God are denied this comfort. The worst thing we can say of God is that he knows all. The best thing we can say of him is that, on the whole, he tends to keep his knowledge to himself.

— from Northrop Fry Unbuttoned. Wit and Wisdom from the Notebooks and Diaries (Gnomon, 2004)

The Poetry Wiki has been reincarnated through Heraclitean Fire.

Here’s a bit of one of the ongoing projects, a familiar place for all of us to start:

This is The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock run through Google’s translator (English - Portuguese - English - German - French - English). Have at it! Some linebreaks might be a good start…

It leaves, if it suits it then,
and I am night, the meeting of the sky,
a quiescent sleeper at the upper table.

It leaves the final roads, becomes a marble
rolling along the craneboom of the night.

For me, it takes a lot of energy to try to meld into a group mind, to try to think (or intuit or speak) in the same mood/voice of the poem so that I would be actually trying to build it and not just edit it or change it to reflect my own way of writing. I’d rather save what little energy I have for projects of my own. Yes, projects I can put my name on and own – although there are some I’d like to disown. But also projects that reflect my material – the stuff I write out of.

On the other hand, I can see that it might not hurt me to be jostled out of my normal rut. Certainly I’d have to stretch some to participate in projects like Blue Whole:

Plunge bristling dark:
knife into sharp water,
sinking fresh where is expected brine.
Basalt steals each blue glint
and cups the cold.

But it is less than fair of me to choose that one. Others in the collection are more straightforward in the use of language. Take The Crystal Palace, for example. The problem for me here is more cultural than linguistic:

On Sydenham Hill the sphinxes sit
and stare at Kent.
Around them fly the feathery seeds,
willowherb blossoms.
Bees move amongst the buddleia.
A Crystal Palace stood here once;

If you want to have both your collaboration and your control, you might try Pom2

The editors seek work that directly engages and responds to poems published in Pom2. We encourage submissions from those who are willing to have their work altered, lifted, plagiarized or transformed in later issues. Contributors may respond to one poem, or several, from any issue. No previously published work will be considered.

Make the editors happy by including with your submission:
(1) title of “source” poem(s), (2) full contact information: phone, address, fax and e-mail, and (3) optional: a photograph of yourself.

Submit no more than 5 poems.

Electronically to:
pom2@pompompress.com
Subject line: jam
PC or Mac attachments welcome

Or mail to:
Allison Cobb, Pom2
720 5th Ave 2L
Brooklyn, NY 11215
SASE required

How did we get to the point where this sort of thing is tolerated at all?

LOS ANGELES, California (Reuters) — An alumni group dedicated to “exposing the most radical professors” at the University of California at Los Angeles is offering to pay students $100 to record classroom lectures of suspect faculty.

The Web site of the Bruin Alumni Association also includes a “Dirty Thirty” list of professors considered by the group to be the most extreme left-wing members of the UCLA faculty, as well as profiles on their political activities and writings.

I heard a report about this on Morning Edition yesterday morning. The last several years have given me much to be outraged about, but this kind of thought policing is both outrageous and frightening. In the NPR report, they interviewed one student who said her women’s studies professor had said she had to be careful, now, what she said for fear of being blacklisted.

Think about that.

A man sitting reading a book in a library while a mouse ran past him unobserved would not be in a more subjective state than a cat, but he would appear so to the cat. A desire for a contest with reality is psychologically quite different from a desire to escape it.

— from Northrop Fry Unbuttoned. Wit and Wisdom from the Notebooks and Diaries (Gnomon, 2004)

[Note: I really don't know what this quotation means, if it means anything. Nor do I know whether it falls under wit or wisdom. I'm not sure who is having the contest with reality here – probably the man, though I'm pretty sure the cat wouldn't spare much philosophical thought on the matter and the one trying to escape is the mouse. Also, if the man lets mice run around his library unobserved, pretty soon he'll have one big mouse's nest and nothing to read.]

Steven DaGama’s Passages (Wavelength/Albireo Press, 2005) is as cynical as Brooks Carver’s Pilgrim Heart is romantic. Passages is filled with terrorists and exiles, soldiers and travelers, music and lovers.

I feel too dull-witted to comment on the prosody – it is somewhat imagistic, very masculine, but clear and sure-footed. There may or may not be a woman’s poetry (see discussion of the question here), but I would characterize this definitely as man’s poetry, filled with mysterious women and exotic locations. Come to think of it, I’ll take back what I said. This collection is also romantic, though it’s the romance of noir.

I can appreciate Passages for its commentary on the modern condition. It is a poetry of witness. Here is a section from one of my favorite poems in the collection:

Sandstorm

Everything we see is something else.
— Fernando Pessoa

In the nightmare, deployment
is familiar, not so the terrain.
A shifting sandscape, male, never female,
women never — Women cook, Men assume

crucial tasks: they devastate.
Through sandstorm and heat shimmer
humps rise, sink, rise, sink. Everlasting
columns of boy-men, man-boys

sandblasted. …

DaGama is also a visual artist. He drew the cover illustration.

I’m not sure how this collection came to be in my mailbox on Christmas eve. I suspect because I subscribe to Wavelength. Nor am I sure how you would acquire a copy or how much it would cost. I’ll ask David Rogers and get back to you.

Check out the Carnival of Feminism Issue 7 at Feministe for links to some great posts about what it means to be a woman, so far, in the 21st Century.

and

The Carnival of Speculum Issue 1 at Satellite Heart for some great reading of and about poetry (I must disclose that I’m included here – and very flattered to be so).

More on both these carnivals later, I hope. Meantime, I urge you to follow the links and explore.