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April 24 Iraq Vets
In Las Vegas
Virginia Tech, Women Writers, Dublin, Sexualizing Everday Life, Sexualizing everyday life
from Mann and Nabokov to Sheik al-HilalyRoger Sandall Quadrant, January-February 2007 Where are the sheiks of yesteryear, riding romantically over the dunes? Not in Australia. Here a burly Egyptian with an ugly turn of phrase recently set new records for ungallantry. Scantily clad Australian women, complained Sheik Taj el-Din al Hilaly, go around like "exposed meat" inviting rape. Of course we all made a huge uproar. Unbelievable! Who asked his opinion anyway? The sheik calls himself a Mufti and thinks he represents Islam Down Under. But the man's a brute who plainly hates western culture, who may have channelled funds to Hezbollah, and on top this he's a security risk too. Go home sheik, go home! * * * This said, maybe he had a point all the same. It does seem nowadays that you can't go to the newsagent to buy a paper, or the supermarket to buy a loaf of bread, without being surrounded by acres of glossy magazine erotica and exciting flesh. Not all of us would call it exposed meat, perhaps, but whatever it's called it's there—much of it little short of pornography. To be honest, it seems to me that what the sheik was complaining about is a process that has gone on so long, and has now gone so far, that it has become the water we swim in and the air we breathe: a sexually heightened moral environment far removed from most normal human cultures in the past, where once forbidden instincts, thoughts, and desires, along with grossly exhibitionistic behaviour, are now increasingly treated as routine. What has happened? Has a moral tsunami left our middle classes in ruins? What has been the corrupting role we ourselves have played in this state of affairs—every one of us that is, from the trash merchants at the bottom, to our most celebrated writers and artists at the top? Last December Kay Hymowitz wrote in the Wall Street Journal how when "Britney Spears jauntily revealed her waxed nether-regions to waiting photographers as she exited her limo," this made her "the Internet smash of the season." Hymowitz then underlined the naivete of the exhibitionism involved—the taken-for-granted security of the celebrity world where Britney Spears and Paris Hilton live: They underestimate the magnetic force field created by intimate sexual information and violate the logic of privacy that should be all the more compelling in a media-driven age." The sheik and his followers live within that force field—as do we all. Recently too the papers have been filled with scandalised reports of paedophilia in a surprising variety of milieus, sometimes at high political levels. A cultural complaisance regarding men who like boys is not uncommon in the Middle East, particularly among the Bedouin, a fact that is doubtless well known to the sheik. But our subject today is not the comparatively innocent behavior of desert tribesmen; it is the more knowing depravity of modern decadence. What has made us this way? Art and innocenceA hundred years ago the German author Thomas Mann made an interesting comment. Thinking about morality and its relation to the world of art, he wrote in his novella Tonio Kröger that "as the kingdom of art increases, that of health and innocence declines." Many artists are estranged from life, he said, pursue goals hostile to life, and work continually to destroy the bourgeois world.
Artists were exciting. Artists were sexually free. Above all art redeemed the bourgeoisie from the greedy sin of acquisitiveness. As Jacques Barzun has argued, it wasn't long before art became a new religion, writers were revered as prophets, and as part of this understanding the bourgeoisie came to believe that the creators of fine literature and beautiful music also had beautiful souls. This was nonsense. The so-called artist's 'gift', wrote Thomas Mann in 1903, has dark roots in a poisoned psyche. "It is a very dubious affair and rests upon extremely sinister foundations." The world should know that most artists today are sick in mind and spirit, a danger to decent people and heedless of the damage they cause. Plumbers and carpenters and other tradesmen are reliable friends. But artists are not. And because he understood this so clearly, the eponymous Tonio Kröger (the character of a writer in the book who speaks for Mann himself) was embarrassed to find complete strangers sending him letters of praise: …I positively blush at the thought of how these good people would freeze up if they were to get a look behind the scenes. What they, in their innocence, cannot comprehend is that a properly constituted, healthy, decent man never writes, acts, or composes…" Literature is not a calling, it is a curse, believe me! It begins by your feeling yourself set apart, in a curious sort of opposition to the nice, regular people; there is a gulf of ironic sensibility, of knowledge, scepticism, disagreement, between you and the others; it grows deeper and deeper, you realize that you are alone; and from then on any rapprochement is simply hopeless! What a fate! The rise of the paederaestheticIf art increases as innocence declines, is it a matter of cause and effect? In that case Mann would seem to be supporting Rousseau's view in the First Discourse that literature and the arts are actually making the world worse. It certainly sounds like that. In Mann's view the writer stands in permanent moral opposition, sceptical and ironic and relentlessly gnawing away. Worse still: having found a role in Art he may have lost a useful role in Life. The sense of being set apart in an alien moral universe is overwhelming: You can disguise yourself, you can dress up like an attaché or a lieutenant; you hardly need to give a glance or speak a word before everyone knows you are not a human being, but something else: something queer, different, inimical. Sexually inimical too—or sexually perhaps most of all. "Is an artist a male, anyhow? Ask the females! It seems to me we artists are all of us something like those unsexed papal singers. We sing like angels; but…" Here Kröger/Mann breaks off. Perhaps from weariness or boredom. Perhaps also because the angelic songs of yearning can hardly be named for what they are. Readers of Death in Venice will however take his meaning. In that story the ageing writer Aschenbach lusts after the youth Tadzio, and the ironic sensibility so ably described, the scepticism, the irony, the extreme narcissism, is combined with the mysterious obsessions of the paedophile—such obsessions being those of the author himself. * * *
Planck had requested a personal interview with Hitler regarding anti-Semitic dismissals of professors. He was subjected to a three-quarter-hour harangue, after which he returned home completely crushed. He said it was like listening to an old peasant woman gabbling on about mathematics, the man's low-level, ill-educated reliance on obsessive ideas; more hopeless than anything the illustrious scientist and thinker had ever heard in his entire life. Two worlds coming together as the result of the one's rise to power: a man from the world of knowledge, erudition, and disciplined thought is forced to listen to the arrogant, dogmatic expectorations of a revolting dilettante, after which he can only bow and take his leave. Stephen Spender wrote of the diaries that "Thomas Mann is a monumental figure of our time. Reading these journals one feels that this monument is made of very hard, resistant, almost cruel material: but under the surface there is a human being who, together with Freud, was the greatest human being this century." Under the surface, too, unmentioned by Spender, was a pederastic interest that pervades his work and accurately reflects his inclinations. There is far more to his stories than that, and we should also note that he appears to have spent most of his life in chaste frustration. But with their adored 'Hermes' (and their slighted and ridiculous women) the tales he spun probably helped to disinhibit, to condone, and to legitimise predatory behaviour that mothers with children can only regard with dread. * * * Vladimir Nabokov once joked that if Lolita had been about a man and a boy he would have had no American publishing problems—and that this was considered a joking matter is almost as revealing as anything else to do with the book. It would of course be ludicrous to suggest a direct connection between the works of these authors and what is now going on in the media and the streets. The self-conscious complexities of literary style alone would exclude all but the most determined reader from the experiences Mann and Nabokov publicise. Still, there it is, an unbudgeable fact of literary history: two of the most distinguished writers of the 20th century, the most relentlessly cerebral and self-conscious writers, and the most academically admired and studied writers with whole shelves of earnest research devoted to their books, gave what I shall call "paederaesthetics"—the world of belief and feeling embodied in erotically idealised juveniles frankly treated as sexual prey—an important place. A widely used Simon & Schuster reader's guide for college students from 1995 tells us that Lolita, with its murder, paedophilia, sadism, masochism, and even hint of incest, clearly struck a nerve in our society by violating a number of its strongest taboos. I'd have thought that any healthy society very reasonably should have taboos against murder, paedophilia, sadism, and incest. I am neither a prude nor a killjoy, yet rules against these things seem sensible to me. But the author of this student guide to Lolita apparently feels otherwise, suggesting, in accord with his antinomian principles, that the proper function of literature is to overcome such taboos. And perhaps in the case of paedophilia it has succeeded. * * *
Yet to know this literary fact was not enough. After every extenuating aesthetic argument had been considered, it remained the case that Lolita "makes a prolonged assault on one of our unquestioned and unquestionably sexual prohibitions, the sexual inviolability of girls of a certain age (and compounds the impiousness with what amounts to incest)." It might be true, he writes, that Juliet was fourteen when she gave herself to Romeo, and that we all now regard ourselves as sensibly clear-eyed about sex after the enlightenment of Coming of Age in Samoa. But let an adult male seriously think about the girl as a sexual object and all our sensibility is revolted. The response is not reasoned but visceral. Within the range of possible heterosexual conduct, this is one of the few prohibitions which still seem to us to be confirmed by nature itself. The sexualizing of everyday lifeNot any more—or not in certain circles. Trilling's is plainly a voice from the past. Today the debate is more likely to concern the acceptability of public copulation or pubic display. If it's okay for Paris Hilton to make a video of herself having sex and to share it about in cyberspace, why shouldn't Susie and Jim make one too? A glance at any newspaper shows how each libertine advance ratchets up another without anyone knowing where to stop. A mass-market color supplement to Sydney's Sun-Herald for October 29 2006 has the Hilton sisters on the cover, while inch-high yellow lettering shouts "Hedonism is Back, How to Party Celebrity Style". The following 30 pages promote celebtrashery as a way of life. Spectrum, a literary supplement of the Sydney Morning Herald edited and written largely by women, moves up a cultural notch and features a story about the female author "of a best-selling erotic novel". This cites "a man who wishes women would make more noise in bed, and a divorcee in her 50s finding sex on the internet." Reviews follow, a scene from the film Suburban Mayhem showing a chesty chick in thigh-high leather who, we are told, is "mistress of the SMS, and the local boys are her Praetorian Guard." Reviewer Sandra Hall reports that "Wanna Fuck? is their call to arms" and that the young woman in question "usually obliges." Some relief from this brazen brutishness is provided by the writer Elizabeth Farrelly. Her essay "In search of a cure for paradise syndrome" questions the concept of illimitable human desires, and quotes Raymond Tallis's thoughts on this subject. But only pages later there's a full-color cartoon of a pole dancer getting her rocks off—if that's the expression I need. Not wanting to unfairly target a single Sydney newspaper I looked at The Weekend Australian Magazine for November 11-12. The cover is a bold come-on for an article asking if it is right or wrong for women teachers to seduce male pupils. No particular moral stance is adopted, and a number of court cases are examined. Yet by only the second paragraph we are treated to a vivid description of a 37-year-old woman who "wound up in the front seat of her car giving one of her boys oral sex… His friends thought he was 'a bit of a legend'. He let them in on juicier details, like her glasses fogging up." Civility and common senseNow then. Let us stop for a moment and consider. Put yourself in the position of conventionally respectable immigrants from some traditional culture—Sri Lankan Buddhists, Colombian Catholics, Eastern Orthodox from the Ukraine—who are used to certain standards of dress and appearance, who go to buy a weekend newspaper, and who are confronted with this sort of thing. We might also mention the good Rabbi and the pious Lubavitchers over my back fence, whose views of female decorum are in all important respects indistinguishable from the sheik's. What conclusion can they possibly draw from the daughters of billionaires fornicating on the web, cries for more noise in bed, shouts of "Wanna Fuck?" from movie stars, a female pole dancer engaged in public masturbation, and Australian women teachers who seduce their pupils and provide them with oral sex? Sheik al-Hilaly is a boor and a pest. He undeniably has a wider political agenda. But if these are not examples of white western women calling for action, what exactly are they? Thomas Mann's premonitions have come about. With the expansion of media mimesis in every direction the numbers of those who write and film and act and transform reality in a thousand more-or-less artistic ways has steadily expanded, the boundary between life and theatre has blurred, and what were once the values of a picturesque social fringe have taken over. Many of the people in our Theatrical Industrial Complex are very sick people indeed. * * * Getting the balance right between the animal and the civil has been a problem since civilization began. It hasn't been easy. There has been a perpetual strain between the puritan tendency and the libertine, in China, in Japan, in India, and in the West as well. Some cultures and some eras veered to the voluptuary; some to the ascetic. Alexander Pope saw this perplexity as part of Man's condition. Created half to rise and half to fall, He hangs between, in doubt to act or rest; For Europe's educated classes the situation in the 18th century may have been as near as we are likely to come to a secular world where mind and body, thought and passion, were in some kind of balance—the various worlds of Hume and Rousseau, of Gibbon and Voltaire, of the Baronne de Warens and Madame du Chatelet—a world where both the conventional Johnson and the promiscuous Boswell could separately thrive and flourish. * * * Be that as it may, the usual way of dealing with this matter involved a common sense separation of realms. You didn't publish entertaining accounts of oral sex provided by female teachers for their male pupils in family magazines. You didn't have leading novelists advertising the joys of paedophilia. Though one should expect, in a free country, that such matters may be discussed and argued about—the pros (few) and the cons (many)—it has usually also been assumed that this would be constrained by a thoughtful choice of time, place, and occasion. That's where we seem to have gone wrong. An abandonment of the common sense rules to be found in hundreds of traditional cultures, and a foolish refusal to confine the sexual world to where it belongs, has led to its being indiscriminately mingled with everything else, 24/7. A burly Middle Eastern peasant in a nightshirt may seem an improbable source of moral guidance, yet in a way that's what the outspoken sheik is—and he's calling the shots as he sees them. But shooting the messenger is hardly the answer. Sheik Taj al-Din al-Hilaly and his followers are what they are. We are what we have fatefully become. April 2007
By Kelly Jane Torrance On the final pages of her 880-page biography "Edith Wharton," released this week, Hermione Lee recounts her visit to the novelist's neglected grave in Versailles. "[T]he tomb was covered with weeds, old bottles and a very ancient pot of dead flowers," she writes. Miss Lee "tidied up" the grave, weeding it and planting a single silk flower.
Derek Speirs for The New York Times
The Long Room at the Trinity College Old Library. April 22, 2007
36 Hours in DublinBy WENDY KNIGHT
A pint of beer in Dublin will run you 4 to 5 euros, but the famed Irish wit is free. With an economic boom fueled by banks, high-tech companies and tourism, this compact Gaelic city is no longer the land of ramshackle pubs and baked-potato pushcarts. Stylish restaurants, designer hotels and pricey shopping malls abound. But Dublin's wealth has also brought with it an influx of Poles and other Eastern European immigrants, who are helping to keep prices in check, while also giving this ancient city a cosmopolitan face-lift. So expect phone-card kiosks next to old butcher shops and Slavic accents alongside the charming Irish brogues. Friday 3:30 p.m. One of Dublin's finest cultural landmarks, the National Gallery of Ireland, is also its most economical: admission is free. The National Gallery (Merrion Square West and Clare Street; 353-1-661-5133; www.nationalgallery.ie.) displays works by 17th- to 20th-century Irish artists including Jack Butler Yeats, brother of the poet William Butler Yeats, and an impressive selection of Italian works including Caravaggio's magnificent “ Taking of Christ,” which he painted in 1602. Van Gogh's “Rooftop in Paris” is among the museum's recent acquisitions. 7:30 p.m. Although the culinary scene in Dublin is becoming more varied, its traditional choice of two extremes — standard pub grub and overpriced French cuisine— can be tiring. Solas (31 Wexford Street, 353-1-478-0583), which means light in Gaelic, is an enlightening alternative. An artsy and media clientele gather downstairs at the 22-foot-long stainless-steel bar with red-cushion stools. The new second-floor bar is filled with light from the adjoining roof terrace. This nonchalantly hip establishment boasts a 40-plus list of world beers (5.30 euros, or $7.20, at $1.36 to the euro) and a Mediterranean menu with an antipasto salad with Serrano ham and chorizo (9.50 euros), which will leave you wondering whether your flight detoured to Madrid or Rome. 10 p.m. Dublin has more than 1,000 pubs, many featuring live Irish music, though you won't find a posted schedule anywhere. Skip the trendy Temple Bar area and wander north of the River Liffey to Hughes Bar (19 Chancery Street, 353-1-872-6540), which is just behind the eerily quiet Courthouse area. Local musicians like Paul Doyle and a renowned Cape Breton fiddler, Jerry Holland, perform at the bar. The faded pumpkin-colored walls, the plastic plants and old men in cardigan sweaters let you know you've found the real deal. For more merriment, head to O'Donoghue's (15 Merrion Row, 353-1-660-7194) in the South Georgian area, where musicians congregate at the front of the bar, sipping pints of Guinness (4.50 euros) and playing their fiddles and tin whistles, just as the Dubliners, one of Ireland's best-known bands did in the 1970s. Saturday 9:30 a.m. Although it might seem sacrilegious to step inside a brewery before noon, consider that Guinness was once prescribed to nursing mothers and patients for its “cheer-producing effect.” Besides, you will want to visit the Guinness Storehouse (St. James's Gate, Dublin 8, 353-1-408-4800; www.guinness-storehouse.com; admission is 14 euros) before the crowds grow thick around 11 a.m. The storehouse may scream tourist trap, but it's an engaging and sleek tour of how the dark stout has been made since 1759, beginning with water from the Wicklow Mountains that streams throughout the exhibit. The tour takes you through a labyrinth of catwalks, past an old roasting oven and up a circular staircase that wraps around a huge oak barrel. It ends at the seventh-floor Gravity Bar, where one free pint of Guinness is served per visitor. If you're still hungry after a Guinness, head to Bruxelle (7-8 Harry Street, Dublin 2; 353-1-677-5362), a barley-smelling pub with worn wood floors that serves a hearty Irish breakfast of fried eggs, sausage, bacon, beans, blood pudding and toast — for just 6 euros. Noon Dublin was the birthplace of erudite lions like James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, so immerse yourself in its literary traditions. The Old Library Building at Trinity College (College Green, Nassau Street, 353-1- 896-2308; www.tcd.ie, 8 euros) houses the Book of Kells, a masterpiece of ancient calligraphy and art by ninth-century Irish monks. Upstairs, the magnificent vaulted Long Room has 200,000 of the college's oldest books, stacked in neat floor-to-ceiling rows, including a rare first edition of Dante's “Divine Comedy.” Make sure to also visit the less-heralded Dublin Writers' Museum (18 Parnell Square, 353-1-872-2077; 7 euros admission), which has the original chair used by Handel for the first performance of “The Messiah” (in the Temple Bar in 1742) and a first edition of “Dracula,” written by the Dublin-born writer Bram Stoker. 2:30 p.m. A major renovation of the historic Abbey Theatre (26 Lower Abbey Street, 353-1-878-7222, www.abbeytheatre.ie), unveiled this spring, will thankfully replace the Sinatra-era décor and dingy burgundy carpeting with plush new seats and interiors by the French designer Jean Guy LeCat. Built in 1904 (and rebuilt in 1966 after a fire), the Abbey had been the cultural home to such playwrights as William Butler Yeats, while continuing to promote new Irish playwrights like Billy Roche. Coming shows include Arthur Miller's “Crucible” (May 26 through July 7). Even though ticket prices rarely exceed 30 euros, you can catch the Saturday 2:30 p.m. matinee for 15 euros. 4:30 p.m. You'll see mimes, gents in three-piece flannel suits and stroller-pushing moms walking briskly past the windows of Brown Thomas (88-95 Grafton Street, 353-1-605-6666; www.brownthomas.com), one of Dublin's grand department stores. But for funky and affordable shopping, check out the Saturday markets in the Temple Bar neighborhood (www.templebar.ie). The Fashion and Design Market (Cow's Land) is where you'll find Irish designers like the jewelry maker Clare Grennan (www.claregrennan.com) showcasing their latest creations. The Book and Record Market (Temple Bar Square) sells used and limited-edition books, as well as vinyl records and CDs. And the Food Market (Meeting House Square) sells delectable raw milk Irish cheeses and organic produce directly from farmers. 7 p.m. In the land of Guinness, the 470-bottle wine cellar at the Ely Wine Bar (22 Ely Place, 353-1-676-8986; www.elywinebar.ie) is a refreshing change. The two-story bistro has more than 90 wines available by the glass (6 to 14 euros) and one of the hottest singles scenes in town. Draped in wrap dresses, cashmere sweaters and stone-washed jeans, Dublin's fresh-faced professionals pack the dining room, cellar bars and a romantic, street-level lounge with an onyx bar and a stone fireplace. A family farm in County Clare supplies the restaurant with organic meat for dishes like lamb burger on creamed potatoes (15.95 euros) and bangers and mash (15 euros). 9 p.m. Dublin's younger, cosmopolitan set heads to the Village Venue (26 Wexford Street, 353-1-475-8555; www.thevillagevenue.com). The 650-seat hall features top acts like Tony Bennett and Morrissey (tickets around 25 euros), and the two-level space with stone interiors turns into a popular lounge and nightclub in the late evening. Expect women in short skirts and lads in button-down shirts. Established D.J.'s like John and Aoife Dermody spin techno, rock and pop music at 10 p.m. in the downstairs bar, and the dance floor opens at 11 p.m. (cover charge 7 to 10 euros). Sunday 11 a.m. Walk off last night at Iveagh Gardens (Clonmel Street; 353-1-475-7816), an 8.5-acre gem of a park hidden behind the National Concert Hall near St. Stephen's Square. With its beheaded and broken statues, unkempt landscaping and leaf-canopied corners, the rambling park feels like a former starlet past her prime, though she springs to life every April, when the bluebells are in full bloom. 1 p.m. Sample the city's sweet side at Queen of Tarts (4 Corkhill Dame Street, 353-1-670-7499), a darling confectionery in Dublin's quiet medieval area. The glass display cases overflow with nectar-oozing plum tarts, savory scones and warm chocolate ganache cake (1.25 to 4.75 euros). And after a weekend of pints, a spot of tea goes down nicely. THE BASICS Continental flies direct to Dublin from the New York City area, starting at about $650. Aer Lingus flies from New York to Dublin, with a short stopover in Shannon, starting at $358. If you're already in London, Ryanair operates as many as 30 daily flights to Dublin for about 25 euros round trip, or $34, at $1.36 to the euro, not including taxes and fees. From Dublin Airport, a taxi ride into the city costs 20 to 35 euros. Dublin Bus (353-1-873-4222; www.dublinbus.ie) offers 35-minute rides into town every 10 minutes for 6 euros. Traffic in Dublin is hellish, and cabs are expensive, so it's best to walk. With its hip clientele and sunken lounge area, Number 31 (31 Lesson Close, 353-1-676-5011; www.number31.ie) is a B&B that feels more like a boutique hotel. Fresh from a major renovation, the Georgian town house and adjoining coach house has 21 rooms, 8 of them very large. Rooms start at 160 euros and include a full Irish breakfast. Harrington Hall (70 Harcourt Street, Dublin 2, 353-1-475-3497; www.harringtonhall.com) is a 28-room guesthouse in a refurbished Georgian town house near St. Stephen's Green. All rooms have high-speed Internet connections and trouser presses. Rates begin at 120 euros and include a full breakfast.
Robert F. Bukaty/Associated Press
Students and faculty members in the thousands paused at the center of campus to honor the victims of last week’s rampage April 24, 2007
Virginia Tech Struggles to Return to NormalBy CHRISTINE HAUSER and IAN URBINA
BLACKSBURG, Va., April 23 — For the most part, the campus of Virginia Tech looked like any other on Monday, a week after the nation’s worst mass shooting. Students, laden with overstuffed book bags, shuffled across the sidewalks and greens, cradling cups of coffee and bottles of water. Books were open on desks, and chalk scratched across boards. But the resemblance to other universities was entirely superficial. On its first day of classes after the shooting that left 33 dead and 24 injured, the campus was still struggling to decide how to resume a semblance of a normal life. For one thing, only three-quarters of the student body had returned to classrooms. The others remained reluctant to come back or had taken advantage of the university’s offer to take the rest of the semester off. Many of those who returned refused to talk to the remaining reporters, hoping to give the university a chance to escape the echoes of the killings. In addition, some departments simply could not open their doors and begin teaching again. Norris Hall, the engineering building that was the site of 30 of the 32 killings, has been taped off by the police, and Ishwar K. Puri, chairman of the department of engineering, science and mechanics, said he was trying to find out whether it would be demolished and what could be salvaged. “In many cases, our faculty and students do not have access to their scientific data, their notes, their personal libraries, their experimental equipment or a lifetime worth of results,” Professor Puri said of Norris Hall, which holds the laboratories where many of his 80 doctoral students and 25 master’s students work. “Imagine going to work and finding no workplace and no records.” The students whose teachers were among the five engineering and language faculty members killed were reassigned to other classes Monday. Dr. Puri said that since his students were blocked from their research and lacked some of the professors they needed, some of them might have to delay finishing their dissertations. That, in turn, could mean an end to their grant money. The police have pulled from the university’s servers all of the e-mail of the gunman, Seung-Hui Cho, as well as that of Emily J. Hilscher, a police spokeswoman confirmed Monday. Ms. Hilscher was one of the first two students killed, in the West Ambler Johnston dormitory. The spokeswoman, Corinne N. Geller, said the police were still analyzing that information as well as cellphone records and computers. “We have not been able to make a definite link between Cho and Ms. Hilscher,” Ms. Geller said, “but we are still processing all that information.” Another law enforcement official said it appeared that Mr. Cho had not attended any classes in the month since his parents dropped him off on campus after Easter break. The official said Mr. Cho appeared to have used that time to buy supplies and make other preparations for the shootings. The authorities also confirmed Monday that Mr. Cho had fired all the shots, officially ruling out the possibility of a second gunman. The burden of finding alternative locations for the classes that had been held at Norris Hall fell largely on the registrar’s office, which tried to match students and classes with available space in other buildings. “They had to pull up all the data,” said Mark Owczarski, the university’s director of news and information. “You’re dealing with several dozen faculty offices in Norris Hall and several hundred students. They identified all the affected individuals, contacted them all and found new locations for all the classes.” Rooms in the more than 100 campus buildings appropriate for lectures were used for the relocated classes. In addition, Mr. Owczarski said, several classes were moved to a nearby corporate research park used by start-up companies. During meetings last week, professors questioned whether a week was enough time to allow students to stay away. University officials decided that canceling the rest of the academic year was an extreme step and that many students might find returning to campus therapeutic. In the end, Virginia Tech officials asked professors to set aside time to discuss the violent events before moving on to regular course work. In one freshman chemistry class, which had attendance above 80 percent, a university T-shirt and a bouquet of flowers were placed on a seat to signify a member of the class who had been killed, said Joe Merola, the chemistry department chairman. “I lost it halfway through class,” Dr. Merola said. “I burst into tears and had to turn it over to the counselors.” After a lengthy discussion of the shootings and the victims, and how to finish out the semester, the class was eventually able to move on to chemistry, he said. The campus paused momentarily at 9:45 a.m. on the drillfield, the center of campus life, as a single bell tolled exactly a week after the shootings. A minute later, the bell rang 32 more times as a white balloon was released with each toll. Some students carried bouquets to lay at the impromptu memorials scattered across campus. Three police officers stood, hands on their gun belts, in front of Norris Hall. Akash Patel, a sophomore majoring in aerospace engineering, who was back on campus after spending the weekend with friends in Northern Virginia, said the university had been very accommodating. “But I’m stuck here, actually,” he said. Mr. Patel explained that he had decided to finish his classes largely because he had already bought a nonrefundable plane ticket back home to Fremont, Calif., in May. Other students said they were still figuring out whether to stay. Xiaomo Liu, a graduate student in computer science from China, said that since he was working with two other students on a research project, he would have to come to a shared decision about stopping the project now or forging ahead with the research. “If it is anything like last week, we will not be able to focus,” he said. “We will meet and decide whether to take the grade or not. But I am not even sure if we will be able to do that. One group member went to New Hampshire.” Karan Grewal, 21, a former suitemate of Mr. Cho, said he had decided to finish classes to avoid ending his college career on such a grim note. But Mr. Grewal said he still did not feel comfortable being near Norris Hall. “It’s just too sad,” he said. Nikolas Macko, who joined other students in barricading a door to prevent Mr. Cho from entering their Norris Hall classroom during his killing spree, said he was not apprehensive about returning to the building. “It was a random event, and I’m hopeful that it was independent and isolated,” Mr. Macko said. “For me, that’s the only way we can move forward.” Sarah Abruzzese contributed reporting from Blacksburg, and William K. Rashbaum from New York.
April 23 Why Virginia Tech Shooter Was Not Committed
Today's Papers,Gun Laws,Gun Control?,Virginia Tech Tragedy,Imus ControversyRollingstone.com Back to THE LOW POST: The Imus Sanction THE LOW POST The Imus SanctionIn a media storm, everyone ducks for the cover of easy moral outrageMATT TAIBBI >> See what people are saying about Taibbi's latest column, add your own response and browse a full archive of The Low Post.
Ultimately, the fact that rappers are now being held accountable for something Imus said shows the bias many people have against hip-hop culture. Hip-hop is often the scapegoat of everything gone wrong in America, but hip-hop didn't slander the Rutgers women's basketball team, Don Imus did, so let's stay on point here...The point is, hip-hop didn't invent cursing, slurs, bad language, sexism or misogyny, though hip-hop like so many other fictional forms of the culture uses this type of language as a form of expression, however problematic it might be. This expression represents the way people in the streets talk. It might not be pretty or politically correct, but it is a unique form of fictional expression that emerges from the minds and mouths of young black men.-- Dr. Todd Boyd, professor of critical studies at USC, writing for ESPN.com
The most annoying thing about the Don Imus fiasco? The instant it blew up into an absurdly overdone national controversy, we all knew exactly how everyone was going to play it -- or overplay it, as it were. We all knew that the angry-white-guy columnists of the Townhall.com ilk were going to turn even the previously-hated liberal Imus into a martyr of the political correctness age ("Imus, Political Correctness and the end of America" was Douglas McKinnon's not-at-all-hysterical offering). We knew Al Sharpton would show up, business card in hand, at the back of the ambulance, offering his services. We knew campus feminists would surface en masse to paint Imus as a hatemongering symbol of the old-boy white male power structure that secretly still insists on its power and privilege in American society, his show a daily vulgar wink to fellow members of the Matrix. And we knew -- or at least I knew, since I've personally been through a couple of these media ass-whippings before -- that virtually every editorial denouncing Imus would include a line in there that would read something along the lines of, "And the worst thing is, his so-called 'jokes' aren't even that funny." Canny observers of the cultural issues underlying the Imus controversy could have also made a few other predictions. The first is that the angry-white-guy crowd would try to turn the tables on Imus' accusers and point the finger at the hip-hop culture that introduced old white liberals like Imus to words like "nappy-headed hos" in the first place. The second is that black intellectuals like the above-quoted Dr. Todd Boyd of USC would use their advanced degrees to find a way to split the necessary rhetorical hairs to repel these attacks, dismissing Imus as a worthless bigot on the one hand while upholding rap and hip-hop as a "unique form of fictional expression" deserving of the broad indulgence we grant to true art forms. They're all full of shit, all of them. With very few exceptions almost everyone who jumped onto the Don Imus pigpile was a shameless opportunist whose mind was made up years before this incident even happened, and used the occasion of a radio jock stepping in shit to robotically jerk off his constituency for a cheap buck. First of all, let's just get this out of the way: The idea that anyone in the media world gives a shit about the dignity of women, black or white, is a ridiculous joke. America's TV networks have spent the last forty years falling over each other trying to find better and more efficient ways to sell tits to the 18-to-35 demographic. They make hour-long prime-time reality dramas these days about shopping-obsessed sluts hitting each other with pocketbooks, for Christ's sake. Paris Hilton -- dumb, rich -- gets her own prime-time show. MTV, the teenie mags, the pop music industry, they're basically all an endless parade of skinny, half-naked brainless women selling makeup and jeans to neurotic, self-hating, weight-obsessed little girls. The idea that NBC -- the company that proudly produced 241 episodes of Baywatch, a show whose two main characters for nearly a decade were Pamela Anderson's tits -- was "offended" by the use of the word "ho" is beyond preposterous. Until this incident, I would have wagered very good money that "ho" would be in the title of at least one NBC-produced reality pilot within the next ten years. You can't see that? Trivia-battling sluts in Ho-llywod Squares? An irony-for-irony's-sake callgirl-improvement show called Pimp My Ho? Would you bet real money that the Paris-and-Nicole vehicle The Simple Life wasn't originally called Whore Acres at some stage of the pre-production process? I sure as hell wouldn't. Programming decisions of the The Bachelor ilk aren't spontaneous mid-show farts by an aging drug-battered brain like the Imus deal -- they're wide-awake decisions, forged in the crucible of number-crunching corporate reflection, to use reactionary images of cheap brainless skanks to sell Fritos and pickup trucks. The race question is even more ridiculous. Dr. Todd Boyd notwithstanding, there's just no way to talk about the Imus incident without talking about hip-hop and rap culture. Let me just say right up-front that I listen to a lot of rap music. I'm one of those revolting well-off suburban white kids who grew up on PE and NWA and privately mourns the fact that he looks like an idiot in a Starter jersey. I love rap music, always have. But as an adult white male I also know a minstrel show when I see it, and that's what rap has turned into. Satan himself couldn't have designed a more effective vehicle for marginalizing black culture than modern hip-hop. In the early days rap music was scary social commentary; it was raw and real and it vividly described a violent street culture that white people didn't know about and didn't want to know about. But very quickly rap turned into a multibillion-dollar industry in which the same corporate behemoths who sold us crap like Garth Brooks and boy bands and Britney Spears made massive profits selling a stylized, romanticized version of black misery to white kids in the suburbs. That was bad enough, but even worse was the way black politicians and black intellectuals so easily bought into the idea that these endless video images of gun-toting, ho-slapping black men with fat wallets, rock-hard tattooed abs and fully-accessorized rides were positive living symbols of "black empowerment" and "black manhood." Like Tupac was the next Malcolm or something. Yeah, right. Seriously, how dumb do you have to be to not see through this shit? Here you've got the modern-day version of The Man signing big checks to back your record deals and cheering along as all the artistic talent from the black community starts walking around in public wearing one-word stage names like strippers, writing song lyrics featuring preschool-level spelling and primping endlessly for the cameras with gold teeth and swimming pools and pimped-out cars -- all of them absurd caricatures of the capitalist wealth fantasy. How exactly is any of that that different from the minstrel show, the conk and the zoot suit? The black man who can dance and sing, but can't control his urges, can't resist pussy and just can't get enough of what Whitey is selling, can't stop preening in his Caddy...that's innovative? That's empowering? Bullshit. Rap was real once, but once it became an industry it turned into the same con white people have been playing ever since they set foot in this country. It's a bunch of shiny trinkets for the isle of Manhattan. Here's your Hummer and your bitches, knock yourself out. You need us, we'll be buying the African grain market. Oh, and, thanks for the cap, my kid loves it, he wears it sideways just like you...No matter how catchy the music is, on a deeper level, that's what big-money rap acts amount to now. And the longer the black community eats it up, the more time Whitey is going to have to laugh all the way to the bank, like he always has. Pop Quiz: Where did the practice of calling all black women, and especially black women who are not actual prostitutes, hos? I seem to remember a line from Boyz n the Hood where some girl complains to Ice Cube about his habit of calling all women bitches. "Oh, I'm sorry, ho!" is the answer. Laughs all around. When the Imus thing hit, we heard Snoop Dogg explain that the difference between rappers using the word "ho" and Don Imus using it is that unlike "old-ass white men" like Imus, rappers are "not talking about no collegiate basketball girls who have made it to the next level in education and sports. We're talking about hos that's in the 'hood that ain't doing shit." Oh, I get it, Snoop -- you were satirizing the hos and bitches. You obviously checked the crowd to make sure nobody had a degree when you did your "So all the niggaz and the bitches, raise your muthafuckin hands in the air!" act. And it was satire when Ludacris did his thing: "but hos dont feel so sad and blue/cuz most of us niggaz is hos too." People say that Don Imus isn't funny, but let's face it, there is a joke in all of this. It's a joke on the black community. And the joke is this: white people don't even have to call black people niggers and bitches and whores anymore. They do it for us. From Whitey's point of view that's a hell of a punchline. The mistake Imus made was saying it out loud. As for the people who say there's no connection between hip-hop and what Imus said, they're out of their minds. Without Ludacris and 50 Cent and "We Luv Deez Hoez," Don Imus doesn't even know what a ho is. The unspoken truth about the Imus story is that there is no difference at all between what Imus does and what Snoop Dogg does. They both get paid to make ethnic slurs. In this case they both use the same one, one stealing from the other. The only difference is that Snoop doesn't know the joke is on him, too. That is a dark and ugly truth and I suspect that its very ugliness is what so many people were hiding from when they pretended to be "outraged" by Don Imus. Because everyone knows that the issue with Don Imus isn't what he said, but who said it and in what context. We've got a TV entertainment industry that ritualistically demeans women, a recording industry that makes billions cartoonizing black culture and a radio and film comedy industry that lives almost exclusively off lowbrow racial stereotyping. Guys like Carlos Mencia even use the same jokes over and over, changing words here and there to fit the different stereotypes. (Mencia did "That's like going to Compton and finding the only Hispanic teenage girl who isn't pregnant" and he also did "That's like going to a NASCAR event and finding the only white girl who doesn't have a black eye.") Every comic in America does this shit. It's gone so far that we even make jokes about making jokes about ethnic groups (Sarah Silverman's song about "I love you more than Asian people are good at math" comes to mind). And we get critics to bail out these comics by saying things like "He/she mocks bigotry and stereotypes by ironically embracing them" (the Voice's Michael Musto has used that one before) but deep down inside we all know that's bullshit. I dare anyone to watch tape of Richard Pryor doing his impression of a stuttering Chinese restaurant owner and then tell me with a straight face that Pryor is "mocking Asian stereotypes by ironically embracing them." Of course he isn't. He's laughing at stuttering Chinese people. And the way Richard Pryor does it, it's funny. If Pryor were still alive and coherent today we'd put him on HBO, where he'd do huge ratings with the very same people who are pretending now to be appalled by Don Imus. Because we love our black jokes, we love our Jew jokes, we love our redneck jokes and we love our misogyny -- we just don't want it all on the wrong network in the wrong time-slot, coming from a white guy, in whose mouth it might very well sound like the bigot in all of us. And when it does pop up in the wrong place, coming from the wrong person, we've got to pull the "I'm shocked, shocked" act and pretend it's a criminal aberration. Because that's much easier than facing the truth about what we just heard. >> See what people are saying about Taibbi's latest column, add your own response and browse a full archive of The Low Post. Posted Apr 18, 2007 11:44 AM
Since Monday afternoon I have been trying to fathom what has occured in Virginia. I have no understanding of how something like this could have happened, and as the father of young children it is something horrible and impossible to imagine how I would feel if this were to happen to my son or daughter.
It seems somehow inadequate to say that I will pray for the victims and their families, because I honestly do not know how my prayers will help to lessen the never ending pain of loosing a child in such a violent, unexpected and unjust way.
All I keep wondering is WHY? Why did this happen, why do people go crazy and become violent, why did not someone follow up on this individual, and why did not the Campus Police act with more deliberate means after the first two victims were murdered.
I know that hindsight conveniently makes decisions seem faulty, but if there is a person who cold bloodedly kills two people on a college campus, and I do not know his exact whereabouts or movements, then it would seem that I might be taking steps to alert the surrounding community.
This is by no means to criticize the Virginia Tech Police, but I cannot understand what they must have been thinking, even if they did believe they had a suspect in their viewfinder. It would somehow seem appropriate to make better safe than sorry. I know as a parent I would surely be asking these questions if my son or daughter were injured or, God Forbid, murdered in such tragic circumstances.
I am saddened by all of this. I hope and pray that we somehow find a way to get the political concensus necessary to get a handle on this gun problem once and for all. It is absurd at a point in time when we have the technology to manage infinite data bases of all kinds so as to construct impossibly complex computer generated strategies employed for commercial benefit, meanwhile we cannot somehow manage to identify someone who has been flagged by our mental health and law enforcement agencies before they purchase weapons that can be used almost exclusively for death and destruction.
Whoever thinks that handguns being purchased and stockpiled with ease is somehow integral to our freedom under the Constitution, would they please explain to me where this madness will end. How many more children will have to die so as to uphold this "right to bear arms" obsession.?
This has been a very sad, unexplainable, disturbing, painful, overwhelmingly tragic week in the history of our nation.
I am so sorry for all of the people who have been unfairly hurt by this unbelievable tragedy.
With Love, Thoughts, and Prayers, Michael P. Whelan
Today's Papers
The Court's First Time Everybody leads with yesterday's Supreme Court decision that upheld the federal Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act passed by Congress in 2003. The 5-4 vote marked the first time the court has upheld a ban on a specific abortion procedure. It was also the first time an abortion law was upheld that did not include an exception for a pregnant woman's health, although it does allow the procedure to save her life. Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote the opinion for the majority and said Congress has the right "to show its profound respect for the life within the woman." Seven years ago, the court struck down a similar Nebraska law with a 5-4 vote, in which Justice Sandra Day O'Connor sided with the majority. This time around, her replacement, Justice Samuel Alito, voted to uphold the ban. The New York Times notes up high that the decision means doctors who perform the banned procedure could face "criminal prosecution, fines, and up to two years in prison." USA Today makes clear "the decision is unlikely to reduce abortions." That's because the abortion method that was banned, which involves partly delivering the fetus, is not the only way to perform a late-term abortion. But, as the Los Angeles Times notes in the second sentence, the real significance is that the "decision clears the way for states to pass new laws designed to discourage women from having abortions." The Washington Post quotes the president of the Christian Coalition of America predicting, "It is just a matter of time before the infamous Roe v. Wade … will also be struck down by the court." The Wall Street Journal notes that some see the decision as the first step "in chipping away at the landmark 1973 decision rather than attacking it head on," a strategy Alito proposed while he was an aide to Ronald Reagan. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said the decision was a clear attempt to remove "a right declared again and again by this court." Ginsburg also took aim at Kennedy's insistence that the ban is good for women because it would prevent them from regretting their decision to have a procedure they might not fully understand. Instead of giving women more information, "the court deprives women of the right to make an autonomous choice," Ginsburg wrote. Slate's Dahlia Lithwick characterizes the decision as "a strange reworking of Taming of the Shrew, with Kennedy playing an all-knowing Baptista to a nation of fickle Biancas." Everybody fronts the latest in the Virginia Tech massacre, which took an even more chilling turn yesterday when NBC News received a package from the gunman containing videos, photographs, and writings. The package was sent from Blacksburg at 9:01 a.m. Monday, which means there could be an answer to what Cho Seung-Hui did in between the first and second round of shootings. If more proof was needed that Cho was mentally disturbed, the package provided it, as he ranted, often nonsensically, against the rich and compared himself to the Columbine killers and Jesus. Everybody notes it appears that Cho began working on the package at least six days before the shootings. Everybody fronts the photograph that shows Cho aiming two handguns at the camera. Meanwhile, another day brought even more evidence that Cho's mental-health problems were not a secret to many on campus. After two female students complained that Cho was bothering them, authorities questioned him and tried to have him committed to a psychiatric hospital. A judge even said Cho "presents an imminent danger to self or others" and sent him to a hospital for evaluation, but a doctor determined he didn't pose a real threat. Despite this past, nothing was done when one of Cho's professors expressed concern, and he was also legally allowed to buy the guns he used Monday. The NYT fronts a piece on how universities have few options when trying to deal with students who are mentally ill. Inside, the LAT says schools take different approaches to dealing with students who might have mental-health problems and some make a concerted effort to monitor them closely. The Post fronts a great piece by David Maraniss that joins facts and testimonies of the last few days into a comprehensive narrative of Monday's events. Everybody fronts the five car bombs that exploded in and around Baghdad yesterday that targeted mostly Shiite neighborhoods and killed almost 200 people. It was the deadliest day in Baghdad since the beginning of the new security plan earlier this year. Before the bombings, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki said his government would take over security for all of Iraq by the end of the year. The WP goes inside with word that congressional Democrats are moving toward making any deadlines in their war spending bill "advisory," rather than mandatory. Democrats, who risk losing support from the more liberal lawmakers, want to portray themselves as flexible and put President Bush on the spot. As Attorney General Alberto Gonzales heads to Congress today to answer questions about the fired U.S. attorneys, the Post fronts a look at the premium Bush places on loyalty. Many say that under a different president, the attorney general would have already been fired. The NYT's op-ed page asked four legal experts, including fired U.S. Attorney David Iglesias, to list three questions they would ask Gonzales. Slate has a list of the "big and awkward questions he's likely to be asked" and will fill in the answers as they become available. They don't call 'em CrackBerrys for nothing. … The LAT fronts, and everyone mentions, the panic that ensued among many of the 5 million BlackBerry users when they couldn't access their e-mail Tuesday night. It was the first nationwide outage in more than two years. While some used the time to give their thumbs a few hours of well-deserved rest, others realized just how addicted they have become to the little devices as they desperately tried to fix the problem.Daniel Politi writes "Today's Papers" for Slate. He can be reached at todayspapers@slate.com. Virginia Tech Tragedy
Virginia Tech Tragedy,Cho's Mental Illness and Gun Sale,University ExplainsApril 20, 2007
By IAN URBINA and MANNY FERNANDEZ
BLACKSBURG, Va., April 19 — Officials at Virginia Tech on Thursday defended their decision to allow the gunman in Monday's rampage to return to campus after he was released from a psychiatric facility, even though they were aware of his troubled mental history and potential for violence. Cho Seung-Hui, 23, the student who killed himself and 32 others, received outpatient psychiatric care ordered for him after he was involuntarily hospitalized and reportedly suicidal in late 2005. Christopher Flynn, director of the campus counseling service, said the university had played no role in monitoring Mr. Cho's psychiatric treatment. "The university is not part of the mental health system nor the judiciary system, and we would not be the providers of mandatory counseling in this instance," Mr. Flynn said at a news conference. "This is not a law enforcement issue. He had broken no law that we know of. The mental health professionals were there to assess his safety, not particularly the safety of others." Also on Thursday, a law enforcement official who asked not to be identified said it now appeared that Mr. Cho had fired more than 100 shots during his rampage. The official said investigators believed that most of the 32 dead were shot a minimum of three times. Investigators now believe that after Mr. Cho left the scene of the first shooting, where two people were killed in a dormitory just after 7 a.m., he went to the post office to mail a package of writings and videos to NBC News, the official said, and then returned to his dormitory room before going to Norris Hall, where 30 people died. He chained shut a door to the building from the inside, using chains he had bought at Home Depot, the official said. The police who first responded to the shootings were able to force their way in by firing at the door with a shotgun, the official said. Investigators believe the shotgun blast alerted the gunman to the arrival of the police, and he shot himself. In the weeks before the violence, the investigator said, Mr. Cho went to a shooting range in Blacksburg, spending an hour practicing with the weapons. Investigators believe, based on interviews with an employee at the range, that Mr. Cho recorded part of his video statement in a van in the range parking lot, the official said. Soon after the shootings, university officials and police were criticized as taking too long to alert students to the danger after the first one. On Wednesday, criticism increased after court documents, classmates and professors indicated that Mr. Cho had a long history of disturbing and menacing behavior. On Thursday, even President Bush joined the chorus of those questioning whether more could have been done to avoid the tragedy, though he did not specifically mention university officials. In previous cases like that of Virginia Tech, "there have been warning signals that if an adult, for example, had taken those signals seriously, perhaps tragedy could have been avoided," Mr. Bush said at a town meeting in Tipp City, Ohio. "One of the lessons of these tragedies is to make sure that when people see somebody or know somebody that is exhibiting abnormal behavior, to do something about it," he said. Also on Thursday, Gov. Timothy M. Kaine of Virginia said the state, rather than the university, would oversee a review panel that plans to examine how the university handled Mr. Cho's mental health needs and the Monday shootings. The panel, which Mr. Kaine said would seek to make recommendations before classes start in the fall, will be led by retired Col. Gerald Massengill, a former state police superintendent, and includes Tom Ridge, the former secretary of homeland security, Mr. Kaine said. "This is a case study of a very tragic incident that has occurred unfortunately in Virginia," Colonel Massengill said at a news conference. "We're not trying to second-guess anyone with any decision or any action that was taken." In defending their actions, university officials pointed out that Mr. Cho was legally an adult and that a doctor at the psychiatric center in nearby Radford where Mr. Cho was sent in 2005 determined that he was mentally ill but not an imminent danger to himself or others. "I know that we followed all of our policies correctly in the past and we acted on information that we had at the time," said Edward Spencer, associate vice president for student affairs. He added that Mr. Cho had lived in a suite with five other students, and that "none of them expressed any concern to us of any violence, danger or whatever. I think that gives you a view of the inner world of mental illness." Police officials said that while the multimedia manifesto Mr. Cho sent to NBC News on Monday provided them with little new information to help their investigation, they were disappointed it was broadcast. "We appreciate NBC's cooperation, and they're cooperating with all of the authorities, though we're rather disappointed in the editorial decision to broadcast these disturbing images," Col. W. Steven Flaherty, the superintendent of the Virginia State Police, said during a morning news conference. NBC defended its decision to release parts of Mr. Cho's video, saying that it "did not rush the material onto air, but instead consulted with local authorities, who have since publicly acknowledged our appropriate handling of the matter." The police recovered a Dell laptop computer and a cellphone that appeared to belong to Emily J. Hilscher, Mr. Cho's first victim, according to an affidavit for a search warrant filed on Thursday afternoon. The police have been investigating whether there were any links between Mr. Cho and Ms. Hilscher. Police officials said they were also continuing to explore whether Mr. Cho had any connection with any of his other victims. Crime scene technicians recovered a total of 17 spent magazines of ammunition, the majority of which were for Mr. Cho's 9-millimeter handgun, a law enforcement official said. "He ended up buying a load of mags from Wal-Mart and Dick's Sporting Goods," said the official, who asked not to be identified. "This was a thought-out process. He thought this through." Classes were scheduled to resume on Monday, but Mark G. McNamee, university provost and vice president for academic affairs, said that the university planned to offer students a number of ways to complete the semester. Students will have the option of removing themselves from the campus for all or part of the semester without penalty to their academic standing, Mr. McNamee said. The students killed on Monday will be posthumously awarded the degrees they were pursuing, he added. The degrees will be awarded in regular commencement exercises.
It is impossibly sad, gut wrenchingly sad, to watch the video of the candlelight ceremony on Virginia Tech's campus on Tuesday evening. What can anyone say? All of the people in the Virginia Tech community deserve our support and prayers. Why God? Why do these things happen to young people who have so much to live for? If nothing else, we must get this Gun issue under control, once and for all. If not, then what kind of a society are we? As we display guns at shows around this nation like so much fruit at a Farmer's Market. I am unable not to cry when I view a MySpace page of one of the victims of this unspeakable tragedy at Virginia Tech. When you see the page of a person who last week you might have found somehow linked into your own friend's list, now they are names on a list of dead people. This time last week they may have been checking their MySpace page for emails, comments, friend requests. And unbelievably they were slaughtered for no reason and I cannot imagine how the friends and families of these people must feel. I am so sorry this ever happened to anyone. April 11 Sexuality Is Written in the Genes
DNA Tests Hope or Despair
Michael Nagle for The New York Times
Sandra and Balfour Francis of Brooklyn, with a photograph of Nickiesha, who is in Jamaica. Last year, DNA tests showed she is not his daughter.
. C. Worley for The New York Times Letters from boys in Ghana whom Isaac Owusu considers his. He will petition as a stepfather since tests showed three are not related to him April 10, 2007
DNA Tests Offer Immigrants Hope or DespairMINNEAPOLIS — For 14 years, Isaac Owusu's faraway boys have tugged at his heart. They sent report cards from his hometown in Ghana and painstaking letters in fledgling English while he scrimped and saved to bring them here one day. So when he became an American citizen and officials suggested taking a DNA test to prove his relationship to his four sons, he embraced the notion. Imagine, he marveled as a lab technician rubbed the inside of his cheek, a tiny swab of cotton would reunite his family. But modern-day science often unearths secrets long buried. When the DNA results landed on Isaac Owusu's dinner table here last year, they showed that only one of the four boys — the oldest — was his biological child. Federal officials are increasingly turning to genetic testing to verify the biological bonds between new citizens and the overseas relatives they hope to bring here, particularly those from war-torn or developing countries where identity documents can be scarce or doctored. But while the tests often lead to joyful reunions among immigrant families, they are forcing others to confront unexpected and sometimes unbearable truths. For Isaac Owusu, a widower, the revelation has forced him to rethink nearly everything he had taken for granted about his life and his family. It has left him struggling to accept what was once unthinkable: that his deceased wife had long been unfaithful; that the children he loves are not his own; and that his long efforts to reunite his family in this country may have been in vain. The State Department let his oldest son, now 23, come to the United States last fall, but said the others — a 19-year-old and 17-year-old twins — could not come because they are not biologically related to him. Isaac Owusu, who asked that only his first and middle names be published because he would like to keep his family's pain private, is still hoping the government will allow the teenagers to join him, arguing that he has been a devoted stepfather, if not a biological parent. But in recent months, he says, he has simply unraveled. "Sometime when I get in bed, I don't sleep," said Isaac Owusu, 51, who works for an electrical equipment distributor and an auto supply shop. "I say to myself, 'Why this one happen to me?' " he asked, his eyes wet with tears. "Oh, mighty God, why this one happen to me?" A similar sense of shock is reverberating through other families across the country as genetic testing becomes more common. State Department and Homeland Security Department officials do not keep statistics on the number of DNA tests taken by new citizens or permanent residents, who are allowed to bring some close relatives to the United States if they can document their family ties. But Mary K. Mount, a DNA testing expert for the A.A.B.B. — formerly known as the American Association of Blood Banks — estimates that about 75,000 of the 390,000 DNA cases that involved families in 2004 were immigration cases. Of those, she estimates, 15 percent to 20 percent do not produce a match. Negative results can suggest an effort to bring in illegal immigrants or distant relatives, officials say, though they note that requests for DNA tests deter illicit activities. An official, who spoke anonymously because he was not authorized to discuss the cases, found no indication of wrongdoing by the families interviewed for this article. Such genuinely unexpected results hit immigrant families particularly hard because DNA testing sometimes provides the best chance of reuniting with loved ones abroad. "Sometimes these are complicated families," said Tony Edson, a deputy assistant secretary of state. "People are learning things that they never knew about themselves." In California, for example, a Mexican-American family splintered after a DNA test showed that a young woman, a new citizen, was not related to the man she considered her father. The man, who was living in the United States, was ordered back to Mexico because his visitor's visa had expired. In Maryland, a man from Sierra Leone discovered that his baby back home was the product of a hidden trauma. His wife, who was separated from him during their country's civil war, had been raped by rebels. In her shame, she had never revealed the truth. New citizens and permanent residents are asked — not required — to take the tests if they lack documentation of ties to relatives overseas. Physicians designated by the State Department typically collect samples from relatives abroad and send them to this country for testing. A negative result does not eliminate the possibility of reunification. New citizens can adopt children under 16 and bring them to the United States, officials say. They can also petition for stepchildren or stepparents in certain circumstances. But immigrants say officials rarely notify them of such alternatives. Meanwhile, lawyers say the government's growing reliance on DNA testing burdens immigrants who often pay $450 or more to test parent and child. Officials counter that the process helps reunify families who might otherwise remain divided because they lack adequate documents. But they acknowledge that genetic testing can carry an emotional toll. Tamara Gonzalez, a new citizen from Jamaica, said her test result has forced her to question her very identity. She and her father, who lives in Jamaica, took the tests last year after she applied to bring him to the United States. When she learned they were not related, she confronted her mother, who said the result must be a mistake. Mrs. Gonzalez, who works at a day care center in Brooklyn, said she would like to believe her mother. But she said her faith in her family bonds had been shaken. "It changes my sense of who I am," said Mrs. Gonzalez, who is 31. "And it has changed things between me and my mother." "I wonder now if there's something she's hiding or not saying," she said. "I start to wonder: Who is my father? Am I ever going to know?" Clevy Muir, the man she knows as her father, says he is still trying to sort out their options. "I'm not going to give up my daughter, you understand?" he said. "But where can I turn?" Balfour Francis, a 44-year-old Jamaican-born welder in Brooklyn, had even set aside a bedroom for the teenager he considers his daughter. She was born to a woman he had never married, but he had never doubted that she was his baby girl. Then came last year's DNA results. Now, he said, the bedroom is used for storage while he struggles to get immigration officials to tell him what he can do next. "I will not let anybody dictate who is my child," said Mr. Francis, who is a permanent resident and has a wife and children in New York. "I try to assure her I am who I will always be." Meanwhile, Isaac Owusu cannot keep the faces of his boys in Ghana out of his mind. They call him collect on weekends, begging him to explain why he left them behind. At night, he sees them in his dreams with those big brown eyes that everyone used to say resembled his own. "They ask me, 'Why? Why? Why?' " he said. " 'You come and pick up our senior brother. What about us?' " He blames the bureaucracy for the delay because he cannot bear to tell the truth. They are already motherless, he said. How can he tell them they are fatherless now, too? Over the years, while his sister cared for the boys, he has sent money for tuition and uniforms, doctors and food. He has saved their letters. ("Father, in Ghana we are in the rainy season so I need two thing," one son wrote, "rain coat and rain boot.") He has pored over their report cards ("Obedient and respectful," one teacher wrote), urging them to study harder so they could succeed here. He moved, with a new wife, from an apartment to a house to make room for them all, and became a citizen in 2002. But last year's DNA tests dashed his hopes for a speedy reunion. After months of inquiries, Elizabeth M. Streefland, his immigration lawyer, finally determined that he could petition for the teenagers as their stepfather. He must prove that the boys are the children of his deceased wife. Isaac Owusu hopes that a DNA test of one of his wife's siblings, which could be compared with that of the teenagers, would provide that proof. That will cost more money. But he says he simply cannot give up on his boys. "I tell them, 'Daddy still loves you,' " he said. " 'Anything it takes, I will do to get you over here.' " Romantic Revulsion
John Hersey April 10, 2007
Findings
Romantic Revulsion in the New Century: Flaw-O-Matic 2.0By JOHN TIERNEY
ABSTRACT. When I first identified the Flaw-O-Matic, in a 1995 column, it seemed primarily a mechanism to kill romance. After studying picky daters — like a guy who couldn't tolerate dirty elbows, and a woman who insisted on men who were at least 5-foot-10 and played polo — I predicted that they would remain permanently single. Today I'm more hopeful. Thanks to a revolution in dating research over the past decade, the Flaw-O-Matic now looks like a more versatile mechanism than we theoretical pioneers imagined. My early work was done using personal ads, a crude tool (although state of the art in 1995). I found that people looking for love in New York magazine listed far more prerequisites (like polo skills) for a partner than did people advertising in other cities. Based on these numbers, and many dinners with friends who could never find anyone good enough, I concluded that the high percentage of single-person households in New York was due to New Yorkers' hyperactive Flaw-O-Matics. This new theory of a neural mechanism did not immediately gain wide acceptance in the social-science literature. By my count, it has been cited a total of one time (in a psychotherapist's treatise on the "avoidant lover"). But the study of romantic revulsion has expanded because of the rise of online dating services and speed-dating events — gold mines of data. Instead of asking people about their mate preferences, scientists can now watch mating rituals in real time. They've tracked who asks out whom — and who says yes — at online dating services by watching the customers' clicks and scanning their messages to look for telephone numbers and phrases like "let's meet." They've analyzed the courtship choices of more than 10,000 customers of a commercial speed-dating service. On campuses, they've even organized their own speed-dating events, at which you talk for several minutes apiece with perhaps a dozen people, sometimes two dozen. You discreetly mark on your scorecard which partners you'd like to see again, and the organizers match you afterward with any of them who reciprocated your interest. Just as Darwin could have predicted, the researchers have found that women are pickier than men. While men concentrate mainly on looks and will ask out a lot of women as long as they're above a certain threshold of attractiveness, women focus on fewer prospects. They're less willing to date someone of another race. When using online services, they pay more attention than men do to a potential partner's education, profession and income. They prefer taller men, but they're willing to relax their standards for the Ron Perelmans of the world, as revealed in a study of more than 20,000 online daters by Gunter Hitsch and Ali Hortacsu of the University of Chicago and Dan Ariely of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. They found that a 5-foot-8 man was just as successful in getting dates as a 6-footer if he made more money — precisely $146,000 a year more. For a 5-foot-2 man, the number was $277,000. [For more of these trade-offs, see nytimes.com/tierneylab.] Online dating reveals the most exquisite calibrations of the Flaw-O-Matic because the daters fill out questionnaires listing more attributes than could ever fit in a personal ad. They can spend all day finding minute faults in hundreds of potential partners. But that's also why so many people never make a lasting match. "When you have all these criteria to consider, and so many people to choose from, you start striving for perfection," Dr. Ariely says. "You don't want to settle for someone who's not ideal in height, age, religion and 45 other dimensions." It's the same problem afflicting New Yorkers: with so many prospects in the big city, they refuse to stop searching. Customers of online dating services typically end up going out with fewer than 1 percent of the people whose profiles they study online. But something very different happens at a speed-dating event. The average participant makes a match with at least 1 in 10 of the people they meet; some studies have found the average is 2 or 3 out of 10. Women are still pickier than men, and in some speed-dating experiments they still prefer affluent, well-educated men, but the preference is less strong — and in some other studies they don't discriminate at all by income or social status. What happens to speed daters' Flaw-O-Matics? The people at these events realize that there aren't an infinite number of possibilities. If they want to get anything out of the evening, they have to settle for less than perfection. They also can't help noticing that they have competition, and that their ideal partner just might prefer someone else. But these speed daters don't simply shut down their Flaw-O-Matics. They still have their standards, as demonstrated in speed-dating sessions organized by Paul Eastwick and Eli Finkel at Northwestern University. The researchers, working with Daniel Mochon and Dr. Ariely of M.I.T., analyzed the preferences of more than 150 students at the sessions. The students were particularly turned off by prospects who exhibited what the researchers call "unselective romantic desire." Another way to put it would be "desperate." The speed daters were very good at guessing which of their partners were indiscriminately friendly — willing to go out with lots of the other people — and which dates had eyes only for them. They much preferred the ones with "selective desire." Being able to make this distinction in a four-minute speed date, the researchers write in the April issue of Psychological Science, "suggests that humans possess an impressive, highly attuned ability to assess such subtleties of romantic attraction. In fact, the need to feel special or unique could be a broad motivation that stretches across people's social lives." The scientists don't propose a name for this phenomenon; nor, as usual, do they deign to mention the Flaw-O-Matic when discussing this "impressive, highly attuned ability" to make snap romantic judgments. But to me this clearly looks like a redirection of the Flaw-O-Matic's power, because of what I call the Sally Field Effect. These speed daters were looking for someone who shared their distaste for the others in the room: someone who was just as picky as they were. When they found that person, and neither one of them sneered or bolted, that hectoring little voice in the brain was suddenly transformed into a purring engine of love. They gazed dreamily into each other's eyes, channeled a certain actress on Oscar night, and thought: "Your Flaw-O-Matic likes me! It really likes me!" That may not be enough to sustain the relationship through the trials of dirty elbows and long, polo-less weekends. But it's a start.
Photography Collection: Corbis
Lisa Kyle for The New York Times
Corbis, started by Bill Gates in 1989, owns millions of images, some of them kept underground in a former limestone mine in rural Pennsylvania. April 10, 2007
A Photo Trove, a Mounting ChallengeBy KATIE HAFNER
Correction Appended In some sense, the iconic photograph of Rosa Parks recreating her quiet act of rebellion on a bus in Montgomery, Ala., belongs to every American. But as a practical matter, it belongs to Bill Gates. Anyone wanting to use that image in a book or on a Web site must first license it from Corbis, a corporation founded and owned by Mr. Gates, who is better known for starting Microsoft. The photo is among the 11 million prints and negatives in the legendary Bettmann archive, which Corbis bought in 1995. Since that first purchase, Corbis has spent tens of millions of dollars acquiring image collections and other companies, hired more than 1,000 people and set up two dozen offices worldwide. Although Corbis says it brings in some $250 million a year in sales, it has yet to turn a profit. Now the company is shuffling its top executives as it takes on new challenges, building up a business in rights management and plotting its response to the rise of low-cost online photo services that threaten to undermine its lucrative stock photo sales. The company plans to announce Tuesday that Gary Shenk, the president, is being made chief executive as well. Mr. Shenk, 36, is an expert in rights licensing who has risen rapidly through the Corbis ranks since he was hired in 2003 from Universal Studios, where he started a small licensing unit. Steve Davis, 49, the departing chief executive, will continue as a senior adviser after 10 years of running the company. The move into rights clearance, which involves sorting out the questions of who owns what material and how much they should be paid for its use, is a departure from the original vision for the company. Mr. Gates started Corbis in 1989 with the idea that people would someday decorate their homes with a revolving display of digital artwork — interspersing, say, Stanley Tretick's shot of John F. Kennedy Jr. playing under the desk in the Oval Office with photos of their own families at play. That is not how things have worked out. But meanwhile Corbis has built up a formidable stash of historical photos, including those in the Bettmann Archive. In 1999, Corbis acquired the licensing rights to the Sygma collection in France, and two years ago it did the same with a German stock image company called Zefa. It licenses those images for an average of about $250 apiece. Corbis also owns digital reproduction rights for art from the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the National Gallery in London. In all, Corbis represents or owns the rights to more than 100 million images, including some of the most famous photographs ever — Arthur Sasse's photo of Einstein sticking his tongue out and Marilyn Monroe on the subway grate. And Corbis handles the licensing of millions of other images on behalf of thousands of photographers. The archival photos bring in about half of Corbis's sales, but the company also has a stable of professional photographers who generate stock photos for advertising and media clients — images of children on playgrounds, people sitting in business meetings and men in khakis swinging golf clubs. Over the past few years, Corbis has moved beyond newspaper and magazine clients to pursue advertising and graphic design agencies, as well as corporate marketing departments, which are turning increasingly to high-quality stock photography rather than doing their own expensive photo shoots. Those customers are also buying from Corbis's growing library of 30,000 short video clips — mostly generic scenes of, say, people shopping or running down the beach. What Corbis did not foresee was the rise of so-called microstock agencies like Fotolia and iStockPhoto. These sites take advantage of the phenomenon known as crowdsourcing, or turning to the online masses for free or low-cost submissions. Thousands of amateur and semiprofessional photographers armed with high-quality digital cameras and a copy of Photoshop contribute photographs to microstock sites, which often charge $1 to $5 an image. Although the microstock business still represents a small fraction of the $2 billion market for stock photos, analysts say it is possible that low micropayment prices could take business away from the higher-priced images Corbis relies on for the bulk of its revenues. "Think about how visual the world is," said Barbara Coffey, a senior research analyst at Kaufman Brothers in New York who follows the stock photography market. "We have pictures on our cellphones. If I can get a reasonably clear picture and the rights are cleared and I pay $2 for it, then why would I pay Corbis $200?" The rise of the microstock companies has been of particular concern to Corbis. For all its new lines of business, the company still gets some 88 percent of its revenues from image licenses, yet commands only about 11 percent of that market. Getty Images dominates the market with a 40 percent share. Getty, which has grown quickly since its start in 1995 with the backing of its wealthy co-founder, Mark Getty, has a foothold in microstock thanks to iStockPhoto, which it bought last year for $50 million. Mr. Shenk said Corbis would announce its plans for the microstock business sometime this quarter. As for the question of how a high-end company enters that business without cannibalizing its more expensive products, Mr. Shenk said the idea was to find a new kind of customer, people who would never envision buying pictures from a Corbis or Getty. In that vein, Mr. Shenk said Corbis would make its service as easy to use as the iTunes store of Apple and hinted that Corbis would also be following the crowdsourcing model. "More interesting and innovative things are happening on the pages of Flickr these days than on Corbis and Getty," said Mr. Shenk, referring to the photo-sharing site owned by Yahoo. "If we can use this type of opportunity to find the next great group of Corbis photographers, that also makes it a great opportunity for us." Corbis is also betting heavily on its Creative Resources division, which includes rights services and recorded 44 percent growth in revenue last year, to $30.1 million. Mr. Shenk, who will take over from Mr. Davis at the end of June, is most likely the biggest reason for that growth. When Mr. Shenk left Universal for Corbis in 2003, he took five people and an impressive Rolodex with him. Now nearly 30 Corbis employees work in rights clearance, in offices in Los Angeles, New York, Europe and Asia. Mr. Shenk, a Hollywood veteran who is an expert in what he calls "new ways to sell media," said he believed Corbis was offering something unique in building a worldwide network of rights experts. The business of rights clearance, he said, is often a matter of knowing whom to call, and the idea is to make Corbis the first place that comes to mind when, say, an advertising agency is trying to clear the rights to use an image, video clip, or song. Such was the case when the band U2 made its most recent video, for "Window in the Skies," which braided together some 100 clips of old stars like Ella Fitzgerald and Frank Sinatra, synched to the new song's music and lyrics. Corbis helped the band's production company negotiate a thicket of publicity rights. Roughly one-third of Corbis's 1,100 employees are in downtown Seattle, in an old bank building well suited to the company's hip self-image. The vast, open, two-story space has retained several enormous vaults that once held gold bars and now serve as photocopy and office supply rooms. Conference rooms are named after famous photographers, and copies of their work cover many of the walls. The Corbis photographs themselves are not stored in Seattle, except digitally on the computers there. And those digital images constitute only a small fraction of Corbis's holdings. Of the 50 million items in the Sygma collection, just 800,000 have been digitized. The prints and negatives from Otto L. Bettmann's archive, as well as those from a few smaller collections, are kept 220 feet underground in a former limestone mine in rural Pennsylvania. In February, Corbis announced that it would be storing the Sygma collection in a preservation facility near Paris. As ventures go, Corbis represents a small investment for Mr. Gates. He pays for large expenditures, and the company uses its revenues to cover smaller projects within the firm. Mr. Gates's involvement in the company is minimal. He spends only two to three hours each month meeting with Corbis management. Yet it is clear that he makes the big decisions. He has no interest, for example, in treating the undigitized portions of the image collections like one of his charities by, say, donating them to a public entity. Despite the hands-off approach, Mr. Gates is apparently never far from the minds of Corbis employees. Mr. Shenk is in the process of relocating to Seattle from Los Angeles, and his sparsely decorated office in Seattle is evidence of the commuter life he has been leading. The only work of art in evidence one recent afternoon was on Mr. Shenk's whiteboard, where a colleague had drawn the unmistakable likeness of Mr. Gates, peering out from behind his glasses. "Keep up the good work, Shenk," Mr. Gates says. "Or I'll kill you." Correction: April 11, 2007
An article in Business Day yesterday about the photography licensing company Corbis misidentified the photographer who took a well-known photo of John F. Kennedy Jr. playing under his father's desk in the Oval Office. It was Stanley Tretick — not Cecil Stoughton, who also shot pictures in the Kennedy White House.
April 07 Happy Easter Message 2007Easter Message 2007
I would like to wish everyone who happens by these pages a blessed and happy, serene and pleasurable Easter Sunday.
Holidays are somehow fraught with inherent tensions. The collisions of extended family friction and a variety of traditions and expectations, are more the rule than the exception.
Regardless, the people who have the greatest challenge, not only on holidays, but throughout the weeks and months unmarked by special calender dates, are those whose family members are engaged in the military effort in the Middle East.
For each and every American who has a loved one engaged in this war, I would like to extend my gratitude and promise of my prayers for the safe return of our soldiers, and a reasonable resolution of this intractable conflict.
And to our military personell, on behalf of my daughter Olivia Frances, and my son Michael Patrick and myself, I would humbly like to express our gratitude and undying respect for the mission you have undertaken in the most unspeakable circumstances. Where the enemy is poorly defined and the measure of success clouded by political agendas which complicate and already impossible task.
God Bless All of America's military. They are the finest people our society can produce, and they are where they are so as to make it possible for all of us to enjoy a holiday like Easter in safety and comfort.
On this Easter in 2007, the first prayers of my children and myself will be for our brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles, mothers and fathers, Grandmothers and Grandfathers, cousins, wives, husbands, and significant others, who are presently carrying on a war in dangerous and uncertain domains.
Remember always, that we are a great nation of kind, decent, hard working and honorable people. The recent years have brought unexpected and poorly understood threats for which we were woefully unprepared.
Our political apathy has been a great undermining influence in that it has allowed individuals bent on the consolidation of economic gain and political influence to feel secure in acting with cynicism and outright deceit.
Americans have all of whatever it takes, within themselves, to put our nation back on the path which will ensure the quality of life for our children's children, and generations thereafter.
WE will prevail, we will participate in the process by informing ourselves of the salient arguments within our competing considerations.
We will communicate in greater and greater numbers for an infinite variety of exchanges, as I am witness to here on MySpace.
You are reading this and as such, we are united in a common thread to work together to share music and videos, but more importantly, our love and our support and our energy, dedicated to an unwavering commitment to guarantee a future for the children we are raising today.
Happy Easter To All.
And once again, a humble and most sincere thank you to the men and women of our Armed Services.
Our LOVE and PRAYERS are with you all.
Sincerely ,
Olivia Frances, Michael Patrick, and Michael Whelan.
Easter Sunday, 2007 |
Destroying the bourgeoisie was on many people's minds at the time. Thoughts of bloody revolution were in the air. Mann however suggested that this would be wasted effort. Given time, and left to itself, capitalism would be more easily debauched than overthrown—destroyed by the values of the artistic bohemia it admired.
Thomas Mann was a towering figure, intellectually in touch with the major currents of thought in his time, and to try and reduce him to his erotic interests would be ridiculous. His diaries for 1933 and 1934 reveal an observer whose understanding of European realities was second to none. Under the Nazis, he wrote, the Germans were becoming a "wretched, isolated, demented people, misled by a wild, stupid band of adventurers whom they take for mythical heroes." In his entry for December 15, 1933, Mann reported Max Planck's meeting with the Führer:
Lionel Trilling discussed Lolita in Encounter in 1958. A critic of high moral seriousness, he made it clear that he wished to avoid a "correct enlightened attitude" or "to argue that censorship is always indefensible." The stakes he said were high—too high for grandstanding about artistic values regardless of social costs. Detachedly considering Nabokov's literary achievement, Trilling found that Lolita belonged to a tradition of tales about hopeless erotic infatuations going back to medieval times.
One day, I voiced that opinion in class, questioning if any mechanisms were being set in place to prevent a flood of schizophrenics from ending up on the streets, homeless, helpless, victims of crime and, in some cases, victimizers. The Community Psych professor--one of the liberationists--responded with a patronizing smile and a folksy account of the success of a program in rural Belgium or some such place, where humble working folk created a therapeutic milieu by volunteering to house psychotics in their humble homes and everything ended up peachy.
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