Seamus Heaney, reading
Happy belated Pi day
John Calipari: "sleaziest coach"?
[I]n 1996, a 35-2 University of Massachusetts team coached by John Calipari made it all the way to the Final Four. A year later, because of a tangled scandal involving Marcus Camby, jewelry, and hookers, the NCAA stripped UMass of its tournament victories, forced the school to pay back $151,617 in tournament revenues, and expunged the team's accomplishments from the official record book. Then, in 2008, a 38-2 Memphis team coached by John Calipari made it all the way to the championship game. A year later, because of a tangled scandal involving papier-mâché SAT scores, the NCAA stripped Memphis of its tournament victories, forced the school to pay back more than $500,000 in tournament revenues, and expunged the team's accomplishments from the official record book.
This is awe-inspiring. Two schools, at different times and in different places, both with their greatest seasons erased from the record books, and both of them coached by the same guy. None of college basketball's other historic buccaneers ever pulled this off.
For his sins, Calipari now oversees one of the most storied basketball programs in the NCAA. Can you say "ethical blindspot," baby?
Happy St. Patrick's Day
From Harvard University Press's new "Anthology of Modern Irish Poetry," edited by Wes Davis, the opening lines of "Irish Poets Open Up Your Eyes," by Patrick Kavanaugh (1904-1967):
"Ah, Mozart; yeah, rock music"
Ross went beyond this somewhat stalemated argument, however, to say that the debate underscores how restricted we are in our thinking about different genres of music and different composers. And even different pieces by the same composer. Ross:
I dream of the concert hall becoming a more vital, unpredictable environment, fully in thrall to the composers who mapped our musical landscapes and the performers who populate them. The great paradox of modern musical life, whether in the classical or pop arena, is that we both worship our idols and, in a way, straitjacket them. We consign them to cruelly specific roles: a certain rock band is expected to loosen us up, a certain composer is expected to ennoble us. Ah, Mozart; yeah, rock and roll. But what if a rock band wants to make us think and a composer wants to make us dance? Music should be a place where our expectations are shattered.
A *stylish* purse. Get it?
Forget about gym guilt, says poet
Jennifer Michael Hecht's new post on exorcising gym guilt--"Gyms and Poets"--takes longer to get going than her (superb) anti-suicide manifesto, which Ideas adapted and published. But it is full of wisdom, and non-linearity is part of Hecht's writerly charm.
The "first step down the rabbit hole," she writes, "is to be so ever-lovin concerned about longevity. Next is to believe that food and exercise are what is different between those people over there, where no one dropped dead, and these people here, where Fred did."
Then she pulls out a dog-eared copy of "Discipline and Punish": "With training from Foucault and Freud, who both told me that bold claims sometimes actually mean their direct opposite, I came to believe, for instance, that gyms are occupying precisely the role they did in Ancient Sparta and in Fascist Germany. Being obsessed with bodies is actually a pretty rare thing in human history and we're in lousy company."
Finally, the "takeaway" (aimed at poets but easily universalized):
If you are a poet, you shouldn't freaking care about this. Only workout at the gym if you like it. You've been invited to the planet for a long yet short stay. Go make something you enjoy making. Next time you want to go somewhere leave enough time to walk there, or part of the way. Sweep your own leaves. Forget the weights. Unless you like it. In which case, knock yourself out. I'm just saying, the universe is vast and fine, and the universe of the mind is equally extensive and divine. What's in between is a little piece of meat that is admittedly easier to get your hands on than the universe or the inner life. But still. Feeling guilty for not going to the gym is ridiculous. You don't have to go there. Go there if you like it. But that place isn't what it says it is. If it doesn't feel right to you, that's because there's something a little wrong with it.
Dick Armey, historian
Your literary questions, answered here
Book-review bingo hits close to home
Did you find the last book you read to have been compelling, poignant, and lyrical--in short, a tour de force? Then you may have what it takes to write book reviews.

Hot (literary) stuff on Chatroulette
Design guru joins the Obama administration
Edward Tufte, an emeritus professor of political science, statistics, and computer science at Yale and author of The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, has agreed to serve on the federal Recovery Independent Advisory Panel. The panel's job, as Tufte puts it on a brief note on his website, is to "track and explain $787 billion in recovery stimulus funds." He writes: "I'm doing this because I like accountability and transparency, and I believe in public service. And it is the complete opposite of everything else I do. Maybe I'll learn something."
President Obama surely hopes the images Tufte produces will have little in common--financially or politically--with one he made famous, calling it "probably the best statistical graphic ever drawn": Charles Joseph Minard's depiction of the losses Napoleon suffered during his 1812 invasion of, and retreat from, Russia.
Linda Greenhouse, Justice Thomas, and the Eighth Amendment
I feel as though a fresh descriptive literary term, beyond irony or sarcasm, needs to be invented for this Linda Greenhouse post about Justice Clarence Thomas's views on "cruel and unusual punishment."
Honors even closer to home
Imagine entering a tunnel that's been bored into the earth hundreds of feet below Massachusetts Bay and continues straight out, for 9½ miles. There is no light, besides what the bulb on your helmet can give off. There is no sound, besides the water dripping overhead or sloshing around your boots. There is no air, besides what you brought in with you, a lifeline pumping through a hose and into your face mask. At the end of the tunnel, there isn't even enough room to stand up straight, since it chokes down to just 5 feet in diameter before ending abruptly. It's the world's longest one-way tunnel, so there's no way out other than turning around and making the hazardous trek back to where you started.
This is where DJ and four other commercial divers were headed on that Wednesday morning 10 summers ago.
Even with the Atlantic now in Washington, who says Boston's not a magazine town?(For years, newspaper-based magazines were unfairly excluded from the National Magazine Awards, but are now eligible.)
Reality overtakes satire
Does Apple realize what it's gotten into?
Congratulations, Technology Review and Boston Review
Two Boston-based publications were nominated this week for National Magazine Awards in the prestigious (and honorable) public-service category: Boston Review and M.I.T.'s Technology Review.
Boston Review got the nod for a harrowing piece by Tom Barry, titled "A Death in Texas," which looked at the growing phenomenon of public-private prisons--invariably placed in the middle of nowhere-- that house so-called criminal aliens. Its opening paragraph:County Clerk Dianne Florez noticed it first. Plumes of smoke were rising outside the small West Texas town of Pecos. "The prison is burning again," she announced.
Technology Review's nomination came for a piece by David Talbot, "Dissent Made Safer," which explored how dissidents in murderous regimes were using software to cloak their identities as they went about exposing injustice. It begins this way:
"Sokwanele" means "enough is enough" in a certain Bantu dialect. It is also the name of a Zimbabwean pro-democracy website whose bloggers last year published accounts of atrocities by Robert Mugabe's regime and posted Election Day updates describing voter intimidation and apparent ballot stuffing. You can visit Sokwanele's "terror album" and see photographs: of a hospitalized 70-year-old woman who'd been beaten and thrown on her cooking fire (she later died, the site says); of firebombed homes; of people with deep wounds carved into their backs. You can find detailed, frequently updated maps describing regional violence and other incidents. You will be confronted with gruesome news, starkly captioned: "Joshua Bakacheza's Body Found."
Skiing: a scholarly lacuna
Skiing may be as well chronicled a leisure pastime as any, but it has not attracted much scrutiny from academics.
I am not sure that this is a great tragedy. But Paumgarten goes on to cite "The Culture and Sport of Skiing from Antiquity to World War II," a book by E. John B. Allen, a professor emeritus at Plymouth State University, who places the sport in the context of other "invented traditions." French nationalists, for example, in the wake of the embarrassing defeat in the Franco-Prussian war of 1870, promoted alpine skiing--at the time hardly known in France--as a way to promote virility among supposedly coddled young male elites. The French alpine-advocates imported Scandinavian teachers to get the sport off the ground. "The same thing was going on in the other Alpine countries," Paumgarten writes, drawing on Allen. "Military initiatives turned into recreational sport and social amusement." Scandinavians themselves were more drawn to what we call cross-country skiing, but in the hothouse atmosphere of nationalist-tinged athletic competition, alpine skiing began to take off.
One line of continuity, in skiing, from the late 19th century to today: sexism. Paumgarten writes that doctors a century ago were convinced that "the female organism" was too fragile for ski jumping. Amazingly, the current president of the International Ski Federation holds the same view: He has "speculated that jumping could harm a woman's uterus, and subsequently reiterated that it 'seems not to be appropriate for ladies from a medical point of view.'"
A view, from within, of the tea-party movement
It's one thing for pro-life evangelicals and secular libertarians to march shoulder to shoulder behind banners saying "Kill the Bill!" and "Oust the Marxist Usurper!" or displaying a portrait of Obama rouged up and kohled to look like Heath Ledger's Joker in the Batman movie Dark Knight. It's quite another to coop up the same people for three days in a hotel, where they must talk to each other through breakfast, lunch, and dinner. At the march on D.C., there were T-shirts proclaiming "I am John Galt" and "Atlas Has Shrugged" alongside others that said "Obama Spends--Jesus Saves" or had the legend "Yes, He Did" beneath a picture of Christ on the cross. At Opryland, devout, abstemious Christians were breaking bread with followers of Ayn Rand's gospel of unbridled and atheistic self-interest.
The senator(s) for low-income America
Reformers often lament that the U.S. Senate grants disproportionate power to small-population states. But what if seats were apportioned not by geography but by income? Annie Lowrey, an assistant editor at Foreign Policy magazine, gave that thought experiment a whirl recently, in an opinion piece for the Washington Post: "Imagine a chamber," she wrote, "… with two senators representing the poorest 2 percent of the electorate, two senators representing the richest 2 percent and so on."
Under such a scenario, 8 senators--the same number, of course, who now represent California, Texas, New York, and Florida-- would represent Americans with zero income (!). Sixteen would represent the interests of those making less than $10,000 a year. Meanwhile, 34 would represent the broad, middle-income band of $30,000-to-$80,000. The senate is often called a millionaire's club, a reference to the wealth of current members, but, in Lowrey's restructured senate, millionaires, as an interest group, would not even receive a full complement of two politicians. At best, they'd get one. (Lowery proposes Michael Bloomberg for the thankless role.) Might battles over bank regulation and health care take on a different cast if the upper house looked like this?
Incidentally, if senators represented racial and ethnic groups, white women would have the most clout, responsible for electing 37-- even though, in all of U.S. history, only 38 women have held the title of U.S. Senator.
(Hat tip: Caleb Crain)






